On the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings, Andy Goddard, the father of one of those injured on April 16, 2007, spoke in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. 

I felt that Andy’s comments were very eloquent and needed to be heard by others.

Following are the remarks delivered by Andy Goddard on April 16, 2008: 

A year ago today, as I watched the unfolding coverage of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, at about this time, I found out that my own son Colin had been shot multiple times.  A year ago tonight, I sat by his hospital bed and struggled with my emotions as I watched him lying bleeding amidst a tangle of wires, tubes and pipes all connected to the machines that were sustaining him.

I decided that, in exchange for him being spared, I would dedicate myself to the cause of preventing gun violence.

Today, I choose to stand here, in front of the Supreme Court, rather than by my son’s side in Blacksburg, because, at this time, the justices are deciding on what could be the most important case regarding guns in my lifetime.  While they have been asked to rule on the constitutionality of the DC handgun ban, they will also be examining the meaning of, and intent behind, the 2^nd amendment.  This involves far more than the parsing of an antiquated sentence.  I am not a constitutional scholar, or much of a historian, but it is obvious to me that our founding fathers took great care in crafting our constitution and used the language of the day with great skill.  They didn’t use words or phrases which they expected to be ignored or were of passing importance.  Those brave and intelligent men, put into words the aspirations and hopes of the fledgling nation and they addressed the most pressing of problems and threats that faced them at that time. 

I find it difficult to believe that they would have wanted to craft any language which would prevent future generations, of their descendants, from addressing the new and more complex problems that face our evolving society.  In those early days of flintlock muskets, our ancestors could not have imagined a future world where a deranged individual could murder so many people with such ease.  They probably could not imagine that weapons would become so powerful, so easy to conceal and so simple to use.  Regardless of whether the court rules that the 2nd amendment guarantees an individual right to own a gun for self defense or a collective right for communal defense, I hope and pray that the justices uphold the concept that no right is absolute, that no right comes without an equal amount of responsibility and that the expression “well regulated� is not totally ignored.  

Normally we expect strong leadership on difficult issues, but look at the current crop of Presidential candidates: their silence on this subject is deafening!  It seems to be the perception that, in political suicide, just as in actual suicide, nothing is as effective as guns!  OK America, it looks like “we the people� will have to work out this problem ourselves from the ground up.

In a few moments many of us will lie down to commemorate the 32 students and faculty that were murdered on that awful day one year ago in Blacksburg, but I want to remind you that today is also another anniversary, in fact it is many.  Today is the one week anniversary for the 32 Americans that were shot dead on April 9^th, the one month anniversary of the 32 that were shot dead on March 16^th this year. 

I know this because an average of 32 Americans are murdered with guns each and every day of the year and almost 200 others are wounded, with injuries ranging from minor all the way to permanent disabilities that last their entire lives. Sadly today is also the day before 32 more Americans will lose their lives to our national obsession with guns.  Tonight 32 people will go to bed for the last time and tomorrow 32 families will be ripped apart by bullets.

During the Lie in, and afterwards, I would like us all to think not only of the 32 Virginia Tech victims and the injured, but also of the other victims whose passing may not be as well memorialized. People whose murder is noted only on the inside pages of their local newspapers with a short paragraph, but who are equally mourned and missed by their relatives and friends.

It is too late now to stop the 32 people from dying today and even the 32 that will die tomorrow, but we must seek ways, that we can agree on, to do something about reducing this number in the near future.  Laws alone may not completely solve the problem, but neither will the unchecked proliferation of guns!  There are many common sense measures that need to be taken to reduce the ready supply of guns to criminals, terrorists, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill.  We need to ask ourselves, what real benefit does an honest law abiding gun owner gain from protecting the right of unlicensed sellers at guns shows to sell dangerous weapons to complete strangers without a background check?  What responsible law abiding citizen needs to own an assault rifle or a 50 caliber sniper rifle for their personal defense?  

It is time to declassify guns as objects of worship and treat them as dangerous tools that should only be owned by responsible people, who can operated them in a safe and responsible manner.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness remain the aspirations of all Americans, but none of these is available to those that lose their lives, or their health, to gun violence.  Our founding fathers did not expect us to live our lives staring into the barrel of a gun - just waiting for someone to pull the trigger.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)