Here's a letter I sent to the local Newtown paper recently. No surprise it didn't get printed...
"To the grieving families of Newtown -
I was part of the mourning nation that was devastated by your loss. I traveled a hundred miles each way to attend the wake of Victoria Soto, whom I had never met. On the line to pay my respects, I heard mourners ahead of me introduce themselves to Vicki's mom - "I am a teacher from Vicki's school", or "I was one of your daughters instructors". When it was my turn, I shook her mother's hand and said, "I am nobody, Ma'am; I am here representing the rest of the world." I gave them the flight helmet my Dad wore on his missions as a B-29 tail gunner in WW2 to commemorate their daughter's bravery.
I understand you all have suffered an unspeakable loss at the hands of Adam Lanza. It could be argued that Adam was born of the HIPAA-protected privacy in which he imploded. It could be said he was allowed to destroy himself within the legislated safeguards that ignored him, that he was devoured by the cracks he fell through, or enabled by an apparently twisted mother engulfed by her own delusions.
I say to each of you: You have experienced the death of a child, the worst hell a parent can endure. Your child's spirit cries out in your mind for justice. But Adam and his mother are dead, so it's too late for justice to follow the most obvious path.
If Adam had used some other method, you would be crying out solely for more mental healthcare reform. Instead, you reacted by sending the government once more to my door. They kicked it in and, fueled by blind obligation to you and awash in ignorance, they burned the Constitution and forced me to eat the ashes. Me, a man no more guilty than you.
Therein lies the dreadful end result of your feelings of helplessness and your suffocating, unnavigable grief. Swept away by it, you have endorsed and encouraged an act of perversion when you could have been the voices of reason. You failed to honor your child's memory in so doing. Adam senselessly lashed out at innocence itself. And in your blind rage, identical to Sarah Brady's, so have you, thereby accomplishing nothing of substance toward stopping the next Adam Lanza.
As they grow, the surviving children can confirm two things from men like Lanza and James Holmes, and from blind, deaf, tyrannical politicians who are above the laws of God and man, and who serve no one:
That monsters are real, and Nazis are alive and thriving.
Of course, you are certainly not Nazis - you are merely the frightened masses who enabled them, and the spirits of your children know it.
And once again, it is too late."
In retrospect, I sorta wish I had my Dad's helmet back.
