Saying It Again About Guns

THE MAYOR OF MNNEAPOLIS, Jake Frey I think his sname is, distinguished himself during the unrest in his city associated with the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of twenty one, with his calm, confident, positive leadership. At a press conference folloing the recent mass murder in Minneapolis, he stood up and stood out once again, by asking a single,simple, but extremely relevant question. "Should anyone be able to fire thirty rounds or more before having to reload?" A very reasonable question indeed. Also, should you have the option of firing them from a fully automatic weapon, with a single pull and squeeze of the trigger sending forth a raging hellish hail storm of bullets? Semi automatic fire seems deadly enough; fully automatic, catastrophic. Of the nearly six thousand essays which have appeared on this website, surely at least a couple hundred, or several dozen at the very least, have been concerned with the topic of mass shootings in America. You get to the point where there is nothing new to say about it, so you say the same things repeately. Mayor Frey, asking this rhetorical question, passionately, on camera, was impressive. On the news cast, after showing the mayor, the camera showed a long line of high school students, dressed for school, carrying backpacks and books, lined up for what seemed like blocks at the front door of their school, walking,supervised by teachers, one at a time through a metal detector on their way into the building. Every student of every public school in the state of Tennessee now is required to pass through a metal detector every day as he or she enters his or her respetive school building. This is in response to the proliferation of mass shootings in American schools, and in particular to one which took place in a Tennessee school some time ago. The reason for it is obvious, and its hard to argue that it isn't a good idea. It might be inevitable that every public school or building in America eventually have metal detectors for all. But also, on an entirely different level, its sad. Its sad that we live in a country and society in which this horrible mass shooting nightmare goes on, endlessly. Especially sad, because, it seems so perfectly obvious that this situation does not have to exist, that it only exists because we as a country and society allow it to, and that we could greatly reduce to the point of essentially eliminating it by taking a simple step which has demonstrably worked well in all other countries; strict gun control and a drastic reduction of the number of guns in the average American home. Maybe its too late; the cow, so to speak, is out of the proverbial barn. This modern interpretation of the second amendment according to which the founders intended all Americans to have the freedom to own any weapon they choose should, quite obviously, be reconsidered. How could the founders possibly, for example, have intended automatic weapons to be legal? Australia and Great Britain got rid of guns, and their murder rates fell considerably. However, those countries were not quite as inundated in and awash in guns and gun culture as we here in the land of liberty and freedom. And as long as most Americans consider gun ownership to be a sacred god given right along with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it isn't likely that America's perpetual epidemic of gun violence will end, nor even abate significantly. Freedom comes at a high price, and we gun slinging Americans proudly pay it.