Archived Observation

A week after the Littleton school shooting, the 10:00 News ran, like, five stories in a row about gun control. They talked to people at a shooting range, showed President Clinton pounding on his lectern while talking about new gun control laws, and spoke with the militant No Guns No Not Ever Bury Them All Right Now people. Gun control? How about bomb control? I read a newspaper article which stated that neighbors often saw the two boys coming home after school. The bored-and-snoopy neighbors would watch them go directly into the garage, and though their view was most likely obscured when the boys closed the garage door, the neighbors would still be able to hear the breaking glass and smell the noxious chemical smells that wafted out into the crisp Colorado air. Hmmm.

And where were the parents? "Son, if you and your friends are going to build bombs in the garage, you're going to have to be more careful of the car, OK? Those chemicals eat right through the paint." Did they think it was normal that their son would come home and promptly shut himself in a garage filled with chemicals? "What the hell are you kids doing in there?" "Umm, science… project?" "Oh. OK." These bombs could have killed hundreds of people if they had happened to be detonated. But no one mentions the bombs. No one mentions the mental health issues. No one mentions parental responsibility. They just focus on the guns.

There's nothing more annoying to me than the "extreme" people who think the only way to solve a problem is to take the most extreme measures, like believing that absolutely no guns should exist whatsoever. What, exactly, would that solve? Removing guns from society doesn't remove the fact that there are still a significant number of wackos who will stab you, smother you, blow you up, or even poke your eye out with a sharply-whittled twig if they so inclined. And when these "concerned citizens" say that we should make it a law that no violence be shown on television, in movies or in video games, I have to disagree. Two boys who played Doom killed their peers. What about all the millions of other kids who play Doom that haven't killed anyone? I mean, if every person who watched virtual violence committed actual violence, we wouldn't be having this guns-no guns debate at all. We cannot simply will ourselves back into a world of quilting bees and ice-cream socials. 

(Besides, I hear that those sewing needles are pretty damn sharp.)