gun

A collection of guns were confiscated from the Cutthroats Gang and displayed during a press conference at Cleveland Police Headquarters in Cleveland on Monday, Feb. 2, 2015. A Cuyahoga Grand Jury has indicted 12 members of the Cutthroats Gang in the Glennville neighborhood. (Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer)

Last month, my former roommate was shot and injured in Moscow, Idaho, during a shooting rampage. These shooting rampages should really make us angry. The inane public debate on gun control should anger you even more.

We were missionaries together in Bratislava, Slovakia. He was a type-A wunderkind who excelled in every situation, an exacting teacher, with a heart of gold. The idea that anyone, other than his former students, would want to shoot the guy is ridiculous. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The shooting of Michael Chin is just the most recent example of how something is broken in American society. I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. I will be a part of that solution, however.

Gandhi is often quoted as saying, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." The serenity prayer asks for "the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can ..."

None of us can undo what happened to Mike. None of us can change society's problems overnight. What we can do and should concern ourselves with is how we can make sure those closest to us never have to feel the pain of a Columbine, Aurora, Newtown or Moscow.

We need to worry about how to change ourselves, because that is the most important, empowering and actionable focus in every situation.

The debate about random gun violence has exceedingly been about gun control, which is an unrealistic option. Gun confiscation is not feasible in America and gun control accomplishes little more than disarming the innocent, precisely because it is so unrealistic to disarm all Americans.

The reality is that our government is not able to protect us from the problems of 2015. It cannot protect us from scourges like Ebola, and it cannot protect us from random acts of violence.

The good news is that we can protect ourselves from both. We can also protect ourselves from the many other problems of contemporary life that we would never look to government to protect us from.

Since government cannot be around every corner to protect us, we need to adapt our thinking about random violence.

For example, so many of us have a gun phobia. We apply that phobia to any gun-related situation and call for gun control. That's comfortable thinking, but comfortable thinking isn't getting us anywhere.

There's a paradox here that must be accepted: The more guns proliferate, the less violence we end up with, as demonstrated in painful-to-read detail in John Lott's book "More Guns, Less Crime."

We must accept that paradox, accept that what we are doing is not working and accept that something drastically different must be done.

As I was looking for Mike's mailing address on his Facebook page, I came across a Charles Darwin quote he posted to his "About Mike" section a few years back:

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

That's right, I thought. That makes sense. We need to rethink and reframe the debate so it makes more sense and each of us is further encouraged to protect people now, today.

Today, right now, a trained civilian who starts carrying a gun has made a decision to prevent a shooter from going on a rampage, killing friends, family, or strangers in his or her presence.

That is an immediate solution to the problem. The trained civilian immediately provides everyone around him or her with a greater measure of safety and should be a revered person in society for accepting such personal responsibility.

That, of course, will not eliminate the problem; it certainly will limit the impact that an unhinged lone actor can have against a group in public with armed civilians among them.

Once we have societally encouraged that near-term safety measure, we must shift focus on a dialogue to figure out where society has gone astray. Mass shootings have become a problem in recent decades in a country that has always had guns. That trend is a sign that something is wrong in America.

It's an unpleasant and sad moment for America. It will only become more unpleasant if we refuse to step up to the challenge. We must face reality, we must adapt, and in doing so we can prevent the random lethal violence that has increasingly become a fixture of life in America.

Allan Stevo is a New York-based writer and a political consultant at Public Appeal.