A gun is not some magical thing. You have to know how to shoot, sights can be off, not to panic, where the safety is, gun safety. You can’t just pick it up and magic happens. Sometimes, without 
intent, the wrong people get shot, even with professionals like officers.. Even with intent, even with officers if they forget their training, if anger takes the best of them..
A gun is not some magical thing. Abracadabra and bad guys go away! Sometimes good people: even kids, go away because weapons are carelessly left out loaded, and kids aren’t taught to respect them. Since kids do misbehave remember training can be tossed out the window. They are a bucket full of energy, hormones, get mad without knowing how to handle their emotions like an adult should. Sometimes they are curious what would happen “if.”
Sometimes adults suffer from that too. Think Terry Kath of Chicago who played one round of Russian Roulette.
A teacher having a gun can make things far worse. Students find it. It may be left out, loaded, because they have never had to learn basic safety.
People buy guns for all kinds of reasons: not just safety. Checking out people and having police pay attention to them if they have a violent history is NOT unreasonable, or a violation of any rights. It is the bare minimum of “well regulated.” We no longer have militias like we had, and certainly not well regulated, but at least a minimum of regulation would be required by an ounce of common sense. Everything needs rules. Whether it be the economy, or guns, some magically perfectly ordered free of rules for all doesn’t work.
”Good guys” with guns far too easily can become bad guys with guns. Guns don’t turn people into perpetual good guys. Bullets don’t discriminate: shooters do.
Please stop talking as if guns are magic.
They’re not.
-30-
Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for almost 50 years, first published in fall of 1972. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks, and into the unseen cracks and crevasses, that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
©Copyright 2022
Ken Carman and Cartenual Productions
all rights reserved