... I don't even know what to say about Friday's atrocity. I have 3 children, 2 attending school and 1 attending daycare. I cannot beging to imagine what those families are feeling and I feel sick to my stomach envisioning 20 tiny caskets being interred over the next short while, along with the adults who were caught in this with the children and some of whom saw it coming and knew that very young children could be hurt before they themselves were killed. It is sickening and unbelievable. Shocking saddening and heart-breaking.
However, the issue of course turns to gun control. As always. I do not know what anyone could possibly do to stop this from happening again. There are over 300 MILLION known firearms in Canada and the US. Almost one for every person in the US and one for every 3 people in Canada (that we know of, that are registered, licensed, etc). God only knows how many are out there illegally that we do not know of. Even if the making of all guns was banned right now, there are more than enough to kill every single human being in the US and Canada available right now. So what's that going to do exactly? I say this because I have read numerous posts lately that talked about ceasing the marketing, sales, and production of firearms. Well that's just dandy - put thousands of people out of work when there are over 300 MILLION available right now, according to official govt pages in Canada and the US.
Okay - so then it's that everyone should hand in their firearms right now. No need for them. They are made for one purpose - killing. That's what I read about on countless pages. Okay - so is every person going to hand their's in? I can almost guarantee it's only going to be law abiding citizens that comply. So how many firearms will be still out there, and who will have them in their hands? It's not rocket science.
Another perspective to take on this is looking back at past mass murders using a firearm of some sort - how many times have we heard on the news 'the suspect/gunman had no previous record for violence and was not known to the police'? Quite a few. It seems to be a trend. 'Everyone' is shocked at the news of who the gunman is, or they say he was a bit strange but they never thought he could do something like THIS...
So then there is all of the talk of mental illness - of course something is wrong with these people! That's not rocket science either!! Who in their right, sane mind would go into a school and shoot children and teenagers? Even if they were bullied, something has to be seriously wrong inside their mind for them to come up with these plans. Of course they were ill! They had to have been, sociopathic, psychopathic, anything. But there are millions of people who have similar or the same mental illnesses who would never come up with such heinous plans and act out on them. Never.
So how do we figure this out? How do we stop it? Have you noticed on the news that they keep saying this is the 'second deadliest school shooting' next to Virginia Tech (32 deaths), but they have to carefully say School SHOOTING because the deadliest School MASSACRE was actually done with bombs, not firearms (45 deaths, 58 wounded), in 1927. Yes it is the second worst shooting, but it's actually the third worst school tragedy. In the end, it doesn't matter if it's the 100th worst, it is a terrible horrible unimaginable thing, made worse by the young ages of the children, who had almost no hope of getting away from this insane deadly maniac. But I choose to listen carefully to all newscast wording, no matter the topic, and I looked up the info myself. It may be worth noting here that more than 300 people, most of them children, were killed in 2004 in Chechnya while trapped in a school as hostages. Or we could think about the 900 people, 300+ being children, who died with the Jim Jones gang in South Africa, using poison as a crazy cult mission of death. Or the over 1000 children who have reportedly been killed in Suicide Bombings in Iraq alone over the past 10 years.
What can we do to protect our children against these lunatics? I have no idea. But I am not going to tell my friend who target shoots as a sporting hobby (and has never even killed an animal with one, let alone a human) that she needs to hand over her guns in order to keep bad things from happening. I'm not going to tell my father in law that he can no longer have a .22 sitting by his back door to scare coyotes away from his acreage (or people who repeatedly go on his property to steal stuff). I am not going to tell my friends who's sons are Autistic or have Asperger's Syndrome to lock them up in the attic in case one day they become a homicidal maniac.
And next week when I had planned to go to a firing range for the first time in my life - firing a weapon for the first time in my life - I am going to try not to feel like I am an insensitive callous murderous person for doing so. I have wanted to do this for a long time, just to try it out, see how a gun works and fire off a few rounds in a controlled environment - and now this happens and some of my friends said they 'cannot believe' I am going through with it!!! I feel like we will go and I will do it, and then not be able to tell anyone about it because they will think less of me. Why? I didn't shoot anyone and don't plan on it. There are no firearms in my home and I have never owned one. I've only seen one handgun in person, other than police firearms, and I held it long enough to hand it over to the police after my dad died, because my mom didn't want it in the house anymore. That's my experiece with holding a firearm - giving my dad's .357 (I only know what it was because the officer told me) and hunting rifles and old military rifle to the police. We also gave them my dad's harpoon. That's my experience with it but now I am being made to feel guilty about wanting to go to a range and try shooting a .9 mm. I am not the guy who killed those innocent children. I do not have guns in my house for someone to take and use for unbelievable crimes, I just want to learn how to use one. You never know, one day I may find myself face to face with an armed person who wants to kill me and maybe I will be lucky enough to get it away and be able to use it on THEM if I see fit. Or maybe, since shooting is even part of an OLYMPIC SPORT, I would like to try firing at a target and see how good I am. I also want to try archery - that would be acceptable right? Well what were arrows designed for? Knitting?
