Enough.

Well, it's happened again. A gunman opens fire on an unsuspecting and innocent group of people, killing or wounding dozens, and traumatizing hundreds more. This time, it's in DeKalb, Illinois, at Northern Illinois University, but just last week it was a Lane Bryant store in Tinley Park and a city council meeting in suburban St. Louis. Before that it was a Von Maur department store in Omaha, and of course the earlier Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings, along with so many others. The pattern is familiar: shock over the initial news, somber grieving as the victims are laid to rest and, for the millions not directly impacted by the tragedy a gradual forgetting and return to normalcy. That is, until it happens again.

It has happened too many times, and it has to stop. Handguns are simply too plentiful and readily available in this country for any disaffected loner or hardened criminal who wishes, whether for personal enrichment or to pay back society for perceived injustices, to use them to wreak havoc. It's time to greatly curtail the manufacture and sale of guns, and even perhaps to ban them completely.

Again and again we hear the argument from gun advocates that the Second Amendment guarantees our citizens the Constitutional right to bear arms. Keeping their guns, they say, represents a critical freedom. But what about the freedom from fear? There is no freedom of any kind, no liberty, when one lives in fear of being a victim of random violence. Freedom to bear arms benefits several million gun owners, while freedom from fear is the right of every single American - all 300-plus million of us. All human beings do have rights, but the latitude of personal rights ends at the moment at which others' rights are infringed. True, the vast majority of gun owners are law-abiding, upstanding citizens who handle their weapons responsibily. But the responsible behavior of that vast majority is fully and decisively negated by those who use guns to commit violent acts on innocent people. An appropriate analogy is nuclear weapons - countries like the United States argue in favor of their defensive capabilities, but certainly no one is arguing that every country in the world should have them. There's simply too much inherent danger involved in nuclear weapons too allow their widespread deployment - and while guns have a much more limited scope in terms of the number of people they can potentially harm, their impact on the people they do harm is every bit as horrible. Okay, one might argue, the fact that a handful of nations have nuclear weapons and have largely been able to keep them away from rogue nations suggests that the same can be done with guns - keep them with the peacekeepers and away from the baddies. But the advanced technology to develop nuclear weapons ensures that their deployment can be controlled, while guns are so rudimentary and cheaply mass-produced that they easily fall into the hands of those wishing to do harm. So because we can't really control who can buy guns, and thus can't ensure that all gun owners are responsible and law-abiding, we simply have to stop allowing their availability to anyone other than law enforcement authorities.

When citing the Constitution, advocates usually point to the framers' intent in granting specific rights. I find it very hard to imagine the framers ever could have envisioned, let alone condoned, anyone having the right to shoot up a lecture hall full of students or executing female shoppers with bullets to the head. When the framers drafted the Second Amendment, it was during a time of precarious defense of the homeland - we had only just repelled the British, who weren't terribly pleased at losing their prized colony, as the War of 1812 would soon attest to - and the fledgling country had to rely heavily on local militias in the absence of a strong federal military. The country wanted to be sure it could defend itself, which required the arming of everyday citizens. When the Bill of Rights was drafted, our greatest threat was external. But times have changed - today, with a strong federal military and state National Guard, the likelihood of foreign invasion is minimal. And now, thanks to the pervasiveness of guns, our greatest threat is internal.

We have seen the enemy, and they is us. But it doesn't have to be this way, and it shouldn't be.