Thoughts on the Newtown Massacre

The "elephant in the room" in the discussion of recent mass-killing events is how existing gun regulation and cultural mores have created pockets where there are concentrated numbers of potential victims. Once a person has decided, for whatever unfathomable reason, to kill a bunch of people in a public spectacle, the obvious best places to do it are where they are most assured of not encountering armed resistance: schools, malls, theaters, or anyplace else with highly publicized bans on gun possession. These events decidedly do not occur at places where one encounters ordinary citizens with guns on their person: firing ranges, police stations, hunting clubs or gun shows. We have concentrated the most vulnerable members of our society in places where they can easily be victimized, and then systematically disarmed the people charged with protecting and defending them.

After pilots were targeted by the 9/11 terrorists, a number of airlines changed their policies to again allow pilots to carry side arms. Now we hear a cry for a police presence in schools. Well, we don't need armed guards in schools. We need to allow legitimate, responsible gun owners to carry their weapons in defense of themselves and their communities. That's what the Second Amendment is about. That's what we've spent the past 50 years systematically thwarting with gun regulations and enculturated squeamishness about gun ownership. Meanwhile, paradoxically, much of our popular culture glamorizes and cartoonifies gun violence in ways that, while not clearly causative of gun violence, certainly desensitize some of us to the horrific damage that guns can do.

20 children are dead because some decided to be evil and nobody was able to shoot back and stop him. A bitter harvest indeed.