Would Gun Control Have Deterred School Shooting Tragedy?

By Mike Thompson, Contributing Writer

In the wake of the tragic Connecticut elementary school massacre, similar to other explosive incidents going back to Columbine, calls are being made for gun control. I'm all for gun control. Specifically, proposed federal laws to ban assault weapons and rapid-fire clips should be passed, along with a provision to clamp down on unregulated gun show sales (and while we're at it, web sales).

If these laws can forestall even only tragedy, they're worth it. I'd like to see these proposals come forward just so we can still see which elected officials remain cowards under the boot heels of the NRA.

Still, let’s be real. If somebody such as deranged Adam Lanza, the Connecticut assailant, wants to get his hands on weapons, he's probably going to find a way to do it. To me, it's sort of like the war on drugs. I've never known of anyone or heard of anyone who wanted illegal drugs but couldn't find them. Same with guns.

One of the TV commentators was saying there already are an estimated 300 million guns in circulation. That's more than one for each and every American adult, including myself, who doesn't have any. So even if somehow nary another gun were manufactured, our misery index is quite high.

Society can work on prevention but in the end, society can't completely prevent. Does this mean future mass tragedies are inevitable? Sorry, I don't have an answer. But I do have a suggestion, for what it's worth, that might help even more than gun control: Movie and TV control.

Why is it considered okay to have so much shooting and killing in our "action" movies and television shows? I'm among the oddballs who questions this virtually each time observing. They wouldn't show pornography on network TV. Maybe we should begin to treat violence in our entertainment programming (and video games) as an equivalent of pornography.

Imagine how much violence Adam Lanza witnessed, as an obviously sick individual, before he reached his 20th year. Readers may scoff at my views and say that I'm overreacting, that only one in a million people would act out in this way, but as we saw in Newtown, it only takes one in a million. Plus, I'd say the violence in our "entertainment" is reflected often in our society, in less-fantastic ways than mass murder.

FOOTNOTE: Tragically ironically, in my homestate of Michigan, on the night before the Connecticut tragedy, tea party legislators passed a law (over the objection of the Michigan Association of School Boards) that allows people to CCW on school grounds. First I asked myself whether they might have felt any remorse the next day, but then I figured, probably not. Too ignorant.

FOOTNOTE II: I thought it was really sick for TV “journalists” to interview the surviving kids only hours after they emerged from the school, and for parents to allow this. You, too?



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