Will Bordell

An Interview with Peter Hitchens – Shouting into the Wind

“I didn’t arrange that,” Peter Hitchens blushes. A stranger has just told him of her appreciation for everything he stands for and, for once, he’s been caught off guard, disarmed by praise. The stone wall of rhetoric, dogmatic conviction and obduracy against which I’ve been fighting an attritional struggle for the past hour is felled in an instant. And I can’t help feeling relieved.

We’re in Starbucks showing our solidarity with their tax avoidance – well, Hitchens is. “I’m a very bad interviewer,” he opens, slipping into the rich baritone of the ‘Hitchens’ voice that so melodiously beguiles and bewitches, “partly because I’m usually more interested in myself than the other person.” And he has reason to be. After all, Peter Hitchens is a hell of a lot more interesting than most other people; I’ll give him that. Columnist and blogger for The Mail on Sunday, author of five books on drugs and God, crime and politics, reporter from more countries than you can count on two hands – it’s a CV that would dwarf most.

But, if you’ll believe him, no one’s taking him seriously. Never mind, though: the fact that they aren’t will hardly matter soon enough. Indeed, the world as we know it is preparing for its final curtain call. This is the end of civilisation according to Peter Hitchens.

Characteristically, Hitchens has been one of the more outspoken commentators on the recent Sandy Hook massacre that has reignited the debate on gun laws in the US. “People don’t think about anything most of the time,” he notes about the arguments against gun ownership in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, “It’s just intellectually moronic to close your mind to the possibility that something other than guns are at issue.” He’s thought, he’s decided, and I’m not about to change his mind: “I’m bored by this subject. If someone produced a gun in here I’d be as scared as the next man – probably more so because I’ve seen what happens when a bullet passes through a human body. It’s not nice, I’m not in favour of it.”

Hitchens rests his arm over the railing next to our table, as he attempts to deconstruct the myths of gun control. To him, the reasoning is unsound. Indeed, until 1920, he maintains, the UK’s very own gun laws “were so lax they made Texas look effeminate.” And what about the rarely reported knife massacres in China? Guns aren’t the only things capable of causing havoc, he argues. “This problem of increasingly frequent gun massacres is new,” Hitchens goes on, “It’s not something that’s been going on during the entire period that the United States has had relaxed gun laws. In fact, its gun laws have become increasingly restrictive over the past 30 or 40 years.” His tone is such that it almost caresses me into submission. Almost. But I’m not convinced. Fifteen of the 25 biggest mass shootings worldwide in the last half-century have taken place in the US, a country with double the number of guns per person compared with somewhere like Yemen. Hardly coincidental, I might suggest.

“It’s theoretically arguable that the existence of law-abiding gun owners in places where people start shooting provides some protection,” Hitchens digresses as I inwardly cringe, noticing the tell-tale signs of the strand of thought with which he’s aligning himself – the NRA honchos and their ‘more guns, fewer shootings’ claptrap. For someone who prides himself on logic being his weapon of choice, this doesn’t seem awfully logical to me. “Take the Anders Breivik incident,” he explains, “Had there been anybody on that island in possession of a legally owned gun, a law-abiding sane person, they could have dropped him from 300 paces, and that would have been the end of that. Good thing, no?” Well, yes… provided that you haven’t taken into account how many more Anders Breiviks might crop up if guns were readily available.

Yet still his claim is that the problem lies elsewhere: “It’s a case of the old saying,” he recalls, “‘When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.’” Focusing on guns is a lame distraction. In the world according to Hitchens, we’d bite the bullet and scrutinise “a scandal as big as thalidomide” much more closely. Most of these shootings, he’s convinced, have involved anti-depressants or illegal drugs (and sometimes both). However, “the reason we don’t look there is because it’s fashionable to be against guns and it’s fashionable to be in favour of anti-depressants and marijuana.” Hitchens takes a gulp of his coffee and shakes his head irately: “Fashion shouldn’t govern thought.” I couldn’t agree more – but contrariness is fashionable too, I think to myself.

