"I THINK its totally ridiculous that we should have to be afraid to go to school" asserted a percipient high schooler in the aftermath of one of our American bloodbaths, rituals of death and devastation enacted upon ourselves by ourselves about every day or so. So many so that they are no longer news worthy in their overabundance, and the media picks and chooses which of them to regale us with. (In fact, there is at least one mass shooting in these United States each and every day, defined as a situation in which three or more folks are gunned down in rapid succession by a monster whose reason is always temporary insanity. As if only a tiny proportion of Americans are mentalyl unstable, the rest of us are perfectly sane, and it is even remotely possible to tell the difference beforehand. before the bullets fly, and to keep the guns out of the hands of the insane minority, and in the hands of all the presumably sane in the land of the free and the home of the heat packing brave. I graduated in 1973, and the only things I feared were report cards and rejection from girls. If I were in school today, I'd probably be afraid to go, and would insist on being home shoooled. There, at least the gunman would have had to get past my mother, no easy task. Fifty years after I got my diploma, public schools have become fortresses of fear, complete with metal detectors, iron bars, and security guards. We have met the enemy, and it is ourselves, as the ancient Roman general is said to have said. But here is a "law eternal", to quote the Dhammapada: that in every society on Earth, the fewer the firearms among the general population, the fewer the gun crimes.. the converse is true: the more guns in circulation, the more shooting deaths. As the great baseball mind and philosopher Casey Stengal actually did say: "you could look it up." England and Australia in recent years took the guns away from its citizens, and they didn't have to climb over any dead bodies to do it. Of coourse, those are civilized countries. Gun crimes plummeted dramatically in both places. In the United States, gun owners always use the "over my dead body" threat, and even though you become tempted to take 'em up on it, you don't want to reduce yourself to there level, and, be damned sure, they mean it. Or, we must assume they do, even though I have my doubtfuls, as Festus Hagan would say. Arguably, it is the gun owners who are the most afraid of anything that moves, the least trusting of their fellow humans, and the least confident in the law enforcement heroes they purport to trust love dearly. Even in this culture of gratuitous violence, I don'tfear to go out into public armed and loaded, and I do not fear being home without a gun to protect me. Go figure.