Collier: The red flag US refuses to see

Gene Collier is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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At the right time of day, you can hear at an elementary school before you can see it, and if the air is still and the natural acoustics favorable, the discordant symphony of America’s youngest students at recess is an auditory blessing.

The beautiful racket that boils from an attack on playground equipment or a race around it or any of the thousand other impulses bursting from dynamo bodies and newly freed minds has a clamorous harmony like nothing else.

There’s one school I walk past almost every day, through the park across the street, then back across the full span of its architectural footprint. With or without the soundtrack, I look for one thing — someone who looks out of place, or who is carrying something that looks out of place, or more bluntly, someone with a gun.

There was no school at Richneck Elementary in Newport News, Va., last week after a first-grade teacher getting shot in her classroom by a 6-year-old.

“This,” said Newport News Mayor Phillip Jones, “is a red flag for the country.”

Respectfully, mayor, you new to this country?

This country did not just lose its gun-loving mind. It took decades upon decades of ill-conceived arguments, millions upon millions of gun lobby dollars, and generations upon generations of gutless politicians to make this a country with more guns than people, a country with less than 5 percent of the world’s population holding 40 percent of its civilian-owned weaponry.