How many times have you heard this refrain from those who support widespread gun-ownership?
Indeed, I feel fairly confident that some reading this will have either uttered, or typed those very words during a conversation or written debate.
Then they tie up the discussion with mis-direction, flat-out denial that you have anything useful to offer. Followed by an insistence that nothing you suggest will work and rounded out with the common refrain that criminals won't obey the laws.
When all that is done they will hit you with the suggestion that nothing will pass Congress anyway.
Well I for one am getting tired of the sheer negativity and paucity of proposals for reform, that most people feel is necessary. I am fed-up of being told that there is something that Americans are unable to do.
Need I remind anyone here of things Americans have done? When all the odds suggested that it were a fools errand, Americans managed to accomplish the task.
We put men on the moon, we can impose our military will just about anywhere on Earth. We have an economy that drives the world economy. We have Universities that produce scientists, writers, artists who between them have accumulated more prizes than anyone.
So please stop telling me that there is something we can not do. I don't believe you.
Feel entirely free to call me unrealistic, an idealist, even point to your belief that my call for the population to be effectively dis-armed is counter-productive. I don't, not any more, much care what you think because I simply refuse to bow to your pessimism.
I refuse to buy in to your belief that Americans are too weak to accomplish the simple task of preventing us killing each other, killing our cops, murdering our children. I have three children in Grade School, and you dare to tell me that I have to send them to school each morning and simply hope that they might return?
You think that is the price I must pay for your rights? You do not have that right. None of you. You do not have the right to do that to me, my kids, and the many millions of similar parents, and their kids.
You do not have that right and I demand that you get your sorry asses round the table and help us fix this.
Dammit you are Americans! You can do this, you just have to want to do it.
There have been three hundred people murdered with guns in December alone, and you don't have to look very far to find the numbers. That is three hundred this month, it will be three hundred next month, the month after and the month after that.
You talk about the 2nd Amendment like it was brought down from a mountain, carved into a tablet of stone. It is your Bible and you thump it with a passion that is killing us. The 2nd Amendment is a law, made by man, not God, and it can be unmade by man. Indeed it can be unmade by ONE man. One vote on the Supreme Court and bang (sic) goes your inalienable right. Not so fucking inalienable as you thought, is it?
How many murders? How many school shootings do we need before you decide that it is time to actually ensure that the "responsible gun owners" are, in fact, responsible? Because they are not right now. They are demonstrably irresponsible and there is no excuse.
It does you no credit to suggest that you, as an individual, are indeed responsible if you refuse to support simple steps that would ensure the responsibility of others. It is to your eternal shame if you refuse to help us limit the damage, should a madman get hold of a rifle and then have the capacity to mow down a class of first graders without re-loading. You are complicit if you refuse to help.
I don't care how many rounds you want in your rifle or handgun. What you want is a matter of complete indifference to me because my children go to grade school, and that equipment makes it way too easy to kill them. You know that, yet still you refuse to help remove these offensive weapons from our society. Weapons that have no reasonable defensive or hunting uses. Weapons of destruction that you have no Constitutional right to own or carry.
It is time for the gun-owning community in this country to shit, or get off the pot!
-