Editor, The Herald:

First, for me, comes the easier part: the heavenly chorus is singing just a little bit more robustly and with a discernibly innocent edge in its soprano and alto sections now, having increased its membership by 26 newly minted angels. They are all safe, all snuggled down in the bosom of our Maker.

Yet, perhaps the older ones, the teachers, may be concerned about the angst and hullabaloo going on down here in the wake of their unexpectedly abrupt absence. One hopes that they will not be disquieted long by the penultimate pain we now endure, the ones who live on in a world grown more truculent by the hour.

Still our national grief, unfathomable as it is at this moment, does not obtrude my faith that they are all indeed now eternally safe, no longer tinged by the irony of our problematic notion that the absolutes of individual freedom trump duty to our neighbor, here, in land of the free and the home of the brave, when it comes to firearms.

A dear friend of mine greeted me this morning at Sailor's Creek, as I was raising and then lowering the national and state flags to half-mast in response to the president's and governor's written orders received over night. What my friend said struck me dumb at the time, but it lodged in my mind to chew on all morning before I stopped to eat my desk-side lunch and to keyboard these thoughts:

“You know, Sam, I woke up this morning, thinking about how we used to send our service men off to war on troop trains, knowing that some would not be coming back. Now, it seems our parents put their kids on school buses with the same growing apprehension.”

I am not sure enough of my thinking right now to deny his thought. It holds sway with me, while I struggle to get my bearings after Friday morning in Connecticut.

As a combat infantry veteran, I have long wondered why we insist on waiving restriction of the right privately to own weapons whose original design was to kill people in combat-AR 15's, AK 47's, M16s-quickly and in quantity. I have not yet connected the dots of the nature of these weapons to the patterns and norms of sport, hunting, even self-defense. I am synthesizing thinker. I am good at connecting dots. This time, however, I need help.

Perhaps it is because I lately have been focused on the socially prolific inventory of graphically violent video games and the legion of over-the-top action movies, replete with Dolby Sound that rumbles the eardrums even of the half-deaf like myself. Increasingly, I have become alarmed at the seemingly unmediated access to violently suggestive video and cyber stimulation by the under aged, immature, mentally and emotionally impaired, and the disturbed. I marvel at the ubiquitous “cracks” in out social awareness in which the socially estranged among us hide in plain site, openly to nest and mutate in the most information rich culture on earth.

The Viet Cong, whom I went up against, would not stand a chance against the video game-honed and stealthy wiles of the Adam Lanza's, the Jacob Tyler Robert's, the James Holmes', the Jared Lee Loughner's, the Eric Harris's and the Dylan Klebold's of our time. The former would be outthought and outfought by the latter, at every turn.

Only the perverse in Sandy Hook, in Oregon, in Aurora, and Columbine, and in Tucson, would have pride in this assessment, however.

We write reams of regulations and hire professionally trained people in our communities to inspect and make sure that we don't store paint in inhabited buildings, that we don't leave gasoline out in open containers, to make sure that we have fire alarms and extinguishers in our homes and kitchens. No one seems to argue against these provisions. After all, they are to ensure our safety and protect our property and our neighbor's.

Yet, we threaten our revered constitutional rights to the quick when we suggest prudent, enforceable, and common sense restraint when it comes to our precious firearms, specifically the ones that clearly belong in military armories under lock and key.

Furthermore, our heavily animus-ridden psychology of self-respect clearly lags behind the rapid advent of the science of emotional intelligence, as we continue in our tone deafness to the war chant of violence that flourishes as the primary channel of masculine emotional expression in segments of our population. Even after some of us have shaken off the shallow, yet long unchallenged aphorism, that “guns don't kill people, people do,” we remain transfixed in the headlights of social and political paralysis on the matter, spotlighted deers on a Southside winter night.

Adam Lanza may have pulled the trigger with a discretionary human finger while pointing the barrel of a semi-automatic pistol or a AR15 at an unsuspecting kindergartener or at her brave, unflinching principal. But his ability to leverage his spasm of killing-in the blink of an eye-to a magnitude of tiny little targets in their tiny tot classrooms, huddling in instinctive confusion and raw vulnerability, is undisputedly linked to the lethal technology we continue to allow to be unleashed in outbreaks of deadly force on both the knowing and the innocent.

So, NRA, save your breath and come up with a better apologetic. When it comes to automatic and semiautomatic weapons, your dog does not hunt here anymore. In fact, it never did. I just did not cowboy up to my convictions like the man I should have been. I have been a wimp.

So now, why don't we take the first step and be adults?

The truth is we may never be able to scrub away the moral stain of cowardice on our hands from not proffering and then enforcing reasonable restraint in our society to the access and use of deadly instruments specifically designed for the mass slaying of human beings.Too many may have fallen in the wake of our apathy. And one is too many.

Rather, our lethal foolishness appears heedlessly to have leapt over the rational firewall that retained the precious grace to empower us to reverse course and seize accountability for ourselves, our children, and our neighbor's children, to close the loophole in our law that allows madness to compound itself in mass murder. Science tells us that there comes at time when our genetic moral code inevitably mutates under prolonged stress, and we risk becoming creatures of our own indelible dark folly. Only the lucky ones among us recognize this as the vestige of sin. For that reason we cry out:

“Sing little angels! You, too, our beloved angel keepers to whom we entrusted our dear ones. Sing fervently. Sing, 'Lord, have mercy upon us.'”

May we hear your voices chanting in our ears, as we crawl up next to the old self-righteous Job of our lives, to sit on the respective conundrums of our dung heaps, vainly to wrap ourselves in the borrowed cloak of self-pity.

May the Lord, indeed, have mercy on us. We certainly deserve none. We have played Russian roulette with the lives of our children for far too long. We have no excuse anymore. None of us.

Samuel V. Wilson, Jr.

Farmville