Guns and society

With the tragedy which has happened in Sandy Hook, the topic of guns has started to make its way on my Facebook feed. I get this, because I have been thinking about guns in our society as well. The problem is, these are emotional responses because we want to do something, want to change something so this won't happen again, want to feel like we have made our children safer.

On one hand you have those who would tell you we need to greatly heighten gun control, perhaps even eliminate privately owned arms. The idea is, if you remove all the guns, then when a crazy person gets a crazy notion than he'll have no weapon to use. There are tons of problems with thinking this fixes the problem. First, these kind of massacres have happened with other weapons such as what happened in Bath Michigan. Second, making the guns illegal does eliminate the guns, it just takes them from the hands of law abiding citizens. Someone willing to commit such a heinous crime, is probably willing to own an illegal gun. Might it have fixed this problem? I don't know, it is not what happened.

On the other side, there are those that would like to see all of those teachers armed. So, rather than hiding her students and then being shot, the teacher could kill the gunman, maybe stopping the massacre shortly after it started. Again, their are problems with this. No teacher was expecting this gunman to be there and it doesn't sound like he spent much time talking. He killed quickly. Meaning, even armed, those first few teachers would likely be killed. Additionally, being armed, might have emboldened people who would have withered under superior firepower. Might it have fixed the problem? Might he have been killed sooner? I don't know, it is not what happened.

The commentators I have read on this have read the same news stories and understand the same timeline, but each find evidence which supports the points they already had. The anti-gun lobby points to this as evidence of the problem with being an armed society, which the pro-gun lobby sees this as evidence what happens in an unarmed environment. I have yet to see anyone cross over. There has just been digging in. Stop taking what should be a matter of prayer and making it a matter of politics.

I get it, you want your children safer. So, to help you out, I've made a short list of things you can do which will make you child safer, based on real numbers, real dangers, not a knee jerk reaction from one tragic event. The data I have is a little dated, but in the years I'm looking at children where three times as likely to die from ingesting something. So, no putting things thing their mouth. They were also three time more likely to drown in a pool, lets eliminate those. But those weren't the big ones, they were seven times more likely to die from a fall. Please no walking or climbing on things. But that is not the big one yet. If you really care about your children, you will stop driving them around. Car accidents killed 38 times the number of people as firearms. Are you really interested in reducing risk, or just feeling better about a bad situation? Think before you post.