The Net Monkey

I don’t like guns.

I don’t think people need them as much as they think they do.

And I think it should be very difficult to get them.

With that being said, I also don’t think that having stricter gun control laws would necessarily have made a difference in preventing Cho Seung-Hui from killing 30-some people at Virginia Tech on Monday. I’m sorry. I just don’t think that it would have stopped a deranged lunatic from getting a gun and shooting it at a bunch of people.

My point is that all of this rhetoric right now about changing the gun laws is nothing more than damage control. People are justifiably upset, and we all have an emotional need to explain what happened. People demand action and politicians make it a political issue, so it appears that someone is going to fix it.

If you want to take the overall issue we have with shootings in the USA in to scope, I would be inclined to agree that stricter gun control laws would have a measurable and provable impact over time, but I think we need to get off this notion that it is some kind of silver bullet.

Regardless of whether or not we have stricter gun laws in this country, someone will always be able to find a way to kill lots of people. There are plenty of alternatives for someone who is hell-bent on hurting and killing others.

I guess I’m a pragmatist about it. I believe that these things just happen. If history has taught us anything (for those that bother to understand it), bad things have always happened to people, and they will happen again.

As I’ve already said, there just isn’t a silver bullet solution here.