Enough is enough.
I think it should be fairly clear by now what my opinions are on gun control. If you have any doubts, feel free to check out the op ed I wrote here. More importantly, today we experienced yet another school shooting, in which at the time of writing two have died and three more are injured. You can read more about the shooting here. The situation is contained, the shooter--a sixteen-year-old boy--shot himself as well, though it appears so far that he survived his self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police responded to a call about gunfire and arrived at the school within two minutes.
It was already two minutes too late.
What happens now is the standard cycle of the left calling for stricter gun control and the right blaming everything but guns for the violence surrounding them. We've seen it all before. Unfortunately, this won't be the last time because those who refuse to admit to the problem are just slightly more influential than those who aren't burying their heads in the sand in the name of profits. We just keep going over the same ground again.
And again.
And again.
Over and over the debate rages. Some will focus on why the shooting happened, and blame a broken mental health care system that will never be fixed. Others will instead insist the problem could have been avoided if armed teachers could have been there to shoot the gunman before he killed anyone. It's like a formula; a chain reaction of stupid that has become so commonplace you can predict with near-pinpoint accuracy when each argument will occur and what will be said by each participant. It's like a programming script, executing a single line of code over and over in a loop, because the programmers are all too busy arguing over whose fault it is the code is wrong instead of just fixing it.
Only this flaw is costing lives.
Our children now live with a kind of fear we never did, and so it's difficult to understand it. Instead we focus on our own fears and bury them, to try and "protect" them from real life because they're "so delicate" and "fragile" that we have to bubble wrap them to keep them safe. But bubble wrap won't stop bullets, and so we lash out at each other because we're all too afraid. Except for those who have gone past fear.
Now, instead of being afraid, they're angry.
They have every right to be. After all, the very government they trust to protect them and their families is letting them down even when doing everything absolutely right. Police response to the shooting was flawless. They did everything exactly right, and it didn't matter one bit. The argument of "good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun" doesn't even apply, because who would ever expect a kid to bring a gun to school? Who assumes a sixteen-year-old kid is a "bad guy"? And who would ever think it a good idea to put the burden of stopping them on teachers?
Then comes the argument that we need guns in our homes to defend ourselves. If armed robbers come in and try to steal our stuff or kill us, we need guns to defend ourselves and stricter gun control laws will make it impossible to do so. After all, bad guys will still get their hands on guns. I would like to point out that the same straw-man argument is used to defend the development of nuclear weapons. We need them as a "deterrent", to protect ourselves from others who have them and may use them against us. After all, if a government knows we will retaliate against a nuclear strike with one of our own, they'll be less likely to attack us.
And how is that working out?
Look, it's really quite simple. Yes, there are bad people, and bad people will find ways to get their hands on weapons. It's a given. But if you feel so unsafe in your own home that your only protection is a gun, there's an underlying problem there that needs to be fixed. More frequent police patrols, a home security system, or even just moving somewhere safer are all viable solutions to the problem that don't involve the risk of you shooting yourself in the foot. We don't need guns.
There are dozens of advocacy groups out there dedicated to putting a stop to gun violence. You can find a list here. It's long past time we all admitted the problem isn't bad guys, video games, or the mentally troubled. The problem is too many damn guns and it's time we do something about it.
Enough is enough.