Another Gun Screed
“Robert Hawkins, the 19-year-old shooter who killed eight people at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska – and then (thankfully) killed himself – is being described this morning as mentally unstable. His landlord says he was recently fired from his job at McDonalds. He left a suicide note saying that he was going to be famous.
“The anti-gun people are almost certainly going to jump on this as an example of why we need more gun control. What these anti-Second Amendment types will never be able to explain to you is how they propose to get the guns out of the hands of criminals and people like Robert Hawkins.
“The truth is that there was really no way to keep a gun out of the hands of this nut job. The only real hope those people had when Hawkins walked into the mall was that there would be someone else there with a gun capable of stopping him. That would have been a security guard or a private citizen with a concealed weapons permit and his gun.”
That’s a quote from today’s Nealz Nuze found at Boortz.com.
I’m not “anti-Second Amendment“ but, I can tell you how to keep guns out of the hands of nut jobs. Don’t sell them. Buy them back. Make gun manufacturers absolutely liable for injury and death caused by their products, in other words, make them charge for the true economic costs of their products, or quit making them. Won’t stop the next nut job or criminal or their successors for a while, but over time, it will be harder and harder to get a gun to whack people in a mall, on a college campus, in a liquor store, or merely store in a closet for your son or daughter to find and play with. Fewer to be available in a moment of anger directed at your spouse, loved one or neighbor. Going Postal will then mean you pulled out a steak knife.
Second Amendment aside, there is no reason we have to as a society allow a lethal modality to exist when it is not needed. Treat guns like gas is about to be treated. Up the price to pay for all the costs. If you factor the true costs in, most people won’t buy them. As the supply dries up, fewer nut jobs have access to them.
OK, I’m repeating myself. Sorry. Deep breathes.
4 comments:
If wasn't a gun it would have been a knife, a baseball bat, or a pipe. Maybe not as many people would have been killed but the end result -someones death- would have been the same. What we need is better mental health services to get to these people before they are to the point of no return.
The truth is, if a person wants to kill a lot of innocent people, and he's willing to die himself in the process, there's not really anything that can be done to stop him.
What disturbed me was that the gun nuts immediately jumped in front of the cameras to demand more guns and the anti-gun nuts immediately jumped in front of the cameras to demand fewer guns. The victims had been turned into political pawns before their bodies were even cold.
SM and TLB, you are both right; but, I'd like to think I'm not an anti-gun nut. I'd like to see the only weapons of choice those described by SM and the guys like the one in Omaha with a death wish, limited to them.
Amen.
My thought on this guy was that he killed innocent people just to get his 15 minutes of fame - so don't give it to him. Don't tell us his name. The people who know him will be told. And hopefully, it won't occur to the next nutjob to take innocents with them when they want to die.
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