Well, it took just one day, but the European press is already weighing in on the Virginia Tech killings. And apparently Charlton Heston is to blame, according to Der Spiegel. Forgive a brief straying from Freemasonry here, but I am curious:
So, was Charleton Heston to blame for the killing of 18 at the school in Erfurt in 2002?
Or the shootings at Emsdetten last year?
Or Freising in 2002?
Or the Dutch shooting spree of a 17 year old in Veghel in 1999?
Or the headmaster shot by a 17 year old student in the Hague in 2004?
Or the Montreal Massacre of 1989? Or another one in Montreal last September?
Or the killer of 16 kindergarten children in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996?
Or the unspeakable deaths of 334 people at a school in Beslan, Russia in 2004?
Spare us the European sanctimony over violence and murder. There's plenty of bloody hands all around the world. Madmen can appear at any time, anywhere. And Germans should know that more than anyone.
The average kid in the 1940s - or for that matter, the 1840s - had far easier access to guns than children do today. (When I was at the University of Southern California, there were still rules on the books from the 1800s that firearms had to remain holstered while attending class.) Yet how many gun-toting kids can you find a record of attacking their school prior to the 1990s? And with all the hand wringing about "machine guns easier to get than a drivers license," Cho Seung-Hui used a .22 pistol and a 9mm pistol, not a machine gun.
It is the coarsening of the culture, the raising of children by television and daycare, single parent families or parents too wrapped up in pursuing their careers to notice their kids are slipping into darkness. And the ceaseless violence that fills 225 digital channels, all day, all night. It is the repeated watching of Hostel, Saw, Texas Chainsaw Massacres, and their hundreds of shootings, choppings, beheadings, impalings, dismemberings and slow-motion bloodletting – all trying to out-gross the last ones – that have made three generations of kids increasingly insensate to real-life horror. Like the music companies that rake in the cash from insulting, coarse, rude, lewd and crude "artists," likewise to blame are the movie studios that crank out "grindhouse" pictures (that make less money every year), with every more carnage.
And anyone who argues otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
"And anyone who argues otherwise is intellectually dishonest"
ReplyDeleteNo! Here i can not agree with you.
Anyone who argues otherwise simply thinks different from you, and has the right to do so! That's called freedom of thought1 And we. masons, always respect it!
As to the post theme, I agree with you that the Der Spiegel article is unfortunate.
I also agree with you about the causes of the nowadays stupid violence.
But I think that putting an end to the full access to weapons would help to less violence.
And that doesn't make me intellectually dishonest...
Sorry, but anyone who thinks that gun violence can be stopped by the simple expedient of banning guns is living in a dream world. There is no truism so true as "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Look at the gun violence statistics in England and Australia, if you want a good idea of what happens when law-abiding citizens are banned from owning guns. Then look at the number of burglaries, robberies, and home invasions in the States that are stopped every year just because the homeowner or business proprieter had a weapon, was trained in its use, and wasn't afraid to use it to defend himself and his property.
ReplyDeleteOne student or faculty member with a gun on his hip could have put paid to the VT gunman. Would there still have been deaths? Probably. But I'll bet there wouldn't have been 32 of them in two separate incidents on opposite ends of campus an hour apart. The fact is that we'll never know, because VT in its infinite utopian "can't we all just get along" wisdom had enacted an absolute ban on anyone but law enforcement personnel carrying weapons on its campus. And we saw how well that ban worked with Mr. Cho Seung-Hui, didn't we?
The intellectual dishonesty Bro. Hodapp is referring to comes about when people insist that blanket gun bans will stop these one-off incidents from occuring. That's nonsense. Criminals will always be able to get guns, even if guns are banned...that's why they're called criminals.
I agree, in general terms with what Nathan wrote.
ReplyDeleteThe question, althought, in my opinion, is not allow or ban guns.
Extreme solutions are always bad!
I am satisfied with the sistem we have in my country (Portugal):
a) guns 7.65 mm or .45 or more are exclusively autorized to the army and police officers;
b) Private citizens can possess and carry guns up to 6.35 mm or .38, if registered and having a permit issued by the Chief of Police.
The permit is issued if the citizen has a clean criminal record and justifies the need to carry a gun.
c) Private citizens can possess IN THEIR HOMES registered guns up to 6.35 mm or .38. A permit is issued without the need to justify the possesion. in this case, when the citizen moves, a police officer carries the gun from the previous house to the new one.
So, there is not a irrestrict right to carry a gun. One only can do it if justifiably autorized to.
This allows the police to easily confiscate the guns ilegally carried. And, most of all, there is not the culture of the right to carry a gun.
I prefer this culture about guns...
Unfortunately, there is no sistem to stop 100 % violence and crime. There is no miraculous solution. One can just axpect to have a sistem that helps to control and maintains as low as possible violence and crime. And, once again, I think it is a better idea to develop the culture that guns are only to be carried by those who really need to carry them.
The bottom line is: it is better if society undertands that a gun is NOT a normal and natural object to carry.
But that's only my opinion...
There is nothing extreme about allowing guns. Virgina is a shall-issue concealed-carry state. The only reason guns can't be carried on the VT campus is that VT has a rule that says you can be expelled for carrying. The extreme position in Virginia is the VT position.
ReplyDeleteMillions of Americans are perfectly comfortable carrying firearms, and millions of Americans have permits that allow them to do exactly that. University regulations should not be allowed to trump state law. Period.
Uhm, comparing Beslan, Russia to Virginia Tech is intellectual dishonesty.
ReplyDeleteDon't just add sources for the reason of having sources.
This should already be clear from High School.