Achieving...something

IN AMERICA, all things are possible. You can be whatever you want, do whatever you want. Anybody can become successful, anybody can sue anybody for anything, and, tragically, anybody can shoot and kill anybody.. A first grader recently proved this in dramatice fasion, when she shot his first grade teacher, who, thank goodness, seems to have survived the shooting, and even heroically led her other students to safety immediately after being shot, incredibly. But let's face it: she could have died, and thus, a first grader can kill somebody, anybody, with a gun. Several years ago a friend of mine, a guy my age, married with grown children, told me that he was intending to purchase a handgun for home defense, and to purchase a lock box to keep it in. My thought at the time was, and still is; What's your plan? If an intruder breaks into your home, are you assuming that you'll have time to unlock the lock box and get the gun, or, in a pinch, would you call "timeout" and expect the intruder to wait while you open the box? I never asked; I assume that to this day his gun is locked safely away from himself and all potential intruders, protected from sunlight and dust. In a society in which a majority of the citizens at large beleive that society is safer when all good citizens carry guns in public, such as American society, once in a blue moon at least, some previously presumed harmless first grader is going to shoot and kill somebody. That's just the statistically real price we must pay for all this presumed public safety and security. More people died by gun fire in the united States last year than by auto fatalities, correct? Hundreds if not thousands of the fatalities are children, are accidents in which the child is either the accidental killer or the victim. Especially amazing is that the folks who advocate widespread gun ownership and public display swear, to a man, that the more guns there are out and around in public, in the hands of "good" people only, the lower the crime and death rate. As if good people can be distinguished from bad people before the trigger is pulled. In face they cannot. A quick glance at all the people who have committed mass murders in America over the past, say, several dedaces, and there are thousands of them, almost to a man they were not identified as "bad" people prior to their obtaining a gun. They all owned their guns legally. Hint: they never will be, it cant be done. A person cannot be identified as a potential murderer before he murders someone. In america, we can all be anything we want to be, even murderers.