The limits should be placed squarely on those who violate the law, those who have proven themselves intent on and been convicted of violence against others. That’s the baseline limit.
I think that much is agreed. The question is how much people who legally buy firearms, for instance, are responsible for what happens because of their decision? You have a right to own firearms. What are your
responsibilities?
The Clackamas Town Center shooting was carried out by someone who swiped a gun from a friend. Kip Kinkle was voted “Most LIkely to Start WWIII” by his classmates; his parents bought him his weapons, the weapons he used to murder them and to shoot up his school. The Columbine shootings were carried out with weapons taken from relatives. The Umpqua Community College shooter had a mental illness, but his nurse mother took him out shooting and helped him to cultivate an interest in guns.
Stephen Paddock, the man who killed 58 people in Las Vegas, had no prior record with the police, unless you count ONE traffic citation as grounds to prevent someone from buying firearms. The Sandy Hook shooting report noted that the shooting spree had occurred in the space of less than five minutes with
156 shots fired; 154 were from a single weapon. He also murdered his mother, to whom the gun was registered, described as a gun enthusiast who owned at least a dozen weapons. She often took her sons shooting and who had no fear of her son.
If military and law enforcement arsenals are included, there are enough personal firearms in this country to give one to every man, woman and child. The last time I checked, about 5-6 MILLION were of the type used in the Sandy Hook shootings. Those aren’t self-defense weapons. Those are military assault weapons.
Do the families of the victims not rightly have the expectation that the owners or buyers of those weapons are responsible for the multiple murders of innocent victims committed with their weapons? It isn’t as if these were “unforeseeable” tragedies that “just happened,” like lightning striking. If you own a swimming pool, you own an “attractive nuisance.” If a swimming pool is an attractive nuisance, what is a firearm? It is in a different stratosphere!
I’m sorry, but putting limits on those mass murderers after they violate the law is too late. Go down the list of mass shootings in the United States. You tell me how we prevent that kind of attack, because waiting for a conviction does not cut it.
Do you believe this? When a teen in Oregon went to his high school and committed murder and a suicide with a stolen weapon, a judge concluded he saw “no reason he could prevent the return of a rifle used to kill a 15-year-old Reynolds High School student to the shooter’s brother.” (
http://www.oregonlive.com/gresham/index.ssf/2015/09/judge_says_rifle_used_in_reyno.html)
That is ZERO accountability. You aren’t allowed to own a dangerous dog or to keep dangerous animals for self-protection, but when it comes coincidentally to forms of “self-defense” that can allow a lone shooter to deliver hundreds of lethal rounds, that is somehow a “right.” Explain that.
