Guns are inanimate tools. They can be useful or destructive, just like any other tool. You cannot ask an inanimate object to bare the responsibility of a conscious, violent act. They are not alive. They cannot think. They cannot act of their own accord.
The occurrence of mental illness in an individual is often difficult to gauge. Psychology is a soft science and therefore subject to pitfalls aplenty: Psychiatrists have their biases, Big Pharma has pills to push, and the fickle nature of the mind itself make the task fairly daunting at best sometimes. How And even when it's glaringly apparent they suffer so, the afflicted often heal from or learn to cope with said afflictions. Would that not make them recovered and therefore eligible for a gun license? Or should they be condemned the rest of their lives for something anyone could be afflicted with at anytime?
With all this being said, there are a few points I would like to make:
First and foremost, more gun control laws will not help us curb the violence we are seeing. Why? Because people who dedicate themselves to committing acts of mass violence are just that, dedicated! If you take away their guns, they will find other avenues to express their anger and hatred!
Furthermore, good luck trying to predict who will and who will not be capable of such things. Most people of anti-social persuasion are very good at camouflaging their disdain for humanity. That and mental status tends to change dramatically throughout one's life time. You cannot possibly hope to regulate anything based on such a capricious condition. Don't even get me started on the unwarranted stereotype that most of the mentally ill are violent...
I think we need to concentrate on the psychology of the matter itself more so than anything else. Its all too easy to blame the tool used to enact the violence and not the individual and the society that helped to shape said individual.
This is just my two cents and I do not have the hubris to try to present this as an end all, be all solution. There are no easy answers to the questions "Why did this happen?" and "How can we prevent it from happening again?" but I do not think the answer will be found in the confines of the state and its regulatory powers.
So lets stop blaming our actions on inanimate objects and have a real conversation about our collective pathology for once. It begins with being conscious about who we are and asking, "why we are so fucking angry, narcissistic, and disconnected?" If we did that, then we would all have to do some hardcore soul searching on a collective level. But our country is too brash and obnoxious to even fathom that sort of introspection. So we will remain blameless while guns run amuck shooting random people in the streets...
The occurrence of mental illness in an individual is often difficult to gauge. Psychology is a soft science and therefore subject to pitfalls aplenty: Psychiatrists have their biases, Big Pharma has pills to push, and the fickle nature of the mind itself make the task fairly daunting at best sometimes. How And even when it's glaringly apparent they suffer so, the afflicted often heal from or learn to cope with said afflictions. Would that not make them recovered and therefore eligible for a gun license? Or should they be condemned the rest of their lives for something anyone could be afflicted with at anytime?
With all this being said, there are a few points I would like to make:
First and foremost, more gun control laws will not help us curb the violence we are seeing. Why? Because people who dedicate themselves to committing acts of mass violence are just that, dedicated! If you take away their guns, they will find other avenues to express their anger and hatred!
Furthermore, good luck trying to predict who will and who will not be capable of such things. Most people of anti-social persuasion are very good at camouflaging their disdain for humanity. That and mental status tends to change dramatically throughout one's life time. You cannot possibly hope to regulate anything based on such a capricious condition. Don't even get me started on the unwarranted stereotype that most of the mentally ill are violent...
I think we need to concentrate on the psychology of the matter itself more so than anything else. Its all too easy to blame the tool used to enact the violence and not the individual and the society that helped to shape said individual.
This is just my two cents and I do not have the hubris to try to present this as an end all, be all solution. There are no easy answers to the questions "Why did this happen?" and "How can we prevent it from happening again?" but I do not think the answer will be found in the confines of the state and its regulatory powers.
So lets stop blaming our actions on inanimate objects and have a real conversation about our collective pathology for once. It begins with being conscious about who we are and asking, "why we are so fucking angry, narcissistic, and disconnected?" If we did that, then we would all have to do some hardcore soul searching on a collective level. But our country is too brash and obnoxious to even fathom that sort of introspection. So we will remain blameless while guns run amuck shooting random people in the streets...
