I read a few days ago that there are now over 1 million people in Florida with concealed weapons permits. That scares the hell out of me. Just from statistics alone I can predict that some of these guns will be used to maim or kill dozens or more innocent people over the next five years. Yesterday we learned that 26 children and teachers were killed in an elementary school here in the US, and the days before that, there were other assaults and murders by people who had easy access to guns. Weapons assaults on school children in the US over the past five years have nearly matched the combined statistics of similar assaults on school children in the all of the remaining countries of the world over the same time period. US citizens possess over 300 million guns and account for, by far, the largest number of gun assaults (outside of countries at war) of any country in the world. Canada's culture is in most ways similar to that of the US, but they have very few incidents of gun violence. The same is true of Australia, New Zealand, England. Yet the US alone has the highest per capita rate of gun violence. Some say that the major difference between the US and these other countries in terms of gun violence is that we have the Second Amendment to our Constitution, which, arguably, gives each citizen of the country the right to possess weapons for their personal use and separately from their use by citizens as part of a well-armed militia. It seems to me that we will soon have to deal with the rights of citizens who do not want to carry weapons to protect them from those who do. There is no reason why I, as a US citizen, should have to worry about whether a person with a legally acquired gun can use it to kill me because he/she happens to be pissed off at the moment. The more guns on the street the more certain it will be that these senseless killings will continue. It is naive and foolish to think otherwise.