dleong
Member
Someone in a Singapore-based discussion forum just posted his response to the VT incident:
Here is the relevant page of the thread with the post (it's about halfway down).
Yeesh! That post is riddled with so many misconceptions, inaccuracies and outright lies that I don't even know where to begin to formulate a response. Any suggestions?
Don't act surprised. Seeing the very lacklustre efforts of the US to prevent another Columbine massacre, I cannot help but say that the inevitable has happened. High schools across the US have made conspicuous efforts to up security since the Columbine saga, but there is only this much you can do to prevent the intrusion of armaments into the campus. Surely there are better prevention measures they could have taken to prevent a repeat of this preposterous affair?
The answer is pretty straightforward and facile. It certainly doesn't need a rocket scientist to figure out that a better prevention would be to tighten legislations towards the ownership of guns. If there is one group of gadgets ever invented to the detriment of the global society, that would be guns and other weapons which are made to take a life.
I believe that I represent a huge majority of the world's population when I say that I totally cannot comprehend the need for gun-ownership to be allowed in any society. Unlike our daily staples of food, water or clothing, we can totally live without it. In fact, we would live much better if such an inhumane invention is dispensed of from our society.
Statistics don't lie. The US are have the highest number of firearms-related death rates in the United Nations with more than 30,000 deaths a year, with Italy behind at around 10,000 deaths a year. We're looking at arguable the most developed nation in the world, and you would expect a tinge of rationality in the government to curb this glaring problem. Instead, these figures soar with each year.
One might wonder, what in the world is stopping the US from implementing a nationwide ban on the ownership of guns? The fact is that there are several social and political factors that make this a very complicated legislation to be passed. There are huge group of people who would actually prefer the false sense of security of having a pistol to defend themselves against an assailant. There is also a sense of national pride amongst the Americans for their 'glorious' conquest of the land they took from the native Indians, in which their ownership of guns had a huge part to play. However, the main obstacle of such a move would be the socio-economic effects which would be synonymous with whether the current political party would be re-elected for the next term. Imagine how many hunters would require job-restructuring, how many ammunition enterprises would have to relinquish their assets overnight, and how the ammunitions black market would spin out of control. With less violence to deal with, there would probably be a need to retrench a considerable portion of the country's police force, and the security service industry would definitely plummet. At the end of the tunnel, an abysmal GDP figure awaits, and it would be equivalent to political suicide for the ruling party.
Columbine was a wake up call. It got the nation thinking for a moment, but as history doesn't fail to tell us, people make the same mistakes, over and over again. Apparently in the US, for every voice that crys out for the banning of armaments, there is more than enough voices to cover it. It is all left to see how many more innocent lives have to be lost before the nation finally realises that it has been a folly to trade national security for economic stability.
The Virginia Tech Massacre, which dwarfed the once-unparalleled Columbine affair, will once again bring about a national outcry. Once again, we will see them blaming one another for the incident, and many heads would roll. But again, they will not look to tighten their legislations for gun ownership, which seems almost taboo to the American society.
We're still a long way from seeing a decrease in violence in the US. There will be more public massacres to come, as long as lunatics continue to be able to get their hands on these guns readily.
Country roads leading to Virginia would never be the same again......
Here is the relevant page of the thread with the post (it's about halfway down).
Yeesh! That post is riddled with so many misconceptions, inaccuracies and outright lies that I don't even know where to begin to formulate a response. Any suggestions?
