This is not a "for" or "against" gun issue. This is a case of a clearly deranged person who had full intentions to hurt innocent people. He could have used a gun, or he could have padlocked all the doors and set the theater on fire. Or he could have plowed his car through a crowded farmers market. Or even parked a U-Haul truck full of explosives in front of the building and blew it up. The point is, this event does not bolster the case for or against gun control. It just points out that people with mental issues need to be identified sooner and treated (or controlled) before events like this can happen, if it is possible at all. And if it isn't then we'll just have to accept things like this will happen.
Sigh, as I said before here, this really isn't a pro or con gun issue.
However, since it seems people absolutely insist on making it a gun issue, let me break it down plain and simple.
The simple fact of the matter is that there will ALWAYS be a certain percentage of the population that will just have this urge to kill people for unexplainable reasons. There will always be the Jack the Rippers, the DC snipers, and the Virginia Tech shooters. That is a fact of life and has been the case since the dawn of man.
Crazy mass murders have always occurred in history. The difference is that as technology grows, the capability of that one person to inflict more and more damage in society has grown considerably. In the time before guns, if a madman went on a killing spree, he was limited to the weapons at his disposal at the time. It could have been a knife or blunt object. Just how many people could a person kill in one sitting with a knife or club? One, two, maybe three? That same person, now armed with an assault rifle and 500 rounds can now kill two dozen people in one sitting and injure three times that. Just how many people could the Virginia Tech killer have killed if he only had access to a knife?
People always say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. That is absolutely correct and as discussed above, there will always be a certain percentage of the population that will kill other people. However, the statement should be revised to say, while guns don't kill people, and people kill people, guns give the people who are willing to kill other people, the ability to kill a lot more people when they do decide to kill people. That is a fact.
So although I am a gun owner and advocate, I will be the first to agree that eliminating guns would reduce the number of gun related deaths. Period. If people did not have access to guns, people could not kill with guns. However, people argue that you can't eliminate guns, that is completely false. If someone wanted to go on a killing spree, don't you think they could have been a lot more effective and killed a lot more people with a multi-shot grenade launcher or military grade flamethrower. Why are there not mass murders going on with people equipped with grenade launchers? Answer: Because they are illegal and extremely hard to get. That's why. If guns were illegal and made extremely hard to get, then there would be a lot less gun murders, just like there aren't a lot of people getting killed by grenades. However, more importantly, if guns are outlawed and are nearly impossible to get, then it eliminates the psyche of it even being an option to kill with. Why do mass murders use guns so frequently to kill and not C4 explosives? Because C4 is so inaccessible, it doesn't even cross the mind of a murder to even consider using. Rather they choose something very accessible such as guns. If guns were made as in accessible as C4 explosive, then the psyche of the murder would be quicker to dismiss the use of a gun.
So:
FACT, a certain percentage of people will kill other people. Always.
FACT, the accessibility of guns, means those people will have the ability to kill more and more people than if they did not have access to guns.
FACT, drastically reducing the availability of guns would drastically reduce the number of deaths due to guns.
FACT, gun accessibility can be controlled. It has been done so with fully automatic weapons, grenade launchers, plastic explosives, rocket launchers etc.
So gun control advocates are right and the simple answer is to eliminate guns right? Yes, except that it's WRONG. There is one major problem that keeps that from being accurate. The issue is the proliferation of firearms. The simple fact of the matter is that it is too late to control the accessibility of guns. They are ubiquitous. There are more guns than man, women and child in the US. The fact is, guns are accessible and there is nothing that can be done to change that now at this point. The cows have been let out of the barn and there is no way in getting them back in.
So if we know that guns are accessible and we know that a certain percentage of people are going to use them to kill, then what is the solution? If we try to restrict gun ownership, that will do nothing to affect the accessibility of guns for those who are going to kill. However, it give the madman with the gun, more power to kill more people because nobody can defend themselves.
Take a room of ten people and 1 of them is a crazy nut job. Say they are all unarmed and the crazy guy decided he wanted to kill everyone in the room. How many people could he kill with his bare hands? Possibly none, because everyone would jump him the second he tried to attack one person. Now let's say the crazy person got their hands on a gun. And as I pointed out, due to the proliferation of guns, there is almost no way to stop that crazy person from getting one. Now how many people could he kill. Chances are high that he could kill the remaining 9 people in that room. As long as the 9 other people are restricted from owning a gun, the one crazy person with a gun has the ability to kill everyone. Finally, let's say you give every single person in that room a gun. How many people could the crazy guy with a gun kill? One, maybe two, before the remaining 7 or 8 people all collectively shoot him. The point is, the only way to combat a person who is going to kill is to give everyone else the equal level of power that the person is wielding.
Say it was a law that every single man and women over the age of 21, by law, had to carry a handgun and be proficient with it at all times (like a drivers license). Everyone, all the time. How many people could a crazy person kill then? If everyone in that theater had a gun on them, by law, and were proficient with it, by law, then the number of deaths and murders would have been significantly reduced, possibly eliminated. After all, if you were a murder and you knew that every single person was carrying a gun with them at all times and could use it proficiently, would you even bother trying to shoot up a movie theater, restaurant or any public place?
But one could argue, but if everyone is carrying a gun, would everyone just shoot each other? What about arguments, road rage, bar fights? Well what's to keep people from killing people now? First off, there are laws and consequences for killing. At any time you could grab a kitchen knife and stab someone in the neck. But people don't because they know they would go to jail for that and ruin their life. Plus, most people are not murders. We have instruments of death at our disposal every single day. Everyone has the ability to plow their car into someone else at any time. Grab a knife and stab someone. Push them in front of subway train. People carry concealed guns with them every day, as I said before, there are more guns in circulation today than there are people, yet they aren't shooting each other every 5 minutes. Not to mention, how likely are you to shoot at someone if you knew they had the ability to shoot back. Here's the thing, go to any standard warehouse. Nearly everyone in that warehouse will most likely be carrying a blade or knife on them. Dozens of people carrying knives, sometimes getting into arguments and fights. Yet how many warehouse stabbings have you heard of? It's almost non-existent. Yet it wouldn't be that much different than a society where everyone was carrying a gun.
For me, I'd much rather live in a society where guns were completely inaccessible, illegal and banned. However, since that ship has already left dock and there is no way that kind of society can be established here in the US, then I want a society where more people carried guns and the laws did not prohibit my ability to own one. The situation we have now, somewhere in between, where criminals have access to guns and upstanding citizens either don't want to or have a hard time of carrying one themselves is a very poor combination that will only lead to more unnecessary deaths of innocent people.
