My Current Feeling on Guns and the Pro-Gun Lobby

I’ve written about this topic plenty of times before. The depressing thing is that mass shootings keep happening so frequently that I keep on having more things to say about it.

I’m not a fan of guns. TRC has a BB-gun, and that’s about the extent of the arsenal my household is ever going to acquire. I have friends who have guns. Some of them have an awful lot of guns. I know plenty of people who love shooting, merrily post Facebook videos of themselves shooting, and constantly defend their right to guns after each and every mass shooting occurs.

I get it, folks. You like guns. You’re certainly entitled to like them. But as I keep seeing these terrible events unfold, I’m steadily losing my ability to understand why people continue to believe their love of guns somehow trumps the right of people to go about their every day lives without fear of being shot to death by a random stranger.

You know what I like? Board games. I love me a good board game, and I will happily play one pretty much any day of the week. I have two closets full of board games. Enough board games that my wife probably thinks I’m crazy. I’m a board game fanatic. But if I started to see that board games were killing other people on a mass scale, would I be willing to give them up so that would stop?

You bet.

I know it’s a stupid analogy. Board games don’t kill people. But what I’m saying is that there comes a time to stop defending a right to do something you enjoy, if it’s in the greater national good. I’m not saying hunters need to give up their guns. But this national sense of need for pistols, automatic weapons, and other killing machines? Things designed for the simple, express purpose of ending human lives? Why do we need those things? And why do people defend their need of them?

Yes, there are going to be comments defending and rationalizing. This post will rub many of you the wrong way. And five or six mass shootings ago, I might have still cared. Now? Not so much. I’ve read all the defenses already. I’ve heard plenty about the 2nd Amendment. I’ve had people tell me that the only defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I’ve heard the claim that our nation already has too many guns, and there’s nothing we can do at this point. Each mass shooting, the same tired excuses get dragged out of the gun closet, paraded around for a week or two, and then put away until the next mass shooting.

I’ve had it with them. Clearly those excuses aren’t doing anything to stop these mass shootings. How about we try something different for a change? The gun lobby has had its say, and it has been found wanting. It’s time to let the other side give it a shot. There’s a wide gap between “nothing we can do” and where we are now. You want to know why? Because we haven’t tried to do anything.

That’s the thing that infuriates me the most about this. We’ve had children gunned down at schools, and as a nation, we’ve done jack squat about it. Mass shootings happen almost monthly, and the general consensus is there’s no way to stop them. And we reached this conclusion by simply doing nothing.

What sort of an attitude is that? It’s like staring up at the moon at the beginning of the space race and shrugging our collective shoulders. “There’s no way to get there. Nothing can be done.” And so we give up and don’t even make an attempt?

People, if there were no way to avoid this, then every country would be facing the same crisis. We’d have regular mass shootings across the globe. But we don’t. So why don’t we swallow our pride as a nation, look to some of our peers, and see how they’ve handled these problems? Let’s try some solutions before we just throw in the towel.

And with that, I’ve pissed off enough of my friends for one day. Catch you tomorrow, when I’m hopefully in a less fed-up mood.