"I hope this will not turn into a gun discussion..."

"This is not about guns --..."

Oh, but it is about guns as much as it is about society and sick, frustrated individuals. As Azizi quotes "Friends said he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns." Guns are pervasive in society and in many parts of our sub-cultures, guns are accepted and approved as THE way to settle disputes and raise money.

Sadly, with so many millions of guns already out there, there is very little way the continuing deaths can be stopped by reducing the number OF guns, and the only hope is to identify dangerous people and get them treated and make it very, very very difficult for unstable people to GET guns.

   We have seen a number of violent incidents lately where folks said they saw little sign of problems before the individual did the sad deed. I am 'almost' convinced that the obsession OF the media with 'reporting' every horrible crime in detail, even if it happens 1000 miles away, exacerbates the problem. The more famous crimes get re-run and re-examined on TV programs incessantly. Perhaps the success of Truman Capote's book "In Cold Blood" showed the market for it. We have one local channel where violent crime is 90% of their programming. How much exposure to that can cause an unstable individual to 'explode'? How often do people, even unconciously, seek to emulate or transcend what the see?
...right...no one knows, and we can't prove it in most cases, but I have little faith that it serves as an object lesson or deterrent.

Barring the reduction of availability of guns, I think that restricting the re-enaction and detailed coverage of violent crime is the simplest way to begin approaching the problem.

No outrage? *I* am outraged that some of the real, genuine ways to deal with societal violence are ignored because of perceived 'rights' to own dangerous weapons and dramatize the use of them on TV and in video games.