59 BULLETS. 59 LIVES.
Metal, flint, gunpowder.
It doesn’t take much to make a bullet.
A quick Google search will reveal hundreds of “how-to” videos on how to source the materials needed, how to pack the metal casing with gunpowder and cap it off with the firing pin, and how the firing pin ignites the gunpowder to create the explosion that propels the bullet forward.
What none of these “how-to” videos will tell you is what happens next.
And what happens next is this: once fired, the bullet travels at a life-altering velocity that cannot be stopped until it hits something.
… Or someone.
Fifty-nine people in Las Vegas are proof of this fact.
Fifty-nine easy-to-make bullets ended their lives last Sunday night.
A husband lost a wife.
A mother lost a daughter.
A friend lost a friend.
Bullet after bullet after easy-to-make bullet indiscriminately found its mark, until the last one landed to total fifty-nine.
Fifty-nine bullets took fifty-nine lives.
That’s the black and white of it, the headline, the reality.
News stations are calling last Sunday’s carnage a mass shooting, the worst in our country’s history.
They’re investigating Stephen Paddock, the high-stakes gambler who rolled the dice and gambled with the lives of all those people in last Sunday’s concert.
They’re talking about how he modified the guns to make them fire their bullets faster.
More bullets. Faster.
They’re saying enough is enough. Get the guns off the street. Get the guns under lockdown. Control the guns. Guns, guns, guns, guns, GUNS!
But what about the bullets?
Think about it.
Guns can’t fire if they don’t have bullets. Guns can’t kill if there are no bullets. Without bullets, a gun is a useless piece of metal.
People don’t run from a hail of guns. They run from a hail of bullets.
They ran from the bullets in Columbine. And Aurora, Colorado. They feared for their lives as the sound of bullets filled the hallways at Sandy Hook. And Virginia Tech. They hid in dark corners and texted loved ones about the bullets in Pulse nightclub. And now, this past Sunday, thousands of people ran for their lives from the hail of BULLETS in Las Vegas.
More bullets. More lives.
It seems this is simple math. Sadly, it’s still a hard problem to solve.
And until it is solved there will be more Sunday nights like the one we witnessed in Las Vegas. More schooldays like Columbine. More places like Pulse.
More bullets. More lives.
Until we find a way to stop the bullets, there will be no stopping those who use them to hurt the ones we love — and destroy our lives.
If you ask me, we don’t need gun control. We need bullet control.
Because while the manufacturing of bullets doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon — it’s a $2-billion-dollar industry that works 24/7 to meet customer demand — we can stop, or at least control, the sale of bullets.
Yes, bullets.
Because while it’s easy to make a bullet, it’s even easier to buy a bullet.
Anyone — and I mean anyone — can walk into a gun shop or sporting goods store right now and buy one box, two boxes, ten boxes of bullets.
And it’s even easier online. Another quick Google search turned up hundreds of places willing to sell whatever bullet I wanted. 22 Caliber. 9 Millimeter. 12 Gauge. You name it.
No I.D.? No permit? No problem.
You want bullets, you got bullets.
How insane is that?
How utterly insane is it that bullets are as easy to buy as, say, walking into a deli and ordering a sandwich or logging on to Amazon to buy your kid’s first bike?
Many will argue that this infringes on their Second Amendment right to bear arms.
I want to be clear here: I’m not suggesting that.
You want to own a gun, own a gun. Own two, three, four guns. It’s your right.
But forty-seven guns?
Paddock wasn’t your average gun-loving American. He was a ticking time bomb. And every gun he owned was a worthless piece of metal until it was loaded with — yup, you guessed it — bullets.
So while I’m not suggesting we take away your guns, I am suggesting a more regulated gun policy.
The kind that protects all rights. The right to bear arms. And the right of innocent people to live, work, and play unafraid of being killed by a lunatic who can walk into any store or visit any website and buy the bullets he needs to carry out his lunacy.
More bullets. More lives.
Bottom line: we need to make it harder to buy bullets.
Think about it.
If we treated the purchase of bullets with the same rigor as your local drugstore does with selling medication — where a signed prescription is needed from your doctor and where, in most cases, if the pharmacist is suspicious he will pick up the phone to verify the validity of a prescription or simply refuse to sell the drugs — we’d have a stopgap in place.
We’d finally have some control.
Or what if every registered gun user had to register every bullet he or she buys? When you buy your next box of bullets, that purchase is logged under your firearm permit’s registration number and kept on file.
It’s not difficult to do.
Think about it.
At the end of the month, you can see every purchase you’ve made with your Visa or Master Card, right? Why should buying bullets be any different?
Why shouldn’t the sale of bullets be monitored? And traceable.
We’d know how to limit them. And we’d know when to deny them to people who shouldn’t have access to them?
Just because bullets are easy to make and even easier to buy doesn’t mean they should be easily obtained by every maniac out there.
We need to rethink our position on the issue of guns. Or more specifically, bullets.
And we need to do it now.
Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now.
Because as history continues to show us, there will be another Las Vegas, another Sandy Hook, another Columbine, another hail of easy-to-make-and-even-easier-to-buy bullets that destroys the lives of innocent people.
There will be more bullets. And more lives.
The only question is, will one of those bullets take the life of someone you know?
Your wife?
Your child?
Your father, mother, brother, friend?
… YOU?
We need bullet control. And we need it now.
Before one more easy-to-make-and-even-easier-to-buy bullet takes one more innocent life.