Here's my problem with all this. The narrative of what exactly happened and how it happened in this latest gun shooting case was that Adam Lanza killed his mother and then took her three guns and went to the elementary school five miles away
So I have to ask, how would an improved gun control or more restrictions prevented this tragedy from occurring? His mother, an unemployed teacher probably passed every restriction and criteria met in getting those guns. I'm sure though, that on her shitty salary, even if she had a job - which she didn't, she wouldn't have been able to afford the proper mental health care that her clearly disturbed son needed.
Tightening those gun restrictions and gun control laws any tighter will not fix this issue. Hell, here's Morgan Freeman's brilliant take on what happened yesterday :
"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.
It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed
people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.
CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.
You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."
That last part is just so spot on. Why do we even bother with jumping to gun control? They already have a five day waiting period, in most states you can't own an automatic weapon. Most of all, IT WOULDN'T HAVE CHANGED A GOD DAMN THING IN THIS SITUATION. I bet his mother was fully permitted to own and have those guns. She went through the proper channels to get the licenses that are required and unlike most guns that are used in murders, they had serial numbers and were accounted for in the system --- Yet they still were used to kill children. Why? Because someone who was clearly mentally ill got a hold of them.
There's no amount of gun control measures that could have been taken to avoid the situation that her son was potentially going to get a hold of them. Should we also do background checks on all the members of the family of the person who wants a gun? That's a waste of money. Money that could be used to that field that is very underfunded - mental health. Hell, any health for that matter. It's those crazy hobos and mentally ill folks who were kicked out into the streets and away from treatment when Reagan decided to close up the hospitals for mental illness in a method of saving money.
Mental illness should be the subject here. How this kid should have gotten helped for his demons and now society had to pay for his actions - when they could have just paid in another method of dollars and not innocent lives for available mental help/treatment. Do you honestly think that his unemployed teacher for a mother could have afforded to take him in for help? Hell, even if she was employed, the amount of benefits that your average teacher gets, as well as a complete "fuck you" in the way of a shitty pay scale means that his mental illness wouldn't have been treated anyway.
Shouldn't we worry about that more so on tightening restrictions on gun laws? I'm not even one of those right wing NRA members either, I just know from seeing the war on drugs, that if you make something harder to get, all that means is that someone is going to screw out someone else for the money to get it harder. You'll create a black market for it and that just continues the cycle of violence. Gun restrictions are tight enough as is, and again, making it more hoops to jump through wouldn't have prevented this tragedy.
So how about we curb this bullshit about making gun control a bigger thing and focus on helping those who clearly need some sort of help mentally. Hopefully that way we'll prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
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