The following essay of mine was published in the Op-ed pages of the Orlando Sentinel on January 10, 2013. I weight it against the unreasonableness of the NRA:
 
In 1989, in response to the Stockton school shooting, in which five children were killed and 29 were wounded by an assailant with an assault rifle, I wrote a newspaper essay describing the utter stranglehold the NRA had over our politicians and Constitution. Rereading the article today, I am struck not only by the utter lack of progress on gun control in the last twenty-three years, but that things have gotten shockingly worse. I wrote, in part:
 

“If Thomas Jefferson or George Washington could visit the scene of the recent massacre of children in Stockton, Calif., they would likely weep. They would weep not only for the gun-downed children of Vietnamese refugees seeking a sanctuary from war, but also for the Constitution itself.

“They could not imagine in their wildest fantasies that the Second Amendment could become as warped and perverted as to immerse their precious country in any bloody sea of AK-47 assault rifles and Uzi machine guns. They would weep to find that, alone among the Western democracies, the United States offers death by gunfire as an everyday occurrence.”

“Behind this historical perversion, wrapped in bloodstained flags of deranged patriotism, stands the National Rifle Association.

 
The shocking complacency of our society for twenty-three years is only exceeded by the NRA’s Wayne Lapierres antidote for bullets buzzing as thick as flies – more bullets. The NRA is actively trying to cram loaded and concealed weapons into the last hallowed venues left in our lives – churches, the work place and schools. I am trying to imagine a venue in this country where the NRA would agree that guns are inappropriate. I would venture to say baby cribs, but I remain unsure.
 
What has happened to our politicians in the twenty-three years since Stockton? They are, I feel, collectively suffering from the “Stockholm Syndrome,” a condition whereby prisoners or abductees begin to admire their captures. To say that our politicians at the time of the Stockton massacre were captives of the NRA would be an understatement. But to describe the situation just prior to the Connecticut school shooting is difficult, since the notion of senators and representatives as slaves is such a paradox. I picture them as the captive zombies in the “Walking Dead,” neutered, with nose rings, being led quietly across an apocalyptic landscape.
 
Even our Supreme Court (surprise) in Columbia V. Heller, has given its Constitutional blessing to reasonable gun control legislation. But when even the most tepid whiff of reasonable legislation is brought up, the NRA screeches about the “slippery slope” which ends in black helicopters and UN led house to house searches for guns. This is childish. Horrifically enough, the motivation behind this argument springs not from its member’s fear of criminals, but fear of the U.S. government itself. So, in essence, we are witnessing the most powerful lobby in the country reserving and expanding the rights of those who want the option to use military grade firearms against our current government sometime in the future. What a noble cause. What sort of nightmare have we sleepwalked our way into?
 
The original core of the NRA, the hunters, have been quietly left behind by the NRA as they are an aging and shrinking block of support. This explains the NRA’s two decade pandering to the paranoid right. While all other industrialized democracies in the world have moved toward rational restrictions on guns, far beyond what will or should occur here, we continue to stockpile a cache of almost 400 million weapons because of the fantasies of a fearful minority that these guns will be taken. A deadly snake has swallowed its tail.
 
In the early 1950’s, during the “Red Scare” Senator Joseph McCarthy similarly bullied this country and cowed our politicians. He finally went too far and was publicly called down by Army lawyer Joseph Welch, who said, as McCarthy blindly attacked an accused “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Similarly, we need to demand decency and true citizenship from the NRA. Our zombies/politicians needed a ____ slap in the face. If the deaths of these children won’t’ wake them up out of graveling serfdom to the NRA, nothing ever will. Let’s at long last be adults about this – no one is going to break down gun owners doors and hysteria over reasonable restrictions should be treated for what it is – selfish, unthinking and unpatriotic.

Let’s start with my name, it is Michael Jason Saranko, but most people call me Mike. At the present time, I am a full time student at Hillsborough Community College, and a proud father of my son Alexander Nathaniel Saranko. From time to time, I often think about what my true goals are in life, and what I hope to accomplish by going to college now, and in the future. I have come to realize that there are differences between what I need to do, and what I want to do. In a few simple words one could say, “I do the things I need to do, to get to where I want to be in life.” Saying that has made a huge difference among the things I have chosen to write about.
 

