That is exactly what will happen unless society starts looking to the real causes instead of allowing itself to be jerked around by extremist political jackasses. what point are you trying to make here? we know
exactly what happened in the instances of cho and holmes. they were psychologically unstable individuals who had psychotic breakdowns. their psychiatry histories were longer than your arms. so knowing that, should we allow people who are psychologically unstable easy access to weapons capable of mass murder or not?
btw, our society
does have the information to figure out he root causes of this. which, oddly enough, have been resisted by the right wing (and many on the left) root and stem. we are mammals. more specifically, we are evolved primates. as primates, some of us have chemical imbalances in the brain which predispose to severe psychiatric disorders. in the "luckier" ones, this manifests as depression or anxiety, which is responsive to medication and counseling. in those like cho or holmes, the imbalances are so severe that mainstream medicine (though it was my understanding that cho had not been availed to it) is not enough to restore sanity. in their instance, the imbalance has been lifelong, but in others, it can be totally spontaneous and unanticipated, as in the instance of the chinese man who beheaded his fellow passenger and the hasidic jew who vivisected that child in brooklyn.
what should
also be evident from the above mentioned cases is that these imbalances do not care what race, religion, or creed you are.
another thing we know about primates is that we are easily incited to irrationality and violence. you can observe chimpanzees in the wild spontaneously going on the hunt and murdering members of an neighboring tribe without provocation. a school of dolphins was recently observed to murder a group of porpoises, similarly without clear reason. we could indeed learn much about our own behavior if we accepted this and studied it to see what we could learn about ourselves.
instead, those who are loudest about gun rights want to insist that we are created, and NOT evolved. that none of what i just said has any truth to it or is useful to us. and i will grant you that the majority of mushy liberals want that to be true, too. but under this argument, cho and holmes and that poor chinese man and hasidic jew were ALSO created in the image of god. and what does that say about god?
Updated On: 8/24/12 at 08:21 PM
