It's time to do something

Allow me to step back into the confessional.

I don't own a gun.

Never have - unless you count the BB-Gun I wielded as a kid.

Not only have I never fired a gun, I'm not sure I've ever held one, even though for a time my father was a policeman at the college campus just outside town.

So don't confuse me for an expert on guns. I'm not.

I believe in the Second Amendment, and it's guarantee the citizens have the right to bear arms.

I don't think it should be rescinded.

I do not, however, believe it is absolute and is not open to interpretation.

That gives me something in common with late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the greatest conservative voice in the high court's history.

He freely admitted that he believed the Second Amendment could be addressed - and possibly changed.

I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

Here's the thing I don't get.

For the life of me, I don't understand why a private citizen needs the kind of firepower that the two gunmen who carried out this weekend's latest mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton wielded.

If someone can give me a reason, I'm all ears.

I don't especially want to have an argument about what is or is not an assault weapon or semiautomatic weapon. No, I don't know the difference.

What I want to know is why we continue to allow citizens to legally buy weapons capable of this kind of destruction. It appears in both of these incidents the weapons were obtained legally.

I still believe that if someone wants to do something like this, they are going to do it. It's part of the price we pay for living in a free society.

But I'm all for making it as hard as possible for people to obtain these kinds of weapons.

If someone wants to wade into a crowded open space and open fire, let him or her do it with a shotgun, not an AK-47 capable of raining death on a crowd in the blink of an eye. The gunman in Dayton was taken down by police in 30 seconds. He still managed to kill nine people.

I know the arguments, that an assault weapons ban would be ineffective, that it wouldn't work, that criminal would simply get their guns somewhere else.

I know all that.

I also know I'm tired of writing about mass shootings - while we do nothing.

It's time to do something.