April 3, 2009 – I was born and spent the first 13 or so years of my life in Binghamton, New York.
In the 50s, 25,000 people lived in the little city nestled in a valley where the Chenango and Susquehanna Rivers meet. National news reports today estimated 47,000 live there now.
In the 50s, Binghamton was home to light, employment-bolstering manufacturing firms like IBM and Endicott-Johnson.
When my family went to our cottage on weekends on a lake just over the Pennsylvania border we left the doors to our red brick, two- story house unlocked.
I carelessly ran the streets in my slightly wild childhood with never a thought of danger.
Safe.
Today, images of a quiet, damp, somewhat depressed Binghamton exploded onto the nation’s monitors as word of a lone gunman massacring 13 people bounced around cyberspace.
My brother called me from his home in Albuquerque. "Have you seen the news?"
Terror’s bile rose in my throat.
A lone gunman had entered the American Civic Association on Front Street – the street where I went to our family dentist two Saturdays a year; the street that ended at my mother’s last residence before she died; the street where my best friend in seventh grade lived in a stately brownstone with her two sleek Afghan hounds – and killed 13 people and then himself.
Why?
Because he hated the immigrants who were taking their citizenship test there today?
Because he was unemployed?
Because he was drunk?
Because he was insane?
Because?
He could.
Jiverly Wong had guns.
One report said he owned two registered guns.
To quote the brother of St. Thomas’s recently slain Jack Diehl, "any lunatic with a driver’s license and a few bucks can get a gun."
“We’ve got to figure out a way to deal with this terrible, terrible violence,” Vice President Joe Biden told a group he was addressing today.
But what we really have to do is figure out a way to get rid of the guns.
We need to loosen the death grip the National Rifle Association has on our nation.
We need to rise up in protest as a people under a reign of terror brought about by the stupefying availability of firearms.
Closer to home, we need to continue to confiscate guns wherever they are found; prosecute to the fullest extent possible those who possess them illegally; punish legal gun owners who lose them or allow them to be stolen.
If we don’t, we will live no differently than any civilians in any terror-stricken nation (Pakistan or Afghanistan come to mind) knowing we can be shot and killed at any moment, for no reason.
I cry for my hometown tonight and for hometowns all over our country where children cannot go to school in safety, where Christmas parties cannot be held without fear of gun-wielding Santas, where police officers cannot do their jobs without constant threat from the "armed militia" darkly prowling our streets – empowered by the metallic instant death toys they possess.
And when I think of Binghamton –the little city where I was born – my memories will not be of broad, tree-lined avenues, carefree summer nights riding my bicycle with my best friend, winters tobogganing after dark behind the West End Armory protected only by the frosty, orange glow of the streetlights edging the hill.
I will think rather of those dead immigrants, so hopeful, having been delivered safely to our shores from whatever terror or poverty drove them from their hometowns to mine, and I will weep for them and for the country guns have seized from us all.

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