Because according to our opponents, it’s not really as big a concern if it wasn’t a gun. Check out this story from the City of Brotherly Love, on what happened when a mother tried to take away her 16 year old son’s Playstation, “Kendall went into his sleeping mother’s bedroom, hit her 20 times with a claw hammer and ultimately killed her,” ultimately, they say, because the claw hammer didn’t quite finish the job so then, “he dragged her downstairs and tried to ‘cremate her’ in the kitchen oven. When that failed, he continued, he beat her in the head with a chair leg before dragging her body outside and hiding under debris in an alley behind the house.”
Thank God this juvenile did not have access to a firearm! Someone might have gotten hurt.
What the hell.
For one what the hell was wrong with this kid.
For another thing how tasteless and tactless can you be? Its just as bad for us to take a brutal murder and say “see no guns!” as it is for the Bradys to take a brutal murder and say “OMG it was the gun”. You can’t fight ignorant disrespect with more ignorant disrespect.
I wouldn’t have done it in quite the same language at Sebastian, but I do think there’s an important point to be made with this case. This kid was so far beyond screwed up that he made a conscious decision to kill his mother for less than a grounding. And yet, the kid admits that he did this to the only person who ever cared about him.
This is a reflection of a serious cultural problem. There’s absolutely no respect for life, and yet the leaders of the city – in conjunction with the Brady Campaign – are working to deflect that very real & serious problem by pushing more gun control. Highlighting the cases that show just how deep these cultural problems really are shouldn’t be a bad thing if the person highlighting them is willing to talk about the larger issues. I know that Sebastian is willing to do so because it’s a topic we discuss frequently.
Holy crap. Just take this kid to the local veterinarian and have him put down like a rabid dog. He is broken far beyond repair.
Tactless or not, I think it needs to be said. Some people are simply brutal and it doesn’t matter if it’s ‘harder’ for them to commit murder if they don’t have the ease of use that a gun provides. People don’t murder because it’s easy.
My point was not to trivialize this criminal behavior. This is truly a horrid crime, and there can be no doubt about that. My point was that our opponents trivialize this kind of brutality by focusing on the instrument rather than the criminal. Our opponents will say nary a thing about this case.
But would they if it was a gun, and the sixteen year old had purchased it at a gun show?
In that case it would clearly be the gun’s fault.
I’m blaming Sears Hardware and the claw hammer. Why does a hammer need “claws” – to make it more dangerous.
You don’t have to read between the lines too much in that story, e.g. “Anderson…looked quizzically about the courtroom,” to figure this kid is impaired beyond needing his video-game fix. As in Arizona, the pre-emptive solution isn’t to ban guns, or hammers, or bricks or whatever, but instead to advertise the already existing processes that can and should be followed to remove dangerous people from public. Considering the high number of mentally impaired people in prisons–who got locked up only after they went off the rails in some way–there’s a good case to be made for provided more support to people, like the poor woman in this story, trying to provide for and protect potentially dangerous family members. The recent post here via Assad Mayoob about the guy who ended up shooting his insane brother is another good example, though they are endless.
I really think it’s important to defend our gun rights and general rights of self-defense, and that a good way to do it is to push for better systems for dealing with the mentally incompetent. I don’t pretend to know what “better” would look like, but I’m up for the discussion.
Sage makes a good point, that we need to try to better understand people with mental problems, and try to treat them better.
And Sebastian is right: if we’re so focused on how someone was killed (by gun, for example), rather than why, then we’re less likely to have such a discussion. We’re even less likely to think about it!