I just read a post and it led me to this article, which I’m reposting.

I’ve never looked at Christine’s work before, but this is a very heartfelt post written in response to yet another school shooting in the USA. I’m kinda done with heartfelt – people keep expressing heartfelt condolences, but there aren’t even attempts by senior politicians to improve the situation, and the shootings just continue to happen on a regular basis. I’d like to hone in, though, on just one sentence in Christine’s post. Can we find a way to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people?

I’d like to take a step back and ask, How do we know who are the right people, and who are the wrong people?

Sure, we can get an idea. Probably. We can do background checks. But the trouble is, these are checks on a person’s past, not their future. Put simply, I don’t think we can know right and wrong people. Not 100%. Who knows? I could be a wrong person, it’s just that nothing ever happened yet to tip me over the edge. So, I’d argue that you can’t tell the difference between right people and wrong people.

And this is where I differ from many of my American friends – you need to remove the guns from all people, period.

Okay, doing that will not be easy. If you ask me, it has to start with steps to reform your politics – probably legal steps, not just political willpower, but nothing at all to do with guns. But if your end-game is to get rid of guns altogether, you need to think back four or five moves.

One problem I never managed to think through was how you get existing guns away from people. I’m not convinced a buyback would work. People who own guns often have them for ideological reasons – because they have the god-given right to own a gun – so I’m not sure a few dollars would make any difference. On that one, I’m afraid, the USA is on its own, but should probably prepare for more bloodshed.