Alphecca

Living With Mutants

What do they say, bad news comes in three's? Three school shootings in the space of a week. Add in the one in Canada a couple weeks ago and it's enough to depress almost anybody about the state of the human condition. There's a wrap-up of what is known of the latest sick mutant -- in of all places, Lancaster, Pennsylvania -- over at Eric's.

Meanwhile, at Countertop's an Aussie is scornful of the suggestion to arm teachers and comments:

Why stop at teachers? Why not make it mandatory for all children to carry guns? At least those who are old enough to have strength to tote them? For the 3-year-olds, you could have some of those cute 25-calibre ladies "purse pistols."

And make it mandatory to not just have them in holsters! People in America should have to keep weapons IN THEIR HANDS at all times! To keep themselves safe...

Years ago, during the Columbine Era if I may call it that, it was kids -- students themselves -- committing these heinous crimes. In three of the four incidents these past couple weeks it was instead demented adults going into the schools. I'm not sure what that means other than that now the victims weren't even known by the assailants.

People who don't like guns, and there's nothing wrong with that in itself, will say that firearms made it easy and we should ban them. Aside from the fact that banning guns will be about as effective as banning illicit drugs (so how's that war going?) it doesn't address the problem. We can ban cars but there will still be drunks. We could go further and ban alcohol but since we've already tried that...

Anyone reading the news these days would think that we live in a world completely filled with mutants. Well, there are plenty of them around but the good news is that while four psychotic individuals -- three in the U.S. and one in Canada -- shot up schools in the past few weeks, 332 million other people didn't. That's the combined populations of the U.S. and Canada and regardless of whatever grudges or childhood scars they were carrying around with themselves, they didn't find any to be of sufficient cause to murder innocents.

See! The news isn't so bad after all.

I realize that's no consolation to the families and friends of the victims of these senseless tragedies and my heart goes out to them. Unfortunately, many in the media will use these occurrences to call for greater gun control when in fact the problem is with a lack of mental-illness control.