Or be in the wrong neighborhood while being of the wrong color skin...
my candid response to this ******** will get me banned.Several more words: Crazy tea party politicians, "2nd amendment remedies", preaching revolt if Obama wins, etc.
I am NOT even mildly intending to suggest the guy was on the lunatic right, of course, the POINT, despite any number of people who seek to deny it, mischaracterize it, or otherwise try to hide the fact, public figures, be they good or bad, who advocate things enable the unhinged of any kind, including the "just merely unhinged".
This kind of enablement and (I presume accidental, although sometimes I wonder) encouragement is part of the reason this happens.
A complete lack of mental health care for those under the top 5% of wealth is another problem.
Finally, the stigma attached to mental health care is the third problem.
Except for the politicians who have been speaking violence, this isn't something tied to one party or group of people. Well, the media and the intentional incitement of anger and hatred we see from them needs to be mentioned, as well.
Again, this isn't about political parties, it's about advocation of violence and/or anger.
Right, gun control advocates just want to punish gun owners.
Disagreement on how best to limit gun violence is one thing, claiming that the other side just wants to punish gun owners is just plain stupid. What if I said that gun advocates just want to shoot people?
I thought liberals were all about tolerance? apparently some of them are about taking the rights of law abiding citizens away due to the actions of a tiny minority of bad/crazy people.
Why not focus these crazed red eyed efforts on trying to identify high risk people sooner? Rather than using sad events like today as a weapon to further an agenda?
Wow, that's funny because I feel that everyone with extreme left wing beliefs SHOULD be well armed. In fact, I am dumbfounded as to why the left has spent the better part of 7 decades disarming themselves. WTF left?I don't think anyone with right-wing political beliefs (which research suggest are generated by neurotic/paranoid mental problems) should have gun. It's just too risky.
People are emotionally attached to their rights, not their guns. I'm sure some people fetishize their weapons, but most people actually see the loss of rights as exactly that, a loss of rights.
Gun owners should pay for it.
Furthermore, and I speak as someone who (eventually) believes in the system we have over here, what qualifies as mental health? I have a diagnosed mental disorder, but I don't believe that I am more likely than the average person to someday get together several guns and kill several strangers. This is the problem I have with people automatically saying that the perpetrator in this case must have had a mental illness, as if it's the sort of thing that people with mental illnesses do.
Presumably schizophrenia would disqualify an applicant. Maybe also depression. How about ADD? Or autism? Or Agoraphobia?
Wow, that's funny because I feel that everyone with extreme left wing beliefs SHOULD be well armed. In fact, I am dumbfounded as to why the left has spent the better part of 7 decades disarming themselves. WTF left?
This one was mentioned at local newspaper and caught my attention ..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_bombings .. May 18, 1927
1927, before the Depression. I guess it just goes to show, crazy is timeless.Gun ownership is an individual right in the USA. If a person has to pay for a right, then it is no longer a right.
Since voter fraud is a problem, let's hear your proposal for registered voters to personally pay for fraud prevention measures to ensure the value of their vote is not diluted.
Ranb
Even though this post was dripping with a condescending tone, I really don't have a problem with submitting myself to a mental check. It would be a minor inconvenience to ensure that a lunatic or two are identified in advance of what happened today.
However, who makes the decision that you're competent? Your doctor? The local sheriff? Both? Someone else?
Again, as long as its fair and unbiased, I could live with such a requirement.
I guess what I, and I'm sure many others, don't get is what is so critically important about the "right" to bear arms. What of importance will be lost if that right is withdrawn? As is abundantly clear, a great many countries operate successfully and peacefully without such a right. And with much fewer homicides. Isn't it time for a proper cost/benefit analysis of open slather gun ownership? I contend that a loss of a right would be a very minor cost.
Seems like a reason to carry.
andNor were there guns -- or Americans -- involved in another incident today, which was mostly pushed out of the news in the U.S. in light of the horrific Connecticut incident: in Henan, China, a man went into a school and stabbed 22 children, plus one adult. Apparently, no one was killed, but one report I read said it was part of a "wave of brutal stabbings and hammerings throughout China" over the past few years. Cripes: HAMMERINGS?!
... had the paragraph above finished when they showed an interview with the principal at Columbine -- at the time of the 1999 shootings there, and still today. Frank DeAngeles said the answer wasn't more school security, and wasn't more gun control, but rather better help for people with mental problems. "The thing that I keep stating time and time again is what causes so much hate in people's hearts that they're willing to walk into an elementary school to injure or kill kids? Where did this start?"
I don't think anyone with right-wing political beliefs (which research suggest are generated by neurotic/paranoid mental problems) should have gun. It's just too risky.