As I read through my facebook postings yesterday and today, I kept wanting to yell at the people who used the CT tragedy as an excuse to advocate for more guns in society. Most of the people who were posting this drivel were people I went to high school with and who never left Kansas. They are the epitome of what Franks was talking about in "What's the matter with Kansas."
Here are the memes that seem to be prevelant in their postings and my refutation of their stupidity.
Guns don't kill people, evil people kill people.
Even accepting that this is true, should not the government have a responsibility to keep guns out of the hands of evil people. Limiting the availablity of guns, especially handguns and large magazine weapons would mitigate the damage done by a madman. This would be a start and a national conversation on how to keep guns out of evil people's hands needs to be undertaken.
If the teachers had been armed this would not have happened.
Even well trained police officers hit innocent bystanders during shootouts. During the standoff/shooting in August at the Empire State Building, nine of the victims were hit by police bullets. These were officers who are trained to respond to the stressful situation of facing an armed individuals and they were unable to prevent wild shots from hitting innocents. An individual with less training is even more likely to shoot wild. There is also the case that in a shooting, there is a lot of confusion and someone hearing shot and seeing an armed person, would probably shoot first and might hit another responder rather than the perpetrator.
The school shooting happened because we took God out of the schools
How about I let you stipulate where we insert God into society and I get to pick which God we insert. We live in a secular society with multiple religions. Unless we are willing to force everyone to believe in the same God, something that the first amendment has a problem with, this is just looking back with rose colored glasses at the mythical world of "Leave it to Beaver."
Enough ranting I will end with: Why is it when someone abuses their access to a gun and kills a lot of people we blame the individual and argue against taking guns away from anyone, but when they abuse their access to welfare, it is the system's fault and we should take welfare away from everyone?
