Guns and Cars

A commentary by R. Tone Kister

I am just stupefied by the absolute refusal of the media to address the issues pertinent to the runaway shootings occurring in this country in recent years.  I have watched all different channels for many years and the only thing the collective mind set can discuss is the tool of the destruction.

Approximately eighty persons die by gunshot in America in a single day.  The most important question everyone seems to ask is  “ Why don’t we control guns more?”  With many asking “Why don’t we just get rid of all of them:”   The only thing they are designed to do is kill whatever they are pointed at.

Would it surprise anyone to discover, as I did, that approximately 115 persons die by the automobile every single day in America?  Why does no one even hint at abolishing that tool of destruction, the motor vehicle.

How often do we hear, “guns don’t kill, people do”?  And those people are ridiculed as ignoramuses!  Yet has anyone ever considered, let alone said out loud, “vehicles don’t kill, people do?  And if anyone did have the audacity to speak such a line would anyone actually consider them ridiculous?  They would?  Why?  Because it’s such a stupid thing to say or because the idea of removing motor vehicles from our society is a stupid idea?  After all, if the sole idea of removing the tool of destruction will solve the problem, then saving 115 people a day is far more productive than a mere 80.  How many innocent lives could we save if we would but remove all motor vehicles . . . .?

Folks, the evil is not in the motor vehicle or in the gun!

 Why are we not, collectively, looking back fifty or sixty years and determining what  is different now than it was then.  Certainly not the tools.  We had guns and cars and people then too.

 When I was in high school, we took .22 ‘s, guns and bullets to school.  We kept them at our desks in class, because between third and fourth period, we with guns and ammo, collectively went to the basement of the police station and shot competitively, paper targets as a class project.  We were even graded on this event.  No one even considered shooting one another.  So what changed?  The school, the people, the guns and the ammunition, or something else?  Something absolutely no one now will even considering discussing.

If the guns then were designed to kill whatever they were pointed at just as they are now, but were seldom used for that, what changed the people?  And if it is the people, what caused them to change” and should not we be addressing that issue if we ever hope to change back to the days when the mere sight of a gun in the back window of a pickup did not inflict terror and horror in our hearts.  The sight of a pickup and gun in the fifties and sixties was as common as headlight, and just as feared as headlights.

The world has gone mad, not the tools.  We need to be addressing that, not wasting our time chasing smoke and mirrors.  Think about it seriously!  It doesn’t make a particle of sense to look at guns as the villain anymore that it does to look at cars as the source of death and destruction of our innocent children and family and friends.  We do need to look at ourselves and whether we have allowed our morals to deteriorate to such a point that all evil abounds unabated.  We must not dwell in denial to the point of being impotent because to do so will allow the evil to increase exponentially until we’ve passed the tipping point and resistance is futile.
Guns and cars are not inherently evil or good.  They are simply tools to be used or guided.  People are not inherently evil or good, but they can be and are, guided by good or evil.  And people have the power to choose the evil or the good guides to follow.
We absolutely have to look at the quality of the guides we choose, and if we have collectively chosen evil guides, because like the story of the frog and hot water, we have been acclimated, can we be expected to do good things.
We can and will, if we but wake-up and see the light and say, “enough is enough”  The moral decay is destroying us and America and I am no longer going to be a part of it.”

Each of us alone, will be quite ineffectual but if each of us commit to changing ourselves and only ourselves to the moral values of sixty years ago . .  .  one morning we will wake-up to find we have collectively made quite a difference with hardly any effort at all.