Mass Shootings – Causes and Fixes

 

Mass Shootings – Causes and Fixes

 The frustration, sympathy and anger after every mass shooting in the country is understandable.  Unfortunately, these heart-felt emotions are seized upon by politicians who know very little about firearms, and who have their own agendas.  Marches on Washington or other cities are whipped up in the angry, but clueless sheep that constitute much of our young public.  Useless laws are conjured up in congress to address the public outcry

 Rather than increasing security at our soft targets such as schools, and concentrating on mental health issues that cause mass shooters to go off the track, these demonstrations are aimed (sic) against an inanimate object, the gun used in the shootings.  This is comparable to a drunk driver killing people in a crowd, and blaming the car.

 Many of the shootings in the country occur in jurisdictions that have the most draconian anti-gun laws, - California, New York State, Illinois.  It has been statistically proven that concocting laws against guns as inanimate objects has no meaning.  Neither do reactionary laws in response to anecdotal events.  Recent crazed shooters were 18 years old, so pass laws making 21 the minimum age to purchase AR-15’s.  How absurd!

 Let’s look once again at the numbers.  Our population is in the U.S. is about 335 million people. It is estimated that there are somewhere around 400 million guns in the country, and 20 million AR-15 style .223 rifles.  Every time the anti-gun lobby and anti-gun legislators, parroted by a clueless Joe Biden make threatening moves against second amendment gun rights, citizens that otherwise normally would not buy a gun, flock to sporting goods stores to arm themselves, and further increase the number of guns in the country.

 So, puny incremental anti-gun laws against classes of firearms are inadequate against the shear number of guns in the country, and the attitudes of many gun owners about their “cold dead hands”.  Inventing meaningless terminology like “assault weapons” or “weapons of war” for one-shot at-time semi-automatic rifles and pistols just obfuscates the issue in the minds of a gullible and ovine public.

 Why do we have so many mass shootings, and what can be done about it, if passing more anti-gun laws does not work?  What is wrong with our society?  We seem to have a mass shooting at a school or a church or a super market, or other such soft target, as often as every week.

 What happened to our country?  It’s not the guns.  We’ve always had guns.  Guns are endemic to the American ethos and culture.  We just used them as the tools that they were intended to be, and not against each other, or to enter a school and start killing innocent children.

 In the past, we were raised with guns.  A Red Ryder BB gun at age eight.  A .22 rifle at age twelve.  Then shotguns, higher caliber rifles and pistols when I got older.  And we carried these firearms around in our cars and trucks, and didn’t even think twice about it.  They were tools, for hunting, or for target practice.  Never in a million years would the thought arise to turn a gun on another human being.

 But it was different world.  We went to church.  We respected our parents and teachers and the police.  We obeyed the laws.  We were taught to be good citizens by the paragons of our communities.

 Elements of our society lost being decent, God-fearing people, somewhere along the way, and lost their ethical and moral integrity.  Maybe it was related to the reaction to the second world war and the movement away from religion and toward secularization.   Maybe it started with the assassinations in the 1960’s of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, and the world-wide movement toward anarchy.  Maybe it was related to the resurgence of socialism and communism being taught in our universities, with insufficient stress on the corrosive nature of those philosophies.

 And more recently, this ethical and moral degradation has been hastened by the ready availability of destructive anarchic material and pornography readily available to young minds on the internet, and the rise of “wokeness”, political correctness and “cancel culture” as active facets of popular thought.  Marxist groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa fan the flames of violence, and people like George Soros fund it.  

 Many Americans, at least in “fly over country” retain solid American values.  They still use firearms as the tools for which they were intended.  But unfortunately, some younger Americans have lost touch with what America is all about, and enough of these are disenchanted or lawless or “woke” enough to riot violently in the streets and cause destruction, or to pick up a weapon and go on a shooting spree.

 Ray Gruszecki

A Hot June 12, 2022