Mar 5, 2018 4 min read

An old acquaintance of mine was kinda like Donald Trump. Whatever you bought, he could have found it for you cheaper. No matter how fast you completed a home renovation project, he had a pal who had a buddy who could have done it for you a lot faster. And better.

I was reminded of this blowhard last week when our 45th president told a group of governors at a meeting on school safety following the Parkland, Fla., school massacre, “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”

Sure. But my old acquaintance would have run faster.

Yet Trump is not alone in making such grandiose, hindsight-driven statements. After every mass shooting, every gun owner I know tells me he would have “rushed the shooter and taken him out.” They say this even though every gun owner I know has never fired a gun at a human being under combat conditions. They think they know themselves. I don’t believe them.

I am a subscriber to the theory you can’t reliably predict how you will react in any given situation unless you already have been placed in that situation. And even then, you can never be quite sure your response to the next situation will mirror your response to the last. This applies all the way from, having never attended a luau, saying you would love the taste of poi, to insisting had you been ship’s lookout on the night of April 15, 1912, the Titanic would have docked safely in New York.

So don’t tell me you’re sure you would run into the burning house or intervene to stop an abusive father hitting his kid. And please don’t assure me that we wouldn’t be engaged in another gridlocked debate over gun ownership if only you’d been in Stoneman Douglas High School Feb. 14.

Firing at and hitting a stationary target on a gun range in no way qualifies you as a “trained” gun owner able to use your 9mm handgun to take out a shooter using an automatic weapon. Arm teachers? OK. Bear in mind, however, that on Wednesday, a high school social studies teacher in Atlanta barricaded himself in his classroom and discharged his handgun. No one was hurt. But are you willing to write off as collateral damage students killed by the misdirected fire of a “trained, qualified” teacher?

Those who drone on about preserving the individual freedom to own guns that have no purpose except for military and police use apparently want America to return to the Wild West, when being able to shoot fast and straight from the hip kept wild injuns and outlaws at bay. They apparently operate under the logic that if everyone has a gun, everyone will be afraid to use one. This approach might well have kept us out of nuclear war, but the scale of lives lost from gun violence apparently is of drastically less consequence. Face it: No one in power seems to care if only four or five dozen kids, concertgoers or gay dance club patrons die at one time.

Proposed solutions to the uniquely American problem of gun violence are haphazard, at best. Bump stocks became a buzzword after the Las Vegas concert shootings last year, but banning them will not prevent those already owned from being used. And how did American gun owners react when Trump proposed the ban? They rushed out to buy them, despite a 300-percent rise in price. Maybe he should have threatened to ban health insurance.

Keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, by all means. But people worldwide play the same violent video games and have the same mental problems that exist in the United States. And by what tests are we to determine who is mentally ill?

To me, equating the “God-given” right of gun ownership with the right of all humans to live safely means you’re mentally ill.