How To Convince The NRA That Assault Weapons, Not The Media, Are Responsible For Gun

[tjvh]

Thinkprogress? If I ever wanted to forgo individual thinking for indoctrination into the hive mentality, maybe I'll check out what they have to say.

 

[Mad Scientist]

The last four mass shootings have all been mentally ill.

Loughner, Cho, Holmes, and Lanza...and how many others.

I would humbly submit that it is neither guns nor the media, but mental illness that is to blame.

That plus Psychotropic Drugs.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

How To Convince The NRA That Assault Weapons, Not The Media, Are Responsible For Gun Massacres

Stephen King — best selling author of the very kind of violent books that gun advocates say contribute to gun violence — has penned Guns, a 25-page essay dismissing their criticism, while calling for universal background checks for gun purchases, and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

A self-described “blue-state American” who also owns guns, King is no stranger to how individuals can and do turn to art as inspiration for violence. During the 1990s, no fewer than four shooters read Rage — an early work King wrote in high school years and published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman years later — entered their high schools with guns, held students and teachers hostage, and in some cases killed them. The book chronicles how Charlie Decker, a troubled high school student with a “domineering father,” brought a gun to school, killed his algebra teacher, and held his class hostage — only to see his classmates experience a “psychological inversion” and come to his defense.

After copies of Rage were discovered in the possession of multiple high school shooters, King voluntarily pulled the book from publication. He did so not because the thin tome inspired would-be killers to commit unspeakable carnage; rather it acted “as a possible accelerant” for boys who spent time in psych wards pondering suicide or endured the kind of bullying that results in severe medical paranoia. These boys found a “soul brother” in Decker. He gave them “blueprints to express their hate and rage” and for that, King decided, he “had to go.” “You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it,” the author writes in Guns.

How To Convince The NRA That Assault Weapons, Not The Media, Are Responsible For Gun Massacres | ThinkProgress

You wan to convince people that guns are jumping up and killing people?

Good luck with that.

 

[LuckyDuck01!]

The gun lobby (NRA, GOA, etc.) are not single entities, but rather organizations that are made up of individual voters and many, like myself, agree with their stance.
Of the 11,000 deaths from firearms last year, few of those 11,000 deaths were from assault-style rifles, but rather from handguns. And in the case of handguns, it's gang members killing members of other gangs that account for a good portion of those and to me, the only good gang member is a dead one anyway.