A side note on the issue of gun control

A Cuban friend of mine compared the current proposals for gun control to Fidel Castro’s government taking of all the weapons owned by Cuban citizens at the start of the ill-fated Revolution in 1959.  I strongly disagreed. “There is no comparison,” I told my friend. “The circumstances are completely different,” I reiterated.

We were both shocked: he, because I did not agree with him, being that I am Cuban, and lived through the first two years of the Revolution; I was shocked because the complexity and horror of the Cuban Revolution is so greatly minimized when we compare it to the situation in the United States today.

Unfortunately, the comparison keeps popping up here and there, and instead of shedding light on finding a way to halt the spread of the current epidemic of horrific violent crimes committed with the use of guns, it only adds more confusion.  For those who believe it, the problematic then becomes one of state versus individual rights, of government versus the constitution, of citizens defending their first amendment rights from rulers seemingly intent on conducting a power grab.

And that takes us away from the heart of the problem: What on earth is the evil force that led an Adam Lanza and a Nehemiah Griego to use the lawfully owned guns of their own parents to kill their own mothers, and then in the first case, kill innocent children and teachers at an elementary school and in the second case, his own younger siblings and his father?  As we seek to identify the monster that seems to be lurking in our nation before it strikes one more time, what is wrong with trying to put some restraint on the deadliest of assault weapons that in the wrong hands can produce a massacre in an instant?

Bringing Castro’s speeches and actions of 54 years ago into the mix of the discussions and debates of the current epidemic of violence that assails us, adds monsters that were instrumental in the Castro power grab of my native country then, but that have nothing to do with the demons that are lurking in my adoptive country now.

The Castros are still causing havoc in Cuba and in Venezuela. When it comes to the evil that is assailing us here in the United States, the culprits will not be found there.