Needing an Answer

Posted on by Nicho

Recently news was made about the number of shootings that have occurred on school grounds since the Sandy Hook, CT incident. The reason for pointing it out was that absolutely nothing has been done to solve the problem. That really should’ve been the end of the story.

But it wasn’t. 

Now I’m going to do my best not to offend anyone because I do know more than one person who believes wholeheartedly in their Second Amendment rights. How do I know this? Because of their predictably-defensive reaction to discredit anything and therefore everything about the original article. I guess their main point was that since the article wasn’t 100% clear about where they got their data from, that absolutely none of it can be counted as evidence of a problem. Some even claimed the article was a lie based in lies, and served in a lie casserole dish, drizzled with lie sauce.

I did my best to let this go. After all, everyone is entitled to their opinion. But I cannot help but wonder how much is too much death equated with guns before at least a healthy margin of these folks finally say, “Hey, you know what? This is fucked. We should really address this so that people stop dying.” Because I’ll give you a hint, gun-toters: That’s all the rest of us are asking for. To act as though these school shootings are some kind of overblown statistic used to further a political agenda is intellectually dishonest as best. But since that study didn’t illustrate the need to start regulating guns a tad bit more, I did a small bit a research. Basically, I used a news site’s search engine to look up shootings that may have been otherwise avoided if better regulation or even more cursory instruction and precautions had been in place. (Keeping in mind that one of these incidents occurred at a Conceal-And-Carry class.) This is by no means a complete list – but it covers only the last 14 months or so.

Now I know some of you are just dying to use the same old time-tested strawman arguments. Do yourself a favor and save it. Are you really going to sit there and discredit each and every one of these stories as somehow flawed, thereby justifying your entrenched position? There is a problem here and it needs to be addressed. I’m personally not looking to have all guns taken away from everyone. But I do think that there’s a better way to address gun violence than simply adding more guns to an already clearly under-educated and sometimes deranged population. I would hope that this is a simple enough concept that can be agreed to by reasonable people of all political beliefs. So stop thinking about your personal gun-owning rights so damned hard and help us come up with a solution for this.