The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #120306 Message #2616357
Posted By: Little Hawk
22-Apr-09 - 12:40 PM
Thread Name: BS: Yet Another Mass Shooting (fill in the blanks)
Subject: RE: BS: Yet Another Mass Shooting (fill in the blanks)
I agree, Bill, that it's better to err on the side of caution than to be reckless.
In Canada you have to take and pass a firearms safety course before you can purchase, own, or use a long gun (rifle). The course itself is quite extensive and requires careful study and application to pass it. It's well supervised too. You then get a license qualifying you to purchase long guns and ammunition if you pass the course. There are also some pretty strict requirements about how to store the guns at home or when traveling.
Now, handguns....well that requires passing an even stricter course before you are qualified to purchase those, and the conditions of use are stricter, because they're clearly not "hunting weapons".
So obviously, steps are being taken here. I don't know the details of what's being done in the USA, but I gather it varies quite a bit from state to state.
There has been a national gun registry established and ongoing in Canada for some years, but it seems to have become a procedural nightmare and a bit of a joke for whatever reason. I suspect there are a great many guns out there in ordinary people's homes that have never been registered...those mostly being guns that people owned long before the registry came into effect, and they're not bothering to declare them. Nothing can really be done about that, short of the government sending a new breed of SS troopers into everyone's house in the entire country and searching it from top to bottom...and that ain't gonna happen, needless to say. ;-)
I think that the gun violence in a society is directly tied to a great number of contributing factors, such as:
poverty
unemployment
drug trade and drug use
broken homes
gangs and organized crime
alienation
entertainment media that glorify violence
video games that glorify violence
frustrated, alienated young people growing up in single parent homes or just without much supervision (because the TV is now the babysitter?)
That's why it's a tremendously complex situation, as I said before, and why many different approaches must be taken in many different areas of life to deal with it.
What we have witnessed since the Second World War ended is the increasing urbanization of our society, the tremendous effects of television on changing the way people live, and the steady erosion and breakdown of the traditional values that once held our society together reasonably well. When people don't really know any longer who they are or what the heck they are living for (other than instant material gratification)...things tend to go a bit haywire and a few people lose it and do something totally insane.
That's what I think we're seeing. The mass shootings you see happening nowadays are one of many symptoms of a general societal breakdown that is occurring all around us. It wasn't caused by the presence of guns (which have always been around in North America since White people arrived here)...but one of its more noticeable symptoms emerges in the violent use of those guns.
To merely jump on the pro-gun (NRA) or anti-gun bandwagon is to become narrowly obsessed with a single issue in lieu of attempting to understand a much larger overall problem in society.