Pineridge Blog

I am out of things to say about another mass shooting. If anyone has any ideas, I would appreciate you sending me an email jgordon@pineridge.org

I don’t own a gun, so I admit I don’t understand. But I grew up shooting with my dad - a lot. The most fun I had then was just being out in the woods with my dad shooting at targets together.  Guns don’t bother me, but neither does it bother me to restrict the ownership of guns so that criminals, abusers, the mentally imbalanced 19 year males can’t get guns easily, especially assault rifles, the weapon of choice in most mass shootings. In my mind any 19 year old males who want to shoot assault rifles should be in a highly controlled environment, like the Marines, but that’s just me.

Or maybe we should restrict gun ownership to only women. Of all of the mass shootings in recent years I cannot recall a single incident when a shooter who unleashed an assault rifle on innocent concert goers or 3^rd graders was female. Lots of victims have been women, of course, but no perpetrators whom I can recall.

Mostly it seems to me that what you get when you live in a country where there are more guns than people is innocent people who are killed by guns. Even if the most stringent bump stock, assault rifle, and background check laws were enacted by lunchtime tomorrow, there would still be over 300,000,000 guns in the US. In a nation awash in guns it is amazing to me that more people do not die by gun violence than do.

I don’t want to ignore it. I don’t want to become so hardened or jaded that my heart does not break at the news of yet another cold-blooded school shooting. Or at the agonizing images of more grieving moms begging for politicians to do something. 

But I for one don’t know what to say this time knowing full well that there will be a next time—very soon…

Peace+,

Jim