Quote Originally Posted by RICHARD
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Guns have been around for years and it's just recently that bad parenting, spoil the child/spare the rod, not letting a kid get stupid and then pay the price, let's ignore movie and video game ratings- are responsible for the little bees-turds going overboard.

When Johnny starts to pull butterfly wings, kill puppies and skin kitties, light fires and beat up the nieighborhood kids we send them to the shrink, he says
ADD, ADHD, Dee Dee Dee (carlos mencia fans get the joke.). We give them Ritalin and then play around with the dosage and should they go off their meds and shoot up a college, we stop and wonder why, how and what started it. ...
I'm split on the issue, but I agree with the above quote 100%.

Guns are a tool used by people to kill yes, but it's not the gun or the law abiding citizens that own guns that cause the majority of problems. The problem is in why society, specifically in the U.S., has become so brain dead that this kind of tragedy has become the norm. There is no such thing as family TV anymore, many kids find educational or non-violent video games to be boring, and kids are enabled more and more to disobey laws, disrespect others, and get away with it.

There is a lot more wrong with these murderes than their ability to access weapons.

Take away guns and the underlying problems won't go away, maybe next they'll just make car bombs, or pipe bombs, or hand built RPG's. Heck when I was a kid my friends and I had all read the anarchist cook book and had all sorts of ideas for building explosives. Luckily for me, and others I guess, my parents raised me well and taught me about respect, compassion, and allowed me to even get in a bit of trouble and learn from it. Today I still play with fireworks, enjoy huge bonfires, drive fast cars, play with high speed and high current motors, shoot high powered bows with a variety of arrows, and even shoot skeet and sporting clays with my shotgun.

The key is that I know the difference between right and wrong, but sadly it seems that more and more people don't know that difference and good role models are undermined so much by the mass media attention on poor role models that any chance of common sense making a come back are very limited. We need to get back to basics as a society.

Sadly, I don't have the first clue how to do that. I wish teachers didn't have to be so afraid of the newfound power of students to disobey and manipulate the system, but how can we have confidence in enabling teachers again when there is story after story of teachers molesting children? We need to empower law enforcement to uphold laws, but how can we trust laws that no longer protect us, but rather protect criminals, or how do we trust the law enforcement officials themselves when we head about all of the corruption and scandals? We need to know the facts of news, but how can we when the personal chaos of celebrity lives make headline news over any good deeds or noteworthy news? For everything that needs to get back to a basic standard there are so many issues that prevent it, that it truly scares me. It really scares me to think about the slippery slope of double standards and false realities that we've created as a society.

However, back to banning all firearms: I own a gun; I own a gun lock. Why should I not be able to own a gun? I don't own it for self defense, home defense, or for any reason other than sport shooting. I think proper training, education, real life experience and a progressively developed common sense go a long way in both gun control and life. I just don't know where these simple traits have gone.

Guns have been around since the 17th century and were even easier to get a hold of in years past. Guns aren't the menace, society is.