Washington High School Shooting Is Another Sign Of America’s Warped Attitude On GunsWashington High School Shooting Is Another Sign Of America’s Warped Attitude On Guns
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When as a country do we say enough is enough?
When do we get tired of seeing news reports of our children being rushed out of a high school while armed police clear a school from an armed gunman, usually another student?
When do we decide that the right to own a gun is not more important than the right to live without fear of some gun nut deciding he wants to take out his frustrations about life, about girls treating him badly, about some other perceived slight, on not only himself but on innocent people?
Personally I had enough a long long time ago.
Another of the students shot in the Marysville, Washington high school cafeteria this past Friday died of her wounds Sunday night. That makes three deaths from the incident, including Jaylen Fryberg himself, from a self-inflicted gunshot. Three other students remain hospitalized, two in critical condition, one in serious condition. One of his victims was his own cousin, who he shot in the head.
Fryberg, by all accounts a popular student, just stood up in the cafeteria and began shooting. Apparently he was depressed and upset because he could not win the love of a girl. The weapon used in the shooting spree was apparently legally owned by his father, and Fryberg took it without his father knowing. His parents did however, buy Fryberg his own hunting rifle months before for a birthday gift as he was an avid hunter.
You see the problem here and in almost every case that we’ve all heard of and should be tired of hearing repeated, like in the elementary school in Sandy Hook or the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado or the University of California Santa Barbara shooting, or too many others, is that access to guns is way too easy. And all the old arguments that guns don’t kill people, people do, and that these people were all mentally unstable cases, don’t matter. The fact is time after time the headlines keep being written that say yet another public shooting has taken place by someone somewhere and regardless of their motivations or mental states, the shoters had access to guns and they used those guns to easily take out someone’s child.
We all know it is only a matter of time before the next such incident happens. It is guaranteed. The really sad thing is that we completely accept it as normal in American life. It is not normal. It is just outrageous that we accept it as so. The recent rampage at the government building in Canada, for example, is huge news in that country, not only because of the drama of it, but because such gun violence is so very rare in that country. School shootings are practically unheard of. I came across a statistic the other day that said in the whole country of Japan, in one year there were four deaths attributable to guns. In the whole country. We have more than that in one weekend in a major city like L.A. or Chicago.
These people in other countries must think we are nuts with this wild wild west mentality we have about our right to own guns. And they are right. It isn’t the mental state of those disturbed individuals who get their hands on guns and then head to schools, theaters and public places to take their anger out on innocents that worry me. It is the mental state of a country that actually debates whether or not the public should be allowed to have guns at all. We spend more time working up a lather about Ebola which has killed fewer people in the U.S. than died in Marysville, Washington from this school shooting.
Sick indeed.
Photo Credit: WikiCommons
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OV in Depth: Reported by Opposing Views 18 hours ago.