“The anti-depressant scandal is so huge,” and he’s cross with the failure of his trade to report it. Hitchens carefully explains to me that it’s a “known fact” that the pills induce “suicidality, a tendency to feel suicidal,” but that nobody seems to care: “If people were constantly dying of a physical disease after having taken a pill that was supposed to cure them, the suspicion would be thrown on the efficacy of that pill.” But self-interest shuts the door to examination – on the part of “an awful lot of people in the media” who are taking these drugs, the “huge number of doctors” who prescribe them “out of laziness and a desire to get rid of patients,” and the pharmaceutical companies whose profits keep on soaring.

Hitchens fidgets in his chair slightly, before candidly admitting: “My engagement with the argument about drugs is purely to point out that everybody is talking balls. I don’t have the slightest illusion that anything I say is going to make a difference.” It’s the first sign of Hitchens’ distaste for the modern world – and its distaste for him. “It’s coming, it will come,” he prophesies, “If you’ve read Brave New World, soma [the hallucinogenic consumed ubiquitously in Huxley’s novel] is on its way.” Illegal drugs, according to Hitchens, have been systematically decriminalised in recent decades by the UK. He rubbishes my suggestion that Portugal has seen notable successes since decriminalising possession of all drugs in 2001, regarding the Cato Institute’s conclusions as self-serving: “The evidence is that they had an agenda. Besides, Portugal hasn’t decriminalised to anything like the extent that Britain has,” he explains, swooping up his coffee mug and leaning back once more.

Regulation of the drug market is a cowardly kowtow to the “stupid people that take them,” Hitchens believes. But what about the tens of thousands of preventable deaths in Mexico, or the Taliban-swelling destruction of Afghanistan’s poppy fields (the only crop that yields its farmers any sort of livelihood)? “Well, they’re caused by the selfish cretins who encourage the trade. They’re on their conscience.” He disputes the idea that decriminalisation would, in one fell swoop, eradicate (or at the very least, significantly reduce) the nefarious effects of just these two examples. The way I see it, prohibition has been ineffective – it’s changed nothing but the girth of the criminal underbelly. Peter Hitchens has no time for such arguments, though – indeed, his writings deny the very existence of a policy of ‘prohibition’ in the UK – and he’s not afraid to show his impatience with them: “Oh it’s pathetic, sub-intellectual drivel! Any thinking person would easily see through it if they were given half a chance, but it’s fed to them as truth,” he complains.

Lazy thinking is a bugbear of Hitchens’, not least when it comes to God. Which is why I’m a touch surprised that he appears jaded by the conversation when I bring it up: “I’m reduced to repeating things I’ve said over and over again,” he sighs, “It’s a matter of saying that either this is a created universe, and it is therefore the product of a mind in which we live and move and have a purpose that is discoverable, or it’s a meaningless chaos in which nothing we do has any significance.” Life without faith, for him, is necessarily devoid of meaning and happiness: “You live, you die, it’s over. There’s no justice, there’s no hope, those who are dead are gone and we have no souls. Why would you want that?” The trouble is that Hitchens’ argument smacks of teleology, even though it’s dressed up as rationalism – he wants there to be a meaning, a narrative he can follow with his finger down a page, a universal and unalterable understanding that is discoverable. Therefore God exists. Persuaded?

Above all, what religion gives Peter Hitchens is justice and morality. “I don’t care whether you need him or not,” he expounds in pugnacious style, “Human justice, as we know, is a completely fallible thing. Yet we all desire justice – I bet you do. If it isn’t happening in the temporal sphere, there’s only one sphere in which it can take place: the eternal.” Hitchens believes that a world without religion would substitute morals for ethics. And we’d be poorer for it: “Ethical codes change all the time. What’s more, they usually change to suit powerful people who need them to. But God does not change; justice does not alter.” My mind wanders momentarily, and I wonder whether he would agree that Henry VIII’s divorce proceedings – on which Hitchens’ Anglicanism was founded – constituted precisely the kind of change to the Church’s morality (at the behest of a very powerful person indeed) that he’s disparaging in the secular world.

There’s no doubt in his mind, though, that the Church of England is in decline. According to census figures, the percentage of UK citizens classifying themselves as Christian nosedived by 12.4 per cent between 2001 and 2011. “Christianity has more or less talked itself out of existence,” Hitchens acknowledges, “It lacks confidence and in many cases is espoused and headed by people who don’t really believe in it anyway.” It’s a depressing indictment of his own dearly held faith. “This will be an Islamic country in 60 or 70 years’ time, I think,” he continues, resting his hands lightly on the table, “When the fundamental religions of modern life – namely, uninterrupted economic growth and an endlessly expanding welfare state – have proved to be false, which they are doing as we speak, there will be a religious revival in the Western countries and Islam is very well placed to take advantage of it.”

