Problem of gun violence will be solved someday

Several people raised an interesting point in my piece earlier this week about gun violence.

I argued that fewer guns in the hands of the wrong people might mean fewer deaths, and several of you said that people have been killing people since the beginning of time and nothing would ever change that.

I would rather not believe that.

I would rather be optimistic about the future and believe that even if it is only in small, incremental ways, we have evolved in the two million years or so that man has existed on the planet.

I would like to believe that we will evolve even further in the next two million years and that there will come a time when men and women of all types can live together in peace.

Now before you dismiss me as someone who just wants to sit around the campfire and sing "Kum ba yah," think about the progress we have made in just a few hundred years.

We used to hold people as slaves.

We used to put 7-year-old children to work in factories.

We used to send people to prison for their debts.

It hasn't even been a hundred years since women weren't allowed to vote or in many cases own property.

People used to kill each other in duels, and even later than that, gunfighters met on the streets of western towns and shot it out.

We are changing.

One of the problems we have in our society is that a very large percentage of people -- some say 70 percent -- aren't really enjoying the benefits of our society. They're either not making it or they're barely getting by.

When people feel they aren't getting a fair shake, they often become either depressed or angry. Many of them don't want to believe it's their own shortcomings that are keeping them from getting ahead, so they look for scapegoats.

Whether it's Jews, African-Americans or immigrants they think are the culprits, they resent them. But for the most part, these people don't get their guns and go looking for victims. For all the talk of criminals, militias and survivalists, for all the talk of hate groups, probably 98 percent of gun owners never use their weapons for anything illegal.

So we're not looking at the biggest problem in the world here. Reducing gun violence really only involves a small percentage of people who misues their guns.

And just because we haven't managed to do it yet, I refuse to believe we'll never find the way.

What if researchers were able to isolate the gene that makes people violent or antisocial? What if a simple surgery could remove someone's criminal tendencies? It might sound a little too "brave new world" for today, but it might be perfectly logical at some point in the future.

So never say never.

Progress will make a liar out of you.