People are scratching their heads wondering why these school shootings are happening. And they are happening like crazy, 41 mass shootings at last count this year alone.
I’m going to be blunt and go right to the point, our society and our economic system is based upon selfishness and the concept of “watching out for number one.” That consciousness does not encourage cooperation. It encourages competition for everything from jobs, money, material goods and happiness. It also leaves out a whole lot of people. And what could be more selfish that going on a shooting spree and sadistically shooting a bunch of helpless, vulnerable people who have no way to defend themselves, like a bunch of innocent people at a school?
There are many people who are not happy in our society and they may be looking to target what they blame them for making them unhappy. They can become envious and jealous of people who are happy, including people who have kids doing well and are happy getting an education. And what’s the best way to cause the most hurt for those other people? Go after and hurt what matters most to them — and naturally for most people — that’s their children.
I won’t even go into how easy it is for just about anybody to get a gun or get an entire arsenal of guns, including military type assault rifles especially with the gun manufactures giving the National Rifle Association millions of dollars a year who in turn make “campaign contributions” to congress to keep the money rolling in. I’ll just talk about wealth distribution.
As of March 2012, Forbes notes how the unequal distribution of wealth is defined in real numbers. The top 1 percent of the American population is worth approximately 70 times the amount the remaining part of the population is worth financially and that causes those left behind to feel cheated and left out.
In the same article, Forbes reports that the average income of the upper class is $717,000, while the average income for the remaining 99 percent of the country is around $51,000 per year. Within the top 1 percent of the population, there is an even wealthier subset, approximately 0.1 percent, that has an average yearly income of over $27 million, approximately amount of resources, causing a vast difference in the living conditions between classes.
The New York Times notes that even though American productivity has risen since the 1930s, the value of wages in correlation with work has not. Profits make up the largest sector of the national income, encouraging the unequal distribution of wealth.
And because our economic system is based upon selfishness, people who feel left out and feel left behind and feel cheated, they may not don’t know what to do about it, but they know they are angry and they know guns are quite readily available. The school shooter in last week’s mass shooting had 14 guns at the ready and he was more than willing to use them.
So what’s to be done about this national tragedy? How hard is that to figure out? Either make guns at least as hard to get for the population who have mental health issues and who are angry and ready to use the guns against other people as it is for people to get a driver’s license by doing mental health evaluations or somehow make people who feel left out to feel less angry.
Or, to make the gun manufactures and the NRA happy, make it a law that everybody has to carry a gun, just like in the good old days of the wild west because it looks like that’s what the NRA and the gun lobby want and they’ll be more than happy to go along with it.
That way, when the next angry gun-slinger starts shooting innocent people (any moment now), he (yes, it’s always a guy) may think twice and not have to kill himself once he sees the police closing in because somebody else will probably be more than happy to do it for him.
