The time has come. Little children were shot dead at their elementary school this week. This follows a litany of other horrific acts of senseless violence over the last several years. If we don’t realize now that something is seriously wrong in our society, we never will.

John Lennon, ever the peace activist, sarcastically sang Happiness is a Warm Gun. The ad below ran after he was killed at the hand of one of those warm guns over 30 years ago. I am afraid to know what that ad would look like today.

Our guns are too warm. Our tempers are too hot and the temptation to take sides rages through us like an inferno.

This needs to stop. The time has come to work together and it is up to all of us to make sure this ad looks very different in the next 30 years. 

There is no black and white here. Taking sides means we’re both right and we’re both wrong. As usual, a multi-pronged approach is required when we try to solve complex problems. We need to deliver on smarter, safer gun laws AND we need to place more attention on the mentally ill. We also need to become better educated and more aware as a society of recognizing the warning signs before someone snaps.

Our media needs to take more responsibility too — we cannot deny that it feeds the frenzy by packaging events like this into a numbing cacophony of graphically-hyped violence. The result of that is only a sicker society and promises of fame to the next twisted perpetrator of the next horrific act.

It starts with us, working together to come up with a plan that puts all this together and delivers a solution. We should all demand that our leaders and Congress do the same. Let’s put our energies there.