Pop quiz hotshot. What object am I describing?

In America there is a product sold legally in thousands of storefronts all across the country. Every year millions of Americans present a photo ID to prove they are of age and then with very little else in the way of hurdles to jump, no other tests, fees, or requirements of any kind, they are allowed to buy this product for their own personal use. And then, in a shocking display of abject responsibility, the vast majority of people who buy this product use it to... have a good time. And even though this product is potentially very dangerous, deadly even, millions of our fellow citizens use it safely every single day and never think twice.

I should mention that this product is highly regulated and that using it in certain ways is illegal.  One of the many ways you can use this product to break the law is to kill people with it. And yet despite the existence of many thousands of federal, state, and local laws on the books, every year our fellow Americans do, in fact, use this product to kill other Americans... they did so more than 10,000 times last year alone, even though they knew in advance that doing so is a felony punishable by long prison sentences and hefty fines. Worse, often times these criminals commit mass killings with multiple victims mowed down in a single event... one particularly disturbing incident in Kentucky claimed the lives of twenty-seven people in a single night.

And of course each and every time the calendar clicks over to a brand new January we wake up to discover that in the previous twelve months many thousands more used this product to kill themselves in a variety of nasty ways.

Beyond the death and destruction, some estimates put the financial cost of using this product illegally at 132 BILLION dollars every single year. When you measure both the social and real physical costs to society, very few things come close in terms of sheer destructiveness.

Of course, the product I'm talking about is alcohol. And yet despite the costs I've cataloged here, there is no real support for banning alcohol in America, nor do I expect there ever will be. This despite the fact that we Americans prove every year that no matter how many laws we pass making DUI illegal, some percentage of us are going to continue to do it, and thousands will die. The only way, the ONLY possible way, to save most of those who die from DUI would be to ban alcohol 100%, and even that would be no guarantee of success. Bootlegged home-brew and bathtub gin would still wreak plenty of havoc. We learned this painful lesson during Prohibition when we went so far as to add an Amendment to the Constitution banning booze and discovered that along with our new law we got the added price tag of mob violence, death, and mayhem.

But there's simply no stomach for such a ban in Modern America. Why not?

And why, on the other hand, are so many people so damned anxious to ban guns? Contrast our laissez faire attitude toward booze with the rabid activism of the anti-gun movement. They tell us that we are morally compelled to "do something" about guns if it would save the life of even a single child. All of which raises a question, are children who die in DUI incidents (1,150 under the age of 14 in 2013 by the way) second class citizens? Are their lives less important than those taken by gun violence? Their deaths less meaningful?

I say no. Every life lost is a tragedy, but here's the thing, and there's really no way of getting around this... we live in a free society and living in a free society carries with it a small risk that one day you may cross paths with a dangerous, evil, or even just an irresponsible person and that it will cost you your life. That risk can never be truly removed from our lives... not by laws, not by governments, and certainly not by hashtags.

And so I say let's have a little consistency here. We either ban guns AND alcohol and give government even more control over our lives for some marginal increase in safety... or we don't ban either one... we accept that doing so carries a small amount of personal risk, we do whatever we have to do to mitigate that risk (by, say, getting a concealed carry permit), and we go on about our lives and enjoy our freedoms.

I know which side I come down on.