As I write this, most of the U.S....

is sleeping or is close to going to bed.  In their minds are thoughts of the tragedy that unfolded today in Connecticut and how to deal with it.  Some are raging against guns and gun owners, as if the sudden disappearance of the millions (an FBI estimate placed the number of privately owned guns in the U.S. at more than 200 million) of guns in private hands would make us all that much safer.

Five determined men in Japan attacked subway trains and killed 23 people, injuring more than 7,000 without firing a single bullet from a single gun.  They used sarin nerve gas.  I'm not going to tell you how, because some deranged person might be reading this, but it's easy to make poison gas and/or napalm from things around your house.  Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols didn't need a gun to kill 168 people and injure hundreds when they bombed the Federal building in Oklahoma City.  We might feel safer if all the guns were gone, but the reality is, we wouldn't really be all that much safer from someone who is determined to kill people. 

I don't want to argue the 2nd Amendment or any of the court cases that have stemmed from it.  It's boring.  There are statistics out the ying-yang on both sides of the issue.  You can easily make the argument that gun control works to make people safer as easily as you can make the argument that guns actually make their owners safe.  I have no problem with better background check systems, registration or any of those efforts to ensure that guns don't end up being accessible to those who aren't mentally stable enough to have access to them.  But thinking that eliminating all of the guns will make us a safer society is silly.

I was listening to a psychologist on talk radio this evening as I headed home.  She said that men like this...there's no adequate word to describe how awful and horrible that person was...are almost always victims themselves.  Victims of abuse when they were children.  Maybe we need to do more to identify and try to prevent children from being abused so they don't grow up and someday decide it's time to get even with society for failing to protect them.