This was written by my good friend, Karma:
Imagine you are the most popular kid on the playground. Also, your mom lets you take a gun to school with enough clips of ammo to go Columbine on the whole school. This isn’t something that you are thinking about doing but because you’re the most popular, you get into a lot of fights sticking up for your friends, doing what you think is right.

Its soccer practice one day and you’re talking to two of the neighborhood kids. They have figured out where their parents keep their guns too. The first one, little Suzie, is friendly, nice and fair to everyone she meets. Everyone likes her. She doesn’t get into arguments on the playground but if there were a conflict she would resolve it without violence. She respects other peoples beliefs and is willing to compromise. She says she is planning on bringing her gun and collecting some ammo next week.

The other child is Marcus. Marcus is not very popular. He is always getting into fights with other kids, sometimes he gets hurt; sometimes the other kid gets hurt. He’s also very stubborn. Usually Marcus disagrees with you about everything and he tells you so, rudely. Some of his friends are bullies and many of the kids are afraid of him. He’s planning on bringing a gun next week too, but he hasn’t figured out how to get any bullets. During the conversation with Marcus and Suzie, Marcus promised that he wouldn’t hurt anyone with his gun. Suzie kept silent.

1. Who are you more worried about, Suzie, or Marcus?
2. Do you try to convince either of them not to bring a gun to school? How do you convince them? Do you ask nicely, kick their ass, get the other kids to gang up on them, or something else?
3. What about your gun? Are you willing to stop bringing the gun to school if it means that they agree not to? Do you trust them? Is it fair to continue bringing a gun, if you convince them otherwise?

My little metaphor may seem silly but think about it seriously, as you would in such a ridiculously scary situation. Please think about your answers before you continue…

…Maybe discuss them with someone in the room, what the heck, see what they think…

… Or post them in the comments box…

Okay, so here’s the deal.

You are the U.S. Suzie is India and Marcus is Iran. Both countries are close to producing nuclear weapons. Iran has signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty; India has not. On the other hand, India is a democratic nation while Iran is expansionistic. They’re harboring Al Queda. Everyone pretty much agrees that though they comply with the treaty and India has not, it is Iran that is a danger to the rest of the world. So the debate seems to be, who should we go after, why and how? India is one of our allies but some people think that we shouldn’t be letting them play with plutonium.

Does anyone else see the hypocrisy here? Remember when all of the nations got together and voted to stop producing nuclear weapons? I’ll remind you: The vote was in favor of reducing nuclear armament 147 to one (UK and Isreal abstained). The vote against was yours truely, the good ole’ U. S. of A. How long do we think we can keep producing nuclear weapons and telling other people its not okay to produce nuclear weapons? According to a speech by Noam Chompsky, a recent study showed terrible errors in the security or our nuclear weapons. On top of worrying about other countries making them or our country using them, now we have to worry about terrorists stealing them.

Its happened before and it came close to happening again in the 1960’s. Russia was literally a phone call away from giving the Okay to strike the U.S. Is this frightening to anyone else out there? Sometimes I don’t feel like this is a safe country to live in. Everyone has their crosshairs pointed at us.

How long will these children play with guns before someone gets shot?