There is reliable evidence, both in the short term and long term, that we are moving to a post-violence era. Some may romanticize the past where a man was a man and personal security was guaranteed by a piece of metal strapped by your side. But most of us hopefully welcome this shift.
Guns are tools of combat and survival of the past. Wars today are won with more advanced technologies. The same goes for competition and conflict between people inside one society. We don’t become king of town by gathering some strong men and running the bandits out, guns ablaze. Our weapons of competition and survival today are our passions, interpersonal skills, intelligence, information and technology (the more advanced kind).
Pando daily is slightly wrong when it writes:
You may wonder what this has to do with startup investing or any of the companies and day jobs that unite everyone pitching in. The answer is, nothing.
The answer is not nothing. The startup community understands that the weapons of competition today are not guns. It is natural for this community to want to replace the weapons of yesterday with the weapons of today.
I phrase it this way because I believe there is some deep, primal instinct that speaks to gun-control opponents. The primal instinct says that life is a competition for survival and dominance. A government that prevents you from having guns is putting you at a disadvantage in this competition.
Gun control is not about suppressing this instinct. Rather it’s an acknowledgement that guns are no longer relevant. They played a role 200 years ago. But it’s time to face up to the fact that if you want to secure yourself and your family and perhaps even get ahead, you’re better off getting a good education, making friends and working on your personal skills than stockpiling an arsenal of deadly weaponry.
Because we don’t need guns for the competition of life anymore, we must do our best to get rid of them in our day-to-day lives. Guns produce irreversible consequences from temporary conflict and distress. This is such a waste. In the exact moment when you are really mad at someone or something, you can’t imagine getting over it. But days later, you feel silly about that moment and you are ready to mend things and move on.
By removing lethal weapons from our environment, we can go through thousands of such moments throughout our lifetime and learn from each one instead of ending up in a duel and standing a 50/50 chance of terminating life the first time we make an enemy.
Perhaps you are willing to live with guns producing these irreversible outcomes when two adults have a disagreement. That’s still a tragedy to me no matter what caused the conflict. To put it unemotionally, it’s a terrible waste of human opportunity.
But Sandy Hook should make it crystal clear to everyone that we are paying a much higher price than that.
I have a 3 year old son. I experience the incredible curiosity, innocence, intelligence, passion, thirst for life and knowledge of young children every day in my life.
Learning that 20 such lives, along with the lives of 6 adults, had been taken by a mad gun man made me cry. If you felt the same way as I did, no matter how passionate you are about your right to buy and own these weapons, you must be asking yourself whether it’s time for change.