Did you see the footage of a bereaved father speaking about his son's death during the recent Santa Barbara killings? He harangued politicians and the NRA for being at fault in the endless occurrence of these tragedies across America.

Did you notice that another three people were killed and a fourth person was wounded in a shooting at an oceanfront motel in Myrtle Beach, one of South Carolina's most popular tourist destinations, over the recent weekend as well. Plus, a few hours later in Indianapolis, a robbery and shooting left two men injured just 24 hours after a man was fatally shot in the same parking lot near the Indianapolis motor speedway on the weekend of the big race.

Who knows how many others were shot, some fatally, over the past week. And even worse, thought about using a gun — perhaps one that they owned — to do harm to another.

There have been editorial pieces this week about failures in our mental health systems. Why can't we spot and remove the crazies is the basic gist of most.

There has been a growing outcry about the misogynist aspects of the Santa Barbara killer's "motive." Haven't we had enough of blaming women, or anyone other than ourselves, for deep problems that hurt us to the core?

But what struck home for me this past week was a piece by The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik about truth telling and the ways in which we can let rhetoric lead us astray as a society. In particular, he addressed the various arguments used by the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment zealots against any form of gun control, with particular note as to the idea that "It takes a good guy with a gun to take out a bad guy with a gun."

His line of reasoning could be used with many of our worst problems these days.

The war against euphemism and cliché matters not because we can guarantee that eliminating them will help us speak nothing but the truth but, rather, because eliminating them from our language is an act of courage that helps us get just a little closer to the truth. Clear speech takes courage," Gopnik writes. "Every time we tell the truth about a subject that attracts a lot of lies, we advance the sanity of the nation. Plain speech matters because when we speak clearly we are more likely to speak truth than when we retreat into slogan and euphemism; avoiding euphemism takes courage because it almost always points plainly to responsibility."

What he's getting at is a clear dialogue that's not weighted by bullying attitudes that treat one side as "un-American" or not loyal enough to public consensus. His argument works as well for other issues stretching from Climate Change to health care. Yet it resonates, now, the same as that father's impassioned speech has.

"Speaking clearly also lets us examine the elements of a proposition plainly," Gopnik continues. "We know that slogans masquerading as plain speech are mere rhetoric because, on a moment's inspection, they reveal themselves to be absurd. 'The best answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun' reveals itself to be a lie on a single inspection: the best answer is to not let the bad guy have a gun. 'Guns don't kill people, people do.' No: obviously, people with guns kill more people than people without them. Why not ban knives or cars, which can be instruments of death, too? Because these things were designed to help people do things other than kill people. 'Gun control' means controlling those things whose first purpose is to help people kill other people."

I know many will vilify me for this sentiment, but I am not saying that we take all guns away. Hunting still has its place, as does collecting. But these things can, and are, regulated fairly elsewhere in the world.

What about the idea of self-protection and the potential for taking out our government? Those sentiments don't match our mature idea of a civil world, I'm afraid, where we train professionals to protect us. Or the ways in which change, and revolution, really occurs these days.

As for the rest of the issues raised by the Santa Barbara atrocity... Yes, it is also time that we start correcting male attitudes towards women.

We have to correct our paths. We can't let such hurt as that father showed continue.