No More Guns, Please.

It’s the eve of Christmas Eve: I’m watching Love Actually and decide to pause the movie to get some milk and cookies. On my way to the refrigerator, I notice something on the kitchen table, next to the gingerbread house my best friend and I made. It’s a thick packet of paper with a paperclip on it, and the top of it reads “MONROE COUNTY PISTOL PERMIT APPLICATION.”

My first instinct is to shred it. Instead, I shout at my mother, asking what it’s doing there. “Must be Dad’s,” she says. She goes on to say how we have no idea how many “normal, sane” people walk through the grocery store with guns hidden in their jackets for safety. “I guess this is the world we live in,” she said.

I storm down to the basement, papers in hand. “What the F is this?!” I scream as he stands in his woodshop looking at some tool I don’t know the name of. He giggles a bit, saying that he and our neighbors are going to start an army against “the democrats.” I stand there in bewilderment as he says it’s just for fun.

You know what else is fun? Board games. Roller coasters. Concerts. Making gingerbread houses. Watching movies with cookies and milk. All of these things involve living people. You know what really ruins that? Guns.

Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but let me discuss the claims that were made in those five minutes of fury.

(Dad, this is only a little bit personal.)

“It’s OK when only normal, sane people have them”: How are we measuring that? My dad is certainly sane (at least I thought he was), but that doesn’t mean that I’m OK with him having a gun. Yes, background checks would hopefully diminish the amount of mentally ill citizens with guns, but they’re not going to stop anyone from getting a gun who really wants one. Marijuana is illegal in most states but that doesn’t stop the high school potheads. When more people buy guns, the chances of them getting into the wrong hands increases dramatically. No matter who it is, buying a gun is only contributing to the problem.

“It’s for safety”: We have really big knives, and we have this fancy combination of three digits we can call when we’re in danger. I’ve also heard that Tae Kwon Do can be one of the best methods of self-defense. Decreasing the amount of guns in our country is what’s going to make it safer – not buying more.

I could go on for days, but I think I’m already digging myself a deep enough hole. Christmas is already going to consist of my family telling me I’m too open about my opinions. I didn’t shred the application because I know that wouldn’t stop my dad from buying a pistol, it would just make him pissed at me, which is the last thing I would want to do to a man with a gun.