Another month, another mass shooting, this time at a public elementary school in Connecticut. The lives of 20 children were snuffed out, their families left suddenly to confront a gaping hole that can never be filled. The country reacts with shock and surprise. There's not much to be said here, because what needs to be said can be said in a few lines.

There will always be emotionally disturbed people, mainly men, apparently, who can go on a rampage like this. If you saturate the country with guns, making them easily available to anyone, such people will get guns, and these mass shooting will happen over and over and over again. For a country the size of the United States, with our current degree of gun saturation, the rate seems to be about once every month or two.

There are those of us who think that we should get rid of the guns, that you can't have a civil society in a country where people routinely carry firearms for self-defense. We recognize the plain truth: if you saturate the country with guns, regular mass shootings are the inevitable result. Let us mourn, first for the children, then for their parents who now must live with what every parent dreads, that their child will be taken from them, and finally for the country that has gone badly astray.

For those who think the country should be saturated with guns, you need to wake up and face facts. Don't feign shock and surprise when these events happen. This is the country you ordered. Live in it.

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