I had just got done at the shooting range with my friend and his dad. Nice little place in California up the 90, but more RVs driving that way than you could shake a shotgun at driving there. It was freezing cold to where my hands got so numb I wouldn’t have been able to play chords on my guitar, and I had made the mistake of wearing mesh athletic shoes in the snow up there. My friend decided to let me shoot the 10mm handgun after a bit of practice. “Just keep your eye on the target, dude, it’s just 50 yards away,” he told me. I gripped the cold, unforgiving iron grip, still not secure in my mindset that I could hold onto it. I hesitantly pointed it towards the range, sight going wild with my shivering hands, all around me people popping off their rounds with everything from .22 squirrel hunting rifles to .308 mag loads. I concentrated, breathed out, closed my eyes as tight as I could, and squeezed the trigger.

The only reason I flinched was because I thought the gun’s recoil was going kick the muzzle up and smack me in the face with the barrel.

Movie stars, musicians, artists with music, people like Justin Bieber who are considered music, politicians on the left wing of things, everybody heard and are giving their opinions about the shootings of those poor kids who were shot by some crazed person in their elementary school and had their promising young lives ahead of them, willing to do great things and buy American products (assembled in China) and work for the Future of America. Yes, They Could, but now, they Can’t. All because of the man with the gun. So what should we do? Well, according to Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Taylor Lautner, Brittney Spears, and Meryl Streep, and Lady Gaga, all who are critically acclaimed politicians and great thinkers of the world, are now clamming for a nationwide gun ban. Seems ideal right? Guns go away, people can’t get the guns and therefore rime rates go down right?

Wrong.

Let’s think a minute about what a criminal is. The thesaurus says that other words for “criminal” include “outlaw,” “felon,” “immoral,” and others such as that. An outlaw is someone who is outside the law, so therefore, if we think really hard about it, doesn't that mean that the person, kind of like druggies, would, I don’t know, get the guns in an illegal manner like they already do? Sure, let’s hypothetically say the government searches every single one of the 10 billion American households as well as the millions upon millions of other stores and shacks and gets rid of every single iron and lead pumper you can think of. These criminals will just go to Mexico and get guns there, and we can’t control what the Mexican government and what it does, people still pick up brass knuckles in Mexico and carry them over the border wearing them as belt buckles, and no one’s the wiser. Kind of silly if you think about it.

That’s another thing. Say NATO for some reason bans all the guns. Look at Britain, who banned guns. They have a huge knife problem over there, and that’s actually more brutal by far than the gun. A gun was designed to kill as quick as possible in an easy, almost effortless way. A knife was actually meant in its original from, to gut animals. Now, which is the greater killer? If I remember correctly, the 8th Amendment is to protect against cruel and unusual punishment, meant for federal crimes, but still the point is there, and the 2nd Amendment is the right to bear arms and have a militia. What is more cruel and unusual, a giant knife wound in the chest that punctures your heart and allows you time to watch yourself bleed out to death because the weapon was originally designed to skin a bear or the 9mm hole in the front of your heart or head which hits you so fast and so hard you die peacefully with only the feeling you were punched in the chest? There is a reason those two Amendments exist: knives and bladed weapons have been perfected for max damage and minimum empathy for the target.

Ironically, like Jackie Chan pointed out, how come no one is talking about the 20 kids stabbed to death in China on the same day? I’m sure they had a worse time watching their life bleed out.

Let’s move onto the person behind the gun, who is the reason for the killings. Weapons are just engineered for a specific purpose and get the worst rap out of all human creations save for the “violence-inducing” video games. Let’s start with this simple statement: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The person pulled the trigger, the person put the knife in the other person’s chest, the person is the one who released the bowstring to hit the enemy soldier in the battle of Hastings, it was the Spartan person who threw the spear in the Peloponnesian War, it was Hannibal that ordered the elephants to stomp all over the Romans, it was the Greeks who set fire to Troy, it was Gimli who buried the ax in the orc’s skull, it was Mario who used his shoe to smash the Goomba into oblivion. So…explain to me how it’s the gun’s fault that its trigger was pulled and it fired off the bullet? As far as I’m concerned, the gun was just doing its function, no one ever got mad at a car for hitting someone, it was the driver’s fault, right? And it’s funny, because there’s actually something in Greek history in Athens similar to what movie stars are doing, it goes like this: Some Athenians sacrificed an ox to their gods and then held trial to find who was guilty of murdering the ox (PETA’s early roots, I supposed). First it was the water girls who brought the water to sharpen the ax, to the man who sharpened the ax, to the man who used the ax, to the man who used the knife, and finally the knife itself. What did they do? They threw the knife in the sea, and the man walked away scot-free. Explain to me the logic behind that.

Above I gave examples of things people used to kill other people, and everything you can think of can be used as a weapon, guns just get the worst rep simply because of the damage a gun can do in such a short period of time and at a distance. But before guns were invented, how did people kill each other in the 6,000 or so years before? Well…before that they had steel swords and weapons like the trident which if you stick in someone’s heart, the pressure is so great the blood will squirt directly into your eye in a stream for about 1.34 seconds. Talk about brutal. Well before that? Well…they used bronze and leather…and I guess before that they had rocks and slings and used poisons from toxic plants and possibly animals. Conclusion if we are getting rid of things that kill people? Remove all the plants in your garden and all the rocks and branches and animals (or at least their teeth and claws and bones). Logical conclusion? People find a way to kill things regardless of time, era, or way. Icicles kill people, and so do candy canes if you stab a in the jugular vein with it. Beanie Babies can kill people if you stuff them in someone’s throat. Garbage bags kill people, *cough* Casey Anthony *cough*

So, in conclusion, why do guns get the worst reputation out of everything when there’s a whole plethora of things meant to kill and things that aren't but can? It’s simply the design of the weapon in my opinion and what it means to own one, and the fear factor of the noise and power. Look at the Native Americans’ reactions of “thunder and lightning and death.” Some people just can’t grow out of that mindset, and others can. People exaggerate and stretch out of proportion truths more than Mark Twain in a novel. And in some people’s minds, not all but some, the belief that humans are inherently good are so strong they wish to deny that anyone would consider harming another human, so they deny it’s the human’s fault and blame the tool instead. Surrounded by guns at a shooting range and people firing, I wasn't worried in the slightest that one would accidentally go off and someone kill me, because everyone followed a strict protocol at the range and people obeyed. If one did turn his gun on me, everyone else would turn the gun on him, so no need to worry in the slightest. I’m not saying no gun control whatsoever, because we can’t have unchecked people who are serial killers running around with drum clipped autos, but this nation-wide ban? Seriously, America, don’t repeat what those stupid Athenians before use thousands of years back did with charging a knife guilty with an ox’s murder.