I think the thing everybody is missing is that California has the toughest anti-gun laws in the country. Maybe New York is tougher. But in spite of all the anti-gun legislation, propaganda, Antifa anti-violence rallies (hehehe), progressive politics, repressive thought control, this guy had a gun. He easily obtained a gun.
And bad guys, in France, the UK, Germany will always be able to obtain or manufacture a gun. It's not like a gun is difficult to make, especially if you aren't shooting a particular target.
And there are much more dangerous things. Alcohol, motor vehicles, food. These all are convenient weapons, sometimes voluntarily employed by the victims themselves. Shall we outlaw delivery trucks because killers ran them through crowds and used them to contain explosives to blow up large buildings?
When will we learn the people kill by any means available? Would we feel better if the guy in California blew the nightclub up with a bomb? Or poisoned the drinks? Success! He didn't use a gun. I hear in the UK the stylish way to kill is a nice big knife.
Things otherwise useful and good can be used to kill. The solution is not to eliminate the things, but to get a handle on the people. Mental health care is a disaster in the US, as veterans who gave their lives for their country (all veterans sign a promissory note for their lives. Only some have that note cashed in) have been abandoned by a country that owes them its life. Just fixing that problem would preclude incidents like California where a man trained in the use of a gun goes rogue for whatever reason.
But the sad fact is this. In an open society where freedom is more important than safety, these things WILL happen. Lacking armed guards, active surveillance of every square inch of the country and screening checkpoints at ridiculously frequent intervals, and an atmosphere of "rat your neighbor out," some killings are inevitable.
Part of our problem is that when there's a killing three thousand miles away, you know about it before the smell of gunpowder is out of the air. So we get a very wrong impression of how common these killings are. They are very rare. You'll win the lottery before you witness one of these atrocities. This was happening double or triple in the 1850s and nobody knew about it.
We accept without a shrug that 40,000 a year are killed in automobile accidents, from the flu, or from Tylenol overdoses, yes, that's three times more deaths from those three than from guns. Hell, that's life we say. Scientific American reports
Quote:
In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published the famous "To Err Is Human" report, which dropped a bombshell on the medical community by reporting that up to 98,000 people a year die because of mistakes in hospitals. The number was initially disputed, but is now widely accepted by doctors and hospital officials 2014 and quoted ubiquitously in the media.
In 2010, the Office of Inspector General for Health and Human Services said that bad hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 patients in Medicare alone in a given year.
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Hell let's outlaw doctors and maybe the gunmen will die before they kill. The fact is that life isn't safe.
You know, just about all these killings are done by people under 35. Let's outlaw people under 35. Kill 'em all so they don't kill anyone. I've been listening to the Censorbot in Borderlands 2 too much.....