Look, I know most of the people on here aren't going to agree with me, so I'm just going to put this here and move along.
1) This is a massive tragedy. There's no ifs, ands, or buts, to it. It shouldn't happen. But we keep blaming the tool as if it has a vote in the matter. The media does a great job of pushing the idea that "gun bad" instead of "bad person bad". They also do a great job of not reporting, or underreporting other mass casualty incidents that occur across the world, including attacks on schools and schoolchildren. Do we forget about the man who stabbed 29 in China in 2014?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-26402367 Or the 37 kids in an elementary school in 2020?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/asia/chi ... index.html Or the 2017 London Bridge attack?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_London_Bridge_attack Mass casualty is mass casualty. It's always bad.
Also, look, student stabs multiple teachers in SWEDEN -
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/2022 ... -suspected
2) "Good guy with a gun" presumes that it's legal to have the firearm in that location. This is conveniently left out all to often. Texas, like virtually (if not all) states, has laws that prohibit having a firearm on or in proximity of school property. It originally said you couldn't even have your legally owned firearm in your vehicle while on school property, even if you were sitting in that vehicle or the firearm was in a locked storage device. You were not allowed to have a firearm on school property period. It was changed to be a bit more consistent a few years ago, but the firearm has to remain in your vehicle and be locked within it if you are not in the vehicle. So, fallacy #1 - "Good Guy with a Gun" doesn't work when the good guy is a law abiding citizen who leaves their firearm off school property. "Bad guy with a gun" knows this. And thus knows it's an easy target.
3) "x shouldn't be allowed to have a gun." or "Anyone under x age shouldn't have a gun." Funny thing - we "trust" an 18 year old with a fully automatic firearm and even multi-million dollar weapon systems when they join the military, and often with *very limited* training on those systems. Yet instead of simply enacting laws to ensure proper training or encourage the continuation of responsible ownership and firearm safety passed down from generation to generation for over 200 years, the "only" solution is to remove them altogether.
4) We continue to ignore the *CAUSE* of the issue. Mental health and parental failure. We're seeing it right now in Detroit where the parents of the shooter in the Oakland school tragedy are trying to keep their kid's journal and evidence of their less-than-stellar parenting and personal choices out of the trial because it will "unfairly prejudice" the case.
https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/parent ... from-court Dylan & Clebolt's parents were absentee parents who ignored multiple warnings from others that their sons had issues that needed to be addressed. The shooter in the Sandy Hook tragedy had been referred for treatment on several occasions but never got any. The kid in the Florida shooting - same thing.
Related to that, we continue to allow mass media (social media, TV, radio, internet, etc) to sow hate and division instead of trying to find solutions. We see it not just in domestic issues, but international ones too. How much does the peddling of hate in much of the Middle East against "the West" self perpetuate? How much does our own peddling of "us or them" create more hate within itself? We continue to teach hate. We continue to teach division. We continue to abdicate parenting to the "government" because apparently they know better yet can't provide simple services in *any* country. No government is perfect and no person is perfect, but when everyone is against each other, no one wins and that's what continues to happen.
This kid is an 18 year old who's needed help for *YEARS* and hasn't gotten any. Not from the government, not from his parents/guardians/whomever was supposed to be caring for him. Now he's taking that tragedy and made it a far bigger one and the response is to blame a thing, not a system and a community that failed a *PERSON* and how that failure has real consequences and how fixing that problem is going to be so much harder than anyone, especially politicians, wants to deal with.