Newtown, CT
by Linus
What can you really say about the events in Newtown, CT this past Friday? My heart goes out to all the families that were impacted by this senseless tragedy…and now I like everyone else struggle with the inevitable question of ‘why?’. As a parent you know you cannot control every aspect of your child’s life, you know that you will send them out into the world and hope for the best, but under no circumstances would you expect to send them off to elementary school and be able to envision a scenario like this.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit over the weekend, and I always come back to the thought that it is now time to seriously do something about the guns on our streets. You can’t get away from the irony that the woman whose son did this was the first victim, and that she was killed with her own gun. All her guns were purchased legally, they were registered, she would use them to go target shooting with her kids. She did everything ‘right’, and look what happened. The bottom line is that the less number of guns that are out there, the better off we all are. I’ve reached the point where I don’t care anymore about the people who would lose their jobs if we stopped producing guns, I don’t care if there is an amendment in our Constitution that gives people the right to bear arms, it’s time to get rid of the guns.
I grew up in the country, my neighbor had guns, we would use them to go target shooting in our back yard. Yes it was fun, but would my life be drastically different if I hadn’t had that experience? No. I respect hunters, I respect the fact that they really look forward to when their season starts, I don’t really understand the allure of wanting to get up at 3am to go sit in the freezing cold for 6 hours while you wait for an animal to venture your way, but I think it’s time for them to get a new hobby.
As for the people who say the U.S. Constitution guarantees their right to bear arms, I offer you this. If you could take one of those innocent kids who were just gunned down and bring them back to life for a minute, teach them to say “why did I have to die” to that person who is in favor of owning guns, I would love to hear what their answer is. The truth is that there is no answer; there is no reason why those kids had to die. There is no reason why that mom had to own those guns. There is no reason. Our Constitution was drafted a long time ago, the world we lived in was obviously much different than it is now, the time is upon us to amend that amendment.
This isn’t going to stop. These people are out there and they are unstable, and sadly they are unstoppable. How many more Columbine’s have to happen, how many more Virginia Tech’s have to happen, how many more Aurora, CO’s have to happen, how many more Newtown, CT’s have to happen? How many more of these mass shootings have to happen before people wake up and realize that guns are bad, and that they need to go? Do you believe that guns don’t kill people, that people kill people? Well I would take my chances any day of the week with a person who doesn’t have a gun compared to one who does. The more these events happen, the more they (sadly) inspire others to commit them. The desire to ‘one-up’ and to out-do the previous mass killer is a very present scenario. These lunatics dream of going out in a blaze of glory, to make a statement, and to try to leave their mark and get in the history books. Why aren’t we doing more to stop them?
The Cynics Workshop 
Couldn’t agree more. When will people come to their senses. Well written! LB
This and the other events you mentioned were terrible tragedies and I agree that something must be done, but it seems like most people think that getting rid of guns is the answer. That is a knee-jerk reaction that will not solve much.
The main thing in the minds of people who want more gun control is that they forget that these are laws. They think that laws will stop criminals, but they forget that these people are criminals because they broke the law. There are laws against doing many things: murder, robbery; kidnapping; buglary, carrying weapons of any kind to a school. Who obeys laws? Law-abiding citizens. Who doesn’t obey laws? Criminals! That’s why making more laws doesn’t do anything. In fact, states and cities with the least gun control are those with the lowest average murder rates. The states and cities with the strongest gun control are those with the highest average murder rates. It doesn’t seem like ‘getting rid of guns’ has worked there.
Okay, let’s get rid of guns anyway. Let’s see what happens. First, the people who will give up their guns will all those law abiding citizens I spoke of. How many criminals do you think will give up their gun? Okay, now that criminals have guns and the law-abiding people don’t, do you really feel safer?
As you mentioned, we don’t need to hunt anymore, do we? Do you even know why there are hunting licenses? Without hunting, the wild animal population increases. That causes more disease and starvation among all those animals. Overpopulation also causes more migration into inhabited areas. Oh, none of that is good? Okay, let’s only hunt them with bows and arrows. Well, hunters are not as successful with those so the population would stay high and hunting season would have to be a lot longer. Hmmm. Arrows would make a nice weapon with which to kill people. I guess we have to get rid of those too. Maybe hunt with knives and baseball bats. But wait, people are killed with those, too.
In fact, more people are killed with knives and blunt objects than with guns. Should we get rid of knives and baseball bats, too? And there have been mass killings with knives, mostly in countries that have strict gun control. Well, they couldn’t use guns, could they, so they found another way. And what about arsonists? They don’t use guns to kill. Should we get rid of matches and such?
There have been a number of serial killers and people are shocked by those events as well. However, most serial killers do not use guns to kill their victims. And just because they do their killing over a longer period of time doesn’t make it less shocking.
But let’s face it, all of those mass killings, while technically crimes, were not done by career criminals. They were done by mentally unstable people who just snapped. No gun law will stop this kind of person.
Placing armed officers or people with guns in a place will help, but only for those places. It would take too many paid officers to guard every possible target. The only possible way is to arm citizens as well. In a battle between a person armed with a telephone and a determined person armed with any weapon, the armed person usually wins. And in a case where both parties are armed, the criminals usually flee.
The news media doesn’t help the situation either. I am all for freedom of the press but the reason these lunatics may try to outdo each other is because the first thing the news does is put their picture up for all to see. And they do it for days. In any of the shootings you mentioned, we all recognize the face of the killers, but would any of us recognize the person that stopped any of those who didn’t take their own life? For any serial killer, we all know their names, but do we know who stopped them? Our irresponsible media manifests this type of criminal behavior by granting the publicity that criminals and lunatics desire.
And we manifest it by telling the media that this is what we want to see. Our video games are mostly about killing others. Our kids toys are mostly about attacking other things. Many of our TV shows are all about criminal acts or people who are screaming at each other. Our clothes tell people that the more someone looks like a gangster or bum, the better, so our clothes come pre-worn and pre-torn. These are the things that teach people how to act in our society.
We are a violent society, but getting rid of guns won’t solve anything. Get rid of our love for violence and the rest will take care of itself.
Very interesting, I agree with a lot of what you say. I do place a large portion of the blame on the media. They do tend to glamorize a lot of these events leading to copy cat killers, but ultimately it is our fault for buying the magazines and watching the shows that perpetuate this. And if we get rid of our love of violence…we can look forward to years of television shows like The Waltons.