An emergency room doctor I know was very upset about a 14-year old patient with two gunshot wounds in the head and who wouldn’t be?

Nowadays you only notice it when the evening news doesn’t lead off with a shooting. It’s scary, sad and unrelenting.

There’s myriad reasons for the indiscriminate use of deadly weapons and what seems to be a wanton disregard for human life, but that is not my field of expertise and not the point of this discussion.

I’m not going to say, I’m no scientist, BUT… I’ll leave that to Rand Paul.

Suffice it to say that we as a society need to consider the root causes of violence and how we may have contributed to the conditions that give rise to it.

We can’t continue to label those people and walk away unscathed.

Somehow, amidst all the hyperbolic, tribal anger, we’ve been led astray. We’ve been distracted and misdirected from a key element of gun violence.

It’s the GUNS, stupid. You can’t have gun violence without guns.

It’s true that people are the ones doing the shooting, but it’s elementary that if guns weren’t so readily available, there wouldn’t be as many shootings.

Every statistic from every country clearly demonstrates that shootings and gun crimes are directly related to the availability of guns and nowhere are guns more readily available than here in USA USA USA.

Guns for sale on the streets of Chicago are as plentiful as falafel on the streets of Jerusalem.

60% of guns used in the commission of crimes and confiscated by Chicago police were found to have been originally sold outside of Illinois, about a third of those coming from Indiana.

As a concealed carry permittee, my guns are registered to me. Whether I bought them from a licensed dealer or from a private citizen, there is a record of the transaction and a paper trail leading to my doorstep.

I have no problem with that.

Other states, like Indiana, Arizona, Vermont, Kansas and Montana aren’t quite as diligent about recording gun sales or requiring background checks. These are states that one might want to visit if one wanted to buy a bunch of guns to sell on the streets of Chicago.

Well, you ask, why aren’t there federal statutes uniformly controlling the sale and distribution of firearms?

Good question. The first two names that come to mind – among a slew of so-called 2A defenders – are Moscow Mitch McConnell and Wayne Robert LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association.

LaPierre or any one of dozens of 2A (2nd Amendment) mouth pieces used to rush to the cameras after any mass shooting to announce that it was not a good time to talk about gun control.

According to the people who work for gun manufacturers and the politicians who are owned by the gun lobby, it’s NEVER a good time to talk about gun control.

Not right after a shooting and not before one occurs.

If we felt the same way about fires, very few, if any buildings would have fire suppression systems, or sprinklers, as they’re commonly known.

The NRA knows no better friend than McConnell, who will twist himself into a pretzel with logic challenging excuses to keep gun legislation from ever being brought to the floor of the Senate.

We don’t talk so much about mass shootings anymore, they’ve faded into the backdrop of Americana. They’ve lost their appeal and we’ve lost our outrage.

Nowadays the only people up in arms about mass shootings are monsters like Alex Jones and his tribe, who issue death threats to the families of victims for pretending their loved ones actually got shot.

It’s hard to wrap your head around a world where fake news accuses real crime victims of being fake news.

Why should law abiding citizens have to go through extensive background checks? What a load of crap!

Why do law abiding citizens need a drivers license? Or a license to practice law or medicine or have to do back flips to register to vote?

I’ve never found the process of purchasing a gun to be burdensome or intrusive and if they want to do a deeper dive on me, bring it on. As a law abiding citizen I’m happy to comply and confident I will sail through it.

As a law abiding citizen, I would like to help constrict the flow of guns into the hands of teenagers hellbent on self-destruction and I’d like to be a part of quashing illegal gun sales.

It is, after all, the GUN that fires the bullet that blasts its way into our bodies.

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