Lather, you know as well as I do that no court has ever upheld the meaning of the Second Amendment as protecting the right of individuals to possess weapons. So if you want to discuss this less emotionally, perhaps dropping the idea of Constitutional entitlements might be reasonable. And along the same line of thought, there are lots of western, industrialized nations where the government seems to act acceptably without all its citizens being armed to the teeth, just because that is what democracies do. To me it seems actually clinically paranoid to imagine that the government sweep us all up.
I think that several children being killed at once is certainly massively destructive, but do not insist on killing assault weapons "weapons of mass destruction". I would note, however, that these weapons are clearly not designed for anything except killing a lot of people all at the same time, and that their existence seems to be what has motivated American police--individually and collectively--to campaign for more restrictive gun laws. I think it is insane that the criminals are more heavily armed than the police, in fact. And it would hardly make sense to shoot so many bullets into a deer, for example, that the meat is obliterated. Didn't we already have effective hunting weapons?
I acknowledge that you despise violence, and if only people like you had access to guns, I would not be so alarmed. However, that is not the case. Regarding classroom violence, you are using that old NRA argument, "guns don't kill people, people do." Interestingly enough, in countries where everyone isn't armed, fewer people are killed by guns, so there seems to be some correlation between guns and violence. The teenage years are very difficult; children are impulsive during this period because of developmental factors. Certainly, most reasonable people could agree that arming them to the teeth makes their impulsive urges fatal in ways that fistfights do not. Will your daughter attend high school fully armed? If you look carefully at the rest of your arguments, you are essentially stating that in order to be safe, you must be ready to attack in a lethal manner, so I am wondering how you will handle the whole school thing. I would prefer that we have more restrictive gun laws, so that children are less likely to be in possession of these weapons. I can tell you that it is scary to drop your child at school and wonder every morning whether you are saying goodbye for the last time. I don't think I should have to live this way.
You don't seem to like the Centers for Disease Control, and have expressed this feeling before, but you have never explained how they could take violence statistics gathered independently from the 26 industrialized nations and skew them without gathering considerable attention. Has the NRA challenged these statistics? |
