With three weeks now separating today from the Orlando shooting, I enough ardor has drained from both sides of the argument to safety broach the subject. What should be done about guns? Because I hope we can at least all agree that we should do something.

I would like to start off by saying both sides of the argument have merit and both could be considered correct, which is why I think this issue is so controversial. But like those obnoxious multiple choice questions I would always get wrong, we have to "choose the best answer."

Now I'm going to go easy on the numbers and statistics because I think people are sick of hearing numbers, facts and statistics. I've personally always hated numbers which is why I have to be a writer.

Now as a History major, I consider the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and its Bill of Rights to be the greatest and most influential documents in terms of language as well as abstract ideals put into practice. I am all for the Second Amendment, it was important to the founding fathers and it’s still important to people today.

What I am not for is arguments that have no grounding in logic. And unfortunately, there is one argument and one argument alone for having guns and here it is right here: "Don't you dare take my guns. I like guns."

And there's nothing wrong with that. You like something and you believe you should have access to it.

But that argument doesn’t really fly in politics so people make up ones that sound better. The most prevalent one is protection. "I need it to protect myself and my family." Interesting. And you need an assault rifle for that because….why?

People say they need it for protection, if someone breaks into their house they want to be able to blow them away. Well if someone breaks into your house, chances are they're a drug addict desperate for money and are only doing it because it’s a better option in their mind than just sitting there thinking about how much they want drugs. If you come at them with a baseball bat, they are going to turn tail and run as fast as they can. No one is coming with the expressed purpose of murdering you and your entire family. I've worked at a courthouse, I've seen the kind of people who commit B&E's. Trust me, if you're healthy, you don't need a gun to overpower these people.

Now I know I said I would stay away from numbers but if you have a gun in your household you are 80% likely for someone in your household to die from a gun related incident whether its suicide or an accidental discharge. And the people on the other side of the aisle say, "That would never happen in my household. I am a responsible gun owner. I keep my rifles locked in a safe in my closet, and my pistols with trigger locks on them."

Which is how it should be, if you have guns, I applaud you. But unfortunately, now they're no protection. If someone breaks into your house it will be at 2-3 in the morning and you'll hear something. You'll wake up groggy, spend a couple seconds deciding whether the sound is innocuous or dangerous. Then, if you decide it is dangerous, you have to go to wherever you keep your guns and take them out a gun safe or try to unlock your trigger guard in the dark. Do you think you'll have time for all that?

I honestly don't know, I've never been in a situation like that before but I do know one thing. Guns are LOUD. Most gun enthusiasts go to a gun range and they put their headphones on before they fire. Well I've fired a 9 millimeter pistol without headphones before. My friend took me on his boat and thought he was cool bringing his pistol with him. I, of course, thought it was cool as well and after a few drinks we had a terribly irresponsible time of our lives firing off a few rounds into the ocean. I would tell you how loud it was, but all I could hear for an hour afterward was buuuuuuuuuuuuuue. Nothing but ringing for at least 20 minutes.

So if someone comes into your home and you have anything larger than a .22 for "protection" and you happen to miss that first shot because, let's just say you're groggy and you're not Rambo, you have effectively ruined one of your five senses for the duration of the situation. Now you cannot hear the person who you just tried to kill. Presumably its dark in the room so you're sense of sight is also quite impaired. Personally, I'd just go for the baseball bat. Maybe if you're feeling particularly vindictive you could put a nail through the end of it. No one's going to screw with that.

Another argument is we should have more guns. "If the teachers at Sandy Hook had guns, none of this would have happened." Are these people forgetting what it's like to deal with people? When someone really rubs you the wrong way and they keep at it and keep at it and now you're going to add guns into the mix? Killing someone without a gun is messy and difficult and requires quite a lot of emotion. Killing someone with a gun can be as easy as flipping off the safety and pulling the trigger.

Another argument is that if we put more stringent controls on guns, normal law abiding citizens won't be able to buy them, but criminals will still have full access. And there is some truth to that, I won't dispute it. We've seen a similar trend regarding drugs, the more you regulate the more it opens up black market players to go make a lot of money.

But that's where the parallels stop. I hate to use the most cliché gun in America at the moment, but the average price of an AR-15 is anywhere from $800-1,050 and depending on what state you're in, you don't even need a background check. Now in Australia, where guns are banned, the same gun cost $34,000 on the black market. Now if you have $34,000, you don't need to be a criminal. You have $34,000. I could pay off all my student loans and still have $10,000 to play with afterward. So yes, criminals could still buy off the black market. But a ramp up of gun laws would make it a bit more costly to get guns that actually kill large amounts of people.

And that's really what I'm getting at here. You want a pistol for whatever reason, fine. You want a shotgun or single shot rifle to go hunting? Not my thing, but I'm not here to judge, have at it. But the idea that banning assault rifles or high capacity magazines violates the Second Amendment is lunacy.

People often say "You cannot change the Second Amendment," and I'd just like to point out, yes, you can. I know most of us have grown up in a country where Congress is more gridlocked rush hour in Los Angeles, but things actually used to be passed in this country. Laws were made and struck down, amendments were passed and repealed, yes this actually happened.

We used to have a clause in the body of the Constitution that stated that Senators would be chosen by an electoral college of sorts and the common people would have little to no say in the matter. While this seems a bit anti-democratic, it made sense in a country where 80% of labor was agricultural and literacy was hovering around 60% for white men (we don’t know what literacy rates were for nonwhite men for obvious yet still deplorable reasons). But as literacy rates rose and the average man became more educated, they amended the Constitution so any citizen could vote directly for Senator in 1913. And then women actually got the right to vote in 1921.

So as time passed, variables in American life changed and with it, so did the policies that shaped American life. When the Constitution was written, the US was a loose collection of sovereign states. In fact, people didn't refer to themselves as "Americans", they referred to themselves as Virginians or Rhode Islanders. People referred to the country by saying "The United States are…" It was until 1865, following the Civil War, that the country became a collective nation state and people began saying "The United States is…" When the Constitution was drafted, there was no Federal Reserve or bank, there was no standing army, there wasn't even a federal post office.

The Second Amendment was written in the wake of Bacon's Rebellion in Massachusetts in which a group of overtaxed farmers took up their guns and went around burning and shooting things to show their dissatisfaction. Those who were victims of the rebellion wanted guns (meaning muskets), to be banned. Obviously, the farmers wanted to keep their guns for the same reason people wanted to today: protection, hunting, and recreation. And so the Second Amendment was a compromise. It gave states the authority to organize militias and put down rebellions, but it also protected individual rights of gun ownership.

So how about another compromise? Pistols and single shot firearms remain on the market, but any kind of high capacity weapon is strictly prohibited. However, gun ranges are allowed to keep all kinds of cool assault rifles in their armories. You could rent an AK-47, G35, AR-15 or even a M4A1 to play with for the day at the range. And if you didn't want to rent, you could buy it and it would be exclusively yours to use there.

So when you want to shoot it, you drive to your local gun range, take it out for the day, have some fun, and put it back to be safely kept under lock and key. No one would be allowed to purchase assault rifles or high capacity weapons other than licensed gun range owners who have undergone extensive background checks.

And while this might not stop gun violence altogether, it will stop these massacres where someone can walk onto a dancefloor and mow down 50 people like he's a gangster from the 1920s. And in the event of a zombie apocalypse or if the dollar crashes or something along those lines, we all know where to meet.