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At some point on my birthday every year I am reminded that I share this day with the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki by the United States - an act that finally brought World War II to a close and that was so horrific, nobody has felt the urge to repeat it since. Every year on my birthday, the Japanese have asked the world for peace and for an end to the threat of nuclear war. I can think of no greater birthday wish than that.

I am not naive. I've been on the other side of the equation. I've experienced war first hand (well, as first hand as one can get from a satellite in orbit over a war zone). I've cheered at the death of the enemy in real time - before the somber music and cool video game effects appeared on CNN days later. I've been through all the justification responses and righteous indignation that I've ever wanted to have in a lifetime. In the end, war is still wrong. Dead is still dead. And blowing stuff up is still no way to bring about peace.

We all know it. Deep in our hearts, we all know that any sort of killing is wrong - but we are so obsessed with it that we can't fathom any other concept. The peace we offer is done so with the threat of the big stick backing it up. That is not a way to make a lasting peace as it only lasts so long as we can guarantee our security. We are forced to constantly threaten death to our enemies in order to maintain peace and security.

I've been thinking about this a lot over the past few weeks because of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado. Our love affair with guns and violence is ingrained into our culture in such a way that it has become a part of our American identity. There is no simple solution to the idea of preventing these shootings from occurring in this nation, but the one wrong headed approach to this problem is to suggest that guns are part of the solution. If a rogue nation attacks the United States we don't defend their rights to have weapons and then suggest that we should let all rogue nations have free access to weapons as well because it's their God given right. No. Instead we pound them into dust, confiscate their weapons, and do our best to make sure that these weapons are never again allowed in the hands of those people who seek us harm. Why can't we do the same thing for guns in this country?

To find a solution to a problem, we first have to be willing to change. And I'm not sure that we're ready to go there yet. Our desire to own weapons is tied to our notion of freedom. Owning weapons is not yet associated with death and killing and maiming and the harming of the innocent. Our desire to protect our freedoms from other nations is strong - even unto the point of killing others to maintain them. Peace, real peace, does not come from strength of arms, but from strength of soul. It is not enough to be able to kill every single man, woman, and child on this earth a thousand times over. If we want a lasting peace, we need to be able to build up every single man, woman, and child on this planet and help them to achieve their best life. A first step toward that goal would be to stop trying to kill them.

Now that's a birthday wish I could really get behind.