freelansing in Seattle

I’m not a big fan of either guns or cars. I believe both produce a lot of unnecessary harm in our world (and our country, specifically). But I’m realistic — I know that neither one is going away any time soon. Certainly not here in the good old US of A. So the realistic question is: How do we best mitigate the harm done by these two dangerous things that both kill lots of innocent people?

Many Americans really love their guns. Even more love their cars. But it’s always struck me how differently we as a country treat the regulation of guns and cars. If we regulated our cars like we do our guns, there’d be no car registration, no driver’s licenses, no traffic lights, and we could drive on whatever side of the street we damn well pleased. And the sidewalks. With no speed limits.

And yet we don’t hear screams about the government “taking away our freedoms” when it comes to cars. It’s never been an issue. Nobody argues that we should have no rules or regulations on our cars — that would be considered somewhere off in Crazytown.

Why is the national conversation about guns so different than how we talk about our beloved cars?

Seriously, why? This is not a rhetorical question.