If the shooter didn't have the assault weapon, he just would have flown a plane into the building or something.
Signed,
thedoctor12/Pariah/G-troll (they share the same lame rationalizations)
I could just become a follower of the ruling ideology, swap political beliefs in an instant when the other guy is going to win, and begin to use terms made up by politicians who clearly do not understand what words like 'assault' and 'weapon' mean individually and show no realization of the redundancy of putting them together.
People use the 'assault weapon' term to describe guns that look scary too them. In functionality, those guns are no different than their wood grained brethren. The very same guns that have been mass produced and sold to the public for about 150 years. Hell, you used to be able to buy them in hardware stores. Which goes to where our real problem is. We have a societal problem that is elevating hatred and violence no matter the weapon.
I've read several articles where the shooter's ex-wife said that he was mentally unstable or ill. I've yet to read an article where he was diagnosed and/or treated. I'm all for not letting the mentally unstable get guns. It should come up on a background check. But it seems like it doesn't (and that needs to be changed). And in this situation it seems like it wouldn't have popped up on him. If we'd dedicate some time and effort to identifying and treating the mentally ill, a by-product would be that they wouldn't be able to buy guns to use when they snapped.
I grew up around guns. I don't fear the idea of them, but I do fear the guns themselves. That's not to say that I won't or don't shoot them. That fear makes sure that I'm terribly safe in my handling of them. If anyone says that they aren't afraid of guns, keep your distance from them because they're gonna get you injured or worse by being careless with a gun. I've seen it in people I know who weren't raised with guns but became Libertarian gun nuts in adulthood. All of the people who were hunters and such when I was a kid who themselves grew up with guns as part of their daily lives never had a gun go off when they didn't want it to. But these new to it fucknuts all have 'accidental emmisions' (their term, not mine) where their guns shot a live round when they didn't realize that it was loaded.
We've lost our common goddamn sense when it comes to guns and people in general. Our society promotes this violence by making all the other sick fucks realize that they'll get all the attention they want if they'd just shoot up a school, mall, nightclub, etc. Their names will be up on the 24 hours news networks every few minutes telling the world. Making guns the bad guy here is an easy way out just as it's easy to blame all the Muslims. There's a deeper, societal ill here that we're ignoring for the quick fix answers.
