Andy Hinds | Parenting

Like most everyone else in the country, I listened, read and watched with horror on Dec. 14 as the details of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. unfolded. I was running errands with my 3-year-old twins, who don’t really know what guns are for or what dying is. We stopped at a pizza joint for lunch, which, unfortunately, had televisions aimed at us from every angle.

They were all tuned to either sports or news, creating a jarring pastiche of football, crime-scene tape, baseball, still photos of children being evacuated, more football and talking heads floating above a scrolling death-toll ticker. I may as well have eaten the napkins, for all the enjoyment I got out of the food.

My kids climbed around on the booth, spilling milk and fighting with each other over crayons. I should have been thankful that they were keeping me busy and annoyed, because if I had seen that picture of the kids being led out of the schoolhouse while my daughters were being sweet and perfect, I would have lost it.

I have nothing to add to the words that have been written about how incomprehensibly horrible this tragedy is, nor any advice on how to talk to your children about it or how to process it yourself. On the two latter topics I remain quite ignorant. My kids are far too young to have a clue about this kind of stuff; and as for me, I’m choosing not to process it quite yet.

The unspeakable truth that no children are truly safe from this kind of mayhem almost sank in when I opened an email from my kids’ preschool that explained the school’s defense plan in case of an armed attack. It mentioned “bunker areas” in the classrooms, and I had a fleeting image of huddled preschoolers, but I quickly moved back to the inbox in my email. Instead of processing the horror, I lashed out for a couple days.

Since there was no invading army or terrorist group behind this attack, I directed my anger toward the only culprits I could find: the guns that killed all those little daughters and sons and brothers and sisters. The guns; and the people who love them.

I took to the internet with my torch and pitchfork, reposting article after op-ed after quote, holding up examples of countries with strict gun laws and low gun-violence rates, and cursing the gun lobby and the “enthusiasts” that perpetuate the culture of gun fetishism. I wanted to beat all the guns into ploughshares, to melt them down and cast them into monuments to their victims. I got into extended shouting matches with my Libertarian friends on Facebook to the point that they gave up trying persuade me and moved on.

Of course, it’s not possible to get rid of all, or even most, or even a significant number of the guns in this gun-crazy country; nor is it, based on some pretty credible scholarship, necessarily a worthwhile goal. To be intellectually honest, I had to come to terms with the fact that there’s something to gun advocates’ claims that gun regulations don’t prevent murders. For instance, some of the countries with the strictest rates of regulation and the lowest rates of gun ownership have the highest murder rates, especially when you factor in non-firearm violence, and some countries that are virtually awash in guns have very little violent crime.

It’s an incredibly complicated issue that often defies the logic inherent in my values, much as I wish it didn’t.

But even though I concede that point, I don’t accept that it’s a reason to throw up our hands and say, “If somebody wants a gun, they’re going to get it; so there’s no point in trying to fix our ineffectual laws.” The follow up to that statement is usually that the only protection you have against guns is to get some yourself, which I also find unacceptable.

There are regulations – there have to be – that can help keep guns out of the hands of would-be mass murders, even if we don’t know what they look like yet. The failure of current gun regulations to keep us safe is certainly not a justification to buy more guns, which keeps the gun industry humming along and weapons all the more available to the wrong people.

I’ve heard a number of people claim that the Newtown tragedy could have been avoided had there been armed citizens there to “take out” the killer, just as they do every time some lunatic goes on a rampage with a gun. This conjures for me dozens of nightmarish scenarios that militate against ordinary folks carrying guns in public, all of them involving frightened and disoriented civilians brandishing pistols at one another.

I keep thinking about our densely populated and socially diverse Uptown neighborhoods, and how I would react if I realized a fellow parent or random stranger at the playground by my house were packing heat. Maybe if I lived out in the country, it wouldn’t bother me to see my neighbor with a pistol in his waistband.

But if the profusion of guns in this country got to the point where it was considered normal to publicly carry a weapon in a neighborhood like mine, I don’t think I would ever take my kids out of the house again.

I saw an advertisement today for bulletproof backpacks. For little kids. With princesses on them. I thought it must be a hoax, but sadly it was real.

My pro-gun friends say that strict gun laws don’t change rates of violence and that the only way to protect your family is to arm yourself; they don’t seem to have a problem with that. It’s times like this that I’m glad we live in a state with some of the strictest gun laws, and in a city where concealed weapon permits are hard to come by. Regardless of the impact those regulations have on overall crime rates, I’m thankful that carrying a gun is not really an option.

We can and must work on lowering rates of all violent crimes, but we can’t let these mass shootings turn our neighborhoods into places where regular citizens need to carry lethal weapons and where children go to school in body armor.

—Andy Hinds is a stay-at-home dad, blogger, freelance writer, carpenter and sometimes-adjunct writing professor. He is known on the internet as Beta Dad, but you might know him as that guy in North Park whose kids ride in a dog-drawn wagon. Read his personal blog at butterbeanandcobra.blogspot.com. Reach him at [email protected] or @betadad on Twitter.