A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Next, a segment of Americans relentlessly consume media which has convinced them that when Obama was in office, they were literally five minutes away from having jack-booted officers beating their doors down to take their guns. How do we combat that by making their fears reality?

Then there's politicians who know that enacting actual legislation to restrict firearm ownership would be political suicide. So they instead propose, and pass, laws which have literally zero impact on reducing mass shootings, but inconvenience the hell out of legitimate owners.

On top of that, let's be conservative and estimate that there are two firearms for every American (the real number I remember is higher), and we implement a blanket ban on ownership. If 99% of firearms get turned in, that's still 6 *million* black-market firearms floating around.

As much as I don't want to, I find myself siding with the conservatives who say that people who perform mass shootings will just find other ways of hurting people - but for different reasons than the ones they have for saying so.

Firearms make it easier to hurt people more numerously. That's a fact, too. I agree in principle that having a blanket ban on firearm ownership would have a tremendous impact on the overall number of people killed in these incidents, which is a net positive in any case.

Having said that, it's a band-aid for a wider problem. As someone who has frequently dealt with thoughts of suicide, and wanting to end my life, my heart breaks for the people driven to the point that they feel that hurting others is their only recourse.

Outside of the people who are simply schizophrenic and hearing voices, these people were driven to such a brink that they felt that their only remaining option was to hurt others, and then themselves. We should be asking ourselves why that is. We should be helping them.

A ban on firearm ownership in response to a tragedy is like proposing restrictions on bridge height in response to a wave of bridge-jump suicides. It is a heartless, soulless, band-aid that solves the immediate problem, but still leaves the pained people to fend for themselves.