Gun Violence – When Will We Learn

By / / American Way, Uncategorized / 16 comments
Gun Violence When Will we learn

Tragically, some college students will never get that chance to graduate #UCCShooting

Yet another place of learning,  yet another mass shooting. Forty five shootings just this year.

What, in Gods name have we learned?

 

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16 comments

  1. christinadrh
    Reply

    I just saw the story. So senseless, there were probably obvious signs that were ignored, by everybody.

    Liked by 1 person

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  3. Don Royster
    Reply

    Nothing. We have learned nothing. At least, our politicians and the NRA have learned nothing. Other than give five-year-olds guns so they can protect themselves in kindergarten.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Ichneumon Jones
      Reply

      No one’s advocating giving five-year-olds guns. This kind of hysterical lying about people who have different views on this topic than yourself is part of the reason that so few gun owners trust any of you “we must do something!!!!!!11eleven1!” people to get your way — we know exactly how insane your knee-jerk “solutions” are going to be if you get your way.

      Try growing up enough to realize that reasonable people can disagree, instead of treating us like some extremist scourge to be “dealt with”, and then someday we’ll begin to trust you enough to return the favor.

      But as long as you guys keep pulling this kind of grossly dishonest horse crap to try to demonize all of us, *you’re* the ones who have “learned nothing” and can’t even engage in an adult conversation.

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  4. weggieboy
    Reply

    Nothing will happen as long as the current Congress has anything to say about it. I would write a letter to my Congressman and Senators, stating where I stand on this, but they are wholly owned by the NRA and Koch brothers.

    The only recourse I know is to get out the vote, and vote for people who stand for a national laws to control the purchase of guns and ammo or whatever it takes to bring this outrageous situation into control.

    Good Gad! If the murder of the 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary won’t make the current Congress budge on this problem, nothing will make them do what they morally they need to do, enact realistic gun controls for the entire country to replace the patchwork of laws and fill the loopholes that make these atrocities possible!

    …and how many more people have died needlessly since Sandy Hook because of those assholes in Congress? (Sorry, but that’s the “nice” word I have for them…!) The President isn’t the only one mad as hell that nothing gets done about this!

    Liked by 2 people

    • sallyedelstein
      Reply

      Obama’s frustration eloquently captured how so many Americans are feeling at yet another tragic shooting. “Somehow this has become routine,” Obama said at the White House yesterday. “We’ve become numb to this.” That is tragic itself. The lack of any significant change in the availability of guns these many years after Sandy Hook is unconscionable.

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      • Ichneumon Jones

        Yeah, just like the lack of any significant change in the availability of cars after many years of 7,000+ children (and 20,000+ adults) dying per year on the roads is unconscionable. Right? You seem pretty selective in your outrage, despite automobile deaths vastly outnumbering the rare deaths occurring during school shootings (which are — quite literally — as rare as deaths due to being struck by lightning, both are on the order of 50-ish a year).

        And if you think you can do anything to bring about a “significant change in the availability of guns”, I invite you to ponder how effective nearly a century of the War on Drugs has been in keeping cocaine, meth, or anything else out of the hands of anyone (including school kids) who decide they want some. The neighborhood crack dealer won’t mind adding guns to his list of wares. If you think guns are unregulated *now* (very far from the truth actually), just wait to see how unregulated they are when you push them onto the black market.

        School shooting massacres didn’t happen back in the days when anyone could order a gun from the Sears mail-order catalog, and when kids in rural areas used to keep rifles in their school lockers during hunting season (I’m old enough to remember this). There are many reasons for the recent rise in the frequency of school shootings, but “gun availability” isn’t one of them; guns are a lot less “available” *now* than they were back in the days when school shootings were literally unheard of. (And by the way, the USA’s deadliest school massacre didn’t involve guns, it was 38 people, mostly children, killed by a dynamite bomb — it might not be a good idea to push would-be shooters into being even more creative and deadly.)

        It’s not the guns, it’s the culture.

        If you really want to put a lid on school shootings, STOP MAKING SHOOTERS FAMOUS. Ultimately most of them do it for the shocked reaction they create, to punish society or to go out famous instead of the nobody losers they’ve always been. Every time you make a school shooter as nationally famous (temporarily) as Kim Kardashian, it makes other losers yearn for the same notoriety or the same ability to cause anguish to millions of people by having their spree on the cover of all the major news magazines and debated on CNN and having Obama give statements about it.

        Try having the news media cover school shootings with the same tone they cover a school bus crash that kills the same number of students — like “oh gosh that’s terrible, now here’s the weather, and we won’t mention this again tomorrow”, and watch how fast most would-be school shooters no longer consider it an act worth giving their lives for, because it’s no longer going out in a blaze of “glory” or causing national anguish.

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    • Ichneumon Jones
      Reply

      “NRA and Koch brothers”, “patchwork of laws”, “loopholes”, “realistic gun controls”, “whatever it takes”, blah blah blah…

      You’ve got all the bumper-sticker buzzphrases down pat, don’t you? The Talking Points memos have trained you well.

      Sorry, but the reason there aren’t new guns laws, by this *or* any other Congress in the past several decades (not even Obama’s Democrat-controlled House-and-Senate in 2009-2010) is because there already *are* “national laws to control the purchase of guns and ammo”, and pretty much all that can reasonably be done already has been. Reread that word “reasonably” until it sinks in.

