[quote]Darnell Becker wrote:
Well it wouldn’t have helped in this case, of course not, but many other deaths could have been avoided if it weren’t for the shameful gun culture in this country.[/quote]
Don’t mix issues. It gives people like Pushharder and other gun-happy conservatives more ammo to make legitimate points.
As of now, this appears to be a terrorist event. Whether it was a premeditated one or a spur of the moment one, whether there’s a genuine terrorist cell in the U.S. or this is a “lone wolf” incident, are all unknown. But this appears to be a terrorist attack nonetheless.
Everyone jumped the fucking gun when they started decrying the gun violence issue in the U.S. My Facebook page was inundated by ton of news articles talking about the gun issue, etc.
The thing is, short of banning guns/confiscating/and literally making it impossible for anyone to obtain guns, you can’t prevent things like this. By all accounts, these people seemed to be perfectly normal people. You cannot prevent normal people from obtaining guns unless you put a blanket ban on guns. That’s why all these “place more restrictions on gun sales!” seems like a false argument to me, at least when it comes to preventing premeditated/terrorist attacks.
In short- you cannot prevent people like Adam Lanza and Tashfeen Malik from getting guns by placing more restrictions on guns. You need to ban them, period.
And this leads me to my broader point- How exactly is gun restriction supposed to work? I read an interesting article on Vox.com that stated that the gun violence issue that everyone seems to ignore is suicide by gun. Indeed, apparently at least 60% of death by gun are suicides. It raises an interesting point in that suicide attempts are mostly spur of the moment things and that suicide attempts with a gun are far more likely to succeed when compared to attempts by overdosing/slitting wrists/ what have you.
So, yes, preventing these people from getting guns seems to be a good option at reducing suicide rates.
The problem is, I very much doubt that these people showcased suicidal tendencies when they bought their gun. So, how do you prevent suicide by gun? Stop them from getting guns in the first place.
What I really want to get at is- I think the whole brouhaha on gun violence is incredibly muddled. I mentioned earlier that my Facebook page got inundated by posts about gun violence. Notably though, people seemed to be talking about people being killed by guns. Just death by gun. That seemed to be the common point.
One Christian lady posted a video of SF policemen gunning down some man (who reportedly had a knife and stabbed someone earlier) in plain daylight in front of people filming the thing. She wasn’t upset about the fact that people had guns, since I don’t think any reasonable individual would argue that the police shouldn’t have guns in the U.S. She was just upset that someone got killed by a gun.
People seem to be mixing a ton of different issues (gun violence by police/mass murders via either insane individuals or terrorists/gun violence by criminals/gun-related suicides/etc) and zero in on the only real commonality- that the violence occurred by gun.
And in doing so, they either ignore finer points about all those issues that might actually help in reducing said issues, or they chase after phantom issues that may not even exist to begin with.
I don’t think this helps at all in getting to, and working to solve, any of those issues. And it gives Pushharder and his ilk more reason to say Obama is dumb.
Please, Obama, stop giving people like Pushharder more reason to say you’re dumb.
