Nineteen children were murdered in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday. They were elementary school students, attending their last week of classes before summer vacation, when an 18-year-old gunman came through the door and began shooting.

Well, Texas now has its own Sandy Hook. The cost of freedom has risen another twenty-one lives, most of them under ten years old. If this is the cost of freedom, then freedom is overpriced.  Freedom, as we enjoy it,  is a luxury we cannot afford. We must cut the cost by stricter gun permitting, by reporting on social media surveillance, and in available tip-lines where suspicions can be raised. Tighten the net of enforcement, so we are surprised less often by headlines like this. Every terrorist has a past; we want to get up into it, even if we may occasionally get into wild suspicions or accusations to apprehend them.

The Second Amendment never imagined this. What part of a “well-regulated militia” allows this? What liberties are so precious as to allow this?  Shouldn’t there be a few thousand fewer guns registered to anyone who values life so cheaply? Shouldn’t we be united in a movement to make gun ownership a privilege, not a right?

Does it even matter how this young man bought a gun? Doesn’t it matter that he should not have owned one, regardless of the law?  Does it matter what his motive was? Or if he had a criminal history? He should not have owned a gun to do what he did.  The era of free access to deadly weapons is over.

Hand-wringing and prayers will not stem the blood tide.

If  we believe that people, not weapons, are the cause of this carnage, let us tighten restrictions and surveillance so that people like this can never own a gun. Find them in social media, seek them out in extremist associations. Report even our suspicions to the precinct hotline. Yes, even risk slandering people who may or may not carry out their rash threats.  If we have to hunt witches, so be it.

It does not mean despotism or government over-reach. It means only we take responsibility for weapons, extremism, and mental health. It means we value human life more than unlimited freedom.

Because the price of freedom is too high if it means the lives of children.   We have overspent on weapons and the rights to own them.  We have over-extended the lease to “live and let live.”  We have spread our world village beyond cost efficiency.  It is free-spending out of control. It is time to cut back that extravagance and live within our  survivable means.

Live within the reasonable means of freedom.  Control cost of a child’s life.  No more consequences like Uvalde, or Parkland or Sandy Hook.