The way I see it, gun laws will only affect the law abiding. Guns will always be available to those with cash and no regard for the law. But I don't think gun laws are really the issue. I think we in the U.S. live in a culture where guns are seen as the way to handle problems, going back to the days of the wild west. Look at all the action heroes in our movies that handle their problems by arming themselves to the gills and then taking out all those who stand in their way in a barrage of bullets. And audiences eat it up!
Obviously, the vast majority of us know the difference between fantasy and real life, but for those who are unable to make the distinction, and who have some kind of issue with society, having been indoctrinated from an early age by so much love for firearms, naturally see that as the way to deal with whatever mental struggle they are having.
We are also a society obsessed with fame, and what better way for someone who feels disenfranchised to grab their 15 minutes than to murder a bunch of innocent people?
I read a post on Faceache that was like a breath of fresh air among the endless one-liners and soundbites presented from extreme left and extreme right news sources. The writer basically said that no meaningful discussion can be had between people endlessly posting one-liners and soundbites, and it was time to have a rational discussion that looked to balance opposing desires.
Personally I'm heartily sick of seeing fine-sounding political rhetoric wrapped up in one-liners and soundbites as if they were an answer to anything. I saw one recently that said something like "instead of calling it gun control legislation we should call it anti-massacre legislation". Which sounds well and good on the face of it - after all, who could possibly be opposed to anti-massacre legislation? But take the meme a little further and, like so many others, it starts to break. Let's use the same logic in another setting. I don't like cars, I want to see them banned. But let's not call it car control legislation, let's call it anti-traffic-death legislation. Who could possibly be opposed to legislation to end death on our roads? Er, well, anyone who uses their car most likely. In an instant people would be lining up to say how they needed their car for this or that, and so on.
Another classic line is "you don't need a gun". Well, you don't need a car either. The Amish manage just fine with horse-drawn buggies. You don't need a TV, you don't need a cellphone, you don't need all sorts of things that we've come to take for granted. Of course they make life far easier but the Amish show that it's possible to live with none of those things. But somehow guns are a special class of Things We Don't Need.
Then there's the talk of the "powerful gun lobby" as if the NRA and a handful of gun-toting rednecks wielded enough power to override the wishes of the vast majority of the American people. Except that falls short too, because there certainly seem to be a lot of guns out there and it's safe to assume that the people who own guns don't want their guns taken away. Let's face it, if you didn't think owning a gun was a good idea you wouldn't own a gun - it's not like buying guns is compulsory.
Of course the media is quick to push their agenda, whichever side they support. And politicians on all sides are usually depressingly quick to use tragedy for political gain even if they aren't hugely overt about what they are doing.
Fundamentally the question keeps coming back to the basic issue of what causes one person to actually want to cause so much harm to so many other people? Until we can address that question all we can do is endlessly change legislation in an attempt to force the people who have already made that decision to change the weapon they use to commit their crimes.
Perhaps one place to start looking is the sense that any minor error of judgment is forever held against someone. When we see reports of employers wanting Facebook passwords, relatively minor indiscretions committed during teenage years making it difficult to impossible to get a meaningful job years later and the like, it's easy to see how someone excluded from school (especially over something that wasn't their fault) may see that their life is pretty much over. In a situation like this the hormonal issues teenagers deal with at the best of times are unlikely to help matters. What about if someone loses their job and sees themselves about to lose everything else with it? Since so many people live one or two paychecks from the street it's easy to see how someone who got fired from their job could see a future with no hope.
We also have a horrendous issue with people being so divided. It seems society is becoming ever-more polarised, split along ever-more fault lines where The Other Guy is the wrong side of whatever divide has been created and therefore he is My Enemy. So whether The Other Guy is a different race, a different social class, a different gender, a different political inclination, a different sexual orientation, whatever it is, he must be The Enemy because he is Not Like Me in a clearly defined attribute. And if there are lots of people out there who are Not Like Me and therefore My Enemy, there's an obvious target for the angst turning to hatred that the less stable will experience.
In many ways I wonder if the Rambo-style genre of movies represents too little violence rather than too much. If we look at the first Rambo movie we see a combat veteran mistreated by a smalltown sheriff to the point he loses it and goes on a rampage. Curiously relatively few people are actually killed in the movie but crucially everyone killed or seriously injured, with few exceptions, is pretty much written out of the movie from there on. No sense of watching the person who was shot in the legs trying to rebuild their life with physiotherapy, no sense of the grieving widow and children of the men who were killed, just a sense of "you pushed me, you deserve this, bang bang, move on to the next one"
The dangerous thing about a man with nothing to lose is that, well, he has nothing to lose. If he goes out in the blaze of bullets, what does he lose? If he gets shot by police, or by an armed citizen, part way through his rampage, what does he lose?
