Fifteen days.

These are the statistics broadcast by ABC News tonight. From February 1 through today, 32 people have been murdered in seven mass shootings of at least three people each. We are a nation awash in a sea of guns, where every mentally ill person has easy access to them, where every angry husband has one, where every lost temper becomes life-threatening and every despondent moment can end a life.

You know what those who advocate the status quo say? That we need more people to carry guns, because they will be able to stop these lunatics. That's right, without any training, they will correctly assess every risky situation and make the right decision about who should live and who should die. Of course, extensively trained police officers don't always get this right, but what's the harm in adding, say, a hundred million perpetually armed adults to the mix? It'll make things safer, right? Not one of them will have a sudden attack of road rage or get in a heated discussion after a few drinks? And even if they do, they can all be relied on to refrain from using the military anti-personnel weapon they carry, right?

Gun rights are considered a virtue by the conservative political class, held hostage by the highly effective lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association, among others. That always seems odd to me, because those same conservatives like to talk about a "culture of life". But then, they also advocate application of the death penalty, so you can't really take this as an honest intellectual position.

As for me, I'm tired of watching people in college classrooms, clothing stores, offices, and all these other quotidian places die because, even for the lunatics, getting a gun is about as difficult as getting a ham sandwich. We can split hairs over the precise meaning of the fourth amendment and what the militia clause means, or we can decide that the right to life starts with taking guns away from nearly everyone. Let's start with some modest restrictions and see what happens to the gun death rate. I think the overall murder rate will go down. Guns just make mayhem too easy, a push-button killing device you can activate from a comfortable distance. The moronically simplistic argument that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" ignores the simple logic that if people are so dangerous, we shouldn't give them convenient tools to do monstrous things.

CDs listened to today:

• Garbage: Independent Access
• Girls vs. Boys: Park Avenue
• Bill Watrous: The Tiger Of San Pedro
• Alfred Schnittke: Symphony No. 8
• Ludwig van Beethoven: The String Quartets, disk 2
• Beastie Boys: Check Your Head
• Remy Shand: The Way I Feel
• Hector Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique
• Cure: Wish
• Ingram Marshall: Hymnodic Delays