Preventing school shootings

[G.Irish]

I didn't mean to say that there shouldn't be a waiting period or perhaps a more lengthy background check, only that I'm against preventing people from owning guns. I mean let's face it, this guy bought the gun legally, a month in advance and seemed to have really planned the thing out. He had no priors and nothing popped in his background check so it's likely more restrective laws wouldn't have prevented this. I know that's not what you inferred, just throwing it out there for people who say tighter gun laws could have prevented this.

Bingo. I think the thing that happens with something like this is that a bunch of people jump up and down and holler about how this could've been prevented if someone had done X, Y, and Z. In my mind there are just things that are just damned near impossible to prevent if you want to have a free country.

If you really want to talk about death, over 40,000 people are killed in car accidents. But it would be damned near impossible to prevent every automobile death. So what do you do? You go on about your business dealing with and mitigating that risk every day. Sure, there are some practical things that can be done to prevent deaths like better active and passive safety in vehicles, well designed road signs, and better driver training. But that still doesn't change the fact that people will screw up.

And as Chris says, this guy's background check came back clear, he did the waiting period and this still happened. Shit happens.

I'm just going to throw this out there for the sake of discussion and see if anyone chooses to respond to it.... The root of most of middle-class America's social issues are due to a two working parent household.

Eh, that's hard to say. While there are definitely more two working parent households today than there were 50 or 100 years ago, that doesn't mean it is at all correlated with violence in this case. Maybe it is a factor that contributes to some types of violence though.

But to draw a parallel you'd have to look at other countries and I'm pretty sure in a lot of Western households both parents work, yet they don't have anywhere near the amount of violence we do. I think there are bigger cultural factors at work.