Our future drywaller, Waldo, tries and fails to upset people on the board. He is like many others. He cannot wait for someone with a mental health issue to lose control, and kill others. It excites him and acts as a catalyst to spit venom.
For onlookers who have not actually been attacked, its a rush to point fingers and start arguments. He gets to blame guns - inanimate objects - instead of being concerned with the person who did the shooting, or the victims.
So let's take away the guns! Okay, but the mentally ill don't care about that. And they are still mentally ill. The guns didn't make them that way. So what do mentally ill people do if they cannot get guns? Well, history has shown that they do other things to inflict pain and death. They start buildings on fire. They drive cars through malls or school zones. They poison people. They stab people.
Oddly, the liberal crowd has never cried out to ban cars, or demand mental health checks on potential drivers. Matches and lighters are available at corner stores. Poison is available everywhere.
Demanding that firearms must be banned won't change a thing. Three generations of us have grown up with violence on television, primarily police shows. Law and Order shows murder victims, dead people on slabs at the morgue, and urban shoot outs.
Video games using firearms are very popular. Kill enough people and destroy enough buildings and equipment and you win. Grand Theft Auto takes kids onto the streets smashing into people and other cars. There's a lot of destruction in that game.
Children are being programmed from an early age to be desensitized to acts of violence. Whether it's television or video games, it must be confusing to them. Players can kill at will, but come alive again after a time out. No one feels the pain or stress of an actual murder when they are watching TV or playing Nintendo. They have no problems with violence until they come face to face with it for real.
When they do, they react. They are horrified, hurt and angry that this could happen to them. And in typically human fashion, they look for someone or something to blame. Blaming to person who committed these heinous acts isn't enough.
Blaming the perp isn't enough. They need to blame others. They have to push their pain into everyone's face. Someone has to be held accountable. Firearms are responsible. Not enough police is responsible. A broken home did it. But most of all, it's firearms. They are an easy mark. They are very easy to blame. They don't fight back.
So, to stop the violence, the police, guns and a lousy life are to blame. Mental illness might be mentioned, but no one demands that more effort has to be made to make people better. Just get rid of the guns, put more cops on the street and get after parents to be better at child rearing. That will make it all better.