Responsibility

There is a kind of desperation creeping into the words of writers and speakers who believe we should regulate guns more carefully.  Here today is Adam Gopnik.

The collective responsibility that all Americans share is the responsibility of allowing too many people to have too many guns; guns of a kind that no civilian ever needs can be bought in this country by almost anyone who wants one. We have been running an experiment of a kind that no sane ethicist would allow: what happens when, in a country large enough to contain every imaginable kind of crazy, from the inward-turning, maniac sort to the outward-turning, politicized kind, you make sure that almost anyone can readily buy any kind of gun? And now we know the answer: you get more gun massacres than there are days in the year.

Read the whole article here.

"a political choice"

After the shooting at Sandy Hook, I started writing a lot on this blog about gun regulation and safety.  Now, I have nothing else to say; I’m just tired.  I did write my representative and senators this morning asking that they star working for federal funding to study ways to increase gun safety.

 

On the other hand, Ezra Klein is very articulate.  Here is the beginning of his article at Vox.

"This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America," President Obama said. "We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction."

The occasion for Obama's speech was a mass shooting. But which mass shooting? The shooting on June 18, 2015, that killed nine in Charleston, South Carolina? The shooting on May 23, 2014, that killed six in Isla Vista, California? The shooting on July 20, 2012, that left 12 dead in Aurora, Colorado? Was it Wednesday's shooting in San Bernardino, California?

In this case, it was the shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, that left nine dead on October 1, 2015. But it could have been any of the 351 mass shootings that have happened in the past 335 days. It could have been any of the more than 1,040 mass shootings that have happened since a gunman opened fire on Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, killing 27.

Read the rest here.

About Those Thoughts

I enjoyed reading the book Waking Up by Sam Harris (even though I didn't always understand it).  Now he gives a speech on the book that you need to buy.  I haven’t yet been willing to do that, but I do love this trailer for that video of that talk.  He says something important to help us understand our thoughts. It’s three minutes long and funny too.