Yes, you read that correctly. A 15 year old boy walked into a department store and bought a 12 gauge shotgun. The store owner called his father to make sure it was okay. The boy walked out of the store with that shotgun under his arm.
I can hear Mike Bloomberg and his "Everytown" cadre of liberal supporters having screaming fits. "How could that happen? The boy, his father and especially that store owner should be arrested," they are likely saying in complete shock!
But it did happen! That boy was me. And it was a regular, daily occurrence in 1960's America. In fact, a person could browse through the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, choose from dozens of rifles and shotguns, mail in the money and they would mail your firearm back to you.
And although guns were as easy to get as candy bars, mass shootings were virtually unheard of. And while that was 60 years ago, believe it or not NONE of the many guns I have owned have ever killed anyone (not counting 'Nam - and those weapons belonged to the government)
To sane, logical reasoning people with common sense, this would suggest two things:
- guns are not the problem, and
- something changed after the 1960's that began causing some, albeit only a few people to go on killing sprees.
Those same rational people would then come to the conclusion that, to reduce such crimes, we must identify and effectively address the issues that cause the problem. And we have already proven that it is not guns. Prior to the mid-20th century, guns were far more prevalent on a per person basis than they are now. In the 19th century, virtually every family had at least one firearm on hand. So, it simply has nothing to do with guns, and has everything to do with whatever is causing certain people to go off the deep end. Why, after hundreds of years are some young people now bouncing off walls - even the suicide rate is escalating?
The anti-gun crowd will claim that it doesn't matter - taking the guns is easier and will stop the carnage. Yes, it certainly is easier, if you don't count the casualties from the civil war it would cause. But it would NOT stop the carnage. If the reasons why a person kills is not addressed, he will still kill. He will use a knife as they do in the EU, or a bomb, or chemical or biological weapon. Killers will kill regardless of any gun laws.
The ONLY way to address the issue is, as stated earlier, to find the causes and address them effectively. To ban the only thing the average person has with which to defend himself and family is nothing short of insane.
The first thing we need to understand is that most shootings are not a product of mental illness, though it appears that way. It is actually a result of mental conditioning. More and more young people are being conditioned by our current culture to act with anti-social behaviors. After all, mental illness has always been with us, but has not resulted in so many mass murders in so short a time. No - but what is new is our rapidly changing - and deteriorating - culture.
Certainly, studies have shown that normal children are not turned into sociopaths because of things like social media bullying, violent video games and movies. But if a child is not "normal", if he is borderline unstable, such things can certainly push him over the edge. Look at all the young people who have committed suicide because they were bullied online!
If I were tasked with creating a culture where people feel so disassociated with others that it would result in a mass shooting, here is what I would do - ask yourself if this hits a chord.
The very first thing I would do is disable the persons' conscience. To do this, I would take God out of his or her life. It makes no difference whether or not there is a God - whether God created us or we created Him does not make a difference in how we do or do not have a moral conscience. In other words, if we do not fear God because we do not believe in a Heaven and Hell, we have much less reason to lead a life of morality.
Then I would take away the old-fashioned idea of taking personal responsibility for our actions; that life choices should be like those in video games, where there is a do-over for any choice - simply end the game and start over. No consequences for making poor choices.
Along that same line, the next thing I would do to insure a good crop of mass murderers would be to get rid of any semblance that there is any sanctity of life; that life, itself, is not all that important. To this end I would promote abortion, ensuring that children grow up with the realization that it is just hunky dory to end a human life as long as it is deemed to be inconvenient. If you make poor choices, it's just time for a do-over. No consequences. This takes the lack of personal responsibility to it's highest level - life and death.
To further the development of a mind that is capable of mass murder, I would invent addictive video games that teach developing minds not only how to kill everything in sight, but to feel excitement, and even joy at doing so - an adrenaline rush. And that is the addictive part of such games. And like any other adrenaline rush, it drives adrenaline junkies to move up to a bigger, better rush. Seeking the ultimate high.
And to make sure unstable minds have no reason to NOT commit murder, I would invent social media, where such individuals can live in a world where there is no need to actually meet face-to-face with other people, or make real, human, personal connections that would otherwise provide the individual with relationships that can ground them to reality. In a recent poll, 22% of millennials say they have NO FRIENDS! So, who in their life is anchoring them? Who is instilling personal connections with others, to provide them with a sense that other people have value?
Finally, I would fill the teaching staff at colleges and universities with professors intent on indoctrinating students with radical ideas, and put the mainstream media into the hands of those who would further promote radicalism, and brainwash people by not offering an unbiased view of their story lines.
Of course, it is even more complicated than this, but these are the things I would do that would insure that susceptible people would be prone to mass violence. And I am absolutely certain that these things do contribute heavily. And that is why we, as a people, need to reconsider the long-range results of changes in our culture and begin working on making changes to those changes.
And just how do we do that? In the home! Families - particularly parents - need to take an active role in reducing the impact of such things. Provide your children with a moral compass through religion. Teach them the importance of taking responsibility for their choices so they will be more likely to use greater care in making those choices. Then work to teach sanctity of life by ending abortions of convenience, and limit them to those that involve a life-threatening issue or incest. And limit your child's dependence on addictive video games, even if non-violent, and severely limit their use of social media. In fact, ban social media for any child under the age of 16 - give them a chance to make real, face-to-face relationships with others. And require your representatives to set up a program that monitors universities and forces them to teach our kids HOW to think, and not WHAT to think. And stop watching/listening/reading media that show a clear bias in their reporting.
Do these things in every family, and mass murders will become the rarity they should be. And if a child's family is unable to do so, for whatever reasons, we need after school programs that help to fill that void.
And just for the record, gun control has never been about guns. It's about control, and disarming the public so they cannot fight back if and when the government decides to wrest the power from the people, as every government eventually gets around to.
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