by Jack
The Florida school shooting in the wake of Las Vegas is just too much! It’s way past time for Congress to take a leadership role and find out what can be done to protect the public. As with all serious problems, they need to start with some serious fact finding and not more knee-jerk, feel good, legislation, as they are so prone to doing. We really need to know what’s going on in our society. What the h– is really behind these shootings! Then and only then, can we take the most responsible course of action.
Think of the school shootings as a disease and the weapon used as a symptom. If we only treat the symptom we’re just fooling ourselves.
This is why I think the most responsible approach would be to form a Congressional commission to investigate the shooters history and all that we can learn from it. We need to solve the big questions like, how might they (shooters) have been thwarted by law enforcement? How can we physically employ building codes to add an extra degree of safety to public schools? Can trained counsellors be part of our educational process in high schools? What the courts, and the laws… can we streamline the system and enact safeguards for the public and yet preserve our Constitutional rights?
There are a whole lot of decent ideas floating around now and we ought to look at each one and start coming up with a way to stop these mass shootings! Enough is enough!
Would an assault weapons ban be effective and reasonable? We know AR15’s with 30 round clips or more can wreak a lot of devastation in a very short period of time. But, so can many other things and we must deal with that reality. The picture above is not an AR15, it’s a full auto Thompson submachine gun. The tommy gun has been around for 90 years and it’s never once been used in a school shooting.
Currently, we have we have about 9 million AR15’s in private ownership. We’ve had millions in private hands for decades, so from a purely statistical point of view there is a very long list of other things that kill more people each year than an AR15.
In 2012, the most recent record I could find, there were 16,808,538 applications to purchase a firearm. In 2014 congressional testimony reported, the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated assault-style weapons domestically in the range of 5 million to 8.2 million. The United States gun ownership is the highest in the world with an estimated 300 million firearms in private ownership. That’s a huge number of weapons and it’s impossible to confiscate guns to solve the problem and it would not work anyway.
If the AR15 was the problem we should have a lot more shooting deaths. If guns alone were the problem we should have a lot more gun violence, a vast amount more! But, we don’t in either case. The problem, the heart of this issue, is an anomaly that exists within our society. We need to find it and focus our resources where it will do the most good.
From my perspective, an assault weapons ban is not going to cut it because as I’ve said, this is just a symptom. Besides, we’ve tried that and it didn’t work. I would rather we focus on the root cause. What is the mental illness that causes people to act out in this manner?
Why do we have this problem now when it didn’t exist a few decades ago? What significant things have changed and how can we repair it? You come up with that one and we will be one heck of a lot closer to a solution!
Many people say that mental health treatment is the solution. Maybe so, but I think it is also part of the problem. This last guy and most of the others had mental health problems, and most had treatments, either by counseling or drugs or both. At least, we think they did. We don’t really know because the doctors, if that is what they are, believe they must keep all their patient information confidential. An 18-year old kid undergoing treatment for mental illness should not be allowed to buy a gun. But no doctor, school psychologist, or school administrator, notified law enforcement or requested firearms dealers to deny him a gun. They put patient confidentiality above public safety.
“Why do we have this problem now when it didn’t exist a few decades ago?”
This guy gets it.
http://malcolmpollack.com/2018/02/16/reaping-the-whirlwind/
Powerful stuff RHT447 and worthy of re-posting.
Spread the word, Pilgrims!
Here, here!!
I can walk on to my daughter’s high school grounds without any problem. I assume if I did so I would eventually be asked why I was there; at least I hope that would happen. The problem is I could do significant damage with any kind of weapon before anything was done to stop me just because I could get close enough to commit the crime before anyone had any idea what was going on.
Now lets take the building I work in. All outside doors are locked, requiring an electronic key badge to get in. I can enter through the lobby but I still have go go through locked doors to get from the lobby into the office area.
Why is there more security in place to protect intellectual property where I work than there is to protect our children in school? A simple change in fencing, door locks, etc. could be very effective in preventing outside individuals from entering a school. And, if someone gets expelled, their badge key is disabled.
But this only protects the students from people that have no business inside the school. How do you protect the innocent from a student that intends to do harm to other students? The only way is to allow for armed teachers or administration. And, to be effective, those that are armed should only be known to a limited number of people. That way a shooter can not target the armed individuals to get them out of the way. I believe the simple knowledge that there are people that will shoot back will keep almost every shooter away.
The arguments always presented against arming teachers and admin people is the guns may be taken away from the individuals and used on students, the armed people may accidentally shoot students, and the armed individuals may deliberately shoot the students. We don’t think anything at all to enter a bank with an armed guard present, or enter a jewelry store with an armed guard present. How many times have we read about an armed security guard accidentally shooting someone or going rouge and shooting a bunch of people? I can’t remember ever reading about such a shooting.
We protect our material valuables with armed guards. We protect our politicians and celebrities with armed guards. We protect our country with armed soldiers. Why do we protect our school children by having gun free zones. It is totally illogical.
Liberals want to eliminate so called “assault weapons”. All this does is prove they have no understanding of guns. Do the features of guns categorized as “assault weapons” make them more deadly than other guns? No. Why do we believe outlawing a particular type of gun or guns in general will solve the problem.
