What say you anti-gun-control guys now?

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Frank's Home Page
"This is a brand new song...we haven't recorded it yet, but we're going to now." - John Flansburgh

The child had previously made death threats against the girl, standing on her desk, screaming at her, and spitting. 'Discipline problem' is probably a bit mild a descriptor.
The child's father is doing time in prison, for what I'm not certain.
The child's mother is living with his 'uncle.'
The weapon used was one of several in the house, ALL STOLEN. The gun had been reported stolen sometime last year.

Not exactly the kind of environment that generally leads to an angelic cherub, is it?

I will, however, be watching this with interest, especially for the racial angle.

See, although I haven't seen the kid, his 'uncle' was on TV, and is a black guy. The little girl was white.

Now you know, if this had been the reverse case, Sharpton and Jackson and the vultures would be all over this like feathers on a goose. So, it'll be interesting, at least in a grim, cynical way, to see if anyone like Al Sharpton gets involved in this one, and what they have to say. (Is there a white Al Sharpton in the house?)

None of the roughly ten thousand gun laws in existence could have stopped this. Neither could any of the ones ever proposed by Clintonians, short of HCI's call for total confiscation. And then the little so-and-so would probably have stolen a baseball bat or a knife instead, or maybe built a pipe bomb.

(just as an aside, nobody ever DID get back to me on those London statistics...)

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"Nobody knows this, but I'm scared all the time... of what I might do, if I ever let go." -- Michael Garibaldi

The problem, as I see it, is that we ideally want our justice system to carry out two chief aims. The first is to protect the rest of us from the criminal element, whether through incarceration, execution, or rehabilitation. The second is to somehow punish the criminal, or "teach them a lesson", as it were. The first is rather easy in this case to carry out. Isolate the boy from those he might do harm to. The second is where it all gets tangled. Ask ten different people and you'll get ten different answers. As a vastly exaggerated example, there will be some who might claim that the boy's problem comes from living in a society where women and men are allowed to intermingle as equals. To others, the problem is that the child wore mixed fibers and was allowed to eat meat from animals with cloven hoofs. I'm not putting force either as sound or even likely arguments, but merely as a worst case example to show how deep the conflict can run.

Ultimately, I think we would all agree that the goal is to prevent this boy from ever repeating such an act. But as to what path should be taken to get there... *shrug*

2) Ability to act on these violent impulses.
When they get in a "killing mood" these people will grab whatever weaponry they can and use it until someone stops them forcibly - frequently by killing them, which they may wish to hapen anyway.

Given:
It is unlikely that in the short-term society will be able to prevent some individuals from becoming so alienated that they are consumed by desires for retribution.

Hypothesis:
It is logical, therefore, to limit their access to weaponry that will allow them to maximise their violence.

Rationale:
The argument that everyone being armed equalises the balance of power is sophistry. The element of surprise will always allow the person to take down at least a few before anyone can intervene. It may indeed provoke him into procuring a superior arsenal to ensure he gets to kill more people. Down this road we have those who stockpile sub-machine guns, mortars and explosives. Should everyone be armed with semtex to deter bombers?

By reducing the number of guns in circulation, and limiting their sale by necessity must make it harder for people on the edge to get guns. Yes, they may steal one, or come by one through illegal means. But this would be made progressively more difficult for them as the "gun culture" is reduced and people become less used to seeing them everyday not just on TV, but strapped to the belts of their policemen. If nothing else, restrictions on ownership of guns would prevent all the accidental deaths of kids who blow their heads off because their parents forgot to lock the box they keep the "family gun" in.

A final point to levvy against those who seek universal arming. What does it say about a society where its memebrs trust each other so little that they are perpetually on the brink of "drawing" on each other?

I hope I have given your brains something to chew upon.

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"No way man!
I've served my time in hell, and I ain't going back...
Not without a fight!"

I did not say "Pro-Gun", I merely stated "Anti-Gun-Control". There's no way in hell in which we'll ever know if lack on gun control would have contributed to this. We don't know where this gun came from at all, other than the fact that the gun was stolen, but who stole it, and from whom.

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Ohh, so Mother Nature needs a favor? Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts, and plagues and poison monkeys. Nature started the fight for survival and now she wants to quit because she's losing...well I say "Hard Cheese"!
~C. Montgomery Burns

"You need a license to drive a car, to own a dog... hell, you need a license to catch a fish. But they'll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father."

(Keanu Reeves, fount of wisdom... whodathunkit?)

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Dane

"Guns don't kill people,
People kill people."

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Death before Dishonor!
However Dishonor has
quite a disputed defintion.