Is it the gun... or something else?
In the wake of the Parkland, Florida school slaying, the country has taken up the debate on gun control with renewed, and more insistent, vigor. The polarization of America is being ramped up to an almost fever pitch as liberal anti-gun devotees and conservative defenders of the 2nd Amendment battle it out. Of course, I have my opinions... not that many of my friends want to hear them. So, to the blog it is.
One acquaintance with whom I've often disagreed wrote, "I would go so far to say that the presence of a gun is the only thing that 100 percent of mass shootings have in common." -- Well, any "mass shooting" would pretty much, by definition, require guns. Hard to get shot without one (except I suppose by arrows, which happened in 2012 at Wyoming's Casper College, leaving 3 dead). Mass killings would be another matter. Everything from knives to poisoned grape drink to Samurai swords to baseball bats to bombs of various kinds to gasoline and a lighter to motor vehicles to airliners have been utilized to kill masses of people.
But I get his point -- firearms make mass killings relatively easy compared to most methods, no question. It also goes without saying that guns also make defending against someone wielding a gun possible, which is why most gun owners invest in them. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight and all that.
In response to my mentioning the roles of psychotropic drugs and broken homes in contributing to the mass shooter phenomenon, my friend went on to say, "I have heard of no mass shootings done by young women, who apparently don't take these drugs or come from broken homes." -- His non-comparison of girls to boys is typical of today's equality-driven, gender-bending neo-liberal mindset. He mentions girls not typically committing mass killings in a way that would seem to suggest that the idea of boys needing a father-figure to teach them how to be good men is an antiquated notion.
I disagree. Boys and girls have radically different predispositions, and boys, by nature, tend to be much more aggressive and confrontational. The proliferation of broken homes in recent decades (especially when it means there is no responsible adult male present on a daily basis to help guide and channel a boy's development) certainly do play a role in the dysfunctional male behavior we see in too many of today's younger people. Not suggesting causality here, but significant correlation at the very least.
"But what if he couldn't get hold of a firearm? How many of these young men have taken their pickup and run down a bunch of their fellow students in the school parking lot? How many have grabbed a butcher knife and killed 6 or 8 people in the halls?" -- Interesting that he mentioned butcher knives. Knowing how folks love to bandy about the examples of Australia, Japan and the like in support of stricter gun laws -- in China, where gun laws are extremely restrictive, mass knifings are not at all uncommon. A quick search produced a list of mass knifings in China as long as your arm.
https://crimeresearch.org/2014/04/a-note-on-mass-victim-knife-attacks/
The point being that a massively drugged, emotionally unstable, bullied, socially marginalized and pathologically violent population such as has come to be in America will not be persuaded to stop acting out their evil desires simply because we make certain inanimate objects more difficult to acquire. The fact is there are sufficient laws already on the books regarding gun purchase, ownership and concealed carry that are too often ignored; opportunities to intervene in troubled lives before violence erupts are too often not acted upon (look at how both the disgraced FBI and the worthless county Sheriff down there in Florida let 39 red flag encounters with this lad go unheeded); the widespread and casual use of violence-inducing prescription psychotropic drugs and the many unscrupulous script doctors dishing them out goes unaddressed...
Lord, I could go on and on regarding the roots of our violence problem that are being swept under the rug by liberals and their lapdog media myopically focusing on the tools of violence instead of addressing the human causative factors fueling the mayhem. But no one wants to tackle those disturbing issues, they run too deep, are mind-numbingly complicated, and often touch us all where we live, exposing the true source of evil in this world and our slavish devotion to playing close to the fire.
If sufficient fuel is present and conditions are right, a spark from any source will ignite a devastating conflagration. Arguing about whether it was a match, a lit cigarette, a bolt of lightening, an electrical short, whatever, is pointless. If you want to avoid the conflagration, remove or treat the fuel. Then a spark is just a spark. Pffft.