This tragedy is heartbreaking, especially just before Xmas.
I had a teenage niece pass away last summer from cancer and my sister has been a basketcase ever since, so I know firsthand how devastating this will be on the families of the children who were senselessly murdered Friday.
I hope that this incident and others like the Aurora theater and Virginia Tech massacre will make us think more about mental illness and what is causing these disturbed individuals to cause such carnage.
I am saddened to see these grandstanding and self serving politicians already taking advantage of this incident to promote their agendas to attack gun owners. Can't you vultures even wait until the bodies are cold until you call your press conferences??
The assault weapon issue is phony. If you look up the "assault weapon ban" enacted in 1994, you will see that they couldn't actually define what an "assault weapon" is. Basically it is a semi automatic weapon with a military like appearance. Take the action and barrel of a semi automatic, put a nice blued finish on it and install it in a nice finished wood stock and it's a fine acceptable hunting or target rifle. Put a parkerized finish on the action and barrel, install it in a black nylon stock, and it's now a evil assault weapon with no legitimate purpose they say.
An analogy to cars would be if there were a few high profile incidents involving street racing or high speed chases that ended up in accidents, maybe some street racers ran into a bus stop or crashed into a bus and some kids die.
So some grandstanding politicians invent an emotionally charged term, how about "baby killing hot rods", hold a press conference standing in front of a red Corvette, crying crocodile tears as they proclaim "you don't need a car like this to go to church on Sunday or pick up groceries, the only purpose of a car like this is to race on the streets and endanger the lives of innocent children!!!"
They can't define exactly what a "baby killing hot rod" is, so they enact legislation that bans specific cars, Corvettes, Vipers, Ferraris, GT500's. Of course, those inclined to street race, will still do it in any car they happen to own. Nothing really changes safety wise, but these self serving politicians convince the gullible they are really committed to saving us poor souls from evil racers and the evil greedy corporations that built these dangerous baby killing cars. In the end, responsible enthusiasts are the only ones who suffer and are persecuted and we aren't any safer than we were before.
Guns don't make people kill people, no person walks past a gun store and suddenly thinks, "hey, that is a cool looking gun in the window, if I bought that gun, I could go out and kill a bunch of people!". The gun doesn't create evil, it's just a tool. So we need to focus on finding the causes not the tools. Mental illness is the main issue that needs to be addressed here, I don't know the answer. I don't know that reopening all the mental hospitals that used to house so many mentally ill is the answer, but with all the people that would have been institutionalized in the past out among us now, it creates a danger when some of them "snap" and what can be done to protect us?
