There Are Some Technologies We Should Not Have …. huh????

Pretty much every book, movie, or TV show that has imagined the existence of time machines has come to the conclusion that they’re a bad idea: tools for the very highly trained at best, catastrophic mistakes at worst. Time machines are a technology that the greater public is simply not mature enough to use properly.

Tell me why guns are any different.

Too many people are dying. Colorado. 34th Street. What’s next? How many people have to literally bleed to death in our streets before we realize that easy access to a tool that any unskilled person can use to snatch a life out of existence is too much responsibility for humans?

Would you sell a death ray at Walmart, requiring only a driver’s license and a cursory background check that only checks to see if someone’s gotten caught doing something terrible? No, that’d be crazy. Would you give a 16 year-old a time machine? Of course not. Fortunately, we don’t have to deal with these decisions (yet?), because those technologies are science fiction. Unfortunately, guns are real. And for some reason, we’re not willing to admit that, even though they’ve been around a while, they are too advanced for humans to use safely.

Joe Brown