Maybe it’s time to make a deal? Instead of getting all hot and bothered about the bloody injustices — doled out so callously of late, perpetrated by those ever-more-common bad apples or the obviously misplaced demands to rescind the rights of innocent and responsible gun owners — we should outsource the issue.
Apparently the political calculus is incapable of rendering a reckoning so I propose that, in the transactional spirit of our current political commerce, we hand the responsibility of our gun problem to those who have invested the most into it — the National Rifle Association.
Rather than continuing to gather larger and larger sums to buy politicians, votes and influence, they should pocket the proceeds and pay the piper. Let the NRA be responsible for gun ownership, do their own checks, limits, definitions, etc. They should do so for a price too. And then, where went around comes back around, they can pay the lawsuits, medical bills and funeral costs, not to mention any appropriate punitive damages for any harm caused should their responsibility be found insufficient to prevent it (the actuaries for their insurance policy premiums will work out the numbers for them).
Then we see who, how many, by what limits and at what price. No pesky gun laws or rights to haggle over, just the cold hard facts a balance sheet could impose on our culture since the physical/psychosocial damages and political costs never seem to find a balance.
Kevin Padden
Aspen