Arms Escalation

No one will rise up to defend a man who walks into an Amish school, lines young girls up against a blackboard, ties up their feet, and then kills them before killing himself. But a surprising number of people will inevitably rise up to defend his guns, to call the man guilty but his weapons innocent. . . . But in these killings we see an open society threatened by the ubiquity of its weapons, in which one kind of freedom is allowed to trump all others. (from here)

As someone from a Mennonite background with (albeit untestested) pacifist leanings, the issue of gun control creates a bit of dissonance for me. I'm on record as being in favor of civil and individual rights. So while I may not personally have any use for guns, I support the general principals that protect the freedom of others to own them. I just don't understand why they make such a big deal about it. A very few people in our country hunt for food, and that makes sense, but hunting for sport? Or feeling you need guns for protection? I see that as a negative trade-off that leads to a downward spiral of destruction. You may be better armed in the case of someone threatening you, but those doing the threatening will also be armed. The more we have guns, the more potential there is for someone to use them in a destructive way. Like when a kid was shot last summer in an argument over a borrowed lawnmower. The involved parties may have been just as angry without guns and may have hurt each other with their fists, but they wouldn't have been able to do as much damage if they hadn't had guns. The same is true with school shootings. Some people are unbalanced and seek attention in violent ways. But how many would they be able to kill without such easy access to guns? Everyone gets angry at times with the potential for physical violence. But if the worst they can do is hit someone--even with a big stick--isn't that better than giving them the ability to lash out with guns?