Writing To Stay Awake (and an anti-gun rant)

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It just turned midnight and I decided that I've got nothing better to do than sit here and write a post. I'm at the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) airport with a few thousand others who have ended up spending the night due to flight cancellations.

It seems that the remnants from Tropical Storm Bill hit the area pretty hard. My flight was cancelled around 2 this afternoon while I was sitting in Columbia SC training a great group of teachers from the Richland 2 school district.

By the time I arrived here in Dallas, and was able to contact some hotels, it was already too late to find a room at the inn. Or, at least, a room within shuttle distance. I could have rented a car and driven a ways and gotten a room. But I would have had to turn around and be back here at 6 AM. Just as easy to stay here.

When I finally had time to sit down and pause, I was hit by the news of the shooting in Charleston, SC. The Twitter feed (#CharlestonShooting) had a lot of information but the point that kept coming up was that this was a white man killing a bunch of innocent black people while they were in church!

This should be treated as an act of terrorism. How can the gun proponents keep turning their collective heads? Why do they keep falling back on this "right to bear arms?" What about the right to go to church without some nut blowing your brains out?

I used to say that people should be forced to keep all of their weapons in a municipal armory. I said that they should have to check out their weapons for some specific reason and return them immediately upon finishing that specific reason. And, "going to a church and killing a black person" should NOT be a valid reason to check out your guns!

That seemed, even to me, a bit extreme. Well, it doesn't seem like much of an extreme anymore. Why, in 2015, do people need to carry guns? So they can shoot back at crazy people shooting at them? Really? How many innocent (and non-gun carrying folks) will get caught in the crossfire? I can't think of a single person who I would trust firing a weapon to protect me. The odds of me being hit by my good Samaritan are higher than I like.

But as long as it is legal to...sigh...It's time to do something about the legality of gun possession. Let's go to the extreme left and adjust from there. Give it 10 years or so for people to think about what it means to be a gun owner. During that time let's make gun possession, outside of one's property lines, illegal. Poof! You can have your guns but keep them on your land and don't take them from your land.

If we went to that extreme and then promised gun owners that the issue of gun possession would be re-evaluated in 10 years, everyone would have time to think about it without, pardon the pun, a gun being held against our heads.

Rant Complete. You may carry on with your day.