Liberals want to outlaw all guns. These are the same people that say deporting 15 million illegal aliens is impossible yet they think they can confiscate 300 million + weapons from people that don’t want to give them up. These are the same people want to decriminalize drugs because people that use drugs will get them whether they are legal or not! Outlawing guns will not address the problem. It will only make the responsible people unable to defend themselves.
Over the last couple of days I read many left leaning stories out guns in the press. One thing that stands out is the lefts total ignorance about guns. One story claimed that the bullets from an AR-15 did more damage than other guns. The size and type of the bullet that is the issue, not the gun. There were stories about how much more dangerous an assault weapon is compared to other guns. The AR-15 is no more dangerous than any other gun. And, whether they are dangerous or not is dependent on the person, THE PERSON, that is holding them. A pocket knife is dangerous in the wrong hands. A nail gun is dangerous in the wrong hands. A table fork (or spoon for that matter) is dangerous in the wrong hands. A Nurf gun with rubber bullets is dangerous in the wrong hands. IT IS THE PERSON THAT IS RESPONSIBLE NOT THE GUN!
The common thread that keeps appearing in these shootings is mental illness. Over the last 50 years the liberals have made it extremely difficult for someone to be committed to a mental institution against their will. It should be difficult but not to the extreme that are cities are populated with large numbers of mentally ill homeless people that are unable to take care of themselves.
We address mental illness and many emotional situations with highly potent psychotropic drugs without really understanding the total effects of these drugs. A good friend of my was depressed because his wife left him. He went to his doctor. The doctor sent him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist put him on so many medications he was talking and moving like an old man with Parkinson’s Disease. He was totally useless. He just sat and didn’t do anything productive. He didn’t even realize he was behaving oddly until we told him and showed him video. He got off the meds and is “clean” now. He told me while he was on the meds he heard voices; voices that told him to harm himself! All this because he was depressed his wife left him. Of course he was depressed. He was mourning the end of his marriage. There was a reason for the depression and it was a normal reaction to what was happening. It’s depression without reason that should be treated. Here is my point: what is different today is we seem to want to throw medication at every issue. We over-medicate. And, we don’t really have any idea of what potential harm may be occurring because of this approach.
Note to all the liberals that might read this. The 2nd amendment makes gun ownership a right, period. If you want to change this you need to amend the constitution. There is a proper procedure to do this. Why have the left not attempted this? Because they know it would fail. Their opinion about guns is the minority, not the majority. If it was the majority amending the constitution would be easy!
All one has to do to see how criminals would react to more gun control laws is look at Chicago – where the rules are more restrictive than anywhere else yet it remains the Murder Capital of the World.
I will never understand a liberal’s mind. According to Gov. Brown it’s the gun’s fault, not the criminal who used it. If Moonbeam has his way Calif. will surpass Chicago’s gun killings in record time.
Gov. Jerry Brown Signs Bill Removing Penalty for Using Gun in Crime:
“Assembly Bill 424 made it illegal for teachers to be armed for self-defense and Senate Bill 620 removed the mandatory enhancement for using a gun for crime. SB 620 removed the mandatory enhancement from the Penal Code and placed it at the discretion of the judge presiding over the case.”
http://www.breitbart.com/california/2017/10/30/gov-jerry-brown-signs-bill-removing-penalty-using-gun-crime/
Check out what schools in New Mexico, Texas and New Jersey are doing.
After Parkland High School Shooting, How to Survive the Threat of a Gunman:
http://www.insideedition.com/after-parkland-high-school-shooting-how-survive-threat-gunman-40765
I am no longer surprised by anything legislators do in CA. I expect the worst from them and I have yet to be disappointed.Next thought: I hear almost daily how citizens do not need an AR15, there's plenty of more acceptable guns out here that people can use. An AR15 is too dangerous, they tell us, so we don't need it. However, are Constitutional rights based on need? The very reason people were allowed to possess deadly weapons was to keep us free from tyranny. It was felt by the founders that the risk of arming citizens was acceptable when compared to the risk of being unarmed. One of the reasons schools are attacked by crazy people is because that is the one place there is likely to a whole lot of unarmed people concentrated into one area.... guaranteed a high body count. For a crazy person that target makes a lot of sense.
Closing thought....If we don't need the 2nd amendment, what other rights don't we need, maybe the 1st amendment? They have both been responsible for turmoil and violence. Very inconvenient and troublesome, we would be more passive without them right?
Oh, I’m pretty sure the 1st would be next and our freedom to associate, sine the NRA offends so many. The internet is filled with fake news about how much it’s given to Trump and republicans. One even said he’d gotten $20 million from them since the Florida shooting. Crazy time again.
The NRA isn’t even listed among the top 50 political donors.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=d000000082&cycle=2014
The NRA campaign donations for the last 10 years pales comparted to the unions, so the liberals have nothing to complain about.
Bill Whittle: Gun argument speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn_WedT0pWk
FL Sheriff: ‘Game Changer’ If Some Teachers Trained to Carry Guns:
http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/02/17/florida-school-shooting-sheriff-judd-says-teachers-should-carry-guns-prevent-violence