I wish I could offer more than an acknowledgment of your post and those 30 grim statistics about domestic violence, Jody. It just seems like one of a long list of problems our society can no longer confront. That may be the complexity you were going for in your title.

Everybody can agree on the basic message of the statistics: Humans are innately violent, and human males more violent toward women than the other way, in a tradition going back millions of years.

But then we fall apart into two hopelessly divergent camps. People like me see limiting access to weapons of murder as an obvious way to reduce violence in general. And in the particular case of domestic abuse, where violence is often impulsive and quickly escalates, it's insane to have lying around weapons that can gratify the impulse to murder as fast as the thought can form. Tell me that knives are deadly, and so are hands, and I'll point out that it takes longer to kill with those weapons, and that could make the difference in the heat of passion.

But then there's the sharply different other argument, and it has an obvious charm: All women should be armed, and able to shoot their abusers dead. It has a brutal logic to it, but it bothers me because it simply transfers the power to kill at a whim to another hand; it's just turnabout, and likely turns the victim into the abuser eventually.

To me endless tit-for-tat isn't the answer, but the reality in America today is the momentum belongs to the second argument. "ISIS...(and)Gun violence..." walk hand-in-hand in our country.