Quote:Same thing is true for those in this same thread who have used this situation as an opportunity to talk about more gun laws.  Again, more laws wouldn't have prevented the shooting in Charleston just as it wouldn't have stopped what happened in Sandy Hook or out in Colorado.  But, there's a good tragedy to exploit, so this is a golden opportunity to try to restrict legal access to guns even more so.  

 

Nobody is coming out directly and blaming guns or flags, but all you need to do is look at where the outrage is right now and that's exactly what's happening.   

I love how you selectively see what you want to see.

 

Do I blame guns? No. In fact, ask me sometime about my thoughts on gun control, welfare, immigration, education or taxation, and you might see how right of center I am on certain issues. A person who should not have had a gun used one to kill nine people. I repeat: a person who should not have had a gun used one to kill nine people. Is it the gun's fault that it was in the hands of a racist sociopath with a "mission"? No. A gun doesn't kill people without being loaded, pointed at them, and the trigger pulled. In this case, that was a willful act by a true piece of crap of a human being, and the blame lies solely with him, but some responsibility lies with the system that failed to identify him as someone who should not have been able to acquire a gun. Asking what we can do in terms of creating new laws or revisiting and revising ones currently on the books to keep it from happening again is a fair question.

 

Answer me this, and I know it's a "liberal" question. Why is it that America has such a high rate of violent crime involving guns compared to the rest of the first world? If you can't answer that question, then why should sitting around and pointing at existing policies that clearly failed in this case (and many others) as things that shouldn't be revisited a valid response to any of this? Far-left liberals might want your guns, yeah, and attitudes like that aren't going to get us anywhere. Believe it or not, there is middle ground to be had on gun control. Extended waiting periods, medical background checks (I would argue that keeping a gun away from a schizo trumps the right to privacy), limitations on magazine size and number/type of weapons owned, all things that don't eliminate the right to firearms, but do help to limit the ability of people who shouldn't have guns to get them, and can mitigate the body count when the worst does happen.

 

Sometimes I wish some of you right-wingers would go back to look at the original intent of the Second Amendment. The Founding Fathers never envisioned assault rifles with 30-round magazines that fire twice a second. Shoot, they never envisioned pistols small enough to fit four of them with ten-round magazines inside a single trenchcoat. The Second Amendment was written so that states could form and maintain "well-regulated" militas, not so that someone can amass twelve handguns, four shotguns, six rifles and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Once you take that little detail into account, suddenly the "right to bear arms" is cast in a new light.

 

So do I blame a gun or a stupid flag for the shootings? No, and anyone doing so is either pushing an agenda or being an idiotic parrot. Is it fair to expect that the shootings of nine innocent people by one person who shouldn't have had a gun would stir the national conversation back up? Yes, entirely so, and I hope we get away from this stupid, treasonous flag and back to the issues that matter: respecting the victims first and foremost, and working to figure out how we can reduce the chances of this happening again.

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