It Still Takes People to Pull the Trigger

After the senseless shootings at Newtown, it's easy to shout "gun control, gun control" and hope that will be the cure-all to the problem, but the bottom line is still that guns don't kill people by themselves - it takes people to pull the trigger. When someone has a mind for destruction, they will find a way to bring it about, whether it is through guns as this man used, or through homemade explosives, or some other method. Taking away the guns isn't going to change anything; the only thing it will change is the method in which people are killed. The problem isn't the guns, the problem is people.

In my father's high school yearbook, the inside of the front cover has a picture of four boys coming back from hunting carrying their guns. They would never let that picture be in a yearbook today. In my parents' generation many people grew up with a loaded gun behind the door. They always knew where it was, but they knew they weren't supposed to touch it. How many school shootings happened then?

These days it's harder to get a gun than it was then. Regulations are stricter and guns are usually kept in a locked cabinet instead of behind the door, but it seems mass shootings are more common now. What has changed between that generation and this one?

Is it simply the fact that kids are being raised by babysitters, schools and extracurricular activities instead of by their parents these days? Is it because people spend more time texting someone on their smart phone than talking to someone in the same room as them? We hear a lot about how people don't have time to sit down and be a family anymore and maybe that is really where the trouble begins. Maybe we should all spend more time with our children and other people in the real world (not just the digital world). It might help prevent them from ending up as lost souls just looking to hurt someone.

By blaming just the guns we’re opting for a "quick fix," rather than addressing the real problem. Take away the guns, and they'll just find something else, because the underlying cause is still there. We need to look at why people are killing now, not what they're killing with. At the end of the day, the problem is still people, and until we fix that, all the gun control in the world isn't going to make a difference.