Everyone who makes this absurd argument knows it won’t. They just want to keep their stupid toys and don’t care about the lives it costs, so they muddy the waters to delay actual action on preventing these needless deaths.
- “Just arm and train everyone bro [so we can keep being the problem].”
- “Just use ‘clean coal’ bro [so we can keep making billions destroying the climate].”
- “Just make more plastic recycling plants bro [so we can keep littering the environment with mountain ranges’ worth of single-use trash]”.
- “Just use EVs bro [so we don’t have to reevaluate how fundamentally terrible car-centrism is]”.
Every time there’s a systemic problem in the US, someone shows up to make a proposal that puts a very small band-aid on the problem at best while making it much more deeply entrenched in the long-term and consequently more of a problem (in the above examples, we have respectively more guns and gun culture, more investment put into generating energy via coal, more infrastructure for plastic, and more car infrastructure). Basically, “I don’t want my guns taken away ever, so the solution I’m going to come up with is that everyone has them and so the actually effective solution of restricting them becomes literally impossible.” Their solution doesn’t just not work; it actively causes more deaths while serving their own self-interest.
I don’t think guns were the root of the problem in this case. It sounds to me like this guy was fucked and almost certainly not getting the support he needed. If he was living at home and had a “hoarder” amount of tools he likely didn’t have anywhere to go. Assuming he was getting a even cut of the sale1/5 of the return on a house wouldn’t be sufficient to provide for another house to keep that stuff. Obviously he did a horrible thing but this probably could have been avoided by not letting him get into such a desperate situation in the first place. It’s a failure of society.
“gUnS dOn’T kIlL pEoPle, PeOpLe KiLl PeOpLe” is always fun to see trotted out. This was a failure of society to keep a shotgun out of the hands of a deeply mentally unstable man, and every rational country in this respect is either laughing at Americans who make this ridiculous argument while their gun violence rate is multiple orders of magnitude lower than ours, or maybe they just don’t have it in them to laugh and just feel bad over the mountain of corpses America makes and then just says “well we just need better mental health and then everything will be fine bro”.
Any mental health professional worth their salt will tell you that giving someone access to firearms simply increases the likelihood for impulsive murders/suicides.
Okay so say he didn’t have a gun, he’s still in a desperate situation. As long as he only has the capacity to kill himself it’s fine?