To begin with, my for most important goal is to ensure my son has everything he would ever need and most of the things he may want, and to ensure his health and happiness. At the same time, I want to maintain a happy and healthy life for myself. In order to do so, one of the goals I want to accomplish would be to graduate from college, then pursue a degree somewhere in the field of law possibly becoming a lawyer. Becoming a lawyer has been a long time goal of mine since I was a child. I can recall times as a child watching my father at the law library studying case law to win, or get out of any lawsuits he may have been involved in. I soon came to realize law is just a bunch of paper work in defending a point of view for whatever reason a person may have. Basically, saying who ever did the most ‘homework’ for their case, and got the best facts usually won. Incidentally, an obstacle I am currently dealing with, and have had to try to overcome happened nearly five years ago on August of 2007. This event happened only two months after I had graduated from high school, and was in the process of moving into my own apartment to begin college. It was a normal day just like any other. Everything was going well as I was driving about to make a left turn to enter a gas station, when out of nowhere my life changed forever as I was involved in a motor vehicle collision in the middle of my turn. My vehicle was only traveling around five miles per hour. As I turned another vehicle ran a red light and plowed into me going nearly sixty miles per hour hitting me on my right passenger side. The impact folded the passenger side of the vehicle onto the driver side. I suffered many injuries including, but not limited to a sub-dural hematoma, a right collapsed lung, and two fractures in my top two vertebra. I was very lucky to have survived, seeing how the top two vertebras I fractured controlled my breathing, and motor functions. Shortly after the collision, a homicide crew came to investigate my wreck as if I was not going to survive. The result, lead to me being in a coma for around eight days before I awoke to the worst head-aches anyone could ever imagine as my brain swelling receded. I awoke not knowing that this whole experience would change my life forever, but I soon realized as time progressed that it did. This experience to date would be one of the most difficult points in my life I have had to overcome. Many people have said to me that the person I was before my wreck, and the person I was when I awoke were two different people, but sadly more for the worst than the best. Around thirty days after staying in the hospital I was released, having to wear a neck brace for the following five months. I have had to overcome a great deal having to cope with the great strain of a brain injury that left me with seventy eight micro-mili-meters of hemorrhages throughout my brain. Basically, saying that seventy eight micro-mili-meters of my brain was damaged beyond repair, and I had to re-learn what I had lost. From this point on, some aspects of my life changed forever. However, the real long term goals I have always had since the beginning have not changed, but have become harder to achieve.
 

Another goal I have always had is to become a private pilot. Not to work as a pilot, but to fly myself, and friends from place to place. The year prior to my collision I was attending flight lessons at a nearby airport. But unfortunately, after my collision I lost all ambition to fly, for fear that I would not be able to perform my duties as a pilot. As time progressed, I have been able to overcome that fear. Currently, I have started flight lessons again taking one per week. As the years passed following my collision I lost all interest on the important things I needed to do in life to get to where I want to be in life. Mostly in the years following my collision I was in a care free phase in my life, because school was too hard, and focusing on anything was too difficult for me. It wasn’t until August of 2010 when my son was born I had realized I was taking things for granted I shouldn’t have, but also gave up on things I should have tried harder to achieve. My son has given me “that spark” I had lost since the motor vehicle collision I was involved in. I thank God for blessing me with my son; he is the fuel for mostly everything I do.
 

Overall, life is full of up and downs. No one should ever lose sight of the true things in life they want and desire. If you fall get back up, and push harder. My goals in life are to do good in college and someday possibly become a lawyer. While at the same time, being the best father I can be in every way possible. In the meantime, I am taking flight lessons to someday become my own private pilot. Everyone has dreams, no one should ever lose sight of them. In my view, life is about finding happiness in what I do, and fulfilling my dreams. Life is too short to stress over the small things. I try to enjoy every day as it could be my last, keeping my head up and moving forward in this dream I like to call life.

As if there were not enough ground shaking discoveries to go around in the field of brain research, a huge paradigm shift is underway not only in brain research, but in all of biology. The breakthrough is called epigenetics. Basically, epigenetics turns our prior smug assurances about evolution and heritability upside down. We made fun of the Frenchman Lamarck for his notion of characteristics acquired during an animals lifetime being passed to its offspring. Epigenetics as a field has discovered that much of the formerly considered “Junk DNA” actually is responsible for genetic manipulation due to factors that we experience during our lifetimes.
 

The genetic structure of “DNA” as we know it does not change during this process. However, the “switches” that turn DNA on and off can be changed during a lifetime by certain events. There are over 2,000 proteins thus far that can be manipulated by the process known as acetylation. The modification of histones also comes into play. These changes are within our genetics and can be passed down to our descendants.
 

 

The field of epigenetics was relaunched in 1942 by Waddington, but it was not until a more recent study in Sweden that the full ramifications became evident. In a town known for its periodic starvation in the early twentieth century, researchers found that the stress of starvation generated heritable changes in the individual who had experienced starvation versus someone who had not. These changes in physiology such as body fat ratio, pre-disposition anxiety and depression were found to be directly related to the life experiences of the Swedes being studied. Many other examples have come forth over the past several years.
 

In terms of brain injury research, there are significant ramifications coming out of epigenetics. In a study entitled “Long-Term Epigenetic Modification After Mild Traumatic Brain Injury” (Darwinsh H, 2010) showed that mice with induced MTBI showed bio-markers for epigenetic changes 35 days after injury. Because similar studies involving neuro-chemical and axon changes after trauma in the human brain have shown, contrary to our expectation, that the changes are chronic and ongoing for up to seventeen years, it is likely that these epigenetic changes are going to be found to be chronic. The likelihood is that some of the adverse consequences associated with TBI are going to be transmittable to the next generations. These would include:
 

• Susceptibility to depression
• Susceptibility to anxiety.
• Perhaps decreased resistance to alzheimer’s and parksinson’s.
• Maladaption to stress and cortisol.
 

There should be a lot of work coming out on this in the next six months to one year. As if TBI victims didn’t have enough to worry about regarding recent research! The idea of trans generational tort damages, either suffering them as a plaintiff or paying for them as an insurance company, is for another day. Indeed.