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After the horrific slaughter of 12 people at a movie theater last summer, I was hoping it would be a few years before the next crazy American armed himself with legal guns and opened fire.
Unfortunately, it was only 6 months.
And this latest massacre is even more horrifying than the Colorado tragedy, with 20 children and 8 adults shot at point-blank range by a boy-man who, before Friday, d id not appear to have been particularly deranged.
Of course, the Sandy Hook bullets had barely stopped killing people before everyone opened fire in the ongoing gun debate.
The no-gun-control folks, who never seem to be the parents or relatives of people killed by gunmen (or are remarkably undisturbed by this), calmly weighed in with their standard talking points:
I've listened to these points for years. And I have considered them carefully.
The pro-gun argument that resonates most viscerally with me is this:
Given that there are at least 300 million guns in this country, I don't relish the thought of an armed gang barging into my house and shooting my family without my being entitled to have some means of protecting them.
And I really do not relish that."
"But then I remember that more people are shot in houses with guns than in houses without guns — from accidents and moments of rage. And I think through how readily available my guns and ammo would have to be for me to successfully protect my family after being awoken in the middle of the night by an intruder pointing his own guns in my face (I'd basically have to sleep near a loaded pistol and somehow manage not to shoot it in the dark at my wife, kids, pets, or friends). And that logic tempers my emotional desire to keep "protection" around.
The other no-gun-control arguments, meanwhile, just seem naive, self-serving, and/or ridiculous:
The alternative to supporting tighter gun control, it seems to me, is accepting that random mass shootings and tens of thousands of gun-related deaths each year are just a "cost of freedom" ... and accepting that cost.
I'm not ready to do that.
Other civilized countries have "freedom," and they don't have anywhere near as many gun-related deaths as America does.
Banning all guns in this country isn't practical: We love them too much.
But can we please finally talk seriously about banning some guns?
I'm just not ready to accept that we just have to have regular mass shootings and tens of thousands of annual gun deaths in this country. And I don't see any other practical way to try to reduce the number of these incidents without reducing the availability of assault weapons. And I'm sick of our national policy of standing by and doing nothing while we all wait for the next massacre."
An article that covers both sides of the gun control debate/ conversations.