A Modest Analogy

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled Seussish poem for the following rant:
 
If pilots had reacted to 9/11 the way some gun owners have reacted to Sandy Hook, then I guess we would have seen the following statements made the week after the twin towers fell:

• Planes don't kill people.  People kill people. 
• The only way to stop a bad guy with a plane is a good guy with a plane.
• If everyone on the plane was a pilot, then the tragedy never would've happened.
• If they hadn't used planes, they would've used something else.
• Controlling access to planes = tyranny.
• This had nothing to do with planes.  It had to do with the erosion of our society's moral fabric.
• If you make it harder for law-abiding citizens to fly planes, then only criminals will fly planes.

Do those statements sound ridiculous?  Or, at the very least, insensitive and lacking in empathy?  Well, I hope you recognize that a lot of the gun propaganda being posted on the Internet this week sounds even moreso.  I hope that, if you are a gun owner, you possess both sensitivity and empathy.  Otherwise, if you are walking around with a deadly weapon and you can't see all people as people rather than as objects or numbers or labels, then you are truly frightening.

I am neither a gun nut nor a gun control nut, but I will say to some of the gun owners out there:  using your public voice to defend a tool that was just used to kill 20 children is not helping your cause.  I don't care how factually right you are (or you think you are.)  It's effing insensitive.  Period.  If you're going to talk about the tragedy, then talk about the tragedy, but if your first reaction to the death of 20 children is to defend the tool used to kill them, then you need to look at your priorities.

Guns aren't inherently evil any more than planes are.  They are tools, but in the wrong hands, they can do great harm, so as with planes, we as a nation have the right to take measures to ensure that these tools don't end up in the wrong hands.  Will those measures be 100% effective?  No.  Nothing ever is.  We made a lot of mistakes after 9/11, and hopefully we learned from at least some of them.  However, even if a particular gun control policy is only 1% effective, that's still 100 fewer lives lost every year.  Who is willing to say that it's not worth a little more red tape to attempt to save those 100 lives?  Or maybe even 1000?  Or 2000?  Maybe more gun control wouldn't have prevented Sandy Hook, but maybe it would've prevented other tragedies.  Four times as many people die every year from gun murders than died in 9/11, yet I can obtain military spec hardware easier than I can obtain a truckload full of fertilizer, and you're telling me there's nothing about the system that can be improved?