Another 2d Amendment Circus

Image courtesy of Stockvault.

Author’s Note: This post involves discussion about another mass shooting at a public school in the United States. It’s a downer. It’s also not friendly to canned responses from gun enthusiasts. If you’re not up to any of it, I understand. I’ve been avoiding the news on this myself for a while. Sit this one out.

As the linked story above suggests, there’s been another mass shooting at a school, this time in Texas. I don’t particularly like writing about this stuff, especially since it brings up how ignorant people can be about gun laws in my country. This might be a big part of why we keep generating victims of gun violence without doing anything to curb it. That is, our gun laws are so convoluted and data so scarce that it’s hard to figure out what to do.

Right now, some of our high school students have more combat experience than veterans.
The usual suspects are getting blamed on both sides. This happens before anyone knows how an alleged perpetrator obtains his or her weapons. It’s like nobody cares about facts when the 2d Amendment is on the line.

My government’s constitution is getting treated like a suicide pact. We can’t figure out a way to prevent school kids from getting firearms, so nothing gets done. It’s gotten bad enough that the school kids who speak out get seen as the enemy. Right after this last shooting got announced, I heard a gun enthusiast say, “Damn. Just when the Parkland idiots got out of the news.”

I don’t know why there’s hostility towards people who don’t want to get shot.
It’s a public safety concern for kids, no matter who dismisses them as being political collateral. My interest in this exists solely because I see them getting ignored left and right. It’s like nobody cares so long as they’re not getting shot at.

I get that changing the course of constitutional law is hard; I know exactly what it takes to make a new Amendment. It would require 2/3 of Congress to write and agree on one, and it would require 3/4 of state legislatures to sign off on it. Worse, people throw out all sorts of ideas which drown out more sensible ones.

What it really boils down to is that we need a better way of making people personally accountable for their personal firearms. Having a weapon is a responsibility, and somewhere along the line we as a nation have forgotten that. Now, people who don’t know what a trigger looks like can own a gun. I’m not even making this up.

Or even better, how about just making sure the public has information as to why these things happen? We’re not even doing that. Every time one of these shootings happens, opinions run around more rampant than facts. Who knows? It might even turn out that easy access to firearms isn’t the main driving force in these shootings. Maybe it’s some hidden factor that we have no idea exists. None of us knows until we all look.

But hey, we can still ignore the issue for now. Not enough shootings happen. We might get lucky and have a reduction in mass school shootings. Most shootings still might be limited to acts of suicide. And even if another tragic shooting happens, odds are it won’t affect anyone you personally know.