Bullets are flying

America is a nation of guns, and I'm guessing that hundreds of people get shot across the country in any given week. The past few days have been particularly bloody as it pertains to school shootings. There were a couple of incidents in which high school students who had a gripe with a schoolmate decided that the best way to handle the situation would be to kill that person. Then we had the massacre on the Northern Illinois University campus, where an apparently wigged-out former student opened fire on kids in a college classroom, killing five and wounding more than a dozen before taking his own life. These sorts of incidents invariably prompt someone to suggest that we need tighter gun controls. Well, I'm no NRA member, but draconian gun-control laws won't get the job done. I believe it's legitimate to keep the average citizen from buying assault rifles and machine guns. There's just no reasonable need for anyone to have such weapons. The NRA, of course, would disagree, but they're on the opposite lunatic fringe from the people who want a total gun ban. However, I agree with the NRA in that taking the guns of law-abiding Americans would do very, very little to lower the rates of common gun crimes or tragic school shootings. Your basic street thug in Pittsburgh or Philly or D.C. is going to get a gun, and they're not generally going to walk up the counter of Ace Sporting Goods to buy it. And if some nut decides to shoot up a school, he's going to get his hands on a gun, whether it be by stealing one in a burglary or just "borrowing" grandpa's squirrel gun or deer rifle. We have millions and millions of guns in our homes across this country - I have one, myself - and the government is simply not, ever, going to try to gather them all up. There are some people who believe that if a candidate from a certain party is elected president, "they're going to take our guns." Get a grip, people. No politician who hopes to have any future - and all many of them really care about is their future - is going to back a gun roundup. But that doesn't stop the talk. During the 2000 presidential election, my son, who was then about 10, came home with word from one of his classmates who said that if Al Gore is elected, he's going to "take our guns." I'm guessing the kid heard that from his dad, who is probably now, eight years later, helping to spread the tripe about Barack Obama. You know, that Barack HUSSEIN Obama is an al-Qaida operative who, if elected, would sell us out to the jihadists from the inside. Keep those conspiracy theories coming, people. It provides amusement for those of us who don't wear tinfoil on our heads to prevent the space aliens from monitoring our thoughts.