Taking guns, away from millions of people like me, isn't going to reduce mass shootings. It comes down to a morality problem, and no, I'm not talking about religion. It's a general lack of respect for our fellow man. In some communities, someone gets "disrespected" and the guns come out. That isn't a person like me, doing that, that is a person with a broken moral compass. A couple years ago, a pedestrian yelled at a driver to slow down in a residential area. The driver stopped and shot him, again, a broken moral compass. Of course, the other problem that goes hand in hand with that situation is that the guy should have been in jail, but we currently have DA's across the country that refuse to press charges against many violent criminals and let them out on low, or no bail for them to re-offend before their court dates even come up.
There are countless cases across the country where a person is arrested with a firearm when they're not legally allowed to possess one. Those charges many times dropped, or their plead down, just so the DA can get a win. When that happens, the criminal isn't sentence to the crime they actually committed so they're not put away where they should be. This is done out of a twisted sense of morality that it's wrong to lock up criminals.
How about, instead of passing new laws, we thoroughly enforce the laws that are already there. If you dig into the history of the actual reported mass shooting, you'll quickly find that many times the person that has the gun shouldn't have had it to begin with, mistakes were made, but those that made those mistakes are never held accountable. The mass shooting that we don't hear about are those that happen in large cities, NY, Chicago, Philly, and LA being the large suppliers of stats. Those shootings aren't talked about in the media, instead they're just used to pad the statistics. No one cares of a bunch of gangs in the inner cities shoot each there, there's no compassion for them, there's no sidewalk piles of teddy bears for them. They're just stats.
In many of the cases of young people shooting up schools, it's a parental failure that lead to it, a prime early example of that would be Brenda Ann Spencer, a trouble teen. Her father, trying to connect with her bought her a rifle. She got high on something (she now recants that) and started shooting at the school across the street. Her father knew she was troubled, probably not a good idea to give her a rifle. She didn't steal it, she was given it.
In the instance of Harris and Klebold, they were able to build bombs and stash guns in their home without their parents knowledge. That's a sign of disinterest and probably the parents just too busy to care what the kids were doing. I'm not saying that a parent needs to spy on their children, but you should at least be aware of their activities.
As you start looking into these stories, you'll find there's a lot of parenting failure. In many other cases the signs were there that the person was troubled, and probably needed help, but too many people are blind to either through their own selfishness or disinterest.
We as a society need to do better to raise kids with a strong moral compass (again, doesn't have to be religion) with the strength to do the right thing, to care enough to take an interest in their lives, help them when they need help. Talk to them about the problems they're having. Just make time for your kids. If you see one of your kid's friends being troubled, talk to them too, see if you can help without intruding on their parent's responsibilities. Yes, it can be done.
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