Hi Allan

Means facilitate ends. The systemic ability of a mentally unstable person to acquire a gun expedited murder. Without the gun, 26 people would be alive. The ability of some to retaliate does not resurrect the dead or restore good. An alternate fact the right ought to consider.

The fact that an element of a system failed does not mean that the system cannot be corrected or improved. Your argument both circular and a downward spiral.

I would lean towards “[having] no confidence that additional laws and procedures will be treated any differently”. Disposition towards laws and regulations suggests a psychological factor. The conceptualization of guns/violence as an appropriate solution to problems is evident in America’s Wild West myth and fact as well as KKK and homophobic acts of the past.

That said it remains the problem of USA citizens to work out their own solution. I merely hope the mentality of violence as a solution stops below the USA/Canada border. I much prefer reconciliation through changing attitudes, on both sides, as a solution to social alienation and division.

Cheers

Dale

Hello Dale,
Sorry but I must disagree with you on at least two points…
(1) A murder in which a gun is used is always a murder committed by a person. Guns are inanimate objects and on their own will do nothing, literally nothing. In this specific tragedy if the perpetrator had not had a gun it is highly likely that he would have found some other method of murder. Thus to try to portray this murder as a gun problem is at best misdirected.
(2) It is an indisputable fact that the perpetrator would have continued killing until confronted with force. The first person to confront the killer was a civilian, not the police. If this civilian, also with a gun, had not acted it is a certainty that many more people would have been murdered. This may be one of those alternative facts that the left wing has so much difficulty understanding and accepting.

You do seem to elude to another important point. That being what the US Air Force did not do. If the USAF had done what it should have done than would existing gun control laws have been effective in preventing this tragedy? If yes, than more and tougher gun control laws are not the answer. For if the existing laws and procedures are not being followed than we have no confidence that additional laws and procedures will be treated any differently.

Sincerely,
Allan

The US Airforce failed to fulfill its social obligation to the citizens of the USA . It did not report their experience with the gunman’s deranged state of mind and thereby is complicit in facilitating murder. What little restrictive regulation the USA has was compromised through negligence enabling murder. Hopefully this travesty will play out in the courts.

More troubling is the response of the USA President. “[if other gun shooters were not available] instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead.” I am not convinced that the 26 dead would have wanted more rather than fewer guns at the church. There were too many guns there. But more than that, in the minds of both the killer and the confronters there was a common mental trait. It is the psycho-social paradigm that suggests guns (violence) as an appropriate individual response to issues perceived in the community. The President of the USA supported violence as a social solution.

From a Canadian perspective, we cannot fix this foreign issue, it is not ours to fix. We can work diligently to build and maintain a wall of critical thought that separates USA psychosocial mentality from gaining dominance in the Canadian cultural psyche.

How many times do we have to keep on saying that it is not guns that kill people, it is people that kill people. Tougher gun control laws will not reduce the homicide rates, but will shift the weapons used from guns to some other weapon such as home-made bombs. Tougher gun control laws is like putting a bandage on the forehead of a mentally ill person, and will be ridiculously ineffective. The illness will still be present and untreated, thus the suffering will only continue.