aurora

After last week's horrible shooting in Aurora, Colorado, I've had several conversations with various people about guns and gun violence and gun control and gun rights and what is it, exactly, about our modern culture that has allowed horrible incidents like this to happen again and again? Littleton, Paducah, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech (my brother was less than a mile from there, so that one was particularly scary)...of course I don't know what brings a person to commit such a crime. I imagine it's a perfect storm of psychological issues, the intelligence to plan and carry out an attack, and - this is especially tragic in my mind - access to the weapons to pull it off.

I firmly believe that semi-automatic and automatic guns have no place in the hands of citizens. Handguns make me pretty uncomfortable, too, but I can see the logic of it just a little bit better (even though I will never, ever EVER have a gun in  my house. Ever.) Of course, restricting access to weapons like the one used in last week's shooting won't stop heinous crime, but I'm all in favor of making it that much harder for maniacs to get a hold of them.

Just thinking about it makes me feel sad and sick.

Jason Alexander says all this and more in a post from a few days ago. Read it, and think about it.