A distinct sense of resignation penetrates nearly everything Hitchens says. He appears to see himself as a modern-day Cassandra, shouting truth into the wind whilst everybody else’s back is turned. There’s a certain earnestness in his voice when he laments that he has “absolutely no influence over the politics of this country. Maybe you do,” he offers. “The existing political system is incredibly intolerant of dissent. And it keeps me out,” he notes as though he’s living in 1984, but still he keeps fighting his corner, “I’m treated as a sort of licensed lunatic. Nobody reads my books; nobody listens to anything I say. All I can say is that I’ve tried.”

And just when I think we’ve reached the nadir of this conversation, he hits back with a sucker punch: “The jig is up, the country’s finished, Western civilisation’s over. It’ll be the Chinese writing the history of this place.” His advice? Emigrate: “If I were you, I’d leave tomorrow. But I’m too old, I couldn’t make a living abroad now. I’m stuck.” He tells me how he’d board the first plane to Canada, because “it’s a sensible, well-governed place and its people have a good sense of humour.” But that does nothing to take away the sour taste of his doom and gloom end of days story. “We’re watching the end of an ancient and once rather wonderful civilisation,” he meditates wistfully, “You’re watching the end of it. It’s how these things go – neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with the country sinking giggling into the sea.”

At length, we get up to leave. Maybe it was something in the coffee, but I felt sure I’d walked into Starbucks feeling about five feet taller than I did now. We shake hands, and I watch as he flings a scarf over his shoulder and strolls back to another day at the office, another day in the world of Peter Hitchens. It’s all well and good, but the trouble is that I’m not quite sure the world that Hitchens thinks he lives in really exists. At least, I hope it doesn’t.

The War That Never Ends

“What is the fundamental question one must ask of the world? I would think and posit many things, but the answer was always the same: Why is the child crying?”

—Alice Walker

(Possessing the Secret of Joy)

His name was Ahmed Younis Khader Abu Daqqa. He was Palestinian; he was Gazan; he was human. He was the first of 30 children killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza in the space of just 11 days last November. He – like all the others – stood no chance: a 13-year-old boy with weapons no more deadly than the football he was playing with, shot in the stomach. Such ‘surgical precision,’ such care!

It’s only weeks after these events that I feel able to write about them with any sort of cogency. Even now, I only have questions: Who are the terrorists here? Which is the ‘rogue nation’? Where has the morality gone? It’s time for Israel to be held to account – fairly but frankly – not just by its enemies but by its friends too. Mindless, juvenile apology for an Occupation-addled junkie won’t get us anywhere. But that’s what you get when you’re brought up on a diet of indoctrination and half-truths.

Let’s get some facts straight. Since September 2000, 1,638 children have died in the fighting – 92 per cent (1,509) were Palestinian. From 13^th until 19^th November 2012, the IDF claims that 2,198 missiles were fired from both sides put together – 61 per cent of these (1,350) were Israeli. At a minimum estimate, 166 people were killed in last month’s episode – 96 per cent (at least 160) were Palestinian. The figures don’t lie.

There hasn’t been nearly enough contrition – not from Israel itself, and not from its apologists. “If we don’t support Israel, who will?” they say. Such an attitude is a double perfidy: of the principles a state of Israel should be held to, and of those dead, dying and to die (on both sides) because of the perversion of them. Resisting the automatic urge to leap straight to the defence of a country whose brain-washing machine is so slick that it would have us believe that the whole world is perpetually against ‘us’ is by no means easy for any Jew. But we must at least try. After all, the more in touch you are with the Jewish story of persecution, the more repulsed you should be by the day-to-day suffering, degradation and brutality to which the Palestinians are subjected. As Noam Chomsky notes, the “images of terror and destruction, and the character of the conflict, leave few remaining shreds of credibility to the self-declared ‘most moral army in the world,’ at least among people with eyes open.”

