I guess I'll say what's on my mind -- the deaths of the children in Connecticut are tragic, but they are a handful, a mere droplet in the bucket of deaths this year caused by things we can actually do something about -- revisiting our drone attack policies, cracking down on drunk drivers, making the food we eat safer, hell -- stop more people from smoking and we can save MANY more lives than we can going on about gun control and even mental illness, which is what I was posting about the other day.
This was a random attack by someone who had a psychotic break. How are you going to prevent that in the future? Anticipate psychotic episodes among .001 percent of the population? In the grand scheme of things, in a country with over 300 million people, think of all the energy spent on this one tragedy that affected a handful of people. Let's let this go, let these people bury their family members and get out of the incessant spotlight. Let's tell the media by our lack of attention to the event that the nation can't afford to ignore the rest of its business and the business of the world.
This was a random attack by someone who had a psychotic break. How are you going to prevent that in the future? Anticipate psychotic episodes among .001 percent of the population? In the grand scheme of things, in a country with over 300 million people, think of all the energy spent on this one tragedy that affected a handful of people. Let's let this go, let these people bury their family members and get out of the incessant spotlight. Let's tell the media by our lack of attention to the event that the nation can't afford to ignore the rest of its business and the business of the world.
You want gun control? You could send money to the Brady bill people, who spent what they could last year on their campaign to change gun laws, which was less than $6000, compared to the NRA's $24 million. That's $24 million dollars. I heard those numbers quoted yesterday. I don't mind an uphill battle, but liberals are going to need to knock over Fort Knox to even try and compete with that.
And this is really going to make me popular -- gun sales are up in the last five years or so -- but gun crime is down. Everyone can rail on all they want and cry about these children but the reality is that less people are getting killed with guns with the laws we have now.
People need to realize when they're being egged on by the media into a feeding frenzy that changes nothing. Enough about the shooting. People want an issue? Let the news go back to pushing the world's leaders to do something about Syria, where there are HUGE, enormous numbers of tragic deaths. Are people obsessing over one psychotic killer because they're fascinated and feel like it's a real-life version of Dexter or CSI? That's what scares me.
Jim Higgins
December 18, 2012
