There's just no stopping it

As everyone has heard by now, a nut with a deep-seated hatred of women opened fire inside a Bridgeville fitness club Tuesday night, killing three women and wounding nine more before turning his gun on himself. This will no doubt spark a new round of hang-wringing by supporters of strict gun controls. Those calls to rid our streets of guns should be met with a strong dose of reality. Handguns will never be banned in this country. We can try to minimize the number of mass killings by putting limits on assault weapons or perhaps clip sizes, but as we saw Tuesday, a determined lunatic with a couple of handguns can wreak just as much deadly havoc. The bottom line is that when a sick individual hatches a hate-fueled plot of kill people, there's really not much that can be done to prevent it. No matter what type of controls you put on weapons, a determined psychopath will find a way to circumvent them. We are a nation of gun owners. We always will be. And one of the side effects of that is the occasional mass murder. It's horrible, but it's inevitable.

To carry, or not to carry?

Someone suggested on the last blog post that it’s time for a fresh subject. So how about something non-controversial like gun control? The U.S. Senate today narrowly defeated an amendment to a defense-spending bill that would have allowed a person with a permit from one state to carry a concealed weapon to carry that weapon in any other state. I’m generally of a mind that most gun-control measures, such as the silly Pittsburgh law requiring a person to report the theft or loss of a handgun, are worthless, but I can see some sense in the arguments of the people on both sides of the gun permit debate. On one hand, if a person is deemed worthy of being able to carry a concealed gun in Texas, why should that change if the person drives over the border into Oklahoma? But at the same time, there’s some merit to the position of opponents who note that in some states, getting the OK to carry a concealed gun is about as easy as ordering a Big Mac at McDonald’s. What are your thoughts?