I have an idea.



See, as this whole gun control debate rages in congress, each side seems unwilling to back down from their position like every goddamn issue in American politics ever. Personally, I’m in favor of stricter gun regulation. At the very least expanded background checks.



I’m aware that there are many reasons for being pro-gun. This is a very complicated, nuanced issue and you can’t just boil it down to “people want more guns because ______!” Everybody has their reasons, some hold more validity than others and some more personal than others.



I think, however, that a lot of people don’t truly understand the ease of killing that a gun provides. Probably not a majority, but more than you’d think. They get that guns can kill but don’t fully absorb the fact that it’s just a flick of the finger. Flick – dead. The slightest accident, the one time you don’t follow all the safety precautions can lead to somebody accidentally not being alive anymore. One slight overreaction, one lapse in judgment or temper flare up is now a 2nd degree murder. It can happen to anybody. It has happened to a lot of people. One time it almost happened to me.



Every year from when I was 12 to 18 I would go pheasant hunting with my dad, brother and a few other people (uncles, friends of his, etc). We were never really big outdoorsmen but one time he thought it’d be fun to try hunting, pheasants seemed like a good place to start and we had fun so it just sort of kept doing it and turned it into a tradition. I’ve even gone a few times as an adult to South Dakota or southern MN and always had fun. One of the first times I went out, though, I almost accidentally shot my dad.



It was somewhere in southern MN late in the season. My dad and I had gone with a couple of his work buddies and we had split into groups of two. I was far from experienced but this wasn’t my first time out and I had undergone the MN firearm safety course. In it, they repeat over and over again that you are never to point a firearm at another person or yourself and to always treat a gun as it’s loaded. Treat it like it’s loaded even if you know for a fact that it’s not. Following this creates good habits until keeping the barrel away from a person just becomes a subconscious thing you do. I followed this to the letter, knowing boomstick=dangerous but as we were walking through a soybean field and I got a little bored trying to scare up a pheasant (late in the season you have to practically kick one in the ass to get it to fly) I cradled the gun with the barrel pointing towards the ground as my dad walked in front of me.



The gun wasn’t pointed at him but he was close enough to my line of fire that I should have just had the barrel over my shoulder or off to the side. I tripped over a rock, stumbled and jerked the gun hard enough that the gun fired without me even touching the trigger. The pellets hit the ground, ricocheted off and a cloud of dust hit the back of my dad’s jeans. He wasn’t hurt. It was a .410 with birdshot and the soft, plowed farmland absorbed a lot of the pellets’ velocity but we were both really shook up. Just a slight jerk upwards and he’d have been in the hospital or worse. I profusely apologized and he assured me that it was an accident and he was fine but maybe we should take the gun safety a little more seriously in the future. I’ve gone hunting and shooting at the range plenty of times since and every time I’ve made sure I was following every single minute rule that was taught in the gun safety course.



This is why I think we should give everybody guns.



I truly believe that if you want tighter gun regulation, we should issue a firearm and permit to carry anywhere to every single person in the country over the age of 12 (that’s when I got my first gun). Let this country just turn into a giant standoff. Give people an idea of what it’s like to actually be responsible for that kind of power. Let this go on for a few months and see what public opinion of guns is like after that. After people have actually had a chance to get to know them.

You walk into a grocery store and you know that everybody is packing some sort of heat. Go to the movies and know that every single person in there with you has some sort of loaded gun. Your kid’s school play? Every parent in the auditorium and teacher backstage has a cannon at the ready. I’m sure it would make for a much more polite society.



After a few months we’ll have congress put it to a vote. Is this how we still want it? Now that everybody’s had a chance to really get to know guns, how much do we want them to be a part of our lives? I’m sure that some people would love the 1 person = 1 gun thing even after the trial period but I think we might end up with tighter gun regulation.



Just a thought.