When will the madness end? When will legislators stop turning a deaf ear and blind eye to the cries of the victims and the entreaties of most Americans begging for some, any kind of gun control laws? We are caught in an absurdist arms race where logic has gone begging, and the knee-jerk response to mass shootings is to increase access to guns. Mere days after the mass shooting in Nashville, North Caroline enacted a bill decreeing that its residents no longer need a permit to buy a gun. In Tennessee itself, governor Bill Lee signed a bill awarding additional protections, not to its citizens, but to gun and ammunition dealers, manufacturers and sellers. And in Texas, despite calls for gun reforms after the Uvalde and Allen mass shootings, they didn’t enact gun control, they urged bleeding control as legislation is proposed that would mandate training for elementary school children on how to tie tourniquets or pack bleeding wounds during mass-casualty incidents. Conservatives want to ban abortion, ban books and ban uncomfortable history, but it’s fine for young children to experience battlefield-like trauma as they try to staunch the blood of their wounded classmate/teacher/principal. But at least, the gun merchants are unharmed! When will we begin to staunch the flow of this absurd fixation on guns and more guns? When will we pull out of this ever escalating arms race? What does it say about us that legislatures value the unborn over the living? That they value unfettered gun ownership over the safety of our school children? We are killing ourselves, and the gun proponents play on, fiddling as this country burns, one mass shooting after another. We bleed, we mourn, we cry out “ENOUGH!” But the legislators and lobbyists, like Gollum, are oblivious as they clutch their guns, their own, their precious, chanting, “We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious,” resolute in their delusion, deaf to our cries for change, for regulation, for a return to sanity and safety and a world where guns do not reign supreme.