Guns.

It is selfish to believe that you have the right to own as many guns as you want at the expense of other people’s right to be alive. We as people clearly can’t handle this many guns in this level of proximity. People are literally dying. Forget your “rights.” Forget the idea that you need to protect yourself. There are too many guns. The idea that you need a gun to protect yourself from people with guns because there are so many guns is circular, illogical, and part of the problem. Yes, a large part of the problem is mental illness. Let’s definitely address that. But that’s a slower, more complicated problem to solve. People are dying all the time in huge quantities right now. So, in the future, we can limit gun access using our awesome, 100% accurate, mental illness detectors. But for now, we need a more rapid solution.

In Australia following a mass murder, “rapid-fire rifles and shotguns were banned, gun owner licensing was tightened and remaining firearms were registered to uniform national standards. In two nationwide, federally funded gun buybacks, plus large-scale voluntary surrenders and state gun amnesties … Australia collected and destroyed more than a million firearms, perhaps one-third of the national stock.” – http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/16/opinion/australia-gun-laws/index.html

We have to do something like this. We cannot have this many guns in one country. We have to choose people’s lives over our wants. You might be a responsible gun owner, other people are not. That’s the reason we can’t bring bombs to school or own pet tigers in our backyards. YOU might have no intention of setting off the bomb, and know everything about how to keep the bomb from detonating. YOU might have a super-secure backyard so the tiger can’t escape. But not everyone else does. People bring guns to school to shoot people. People don’t keep their guns locked away in secure safes. They keep them in their glove compartments so when their cars get broken into, a criminal owns their gun. It’s all a matter of: THERE ARE TOO MANY GUNS.

We have to do something about it.

The belief that we have the right to own guns is largely cultural. 5 years ago, so was the wide-spread, socially acceptable belief that homosexuality was a law-enforceable sin. 50 years ago, it was the belief that Black people were biologically inferior to White people – to the point that they deserved fewer rights. We can change our culture in a big way. And we have to change our gun culture if we want more people to stay alive. And we have to do more than writing Facebook or blog posts. We have to write to our senators, stand up for gun-control among friends, and anything else. I don’t know what else! But we have to change, for the sake of those literally shot to death in a horrifying way while simply going about their day to day lives.