Both shooters and proclaimers that “guns don’t kill people” are desperate attempts to develop character. Shortcomings in confidence, social skills, a general inability to get a date, often bring about individuals, who mistake big guns for a rewarding sense of bravado.

Earth is a peaceful place containing large pockets of insanity, with dangerously mentally ill individuals scattered among us. In the days of muskets and during the writing of the second amendment, an individual’s psychotic rampage would have ended with one, or two, dead. Today there is no need to go through the lengthy process of reloading a single musket ball, and thus a greater number of domestic tragedies. We know that atom bombs should be kept off the street, but when small people cry (in the name of freedom), for bigger and bigger weapons to shoot tin cans and squirrels, we let them have their toys. Never carve anything in stone; change happens.

We are not safer with greater fire power. We do not need to kill the king or to start shooting government employees just to stop putting up with corruption. We do not need to protect ourselves from a Canadian or a Mexican invasion. If a chemical spill occurs and it causes zombies to come out of a cemetery, then, maybe, we would need to cling to a widespread availability of headshot capability. By far, most gun owners have no plans to “go postal”, and most patients on a psych unit try to hurt themselves rather than others.

Our country’s problem is a lack of gun control. More funds for mental health may decrease the number of tragedies, but if the planet turned into one giant psych unit, the first thing that administrators would do is to have us lock up all the guns and sharps.

As a group, we are not responsible gun owners, because we are not keeping guns out of the hands of kids that are killing kids. There is no need for the big guns or automatic weapons. We are already very impressed by huge pick-up trucks that never have anything in the back.

Don Brown (author’s website at TheGreaterReality.com)