@LostProphetFLCL said:
Part of the issue here is that even the gun laws we have in place aren't always enforced. I do believe you can buy a gun at a gun show and bypass the background check process. We need to be enforcing the laws in the books before we decide to put MORE laws into play. I will say that some changes likely need to be made, but our enforcement of laws needs to be taken care of before anything.
The lack of mental health care here definitely is the biggest issue. There are a lot of social issue going on here in the US that put a lot of pressure on people, especially teens who are not only trying to keep up with school, but are getting pressured into making serious choices for their future and putting a huge workload on themselves, because apparently at some point society thought it made sense to take people who are struggling with their body going through changes and to say "YOU NEED TO DECIDE YOUR LIFE RIGHT NOW!".
Of course people are going to have issues and yet there isn't SHIT for them here. The mental heath institution in the US has been gutted leaving almost no support for people having issues, unless they attempt suicide which then they can at least get a few days in a hospital...
I would be skeptical of how much therapy may have actually done for people like that Calli kid (whose parents DID try to get something done) and the Columbine folks. I do think they may have been beyond saving, but without any means of helping them anyways who is to say.
Even if the 74 figure is BS, it isn't surprising to me if there is a huge uptick in shootings. There were a bunch of copycat crimes after Columbine, and now you have a struggling economy on top of that which is assuredly putting more pressure on people to break.
Background checks would rarely stop any of these mass shootings or school shootings. Background checks don't account for mental history as there is no effective way to track somebody's mental history. What if you were diagnosed with ADHD when you were a kid? Some would call that a mental illness. Others wouldn't. What if you suffered from some depression and took some medication for it a few years ago? Does that mean you're prone to depression and are unfit to own a gun?
Mental health is too ambiguous to just put blanket rules over. It's pretty clear those who indiscriminately kill others are not right in the head but "mental illnesses" is just too vague to rule over.
In the past few years I've come to the conclusion that the only reason that people advocate for more background checks is because it's a lot more simple than trying to deal with the root causes of crime and people's want to kill. It's one of those "feel good" things that really don't do anything but add more layers of ineffective red tape onto the system but make it look like people are actively trying to help reduce gun violence.
My stance is pretty simple. Since the right to bear arms is a right that should not be infringed as long as you are a law abiding citizen who has proven their ability to follow the simple rules of our land, people are going to have much more easy access to firearms and ammunition. Therefore the US will always suffer a higher gun crime rate than other nations. However we as a nation can work together to reduce the overall crime rate, which will reduce the number of gun crimes that happen in the US. A safer nation in general is going to benefit us all and is something we can logically work for.
We're actually on the right track (all violent crime is dropping) but since corporate media is profit driven, stories about school shootings or any shootings make great headlines. We also have a few key individuals in this nation (like Michael Bloomberg) who are willing to spend millions to push their own personal agenda for gun-control to keep the debate alive. Gun control has become profitable even if it has no guarantee of effectiveness within the USA.
Key steps the nation needs to take to reduce violence is ending the war on drugs, reducing or eliminating minimum sentencing on victim-less crimes, reducing prison sentences for the majority of crime, work on rehabilitating former criminals instead of just punishing them, and working on reducing or ending poverty through a large variety of methods.
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