A few weeks back I wrote about the fire at Our Lady of Angels school in Chicago in December of 1958 to compare the reaction to the reaction of the shootings at Sandy Hook. Good people were horrified after each. After both it was easily determined that the seeds for the next similar disaster were already planted and could easily blossom into another horrible incident in no time.

In the late 1950s, many kids were attending school in rundown buildings. The school I attended had been on the condemned list for years, but continued in use for a long time. A disaster of the magnitude of OLA made it apparent that this was no longer acceptable, that society needed to pay the price for the safety of its children.

At that time the country united to fight this obvious problem of children going to school in ramshackle buildings with little safety features or procedures. Today, after too many incidents of mass murder to count, we still have a large corner of the country somehow seems to want to defend the ability to commit mass murder. This is something I just can’t understand.

Fire has been quite basic to human existence. Without fire, we probably would not have been able to cook food, which in turn allowed us to develop our large brains. In the late 1950s fire in some form was still about the only way to cook food. Microwaves were still a decade or so off. But even though fire was so essential to our existence we knew that fire must be controlled. Just like electricity or any one of a number of tools that man has invented or corralled.

When a disastrous fire took a hundred innocent lives, there was an understandable reaction among Americans that this is a problem that we can fix. That even though fire is necessary to our existence, we as a society can institute controls on fire so that the chances of such a tragedy happening again are much less. We can engineer in safety, we can enact laws that force those using fires to use proper procedures or face fines. We can make access to certain combustible materials hard.

There are safety features that could be engineered into guns that could make them safer. There are rules that could be enacted that would make certain procedures for owning or handing guns mandatory. And one thing I would like to see is liability insurance required for owning guns just like it is required to own a car or house.

Owning a car is in many ways similar to owning a gun. Cars used to be extremely unsafe. With 50,000 of our fellow citizens being killed each year in automobiles, the government recognized that there were things that the automobile industry could do to make cars safer. But the car industry refused to do build in safety features until it was forced. Things like working safety belts, air bags and numerous other safety features have been engineered in. The highways that we drive on are being designed for safety. And of course new procedures when driving are always being enacted. While people are still being killed in auto accidents, the rate of such deaths has gone down dramatically.

Engineering in safety, enforcing proper procedures and limiting choices of firearms to those weapons with only specified ranges could be ways that could help limit the murderous potential of firearms while staying within the dictum of not infringing on the right to bear arms.

Do you really believe that our founding fathers wanted to create a society where we slaughtered each other on a whim? It is well past time that citizens stand up to the fringe elements in our society and demand safety features and procedures that can greatly lessen the chances of a 6 year old being the next victim of someone’s momentary rage.