In sum, gun violence is a crime of opportunity. If you have a gun, then I need to have a gun, because I don’t trust you. This makes a third and a fourth person buy their own gun. Soon we all have guns and ownership proliferates. Then something tragic happens, a gun license falls into the wrong hand based not on malfeasance of incompetence but on the sheer number of requests. Call it an error, a glitch or noise in the system but someone who should not have guns, gets one. This is where massacres happen. The violence that comes with a gun culture is not based on the people who have or the laws that restrict ownership. It is based simply on the need, want and desire to use them. The immediacy of the gun and the lethal impact it may have is instantly apparent. Wherefore if there had been any time to cool off, any time for reflection, any time to distance the crisis from the gun, there would not be an event to speak. Thus far by assertion, this has been about their being a combative scenario of man versus man. However, the sheer weight of numbers point not to the danger being me against you but man verses himself. Note the sexist reference to men here. Gun ownership is predominately male. Worse, male suicide is dependent upon gun culture. Again the immediacy of it all is the main cause of death, instantly without pause or reflect, bang you are dead. Poor impulse control, coupled with lethal impact and you have the wasted potential of a failed human life cut down by fatal self harm. All of this points to where the United States is today, in their overwhelming gun violence and maelstrom of avoidable death if only there had been enough time to thing before pulling the trigger. Worse is the two fold, double barrel political situation. Gun owners are single issue voters. They will drop all considerations and vote only based on the issue of guns and gun ownership. The second barrel is the lobbyists who know this and try to exploit this with every turn. They actually don’t care about human life, or at least their actions show they do not. Rather, they simple try to push every chance they get, gun ownership on to the people. Remember the beginning of the post. If you have a gun, then I have to because I don’t trust you alone with one. This the cycle renews as the wheel turns. The last consideration rests on the fearful reputation of the gun lobby, as they have targeted many and supported many others, but with a few notable exceptions, they fail to unseat anyone. They just boost and crow about the few they have as a warning for others. The hard core gun lobby is a small subset of the electoral vote. There are many more issues. However elections are numbers games, and starting off at 40 % of the vote going to the other side, you need to capture as much of the rest of that vote as you can to be elected or re-elected.