I woke up Wednesday morning ready to write about Ashley Madison and comment on the number of blogs I have read that were making the argument that right wing Christian males had an unfair advantage in the world of human sexuality and some of their Ashley Madison behavior should be expected. I have decided to save that dicey topic for next week as I was deeply bothered by a shooting on live television of a young reporter and the cameraman filming an interview. The shooter, who took his own life, walked up to the interview and shot three people. I commented to my husband when I first saw the footage that the shooter would be dead too before the day was over.

It took only seconds for Facebook and other social media sites to begin their talk about gun control and most of the consensus was that more people need to carry so that these senseless murders can stop. First, there is no way that any one of the three innocent victims would have had time to pull a weapon to prevent what happened. One second they were interviewing a woman and the next second there were shots and screams and two people were dead. The shooter even recorded the murders and posted them online before being identified and pursued until he shot himself.

I will never understand these arguments about how carrying weapons can prevent these quick and senseless blasts at innocent victims. The shooters clearly have no respect for any human life, including their own. They rarely do. You can’t stop a person like that before they have already done great damage and caused many deaths. We have to start looking deeper at how these mentally ill people are getting weapons and make changes to those laws. Whether we like it or not, to protect innocent people, we have to be willing to compromise on the current system and put controls in place. The mentally ill have easy access to weapons and we have to come together to stop it. The NRA does not increase membership rolls and make money if some gun sales decrease. They don’t care if people are dying. They care that they have profits. A reporter and some cameraman will not stop them on their crusade to convince Americans that we are safer with more guns. We aren’t.

America is one of the most violent countries in the world and of course has very few laws restricting gun control. There are ways to legally get guns without background checks and that shouldn’t be the case. Every time I talk to someone that carries, I ask them how many times they have pulled their weapon in the interest of public safety and the answer is zero. I haven’t met a private citizen who has fired a bullet at a deranged person to stop a mass shooting. It doesn’t mean that you can’t find one, but the number of those heroes pales in comparison to the number of innocent people being gunned down daily in this country. The outrage should be unstoppable at this point. We are missing the problem and standing behind a document that offered the protection of muskets against a government that might attempt to attack its own people. This shouldn’t be a Republican or a Democrat issue but a human issue.

We need gun control. I can’t express it any other way. Everyone should be coming together and comprising about how we are going to stop some of these senseless shootings. Arming more people is not going to stop it. In fact, some of the supporters of gun control I know and even some of the carriers I know scare me enough. They are quick to fight for their gun rights and don’t ever seem to think about the blood spilling all over this country. When they see these killings, they just argue for more guns.

How does that make sense? If the NRA isn’t going to help solve this problem, then they need to start dedicating a portion of their profits for better treatment for the mentally ill. The shooter was apparently a disgruntled employee. How can an employer feel safe firing an underperforming employee with what is happening in our society? The NRA needs to step up with helpful solutions for interviewing employees and firing employees and ways that employers can detect potential problems. They need to put their money into research and more facilities for the mentally ill if they are going to continue to encourage more and more powerful guns to be placed on the street.

A gun in the hand of a mentally ill person is no different than a drink in the hand of a drunk getting behind the wheel of a car. We wouldn’t encourage more drunk drivers to try to stop drunk driving and we need to stop encouraging more guns to stop senseless murder. Other countries have had success getting rid of weapons and witnessed huge decreases in murder rates and we really are just laughed at as we sit here and pretend we don’t understand what the problem is. Guns are too easy to buy and until that changes, it doesn’t matter what rules are put into place in cities or anywhere else. Without the guns, there can’t be the shootings. Less guns makes the guns that are available too expensive for most people to afford. It’s simple economics if we can get somebody to stand up to the big NRA and start holding them responsible for the daily gun murders in our country.


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