Oh but they would be okay because no one has committed an atrocity with an arrow in the past, ever, right? Pffft people are not paying attention in history class are they? At the very least they should have seen the volleys of arrows in Lord Of The Rings and see the destruction caused (whether it's against the bad guys or not isn't the point - they are for killing things, food or adversaries). So why is it okay if I take archery classes, but not okay if I head to a gun range next week?
This whole thing has brought up some lively conversations but who I want to think about and say a prayer for are the families of the victims and the suspect's family who will have to live with this forever too. They didn't pull the trigger but I can imagine they almost feel like they did by now. How horrible and unspeakable for all of those people to go through. I think of them and read their children's names and look at their young beautiful faces, and pray that we can somehow find some way to protect them from people who will attack them no matter what rules and regulations are enforced out there.
As an addition, many have wondered about how this young man got his hands on the firearms in the first place. Not all of the details are in yet and who knows what news has been true or not (given that I heard some really crazy stories on Friday that turned out to be completely not the case - such as his brother was hiding out in the woods behind the school, but then later we learn he was at work in another city) - but the news mentioned several times that there were reports of him trying to buy a gun on Tuesday but was denied. If that is true, he was planning something I imagine. Probably planning for a long time, because I dont think you get up on a Friday morning, get into your mom's guns, shoot her 4 times, don a bullet proof vest, load up on ammo and weapons, and drive to a school and shoot your way in and then murder a bunch of people on a 'snap'. He might have 'snapped' to finally go through with his thoughts, but he didn't just snap that morning out of the blue.
ReplyDeleteSo what if his mother had everything locked up tight and he managed to get into everything during the night without her knowing? My dad kept his gun cabinet keys in one spot, his ammo locked in a different spot, and his guns locked in the cabinet - but if I had all night and wanted to cause some havoc, while he was snoozing I could have gathered everything up.
Or maybe his mother did not have her stuff secured - what does that tell you? That all the regulations in the world are not going to keep guns out of the hands of those who use them in crimes. If she didn't have them in the first place, he would not have been able to do THIS but then his fantasies may have involved something else instead. Bombs, knives, molatovs, who knows,,, he would probably have killed less people but is THAT okay?? Would the families of the few slain children think it was okay that 'not everyone was killed, unlike if he had come in with a gun?'. Of course they wouldnt want that to happen but it would not bring their own child back if he had killed less people with a less-destructive weapon.
So what are we to do? Lull ourselves into a false sense of security if gun bans go all-out, or regulations up the wazoo, or millions of weapons are voluntarily handed in? That doesnt sound like so fabulous an idea either.
If you don't have a gun in your house,how will you protect your loved ones from someone breaking in to kill you?
ReplyDeleteCall the police?
If they show up in more than 5 minutes,your already dead.
Lock your doors to protect the criminal,otherwise you're a natural victim.
All I have seen on the news today is stories about gun bans. I totally understand that when a child is killed (or anyone, really, but especially a child), people need someone to blame. Or something. Guns were used, so surely that must mean if we take them away, this cannot happen again. And surely that must mean it would at least be more difficult to procure an illegal weapon for most of these 'average joes' that have committed school murders. Right? That seems to be the onus on the news, but I do not fall for it.
ReplyDeleteIf guns are banned, is it going to somehow be 'better' if kids end up getting killed with an illegal weapon instead, because 'the govt did everything it could to stop it from happening'? No - because the child is still dead no matter what.
I have read and heard many times that there is an assault-weapon ban in Connecticut that would include the very rifle this man killed all of those children with. So did the ban work?? If it is indeed true that the firearm he used, or the number of magazines he had (or type of magazines) were banned in that state - the gun regulations didn't work anyway. I have not read through the reams of paperwork for Conn myself, I can only go by what I have heard several times on one particular news channel.
One thing for people to think about is this: If these weapons or most guns become banned nation-wide, does that not open the police to search anyone and everyone's homes to be sure? If there is a ban and I call in and say that my neighbour used to have a whole whack of semi-automatic rifles in his collection and has never talked about turning them in after the ban, etc - do you think the cops are going to go there with a warrant and search his house? It seems to me they would be allowed to.
Would everyone want to open themselves up to that? Have police pouring over their property to look for weapons that may or may not have ever existed? Made to feel like a criminal while your neighbour's curtains are twitching, just because some people are completely insane and murdered children and teens in schools from time to time? Or malls, or movie theatres - how will police know all weapons are handed in if they don't search private homes? Seriously. It's just something to think about.
But in the end, I go back to what I said at the start of this comment - if there are major gun bans put in place, anyone who is killed after that will be killed with an illegally acquired firearm - does that make their deaths somehow 'better'? No. We need to figure out how to protect our children as best we can, and figure out better ways to spot problems with individuals (difficult in the US with over 300 million people to keep an eye one), and we have to remember that while a gun was the weapon of choice for it's fast mass-destruction, it still has to be wielded by a person who has ill intent and murder on the mind. The gun would be useless in the hands of a person who has no ill-will ideas in their head. It doesnt matter, in my opinion, how many weapons there are in this world - what matters to me is how many freaking crazy people there are out there who are ready to use them against our innocent children. THAT is what scares me, not the guns. It's the people who hold them in their hands.