      Yes, I know you think whatever knee-jerk draconian gun control you have in mind (but haven’t come out and stated) seem “reasonable” or “realistic” to you, but you’re mistaken. It’s like wanting to ban “assault cars” any time a Porsche driver loses control and plows into a crowd of people on the sidewalk. No need for “Koch brothers” (rofl) conspiracy theories, it just turns out that most people in Congress — any Congress — have more sense than you do about what actually would work, versus what wouldn’t work but would also cause a lot of peaceful gun owners to end up in jail (like all the pot smokers currently rotting in prison) and would interfere with the many thousands of *protective* uses of firearms per year. My wife was one of those, so I take it kind of personally when yahoos like you want to push crap laws that would have left her helpless just because you want to “do something”, no matter how pointless.

      As for “loopholes”, the last time I checked all of the recent school shooters (and the guy who shot those reporters) didn’t acquire their firearms via any “loophole”, and even if every single firearm transfer in the country was personally overseen by BATF agents, they *still* would have gotten their guns because they had bought them legally. Alleged “loopholes” really aren’t the issue.

      And even if you just went whole-hog and banned private gun ownership entirely (admit it, that’s pretty close to what you want), see my other post on this thread about how that wouldn’t make guns unavailable to those intent on trouble, it would only make them as “hard’ to get as cocaine and meth and heroin (i.e. no problem at all to get).

      Stop knee-jerking for unworkable solutions, stop the conspiracy-mongering, and come join the rest of us in this messy real world place.

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      • weggieboy

        I don’t have answers. All I know is I have known too many people who died because of assholes with guns, and I am tired of it. If you feel safer armed to the gills, fine. I personally find it unnecessary to live in fear of intruders that never come or laws that wouldn’t apply to me. Putting a gun in my hand wouldn’t make me feel safer.

        I’m leaving your comment up. Surprised? Though your tone is disrespectful, there are some valid points to consider in it.

        .

        Liked by 1 person

      • weggieboy

        Excuse me. I thought this was posted on one of my blog posts. Of course I can’t delete something on someone else’s post!

        Anyway, there are many things that still can be done to limit availability of gins to people who shouldn’t have them, starting with national laws to replace the patchwork of laws across the country. What good are tough gun control laws in Chicago, for example, if easy guns are available in Indiana, a short drive away? Or if 40% of guns are purchased at gun shows where no background check is required? And what purpose does anyone have for thousands of rounds of ammunition, no questions asked and available by ordering on-line? There are many loopholes and details that could be handled better than they are now and gun owners could still have their guns.

        As for cars, there used to be nearly 60,000 deaths a year on American roads. The engineered advances in safety and national programs like MADD and ones to encourage seatbelt usage, for example, have made a big improvement in the safety on the road. The end result is still over 30,000 death a year on American roads, yet car manufacturers continue to engineer improvements in safety features of their cars even though 100% end of road death is never going to happen.

        Likewise, there will always be gun accidents and murders, no matter how many laws are passed. Get it in your head, though, that just because laws won’t end the slaughter, nothing should be done to try to improve the record. Doing nothing is called “giving up”.

        Liked by 1 person

      • sallyedelstein

        I welcome opposing views as long as they are cogent and well thought out as yours are. You do make valid points- I absolutely agree it is the culture that needs fixing, and the instant quasi-celebrity status of the shooters is disgraceful and detrimental. The car accident analogy is a familiar one, but to me they are apples and oranges.

        Liked by 1 person

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  7. weggieboy
    Reply

    People I knew or who were related to me who died by hand gun or shotgun: 1. A first cousin: murdered with a hand gun by an ex-“boyfriend”; 2. A first cousin who committed suicide with a hand gun; 3. a school friend who refused to have sex with another man, who then gunned him down in a park; 4. A son of family friends who was gunned down while working as a clerk in a 7-11 to help pay his way through school; 5. A next door neighbor who was shotgunned by another neighbor of mine who had a romantic interest in her though she thought he was (correctly) a creep, 6. The creep who killed the mother of a young girl in No. 5; he went to the local park and blew his head off with the same shotgun (a child found a piece of the skull the next day and brought it in to the police station. My father was chief of police at the time. Though he never talked about his job so police business didn’t end up getting repeated by family members, this was so upsetting to him because the child found it, that he slipped and mentioned the incident at home. He was sick to the stomach.); 7. The son and grandson of three friends who murdered a man I knew first as the infant son of my first friend where I worked when I came home from the army, then months later, murdered his step father before taking the pharmacist at a local pharmacy hostage for 14 hours in a failed attempt to get drugs; before he committed suicide, he forced a shutdown of the town’s business section for a full day, wounded two policemen and the pharmacist, and had quite a lot of SWAT team officers tied up, prepared to shoot him if he didn’t come out or shoot himself.

    In the spirit of full disclosure, I also was friends with the mother who smothered her three-year-old with a pillow and the brilliant concert pianist and scholar who was murdered in circumstances not completely understood that had something to do with his involvement in Ba’hai. I think it was a knifing. I also am friends with a woman whose brother-in-law and girlfriend were stabbed to death two blocks from where I live.

    Most of my friends hunt or have guns “for protection”. One is married to a licensed gun dealer. That’s their choice. No, I don’t want to take away their stinking guns! I just don’t approve of them. For a person who would never arm himself, I’ve known or been related to an amazing number of murder victims, mostly victims of gun violence, and a few victims of other methods of mayhem. I find it a sad commentary on life in America.

    How about you? What’s the body count in your circle?

    Liked by 1 person

    • sallyedelstein
      Reply

      Just as our country seems to have an inordinate amount of gun violence, so it would seem you have been surrounded by more than your share of horrific tragedy involving guns. It is a sad commentary on life in these United States indeed!

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