The Washington Post's story on the Idaho Walmart shooting was hard to read—still, to me, a tragedy of infinite proportions.

A few days after the shooting, however, some of the commentary from the GVP community gradually shifted its focus from the tragic nature of the shooting to the obvious negligence of the mother who left her son unattended in the presence of a loaded and chambered handgun. And the father-in-law's statements didn't help either: from my perspective, he seems to be a paranoid, angry, grieving white male who loves his guns and has a lot riding on those guns. Aside from the grief he feels, he's angry that his daughter-in-law's death is being used by some to "grandstand on gun rights." (You can read more about that here.)

I would have thought that a daughter-in-law's death, a two-year-old grandson's having accidentally shot and killed his mother, and the numbing grief that must accompany these events would have trumped PR concerns about gun-rights in America.

That it didn't shows where some of our citizens stand now on the subject of gun-ownership. It's a dangerous place, clouded by anger and unreason. But grief, of course, has unexpected effects on its victims. I'll chalk it up to that.

Still, I cannot imagine the sorrow, second-thoughts, and plain, old pain that are currently visiting this family. My predominant wish, as I read the piece, was that the family find effective ways to support and nurture the two-year-old boy as he grows and matures and learns the truth of what he did. And what his mother enabled him to do.

A couple of things occurred to me as I watched this story develop over the past few days.

A very loud and active portion of America is actively stoking our gun-culture. Which is news to no one. We are becoming a militarized country, and I've previously noted the dangers that go along with this trend. ( American Sniper opens on January 16, for example, and is already getting Oscar buzz. Big sigh.) Many are eager to bring military solutions to civil disagreements, and that will cause us much suffering. Among developed nations, America accounts for 30% of the population and 90% of the firearms fatalities. We need either to find creative and effective ways to live with that—which we have not done and which I hope we cannot do—or we need to change it. Obviously, I favor the latter path. But to advocate both for the proliferation of firearms and for public safety is disingenuous, silly, and dangerous. When we increase the number of firearms in our daily lives, as the recent Stanford report clearly showed, we increase the chances that accidents like this one will happen simply because . . . accidents happen. Gun-owners are not immune to bad judgment and tragic oversight. Gun-owners are human beings. Those who believe it essential to carry weapons into Walmart must also accept that a two-year-old commiting matricide, while rare, is an unavoidable feature of the landscape they are actively arming. As we increasingly arm ourselves in public, we need also to arm ourselves with the truth of what we are doing: as more and more people carry publicly (whether open or concealed), more and more people will die in this manner. Those who support right-to-carry laws must also acknowledge this as one of the inevitable consequences of their position. To do otherwise weakens their own platform. The truth, I know, is seldom simple and rarely clear. Except in this case: I'd rather face a two-year-old in a shopping cart with a Nerf football than one with a loaded and chambered handgun. These are the kinds of assessments gun-owners must make when they elect to carry their weapons with them wherever they go. Because they are human. Because they make mistakes. Here's the question: Is it worth the risk to carry a weapon with you into a reasonably safe environment? One where the odds, by Vegas standards, are laughingly in your favor of getting out alive, without even firing a single shot? Sheri Sandow, one of Veronica's close friends, said that Veronica was not carrying a concealed weapon into Walmart because "she felt unsafe." She was carrying a gun, Sandow continued, "because she was raised around guns." Which is to beg the question: Why then was she carrying? She was carrying a gun, then, culturally? Which means, in some quarters, naturally. Carry a gun naturally, however, and you might be carrying that gun unconsciously, and when you carry a gun unconsciously, you're putting yourself and others at risk in ways that will not happen when you carry a knife, for example, unconsciously. (I'd also rather face a two-year-old in a shopping cart with a knife than with a loaded pistol.)

And let me add this: I was also "raised around guns" (read more about that here ), and because I was raised around guns, I would never have dreamed of carrying a weapon into Walmart. Being raised around guns doesn't mean that your default action is to carry guns everywhere you go. But I was raised in a very specific sort of hunting culture, and since there were no birds or deer in Walmart, I didn't need a gun when I went Christmas shopping. And if I had insisted on carrying one into Walmart, my fellow hunters would have accused me of "showing off," or even worse, of being "downright dumbass stupid." But in our militarized culture, things have changed. So I counsel this, whenever I'm asked: if you are carrying a firearm in public, even though you don't feel threatened or unsafe, you need to consider long and hard why you are carrying that firearm. Run the numbers. Undertake a real, military-grade threat assessment. And then ask yourself: What makes me free of mistaken judgment or my firearm free of mechanical mishap? That question also is part of a responsible threat assessment. And maybe at the end of that assessment, some will consider the risk too great. Some, of course, will not. Finally, grammar is telling. Veronica was not "taken" from us, as her father-in-law indicated. The passive voice is inappropriate because it buries the true subject of the sentence and sidesteps the gruesome task of assigning blame for a child's misuse of a firearm. Veronica's son, in fact, took her from us, and he did that because his mother unwittingly gave him access to the firearm that killed her. And she did that because, while she was "smarter" than many, as both sides of this debate have indicated, she also shared one quality that unites us all, has nothing to do with intelligence, and causes us truckloads of trouble: she was human, as Nietzsche reminded us—all too human.

So, if we continue to arm our population, then these kinds of accidents will continue to happen. That is a statistical reality. Right-to-carry advocates must be forced to connect the dots (more guns, more gun-violence), accept the grim figure that lies at their feet, and feel at peace with the positions that logically lead to these tragedies.

Are they ready to do this? Are they ready to say, "Maybe a mother dies, but all across armed America, we feel much safer in Walmart with a handgun tucked away in our zippered purses or an assault rifle slung over our shoulders? After all, we went to Walmart, and we got out alive."

Or, I might suggest another question: How threatened do we really feel in a Walmart in northern Idaho, or in northwest Arkansas, or in central Virginia, and in light of an honest response to that question, begin to adjust our gun-behavior accordingly.

Because mistakes happen.

Whichever path we choose, we will have much mourning to do as we come to clarity on this crippling problem. This one incident in Idaho has given one family a lifetime of sadness, and many more tragedies of this sort will visit families that now assume, inaccurately it turns out, that it can't happen to them.



