Skip this if you are looking for policy. Or rah, rah, rah for one party or another. This is none of those. This is about the tragedy in Aurora, and my thoughts upon looking into details. As usual, I have waited my three day period of silence. It takes three days for thoughts to gel, often because the shock of the initial hearing forces us to rely upon our environmentally developed emotional safety net, instead of a rational thought process.
We need to keep gun laws as they are.
Repeat, we need to keep gun laws as they are. Please be advised. I in no way want to make light of what happened. There are 12 mothers, and 12 fathers out there who just had the worst thing life can do to a person. There are may more praying now for the recovery of a good number of people.
This is not the first such tragedy. I remember the fear of the sniper in Texas Tower. Recently I was reminiscing how one man scared the hell out of Washington, DC. One person confessed he darted from tree to tree on his way to the metro. Funny now, but it wasn’t then. But such is the power of guns.
Bottom line: the problem is people. It is not guns, it has never been guns. It has always been people. Always.
A point made was had one person been carrying a gun in that audience, more people might be alive. Where is a super hero when you need one, eh?
Psychologically, we are reactive people. We’ve been attacked, how do we fight back. And some people turn to saying …..” well, if guns were impossible to get, that crazy couldn’t have gotten them and used them on people. ” And since we all have respect for their firepower, we nod our heads and say, yes, yes, yes. But we fail to see the obvious. The obvious here, was that guns have been around all this time…. the person has been around for 24 years….. but for some reason, on this day, this person used guns to wreak violence.
Why did we not regulate this person?
Why did we not catch that this person was going to do this?
The answer is, there is no way we could have. It is just beyond our control. It is beyond our capacity to prevent. No one appears to have guessed this guy was attempting this event? He worked the system surreptitiously to make sure no one knew he was going on a killing spree. The exact same thing happened with the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shootings. No one could have guessed……
The only thing we can do, in preparedness for events like this, is to be well trained and respond in a very quick fashion to save lives.
It appears the police were there in minutes. We did what we could.
Bottom line, is 12 people died in that horrible incident. In the same weekend, 5 people died in a single car crash in New York City. Likewise, in the same weekend a family of 3 crashed into a van outside St. Louis. A DUI Teen killed two with his car on Long Island. Houston just shut down all southbound lanes of the Gulf Freeway and one motorcyclist is dead.
No one jumps up to ban cars. Why? Well the obvious reason is that we are all familiar with cars, everyone of us has been in one, and that familiarity causes us to accept these things as something that was meant to be. Those who are not familiar with guns, will use that unfamiliarity to voice their fear and concern. The opposite is true to those who know guns. They know a gun cannot shoot a person unless a person performs at least 5 conscientious steps before firing. We call car deaths accidents. We label gun deaths as crimes.
Intent.
So, tell me liberals. How does controlling guns make any dent on … intent?
He could have learned to fly, loaded his plane with explosives, and flown it right through the wall of that theater.
Guns have nothing to do with this. It is a people problem. Sadly, if we had a proper medical system where regular checkups that were free at point of service, we could have channeled this youths sickness and could have done a lot more to prevent this tragedy, than passing tougher gun laws.
No. Leave guns alone. We are going to need them to supply the home grown militia’s we will need to fight the corporate armies that will eventually come to take away our jobs.
Our attention should instead be focused on doing anything we can for the victims families….. That is where we need to focus.
6 comments
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July 23, 2012 at 2:04 pm
delacrat
Taking guns out of the picture leads to some interesting stats.
The non-firearm murder rate in Canada is 1.12 per 100,000. (2010)
The non-firearm murder rate in the U.S. is 1.36 per 100,000. (2010)
So the non-firearm murder rate in Canada is 18% less than in the US. Makes you wonder …why?
July 23, 2012 at 5:21 pm
kavips
The have national health care… We don’t…. Damn medical Bills….. POW!
July 26, 2012 at 8:55 pm
anonone
Dumbest argument ever.
Cars were not designed to kill people. Cars are constantly being redesigned to be made safer. Cars with known safety defects are recalled, and you have to be tested by the state to get a license to legally drive one.
Guns are entirely different. Many guns sold legally to anybody are designed specifically to kill people.
Guns are being sold legally in America that are equipped solely to kill lots of people quickly. They aren’t designed for hunting or any other purpose other than to kill lots of people quickly. There is no sane reason for a person to own a semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle equipped with 100 round magazines considering the danger that weapon represents to others.
Throwing up your hands just to say “It is beyond our capacity to prevent” is sheer ignorance. People aren’t blown up with hand grenades in America because selling and owning hand grenades is banned. Weapons bans can work in America as they do in other western democracies. It is past the time to ban assault weapons and large magazines, control ammunition sales, require a waiting period for purchasing a gun, license gun owners, and rescind the immunity from civil law suits of gun manufacturers.
All of these steps can help stop future Aurora-like masacres. All it takes is political will.
July 27, 2012 at 12:36 am
kavips
Cars are too designed to kill people. Did you ever see Christine? That is a true story. And then there was this tanker in the American desert that tried ramming this guy’s car, and wouldn’t stop, and they had to set it up so it ran over a cliff and exploded. Again a true story. It is on TV.
These guns are not designed to kill people. They are designed to shoot targets on a shooting range. That is why gun enthusiasts buy them up like hotcakes. Killing people is all messy and bloody and then you have to sit in a court room and spend you life in prison… No, people do not buy guns to spend their lives in prison. They buy them for the thrill of stepping up to the rail. putting the silencers over their ears, then pulling that trigger and hearing the PPPDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD and having 100 bullet holes on their target. The best part is smelling the gunpowder after it is over…
You are nuts if you think someone buys a gun to spend their life with Bubba. They buy a such a gun because it is so damn cool to shoot.
Besides if a mad car or tanker is chasing you…… don’t think the little pop, pop, pop of a pistol is going to stop it… It will take several clips of 100 to pop the tires on that bad boy and ignite the gasoline. ,,,,
July 27, 2012 at 4:59 pm
anonone
Hand grenades would be fun to toss and explode, too. Let’s legalize them. Oh, and mortars would be fun to shoot using junk cars as targets. Let’s legalize them, too.
July 29, 2012 at 2:05 am
kavips
Actually, in some areas hand grenades are legal. The make fishing fun, are great for killing deer, and eliminate entire colonies of prairie dogs instead of one pest at a time.
Mortars, if properly licensed, are legal in some areas too. Great for bird hunting and paparazzi airplanes. …
(In most states paparazzi are considered legal pests which can be controlled by property owners.)