WHERE IS ALLEN D. CORS WHEN THE CORONER CALLS?

Where is Allen D. Cors when the Lumberton, North Carolina coroner comes a calling, especially when the call is to collect a three-year-olds corpse, the product of a self-inflicted gunshot wound when the kid discovers a loaded 9-millimeter handgun at his father’s store?

Mr. Cors is the current president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and it has become somewhat of a macabre tradition in this country that anytime a firearm tragedy occurs, the NRA president or one of its spokespersons jumps up on the nearest soapbox and starts spouting off with the same worn-out message that more guns, not less, are needed to curb the endless stream of violent deaths – usually about thirty thousand a year in America – that come from the end of a gun. Isn’t it strange that Cors and his cohorts are never at the scene of a heart-wrenching death, handing grieving family members and friends a souvenir firearm as a memento of their loved-ones passing? If the idea sounds repugnant, that’s because it is, just as it is unspeakably cruel and heartless for members of the Westboro Baptist Church from Topeka, Kansas to show up at a soldier’s funeral and shout hate messages at the soldier’s grieving family.

The NRA and the Westboro Baptist bunch are entitled to their opinions and their ideology, but both are masters at ignoring the pain and suffering their cause inflicts on the lives of ordinary folks who go about their business every day, and just want to be left alone without worrying about whether a stray bullet will hit them or not. Compassion is not rocket science, but you do have to want to make it a part of your character, and neither Cors nor the NRA has demonstrated any desire to move in that direction.

There’s a reason why police and emergency medical personnel, as a whole, are always advocating for sensible gun regulations. They see, first hand, the blood and the carnage and the raw outpouring of grief that flows from the families of gunshot victims like molten lava from the mouth of a volcano. The fire burns their souls, and no amount of water will quench their pain. Only a person without compassion could witness such an event and not hear the cries for sensible change, but Cors and his ilk never show up at the scene to witness the horrors their work propagates. I’d like to think that’s due to fear, or maybe the possibility of having to confront the true costs in terms of human misery of their endeavors, but I just can’t shake the feeling that it’s nothing more than callous indifference, the way Nazi soldiers stood by and watched millions of Jew heading to the ovens. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

On the other hand, maybe it is good thing that Cors and his followers are always absent from the scene. The last thing that people in pain should have to endure is another display of human callousness, and it really doesn’t matter whether the person being callous is holding a gun or not.