It’s the zealotry that’s blind to this fact that worries me most. It doesn’t insulate Israel as its proponents believe; it just pushes it down a path of mind-warping self-delusion. And it pushes us into constructing a frankly sickening fiction. ‘We’ are defending ourselves; ‘they’ are attacking. If citizens are killed, we can blame Hamas for hiding behind them – even though Gaza’s population density of 12,216 people per square mile renders this practically unavoidable. If international lawmakers or the media condemn Israel’s actions, we can cry “persecution!” and “anti-Semitism!” to our heart’s content – even though the reality is that we would never think, for instance, to ignore, exonerate or defend any other nation’s killing of 30 children in less than a fortnight. We should instead step back – in this as in so many other previous situations – and wonder what has gone wrong: Can this really be collateral damage? Is this self-defence?

Well, if it is, then count me out. For even to begin to excuse such atrocities is to make a claim that no empathic human being could: that fidelity to Israel and/or Judaism comes first – before any obligations to supranational legal parameters and before any duties owed to others on the grounds of common humanity. And that is something that I, for one, cannot and will not do. To ignore the standards by which we as a global community choose to judge one another is to assert some external claim (or rather, I might suggest, a divine claim) to superiority. To disavow responsibility for the fates of one’s fellow human beings is to toss morality aside. To support a set of ideals, whether religious, political or otherwise, without proper care for the facts is to become a fundamentalist.

You only have to take two comments from public figures to see the raft of disgusting generalisations and speculations that guide this brand of thought. Alan Dershowitz, professor of Law at Harvard, aired a commonly held, oft unchallenged view of Hamas’ tactics in conversation with Piers Morgan. According to Dershowitz, the Israeli bombing of the Al-Dalou family home in which four children died on 18^th November was a deliberate ploy by Hamas to gain sympathy from the international media: “Hamas was firing rockets in order to induce [Israel] to kill the family… It’s called the dead baby strategy… They want their children to be martyred so they can carry them out… and thereby gain an advantage over Israel.” He presents not an ounce of evidence – and the notion eerily echoes the blood libels about which Jews have been tormented since the Middle Ages.

And such prejudices seem to be shared by those in government. Danny Ayalon, Israel’s current Deputy Foreign Minister (though he won’t stand at the next Knesset), betrayed his misunderstanding of the nuances of the situation in an interview with ‘The Takeaway’. “I would say that most of the people that were hit in Gaza deserved it,” he claimed, “as they were just armed terrorists”. Try telling that to the grieving parents.

This is not to say that Hamas is blameless. Doubtless similar (if not identical) beliefs exist in the Palestinian community. Both sides have their terrorists, their extremists, their fundamentalists – and some of those killed may well have been legitimate targets, even if they were attacked in illegitimate ways that caused disproportionate and inappropriate damage. But it can do no harm to see things from both perspectives: the fact is that Israel is the occupier, and its actions are in nobody’s interests. The destruction they cause hurts Gazans before backfiring on Israel with the radicalisation of more and more Palestinians. Indeed, truisms have a knack of remaining true – there’s no smoke without fire. As American historian Juan Cole put it when talking about his own country’s foreign policy, “When you bomb people and kill their family, it pisses them off. They form lifelong grudges… This is not rocket science. If they were not sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qa’ida before, after you bomb the shit out of them, they will be.”

What’s needed is a drastic shift in attitude. The re-humanisation of the Palestinians could not come quickly enough. Unflinching support of a destructive policy, both from within and without Israel, which succeeds in demeaning, demonising and degrading the enemy will keep peace forever at arm’s length. What’s worse is that it will allow the fundamentalists on both sides to thrive, dividing two peoples whose similarities (as it has been acknowledged so many times) are far greater than their differences.

For me and many others, the image that defined this brief battle in a seemingly interminable war was that of the four Al-Dalou siblings. Their corpses, limp and squashed together on the metal mortuary table, are marbled with bloody scars and debris. It’s an image of everything this conflict has become: amoral, inhuman, tragic. It’s an image that forces us to confront the feelings we must deaden in order to justify any fatal attack, whether Israeli or Palestinian: that ‘they’ are ultimately just as vulnerable as ‘us,’ just as mortal, just as human.

