the time is now
I HATE guns. HATE. Would love to see them wiped off the face of the earth. Guns are the machinery of death.
as idealistic as i usually am though, i reluctantly admit that I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to rid the US of guns. The horses have left the stable on that one already. You can’t unwrite a 200 year old love story.
After every one of these horrifying events (and how sickening is it to even be able to use that phrase?) there’s the urgent clamor to *do* something, to make sure this never happens again, to ensure the victims didn’t die in vain. so we try to help people with mental illness, we try to improve security in public places, we try to raise awareness of potential warning signs. time and again, we try doing all these things. we’ve attempted to address these elements since mass shootings began occurring. **shudder**
but the one proposal we’ve never really committed to is gun control. there are noises, and then the NRA trots out the old chestnut about how “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, and dusts off the “right to bear arms” amendment. and eventually the large font headlines about “massacres” and “bloodbaths” slide off the front page, and everyone dives into the bliss of forgetfulness. and nothing ever happens.
there are other ways to kill people of course, but none so cheap, readily available and ruthlessly lethal as guns.
Britain’s 46 homicides involving firearms last year was the lowest since the late 1980s. New York City, with 8 million people compared to 53 million in England and Wales, recorded 590 homicides last year.
you simply can’t argue that gun control doesn’t work. you just can’t. there are lots of countries with lots of guns that have fewer gun deaths than the u.s. – but you can’t point to a single country with strict gun control laws with a record *worse* than that of the u.s. because there isn’t one.
gun control doesn’t solve all of society’s problems. but fewer people die violent, senseless deaths.
we can’t just continue to do nothing again… until the next time.
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nra, us, gun control 
