No guns=no mall shootings

This time it was a mall. This time it was nine people. This time the name was Robert Hawkins. Like always, he had a gun.

How many disturbed, ignored, kids have to  go on a rampage before America realizes that their probably not going to be invaded anytime soon and that  deer overpopulation isn’t an imminent threat. Get rid of the guns and you get rid of  a skinny 19-year-olds abilty to single handedly murder nine people.

Lets take a look at the common elements of some of the more infamous massacres over. Columbine, and Virgina Tech both featured  rich, angry suburbanites, but the Red Lake slaughter was on an indian reservation. Virgina Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho had legally declared insane but Kimveer Gill of Dawson College infamy  was described as  “the nicest, gentlest person” with “a heart of gold” according to interviews with his surviving classmates.

You can go through every massacre from the past twenty years and you can realize that profiling the killers is a pointless endevor. I think we’ve all at one time known someone who vaguely fits the characteristics given to us over and over again?  Outsiders who don’t quite fit in, are into things that seem a little strange, or that you just describe as “as a little off”. Great, so half of the student politicians I’ve met are potential school shooters.

There’s only one thing that connects almost every slaughter I can remember. Actually, I can’t remember any that didn’t.

Guns. You take the guns away and right away a huge portion of the shootings go away. Sure, some of the people got guns illegaly or would have been able to get a gun illegaly anyway, but a fast majority wouldn’t have.

I personally believe that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold would have been able to find some way to kill 12 people at Columbine. Kimveer Gill sure did. These were people who were so full of black hatred that they just wanted to destroy. But what about the Amish school shooter Charles Roberts? How is a milk truck driver from Amish country going to know how to get a gun illegally? What about the 1998 Jonesboro shootings? Are a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old have been able to get a gun if it wasn’t for stealing one from their grandfather?

This isn’t a new argument, this is an old argument. It’s probably been argued since the first time an incredibly broken person first shot an innocent. Why? Because it’s the one that makes the most sense.

How many mass shootings have we had in Canada? I can think of two in recent memory. The Dunblane shootings took place in 1997 and are the UK’s only signifigant massacre. The US has had 20 since then.

The gun is king in the US. The absolute right to defend themselves has turned into the absolute right to own a firearm. I’d love to ask Doug Golden if he ever used his submachine gun in self-defence once before his grandson stole it and killed five people.

So how about we call a spade a spade? People don’t shoot people  because of Marilyn Manson, video games, goth culture or Tarantino flicks. They shoot them because they have a gun.

Yup, must be Tarantino’s fault. Time to ban his movies.