I Just Don't Know

There's a lot of talk now about gun control. Even those who are for bans on certain types of weapons know that it won't do much. THIS explains a lot of why certain bans don't and didn't work in the past.

I have a few thoughts on this subject.

I can't think of a reason that any law abiding citizen needs an automatic weapon with a high capacity magazine.  For those who claim they need to be armed in case the government ever goes bad and turns on its people?  A bad excuse. Legally attainable guns are no match for Military grade weapons and technology  . When the Second Amendment was written this was not the case. The citizenry and the military had the same type of weapons, so it would have been a fair fight if the nascent American experiment had turned sour.

For those who say they need weapons of this caliber to protect their families? They will often at the same time speak of how safe they are in storing their weapons and bullets in two separate places. Really? In the middle of the night with someone in your home attacking your family you will have time to open two safes, get the weapon and the bullets, and hope they're not all dead by the time you've put it all together with shaking hands?

This country has a love affair with guns. It's almost a religion to some people as any thoughts to try to curb some of the more dangerous weapons is automatically met with resistance. But this may be the tipping point. Whether or not a ban on certain types of weapons would even help (because if someone wanted to illegally possess a gun they likely could) I don't think an event of this magnitude will pass without some action.

And that action (assault rifles, automatic/semi automatic/high capacity magazines) and that conversation cannot be allowed to be painted as gun banning by those who like to consider gun CONTROL as more than the middle ground of this debate. Because that's what control is, not a ban, control.

But I do not think much action will change anything until the culture of violence and the religion of guns is changed. As more and more people connect on social media, they disconnect from the world around them. We have learned to be mean in anonymous internet comments and blogs, we have learned to see each person as an impediment to what we want with our own personal desires taking precedence over everything. There are different views and different perspectives in the world. People grow up differently and have different life experiences. Rarely is any one way 100% correct in a social- secular argument. Yet we have become angry on the one hand, and less accepting of those who are different or "off" on the other. WE worship the beautiful and the superficial, and we let the fringe people fall through the cracks.

Why is this so devastating? Because we need to live in a world where we can kiss our children good bye in the morning and assume that we will kiss them good night the same day. So to all those people who must have their 30 round clips in their one pull of the trigger, I must ask what is WRONG with you?  Don't worry you can still kill a lot of people with a nine or six  shooter, just spend a little more time at the range until you are good at it.

I am left with one thing after what happened in Connecticut, it applies to so many aspects of what happens in this crazy world, and it comes from a man I mostly do not agree with:

This is our first task, caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.