Reality

Seems like there are a lot of people who refuse to accept the world as it is. They continue to insist on wishing for a world that doesn't exist, and coming up with solutions to problems that would work in THAT world, instead of the real world.

Two issues that illustrate this are gun control and the Iraq war.

First, gun control. In the imaginary world of the gun control advocates, all we need to do to stop gun violence is to make guns harder to buy and own. In this world it is the gun that is the problem, not the violent person behind the gun. Forget for a moment that there are already millions (hundreds of millions?) of guns out there in circulation. All gun manufacturing and sales could be completely stopped tomorrow and there would still be millions of guns in the United States alone.

Does it really do anyone any good at all to WISH that this wasn't the case? Argue all day long that we shouldn't have guns, that our culture is evil and violent because of our love affair with the gun, but how does that help solve the problem of protecting citizens from the violent nutjobs?

Not to go too deeply into the "gun culture" debate, but how do these people think we achieved the level of freedom we have in this country without a citizenry that the "ruling" class HAD to respect, due to the citizens ability to protect themselves? And if American culture is evil and violent because of our love of the gun, why do other cultures not get the same label when they allow the killing of sometimes thousands of their citizens? I'm thinking of Rawanda, Darfur, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, radical Islam, the Soviets, etc... We don't decry the "machete culture" of Rawanda and call for the ban of large knives, even though a couple of hundred thousand were killed with them there. Rape was also used to terrorize the citizens there, I've never seen a call for "penis control." Is it possible that guns are not the whole reason that men do violence to each other?

So regardless of whether you think our culture is good or bad, or whether we should have as many guns as we have, here we are. There is no going back to change things around to the way we now think they should be. If one good person had been armed in one of those classrooms at Virginia Tech, far fewer people might have died.

I also wish it wasn't this way, but I'm not counting on my good wishes to keep me safe.

On Iraq I think both sides of the political divide are engaged in wishful thinking. The left just wants to quit and refuses to accept that the consequences would be dire for us as well as them. The right doesn't seem to understand that the weak and fearful now outnumber the strong and brave in this country. The majority in America would rather run from the fight than finish it. Our enemies are blatant in their intentions and openly call for war against all of the west, they won't let us run from this. Yet we would rather watch American Idol and forget about all the killing and brutality that exists almost everywhere else in the world.

We should pull out of Iraq. I, as a Soldier, don't want to die for a country that has already decided that we have lost. I feel like a football player being told to go out and play the fourth quarter even though the coaches have declared the game lost. Except that instead of risking a torn ACL, I'm risking my life.

We could continue to make our stand in Iraq, we could win it. We could eventually leave a stable, democratic government in place. We would need help from the international community, instead of open hostility. Bush has made many mistakes, this was one of the biggest, not getting more international help.

But we have decided to quit. The reality of this decision is that we will fight the war somewhere of the enemy's choosing. So all of you who are so vehemently opposed to private citizens owning guns, would you please wear a button or t-shirt declaring this? I don't want to accidently save your ass during the next terrorist attack with my legally carried concealed weapon. I'm sure you would rather die than have to live with the fact that a gun, carried by a fellow citizen, saved you.