It’s Meant to be the Beautiful Game – Let’s Try to Keep it That Way

I find it very hard to feel sympathetic for footballers. But the image of A.C. Milan’s Kevin-Prince Boateng rifling the ball into the stands, ripping his shirt off, and storming off the pitch (the rest of his teammates in tow) in his club’s match against Pro Patria was certainly a poignant one. “I don’t care what game it is,” Boateng said defiantly, “a friendly, Italian league or Champions’ League match – I would walk off again.”

So what on earth had got up his nose? Along with three other black players on the Milan team, Boateng had been subjected to racist chants from a section of opposition supporters. His decision to put an end to the abuse by putting an end to the match was praised by other players across the globe, but was it justified?

Clarence Seedorf doesn’t think so. The well-respected Dutch midfielder seemed to characterise Boateng’s response as immature: “I don’t see it as such a positive thing because [it] empowers more and more of this behaviour,” he observed. And his argument has an enticing logic to it. By enabling hooligans to cause the disruption they so crave, we show the minority that they have the power spoil the game for everyone else. Far better, says Seedorf, to boot out the offending faction and carry on playing.

The question is not whether racism (or, for that matter, any other form of abuse) has a place in stadia, but whether players have a right to take matters into their own hands if nothing is done about it. Ever since the rightly ridiculed Michel Platini, UEFA President, threatened Mario Balotelli with a booking if he refused to put up with racist hollers from the crowd at Euro 2012, there’s been a fair amount of controversy over the issue – not least because of Sepp Blatter’s gaffe six months earlier when he told players that on-field racism should be resolved with a handshake. (Why hadn’t anyone else thought of that?)

In fact, at almost every level, football’s governing bodies have failed to tackle racism. Just compare UEFA’s initial £65,000 fine on Serbia following persistent abuse of some of England’s Under-21s last October, to the £80,000 that Nicklas Bendtner was forced to dish out after revealing his branded boxer shorts after scoring at Euro 2012. And no, you didn’t misread that. Oh, and what about the paltry £65,000 the Croatian FA was charged after racial abuse at Euro 2012? Or the £32,500 that Lazio shelled out for anti-Semitic jeering at Tottenham fans in September? Or John Terry’s mystifying escape (with just a £220,000 fine and a four match ban), like a cat with nine lives, from the Anton Ferdinand incident?

The simple question is this: why are footballing institutions so reluctant to act? It’s a question that never gets answered. At least we’re not in Russia, where both Christopher Samba and Roberto Carlos have been offered bananas by fans. Zenit St Petersburg’s biggest supporters’ group (called Landscrona) was responsible for one of the most horrendous sporting stories of 2012: they went completely unpunished for writing a manifesto making the oh-so-reasonable request that the club recruit no more non-white or gay players – please. The multi-million pound signings of two black players who were “forced down Zenit’s throat” had broken “an important tradition that underlines the team’s identity”. And gay footballers? Well, they’re just “unworthy of our great city”. Evidently.

But don’t be fooled into thinking everything’s dandy over here. English football isn’t immune to racism, even if the problems lie just beneath the surface. It still shocks me that only three of the 88 managers listed by the LMA are black. The imbalance is uncomfortable, to say the least. Indeed, the very fact that two of the most high-profile in-game incidents of racism – involving Luis Suarez and John Terry – in Premier League history took place just last season is extremely telling.

Given all the evidence, it’s hard to accept Seedorf’s cynical view of Boateng’s stand. It was one that has long since needed to be made – and one that must continue to be made until the establishment makes some serious changes. As Reading striker Jason Roberts noted, “until the authorities take appropriate action and start taking this issue seriously, this battle will have to be fought by the players.” It’s by no means ideal, but for as long as footballing bodies refuse to clamp down on every kind of abuse, there seems to be no other option – an ugly situation to be in, in a game now drowning in cash but thirsting for morality.

Put yourself in the boots of Kevin-Prince Boateng, the ball at your feet as thugs behind you whoop and holler. “Imagine yourself,” as Fifpro’s anti-racism spokesman, Tony Higgins, does, “at work and someone standing right next to you is constantly insulting you in the worst way possible. Would you accept that?”

I know I wouldn’t.

On the Right to Bear Arms

It’s at times like this when I can feel every inch of the 3,675 miles that separate London from Washington DC. Oakland, Aurora, Oak Creek, New York City, Minneapolis, Brookfield, Newtown, New York, Chicago – and that’s just a small selection of 2012’s mass shootings (you can read about some more here). I could fill this entire article with the names of the wounded and the dead. It’s almost too much to take in. Never has the American anti-gun lobby had more ammunition. And yet, as it stands, I’m more inclined to despair for it than to hope.

