Another mass murder has hit the airwaves. This one at an elementary school in Connecticut. And, as usual, gun banners have decided to use this as yet another "case" for banning guns, or restricting them. There was even a Facebook posting I read where the poster stated "We need to form a congressional committee that will find out why guns make mentally ill people kill."
This is wrong for many reasons. First, it is a purely, understandably, I guess, an emotional reaction to a tragedy.
Second, the poster calls for yet another government solution to a problem.
Third, the writer blames the gun for the action as opposed to the person, though in a dichotomy, calls the person mentally ill. Which brings another point. The shooter may not actually have had a mental illness. We haven't the knowledge to make that judgement, though I would draw the same uninformed conclusion as the act is not one any rational human being would commit.
My overall point in all of this is that had the school not had a zero gun policy in place, a teacher or other staff member armed with his or her own gun could have fell this person most likely 15-or-so victims sooner than he did himself and the only role for government would have been to allow the staffer to defend the defenseless instead of treating the weapon as the evil doer. A subordinate point is that perhaps news agencies should be as selective in reporting these types of incidents as they are when reporting violence by groups or individuals they support politically, i.e, that of the union thugs in Michigan earlier this week.
