jhay78;1345517 wrote:Why do I, or any other responsible gun owner, or any other morally upstanding individual in our society, have to "take responsibility" for this tragedy? First and foremost responsibility lies with the shooter.
If I'm not mistaken, the mother possessed the .223 rifle illegally, so she bears some responsibility as well.
The silence from some regarding our entertainment culture's glorification of violence in movies and video games is quite baffling.
We could use a little questioning of the "gun-free zones" that we have made out of schools and shopping malls, where magically most mass shootings take place. The signs saying "This is a gun-free zone" don't say anything to violent people except "This is an easy target". No sane person would post such a sign at his or her home; quite the contrary, you see signs saying the opposite.
Maybe an armed school official won't solve everything, but I could see a potential shooter not wanting to deal with the hassle of someone with a gun, and picking someplace else.
Nobody else has turned their schools and places of commerce and other places of congregation in free and open society into armed fortresses. They've simply taken reasonable measures to eliminate these weapons of mass destruction from being easily obtained and the carnage has been curbed substantially.
I may be responsbile enough to handle chemical weapons or hell a nuclear bomb in my home but it has no place in civilized society and there wide availability turns "responsible gun owners" into killers and the dead all the time every day in America.
Kids in other countries watch Walking Dead and play violent video games but they don't have the massacres that we have.
It is a choice for this to continue.
The Aussies loved their guns probably as more than any other country but us. They had a gun massacre problem and they fixed it. We can too. Blah blah "America is different" is a convenient excuse to let the carnage continue.
On April 28, 1996, a gunman opened fire on tourists in a seaside resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By the time he was finished, he had killed 35 people and wounded 23 more. It was the worst mass murder in Australia’s history.
Twelve days later, Australia’s government did something remarkable. Led by newly elected conservative Prime Minister John Howard, it announced a bipartisan deal with state and local governments to enact sweeping gun-control measures. A decade and a half hence, the results of these policy changes are clear: They worked really, really well.
At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.
What happened next has been the subject of several academic studies. Violent crime and gun-related deaths did not come to an end in Australia, of course. But as the Washington Post’s Wonkblog pointed out in August, homicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes
