Your Right To Bear Arms Will Be The Death Of Me

I used to be “pro gun.” Or, at least, as much pro gun as you can get as a non-conservative. I used to dream about owning guns. Handguns, mostly. I shot guns in middle PA and liked it. I went so far as buying a handful of airsoft guns in college. I even went to a gun range recently with a friend. I still have the targets.

I used to think that it was your right to own a gun, so long as you kept it safely locked away in your house, used it primarily for hunting, or at least didn’t use it like an evil super hero or something.

That way of thinking for me has changed. It wasn’t to do with age, or responsibility, or even income. It’s been a direct result of watching tragedy after insanely preventable tragedy come pouring across social media.

I’m consistently amazed that more of us aren’t fed up with seeing the nonstop barrage of death and carnage on our TV screens. But I guess that’s become the norm. Apparently 10 people being shot to death in Oregon isn’t reason enough for a national conversation about gun rights. Who knew!?

I guess we all should have seen this coming when a massacre of gradeschool children couldn’t even get us to talk about gun rights.

We’ll probably never really know what happened in Oregon. Or we’ll hear snippets of the shooter’s life through his old social media accounts. Chances are, it was a grudge, or maybe even an argument that needlessly ended with a dozen or more dead. Something that could have been as simple as a verbal argument you passive aggressively mention on Facebook, or even a fistfight at it’s most extreme. Instead we all have to read reports of an ACTIVE SHOOTER SITUATION and wonder when something like this could happen in our own backyards.

I’m sure I’m not the only one disgusted with our current state of gun regulations. I’m positive there are a lot of people out there sick of the shootings, and massacres that we’re forced to read about every week. Those people I have faith in. What worries me — more than the psychotic shooters themselves — are the people who defend gun rights in the wake of massive shootings like this.

The second amendment is one thing, but the right to bear arms doesn’t mean that you get to wave a gun in all of our faces like it’s the bible or the constitution.

It’s quite astonishing just how comfortable we’ve become with having automatic weapons visible to us on a daily basis. Airports. Bus stops. In front of our schools. Anywhere that you might think their’d be a bomb, or some kind of violence, you’ll find a police state instead. It’s all under the umbrella of “security” or “protection”, but it’s all fear.

I don’t want to be ruled by fear anymore. And I hope you don’t either.