How I Ended My Lifelong Love Affair With Guns

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We need stronger legal controls on gun ownership, including not only background checks but mental fitness exams and mandatory training. There should be at least as much required to own a gun as there is to obtain a driver's license. Instead, even people on the government's terrorist watch list are legally able to purchase firearms.

There are obvious reasons that firearms in the hands of civilians make less and less sense: denser populations; higher powered weaponry; ever-looser regulation that prevents weapons from being effectively tracked from owner to owner, better enabling sales to criminals. But just as important is the dissolution of the social mores that once corralled the behavior of civilian gun-owners: the knowledge of one's neighbors; a sense of participation in a community; respect for others, even if their political views didn't align with your own.

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Never mind the drive-bys, the accidental homicides, the random schoolchildren hit by stray gunfire. The statistics began to speak for themselves: Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and 300,000 gun-related assaults in the U.S. As PBS's Bill Moyers points out in an excellent commentary, far more Americans have been casualties of domestic gunfire than have died in all our wars combined.


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