just angry
How often does this have to happen before we figure out that maybe giving insane people free and easy access to guns isn’t the greatest idea ever?? Over and over and over, apparently. We have so many shootings here that you start tuning the "smaller" ones out. When I first started hearing reports about the shooting in Connecticut this morning, I actually thought they were talking about the shooting in the mall in Portland that happened a few days ago. It took awhile before I realized this one is a whole new massacre. Involving a whole bunch of children.
I’ve quit hoping that these never-ending horrific shootings will result in actual real gun laws that are actually enforced. I keep hearing that ooooh, we HAVE gun laws!!! Well, ,they obviously aren’t very good ones. Fill out a form and get a background check and if you haven’t been in prison or you’re not legally crazy, you wait three days and hey, here’s your automatic weapon! And if you have been in prison or you are legally crazy, all you have to do is go to a gun show and you can get a gun without the background check or the inconvenience of the three-day wait. What the hell kind of sense does that make?? NONE.
I’m too tired and upset to write as much as I’d like to about this. I’m sick to death of hearing about a whole new shooting every few days. And knowing that nothing will ever change, because the NRA and the rightwingers are running this country and it’s their godgiven right to tote guns around because they have to protect themselves from the villains swarming the streets and from Obama who is a socialist so they have to be prepared to take up arms against him and his godless non-Christian foreigner ways. I have a very slight hope that maybe this latest horrible tragedy will spur Obama to pass some actual real gun laws that would, oh, require restrictions on who can buy a gun. Maybe weed out the crazy people and shut off all the loopholes. He can’t run again so doesn’t have to worry about making the NRA happy.
The Dunblane School Massacre in Scotland and the Port Arthur Massacre in Australia in 1996 both resulted in massive gun restrictions being passed. The UK had 0.22 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2009. Australia’s latest statistic on this graph is from 1994, oddly – it was 2.94 gun deaths per 100,000 people, before the massive gun restrictions. The University of Sydney has an article from 2006 saying that the risk of dying from a gun in Australia is half what it was before the restrictions.
The US had 9 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2008-2010. This is all from Wikapedia – the numbers of gun deaths are.
Oh, this is an even better table, from The Guardian last July. It’s sortable, and shows homicide rates- the Wikipedia is all deaths, including suicide. The US has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, although we don’t have the highest rate of firearm murders. Not quite. That prize goes to Honduras. We have 9,146 murders per 100,000 people a year. England and Wales had 41. Australia had 30. Scotland’s number isn’t listed for some reason, but I’d guess it’s closer to England than the US for sure.
I’m just really ready to live in a world where small children don’t have to be led out of their school by police with their eyes closed so they can’t see their 20 dead classmates..
i agree completely…well said
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What a sad day it’s been yet again. I work in a school with kids in Grade One and I had a hard time keeping my tears under control this afternoon as I looked at their sweet little faces. My heart aches for those families whose little ones went off to school to learn and never came home today.
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Brilliant! I saw a comment on FB asking the question why a kindergarten teachers bought and owned a semi-automatic gun? It must be something else that spur young people in the USA on to do this, since other countries also have similar legislation as the USA, yet no mass murders on this scale appear anywhere else in the world at the USA rate. Why? The core question should be shifted to determine the real reasons. The USA is a peaceful country, one of the safest countries to live in, yet it harbors the highest number of young mass murderers?
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What you said. Everything. I am effing SICK of guns, gun nuts, and gun mentality.
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It’s so sad. Those poor kids and those heartbroken parents. This tragedy can’t be blamed on one thing. Many things have to go wrong in order for a person to decide to go on a killing spree. The easy availability of guns helps to facilitate a murder spree, but it probably isn’t the cause.
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Random noter: Two orders of magnitude difference, but somehow the facts never seem to matter.
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Well said! Excellent entry.
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THANKS for your reply!!! It makes me feel a little less sad, knowing there are still Americans who think different from all the others who believe their weapon(s) is their freedom! THANKS.
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Nice entry. Now what are you going to do about the problem with MENTAL ILLNESS in this country, hm? Any ideas? Suggestions? Or are you just going to sit here and stroke yourself over how “enlightened” you are? ~
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For the record due to instant background checks, you cant buy an automatic weapon. Also, any gun show does require a background check, they dont just hand out weapons to just any Joe Blow off the street. Have you ever filled out the form to buy a weapon? It is a bit more involved than ‘have you been to prison or are you crazy?’ If you are on any type of antidepressant it makes things a bit harderto buy a weapon. I own several guns and I respect them and follow strict gun safety. So it is fair to punish the rule abiding gun owners with stricter gun laws because of the whack jobs? If you start ‘banning’ guns, what next? Knives? Swords? Baseball bats?
