Unless you’ve been on a four-day Jack Daniels’ bender you have heard and seen the horror of the the Newtown, CT. killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
After the first four hours, the various media outlets shifted into their accustomed role of speculation, as there were no hard, actual facts to report. The usual commentators were dragged up, psychologists, security specialists, gun control advocates, PTSD counsellors and of course, loose cannons, sandwich-short-of-a-picnic social commentators and the monomaniacal who won’t change their mind and won’t change the subject. I think I recall some halfwit on Fox blaming the Palestinians for the shooting, and it was Obama’s fault because he wouldn’t let Israel build a 40 foot wall around the Arab homelands. That’s when I turned off the TV.
Facts, those slippery things, are slowly coming out, as they should with some care for the accuracy. We’re going to add a few of our own facts to the hopper, leavened with rational opinion.
Gun Laws as they currently stand had very little to do with the incident. The weapons were legal as of today and the ammunition was also legal. The killer wasn’t using anything full-auto or cut down to hide it. Connecticut has some of the stronger gun licensing laws in the US.
Health Care or ObamaCare has nothing whatsoever to do with the shootings. Norway, with a very good cradle to grave healthcare system produced Anders Brevik, who calmly executed 77 people in July 2011. Norway’s health system didn’t spot the looney. No health care system, however funded, can spot the looney, unless we revert to a Stasi-era system of everyone being secret informers for the government.
Government Funding of Education: Please, go away, your stupidity is making my eyes hurt. The same for those who believe that the Fiscal Cliff debate, Obama’s re-election, Two-party politics, or stalemates in the Congress and Senate have anything to do with this. Go away, shut the F up and go back to sucking your thumb until you join the real world, you pseudo-intellectual orifices.
Here’s where the problem lies. You ready? It will hurt.
Instant access of firearm weapons of all types, legal, illegal, auto, semi-auto and the willingness to use them on a moments’ notice to settle disputes.
There’s the real points, the real points that are not being talked about.
The issue is the American societal fixation on having firearm weapons readily to hand to “defend” themselves. It is ingrained by decades of media rationalizations and societal conditioning that the ONLY way to settle a problem is to kill the other party.
Even after the Aurora, Colorado theatre shooting, some commentators very directly defended the right to bear arms (and by extension, concealed carry) as a way to have stopped James Eagan Holmes from killing 12 people at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. If only the other people in the theatre had responded with a volley…
Using that logic, if the staff at every school in America were issued or allowed to carry firearm weapons, then incidents like this would never happen again.
A second factoid, making the rounds of Facebook.
Last year handguns killed: 48 people in Japan, 8 in the UK, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 58 in Israel, 21 in Sweden, 42 in Germany,
and 10,728 in the US.
The problem is not guns, laws, health care, politics, fiscal cliffs, unemployment, drugs or bad parenting.
The problem is America.
RoadDave 
This has been a repeated occurence this week, but I’m gonna take a swing at pissing YOU off, along with the rest of my bloggy friends. So hang on! 😉
Seriously – I’ll give you a 50/50. Maybe more a 60/40. A large part is the American mindset – granted. BUT – and like mine, a big one – laws DO play an important part. Or rather, the inconsistency of them. Here’s my points:
1) Chicago has tough gun laws. Indiana doesn’t. Chicago is on the way to world-record setting levels of gun-crime this year. Point? Laws must be NATIONWIDE. Otherwise, a 2-hour drive from downtown Chicago allows you to buy anything short of a 50-calibre machine gun – and I can get you one of those, if you give me a couple days’ notice.
2) All guns aren’t evil, nor are all gun-owners. I’ve got 5 firearms myself – WW1 and WW2 era weapons for my re-enacting. Most WW2 armies used sub-machine guns. Automatic weapons can be permanently modified to work with wood-tipped blanks, so they work just like they would with live ammo, but can never put a live round down the barrel again. Would I have a German MP-40 or US Thompson or Brit Sten? Hell yes. But this way, law-abiding re-enactors can have their fun AND you save the population. There ARE responsible gun-owners – it’s the fruit-loops that kill.
3) Magazine limits and ammo purchase limits would help – but aren’t a complete answer. They would have stopped the Aurora shooter, who bought hundreds (if not thousands) of rounds in one sitting. I’m not sure about the Connecticut shooter – I haven’t heard details of how the ammo was amassed – but if you’re maximum mag capacity was 10 rounds, a whole lot fewer people would die at a given time.
These aren’t full answers, but they’d help. Without a modification to our mindset that the gun is the ultimate arbiter of the law, nothing will ever work in the long run.
So – how well did I irritate the piss outta YOU? 😀
Not at all. What has to change is the mindset.
Whoa, how convenient. First of all your numbers aren’t even population adjusted. second, such rampant sterotyping of all Americans appears to be the product of a pretty shallow mind.