The almost immediate response of my liberal friends to the recent unspeakable evil was "gun control". Our political leader, Joe Biden, who started off OK in his response, morphed into a tirade against the "gun lobby" as his big solution, the only one he mentioned, and made himself into an irrelevancy.
I'm not a gun guy. I never owned a gun and never plan to. The only time I ever shot one was in obligatory ROTC in college. I was allowed to opt out when I was in the Medical Corps during my Army time. So, I'm middle of the road on this issue. I'm willing to listen to restriction ideas if they sound practical, but I get the desire of the average law abiding person who wants to have one for whatever.
Emily wants to have an age limit on buying guns, and that sounds OK. After all, we have age limits on tobacco and alcohol. But at the same time kids get tobacco and alcohol – no problem. And the average kid isn't the problem. As we're told by experts, a demented 18 year old determined to kill will find a way.
So, if you're talking "gun control" I want to hear the specifics. Just what laws do you want to be passed and how effective will they be. I'm not interested in something just to make us feel like we've done something. From 1994-2004 we had a federal assault weapons ban which had zero effect on gun violence. It seems to me like the usual "one-stage thinking" that Thomas Sowell talks about. Somebody kills a bunch of people with a gun so we do "gun control". It's like stopping poverty with giving people welfare payments.
What is the answer? Armed guards and restricted access in all our schools? We've got about 100,000 public schools. It's doable but how discouraging. After all I remember when we used to just walk onto the airport gate, but we've all become accustomed to the present insanity. Maybe there should be a lot more interest taken in evaluating and helping off-beat kids. Easier said than done I guess, but these blossoming psychopaths all have some interaction with the school system where they're observed for a time.
But to me the problem seems a lot more complicated. Our society has a problem with its soul. Generally, there's increase in violence, murder, drug addiction and overdose, suicide. And we just accept it. Increasingly we walk in the streets of a big city and go around people sleeping on the sidewalk or shooting up and it's just part of the scene.
I think we have a soul problem folks. We all tend to sugar-coat the past, but I kind of long for the time when there was some sort of moral sense that everyone accepted. Not even the mafia would take out their problems on little kids. Without going into detail, the stuff the major media and present social and political talking heads are pushing as morality today strikes me as part of the corruption. The polls say that ¾'s of us feel that the country is headed in the wrong direction so I'm not alone.
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