Seriously, I’ve already heard the comments about the police and faculty not responding quickly enough or aggressively enough.
Bullshit.
If you’re the police called to the scene of a shooting, you simply don’t lock down an entire campus of 26,000 when you discover you have what appears to be a simple homicide.
You rope off the area, and begin your investigation. You assume that the killer is acting, well, like a typical killer…and is probably running scared, looking for someplace to hole up, dispose of any incriminating evidence, etc., and figure you’ll find the shooter within a week or so, and you’ll arrest him without incident, and take him in for questioning, blah blah.
(Which, judging from most newspaper reports on cases I’ve followed even casually, that’s about how it works.)
Unless you’re The Psychic Cop, naturally.
In any case, kudos to the shooter for doing a good job (Hey, didn’t your parents always tell you that ‘any job worth doing is worth doing well’? Why apply a shade of meaning to the word “any”, huh?), and also to the police on scene for swift and efficient handling of the matter.
Also in any case, I can see the gun debate coming, and my feeling is that…for sheer number of ‘inflicted fatalities on innocents’ per annum, we should ban both cars and/or alcohol LONG before we consider banning firearms.
Oh, and thank god the shooter used pistols, so we can leave the ‘assault weapons’ out of it…not that we will.
Perhaps not the most popular but one of the more honest ones . . . and that can be respected.
I see that gun debate coming back as well. The old claims will be made and comparisons on boths sides of the argument will be presumed. Both sides will be missing the point as each tries to sway to favor of the American populace.
The point is – How do we reduce violence in our society?
The problem is that we can’t. With 400,000,000 people or so even a 1 in 400,000,000 chance of someone blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City means that one will try (and possibly succeed . . . Oh wait). With a population that large small the normally small percentages of psychotic activity that occurs in populations naturally will be magnified accordingly.
The argument against guns is that if he didn’t have guns he wouldn’t have been able to kill as many people in so short a time so efficiently. That’s basically true. But the absence of guns would not have prevented him from killing people if that’s what he wanted to do. He would have found another way to do what he wanted to do.
The counter argument is the one that you make about cars and alcohol. Alcohol I can understand as it is a very common reason for fatal car accidents. Fatal car accidents are much less common outside of alcohol.
The problem with the comparison to cars is that cars have a use beyond inflicting wounds over distance. They have practical daily uses that can vary in nature. The nature of a fire arm is to project a missile across a distance to strike a person or object and inflict damage. There is no other use for one.
Having said both of those arguments – I own guns and would like to keep them. My guns will never be used except for sporting and (hopefully never) for self-defense. This is one of those debates that I believe will never be properly resolved.