Point, click, bang.

The obscenity has occurred again. A disaffected teenager with an automatic weapon opens fire on an anonymous crowd of people, kills a double handful, and then blows himself away. All because his girlfriend broke up with him. At least he saved the state the expense of a trial and execution.

Would citizens with guns have prevented today’s tragedy?

Panicky citizens don’t shoot straight. Most people who buy handguns have had little or no training in how to shoot them. Of course, they don’t need much to be lethal. Guns are too easy to use. Point, click, bang, and eight people go down. Point, click, bang, and the bad man, and maybe ten innocent bystanders, go down. Even trained policemen have trouble hitting anything when lead is flying at them. I have serious doubts about the marksmanship of frightened amateurs.

The gun is the most democratic of weapons. It is no coincidence that the overthrow of the ancient kingdoms in favor of more (or, in some cases, less) representative governments came about soon after the invention of relatively cheap, good quality gunpowder weapons. Such was the power of the gun: after centuries in which only wealthy and powerful noblemen had the time to train in the art of killing, the gun allowed peasants of modest means, and modest strength and stature, with but a few weeks training, to kill those well-muscled noblemen very, very dead. The gun was and is, to say the least, a great equalizer.

With guns, especially automatic guns, people can die in tens and twenties, or hundreds, even thousands. Any teen-aged malcontent with pimples and a Glock can make the news by killing a crowd of innocents. People can die by accident, with the merest flick of a finger, just because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because someone was just a little distracted, or a little too focused. Lead a quail just a little too long, point, click, bang: and your friend has a face full of twelve-gauge birdshot. Lose track of your gun and your children, and point, click, bang; you’re child isn’t playing cops and robbers anymore. Play around with that “unloaded” gun, and point, click, bang; you’re laughing friend’s an organ donor.

So, do we cry out for gun control and ban guns from everyone?

The United States Constitution, in words tempered by our natal Revolution and hallowed by millions of NRA pamphlets, is pretty clear:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Both sides of the gun-control debate seem to suffer from a form of selective illiteracy. The NRA seems to never read the initial clause of the amendment. The gun-controllers can’t seem to remember there is a Second Amendment at all. Those of us who are literate and capable of reading the entire text of the amendment may understandably be as worried about the quality of reading education in our primary schools as we are about who can buy a gun and what kind of gun they can buy.

But what constitutes a well-ordered militia? The National Guard? The Army Reserve? Whatever it is, what we saw today in Omaha, and earlier this year in Salt Lake City and Blacksburg, do not constitute anything like a well-ordered militia. There must be a compromise, no matter the mercenary fears of the gun manufacturers who fund the NRAs lobbying efforts, no matter the foaming-at-the-mouth shrieks of the Left that would have citizens armed with nothing more than coffee and a danish. There has got to be something better, better than a defenseless community, better than bodies lying dead in a shopping mall.

Here’s a couple of suggestions:

Every state in the union requires new teenaged drivers to take a test before they can have a driver’s license. Most require at least some period of time with a learner’s permit before getting behind the wheel of a fifteen-hundred pound automobile. They do this for a machine that is designed to carry people from place to place, and is only occasionally and accidentally used to kill people. Why don’t we require a training period, a certification of some kind, for firearms, which are machines designed specifically to kill?

Or, if we’re not going to require training, what about a test? Why not a simple test so that someone can prove they have a basic understanding of gun safety before they’re given the ability to kill other human beings with the mere flick of a finger?

No, we don’t license other weapons; we don’t require training in knife safety before we can buy one. But trust me, if it were so easy to kill someone with a knife, then the French Revolution would have happened in 1345, not 1789.

I am not going to say that training course or test would have stopped today’s killing. Angst and automatic weapons are never a healthy mix, and a test wouldn’t have kept the Omaha gunman from killing eight people before taking himself to his own special place in Hell. But maybe, just maybe some of those accidental deaths, those stupid, senseless household tragedies might be curtailed. Because it’s an awful way to die, and an awful way to lose a child.

I say this, even though the kidney and the pancreas I received once belonged to a young man, a teenager, killed in one of those accidents: a friend with a gun who thought it wasn’t loaded. I received my new chance at life from the donor’s family who chose to turn their tragedy into a gift to help people they did not know. I will always thank them for that gift.

I will never thank the gun that killed my donor.

Point, click…

Bang.