I don’t need a gun.

I mean, it’s not really a right I feel passionately about which sounds odd because I should feel passionately about all my rights.  Once one right is taken away, we are always told, that leads to a slippery slope and before we know it all rights are gone and it’s a dark and dismal place.

I know this and yet, I’d be okay without the right to bear arms.  I’ve only fired a gun a few times and I don’t hunt.  If I hunted or collected guns then I’m sure I’d feel more gusto to protect this particular right, but I don’t.  I’m actually annoyed when I see someone carrying a gun.  What the hell is that and why would you need to walk around like Jesse James?  The world is violent enough without toting that thing around.

I’m the perfect candidate to start crying for gun control in the wake of such an unbelievable act of violence on innocent sweet babies.  Whether or not I have a gun doesn’t matter to me, so this blog should be a call to action.

Especially as a parent, I should be saying that those children would still be alive and in front of the Christmas tree with their families if we had gun control.  Those adults would not have given up their lives if only it was not a right to own a gun.  If guns were off the street this crazed lunatic would not have busted into that school and destroyed so many lives.

I should be feeling all these things, thinking all these thoughts, but…I just don’t think it’s that simple.  I wish it was, I wish we could just ban guns, all guns, and this violence would disappear.  Children would be safe, but that’s just not reality.

As with all things in life, what happened in Connecticut is complicated and could be the result of so many factors.  It could be that our mental health system is failing, it could be that home schooling a troubled child leads to issues that should be monitored, it could be that we need stricter gun laws or a ban all together, it could be so many things.

And yet, when the dust settles and fingers are pointed, it may be that some times, in all parts of the country, and the world for that matter, ugly horrible things happen.  People do the unimaginable and we as a collective people are left confused and heartbroken.

I hope this tragedy and ones like it come down to the need to ban guns.  I hope they figure out that if we just do that, all this horror will go away, but I fear it won’t.  Unfortunately it doesn’t seem that easy.

My thoughts from the laundry room.  Kiss Before Bed.

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