Actually, I Don't Want to Hear Your Pro-Gun Argument, Unless You'd Be Willing to Trade Your Child's Life for One That Was Lost Today

A madman shot and killed 20 children and seven adults today, most of them at a school in Connecticut. Everyone in America who isn't living under a rock has heard about it.  The gun debate will boil up with all the usual phrases and such.  Nothing will change.

Guns are one of those issues that I just don't put much fight into.  There are other fights.  I only have so much energy and outrage to go around, so this is one that I just let go.  My brothers are legally registered gun owners.  Some of my friends are, too, and I've had to tell at least one of them that he may not carry a firearm into my home.  He respects that, and I am grateful.

I think it's a bad idea to have one firearm per citizen in our country but it's been made abundantly clear that all the numbers, statistics, and reasoned arguments that tell us that having these weapons readily available is what makes us the killing-est developed country on the planet is never, ever going to convince the someone on the other side to give up even the most ridiculously overpowered and unnecessary weapon in their arsenal.

These arguments can't even convince gun rights advocates to police themselves, or get them to work to ensure that legal guns only get into the hands of people who have the knowledge, will and sense to keep them out of the hands of those who should not have them.

Gun rights advocates insist that they be allowed their weapons, but not one of them has yet to come up with a way to prevent those who should not have guns from getting them.  Is it an unsolvable problem, or simply a lack of will?  I do not know.

Please don't think that I'm trying to argue that we should take away all the guns.  That would be a pointless and fruitless endeavor.  The gun lobby won, and this will not change.  I don't expect it to.

But there were nearly 13,000 people murdered in the US in 2010, and about 2/3, nearly 9000 of them were killed with a gun.  Thousands more people were injured, either accidentally or purposefully, by guns.

A few times a year, madmen take their firearms and kill the innocent, the passers-by, the blameless.

Today, 20 small children are dead because they were shot with a gun.

In a classroom.

For no reason.

Twenty sets of parents got to touch the body of their dead child, and weep.

And that this is the price of gun ownership in our country.  

We will pay it, every year, thousands and thousands of times.

So I'm not going to argue that we should take away all the guns.  But I would like someone to explain to me how it is worth the cost.