(no subject)

When response to the shootings at Virginia Tech turned to talk of gun control, as it inevitably would and should, I was surprised to discover that I had, sometime in the past decade-ish, seriously relaxed my stance on the issue.  Back in college, I was a firm believer in "get rid of all guns," but last week I realized I don't actually feel that way anymore.  I think the reason for this is mainly because gun ownership is so common in this country that I think it would be legally impractical, not to mention politically almost impossible, to ban guns altogether.  That, and I just didn't think about it very much. 

No one in my family has ever hunted for sport, to my knowledge, but I'm willing to allow for it in limited cases. 

When reading about the VA Tech killer, I was unconvinced that tighter gun laws would have stopped him.  Supposedly there were laws already in place that should have stopped him, if they'd been properly enforced.  But he could have gotten weapons on the street, if not from a legitimate dealer.  He was a sick sick young man, and very determined.  I don't think gun laws would have stopped him.

This morning, I lay in bed remembering two cases that happened when I was in college.  The first hit fairly close to home.  I'd just started dating a friend of my cousin's.  They'd gone to Catholic high school together.  This was in the mid 1980's, when the newspaper was still delivered by kids on bikes.  A yonger kid from their high school, the brother of a friend of theirs, was killed while collecting payments for his paper route.  Some paranoid guy with a gun thought he was an intruder.  A few months (whoops, it was 1992, a few years) later, in another state, a Japanese exchange student was shot on Halloween when he entered the wrong home to attend a Halloween party. 

Remembering these things got me thinking again maybe tighter restrictions on gun ownership are a good idea. 

Then my best friend called at 7:15 this morning.  Last night her brother-in-law got drunk, got into a fight with his girlfriend, and, in the midst of the fight, in a drunken rage, walked across the room to a gun and killed himself. 

As if that weren't enough, I happened across an article which contained this chilling piece of information:
A jury convicted a man of murder yesterday for shooting a teenage neighbor who walked on his obsessively maintained lawn.

My first Google search for gun-death statistics was front-loaded with pro-gun sites.  A slightly refined search led me to better information. 

In 2003, more than 30,000 people in the US died as a result of gunfire.  More than half of them -- 16,907 --were suicides. Another 11,920 of them were homicides.  (Source: VPC.org ) 

Suddenly I'm finding myself strongly in favor of strict gun controls again.