Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Another Peaceful Day In School

Five girls are now dead with another 7 girls in hospital fighting for their lives. Yet again, another American community is struggling to come to terms with the consequences of America's love affair with the gun.

Some straight-forward facts courtesy of infoplease.com.

Since 1996 around the world, 84 children have been killed in school shootings - 53 of them in America.

At the same time, 38 others - including teachers, janitors and police have been killed - 12 of those in America.

Of the 120 wounded children, 106 were in America and 5 of the 7 other wounded - again mainly teachers, were in America.

The gun lobby is clearly correct - America is a much safer place to be with guns. Children can feel secure as they wander off to school today.

Who cares if they don't come back in the evening?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's Clinton's fault.

Mark said...

Of course - I should have realised!

sandegaye said...

It's certainly good reason for home-schooling.

I'm sure Charleton Heston is one proud man.

Lawrence said...

I have mixed feelings. One part of me says we should be able to retain some form of gun in our homes. This because I fear the day may come when we will lose liberty and once again it will have to be retaken. The other side of me, the more practical says, no, we should not have guns, not machine guns or AK-47's or any automatic weaponry. No good can come of it.

Bag said...

Sorry Mark I don't agree with you on this subject.

OK it is easier to get a gun in the US but people get them here as well. It comes down to the people in your society. If someone is going to go off and do these things then they will do so regardless of our laws. They have decided to break the law anyway. Amazingly enough all these guys are criminals with or without the guns. Guns were legal here for decades and crime was significantly less. Our rules changed, society changed and things changed for the worse.

The funny part is my mind tells me that reducing availability of guns would help. But that same mind would not shoot someone even if I had a gun in my hand in an arguement. It is a logic peculiar to me. Bad guys don't follow the same logic and is the reason why so many things happen that people like you and me think 'Why? I don't understand how anyone could do that'. It's because we, and most people, have a strong moral compass. We are bringing up a generation with a weaker moral compass. Until we turn this around and introduce justice we will see more and more of this guns, knives or whatever they find handy.

There are other ways of managing crime such as this but we insist on following a flawed path that we know does not resolve the issue because we think it is right. It's well trodden so it is easier to follow than beating your own path.

Data is available if we want to look about doing something about these things in a sensible manner but, with this issue, nobody is going to move from their well trodden paths and therefore we will always have a stand off. Personally i don't blame the pro gunners. Why lose your viewpoint when it won't make you any safer?

Personally if I am going to kill someone I would do it even if they banned guns, knives, pointy sticks or whatever. All that banning these things does is makes it more likely I'm going to complete my task as I won't get any resistance.

Do you feel safer in the UK now that guns are banned than you did before?

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