Sandy Hook Elementary School: remove guns from people who didn’t do it?
THE Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut: Should guns be banned? Glenn Reynolds:
“After a shooting spree,” author William Burroughs once said, “they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.” Burroughs continued: “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”
Plenty of people — especially among America’s political and journalistic classes — feel differently. They’d be much more comfortable seeing ordinary Americans disarmed. And whenever there is a mass shooting, or other gun incident that snags the headlines, they do their best to exploit the tragedy and push for laws that would, well, take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.
There are a lot of problems with this approach, but one of the most significant is this one: It doesn’t work.
Adam Lanza did it. He forced his way into the school. and because the school was a gun-free zone, he was the only one armed.
The gunman who slaughtered 20 young children and six adults at a US school in Connecticut“forced” his way into the building, police say.
Lieutenant Paul Vance of Connecticut State Police said the man – identified widely in media reports as 20-year-old Adam Lanza – was not let into the Sandy Hook Elementary School “voluntarily”.
So. banning guns works? At Virginia Tech, only the killer was armed. In Colorado, only the killer was armed.
Photo: Gary Seri, general manager at the Stone River Grille, prepares to hang a message written on a table cloth in honor of the teachers who died along with students a day earlier when a gunman open fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Saturday, Dec. 15, 2012, in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown, Conn. Seri said the teachers were scheduled to have their holiday party at his restaurant. The massacre of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary school elicited horror and soul-searching around the world even as it raised more basic questions about why the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, would have been driven to such a crime and how he chose his victims. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Posted: 15th, December 2012 | In: News Comments (5) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
December 16th, 2012 at 9:13 pm
I’m saying you fix the root of the problem. You don’t end drunk driving by getting rid of cars. Don’t forget, those guns were legally registered to his mother. All of you gun control proponents are so fixated on guns, you aren’t getting to the real issue of mental health in this country. Guns or no guns, there are a lot of emotionally unstable and potentially violent people in our society. If gun control advocates spent half as much time as finding out why that is rather than removing guns from the world, maybe we’d be farther along in solving the root issue of violence. But no, we are too simplistic in our approach to life and we want 5 minute solutions.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m done discussing this topic. I’m going to go read about that Bar Rafaeli topless story.
December 16th, 2012 at 8:03 pm
Michael, yes people can be evil and kill others. But guns make it substantially easier to do and that’s a big problem
December 16th, 2012 at 10:33 am
Take away guns and they will only use a different weapon. Good point. A man in China entered a school and stabbed 22 children and one adult. Death toll – 0
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In 2010, there were similar incidents in China. In one, 28 children, one teacher and a security guard were stabbed. Death toll – 0
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24 hours earlier, there was an incident where 18 children and a teacher were slashed. Death toll – 0
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There were other incidents where children actually died. For similar incidents that year (2010) as a whole, 21 children and adults died and 90 were injured.
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So given the use of guns, lanza has managed to kill more children and adults in one incident than the multiple perpetrators of such crimes managed in China in one very bad year.
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So yes, other weapons can and are used, but the outcomes are not even close to those involving guns.
December 16th, 2012 at 6:22 am
Maybe Connecticut should ban assault weapons.
Oh wait, they did, in 1993
December 16th, 2012 at 5:12 am
Look, you can take every gun in the country and melt them down into steel dildos.
The issues that made this guy go out and kill people were still going to be with him. He just won’t have a gun to go through with his killings. Instead he’ll use a car to run down people or make a bomb and possibly kill even more people.
The tools change, the crap that messed up this guy won’t change unless we stop treating guns as if they are the cause of violence. We have to find out what made him go through with this, and find out if this is a societal issue, or exclusive to him.
Judging from humanities history with violence, long before guns were even invented, I think we’ll find that we humans all have a little bit of Adam Lanza in us, whether we want to admit it or not.