By Dorothy Meindok
The Post Newspaper Veterans Consultant
If you’ve never heard the Norwegian fairy tale about Three Billy goats trying to cross a bridge to get to greener pastures, I suggest it as a good read. There’s a lot to learn from it no matter how young you are.
Clearly, I don’t speak for all veterans, however, like everyone else I’ve been listening closely to the conversations surrounding the issue of guns and violence. Within the veteran community many have expressed the same thoughts that Mr. Mathew McConaughey stated on Tuesday have been shared with him from moms and dads, sisters, brothers, teachers, pastors, priests, first responders, hunters, teenagers, college kids, gun collectors, et al as he journeyed and visited his hometown of Uvalde. I don’t watch a lot of regular television, preferring the radio, but caught his 20-minute national speech from the White House on Instagram. I listened intently to every word, praying there weren’t some Hollywood catch and release phrases and was grateful to hear only real compassion and heartfelt words of truth.
My social media waves remained eerily still & silent for a while. I thought to myself, “finally someone has cracked the veneer of this needed and tragic conversation.” People are thinking for themselves, I gathered from the silence, otherwise there would be a quick step media backlash causing me to turn off my phone for a few days or more in disgust.
It only lasted a little while because then the overarching political games started, misusing the gained inch of shared ground resulting in shooting the messenger, Mr. McConaughey. I hadn’t heard the onslaught of reducing him from “Texas native with some common sense points backed by facts” to “Hollywood hypocrite” until someone took his reasonable plea away from the discussion of raising safeguards on weapons by increasing age, fitness and proficiency requirements, replacing it with a personal platform agenda of pushing further to wholly restrict access to all semi-automatic weapons as well!
Unsurprisingly, like the troll under the bridge in my favorite childhood tale, Three Billy Goats Gruff, it was Nancy Pelosi that again thwarted progressive thought and possible solutions with extremism which naturally brought out the rest of “the fringe” on all sides of the matter. Suddenly, people who hadn’t heard a word said by McConaughey began posting against him with pictures of him labeled a hypocrite because he walked with possible armed guards as he might do every day, despite that McConaughey didn’t mention BANNING semi-auto weapons. Pelosi did. Her political, vote-centric, actions certainly worked to kill a possibly effective conversation at its start. This comes at a time when people may have been thinking about speaking up on a common sense resolution past the fears and heavy societal pressures of the extremists that have kept the majority silent on the issues of gun safety measures that also protect the Second Amendment.
Enough of the arguments to do away with or build a slippery slope to destroy the Second Amendment or the Constitution. Away with the arguments that dictate either of those two American fundamentals equate to carte blanche freedoms to the point of overlooking God’s Word and Law as to protection of children and innocents.
Anyone who knows about guns understands the differences in shoguns, revolvers, semi-automatic weapons and the enormous jump to fully automatic weapons in terms of lethality; thus, they also understand that being able to safely and capably handle guns is incremental and rooted in safety & hands-on experience. There is a reason that when people of all ages learn to drive there are big signs on the cars alerting the rest of the population that the vehicle is being operated by a “STUDENT DRIVER” because modes of transportation can very well become weapons. Additionally, one doesn’t see that warning plastered on the outside of a Bugatti with capability of reaching over 300 miles per hour in a few seconds and there are logical reasons for that. Motorcyclists usually don’t recommend brand new riders start out with a Harley Davidson, 2001 V-Rod but are happy to pull out a slower, more easily handled dirt bike to begin with.
It’s about safety and common sense over being cool or looking tough, about proficiency and responsibility over haphazard experimentation and carelessness.
Don’t be fooled by far-reaching, fringe agendas regardless of the loud platforms their money can buy them. I urge you to stay focused on the issue at hand and help in finding a solution that most of the people of the United States can support. Take back the bridge, America. Sure, there’s more than one troll below it to send swimming down river but there are more of us than there are of them.
The answer is not to use tragedy as a backdoor attempt to quash the Second Amendment nor is the answer to simply look away and knowingly enable tragedy.
It’s time to reclaim the bridge.
Dorothy Meindok is the Veterans Consultant for The Post Newspaper. She served in the United States Navy and is currently a lawyer advocating for the rights of our nation’s veterans.
