No words suffice except: Enough is enough.
Please, please, please keep the conversation in line with stated Forum Rules.
My thoughts and prayers are with the families.
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I don’t even know what to say anymore. I’m heartbroken and angry.
We can do better.
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I’m heartbroken and angry too. I have no words.
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We have to start somewhere, even if it takes a century to rein in the gazillion guns out there. They said it was hopeless after Sandy Hook and that was so many years ago. Today is the first day of the future.
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National Rifle Association annual meeting is tomorrow in Houston.
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I have no words. I have questions, but I can’t even manage to put them into words. What is happening???
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I want to share the words of Amanda Gorman:
“It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again and do nothing isn’t just insanity—it’s inhumanity.”
“Schools scared to death.
The truth is, one education under desks,
Stooped low from bullets;
That plunge when we ask
Where our children
Shall live
& how
& if“
“ What might we be if only we tried.
What might we become if only we’d listen.”
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Nobody and I mean nobody is ok with this, much less 100% ok with this. I believe we have a mental health issue or just pure evil. Unfortunately, mental health is a very tricky difficult issue to deal with due to HIPPA. Maybe we need to look at HIPPA laws and carve out some exceptions.
As far as gun laws, I also believe that is not as cut and dried as many believe. Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country yet every weekend Chicago has 10 to 15 shootings. Most of those guns are not of the legal variety. Take away all the guns, and the black market on illegal guns will sky rocket from an already active black market.
The evil criminals will still get the guns, just like they get the illegal drugs or got the illegal alcohol during prohibition.So you take away the 2nd amendment rights of millions of law abiding gun owners and hunters yet the criminals will still get the guns. Many feel they should have the right to defend themselves in these situations.
We also need to look at security within our schools.
This can’t keep happening, totally agree with that. I just don’t believe there is a simple solution. For just once our congress needs to get together and have a real discussion in a bipartisan way to understand the unintended consequences. It’s absolutely necessary to work together to protect our children.
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The good guy a gun strategy is not working!
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The Chicago example is ridiculous. Chicago os a city surrounded by juridictions with lax gun laws that anyone can get to in a short train ride. The fact is STATES with stricter gun laws have FAR fewer incidents of mass shootings than STATES with fewer gun laws.
The mental health talking point also makes no sense. Other countries have similar mental health illness rates, many of them with even less access to treatment, and dont have kids being slaughtered in schools. The difference is not the US mental health situation, the difference here is the easy access to guns.
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There are very strict gun control laws in NYC (far from Buffalo) and although there are shootings, the rate is much, much, MUCH lower than in other big cities.
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Would the right be amenable to (and which would they prefer?):
- fed funding for armed police in every school
- arm every teacher who wants to be
- raising the age for legal gun purchase
- putting a bar code on every bullet and allowing civil penalties to be imposed on the original buyer
- mental health check (and relaxation of whatever hipaa reg) before every legal purchase of gun
- national registry of all people with violent mental disorders (sorry don’t know how to phrase) not sure what this would accomplish but maybe it would lead to more treatment?
PS - I just re-read the New Yorker interview with Peter Lanza and it is perplexing. Doesn’t seem like much would have helped except forced medication.
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Anger just doesn’t even begin to cover how I’m feeling right now. There is something so fundamentally broken about a country that accepts this again and again and again. This doesn’t happen other places to the degree it happens here. And I don’t believe there is the will to make it different. I’m furious.
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I’ll be honest, I really don’t know what the right would be ok with. I identify with center right on fiscal or similar issues and center left on social issues. I really try to listen to all sides and by doing that you come to the realization that all sides have reasonable concerns and points. The extremes of both sides are loud, vocal and inhibit real discussion and compromise. I come from a family with close members who have served in House of Representatives and attorney general. They served in a time when politics was truly about governing for the people and compromise was expected and they worked hard to compromise. Unfortunately we have gotten away from that and it is not serving us well.
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There are mental health issues across the world. Only here in the United States do we have this problem. Hmmm.
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The New Yorker article was unbiased (in my opinion) as it focused on the facts of killer’s life.
The guns were legally purchased and no law would have stopped the killer’s mom from letting him use.
The killer refused meds and mom kept him home schooled. Maybe the mom was a little over protective but professionals were not alarmed enough to let her try her way (i.e. no meds/home schooling).
Maybe more monitoring of the millions of websites and chats would have revealed his murdering tendencies.
A bit naive of me, but I think some of this is due to our “rich” society in the Newtown case. The killer did not have to work to live. In poorer society, would likely have been forced to go out of house to make a living.
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I actually kind of like this idea. I think we can add to that and maybe hold the manufacturers and the sellers liable for wrongful death - why not, they have done it to cigarette companies and everybody else. I’ll add congressman who repeatedly vote against measures to meaningfully combat gun violence. Because right now whenever they talk about combating gun violence, all the burden is put on those who want nothing to do with guns, so as to not interfere with the so-called rights of the gun owners. So that the gun owners can own arsenals to assault small nations, and open carry assault rifles at wal-mart the rest of us have to submit to metal detectors, bag checks, clear bags, no bags, pat downs, etc. Why does the vast majority have to suffer endless inconvenience and endless massacres for a loud vocal minority? Why have schools become prisons and still these massacres happen? What’s next, strip searches of every student and worker on the way into every school? We continue to turn more and more of the world into a prison to “protect us all” against the very very few because of that loud vocal minority. Seems we’re going about this wrong way.
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It’s up to 21 dead according to one report. RIP. This madness must stop:
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Nobody is ok with this? There are certainly those who are ok with this. For years they have done nothing to improve the situation and they refuse to even admit that guns are the problem. For the past several years their latest tactic is that they have tried to deflect and claim mental health is the issue, while sending thoughts and prayers. Fact of the matter is, I went to school from kindergarten through 12th grade (not counting college and graduate school). Not a single building had metal detectors, there were no armed police officers patrolling the halls, there were no armed teachers trying to turn the schools into a wild west shooting gallery where everybody is going to get gunned down in the crossfire. There were no clear bags. There was no - you cant have lockers because you might use it to stockpile weapons. There were no bag checks. There were no trauma inducing lockdown drills. Know what else didn’t happen when I was in school from K through 12? There were not mass shootings in schools every other day. So what changed? The prevalence and ease of access to guns. For that, you might want to look at the history of the NRA in the 70s, 80s and 90s. You know what, if it was truly a mental health issue, a person with mental health issues and an assault rifle can kill 1-100 people in a shooting spree in a matter of minutes. A person with nothing but his fists, isn’t going to kill very many people.
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