Common Sense vs. the Paranoid

The head of the NRA recently proposed that we should provide some form of an armed guard at every one of our schools. I have just one question for him. How did that work out at Columbine? There was an armed guard there that day and he did exchange fire with the shooters but he was repelled by their superior fire power. Are they saying that every school should have someone with some form of a semi-automatic or even better an automatic? Because, if they were honest about it, that’s where our society would be headed if we follow their advice. We’ll keep arming our guards’ one better than the last shooting, in hopes of preventing the next one, but we will never succeed.

Another fact the NRA is not being honest about is that most people do not have the training to stop a shooter like that. Most people, in the face of violence, will run away or hide. Sure, we like to think that having a gun will automatically make us a bad ass, but it doesn’t. It takes training to counter most peoples’ natural inclination to run away from violence and instead run towards it. That kind of training is something the majority of us do not have. The truth is that there are not enough sheepdogs in our country to place an armed guard in every school and most sheep have no desire to undergo the training necessary to become a sheepdog.

The conversation this nation should be having is one of common sense, safety and responsibility. Instead, we seem to be letting the paranoid dominate our discussions. I was told that the reason that Americans need high capacity magazines is because our military has them. They also have drones, tanks, nuclear weapons, etc. If we follow that line of thought, should we then allow everyone to have those as well? I would hope that the majority of Americans have enough common sense to realize how paranoid those who make this argument are.

Why are we allowing the small (but vocal) minority that believe that everyone should have the ability to arm themselves like our military and that every law that concerns the regulation of guns is a gateway to banning all guns to dominate our national conversation? It is time to take our nation back from the nuts and pass some common sense measures about guns. It is time to address our mental health problem in this country and look for solutions to keep guns out of people’s hands that have no business possessing them. It is time to fix the loopholes in our background checks and make sure the national registry is updated regularly. It is time to ban the sale of high capacity magazines. And finally it is time to pass a common sense law keeping weapons of war in the hands of our warriors and not our civilians.