How many American men, women and children have to be shot to death before we are willing to admit that the fantasy of the concealed carrier will not win the day? How long before the notion of the heroic vigilante, seated in the back of the theater, perched behind the counter of the supermarket or quietly taking notes in the back of the class, will emerge to stop the madness and, finally, like the reality of shooting-victims, be put to rest?
Even if this were to happen half the time, it wouldn’t be mathematically sufficient. Are you honestly willing to let some of your own family members be shot to death so that an armed bystander can ‘set things straight’ in then end? It should pain everyone that it NEVER happens doubly so. But it never does. Just as sure as the “thoughts and prayers” will go out to the victims, time after time after time, we can rest assured that nothing will ever be done. No thoughts changed nor laws enacted. ‘Freedom’ is working and, once we get these bodies off of aisle 6 or cleared from campus, we can get back to business, start classes back up and go right back to believing it. Otherwise, if we don’t have enough guns and ammo to give to every nutjob who has ‘been acting strangely’ but is exercising his ‘god-given right’ to blow the brains out of unarmed civilians, the gubment will come for us and kill us all. At this rate, I’ll take my chances with the government. How many civilians has the English military and police put away compared to American mass murderers?
I mean this not as a rhetorical rant, but I would literally like your acceptable body count. USA Today notes that 25,423 murders by gunfire took place in the United States in 2006 through 2007, which is more than half the population of my hometown. I wonder if the people of my hometown would be willing to lose half of their friends and family, or even one, for our absolute unnecessary right to own guns with little or no oversight.
Let’s dabble in counterfactual thinking. For a moment, suspend your known history of the United States. Just for a moment, pretend that the Founding Fathers saw no point in allowing every citizen to legally own a firearm and instead forbade in the Constitution. Let’s say we were arguing to get it an amendment LEGALIZING firearms because that had never existed before. For our argument, we can refer to a country called X. X is the actual America you know today, where gun violence is raging and, each week, another killing spree emerges in the news. (Some might argue that this is not really a counterfactual argument in the theoretical , but is known as that perspective which is the rest of the world but not American, but I digress.) Would any politician in his or her right mind actually make this argument? Of course not. It is absurd on its face. Such is the madness of our current state, where, dead bod after dead body, the ‘thoughts and prayers go out to the victims’. It is time our politicians, and we ourselves, gave more than lip service and did something about the problem. I want some protection; you can save your thoughts and prayers.