Increasingly Covered: School Shootings

Another school shooting tragedy:

A gunman has fatally shot a student at a high school near the US city of Portland, Oregon police say.

Authorities said on Tuesday the suspect was also dead and the situation had stabilised.

Increasingly common?

Shootings at schools and college campuses in the US, where there generally is easy access to guns, are an increasingly common occurrence.

Self defense is a natural human right. The US Constitution does little more than recognize and defend those natural right from infringement by government intervention. The Constitution does not grant any rights. The founders recognized this reality, and they rightly viewed firearms as tools, that the person can be either good or evil, and curtailing natural rights would not defend against the world's evils. 

Gun control is a divisive issue in the United States, where the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, beside basic rights such as free speech and freedom of religion.

President Barack Obama's plan for broader background checks on gun purchases, along with proposals for a ban on military-style assault rifles and limits on ammunition capacity, failed last year in Congress.

These measures failed in no small part because these measures have been attempted in the past, with negligible results at best, often with greater negative unintended consequences. 

More:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/06/student-gunman-dead-us-school-shooting-201461021523104470.html

Unfortunately, the gun control debate tends to focus on inconsequential details of firearm ownership and its market. They type of firearm itself is nearly unrelated to these sort of tragic shootings, and often leads pro-rights advocates to believe these measures are merely avenues to curtail overall rights. The paranioa and conspiracy theories are based in solid statistical and historical relevance. 

Quite unfortunately, this debate also disregards the science behind the rhetoric, focusing on emotional arguments and emotional knee-jerk reaction rather than rational discourse and effective policy. 

Until reason returns to the debate, there will continue to be those who readily take advantage for political gain, not letting a tragedy go to waste. 

PolicyMic and Bloomberg

PolicyMic is becoming just another media outlet for partisan politics, with michael Bloomberg using it to promote his rebranding of the failed Mayors Against Illegal Guns as the new Everytown. The message remains the same, that only police (like New York's gang who couldn't shoot straight under Bloomberg) need to have firearms, and they promote only the tragedies, over and over, never letting a good tragedy go to waste. They hardly address social issues, and tout gun bans as the end all to social violence, ignoring statistics and reality in favor of emotional arguments and opinions.

"Since the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, CT, there have been at least 74 school shootings in America. How many more before our leaders pass common-sense laws to prevent gun violence and save lives?
Communities all over the country live in fear of gun violence. That’s unacceptable. We should feel secure in sending our children to school — comforted by the knowledge that they’re safe."

More:
http://everytown.org/article/schoolshootings/?utm_source=PolicyMic+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a0ea9c1d69-Mic_Report_6_11_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_51f2320b33-a0ea9c1d69-285138917

Harry Reid calls for universal background checks following Las Vegas ambush

Senator Harry Reid never lets a tragedy go to waste, jumping on the anti-gun bandwagon (he really never fell off) and promoting a solution that may or may not even address this particular scenario:

"According to the senator, future incidents such as the Las Vegas attack could be mitigated by a move to require all firearms transfers, even those between two otherwise law-abiding citizens, be subject to a background check. At least one of the suspected murderers from this weekend’s violence is known to have a criminal record, although it is currently not known how he obtained the weapons used in the ambush."

Might it be prudent to wait for the facts about this specific tragedy before proposing knee-jerk solutions? Perhaps we should find out what the criminal and psychological background of the shooter, or how the firearms were acquired? These questions and more should be answered before offering solutions that effectively negate specific risks, rather than setting policy that negatively impacts law-abiding gun owners.

More:
http://www.guns.com/2014/06/10/harry-reid-calls-for-universal-background-checks-following-las-vegas-ambush/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=harry-reid-calls-for-universal-background-checks-following-las-vegas-ambush

No, We Don’t Need to ‘Fix’ the Second Amendment

Former Justice John Paul Stevens wants to "fix" the Second Amendment in the following way:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed."

Apparently, he doesn't grasp the intent of this civil right, believing that civilians have no need to defend themselves.



No, We Don’t Need to ‘Fix’ the Second Amendment - Hit & Run : Reason.com