Yeah, I figured it wouldn't be obvious at a glance. The pertinent line is highlighted. It's important to note that licensing individuals opens up the possibility of restricting or negating that person's license (as should have happened in this instance) which is the other point where the pro-firearm faction starts to chafe, at which point they put themselves in the tenuous position of arguing against being held responsible for what they do with their firearms.
I'll agree, but I don't see where mandatory training for everybody fits into it.
And again, while I wholeheartedly agree that people who want guns should have a license, it's not strictly relevant here as the shooter was not the gun-owner. Shinra's right: for the law to have prevented the shooter from having access to these guns, it would have to go beyond simply evaluating the gun-owner and into evaluating the entire household.
Which I suppose would be easier to do if every single person had to be evaluated, I suppose, but then you start to veer off mandatory gun training and into mandatory psych evaluations for everybody. And I think the potential negatives there are pretty clear.
These sorts of changes have to happen on a cultural awareness level rather than at a kneejerk reaction to the current situation level, because you honestly only really have two solutions to this situation: Add more security, which as everyone's pointed out is a terrible idea, or try to ban possession, at which point you run into the inconvenient fact that 'ban possession' has never fucking worked for anything in this country.
I'll buy that. And doubly so for the mental health issue.
My fiancee told me she doesn't know how to talk about it with the students at the school where she works -- apparently "how to talk about school shootings in the news" is not part of teacher training. You'd think that would be part of the curriculum at this point, sadly.
I mean, the way my high school handled it after Columbine was utterly asinine, but at least they had the excuse that something like that was totally new and unprecedented at the time.
(Brent may remember but the rest of you won't have heard the story: my high school had a bomb scare shortly after Columbine. They herded us all out onto the football field and then up into the bleachers to deliver a dumb-ass speech about how perfectly safe we were, while they had bomb-sniffing dogs going through all the halls. Have you ever sat in bleachers? If somebody HAD been armed, we would have been fucking sitting ducks. Terrible, terrible idea. Also, they brought the kids from the on-campus daycare out too, and had them sitting upfront while the principal gave her speech about what had happened at Columbine. Completely inappropriate.)
As I see it, the purpose of that comparison is not to equate guns to cars, because they're obviously not the same. The purpose is to try to get gun ownership and use to be at least as tightly controlled as car ownership and use, as a stepping point to a more sane state of being more tightly controlled.
Oh, in this case sure, of course.
But it's FREQUENTLY invoked by gun rights advocates as a way of dismissing any suggestion of regulation. "Cars kill more people than guns! You going to ban cars?"
Of course, given that the discussion is about licensing things and preventing incompetent people from using them, obviously that's a dumb comparison. But it's a common one. And I still think step one is to point out that it's a flawed comparison since cars aren't actually designed with the express purpose of killing people.
It becomes Occurance at Owl's Creek Bridge
Ooh, nice reference.
(Tangentially: anybody else notice Jon Stewart busting out the Ambrose Bierce this week? "CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." I mean, that's, like, a Dennis Miller level of snobby literary reference, but delivered so off-the-cuff that not only was it accessible to the audience but I'm not even entirely sure he knew what he was paraphrasing.)
OK Boy planned to shoot up (and blow up?) school Friday, plan thwarted entirely
Sammie Eaglebear Chavez, 18, told friends at Bartlesville High School that he wanted to lure their schoolmates and teachers to the gym and then open fire, according to officials.
See? See? Sitting ducks in those bleachers, man.