It’s hard to find someone who isn’t devastated when they hear about the latest mass shooting in Texas, where 26 people died at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs. First of all, we shouldn’t have to say the “latest mass shooting” as if it’s just another episode in an extremely popular TV series.
But like some of our favorite shows, we can’t just look away when it gets tough. We want to get involved.
Check Twitter.
Your friends, the celebrities you follow, your favorite magazines: They’re either calling for actions or sending their condolences. But the debate stays the same.
“This isn’t a gun situation,” President Donald Trump said, “This is a mental health problem at the highest level.”
He encourages the people who say that people kill people, not guns.
Air Force veteran Devin Kelly was a person who killed people at that church. However, automatic weapons like the one he (and the Las Vegas shooter, Steven Paddock) used extend him from being just a person who killed people.
An automatic weapon gives a person holding a knife hundreds of extra arms to commit mass murder.
It gives one cowardly person the strength of an army at the pull of one tiny trigger.
It’s obviously impossible to cure the world of murder and mental health
issues.
Why are we making it easier by ignoring the fact that an automatic weapon makes people with the intent to murder much more dangerous?
Why don’t we look at automatic weapons and say, “what if a murderer got a hold of this?” Now that we know how possible it is that they are capable of doing so, we need to change our phrasing, and then change some legislation.
People kill people. But automatic weapons kill a lot of people at once. There’s 26 in Texas, 58 in Vegas and 49 in Orlando.
The president is right — Kelly was suffering from a mental health problem at the highest level. But if all he had access to was a knife or even a handgun, less people would have lost their family members.
Churchgoers wouldn’t potentially lose as much hope in their faith. Americans everywhere wouldn’t have to fear that the next mass shooting could happen in their own town.
If this country really wanted to stop mass shootings, it would immediately condemn the sale of these weapons to everyday people.
