Quote:
Originally Posted by bob47
There are those who believe more guns in more hands, hardened facilities, and armed guards in abundance is the appropriate future. Some folks believe fewer guns and open facilities is what you would expect of an advanced society and can actually be found in some advanced countries. These two groups will never agree on a path forward.
Personally, I find it a pretty dismal future to comtemplate, that access to a lot of facilities is actually like entering a prison. But let me ask a few questions of those who advocate hardening public facilities.
What do you do with a place like the University of Massachusetts which has about 24,000 students and hundreds of buildings on over 1400 acres? And all the other universities like it?
What do you do about a place like Saint Mary-of-the-Woods college, a small catholic womens' college in Indiana with about 700 students on 67 acres? And all the literally thousands of small colleges in this country?
And what do you do about all the shopping malls and transportation terminals and nursing homes and hospitals and performing arts centers?
And how do you ensure that somebody who today has been screened and deemed safe to own a weapon of tremendous destructive capability doesn't go off the rails at some time in the future and use that weapon to wreak havoc?
It seems to me that one component of the answer is to limit the destructive capability that individuals can own. Certainly there are social issues that need to be addressed as well. But some people believe that there are already too many guns out there and control is now impossible. Unfortunately, especially for lack of will, I fear that is true.
Let us, however, remember an incident that occurred a few years ago at night in Spanish Springs. There was an armed robbery at a restaurant and some folks had money and who knows what else stolen. I don't know if the perpetrators were captured or if the folks got their money back. But there were no shots fired. Nobody was hurt. No innocent bystanders were killed. If somebody had pulled out a gun to shoot it out with the robbers, isn't it just possible that one of the victims or somebody at the Rialto theater or on the square would have wound up dead? Just some food for thought.
|
Schools with spread out campuses and buildings, characteristic of universities, will require a different approach. As it has been repeatedly demonstrated, school shooters tend to take their own lives as soon as confronted by armed opposition. Ten states now have provisions allowing the carrying of concealed weapons on public post-secondary campuses. These states are Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. This makes it more likely that a campus shooter will be confronted more quickly.
Frankly, I'm surprised that we haven't seen more mall shootings, although there have been some. Again, ordinary citizens legally carrying concealed weapons are a deterrent.
There is no such thing as perfect safety. Distracted drivers kill thousands of innocents annually. Backyard swimming pools kill thousands of children annually. Drug abuse kills thousands of people annually. Drunk drivers kill thousands of people annually.
About "limiting the destructive capability that individuals can own" think about the fact that the National Firearms Registry has a list of all owners of legally registered machine guns, short barrel shotguns, silencers, short barreled rifles, destructive devices, and "other" weapons. There are 3,656,034 of these items legally owned in the United States. In the past year
none of them was used illegally.
Recognizing that a gun ban would only result in an underground Black Market for the banned items, let's come up with some other ways to deal with the problem.