I’ve decided not to think about CT anymore. That’s my completely rational response to the situation. I wasn’t getting anywhere positive when I was thinking about it anyway. I am pretty certain there is not a solution or an answer or an explanation. Therefore thinking about it is like looking at the scrapbooks of your failed relationship. If you know what I mean.

“I feel so strongly about this that I have a hard time understanding how others can not.” Yes, I hear you. Many people feel this way, about this and other issues. This is something I experience only very occasionally, and only when I am personally and emotionally heavily invested in something. For example I feel this way about people who are opposed to peanut bans. I’m touchy about food personally and emotionally and for that reason I get very ramped up about people who want to eat peanut butter sandwiches in schools. I feel so strongly about it I have a hard time understanding how others can disagree. But on the assault weapon issue I do not feel that way. I feel ambivalent. I do not feel strongly in either direction. I do not think that banning assault weapons will solve any problems in the world. To me, banning an assault weapon is like jamming your finger into a leaky dam.

@turningreen - I’m really torn about this comment. On the one hand, I highly value your friendship, as internet-y as it is, and I have no desire to engage you on this issue because I can tell you have a genuine and heartfelt position on it that is emotionally charged and important to you. On the other hand, it almost sounds like you’re asking me to explain why I don’t see it the same way you do, and I find those kinds of conversations nearly irresistible, given my propensity to try to understand opinions and positions that are different from mine. So I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not sure how you would prefer I respond, but your friendship is more important to me than this issue. 

Having gotten all that out of the way, here is my response: I guess I don’t see any good coming from an average citizen having an assault rifle either, but then again, I don’t really see any harm in it either. I hear what you’re saying about violence that has been inflicted using assault rifles. I’m not ignorant of the arguments re: reload time, etcetera, but in my head, for whatever reason, I don’t connect this particular kind of violence (inexplicable, evil, mass) with the gun. I connect it with the kinds of unstable, mentally ill people who are committing these crimes. I don’t have any weapons in my home either (other than our “family heirloom” which is unloaded and locked in a safe) and I’ve never hunted and I don’t even like my kids to play with Nerf guns, particularly. But for me it feels like a preference rather than a position, if you know what I mean. I DO drink and I like drinking, and I know people who think it’s a terrible vice that should be eradicated from society. I like to gamble, too. I see guns as sort of a vice issue…one person’s bad habit is another person’s hobby, I guess. I think alcohol and gambling can be horrible, killing, society-destroying habits as well, but I don’t feel compelled to see them outlawed. I don’t feel compelled to defend the ownership and use of assault rifles. But I don’t feel compelled to eliminate them (or try to eliminate them) either. And the dam/starfish thing, yeah, I know it’s a defeatist argument, but it’s also pragmatic. I just don’t think fighting about assault rifles, even if ultimately every assault rifle disappeared, is going to solve the problem of mass violence. I think there are zillions of ways to perpetrate mass violence and someone who spends all day in a basement locked in a lonely, mentally ill, isolated world with a computer is going to be able to come up with a lot of them.
I still cry every time someone mentions CT. We watched the Survivor Reunion show on TiVo last night and they did a moment of silence and it killed me. I hate living in a world where something like that is possible. But I don’t see an assault weapon ban as any kind of answer or even partial answer.

@turningreen - of course I’ve lived most of my life in Texas. It is only very very recently that I’ve seen guns as a conservative/liberal issue. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around the connection between a person’s views on, say, taxes and women’s rights and that same person’s feelings about guns. But the other deep-seated influence in my life has been law enforcement, weirdly enough. My own father never owned a gun, never hunted, never served in the military. He’s a conservative guy who has never shot a gun, as far as I know. He’s kind of a nerdy intellectual person and not at all interested in weapons. My husband’s family, on the other hand, is law enforcement for three generations back. Through my husband I became a prosecutor, and now one of my closest friends is in the Secret Service. She carries her weapon everywhere. Many of our good friends are either officers or ex-officers and my husband grew up with a gun in the house all the time. My father-in-law brings his weapon with him every time he comes here. I don’t even notice it. It’s not that I’m unaware of the danger of them, and we lecture our kids all the time, just as we do about myriad dangers around them. But guns don’t figure high on my list of things to fear, I suppose. They are tools to me. My husband had a client whose son killed his best friend by accident with a gun. It certainly happens. It’s awful. But then again he has another client whose son was sexually abused at a popular summer camp for rich kids. So I suppose I have a little bit of a broad and deadened sense of the range and prevalence of evil.

@turningreen - hahahahahaha…sorry. Don’t mean to be creepy. A person gets jaded after a while. I saw some of the golden globes but missed Tina and Amy Can’t remember why. Basketball game, maybe.