Who needs terrorists? We kill ourselves.
Anyone who says to you, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” you look them in the eye and tell them they are an idiot. The debased, dumbed down, and debilitated culture in this gun-packed country has just claimed more lives in an elementary school massacre. How many mass murders do we have to suffer before someone with a little chutzpah takes real action to accomplish some actual gun control around here?
Is the National Rifle Association really so powerful, so in bed with politicians, so feared, that no politician is brave enough to spit in their eye? Does NRA money purchase cowardice?
I promise you, the Founders who drafted the Constitution, then added the 2nd Amendment, did not envision this. Nor did they remotely consider that future U. S. Supreme Court justices would stretch the idea of a well-armed militia into the authority for gun-crazed imbeciles in our midst to arm themselves to the teeth and carry firearms everywhere they go with as little control as our government now provides.
Now add the sorry state of our system for treating mental health problems or, more exactly, the lack thereof. Prisons are filled with mentally ill people who may not have committed the crimes for which they are imprisoned had some treatment been available to them. Prisons and jails are likewise filled with mentally ill habitual offenders because we have a totally inadequate mental health treatment system to deal with them otherwise. We need (a) a better system for identifying dangerously mentally ill people, (b) better laws for making it possible to compel at least temporary institutionalization for purposes of treating these individuals, and (c) actual places for them to be housed while treatment is accomplished. Left to their own devices, they don’t recognize that they are ill, they don’t take medications prescribed to them, and they recycle through the criminal justice system continually. Sometimes, too often these days, they go haywire and begin shooting innocents with firearms made for nothing other than killing people.
I would also heartily recommend rethinking the appropriateness of all the violent video games, movies, and TV shows youngsters are exposed to, resulting in a dangerous dehumanizing effect upon their otherwise immature psyches.
Until this country wakes up and realizes how messed up we are, nothing will happen to change this. If 20 little children being massacred doesn’t do it, nothing will.