The Horror story from Connecticut.
I feel & pray for the victims ,families, & those children that survived this insane act. I do get the feeling that this will be used as a platform for gun control laws that only feed a political agenda. How sad is that? I think this quote from Mike Dowd sums up the real problem:
Here's what we should have learned by now: You do not mend broken people by trying to close off their access to guns, because they will get them online or use homemade bombs instead, and you do not deter other broken people by killing the ones who crack. If you were to ask Jared Loughner or James Holmes about Timothy McVeigh, your answer would probably be a blank stare.
Gun control is good for a lot of things. It will keep kids from killing themselves with their dads' unsecured guns. It will make it harder for drug dealers to kill each other, and it will save lives in ordinary robberies. It might even prevent wildfires in the west. But it will not stop the mentally ill from reaping carnage because the proximate cause of their carnage is disease, not hardware.
If you say that a ten-round clip would have limited the damage in Aurora, and you might be right. But you also might be wrong, because Holmes might have walked in instead with a bomb. Either way, here we are arguing about how to limit the damage broken people do rather than talking about how to mend broken people.
Of course nobody needs an AK-47 or a twenty-round clip, and the Supreme Court ruling making it more difficult for communities to restrict access to guns was deeply unsound. But before we get sidetracked for the umpteenth time talking about limiting access to certain calibers, or muzzle velocities, or clip size, we should perhaps start talking about how we can identify broken people—not just when they walk into a gun store to purchase a weapon (although certainly there as well), but also when they apply to college, or for a driver's license, or do anything else that might call them to the attention of people who are trained to look.
Prisons, homeless shelters, and highway underpasses are teeming with mentally ill human beings because our society thinks harsh punishment will solve most of the problem, and restrictions to the implements of crime will solve the rest. Wrong and wrong again. Nobody is responsible for the unspeakable tragedy James Holmes unleashed besides James Holmes. But all of us share responsibility for ignoring the James Holmeses of our world until they force us to learn their infamous names.
