Heavy, thick raindrops are falling outside my window right now, as if even Mother Nature Herself is trying to passive-aggressively remind me how fat I’ve gotten in the past month. “These drops were smaller in May, Laurie, wouldn’t you agree?” Well, it won’t burn any calories, but I’m going to exercise my mind tonight as I craft this essay. Not that that will satisfy Mother Nature. We all know how bitchy & hard to please she is “I get it!” I yell at the weather. “I’m going to go back to the gym this weekend! Get off my back!” (“I’ll try, but it’ll be hard to miss. Your back, I mean. Because it’s so fat.” I imagine her answering serenely.)

Writing feels similar to painting to me. Of course, I have never painted anything in my life and I can only call myself a writer in the sense that I have, at times, strung sentences together in an effort to express a complex thought, but every blank screen feels like an empty canvas. Every time I face one I am filled with trepidation and doubt about where to place my brush, what color I should choose, what emotion I am trying to convey, or what subject I am going to illustrate.

I think that most people with an internet connection read a lot. As my grandmother used to say, if you’re on the internet you’re either reading, watching porn, or playing Candy Crush. If you’re bothering to read this, believe me, I feel pretty honored. Particularly because I know so much of that porn is free. No, really, it is. Just Google “free porn.”

And there went my audience.

I consider myself relatively aware of the world. What that means is that I don’t know who the president of Chile is, but I’m cognizant enough of the political shift in South America to know that a)she’s probably a woman and b)she’s probably a goddamn Socialist, loathed by the United States government.

Which, you know, puts me in the 90th percentile of Americans, because I a)know that Chile is a country, not just a casual dining franchise that serves Mix & Match Fajitas®, b)I know that country is in South America and c)I know that there is a SOUTH America.

Not that this essay is going to be about Chile.

I’m not going to lie to you, it is difficult for me to live in the world. In fairness to this century, I think it would have been difficult for me to live in any moment in time, assuming that I had this brain in every century. Which, let’s face it, due to a lack of education, poor diet and status, I wouldn’t have. But it is particularly difficult to have intelligence, to see the poor choices that are being made by those that are in charge, and to be incapable of preventing them.

I feel like this world is divided into two camps: a)The Well-Off and b)Everyone Else. Except that The Well-Off very rarely feel well-off, and everyone else spends their time being tremendously pissed off at those who are poorer than they are.

Very few people look outside of their own pain, and even fewer look at the big picture.

It drives me absolutely mental. I can only hope that other people are bothered by this, too.

As Americans, let’s talk about guns.

(For THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD, this really isn’t a debate. FOR THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD–which is a sizable majority, Americans, in case you didn’t know: most of the people that live on this planet don’t live in the United States–this isn’t even an issue.)

Guns.

God damn the Second Amendment. I wish it had never been written. I am absolutely positive that, were James Madison allowed to travel through time and see what his vaguely worded edict had wrought by the 21st century, he wouldn’t have written it in the 18th.

I completely understand how frightening people can be. Strangers can be violent. Strangers can be criminal. The fear of the unknown is genuine, and something to take seriously. Unfortunately, I believe that Americans have taken this fear to pathological extremes. We are paranoid about being murdered by strangers. I believe that this fear has been manipulated by the NRA, which has been encouraged by the 2nd amendment. So many of us are convinced that having a gun in the home will protect us from invaders that we fail to see that having the gun in the house is causing us more deaths than burglars ever could. Our kids are killing themselves with the guns. We’re killing our spouses with the guns when we’re angry. We’re killing ourselves when we’re suicidal. We’re taking the guns out of the house and killing people in malls and schools and churches.

But we’re so obsessed with guns that we refuse to see it. It truly is an addiction.

It reminds me of how people used to be when smoking rights were slowly curtailed. “I can smoke where I want!” “My smoking doesn’t hurt anyone!” “I have the right to smoke!”

Replace guns with smoking. It’s all the same rhetoric. But, of course, there is no right to smoke written into the Constitution.

The obvious solution would be to change the Constitution. We repealed the 19th amendment. Certainly we could repeal the 2nd, right?

Yeah. I think so, too.

Sometimes I think, the 2nd amendment wouldn’t even need to be repealed…just interpreted properly. It says right in the text “A well-regulated militia…” I mean, shit. That’s a no-brainer, right. Sure…as long as you’re part of “a well-regulated militia,” you can possess your precious firearms. IT’S RIGHT THERE IN THE CONSTITUTION. But, somehow, the brainiacs on the Supreme Court haven’t really focused on that wee little bit of language for the past 40 years or however long the NRA has been pressing its knee on the throat of American politics. (Not that there is corruption in this great country of ours. That would be horrible.)

There are so many people carrying their revolvers and long guns around in this “great” nation of ours. And I have to wonder what they think they’re doing.

The “reason” for the 2nd amendment is to protect against the tyranny of the government. A man with a Glock isn’t going to stop the local police department from killing him, much less the force of the United States government.

The second “reason” people give for promoting gun usage is that police departments are never there when you need them, so it’s best to defend yourself. Well, to that I say, let’s do away with most of the police departments. As it is, SWAT teams are invading homes, innocent people are being killed, no-knock warrants are perfectly acceptable according to our government…so let’s stop spending money on police departments.

People also seem to think that their gun collections will never be infiltrated by their children. They have their security codes in place. People with guns don’t seem to give a shit that a lot of mass murders in America occur because the kids get the guns and go on a rampage. They don’t seem to connect their violent weapons with their children’s desire to act violently.

No one who loves guns and identifies with the second amendment sees that they are part of the problem.

Do they value life, these gun owners? They would rather shoot first and ask questions later, as the proliferation of the Stand Your Ground laws would attest. You have to ask yourself: Are we a civilized society?

It doesn’t feel very civilized to me. It feels increasingly more wild.

I would say that it feels like the wild, wild west, but that’s not fair to the wild, wild west. They were much more concerned about gun play then we seem to be here in the 21st century, thanks to the manipulation of public opinion by the NRA.

Gun sales went up after Barack Obama was elected president. So they say. Did gun sales go up after Ronald Reagan was almost killed? If not, why not? Why not? If there was a time to worry about the government taking over your guns, you would naturally think it would be after the attempted assassination of the president.

And people hold onto their guns. Like, desperately. The very ownership of the gun makes a person feel like a vigilante. I don’t think people realize the impact having a killing weapon in their possession has on them.

Listen.

I know that life is frightening.

I know that someone could smash my door in, attack me, and kill me. I know that possibility exists. It’s remote, but it could happen. Two cars have been broken into on the curb outside my house since I’ve lived here.

But I have to weigh how rare that possibility is against the possibility that that gun could be used in a suicide, in anger, in doubt, in panic, in fear. I could take a life so suddenly that I wouldn’t have the ability to rethink my decision. Do I really want to take someone’s life because he wanted to take my television? Someone could find my gun and take my life just as suddenly.

I don’t know why people would find comfort in owning a handgun. The only reason I can think they would is because of the second amendment.

God damn the second amendment.