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Yes, it is terrible. 2.97 per 100,000 people–still too many.
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With more gun control, the average, law-abiding citizen will have less or no guns. The criminals, insane, drunk or drugged individuals, who most likely do not pay attention to “laws”, usually, those types will have guns WHENEVER and WHEREVER they like. So, what’s the end result with “more gun control”? Read that sentence again and figure it out.
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Looks like its higher than that according to the CDC. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm…Banning guns isn’t going to stop anyone though since a majority of people have firearms that are not even legal. We as a society need to work on the underlying problems such as mental illness, drug abuse, unemployment, abuse, etc…
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Ugh. I am totally with you, and it is one of those areas where I just do not get the other point of view. Sure, if people do not have access to automatic weapons they might well find other ways to kill someone, but when was the last time you saw a headline that read “Drive-by Knifing Kills Fifteen”? And I wonder what people like Tender Lumpling are doing about mental health, specificallytheir own??
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No one is talking about banning guns, but we should make it more difficult for people who are bad or mentally ill from aquiring them. People are always going to steal cars, but does that mean we should give up or not make any effort to make it more difficult for people to steal cars? Of course not. Use your head people, we need resonable gun control in the US to at least try tostop this from happening again. Later,
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I wasn’t able to react to this all day yesterday, and it left me feeling awful. I mean, I thought the news was beating it with all the stories and inteviews, etc., and I couldn’t even be emotionally involved. I just felt nothing. My ex-husband’s nieces live in this place, though I think they are both older than elementary school. I got word that they were safe. It WAS what you said, though. Oh, another shooting. Another troubled child. (He was 20, but imagine. He was probably not really an adult.) How awful. Today, I am processing a little better, but I still don’t even know what to do with it. Am I numb to this also, because it keeps happening?
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Obama isn’t a socialist, he isn’t godless, he isn’t non-Christian, and he isn’t a foreigner. The kid stole the guns from his mother, who owned them legally and passed all background checks accordingly. She was a school teacher. Are you going to blame her for that? Are you going to blame her for having a mentally unstable child? You do realize if we “ban” guns, things will get worse.
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Didn’t you learn anything about the Prohibition in school? Banning alcohol surely worked in that case… There is no simple solution to this. Stop pointing fingers and try to produce valuable possibilities. People need to get out of the “banning” mindset. Telling a child he cannot have a piece of candy is going to make him want it more and do whatever he can to get it.
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As a Canadian, we watch and think you guys are insane. It is against the law here to have a hand gun unless you are in police work of some kind. You get arrested if you have a concealed weapon. More people in Canada die from murders due to knives over guns. Still, you cannot kill as many people from a knife over a gun. I do hope it changes. Many Canadians are afraid to visit America becauseof it.
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oh yes yes yes yes… No reason …. so beyond sad
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This is so sad to me. All of it. The beyond horrible news, the suffering, the anger and the fear. And the polarization between folks who feel so strongly about their rights to protect themselves with firearms and those of us who believe they should be regulated more effectively. We can’t keep on pretending we don’t have mentally ill people out there. I think one of the differences in theU.S. is that we are often so isolated from each other, our culture of privacy allows disturbed young men to grow up alone with their families struggling desperately to deal, ashamed and without effective resources. But the easy availability of guns that can kill a classroom of children in just a few moments (who in civilian life needs a gun that can do that???) is a factor too. If I believed in the Fates, I would believe this availability of semi-automatic and automatic firearms is some cruel new balancing mechanism for population control now that we don’t have plagues anymore.
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RYN: it really boggles the mind. A friend on FB posted an article by a woman with a mentally-ill son, with the comment “It’s not just about guns.” But who is saying it is?? (Ironically, the woman wrote about how her son had gone after her with a knife, and so she had gone through the house and made sure all the sharp objects were inaccessible to him–but somehow she doesn’t make the linkto the idea that even if “it wasn’t all about knives” it was still a good idea to make sure he couldn’t get ahold of one.)
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Great entry
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I wonder what it is about our culture that makes so many suicidal people want to take other people with them when they go. That anyone should be victimized because someone else is in crisis is a tragedy. That school aged children should be the victims is horrific beyond all reason. I feel and share your anger and disgust.
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It gives me hope to see that plenty of Americans think like you. I hope they will get the power to change this. I note that some of the people arguing against you don’t have the courage to sign in. I am a citizen of a country that doesn’t allow handguns and where you have to have a gun licence and police check to own guns, and have to keep them in a locked cabinet. I have consciously avoided going to the USA in the past, despite really wanting to see much of your fascinating country. The main reason – I am terrified of American gun culture.
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I have a few things to say to tender lump but they are not fit for mixed company…re nice and not nice people company.
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