Every large city in America has a rotten core of chronically poor people compromised to live in substandard housing. Their children go to high school, and graduate not knowing how to read or write. Our society is willing and anxious to help these people, but who in their right mind would venture into such a place of random violence and chaos without protection? Do we as a nation want to just forget about these inner city neighborhoods, and not give teachers, architects, and businessmen who are willing to brave that wretched environment a fighting chance to make a difference?
Indeed, we have become such a selfish, fearful populace that good, honest citizens in grave danger are totally ignored. Violent acts are routinely done in broad daylight on major highways, say, with thousands of cars passing by. Nobody is willing to get out and help; or even to make a phone call to the police. Being a good Samaritan against the Sons of Sams of this world is not the politically correct thing to do; not when you can be in the pursuit of commercialism at Sam’s Warehouse. Being good is a ticket to a major lawsuit and as much trouble at the hands of the law as the victim received at the hands of felons. If no one is willing to risk helping such victims of mindless violence then people need the right to protect themselves. Or is it the criminals who have the Constitutional right to wreak havoc as they wish?
These and many, many other issues of gun control can only be understood and solved once guns are taken out of the equation – not literally, but figuratively. To assume gun control will solve all these complex problems is just the kind of myopic tunnel vision that our entire democratic tradition has been devised to stop. That we as a nation are so very near to banning guns stands as mute testament to just how far we have strayed from the honest and free path set forth by those who gave us the right in the first place.