Turning America into Iraq

Andrew Jensen
The New York Times 

If more Americans carried guns, we’d all be safer. That, said Andrew Jensen, is the rote response of Second Amendment absolutists every time some crazed gunman goes on a killing spree. But as a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, I seriously doubt that I, or any other armed civilian, could have stopped the madman who stepped into a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., armed with a semiautomatic rifle with a 100-round magazine and three other guns. “Would I, as a trained rifleman, really be able to shoot a single person through a cloud of tear gas in a movie theater full of people screaming and running?” Those who oppose all gun control prefer Americans to carry “a gun at soccer practice, at church, at Batman movies”—everywhere. It would feel “almost like being in Iraq.” The sane alternative is to limit the sale of weapons and magazines designed to inflict mass casualties. “Is someone’s right to buy an assault rifle worth having to carry a weapon yourself, every moment you’re outside your home, for the rest of your life?”