Weilding a gun! Your right or another's threat?

It was another Friday at work. Being the week before Christmas I was decorating my cube to make it look festive. I went to check my email and there was nothing festive about what I read. I sat there miles away from the tragedy but a mom nevertheless. I felt my breath leave my lungs and could feel the sadness engulf me. A colleague looked ashen white and another couldn't get herself to eat food. These people had nothing to do with the tragedy, but they had one thing in common with the people in Newtown. They were moms, parents and they knew what the parents in Newtown were going through.

This weekend as I went about my regular activities there was a shadow cast on it. My thoughts kept going to the parents who had to bury their kid. Who had to deal with losing a child and who had to live with it for the rest of their life. If you are a parent, you went through this too. Today my husband and I talked about how to tell this to our children. How do we prepare them for that crazy guy with a gun. For if it can happen in Newton, in Colorado and in Virginia it can happen anywhere! Many parents are thinking the same things today.

Yet there are those that say gun control is not the answer. There are those who claim an armed teacher could have helped. We call ourselves a civilized society yet we argue that we need to bring a gun to a school in order to take out a maniac? There is a reason we have cops and law enforcement. And to me the point is lost if anyone can pick up a gun and defend himself. So when the kids get caught in cross fire it would be justified? Because someone was trying to save them?

I read an article today about how Australia, Scotland and Finland learnt the hard way. After mass massacres they brought in gun control laws. 

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/politics/121217/sandy-hook-newtown-shooting-gun-control-australia-scotland-finland-changed-gun-laws-after-shooting

Yet we stand here after yet another tragedy, not the first one we have seen in the past few years and talk about the right of wielding a gun? I dont have to make any arguments the facts speak for themselves

Fareed Zakaria of CNN posted recently : "From GPS: The sheer number of guns isn’t an isolated statistic. The data shows the U.S. compares badly on fatalities, too. The U.S has three gun homicides per 100,000 people. That’s four times as many as Switzerland, ten times as many as India, 20 times as many as Australia and England. Whatever you think of gun rights and gun control, the numbers don’t flatter America."

To me it is neither these facts, nor the arguments for and against gun control that sway me. It is the fact that ever day my child goes to school, everyday a loved one goes to a movie theater, or goes to a mall to go shopping I will worry. I will worry because terrorism is not from countries foreign to us, but stems from those within us. Every third person in my city holds a gun. Do I need to ask for mental research or that he put that gun away? I choose the latter!

Put it away. Put your kids ahead of everything else. Gun control!!