Oh, the Guns, the Guns, the Guns...
When unspeakable acts such as the Sandy Hook shooting are smeared all over the news for days on end, hour after hour, people become very emotional. How can you not be touched or affected by such a tragedy? Your heart would have to be made of frozen hydrogen not to feel something when these heinous acts occur.
What can we do to prevent something like this from happening again? Many come to the simple conclusion that guns just should not exist. Sure sounds easy enough, right? Only the police and the military get the guns. The rest of us have to settle for rocks and sling shots. Those would probably be banned, too, and then it would be civil war over the right to bear arms. There are just too many people that will not give up their weapons unless pried from cold, dead hands.
A civil war over the right to bear arms would be very one sided, I would think.
Again, what can we really do? If you take away guns, disturbed people will still find ways to take as many people with them in their suicide as they can. There will still be those few who want to go out in a blaze of glory, and be plastered in memoriam all over the media for days on end, hours at a time. A lack of firearms certainly will not curtail such actions.
Let's take a hypothetical situation... At first, maybe it would be someone with a few bottles of gasoline or kerosene, setting themselves or others on fire, for example. After that, there would undoubtedly be copy cats. Most people are not all that creative, and it is easier to take someone else's plan and modify it for your own use. Some people are a little more crafty, a little more inventive. These people perform the "one-ups" in this scenario. One of them gets the idea to add fertilizer to diesel fuel, and fill a cooler with it. He then sets himself down in the middle of a fireworks display. Just as the grand finale is going off, he detonates his cooler. With all the explosions overhead, he's back on the subway before anyone notices the bodies in the middle of the throng. The next semi-inventive sociopath one-ups this idea by adding ball bearings duct taped all over the outside of his cooler for more collateral damage.
Before you know it, coolers are banned in public.
People that want to harm others will always find a way. The method and the weaponry may change, but the actions will continue. While I believe the founding fathers may have been more specific about the 2nd Amendment had assault rifles been available at the time, I also believe they would have left a provision for the people to maintain the right to keep and bear arms. Some would argue that such thinking is antiquated and out of date. We should abandon 200 year old thinking. However, thousands of years of world history shows us that a disarmed people quickly become an oppressed people.
This oppression does not always derive from a governing body, either. The source of oppression is derived from any number of special interest groups. A fine example of this in modern times is the Taliban in Afghanistan. This non-governmental body completely subjugated the population, and ultimately the government. Even today, after ten years of war, they control vast areas of the region. With this one example, you cannot say that totalitarian regime from a non-governing body is a fictional impossibility. If you think it is, I invite you to visit the lovely country of Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda is another fine example of a non-governmental organisation that has managed to manipulate and oppress people in various nations on a couple of different continents.
Wall Street stands accused by many of predatory lending habits that nearly collapsed the financial system for the sole benefit of corporate profit. You've lived under a sort of financial oppression for years if you live in the United States. You have seen in the news how the armed police treat the unarmed American protesters. Pepper spray, rubber bullets, public beatings. But no, OUR government never does ANY thing to oppress any part of the American population. Nope, it doesn't happen. (please note the sarcasm.)
So again I ask: What can we do to stop this sort of violent attacking?
It begins with culture and society. It does take a village to raise a child. You did not see these sorts of horrors on the evening news in the 1950's. You also saw families that attended religious services on a regular basis. Even those that did not have religion shared another demographic with those that did in the form of a very low divorce rate. They also had the most robust economy our nation has ever seen. Anyone that wanted one could get just about any kind of firearm they wanted. When kids got out of line, they got spanked. There were not school massacres committed by madmen on the news every few months.
The decay of the nuclear family has resulted in the decay of societal values. Half of all marriages fail. Attendance at religious services is a mere fraction of what it was 50 years ago. Couples that do stay together are working 3 or 4 jobs to break even on living expenses. An overwhelming number of our children are part of what we used to call "broken families", or single parent homes. There is a lack of parental guidance. Items previously reserved for the back room in adult book shops are now piped into our homes on a wire. Vampires and serial killers have become protagonists in mainstream entertainment. Millions of kids across the nation "kill" each other in video games every single day.
When someone goes off the deep end and wastes 28 people in a senseless massacre, we are surprised?
To stop these violent occurrences, we need to change our culture. We need to change our thinking towards one another. Help should be readily available for the disturbed people that need it. Military style assault weapons need to be in the hands of responsible people trained in not only their use, but in their stowage, if in the hands of the general public at all. Personally, I do not believe any civilian has the need for an assault weapon. If you served in the military or on a police force, we have to trust that you are properly trained and can be trusted with them, even after you return to civilian life. There is no real necessty for any of the rest of us to own anything beyond what would be reasonable for hunting.
Trying to take all of the guns away from all of the civilians will only lead to a very one-sided civil war. Fear and anger can never shape public policy effectively.
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