I lived in Texas in the late 1990s, and I quickly become keenly aware that Texans own guns. You don’t get in arguments or freeway altercations in Texas because you know it could all end very badly.

Texas police officers know this too. School shooters with assault rifles have nothing to lose; they plan to die by cop today — and take as many innocents with them as they can, to immortalize themselves, and inflict their cup of poison on the entire world. They’re packing bigger guns than the cops.

The cops that stood around in Uvalde for more than an hour? There’s no excuse, but this is the calculus in a state where people are loaded with guns. The future in a gun-heavy culture is the death of more innocents. Arming schools, as was pushed by the NRA, is insanity. What parent embraces having their small child walk past people with guns to get to class?

When the Founding Fathers penned the Second Amendment, they never envisioned that future Americans would open fire on small children in school or people shopping at a grocery store or people praying in a church. They worried that we might be invaded by Spain, France, or Holland and would have to push the invaders back, as we’d just done with England. It was the 1780s — the era of European military empires, the biggest threat to this newly emerging country.

Today, we are the biggest threat to our country, as we promote citizen access to military-grade firepower, which are used to shoot our own.

Gun-rights proponents want to believe that we’re all sane, capable of being responsible gun owners, and that there’s no problem here. Those people who go off the rails and commit mass murder are evil anomalies. They’re not us. Unfortunately, indiscriminate access to guns lets the unhinged acquire guns, too.

Stop assuming all gun owners are like you. They clearly aren’t! You have to be part of this solution, of stopping unfettered access to guns. Step up now.

Gun control works. England has proven it. New Zealand and Australia have proven it. California is proving it. Why can’t we as Americans step up, and prove it too?

Aren’t our children, our families, our loved ones, worth it?

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