Are you safe?

We are not ultimately safe.  And there's only so safe we can make things for us and for our kids.  And a day like today is a sad and uncomfortable reminder of that fact.

Some of us will want things to be "more safe" forever and cling to whatever we think will get us there. Be it a fierce ban on guns forever, regardless of how practical that is.  And some will claim true future safety relies on all guns for everyone forever.  And neither is completely right, of course, because both answers seem more or less unacceptable or impractical.  There are 300 million guns floating around this country, and we can't unsummon them, unmake or unpurchase them or outright confiscate them without risking an all-out civil war.  Gun ownership is too deeply ingrained into certain sub-cultures in this country for that to fly.  Not to mention the obvious ineffectiveness of prohibition regarding drugs and guns.  Similarly, gun owners can't insist everyone be armed at all times, because that violates the liberty of everyone else to not add "gun accidents" to the list of dangers they want to manage in their homes.  Nor have they really shown that adding a firearm to every argument will naturally lead an overall decrease in gun deaths.  Trucks full of men with large guns roaming city streets is not usually a sign of a peaceful and harmonious society as far as I can tell.

Which leads naturally, if we are inclined to talk to each other at all, about what we CAN do.  I don't know.  I'm not sure anyone has a sure solution, but there are a wide range of options that amount to "doing SOMETHING" in between those two viewpoints.  I think there's a good argument for regulating guns better.  For making them more difficult to access.  For requiring a somewhat expensive license.  I don't really think there's a great argument for guns in the form of "it keeps the government scared of the populace," because that defense kind of went out the window when the government, now including your local police force, started stocking tanks.  Neither you, nor your militia, can stop the U.S. government if it comes for you.  Not since tanks, not since Waco, not since forever.  You will lose versus the U.S. government if it comes for you, and lose big, and your 5 rifles won't change that.  We know this because people keep trying and failing badly.  When the SWAT team storms your house, rightly or wrongly, and you're holding a gun, they just kill you.  And your dog.  And maybe, accidentally but with no real repercussions, your family.  You have no way to defend yourself by force from the U.S. government and that is the reality we all live with in 2012.  And stocking guns and pretending otherwise is just delusional.  So I kind of want to hear what you need your guns so much for that we need to prioritize your false sense of security over making it harder for the mentally ill to massacre children.  Or why any private citizen in this country requires assault weapons for any reason.

But honestly, I do want to hear it.  While I clearly have an opinion about restricting gun ownership, I really don't believe in taking them all away.  Just making it harder for any idiot to get any kind of gun.  And I think the real problem in all this is we've all gotten so, so bad at coming to a reasonable compromise position that nothing really gets done anymore.  So more than I want my opinions above to be enacted, I want a balanced, evidence-based discussion about the pros and cons of various approaches of making middle schools "temporarily more safe" from gun nuts.  And I don't think that happens until we actually start talking to each other, taking each other's arguments seriously, demanding supporting evidence and, AND, be willing to admit when our own ideas don't have enough evidence to support them.  If only we had some deliberative, authoritative body that was capable of doing just that, and creating effective public policy in the process.  Seriously, we should get one of those.  And maybe become a populace capable of allowing them to do that without freaking out in the meantime.

We don't get to make the world safer for everyone, forever.  We do get to decide what kind of society we want to be.  Wouldn't it be nice if it were one where we were all just barely humble enough to talk instead of posture?  I kind of wish we could at least talk about issues like gun control, mass violence and mental health like a group of reasonable adults.  And I'm glad today to see more people calling for less absolutism, and more talking.  And if the slaughter of some innocent kids who never got to see the end of their first decade isn't enough to start that conversation productively, then I'm not sure what will.