On Friday, twelve people were massacred by a disgruntled co-worker in Virginia Beach, using a .45 caliber pistol, who was ultimately killed in a shoot-out with police. Cue the dramatic over-reactions.
Everyone, of course, started sending their thoughts and prayers to the deceased and their families. Cool. While, for some, such expressions of support are comforting, we can all agree that neither thoughts nor prayers do a damned thing to bring back the dead nor prevent further mass shootings.
On one side, the cries of “mental health, mental health, mental health,” reigned supreme, despite despicable red-flag laws which have been passed in state after state under the guise of “mental health.” Such laws have given broad and wide-ranging power and authority to law enforcement to pre-emptively confiscate weapons from law-abiding gun owners simply based on a family member saying that the gun owner was unstable. That power is being extended in many places to bosses and even co-workers. Pretty soon we’ll have a list of “mandated reporters,” similar to our child protection laws to the point where almost anyone will be able to claim you’re unstable and your guns will be confiscated. All of this, under the short-sighted umbrella of gun owners claiming our mass shootings are a “mental health,” issue. Way to go, fellow supporters of the Second Amendment; you literally handed the other side the very club they’re now using to bludgeon us to death.
On the other side, the predictable calls for everything from restrictions on amounts of ammunition that can be purchased to handgun bans and even confiscation resonated amongst the bizarrely idiotic. In fact, as word emerged that the gunman used a silencer, calls for making those illegal began before all of the victims had even been identified!
Even local law enforcement strapped on a pair of diapers and jumped into the sandbox as they caved entirely into recent calls of not using the name of the shooter; as though the lack of infamy for a dead mass murderer will somehow prevent the next psychopath from committing such a heinous act, believing that it’s juts not worth it if his name won’t be remembered.
In other words, “WHHAAAAA! WHHHAAAAAAA! WHAAAA!!!!”
The collective maturity of society has been in a precipitous decline my entire life, accelerated greatly, of course, by social media. But it truly shows its’ teeth when we are challenged the most. It’s one thing to watch people get worked up over the color of a dress or the pronunciation of a word; if you truly want to be sickened by our lack of cognitive thinking skills, stand back in awe at the way we react to true, genuine challenges such as what to do about mass shootings.
The answer, of course, is simple; almost nothing.
And that, of course, is something adults accept; bad people and bad things exist, and cannot be stopped in their entirety. Tragedies will happen, as will evil. We can and should do everything we can to identify and prevent them, but doing so at the cost of innocent peoples’ rights, liberties and freedoms is anathema to America’s founding.
But rather than pro-gun advocates standing up, as adults, and saying exactly that, they give in to the children throwing a temper tantrum and do the exact same thing; start screaming out idiotic ideas in the hopes it will just shut everyone up; which of course, it doesn’t. By shouting out “mental health,” it de facto acknowledges that we think we can do more to prevent these occurrences by stripping various people of their rights and freedoms, and empowering others to be the ones who do the stripping. By giving in to that formula, you allow different voices to call for different ways to remove different rights from other people. And before long, all rights are gone. Oh, and people will still be getting gunned done.
Not saying criminals names will not solve anything and local law enforcement knows it. But they, too, give in to the children begging for “something, anything to be done!”
There’s an age old expression about the inmates running the asylum; we’re a country living a version of that. The children are running the playground? You decide, and then put it on a bumper sticker, for that’s what we’ve truly become; a nation of slogans designed to make people feel better and feel like solutions are being found. It’s all an illusion, and apparently, that’s exactly what we want, for reality is just as scary as that monster hiding under all of our beds.
