TexasCHLforum.com

A-R wrote:Worst American school massacre of all time happened ...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

You correctly specified "school massacre". Thanks for that. The wiki page you pointed to, however, needs editing. It says that Bath, with 38 victims, was the "fourth-deadliest massacre in U.S. history, behind the Oklahoma City bombing, the Mountain Meadows massacre and 9/11." That's clearly wrong. Offhand, the Happy Land arson murder comes to mind as having more victims. In that case, 87 people died. The killer used less than a gallon of gasoline and a couple of matches.

This is germane. Why?

Note the use of language in the media. They now refer to "mass shootings" instead of "mass murders". If they referred to "mass murders", they'd have to include Happy Land, 9/11, and a bunch of other killings. Yesterday's shooting would fall way down on the list and people would then be reminded that crazy people can find ways to kill lots of people at one time WITHOUT using guns. The nicely-alliterative phrase "mass murder" that was once common and is exactly the sort of wording that a good writer or newsreader *should* use is abandoned in favor of the more cumbersome "mass shooting" solely, in my opinion, because many folks in the media will use any excuse to push focus away from the tragedy of the loss of life and toward, however subtly, pushing a gun-control agenda.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.

RPB wrote:a game he saw caused it
violent cartoons he saw caused it
a TV show he saw caused it
A movie the guy saw one time caused it
(these have also all been blamed in the past; before computer games existed)

Maybe comic books caused it. Back in the 1950s, there were congressional hearings and much public furor over the way comic books were turning our youth into social deviants. A big-selling book ("The Seduction of the Innocent") was at the center of the controversy.

I said that to say this: Over all recorded history, human behavior has (within broad parameters) remained consistent. When something bad happens, there's a natural tendency to want to blame some *thing*, as in a "thing" that can be easily identified and dealt with. People don't like to deal with the bigger issues that are embedded in the human condition - the existence of evil, of insanity, of sociopathy. Those are *hard* problems and it's so much easier to look for easy solutions.

I don't really blame gun-banners any more than I blame the folks who earnestly pleaded that the rise in flapper culture in the 1920s (or rap culture in the 1980s) would destroy civilization. Mostly (except for a few leaders who are willing to leverage tragedy to destroy human rights and consolidate the state- and corporate-run power structures they control) their hearts are in the right place; they want to help. They just don't think things through far enough or logically enough to realize that legislating against *things* does nothing to change what's in the human heart.