The media are already using the special verb they maintain for times like this. The killer “amassed” three pistols and a shotgun. Amassed an arsenal!
My condolences to the families.
Does it seem to anyone else that these kinds of incidents seem to increase during election years? We’ve had two now in Illinois in the last month where gun laws are strictest.
This is just one more tragedy in a long list of tragedies. My thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. No one should ever have to go through something like this. Nothing is ever solved, nor any situation improved by knee-jerk reaction or playing the blame game. I suppose, it is just a natural human response when trying to cope, to deal, to rationalize such events.
Long before there were firearms and SSRI’s, there were tragedies and mass slaughter of the innocent. Who is likely to shoot someone? Someone armed with a firearm of course, since it is hard to shoot someone without one. How likely is it that someone who is psychotic enough to go on a killing spree would be taking an SSRI? There are a great number of people on these drugs and a great many people who own firearms. The percentage that go on a shooting spree, however, is very small.
So you get rid of guns and SSRI’s and we can live in a non-violent Utopia? Of course not, and if you have to blame someone or something blame those who have allowed the society to devolve into one that no longer values life. A society that seems more interested in protecting the rights of criminals, than seeking justice for victims. A society that limits or prohibits an individual the basic liberty and freedom to protect themselves. We search for answers to resolve our own fears. Sometimes, there are no answers, and certain acts, by their very nature, defy explanation.
Yes, you do, it's called a Firearms Owners Identification Card, although you can get it before you attempt to purchase a firearm, you don't have to wait until the after, if fact you must get it before.
From the NRA-ILA factshet for IL:
A buyer is required to show his Firearms Owner’s Identification Card (FOID) when purchasing any firearms or ammunition. Any seller is required to withhold delivery of any handgun for 72 hours, and of any rifle or shotgun for 24 hours, after the buyer and seller reach an agreement to purchase a firearm.
In fact you used to be able to get handguns at WalMart, and some time before that, at Sears and Wards. Back when people rarely shot up classrooms with them.
Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
—Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment (1764).
Yesterday seven people lost their lives to a madman. It is tragic, but equally as tragic is the sheeple have abandon their responsibility for their own safety and outsourced that responsibility to a government that is not legally bound to protect them!
As hard as this may sound, they were complicit in their own deaths by the inaction not to secure their own safety.
Another shooting in a “gun free zone”. The folly of it all, if it were not so tragic.