Early morning, before the sun came up. I was beginning the day with the usual checking of news and blogs. One post had a story of how one mother from Newtown was grieving the loss her son. Her son was 6 years old. 6 years old. Now his ashes were in an urn on the mantle. An urn that she would pick up and kiss each morning on waking and would kiss each night before retiring.

I just went cold. There was a picture of her son. As you can imagine, the picture was a little boy in a red shirt with tousled hair and a smile that could melt an iceberg. I looked at this picture and just thought to myself that this boy, this bundle of energy, this youngster with a huge future was no more.

I do not know why today, but it just shook me to the very core of my being. Then came the thoughts that no one ever wants to think: what if something like that happened to some one close to you. What if your grandson’s life was snuffed out like a candle in the rain? Or what about the children of your friends in the small town you live in? Nothing, absolutely nothing could be as devastating as a parent losing a child.

Losing a child so young in a way that is so unexpected and so violent and so preventable. To die in a car accident or a fire would be horrible. We as a society actually spend much time, effort and money trying to prevent loss of life by things like car accidents and house fires and other things like drowning. Over the past half century we have forced manufacturers to engineer safety into dangerous things like cars, houses, bathrooms, boats,  ladders etc. to make these and many other products much safer. Think of cars in the past half century. We can start with safety belts, air bags and then move to design where energy is dissipated away from the passenger compartment. We can also see that despite the fact that everyone would like to think that personal transportation is a right, who gets a license to drive is highly regulated. You can’t get a license if you have been caught drinking and driving too often, if your eyesight is bad or if you are getting too old. While all this has not stopped automobile deaths, they have surely been curtailed.

In housing we now use materials that are fire resistant. In much housing sprinklers and smoke detectors are required and escape routes are mandatory. And one other check in both cars and houses are the cost and availability of insurance. If you live in a firetrap, if you are driving a car without brakes, insurance may be hard or expensive to get.

So as I am sitting there just cold inside thinking that living in America, our grandson has a much greater chance of dying young than in any other industrialized society, I start to think about how we can stop the total waste of life. The first thing that makes sense is to limit access to weapons that are designed almost specifically for the killing of other humans. Many say that buts up against the second amendment to the constitution. I disagree – taken as a whole the amendment talks about a militia being necessary for the security of a free state. Seems to me that all weapons not being used as part of a well-regulated militia are not necessary.

Secondly, America needs to put effort into engineering in safety. As it were, we need an “Apollo-type” program to create the gun that can only be shot by one person. Finally, I believe that all gun owners should carry liability insurance just like we are required to do for automobiles. When a person is maimed by gunfire, who pays the medical bills? I believe it should be the shooter in cases where there is no criminal activity that the gun owner is responding to..

A guy can dream, can’t he? I am tired of seeing the maimed and lifeless bodies of children in the news. I can’t imagine what the parents, brothers and sisters and other family members must be going through.This is a scene that simply doesn’t belong in a modern America. It is time, well past time to make these pictures relics of a time that America needs to put behind us forever. It is time that Americans have the real freedom to work, play, live and raise their families without being fearful that some nut has obtained a gun and plans on killing a few folks on his way out.