There’s an elephant in the room regarding these gun control protests. The protests are understandable and sensible, and if I was in high school right now I’d certainly participate. The demands seem very reasonable.
The elephant in the room is that people only care about gun control when a large group of people get killed, but people in inner city neighborhoods are getting killed all of the time and everybody is indifferent.
Parkland saw 17 victims. The Las Vegas shooter was able to kill 58 people. In 2017 the city of Chicago saw 650 gun homicides, down from 771 in 2016.
Mass shootings account for less than one percent of all gun homicides in the US, meaning there are an awful lot of deaths by gun.
The fact is that 66 percent of gun homicide victims in the US are black.
Banning the sale of assault rifles to the general public is certainly a solid common sense idea, but the AR-15, which has seen a lot of press lately, is not an assault rifle.
The FBI keeps track of the type of guns used in homicides. In 2014, the most recent year stats are available, there were 11, 961 firearm murders. 5, 562 of those were with handguns. 242 were rifles, and 262 were shotguns. 1,959 of them were “firearms, type not stated” which goes to show that police are lazy.
Even if all of those “type not stated” were semi-automatic rifles, which is clearly not the case, the fact is the vast majority of gun homicides in this great country are by handgun
The reasoning would follow that if the sale of rifles and shotguns are limited, crazy people will just commit mass shootings with handguns, strapping several of them to their body like in a video game.
All of the mass shooters are men who are on medication and are pissed off at the world. Our political divide likely plays some role in this. Americans are pissed off at the country in general regardless of whether they identify as Right or Left. We need to acknowledge the link between anti-anxiety drugs and anti-depressants and mood stabilizers and psychotic behavior.
We also need to stop diagnosing boys with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.) You’re supposed to be hyperactive when you’re a boy, and it is totally normal that you are not interested in the works of Chaucer. You should be allowed to go hit a punching bag for a while.
Instead you’re given Adderall, which is a literal amphetamine. Now you’re medicated and pissed off, and the drug is probably causing some serious side effects such as irritability, excitability, impotence, hair loss, insomnia, etc.
As if you had any chance with the girls before, now you’re walking around school balding and impotent, gnashing your teeth and generally coming off as a weirdo, and you are consequently even angrier.
The United States Air Force gives their pilots a standard issue dose of amphetamines before each mission. The philosophy being that they will be more able to concentrate, and more likely to pull the trigger.
We also need to acknowledge that white upper and middle class people are annoying as fuck whether they are conservative or progressive. You won’t hear a peep at the barbecue from these people about the homicide that took place three miles from their house in a mostly black neighborhood the previous night.
Yet as soon as there’s a high profile media event they’re suddenly extremely well versed on the subject of gun violence and crying out for either more guns or less guns.
Of course a mass shooting is going to garner more attention than a random gang murder, but some perspective would be much appreciated, and these shootings will continue whether we have more or less guns because we are a divided country full of emasculated tools.
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