IT'S STILL ABOUT THE LAWS

In yet another horrific incident, a gunman marches into an Amish school and kills three little girls execution style before turning the gun on himself. Two other girls have died in the hospital, and two others are critical. This comes less than a week after an armed man killed a 16 year old girl in Colorado (the same state where Columbine happened).

There are people on the BBC news site (among others) who claim that given the mental state of the killer in this incident, no gun control laws could have prevented this violence. Aren't these people completely missing the point? To me, they sound like the naysayers who say that you cannot pin down a particular hurricane as being caused due to global warming. But that's not the point. In the first place, maybe you can and maybe you can't. Secondly, one is 'only' talking about the average increase in violent and unpredictable weather events because of global warming, which is well-established. Likewise, gun control has to do with the average tendency of people to walk into schools and open fire on children.

I personally believe that the US should implement gun control laws right away and see what happens. If anything, how could it make matters worse? I also think that easy access to guns definitely has to do with an increased probability of using them, at least on the basis of human nature. How many people who contemplated suicide would have actually done it had they had quick and easy access to things they could kill themselves with? Quite a few in my opinion, who did not. Of course, those who had really went over the top did it anyway using whatever they could. But there would definitely have been a reasonable proportion of those who were close to the top but not over it yet, who did not do it in the throes of impulsiveness, and then calmed down because of sheer passage of time before abandoning such an idea.

Obviously, even a demented would-be killer would have a harder time carrying out his act if he actually found it difficult to lay his hands on a weapon. Several changes can happen in the sheer amount of time that he would need to find such high-tech guns: he might change his mind because he actually thinks about what he is going to do, he might think clearly about the consequences and get dissuaded because of the legal action and death he may face, or he may get deterred by the sheer inability to do what he wants to. Any one of these possibilities might occur simply because of the passage of time. As they say, time can heal many things.

But the US government, by making access to weapons so easy, is not giving time a chance to do its job and calm or change troubled minds, and is giving instant vent to disturbed and impulsive psyches. It's quite clear that there is almost no legitimate reason for not implementing the laws, except as always, the political interests and propaganda of lobbyists who work for the economic interests of gun manufacturers.