I don't own a gun.... I've never even physically touched a gun (not even a toy one).... closest I've come is a water squirt gun - and it wasn't in the form of a gun...
BUT....
I honestly don't think guns are the problem. People are. Sick people. People who don't value human life.
Exactly. Guns have been around for hundreds of years so if guns were the problem we'd have been seeing mass shootings for decades. Something has changed in recent years.
My barber told me when he was a kid, LOTS of highschoolers had guns in the car or truck, and he was a member of the largest school club, the gun club. He brought a rifle to school every day there was a club meeting to use for target shooting after school. NO ONE even thought of a theoretical possibility that such would be used to KILL PEOPLE, didn't even cross the mind of anyone. What has changed? Not the guns....
Also true.
We have two problems....
1. A Pro-Death morality and mentality. Note the prevailence of abortion and euthanasia in our society, so treasured as if they were Sacraments. Note video games. The reason why people walk onto campus and shoot people is not because there are more guns (there are FEWER of them now) but because we now live in a culture where life isn't honored. What do we teach kids when we say we can kill innocent, defenseless life because we wanna (abortion)? We teach them that we can kill innocent, defenseless life because we wanna.
I often wonder about the issue with video games. They seem like an convenient scapegoat, much like heavy metal is often a convenient scapegoat for the times someone suffering with chronic depression spends six hours listening to Ozzy Osbourne and then kills themselves. It's always hard to know whether there is an actual cause-and-effect relationship (and if so which is the cause and which is the effect), or merely some form of correlation that may or may not be relevant. Back in the day I used to enjoy playing Grand Theft Auto and wreaking a reign of carnage on the fictional towns (quite often I'd simply commit enough crimes to get the police to show up, then fire on the emergency services until the SWAT teams and special forces showed up, then see how long I could stay alive). In the fictional world of GTA my "rap sheet" was huge; in the real world my rap sheet is a far more modest 0 murders, 0 hit-and-run, 0 carjackings, 0 molotov cocktails thrown, 0 police officers killed. In the real world I don't have as much as a speeding ticket. Maybe I'm an outlier but it does lead me to suspect there's more to it than violent video games.
2. Mental illness. Nothin' new here, there's always been a small percentage of mentally ill people (and probably FEWER of them have guns today, see #1 above). We USE to institutionalize them and label them, but we can't anymore. Think of the mass murderers in the past generation or so, every one has clearly been mentally ill (and morally sick). Funny.... we see the common denominator of a gun but don't see the common denominator of mental illness and moral depravity.
Interestingly it seems that mental illness (that truly is an illness, and not the individual's fault) is so often not labelled as such any more, while all sorts of other things are labelled as "disorders". The relentless rise in diagnoses of ADHD is remarkable (to be clear here, I have no doubt that some people do have a genuine brain disorder that is best treated with medication, but struggle to believe that it's anywhere near as commonplace as diagnoses would have us think). A system that is endlessly geared up to make allowances for people creates advantages for people who can claim a "disorder" because, at a stroke, any failings in their work or shortcomings in their achievements aren't their fault and they need more allowances made.
Where not that long ago children were expected to do as they were told, to sit down and be quiet, to prepare for places like waiting rooms and take a book to read - now just about everything revolves around children. You can't go to a restaurant without running the gauntlet of screaming children, waiting rooms are turned into playgrounds so you get to sit and wait while tolerating some unrestrained brat running around shouting, and so on. The education system these days appears to value diversity and inclusion over education, and value self-esteem over achievement. The real world doesn't care whether you feel good about yourself, it doesn't see that you failed 142 times but still gives you another chance, and it isn't interested in the fine-sounding excuse you thought up for why you didn't do what you were supposed to do. When we essentially set an entire generation up to fail, all the while telling them that nothing is their fault, teaching them about this mysterious "privilege" that Other People enjoy, and then sending them out into the real world totally unprepared for anything except a lifetime of blaming anyone and everyone else, that's unlikely to help the situation. Clearly it doesn't justify committing atrocities in any way at all but I do sometimes wonder how much damage is done by people who are set up to fail while being taught that their failure is someone else's fault - sooner or later it seems at least plausible that they will seek vengeance on the Someone Else who they perceive as being to blame.
