As with most gun control folks...
Berkowitz said “young people are losing direction and don’t value life.”
How is gun control going to affect young people and their values and directions.
I'll apply my political stance to the argument:
It all comes down to personal responsibility. The person who uses the gun to commit a crime is to be blamed. Not the gun. I don't believe the government should limit things like this. Just punish the people who use the guns to hurt others. Let's say the guy in Colorado couldn't get guns...what would have stopped him from filling up a cargo van with gasoline and other flammables and driving into a crowd before setting it on fire? There are lots of ways to hurt others, let's not miss the point and go after the tool instead of the tool user.
Just my two cents.
The thing is, to make it much more difficult for people to cause the sort of damage the shooters did.....filling a van with gasoline wouldn't do the damage that the automatic weapons did. Like McVeigh did in oklahoma, with fertilizer, the authorities learned to put limits on how much of a certain substance one can legally buy. For eg: if you don't have a farm, what do you need with 500 lbs of fertlizer? You don't need it so you can't buy it. Same as compounds used in making c4...you can buy most of them, but the key ingredient you just can't get or make.
The big issue with gun control in the US is the NRA's motto that ANY control is too much. For example: a state tried to impose a mandatory 7 day waiting period before being able to take your gun home...they went ballistic over that...how dare anyone say you have to WAIT for your gun....fucking lunatics. The 7 day waiting period was so that a complete and thorough background check could be completed via state and federal sources. If this had been in place in colorado, I remember reading they would have discovered he was seeing a shrink because he'd put in medical reimbursement forms to pay for his treatment.....that would have prevented him from obtaining the weapons thereby stopping him from shooting up the theatre.
Ok, maybe not prevented it entirely, but surely made it much harder for him to get the kind of weapons he was easily able to.
The one factor that is undeniable: the country with the easiest access to weapons has the most deaths due to those weapons. It is so simple a child can understand it. There is no arguing it, no debating it, no discussion or avoiding it. YOu want to have free and easy access to assault weapons? You're going to have mass killings...end of story.
A good example is: people are people. YOU make it easy to put guns into the hands of those who would use them, they'll use them. Just like if you put 5 lbs of crack in front of a crack addict, they'll end up smoking it all.........
The motto "if you make it criminal to own a gun, then only criminals will have guns" is true. Then you enact laws that state if you are in possession of a gun, you go to jail forever....problem solved.
