Guns and Cobras

The only people I fundamentally do not understand are the people who have guns. It's like they love living next to a cobra thinking it will never bite them. Believing also that if only everyone in the world lived next to a cobra, then we'd all live in a safer world.

While some have an indisputably worthy reason to live that way, most seem just paranoid that without an enemy they will not be able to define themselves. You take away the cobra, you take away the duality they need to see in the world. If no one wants to bite you or shoot you, then why do you exist? And no one shoots anyone in a world where nobody has guns except for the ones who enforce the laws you come up with. No guns, no bullets, no gun murders. There will be other violence because we are a growing species, but something that ruptures our souls as deeply as the Connecticut abomination would not take place. At least not from one disease our society could have cured. These mad men who live amongst us and attack us in our safest harbors might as well be wearing suicide vests.

It changes the equation when you know you have a gun. It must be so. By accepting this gun into your life, you are declaring that you are now in the position to decide between life and death. And if you have a population of people who believe they can at any moment be able to decide between life and death, you essentially have an undulating, emotionally unstable system which like a wave will have its peaks. And it will have mind-blackening lows filled with death.

There is no realistic scenario under which an armed people must be the bulk of our modern country. Armed against what if not ourselves? There is another place in the world where the people feel the need to be armed. It's called Afghanistan.