In order for our government to meet the expectations of the citizenry it serves, our  politicians need to follow the two freedoms under which our Constitution was written, called private and public virtue. They haven’t been doing that of late. As a result, over the years, our system of government has become broken, resulting in the needs of many Americans not being met.

Private virtue involves your personal integrity which urges you to follow your heart and your moral compass, all of which means being compassionate and honest with others.

Public virtue speaks to the need to set aside your own selfish and personal wishes for the greater good.   Politicians are hired to serve the public and not themselves. Not only are they expected to make decisions based on their integrity, but also, their public virtue, even if there’s a chance that by doing that, their political ambitions may be jeopardized. Since they swore on the Constitution to protect and serve ALL the people, they may need to make unpopular choices to meet that criteria, thus not being able to please their constituency for whom they depended upon to be elected vs. what the overall electorate, or the country so desires.

For many years now, our politicians have not shown a proclivity to practice public virtue, where they give up their own selfish interests for the greater good, which is our society.

The examples of that are legion, where consistently, politicians will play party politics and speak to what their party or what they want, rather than what our country desires. An example of that practice was the defeat of a compromise plan to expand background checks on firearms sales as well as a proposal to ban some semi-automatic weapons modeled after military assault weapons. It got defeated because of fierce opposition by the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) lobby, who led a backlash of conservative Republicans and a few Democrats from pro-gun states that doomed key-proposals in the gun package, even after they had been watered down to try to satisfy opponents. The reason the measures were defeated, including universal and more comprehensive background checks, was because it did not have bipartisan support. Clearly, the decision how to vote was politically motivated.

This happened even after a number of parents of the 26 families, where 20 children and six adults were massacred, went to Washington and made a heartfelt, tearful, emotional appeal to senators and lobbyists for stricter gun legislation and background checks, the senate having full knowledge that over 90 percent of the general public favored universal background checks.

When we compare and contrast what our Founding Fathers would have done when confronted with the dilemma that I just described to how our senators handled things, they would have rejected everything they did out of hand. First of all, they would have outlawed the sale of semi automatic weapons in toto because they would have recognized that the Constitution was written in part to protect the ‘general welfare of its citizenry’, more specifically, the Declaration of Independence, which states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,..that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (italics mine).

The optimum assurance of the greatest safety against innocent people being massacred would be if only one bullet could be expended before reloading would be required. However, in an earlier blog, I explain how politically, that’s not feasible.  Nevertheless, it is our government’s responsibility to protect its citizen’s life. The gun rights advocates make an argument this wouldn’t have helped in the slaughter at the Sandy Hook elementary school. That’s true. At the Federal level, not every law passed is going to make a difference in every situation. But reducing to a minimum the lethality of every potential assailant to do maximum damage by disallowing the sale of semiautomatic assault weapons would reduce the amount of carnage that would result. Now that’s a good thing.

Ninety percent of the general public supported universal background checks, yet it didn’t pass the vote; clearly, the senators who didn’t support the measure failed to do so for selfish political reasons. If they were compassionate to the plight of those who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook massacre, (private virtue), and if the politicians respected their integrity by serving ALL Americans, not just their constituency that voted for them, (public virtue), they would have voted with the 90 percenters, even if it was not the politically vote-getting thing to do.