I'm a gun owner. I don't own any "assault weapons" -- which is just a label by the way, many hunting rifles are far more powerful and deadly than an AR-15 -- but for a long time I've been in support of the broad interpretation of the 2nd amendment. When tragedies like Aurora happen, it's hard for me to rationalize my support of the 2nd amendment, because all the arguments I hear from fellow supporters sound apocryphal. The problem is, all the arguments I hear from detractors are just as bad.

Protection from, and ability to overthrow, the government is a pretty laughable justification for firearm ownership these days. Let's ignore for a moment the fact that gun owners would have to take a page from Al Quaeda to have any meaningful chance against even a single branch of the U.S. Military operating on their home turf. We can ignore that, because the government doesn't need force to operate as they please. Since the beginning of civilization, government has been about control, and a large part of control is money. If the events of the last 8 years haven't convinced you that the US government can do whatever they want with regards to monetary policy, I don't know what to tell you.

There is a solid argument to be made that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Switzerland comes close (not really, but they're one of the closest) to the US in terms of guns per person, but they're still not quite at our level. The Swiss have approximately 46 guns per person, where the US has 90 (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership_rate). Yet, the Swiss have a small fraction (less than 1/5th) of the gun crime that we do. If you look at that list, you can see that there is either no apparent correlation between gun ownership and violence, or that data is just all kinds of wrong. I think it's the former.

So, let's accept that guns don't kill people, people kill people. We're left to reach only one conclusion. America is has a disproportionately high rate of murderous psychos. Let's throw away the Constitution for a moment (stop laughing, I'm serious) and look at it from a strictly rational, problem solving perspective. If you were presented with two groups of people, one group had a low rate of murderous psychos, and the other had five times the number of murderous psychos, would you arm the group with 5x the psychos? This is a serious question, and there are two schools of thought with serious answers. Both of these scenarios below grant that the measures taken will be 100% effective, which is a pipe dream, but let's play the game anyway.

Gun school: arm everyone. A murderous psycho is apt to think twice before going on a murdering rampage if he's certain that everyone in the room is carrying a gun as well. There is a near 100% chance that someone in the crowd will fight back and the psycho will end up dead. Even if the psycho decides to go on a rampage, they'll be stopped quickly and won't be able to harm many people.

Anti-gun school: make it impossible to get guns. The murderous psycho will have to resort to other means of killing people, like a knife or an axe. Because these tools are cumbersome and require a close range to use effectively, the number of people harmed is limited.

In reality, neither school is "right".

The gun school of thought has several problems, not including the fact that most gun owners couldn't deploy their weapon effectively, even if they had one. And no, I'm not talking to you gun buddy who practices at the range and in IDPA, etc. I'm talking about the statistical likelihood in a population where everyone carries, which is a necessity for the gun school line of thinking. Colorado has very permissive carry laws, but no one contested the shooter on that day in Aurora. Other problems include the fact that there would undoubtedly be collateral damage, and the fact that many murderous psychos take their lives at the end of their rampage, so the threat of death isn't an assured deterrent.

The anti-gun school faces the problem that there are 88 guns per 100 people in the US right now. Do you really think that this many lawful gun owners are going to just hand over their guns? Really? Stop for a moment, please.... Really? Even if they do, contraband weapons will remain a reality in the US for a very, very long time. Then we end up back at the problem that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Make guns hard to get, and people will start improvising other means. The murderer in Aurora already exhibited the ability to manufacture bombs. You can't outlaw everything.

So I see it this way: we have to arrive at a common goal. That common goal is not going to be outlawing firearms, no matter how obvious it seems to you or your favorite celebrity. It seems reasonable, but it's impractical and politically impossible. You have to accept it.

If you want to accomplish something, you have to be clear about your goals, then adopt methods that have the greatest likelihood of success. Clearly, our goal must be to reduce the amount of violence in the US. Now we must decide on the method. Taking away firearms is impractical and ineffective because A) you can't expect to reduce the number of firearms in the US on any kind of reasonable time scale, and B) murderous psychos will find other means to kill lots of people. The only rational goal can be to have a hard look at why there are so many murderous psychos and work together to reduce them.

I know lots of gun owners, and let me tell you, they're some of the most caring and helpful people you could ever hope to meet. They own a gun because they feel that it's the responsible thing to do. I have no doubt that would any one of them have been in that theater, they would have stood up, drawn their weapon and opened fire on the murderous psycho that day. That act would have surely drawn the fire of the gunman, but they would have done it anyway. These are not the people you should persecute. We should find a way to work with gun owners, not against them.

The term "murderous psycho" is not meant to be hyperbole or some kind of joke. The people who commit these crimes are often psychopaths, by clinical definition. They often go untreated, although not unidentified, until something like Aurora happens. James Holmes' mother was not surprised when contacted by authorities. Does this not seem like the most broken aspect of this situation? And I'm not suggesting a witch hunt for psychotics. That won't work any better than the war on drugs, or the war on firearms for that matter. We have to open up the dialogue about mental illness. We have to start talking about it as more than the punchline of a joke. A person who is sprialling out of control needs to feel comfortable that they have somewhere to go and receive help, not imprisonment.