It's a bumper sticker we've all seen. A lot of them popped up about 10 years ago. The owners would probably explain the sticker by saying something about the sacrifices necessary to preserve our freedom.
Often enough, these people also have NRA bumper stickers.
It's almost 3 a.m. in Connecticut. In the morning, 28 families will wake up with a major part of their lives missing.
We don't know what compelled this man to kill. We don't know where he got the guns. We don't know all the "what-ifs."
But we do know, more painfully than ever, that freedom isn't free. And this is the price.
Gun-rights advocates will argue about the Second Amendment, and about self-defense, and about protecting rights.
One of the things we do know about the shooting was that the gunman arrived in combat gear, brandishing a military-grade rifle capable of firing dozens of rounds. The New York Times notes that the rifle was "similar to a weapon used widely by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq."
This is not about self-defense. These are not defensive weapons. These are weapons designed for militaries, with the sole designed purpose of killing large numbers of people. No freedom is being protected here, except for the freedom to do just that.
Some will argue that gun control won't help. Guns don't kill people, the old slogan goes, people kill people. If you take away guns, they'll just kill in other ways. And, after all, the other old slogan goes, if you make guns criminal, only criminals will have guns.
Hell, some people will argue (and already have argued), this just means we need more guns, so that more Good People are there to protect us from the Bad People. If those teachers only had guns...
Never mind the evidence. Never mind that despite increasingly loose gun laws, our homicide rate is higher than essentially all of the developed world (and much of the undeveloped world), and that we have twice as many gun deaths per year as in Canada, and more than 10 times as many as in Britain.
And never mind common sense. There will always be bad people doing bad things. But mass killings are a lot easier when civilians can readily buy military weapons, when you can buy hundreds of rounds of ammunition without so much as a raised eyebrow, when even restrictions for people suspected of terrorism are shut down by the NRA and its ever-vigilant allies.
Ah, but at least we have freedom.
Nobody (or at least relatively few people) wants to take away everyone's guns. But something has to change. Or at least we could take a look at our gun laws and see how we could tweak them. At least we could talk about it.
But we're not supposed to talk about this right now. 20 children are dead. We shouldn't take advantage of a tragedy.
And so this mass killing, the 19th in five years, will pass like every other. People will sigh, put up a sympathetic Facebook status about how their thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. They'll avoid talking about guns, because now is not the time.
Then the moment will pass, people will forget, and go back to their normal lives until the next tragedy happens.
Or at least most people will. Those 28 families might have trouble with this.
"Freedom isn't free."
Well, no, it's not. Today it cost us 20 children. Here's the receipt.
