The tragic events of Friday, December 14, 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut have shocked and devastated people worldwide. These days it increasingly seems in America as if we are witness to yet another mass shooting every other week. Of course they don’t occur with quite that frequency, but are certainly all too common. From the past few years alone, without prompting, I can grimly cite the Sikh Temple shootings in Wisconsin and the Aurora, Colorado cinema shootings of this past summer, the Tucson, Arizona killings that injured U.S Rep. Gabriel Giffords, the Fort Hood shootings of late 2009, and the horrific Virginia Tech murders of 2007. Each time another such incident takes place, the issue of gun control and the U.S Second Amendment right to bear arms is called into question. And each time another such incident takes place we yet again see inaction on the part of our nation’s politicians to help remedy the issue.

Today a friend cited a comment on Twitter he read, charging that if your first thought in the aftermath of Sandy Hook was to ponder, ‘I bet now the politicians are going to try and take away my guns’, then your priorities in life are seriously off-track.

And yet in the days since the shootings we have increasingly seen the defenders come out of the woodwork, saying things like ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’, and ‘I’m an upstanding, sane, normal member of society who owns and enjoys guns- why must I be punished for another person’s transgressions?’ I suppose at core they’re right, and perhaps it is unfair that they suffer because other people have taken things to the extreme. However guns are designed for but one core purpose: to kill. If (albeit helped along by other contributing factors like the failures of the mental health system and, arguably, even our culture) automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines are being used to fulfill their purpose and killing people in an extralegal manner, then surely it is time they be completely banned or at the very least far more effectively prohibited and limited in their availability than is currently the case.

I don’t care any more how much we have seen other such incidents take place overseas where weapons of this type are already far more restricted in their availability (as in Norway in 2011). I don’t care if statistically such shootings have been on decline in America (and continued to go down after the ban on assault weapons expired during the Bush administration). And I don’t care if your argument is that with so many guns out there already, we need to in fact arm people more so as to make our country safer (a ‘deterrence’, of sorts- that decrepit policy proven idiotic during the Cold War). Put simply, if restricting the sale of guns in America can prevent one single murder from taking place, then that should be enough reason to enact new laws on the matter. Because right now, surely, less Americans are using guns as a valuable means of self-defense than there are people being murdered in tragedies like at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I beseech our politicians to act. Put pressure on your local representatives. Write to them. Call them. Tell them how you feel.

Enough is enough.

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