Knowing Good From Bad

 YOU'VE HEARD the argument before. Everyone has.  it goes as follows; if you take away everyone's guns, the criminals will still have guns, because unwilling to abide by the law, criminals will always find ways of illegally getting guns, while the law abiding citizens will be defenseless. (The police evidently don't count). The same reasoning is applied to all weapons, including assault rifles. This sound perfectly logical, assuming that there are two distinct and identifiable kinds of people: law abiding citizens, good people, and bad people, or criminals. Problem is, like many simplistic lines of reasoning, its all wrong. People are complicated. The criminals and the law abiding citizens are, in fact, the same people. We are all part good, part bad, in varying proportions, at different times, from different points of view. in America, mass murderers and mass murders are abundant, obviously. And every mass murderer, or nearly everyone, has one thing, or perhaps two things in common. Before they committed mass murder they were law abiding citizens, good people, with no criminal record or only minor offenses, and they got their weapons legally, because they were qualified by law to own them.  They were good people, people nobody could or had identified in advance as being criminals unqualified to own an assault rifle. Maybe they were loners. may they were know to be a bit unusual, or strange. Eccentric. Unpopular. Whatever.But not bad. Not unqualified to own a deadly weapon. then, suddenly, out of nowhere, out of the blue, the mass murderer kills ten people, or fifty, and suddenly becomes a criminal, a bad person who never should have had a weapon, and we all use our hindsight and find oh so many clues and warnings in the person's life that should have tipped us off to the coming crime. We always miss the clues and warnings. hindsight is twenty twenty, and we are all such good Monday morning quarterbacks. Good people suddenly transformed into bad people. We just never know in advance which good person is going to suddenly go bad, and kill. and that is why, if we want to eliminate or reduce teh number of mass murders in America, we will have to take away everyone's guns, because it is obvious that just about anybody, just about any "good person" can flip and suddenly become bad. the estranged husband, the failed business person,  the aggrieved loner,and so forth. Good people under great stress gone bad. We never know which of us will be the next to flip out, go bad, and blow away a dozen innocent people..  Because it could be any one of us.