I own a gun. It's never killed anything except a few paper targets, and that was only because I was putting blackpowder and balls into it.

Behind every weapon of destruction is a human being wielding it, who has made a conscious choice to do so. Weapons are only a symptom, not a cause; if we want to stop people from killing each other, we have to get at the cause. If you want the dog to stop biting, you don't cut off its tail.

Now. When I was in public school, in the 80s, religion was never an issue until a bunch of government people got together and said we needed to make it an issue. I don't recall race ever being an issue at my school either. Perhaps I have forgotten many things over the passage of time; but I do remember that I had black friends, Asian friends, Jewish friends, and Catholic friends. (At that time the Middle Eastern population in Nashville was very, very small; it has grown quite a bit since, as well as the Hispanic population.) In our little microcosm of the world, you either liked someone or you didn't, and where they came from or where they worshipped didn't figure into it.

I don't really understand where that changed, or even why. People are people. Why do we insist on dividing ourselves along racial & religious lines?