With the tragedy in Blacksburg yesterday, calls for stricter gun control laws are being heard across the American political center-left. The NYT featured gun control in its lead editorial on the shootings.
According to reliable statistics, there are over 200 million privately owned functioning firearms in the U.S., and 40% of American households own at least one such gun.
Please ponder these facts: 200 million guns, 40% of households.
Now, it is my claim there will never be the political consensus and judicial acquiescence to a large-scale confiscation of guns in this country.
Please come to accept this as a fact.
We have arrived at a bad equilibrium in this country in terms of guns, and, candidly, there is no credible way out. Other nations began at different starting points, had different (and superior) collective consciences, and arrived at different (and superior) outcomes.
This diary is about accepting reality.
And, this diary is about moving.
Five years ago, I purchased a large and beautiful lot of land in Park City, UT, on which to build my dream house. I work in NYC, but I had practiced a commute from SLC to NYC, leaving on the red-eye Jet Blue flight from SLC Sunday/Monday midnight and returning on the Friday afternoon nonstop from JFK. Life high atop the Wasatch Mountains would be worth it. I had a 2-year-old son and a newborn son, and my wife and I are mountain people by nature. A dear friend of mine, an architect, designed our dream home for us. I obtained a building permit, including full water rights.
Then, in one instant, the dream died.
The Utah Legislature passed a law permitting teachers to have concealed weapons in the classroom.
I sold my lot and building permit.
It is my utmost responsibility to raise my children. I am entrusted with this obligation, and I will not fail. The thought of a teacher leaving her classroom for a few moments with her kids knowing she kept a loaded handgun in her desk was too much for me to bear.
It was not too much to bear for the right-wing trash that pervades Utah.
I've got to come to grips with the fact an extraordinarily large number of Americand are dangerous and hateful simpletons. We're where we are today because of deep and structural defects in our collective psyche. I'm near my personal tipping point for this country.
I'm bitter, yes. But, as a parent, I am not permitted the luxury of naivete.