The Question that Follows Me on Every Journey

Whenever Carla and I travel - especially in Europe - there’s one question we hear again and again. It’s asked with genuine sincerity, often in quiet moments over coffee or during a conversation with someone we’ve just met:

"Why, in the United States, do you choose your guns over the lives of your children?"

It’s such a simple question, yet it cuts to the bone. It’s never meant to insult or provoke - it’s often asked with real bewilderment and deep concern. And every time I hear it, I feel a wave of shame and sadness. I know they’re not trying to humiliate me, but I can’t help feeling embarrassed to be an American in that moment. Because the truth is, I don’t think there’s a more honest - or more devastating - way to frame our gun crisis.

Somehow, in our country, we have placed gun ownership above the safety of our children – and of everyone else. The “right to bear arms” has been elevated above the right to simply live. No matter how many school shootings, mass shootings, or daily acts of gun violence we endure, the political will to act never seems to appear.

And when you step outside the U.S., you realize just how abnormal this is. In much of Europe, mass shootings are so rare that when they occur, they make international headlines. Parents don’t send their children to school wondering if they’ll come home. People go to concerts, shop for groceries, or attend church, synagogue, or mosque without scanning for the nearest exit. They don’t live with the low, constant hum of fear that we in America have somehow come to accept as normal.

So, when someone from another country asks, “Why do you choose guns over your children?” I don’t have a good answer - because there isn’t one. There’s only the painful truth: we’ve allowed ourselves to be held hostage by the gun lobby, by politicians who value power over lives, and by a cultural mythology that equates deadly weapons with freedom.

And that’s a disgrace.

It’s one of the rare questions in life that requires no deep analysis and no complicated political debate. It’s as simple as this: Are we willing to protect our children - or not? Until we decide that their lives matter more than guns, we will keep reliving this same national tragedy.

And all of this stems from a deeply distorted understanding of what the Second Amendment was meant to be.

It’s one of the most misunderstood and misused parts of the U.S. Constitution - twisted over time into something I’m fairly certain the framers never intended: a blanket permission slip for every individual to own and carry virtually any weapon, with little to no regulation. That’s simply not what was intended.

The text itself is just 27 words: “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.” 

In the late 18th century, there was no standing U.S. military as we know it today. The young nation depended on state militias - ordinary citizens who could be called upon to defend their communities. The “right to bear arms” was about ensuring those militias could function, not about self-defense from your neighbor or stockpiling personal arsenals of high-powered weapons.

The words “well-regulated” are critical here - yet they’re almost always ignored in modern debates. Regulation was built into the very idea of gun ownership. Weapons were tied to service, responsibility, and collective defense - not to personal whims. The framers would never have condoned having AR-15s in homes, nor would they have stayed silent while guns killed tens of thousands of Americans each year in shootings that had nothing to do with “the security of a free state”.

Our Constitution was never meant to be frozen in time. It was designed to grow and adapt as we grow. Take slavery, for example. When the Constitution was signed, slavery was legal. The document didn’t use the word “slavery” outright, but it protected the institution, allowed the slave trade to continue, and even counted enslaved people as only three-fifths of a person.

We now see that as a shameful and outdated chapter in our history - and rightly so. If we’re going to grow as a people and as a nation, our framework and our laws must evolve to reflect the realities of our time. The Second Amendment is no exception.

Yet today, the Second Amendment has been reinterpreted in ways that move us backward, not forward. Decades of lobbying and carefully crafted messaging - particularly by the NRA - have reshaped it into an unlimited individual right to own weapons, with “well-regulated” erased from the conversation. What was once intended as a collective responsibility has been reframed as a personal entitlement. That shift didn’t happen by accident - it was the result of deliberate political and cultural engineering.

The result is a gun culture unlike anything in any other developed nation. We now live in a country with more guns than people, where mass shootings are so common they barely dominate the news cycle, and where common-sense gun laws are often dismissed as an attack on “freedom.” Somehow, the right to own a firearm has been elevated above the right to feel safe in a grocery store, a school, or a place of worship.

In 2024, nearly 50,000 people in the United States lost their lives to gun violence. That’s about the same as the entire population of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Think about that for a moment. Imagine if, in the course of a single year, a force swept through Ann Arbor and killed every resident. An entire town - gone. The grief, the outrage, the shock would be impossible to overstate. It would dominate headlines for months, maybe years, and be remembered as one of the darkest tragedies in our nation’s history.

And yet, that’s exactly what gun violence claims across America each year.

On top of this, between 2000 and 2020, an average of nearly 32,000 people were hospitalized each year from gunshot wounds. Many of these injuries were life-altering - leaving survivors paralyzed, confined to wheelchairs, or living with permanent disabilities that made it impossible to return to the lives they once knew.

And yet, this same scale of loss and devastation unfolds in America every single year - spread across thousands of towns and cities - and we’ve come to treat it like background noise. We shake our heads, maybe post our condolences, and then move on. Nothing changes. The political stalemate holds. The lobbying grinds on. And the body count keeps climbing.

It’s not just tragic - it’s shameful.

I’m not suggesting guns should disappear entirely - that’s neither practical nor, in my view, the real issue. The real issue is balance, and we’ve lost it completely. The fact that any attempt at reasonable gun regulation is either immediately shot down or rarely even reaches serious debate in Congress says everything about how broken this conversation has become. Guns are treated as sacred and untouchable, while the constant toll of human death is treated as background noise.

And here’s what makes it even harder to stomach: many of the same voices who defend “freedom” when it comes to gun rights are often the first to oppose other freedoms. Where is that passion when it comes to a woman’s right to make choices about her own body? Or the right to love who you love? Or the freedom to worship - or not worship - according to one’s own beliefs?

When “freedom” applies only to one issue  it becomes about power, fear, and the refusal to confront the false notion that gun ownership equals liberty.

It’s worth asking: what would the framers say if they could see us now? The Second Amendment was written in an era of muskets and single-shot pistols - arms that could take a full minute to reload. They weren’t imagining semi-automatic rifles, high-capacity magazines, or weapons capable of killing dozens in seconds. They also weren’t living in a nation of 330 million people, where unchecked gun ownership in crowded cities could - and does - cause chaos.

The Second Amendment is not infallible. Like every part of the Constitution, it was written for a specific time and context - and it must be interpreted with the wisdom to address the realities of today. That’s what the framers expected: that we would adapt their words to build a safer, more just society.

If we could strip away the mythology and return to the original intent - a well-regulated, responsible system for collective defense - we might be able to reframe the conversation. We might remember that rights come with responsibilities. And maybe, just maybe, we could honor both the Constitution and our shared humanity by creating laws that value life over weapons.

And if my words haven’t reached you yet, imagine this - hold this picture in your mind and heart:

A teacher, bleeding from her own wounds, surveys what remains of her classroom. Some children are crouched under their desks, sobbing or too frightened to move. Others lie motionless on the floor, blood pooling where the bullets struck. She - and all of them - are frozen in shock. The trauma, the loss of life, the shattering of innocence is almost beyond comprehension. And all of it was unleashed by a disturbed 17-year-old who never should have had access to a firearm.

This is not an abstract debate. This is not about politics. This should be where the conversation about guns ends . . . we protect our children.