My Plan To Prevent Mass Shootings

My wife and I were chatting before my radio show yesterday that we both take the view that we should be willing and able to understand the argument of someone with a different political view than our own. I find pro-lifers tend to be better able to articulate the view of the pro-abortion side than the pro-abortionists can explain the pro-lifers. The pro-abortion side tends to stereotype pro-lifers as Bible thumpers who want to control women's bodies. They can't acknowledge that there is validity to the argument that the child in utero is a human being. They don't really want to understand the argument, they just stereotype it.

We try to understand the other side's argument as best we can so that we can provide our kids a rational explanation of why we disagree. The only way to provide a rational explanation of why our worldview disagrees with someone elses is to fairly understand and articulate the other side's point of view.

We both have a really hard time with the gun control argument. If I were in that grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, I would want my gun with me. I have a concealed carry Glock 43 and I would want it with me in that grocery store even if I was hiding. I'm not saying I’d go guns blazing to try to stop the shooter. This is one of the ideas the left tends to always stereotype about gun owners, proving they don’t understand our side of the argument.

If I'm in my home and someone breaks into my house and I called 911, it could be 15 or 20 minutes before they arrived. I want to make sure I've got a gun to defend my family and the left routinely tries to claim that an AR-15 is unnecessary. They dance around the fact that the majority of gun violence in this country is through hand guns and inevitably revert to the only solution being to round up all the guns — mandatory gun buyback and a full repeal of the second amendment.

You're not going to take criminals' guns away and part of me wonders if the thing not spoken in the back of their mind is that the bad guys are in gangs and will just kill each other or there's some other pejorative argument that the left doesn't want to articulate.

I have a hard time with this one in large part because we do have a second amendment right to keep and bear arms. The Supreme Court has said it’s an individual right. Unlike abortion, it's actually a right you can find written clearly in the constitution and yet they continue to want to repeal gun laws. They point to countries like Australia and say, “Australia did a gun buy back." This is true, but Australia doesn't have a second amendment and we all know it would be impossible to repeal.

The Erickson Plan

Instead of trying to confiscate people's guns and make it harder to buy them, we should make every one in this country own a gun and know how to use it. Give a federally allocated handgun to every single American. But in order to get the gun, you have to go learn gun safety and how to use it, and when not to use it. Arm every American citizen so that when the shooter goes to the grocery store they know that ten out of ten people in that grocery store are going to have a gun on them. At this point, the left gets hysterical as I bring this up.

The only solution the left provides is curtail the right to own through confiscation, regulation, and taxation. Pay no attention to the second amendment. We've got more guns than people circulating in this country. You're never going to stop the bad guy from getting someone's gun and they're never going to hand in their gun. A well-armed citizenry is probably much safer than a completely unarmed citizenry. Let's have every single American own a gun, make them learn how to use it safely, learn gun safety, and then let's see what happens.

The irony of me saying this is that I actually don’t like guns. I have a lot of guns. I wish I had none. But given security and crazy people and those who have come on to my property to harass my family, I had to learn gun safety and buy guns. Guns scare me. They make me nervous. I go to a gun range and outdoors to shoot machine guns, but guns in my home and on my person bother me. But they are an instrument — a tool — that I increasingly think every American needs to have and learn how to properly use. I have had to overcome my fear of guns and it is so clear to me now that so many of those who make the loudest arguments against guns have never even tried to buy one.

The left’s solution is understandable from the stand point of reductions in access to guns would logically seem to reduce gun crimes. But Columbine happened during the assault weapons ban and we are not going to repeal the second amendment. We should, instead, think differently. Thinking differently would require not a confiscation, but an investment in arms for every American so every shooter immediately knows the odds are against him.