Guns?

Especially in the wake of Sandy Hook, it may feel like there are only two positions: Right or wrong? Gun advocate or gun control? It may seem that, while prayer is unwelcome, guns are walking right into children's classrooms. However, focusing on the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States as well as other moral imperatives to defend life reveals other ways for Americans to arrange these variables as new questions, which each man must ask himself.
Gun violence is typically tied to pockets of dysfunction and is a symptom of perverse and absent values.
Gun violence of the kind that makes people willing to trade freedom for temporary security always involves at least one of the following circumstances: Law-breaking that precedes the ultimate crime of murder; legal guns that have been stolen or appropriated without permission; situational illegality, e.g., bringing guns into a gun-free zone; and some category of dysfunction, e.g., mental illness and instability.
Relying upon 9-1-1, rather than obtaining guns and gun training for self-defense and defense of others, does not remove gun violence from the equation. This is because, the responders upon whom we rely in the aftermath of gun violence must use guns to end the gun violence, which a criminal set in motion.
It is also because untrained individuals continue to break laws to use guns in unlawful ways, blithely indifferent to our well-intended legislative orchestrations. Law does not even enter the minds of these people, unfortunately.
Parents trained in CPR know that it is more important to begin CPR on a child in distress than it is to go running for a telephone to call anyone...because of the immediate threat. With all due respect to the first responders who participate in lives as family and neighbors, they are not detailed to any American citizen as Cook County's Hometown hero, President Barack Obama is appointed the protection of the Secret Service. They do not sit conveniently outside any citizen's home or in his butler's pantry waiting to dispatch the law breakers who come to violate him, his family, or his neighbors. Crime-solving and investigation is not preventative, and first responders are not mind-readers who know the date and time that Mr. Criminal will target his next victim.
It's possible that Americans have made a decision about the course of the country, one that entails less personal reliance, less critical thinking, and more impotence in the face of life. However, as helpful as government has the potential to be on a large scale basis, it's important to as this question: Is it any better at preventing day-to-day crime from touching you than it is at deciding whether you ought to be able to grow vegetables in your own front yard?
Americans may grow to regret giving up trust in themselves as much as society may regret its political renunciation of God.