Reply #85: Perhaps... yet I favor banning handguns as best solution.

[chknltl]

If some children are unable to play nice with a toy in spite of being educated on how to play nice with that toy the better solution is removing the toy. A great analogy here would be drinking age: How many Americans would advocate the removal of the laws which require an adult to be over 21 to purchase alcohol here? Likely a small % would advocate this and a good chunk of the advocates would be under 21! Why is this? Because most over 21 fear the chaos which could potentially ensue. Yet lots of countries have NO age limit for it's citizens to purchase alcohol and there is no chaos!

This is indeed a national mindset issue as you suggest. So I say again, if the kids can't play nice with the toys, take the damned things away from them. The number of deaths from handguns here in the U.S. in comparison to other countries with AND without handguns CLEARLY illustrates that America AS A NATION is not responsible enough to "play" with these "toys". So far, ALL attempts to get this nation to play nice here have failed.

Crybabies who complain that "Not everybody" is a problem, ARE themselves a part of the problem. They utterly refuse to see that their past solutions have clearly NOT WORKED here. They selfishly cling to their failed solutions as the remedy. More attempts at fixing the problem by changing a national mindset here will lead to more handgun deaths, PERIOD!!! Those deaths need not happen. Again I say, the hell with fixing the problem, just remove the problem: ban the handguns.

Had handguns been banned years ago Cho would have had to have found another method...perhaps an I.E.D. or a suicide vest, yes he could have done the same or more damage but it would have been a lot tougher than what he did do. If the suicide vest option were so much easier than a handgun he likely would have done exactly that! He chose handguns because they are easy to purchase and conceal AND implement as the mood struck him. It takes awhile to construct a suicide vest...the inventor has time to cool off, picking up a handgun while angered on the other hand takes little or no time.


Here is a possible simple solution:
I say to our Democratic AND Republican leadership: Propose legislation to do a bipartisan study of the problem. Stick to that as part of your campaign. Don't threaten to take anything away from anyone but promise to do an honest study here. Whatever the results are put the facts out to the people and then put it to a national vote. If the deaths are acceptable to them then maintain the status quo, if not then ban the damned handguns and be done with it, if an alternative is acceptable to them then go with that. Let this WHOLLY be a peoples decision with a full understanding that the people will suffer whatever consequences they have voted on and allow the issue to be re-examined and voted on every 4 years. That should force the national mindset to change, one way or the other. That should remove the hand-gun onus from our 2 party system. Nobody will be able to blame Dems or Reupubs here.

If it were up to me though, I would see to it that hand-guns were removed from America. I guarantee that deaths from hand-guns would go down. When deaths from other devices went up then an examination of the new problem would take place. I sincerely doubt that the replacement weapon of choice for committing crimes will cause as many deaths as the hand-guns did from criminal use. I see no way that accidental deaths will go up once handguns are banned...they can only go down. My priority would be in saving lives.

I am quite confident that once the handguns are removed from our society then the deaths from handguns in our society will fall to numbers quite comparable to deaths from bazookas. The numbers of deaths by bazookas in our society is quite acceptable for me. Yes I know bazookas can be purchased but if the numbers of deaths by bazookas grew to be similar as that of handguns, how long do you suppose bazookas would be around and who would be advocating changing a national mindset here as opposed to just removing the damned bazookas? See what I mean, in this case "responsible" bazooka owners would be a part of the problem, just as responsible handgun owners today are part of our problem.