I'm going to make an awesome new TV show. Let's call it "Explosion Extravaganza". I'm going to get a bunch of men and women, in the 18-25 age bracket, and lock them up inside a new reality show. Please disregard that this age bracket has been shown to be particularly poor decision makers, not fully physically matured, and one of the most difficult-to-insure (or expensive-to-insure) segments of the population. I'm going to give them weapons galore... machine guns, grenades, land mines, anti-armor rockets and missiles, maybe even tanks. Then we're going to run them through a bunch of "missions" where they have to shoot at things and blow stuff up. Ideally, we don't want them to hurt each other in the process.
I'm sure people would think I'm crazy. This kind of thing is probably completely unfathomable to people like Rep. Feinstein, who thinks that just about everyone is too incompetent to have even the simplest firearm, let alone rocket launchers. But obviously I'm aiming my TV show at what is arguably the least competent and most reckless demographic.
Now comes the surprise. Such a thing already exists. They call it the Army, or the Marine Corps if you like that better. So now the question is, "If we can take the most dangerous part of the population, and give them unimaginable access to the most deadly 'Weapons of War' that money can buy, why doesn't everyone in the Armed Forces just kill each other off every few days? What's different here?".
You could have a lengthy debate about the differences, but I think it really only boils down to a couple. Strong leadership and discipline, and training. There's little you can do to instill strong leadership and discipline into people's (civilian's) everyday lives. But that's only part of the equation. The training is a huge factor. The training a soldier gets, while some of the best of all militaries in the world, is still watered down by the fact they have to get dozens, or hundreds, of soldiers through it. While it looks like epic "weeks" of constant training on paper, it probably only manifests in "hours" in reality for a single person. In Basic Training, a recruit will spend weeks going to the range, 8-10 hours a day, during the Basic Rifle Marksmanship phase, and ultimately get to shoot one or two 15-minute sessions per day. Most non-combat personnel get only minimal combat-oriented training, following Basic Training. The point being, that a civilian can acquire this level of training and familiarization very easily in an efficient civilian setting. If a civilian goes to the gun range for 3 hours, they get 3 hours of shooting in, or the equivalent of a week's worth of that Basic Training recruit's.
I realize that gun control supporters probably don't want to hear more pragmatic "reality check" examples of why their theories are flawed. But if myself and my squad-mates managed to survive the fact that we were all loaded down with machine guns, grenade launchers, rockets, landmines, and other assorted awesome toys, during the most wild and irresponsible years of our lives, it would seem that the claims that law-abiding citizens are going to be hurting people at every opportunity if we don't take away these "dangerous" guns and accessories from them, is sorely missing some good root-cause analysis.
This is part of the reason I thought it was important for me to open a training school. Give people all the training they can handle. Make the training thorough, realistic, useful, and most of all safe. Teach people to be comfortable and responsible with tools that can be dangerous if used improperly, and life-saving if used properly. "You don't rise to the occasion. You fall to your level of training."
If we can take the most dangerous part of the population, and give them unimaginable access to the most deadly 'Weapons of War' that money can buy, why doesn't everyone in the Armed Forces just kill each other off every few days? What's different here?