Wow check out this great post on gun control by Jason Alexanders. He makes some great points and I hope people listen and a constructive dialogue emerges. Which is unlikely :)

Having 14 people die at a movie theater sucks. Personally I’m torn on the issue. On one hand I like the cowboy violent psycho culture of the USA, I think it’s a big part of America’s culture and why we excel and fail at so many other aspects of our society. The notion that a citizen has rights to weaponry to defend themselves from a tyrannical government is pretty awesome. Sure it’s stupid right now, but in 50 or 100 years it might not be (highly unlikely but we (Americans) are also super bad at math/risk analysis).

But I can’t help to wonder that maybe it is time to take a step back. We loose so many people each year to gun violence and we are loosing the future those people could build. What if one of them cured cancer? Went into politics and changes the course of history? Was an amazing teacher that impacted hundreds of people? Started a new business? I’m just not sure the loss is worth it on society.

Maybe in order to own guns you have to attend a class every 6 months to be evaluated mentally. Or you have to be part of a “militia” that has similar requirements and seems to be what the constitution was more aimed at (who knows though what they meant?). What can we do to prevent 75% of the current gun fatalities?

Maybe it is time to scale things back and limit it to single shot bolt action hunting rifles only. Our national guard and army are made up of citizens, do we really think they would somehow rise up against us? Do we really think that at some point the fabric of what it is to be an American will so disintegrate that the individuals making up the military would turn on their own people? Not impossible but it seems so unlikely.

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