Yesterday there was a shooting spree at Virginia Tech. I don’t need to link to it — you’ve already heard about it. And been depressed by it. And today the polarized camps of “take away the guns” vs. “I have a right to bear arms” are once again all over the internet, still locked into their positions.

My position is somewhere in the middle. (But then, that’s where I think most sensible positions on most things are — somewhere between the polarized positions.) I was raised by gun owners and gun users and was one myself and I don’t recall any of us ever shooting anyone. Not for fun or sport, not out of dementia. In most ways, though, we were (and are) responsible people, so we also didn’t run a meth lab or produce child pornography in the basement or plunder savings and loans and bill the government for our reckless greed. I realize that not everyone can make these claims, and that laws exist to protect us from the irresponsible people, not the responsible people.

I don’t have much to add with regard to the gun “debate” — as much as there is a true debate — except this:

1. I don’t trust people who make their living being in either camp. That’s their butter in what is a guns and butter debate.
2. No matter what anyone in the bluest areas of the country think, no one is going to be able to round up all the guns in this country. There are dozens of millions of them. We’d better find better ways to live with them, and we would do better to limit the extremely crazy varieties (like automatic weapons that would leave nothing of Bambi’s mother behind to cook).

A couple of years ago Reason magazine ran a debate — a true debate — on this issue. Here’s a link.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under On being, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.