Wrong time for a feel-good column

This was supposed to be a Christmas column. I intended to make you smile by telling you how my three-year-old grandson, Jacob, put Christmas stockings on his feet and a Santa hat on his head and spent an entire day insisting he was Santa Claus.
I wanted to make you remember the extreme things you have done for your children by relating how my daughter used the bucket on the tractor to raise herself high enough to sling a rope over a tree branch so the kids could have a rope swing. She insists she is now a true redneck for having done this.
I wanted this column to give you a break from the mayhem and strife that is so pervasive in our society today. I wanted to remind you that most people are good; that peace and goodwill are everywhere, if we only open our eyes to them.
But the pictures are still on the news. Another shooting at a school. Senseless. Tragic. A true media circus as we struggle to answer the unanswerable question, “Why?”
The radical in me wants to ban all handguns and any repeating rifle. I want to limit the purchase of bullets to a maximum of 10 per person per year. If you can’t murder Bambi or Thumper in 10 shots or less then you don’t need a gun.
I want to require people to pass a test, including a mental health test, before being allowed to purchase a weapon. I want something, anything, to make this kind of occurrence more difficult for the murderers.
Yet, I know that regulation is not the only answer. People have been killing each other since the beginning of time itself. We will continue killing each other until there are none of us left. That doesn’t mean we have to make it easy.
We glorify violence in this society. Blood and gore are entertainment. We fill our television and movie screens with it. Each show is more extreme than the one before. We fill our games with horror and wonder why our children are numb to the true effects of death. We cheer for the little old lady who threatens a knife-wielding intruder with her gun. We fool ourselves into thinking that tragedy can’t happen to us.
I grew up in a household where the adults beat each other up on a regular basis. Yet, not one time did either of them reach for one of the guns stored at the bottom of the stairs. I know that the vast majority of gun owners will never shoot anybody. They will never murder innocent children. They will never kill innocent adults. Most of them won’t even attempt to kill anything they can’t eat.
I have been target shooting and enjoyed it. My brother-in-law enjoys cowboy shooting, which is a form of target shooting. My son-in-law and his family are avid hunters. They teach gun safety to their children and keep their weapons securely locked up when not in use. I live in a community where gun ownership is high and crime is low. I am no stranger to guns and yet I would love to ban them entirely.
There will be more shootings. There will be more senseless violence. We cherish our right to gun ownership more than we cherish our safety or the safety of our children.
This was supposed to be a feel-good column. But the pictures are still all over the news. So many people whose Christmas was destroyed by one deranged individual. He had to be deranged. A sane person could never commit such an atrocity. Could he?[[In-content Ad]]