What took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School was beyond nauseating, beyond horrific. Another mass murder, another gun-wielding maniac, another tragedy. The day itself may not have been about politics, but its aftermath should be. And when Newtown is finally left, out of sight of the cameras and the speculators, to pick up the pieces, I wonder what – if anything at all – will have changed.

“We can’t accept events like this as routine,” President Obama intoned in the wake of the shootings, “Are we really prepared to say that we are powerless in the face of such carnage?” Obama’s emotional barometer was spot on, but what of his political one? Sadly, the promise of “meaningful action” can only be received with a dose of cynicism; we’ve seen it one too many times.

After the near-fatal shooting of Gabrielle Giffords at Tucson, the President assured the public that there would be a “national conversation… about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental-health system”. There was no conversation. After the Aurora cinema murders, many pleaded for a debate about the laws that allowed James Holmes to own the semi-automatic rifle, shotgun and handgun with which he massacred 12 people and injured many more. There was no debate. Change has been slower than glacial.

So what more can we expect now? US gun laws are as lax as ever: the ban on assault weapons ended in 2004; Republicans, with all their links to the NRA, currently dominate the House of Representatives; and recently, the state of Michigan passed a bill which means that people will be able to carry concealed guns into schools (including classrooms and dormitories), bars, hospitals, places of worship and entertainment venues. And all this with the knowledge that 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings of the last half-century have taken place in the Land of the Free, with the knowledge that five of the 11 deadliest American shootings have taken place since 2007.

Still the pro-gun lobby won’t concede defeat. Still they persist with their “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” nonsense, even when the statistics belie their beliefs. It’s no secret that the US has a gun problem: 2009 saw 11,500 gun-related homicides, 554 unintentional deaths and 45,000 non-fatal assaults. With 88.8 guns for every 100 citizens in 2007 according to the Small Arms Survey, the USA has more firearms per person than any other country in the world – almost double the number of Yemen, the country in second place. But at the same time, this is a country where the NRA (a group of over 4 million members) could throw $2.9 million into its campaigns in 2011 alone, ten times the amount its opponents could muster.

It’s hardly a surprise, then, that the Second Amendment continues to be treated as sacred. Not when Republican Louie Gohmert isn’t the only one wishing that there had been more guns, not less, at Sandy Hook: “I wish to God [that the principal, Dawn Hochsprung] had had an M-4 in her office… so when she heard the gunfire, she pulls it out… and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids”. Not when radio host Alex Jones isn’t alone in baselessly refiguring the events, with extraordinary conviction, as a conspiracy, a staged shooting designed to demonise gun owners’ rights. Not when Larry Pratt, head of the 300,000-strong Gun Owners of America, isn’t the only one who thinks that it’s the gun control supporters who “have the blood of little children on their hands”.

Perhaps the pervasiveness of such pig-headedness – opposed as it is to any debate over Second Amendment rights – is the reason why the words ‘gun control’ weren’t even whispered in the presidential campaign. They’re not, after all, vote-winning words. It’s by no means realistic to expect guns to be outlawed overnight; views are far too entrenched for that – the very fact that events like Newtown prompt Americans, absurdly, to bulk-buy assault weapons (without a moment’s hesitation) for fear of them being banned says it all.

And the fear isn’t unwarranted; it’s recently been announced that Obama supports proposals to outlaw assault weapons with the kind of federal law that expired in 2004. For the safety of the countless American lives at risk, you’d better damn well hope he means it. For as long as the Second Amendment and all its implications remain undebated, unchallenged, unexamined, heinous massacres like Columbine, like Virginia Tech, like Newtown will keep happening with the regularity of clockwork.

No longer is Barack Obama fishing for votes; and no longer is he seeking re-election. And though he’s up against a powerful pressure group indeed, now is the time for him to fulfil his promises. As Paul Waldman and Jaime Fuller wrote so incisively in The American Prospect, Obama may have reacted to the Sandy Hook tragedy as a parent, but he must act as a president. Then, and only then, will we be justified in having the audacity to hope for change.