Today’s U.S. Mass Shooting: What To Do?
Yesterday it was Seattle Pacific University. Today: a town near you?
What could we possibly do to prevent shootings?
Nothing comes to mind.
There’s just nothing we can do.
What a puzzle.
Postscript: Oh. Wait. What if we made it really difficult to legally get assault weapons? Would 75% of the pie chart above be gone?
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conversation is an engine 
“There’s just nothing we can do.”
There are a number of things we could do.
1. Repeal the Gun Free School Zones Act
2. Get a concealed carry permit in your state (most have some form of “shall issue” by now.
3. Empower staff at schools to legally carry a concealed handgun (with a license) on schools.
4. Shoot back instead of being a helpless victim.
Read “A Nation of Cowards” by Jeffrey Snyder
http://free2beinamerica2.wordpress.com/a-nation-of-cowards/
lwk
lwk2431
June 6, 2014 at 8:18 am
Thanks for the comment. I’d rather disarm our national arms race.
kirkistan
June 6, 2014 at 8:22 am
” I’d rather disarm our national arms race.”
I wrote a an article a while back on “Universal Background Checks” that I actually think might help some, and which I believe the firearms owning community would support.
http://free2beinamerica2.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/universal-background-checks/
We could do a little better at making guns more difficult for some people to get, but I doubt it would stop many of these school killers. It is usually not an impulse where one day they just fly off the handle and go out and commit these horrific acts. Most of them plan for a long time, sometimes years, and usually are not dumb (just mentally ill). So I imagine most of them could find a way to acquire a firearm in that time, even with far more firearms restrictions.
In my view it just makes sense to protect what we value. As a society we have already decided that we will protect money in banks with people with guns. Was in a jewelry store the other day and they had an armed guy there protecting their diamonds. Armored cars and armed men collect bags of money from big stores. Politicians are often protected with guns. Certainly the President has men with sub machine guns under their coats to protect him. Even Diane Feinstein once got a concealed carry permit in California (before she was a Senator, just a a rich politician who could pull the right strings).
So I don’t understand why we aren’t willing to protect our kids with guns. May not like it, but might like that alternative better than having these horrific shootings. By now the media has firmly established in our culture that they will go to any length to publicize the lives of someone who commits these crimes. The killers will spend years studying what the ones before had done, and more importantly the score and try to exceed it.
I travel to Israel from time to time on business. Israel some years ago had a problem with terrorists trying to kill their kids in schools. Now Israel is about as liberal a place as you are likely to find in terms of politics and world view. But eventually, being also somewhat pragmatic and loving their kids, they started arming some staff in their schools. Guess what? It worked for them (with some other measures, of course, to prevent infiltration of terrorists). It is a documented fact there that lives were saved by staff with guns in schools.
So we may not like it, but at some point I think we have to decide to protect kids with guns, guns in the hands of good people. We could do that a lot faster and get results faster than trying to come up with draconian gun control laws that probably won’t do much good anyway and will take Herculean effort to pass.
regards,
lwk
lwk2431
June 6, 2014 at 9:01 am