9mmforMe said:
I agree with most of this statement, but do not agree that "he is a monster."
He is a mentally ill person and after working with mentally ill for over 15 years as a therapist, I know that people who are so affected are vastly different than most folks. They struggle greatly with regulating their emotions, differentiating between what is real and what is not, making rational judgments and controling their impulses. Intrapsychically this person was likely suffering a personal hell we will never know. Does this exonerate him from blame? No, it does not. He needs to spend the rest of his life in a hospital or jail so to protect society and enact justice as we have developed in this country. Does it mean he is a monster, I think not. He probably has people who love him dearly and when mental illness strikes it does not discern, but it does devastate, as the loss of life in AZ will attest.
While as a rational, well thought out discussion of the shooters situation, this may be right on target, as a response to someone calling for more gun control becasue of this it misses the mark.
An anti proposing more gun control, or one suggesting in front of a group that he shouldn't have been able to get a gun (or a hig cap mag), or a reporter interviewing people over this issue are not going to hear and react to the full statement above. What they will hear, repeat and react to is "he is mentaly ill". They will then immediately question why / how a "mentally ill" person could get a gun.
By definition, you can argue that any mass murderer or serial killer is mentaly ill. From an academic standpoint it's a legitimate arguement. But in a society that wants to make up every excuse possible why someone does something wrong, and then wants to put limits on liberties to attempt to prevent it from happening again, we cannot let them excuse his actions away. Because if they do, they will then place the blame on something else (the gun, gun laws, political retoric).
Anti's have brought up before, and likely will again, the idea of requiring psychological screening before being able to buy a gun and periodicly in order to maintain a "gun owners" ID card. It's my understanding that some countries already require this. We do not want to give them ammo to use to push for this.
As far as the idea of toning down the political retoric and so called "fear mongering": I don't want to see goverment try. It's all to easy to lump all dissenting opinions into the same pile as "political retoric" and all attempts to point out the down side of a course of action into "fear mongering". The end result of that is a situation where the party in power can tell you it's good to march people into a gas chamber and then just add anyone who dissents to the line. IMHO, using this tragedy to squash political speech would be an evil on par with using it to squash gun ownership.