Sunday, June 15, 2014

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. 

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