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No.And I’ll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe itAnd reflect from the mountain so all souls can see itThen I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkingBut I’ll know my song well before I start singingAnd it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hardIt’s a hard rain’s a-going to fall*I was raised around guns. As a military dependent, living on Air Force and Army bases in the United States and in Europe in the 1950s and 60s, there were guns aplenty—not just the military-grade weapons, but small caliber .22 rifles, .38, .45, and .357 caliber pistols, and 12-gauge shotguns. I learned to shoot on NRA-sanctioned ranges located in the far corners of the bases, and got all the NRA medals. I became a proficient, competitive, and champion-level skeet shooter on skeet ranges in Ohio, Nebraska, Louisiana, and Colorado. I was a fair pistol shot with our pistols fired on base ranges, or, when available, at civilian ranges off-base.It was a family thing with us. My father was an excellent marksman; my mother was as well. We had handguns, shotguns, and long rifles in our houses for most of my life. Oddly enough, I guess, we were not hunters. Killing was not our thing. Punching hole in targets, or powdering clay pigeons made up 100-percent of our time with our guns. By the time I departed for college in the late 60s, and my parents were getting older and considering retirement, our gun collection began to dwindle. We sold a few of the pistols, and cleaned, oiled, and stored the shotguns and rifles. By the 1980s, our guns were barely remembered artifacts, encased in a chest in the basement, never to be fired again…with the bulk of them sold after my father’s death in 2003.The same story, with variations, was true for many of my military brat and civilian friends and their families from that age in America where guns were relatively common, often used for hunting in those parts of the country where that sort of thing was safe and acceptable, and otherwise used to punch holes in targets and powder clay pigeons. It never occurred to us—the commonest of people—to turn our guns into human killing machines if or when we had a beef with someone, or if or when we descended into depression, or if or when life did not go our way and someone cut us off on the freeway or disparaged our dog or mowed their lawn not to our liking. It also rarely occurred to any of us to own a weapon that made absolutely no sense to own—like a semi-automatic rifle capable of spraying a room full of children with death.Now, let me be totally frank here. The world around my childhood was hardly cotton candy and carefree hours. I grew up in White-only America, in states where lynchings occurred, where beatings, bombings, burnings and brutalities unimaginable happened to Black Americans and their white sympathizers and defenders. I know physical and psychological bullying, having been the target of a schoolyard bully and seeing how even my best friends turned away from the taunts and beatings that rained down on me from a 14-year-old thug and his buddies. I have a personal connection to alcoholism that was ruinous.And I know the ominous tones of vitriolic hate speech aimed at men, women, and children who did not fit the White version of America as far too many of my acquaintances and their parents wished it to be (and as it never was). You have not felt true embarrassment until you hear the most venomous racial epithets trip blithely off the lips of a pearl-wearing Leave-it-to-Beaver next-door neighbor mom, or spit violently from the adolescent tongue of someone you thought was your best buddy. These were not uncommon words. They were the lingua franca of a large portion of America. I heard those words in the North, the South, the East, and the West. I heard them from teachers, businessmen, mothers, fathers (thankfully, not my mother or father, though my father had a hard time accepting the assimilation of Black-Americans into all roles of American life). I heard these words from privates and generals. There are few things as jarring as hearing an otherwise-revered war hero extrude the N-word from his lips as if he were simply molding some racially-textured Play-Doh for the amusement of dinner party guests.We have not ended such attitudes; we have only put an ill-fitting lid on them, and the rancid stew of inequality and injustice simmering beneath that lid is getting hotter, not colder. You need look no further than the current White House and it’s socially-misguided population to know we stand on a crumbling precipice of perverted potential, one misstep away from descending into irreversible degeneracy, suspicion, and subversion. Aided and abetted by a segment of the media that glorifies all who are white and wealthy, or cruelly pretends to dignify all who are white and ignorant, our national leadership casts aspersions and doubt upon all who are black, yellow, beige and brown (thank you, Nina Simone and Langston Hughes for Backlash Blues).I also grew up in an America that objectified and denigrated girls and women, and stigmatized them if they did not measure up to some unreachable standard, or if they pushed back against the social norms of the time. Many men of the times read Playboy, and news stands in many markets and convenience stores displayed far more crude magazines next to Family Circle, Good Housekeeping and Readers’ Digest. The female form was reduced to a sexual snack, gaudily painted with lipstick, carefully airbrushed, and wrapped like candy in silk for male consumption. And, like racism and guns, Americans defined and accepted—frequently celebrated on fashion and contest runways, in magazines, books, and big silver screens—women’s proper role in our society.We have not ended such abuse and disrespect; we have only glossed it over and made tentative strides toward addressing the underlying misogyny, denigration through popular music, political imbalance, and income inequality that continue to derail women’s reasonable aspirations. As for pornography, it may not appear on store shelves as it once did, but it is thriving in the virtual world, and it is tolerated—and apparently paid for—at the highest levels of government.Note that I have not—nor will I here—discussed the darker side of America of the 50s and 60s: abortion, drugs, spouse abuse, alcoholism, closeted homosexuality, the shame of priests, rapacious environmental pollution and destruction at the hands of the huge coal- and mineral-mining companies and the energy plants and vast factories they continue to feed, the Cold War, nuclear threats…the list goes on. There remain today holdovers of these and other ills, and we still approach them with great reluctance and lack of a galvanized national will.If we cannot fulfill the vision of an America that is open to all, safe for all, filled with achievable opportunities for all, tolerant of all, listening to all, answering to all, uniting all, and celebrating all, how can we possibly deceive ourselves into thinking we have any chance for reasonable and effective debate on what to do about guns? And if we cannot debate the issue, we certainly cannot solve the problem.We thought we were ready to end racial hatred and embrace our differences to such a degree that they would fade into the mists of time. We are not there yet.We thought we could address women’s economic and social equality and set but one bar for men and women—and government—to clear: the bar of equal rights. We are not there yet.We thought our education systems would elevate our children’s intellectual and practical futures to world-class competitiveness. We’re not there yet—and that goal is disappearing in the dust of nations ready and willing to fill the intellectual vacuum our schools are creating.Clearly, we are not ready and willing to act to bring an end to gun violence and killings in schools, killings in theaters, killings at music venues. If we were, we’d be there. It’s as simple as that. Our national baggage of misguided and failed programs is so filled with the junk of past generations it is a wonder we can make any headway under such a loathsome burden.The enormity of the gun problem is beyond comprehension. Hundreds of millions of weapons in the hands of hundreds of millions of people. A miniscule percentage of those people will use their guns to do harm; the vast majority of Americans will not be able to relate. They can’t relate now. No number of deaths will cause Americans to break the chain of ownership. Legislation is not a viable option. Sorry. Just not happening.What would be legislated? A guns-to-plowshares program? A pay-for-gun collection program? A “well-just-come-get-your-gun” program? An electronic tagging program? Oh, sure, that will go over well. How about a turn-in-your-neighbor-who-seems-crazy program? Or a “Well-he-looked-dangerous-to-me” program? More mental heath screenings? Given that the path of conservative government is veering away from funding programs that might help identify troubled—and potentially violent—gun owners or possible purchasers, mental health programs are simply unworkable and unscalable.To think we can resolve the gun problem before we have achieved success in grappling with our other issues—some of which are eroding the foundations of our democracy at an ever-increasing pace—is to deny the reality that we just don’t have the will to protect our young people—or anyone—from the killings that will continue unabated. There are no answers ahead; only coffins of many sizes.It’s a hard rain that is falling. And it will only get harder.*© 1962 Bob Dylan