Calling the Colorado shootings "senseless killings" is redundant. It would seem that killings are senseless, regardless of the method used. I do not want to call some of the diaries and comments I have seen here "fauxrage", as the diarists and commenters seem genuine and sincere in their beliefs, but I cannot imagine a world in which Kos diarists and otherwise sensible people would be in a pitchforks and torches mode about cars if the headlines had been:
"Man drives car at high speed into crowded movie line, kills 12, injures 60."
Before some of you go into "but that's different because guns are evil!" mode, let's look at the end results. The victims would be no less dead. I do not mean any disrespect by that observation. I am merely saying that if one of my loved ones was murdered, my grief would not be any different if it was caused by a gun, a knife or a deliberate hit & run.
The point about "senseless killings" is that they are senseless, not their quantity. Someone or possibly several someones have said or implied "if he could only have had a knife, this would not have happened". If you are one of those people, what exactly are you saying? Are you saying "killing 12 people is unacceptable, but only killing 1 or 2 is okay"? The same goes for those who blame these things on extended clips, as though being able to only kill half a dozen people before reloading is somehow more socially acceptable.
One senseless death is one too many.
This can only be addressed by looking at the people involved, and not the objects they possess. Colorado is a perfect point. The movie was a sold out midnight showing, and there were certainly lines. Holmes could have easily plowed through that line with a car at high speed. His apartment is (at the time of this writing) apparently booby-trapped with explosives, flammables, chemicals or some combination of the above. Again, something that could have readily been used against an unwitting crowd of people. This is not a false equivalency. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 and injured over 600 with nothing more than fertilizer, racing fuel and a truck, a mayhem record that no individual on a shooting spree has come close to matching.
The common factor here is that Holmes was a dangerously unhinged individual, and in the modern world that gave him several easy and impossible to ban means of causing mayhem. Guns are probably not even the easiest nor cheapest means of causing that mayhem. They just happen to be the one culturally linked to the American psyche and fairly easy for an unskilled person to cause mayhem with.
Now, in the day since the shooting, there have been plenty of senseless deaths and acts of violence that you have not been outraged over, that you have not been whipped into an artificial frenzy about. You have shown less outrage about the massacres in Syria than you have about the shooting in Colorado.
You have not been driven to post or comment about the hundreds of acts of domestic violence, dozens of alcohol-related deaths, several stabbing deaths and black lung deaths, and the hundreds of rapes and obestity-related deaths that happened yesterday.
The difference between Colorado and those other senseless deaths and acts of violence? Aside from your lack of outrage over them, the big difference is that a Colorado-style event happens once every year or two. All the others happen every day, 365 days a year.
So yes, let's have that "adult conversation" on the topic. Such a conversation would put the matter in proper perspective and put the blame on the individual responsible, and look to improve how we as a nation identify and deal with the mental illness that causes this behavior and yes, maybe even put controls in place to keep such people from having easy access to dangerous items (which might have also helped in the Virginia Tech shootings). I look forward to reading such a diary, instead of knee-jerk villification of innocent, decent, moral people who just happen to own an inanimate object you disapprove of. If I wanted irrational knee-jerk villification as a response to serious issues, I'd watch Fox News.
Jbou posted a diary with an interesting title: "Always take the opportunity a national tragedy presents to smear your enemies with blood." Are Dkos readers the sort of people to smear good people (liberal and conservative) who happen to own guns or support gun ownership, or are they going to discuss it like adults?