As a resident of Midcoast Maine and Western Connecticut, the recent atrocity in Newtown has been the subject of many of my conversations and thoughts in the last days. The grief in Connecticut is immense, and there are no words to describe its depth. If our broken hearts and our collective acknowledgment of the cracks in our common life do not lead us to action to help us prevent yet another gunman from killing more of our people, that will be the real tragedy.

As we feel our way forward in our grief and anger, many of us have found ourselves in uncomfortable - even heated - conversations about what our response to this tragedy should be after the children and their teachers are buried.

"If only these automatic assault weapons had been truly banned…," some lament. "If only the teachers had been armed," follows the predictable refrain. Then follow the old adages: Guns don’t kill people…. If guns are outlawed, only outlaws…. The whole thing really makes me sick, and yet I can't stop engaging it. I think we should all feel sick for a good long time about this one.

I have been slogging through many "conversations" on Facebook as well as in real life, and I think I have probably lost some "friends" because of it. One of the arguments shared recently on Facebook had to do with gun laws and car laws. Why, asked my friend rhetorically, don't we just outlaw cars? They do in fact kill more Americans than guns. This was the post that caused me to leave Facebook for three days to review in my own mind and heart what it means to be a friend and a citizen. During that time, I came home to Maine for Christmas with my family. And on a run this morning in the rain along the bay, I thought about the cars and the guns and the children and the teachers.

And this is how I see it on the shortest day of the year, four days before Christmas, seven days after the shootings:

The argument linking guns to cars is disingenuous. He could not have really meant it. Cars are such a ubiquitous and necessary component of our collective lives and economy that talk of banning them can only be seen as absurd. Perhaps that was his point — to link the obvious absurdity to any reasonable discussions about more restrictive gun laws.

But the argument does not work. The absurdity is true enough, but not for the reasons he intended.

Yes, cars are dangerous. But they also make our modern lives possible and virtually ALL of us agree that we cannot live without them without intolerable changes to our way of life. We use them to get to work, and school, and to get food and go to church and the mountains, and almost everywhere else. Because we have agreed that we cannot live without them — and because we know that they are also inherently dangerous — we have made laws about how to live better with them. We have restrictions on who can drive them. We have speed limits. We require manufacturers to include seat belts and airbags. We put drunk drivers in jail. We require everyone to buy insurance. We even have inspections to make sure that the car you drive is not an undue hazard to others when you drive it. We recognize that some vehicles, even if driven by the most responsible and most talented drivers in the world, cannot be allowed to be driven on our roads.

We still lose our friends and family members in tragic car crashes. These deaths are still awful. But few of us are outraged by any of this, unless a drunk driver or a reckless driver or a conspicuously culpable person is the cause of the death. Most of our car deaths we write off as the cost of our collective love of this way of life we might call the car culture.

The reasonable and incremental and imperfect laws we have made about our cars has indeed made a difference that have saved many lives. Do they solve all the tragedies? Of course not. Do they make a real and measurable difference? Yes. Are we safer because of them? Yes. Are there still dangerous drivers and vehicles out there? Yes. Should we shrink from enacting and enforcing reasonable laws because the nihilists and anarchists among us remind us (correctly) that outlaws will continue to break our laws? Of course not. That would be absurd. But that is exactly what the NRA and its voices have said with their predictable refrains about the answers being found with more guns and fewer laws. This is absurd.

We have had enough absurdity in our lack of reasonable gun laws. That is the real tragedy before and after Newtown. A few facts to remember: Most Americans do not to own guns of any sort. The vast majority of us get by fine every day without them. Most Americans not only do not own firearms, but agree that more needs to be done to restrict conditions around the most pernicious weapons that have no use but to shoot as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. Like the dangerous truck without brakes or lights or good tires that should not be on the road even in the hands of the best drivers, some weapons have no justifiable use in a civilized society that cares about its people more than its cars.

If we can find the wisdom and the will to regulate the cars we all drive (because we all love our cars), we can certainly find the wisdom to regulate the worst weapons of the American "gun culture" that most Americans are not (and never have been) a part of.

Jeffrey C. Lewis lives in Camden and Connecticut.