Long ago a military commander, for another reason, shouted,“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” But maybe now we ought to look at the bloodshot eyes, at the teary eyes.
Don’t jump to conclusions, I’m a gun owner, always have been. I hunted game as a boy on the farm, and by the way, Dad taught us to eat the game we killed.
Bob Costas will now be even more outspoken for gun control. But in many countries a larger percentage of citizens own guns and there is less percentage of gun violence. It is something more…it is our proclivity towards violence over here. I don’t care if it’s four teens beating a homeless man to death with baseball bats or a hundred other examples.
Sure we need gun control. We need background checks even at gun shows, we need to eliminate automatic weapons (not semi-automatic some mistakenly call automatic). We need to ban assault weapons (Again). We need to ban mega-shell clips and magazines.
But more importantly, we need to change our culture. Some swear up and down that increasingly more violent video games, songs, movies have nothing to do with it. I say you’re wrong. Sure your kid isn’t going to mass murder, but it teaches youth, and some others, that some kind of violence is OK, that it’s the norm.
Nothing we do will cover all extremism, but retraining ourselves sure will help.
