- Moderator
- #1
Amidst the ever predictable knee jerk cries for gun control by the left and screams from the right for armed teachers and metal detectors in schools, everyone is glossing over the real problem here and that is the failure of our mental health system. While I agree that authorities need more leeway in involuntarily detaining people for observation, it needs to be done carefully in order to protect our civil rights.
There couldn't have been any more warning signs with Nikolas Cruz. The police had been to his house 39 times over a seven year period. The FBI was made aware of his threats to shoot up a school and nothing was done despite all of this because up until he actually carried out his threat, no crime had been committed. In obvious cases like Cruz, we need to allow authorities more power to take these people into custody and have them evaluated by a doctor for a week or longer, what ever is necessary to determine if they really are a threat. Instead, these people get pumped up with cocktails of anti-depressants and psychotropic drugs and are dumped back out onto the streets where they can and sometimes do end up hurting a lot of people. However, given our present day society where people get offended by and overreact to every little thing we have to be cautious to also not start witch hunts, dragging innocent people off the streets over surly, off the cuff remarks that are clearly intended as hyperbole. How many times have we all said, "Oh, I'd like to kill that person!" but we aren't really going to do it.
This coupled with the fact that American society in general has been slowly decaying over the last few decades, it's time we start addressing the disease instead of wanting to treat the symptoms. Guns are not the disease. Burdening over 99% of the gun owners in this country due to the heinous actions of less than 1% are not going to solve this problem. Gun control didn't stop the Bataclan Massacre in Paris in 2015 where 130 people were slaughtered with illegal automatic weapons nor did it stop the Charlie Hebdo attacks in the same city. It didn't stop Anders Breivik from gunning down and murdering 77 people in Norway in 2011. It didn't stop machete wielding terrorists from slicing and dicing over 100 people at a train station in Kunming, China in 2014. And while gun control advocates like to point to Britain and Australia as models of success, their murder rates have gone up at times and gone down at times after their gun bans were passed. Less people may have been killed by firearms, but at times more people were actually being murdered than before and at other times less, indicating it really made little difference. Dead is dead regardless of how you get that way.
Conversely, the conservative solution isn't exactly desirable either. Nothing says "Land of the Free" like metal detectors along with teachers and police carrying guns in every school across the country, right? Do you really want to be raising your children in a Soviet style police state? What kind of small government is that, exactly?
Unfortunately, it seems partisans on both sides are more interested in fingerpointing and demonizing the opposition while also pushing knee jerk solutions based on pure emotion that won't have any affect other than to burden the vast majority of the populace who aren't the threat. Hence, as always, I don't see much coming of this latest incident, but one must wonder how many more events like this we are willing to tolerate until Americans want to honestly address this problem.
Florida sheriff calls for more power to detain people after school shooting
There couldn't have been any more warning signs with Nikolas Cruz. The police had been to his house 39 times over a seven year period. The FBI was made aware of his threats to shoot up a school and nothing was done despite all of this because up until he actually carried out his threat, no crime had been committed. In obvious cases like Cruz, we need to allow authorities more power to take these people into custody and have them evaluated by a doctor for a week or longer, what ever is necessary to determine if they really are a threat. Instead, these people get pumped up with cocktails of anti-depressants and psychotropic drugs and are dumped back out onto the streets where they can and sometimes do end up hurting a lot of people. However, given our present day society where people get offended by and overreact to every little thing we have to be cautious to also not start witch hunts, dragging innocent people off the streets over surly, off the cuff remarks that are clearly intended as hyperbole. How many times have we all said, "Oh, I'd like to kill that person!" but we aren't really going to do it.
This coupled with the fact that American society in general has been slowly decaying over the last few decades, it's time we start addressing the disease instead of wanting to treat the symptoms. Guns are not the disease. Burdening over 99% of the gun owners in this country due to the heinous actions of less than 1% are not going to solve this problem. Gun control didn't stop the Bataclan Massacre in Paris in 2015 where 130 people were slaughtered with illegal automatic weapons nor did it stop the Charlie Hebdo attacks in the same city. It didn't stop Anders Breivik from gunning down and murdering 77 people in Norway in 2011. It didn't stop machete wielding terrorists from slicing and dicing over 100 people at a train station in Kunming, China in 2014. And while gun control advocates like to point to Britain and Australia as models of success, their murder rates have gone up at times and gone down at times after their gun bans were passed. Less people may have been killed by firearms, but at times more people were actually being murdered than before and at other times less, indicating it really made little difference. Dead is dead regardless of how you get that way.
Conversely, the conservative solution isn't exactly desirable either. Nothing says "Land of the Free" like metal detectors along with teachers and police carrying guns in every school across the country, right? Do you really want to be raising your children in a Soviet style police state? What kind of small government is that, exactly?
Unfortunately, it seems partisans on both sides are more interested in fingerpointing and demonizing the opposition while also pushing knee jerk solutions based on pure emotion that won't have any affect other than to burden the vast majority of the populace who aren't the threat. Hence, as always, I don't see much coming of this latest incident, but one must wonder how many more events like this we are willing to tolerate until Americans want to honestly address this problem.
Florida sheriff calls for more power to detain people after school shooting
