True Evil

Guns are evil.

They must be—every time something horrible involving guns happens, that is what I hear from the media and from people.

Recently, a man who was having psychological issues both from the loss of a child 3 years ago and from a molestation event that happened 20 years ago, took a shotgun and a 9 mm handgun to an Amish school and killed some children and himself.

He wasn’t at fault; the guns were— because guns are evil.

The guns somehow made him write the multiple suicide notes, call his wife during the incident, and choose a place where he could vent his frustrations without much fear of reprisals—a school. Damn, those guns are evil.

Two other gun-related incidents occurred this week as well. In both cases, children got weapons and took them to school and shot people. It is not the parent’s fault for not properly storing or locking the weapon. It is not the parent’s fault for apparently not teaching the children proper respect for the tool, or forgetting to teach the children that a gun is not the proper response to the travails of life. No, it was that evil gun’s fault for sitting there in a drawer and corrupting those in the household.

Columbine was the gun’s fault. The two children who were psychologically unbalanced, feared by their fellow students for their odd and aggressive behavior, and about whom the police did nothing regarding the many complaints and fears that had been forwarded to them about those two boys’ behavior for the year leading up to the event—they aren’t to blame. If those darned guns hadn’t been around to influence their minds and make them turn bad, Columbine would never have happened.

We can go all the way back to the first incident—that McDonald’s shooting in the early 80s where another unbalanced person took a weapon to a favorite eatery and unloaded, killing multiple people during a rampage. How possibly could he be to blame for that? It had to be the gun.

A growing voice can be heard once again asking why our country does not ban this gun or that gun, or even all guns. That growing voice is asking why we don’t do more to protect the children.

And here is the problem with that voice—we don’t need more laws, we just need the laws we currently have enforced. This country has literally hundreds of laws on the books, both federally and locally, about who can and who cannot have guns, where they can be used, training courses that are supposed to be taken prior to buying or using guns, and waiting periods. Some locations have banned specific types of guns or modifying weapons to make them more deadly. And the guns still find a way into those locations. Those changes still get made to the weapons. And people still manage to buy guns without the waiting periods or without taking gun safety courses first.

We need the police to take complaints against anyone about violent and extremely anti-social behavior more seriously; including funding them well enough they have people to work these complaints. For that matter, we need all of the many, many systems we have in place in schools, churches, and communities to be properly funded and staffed so they have a chance in hell of actually working.

We need people to understand that well over 95% of all legal gun owners, makers, and sellers are law-abiding citizens from whom you never hear a peep and about whom very few of these news stories are written.

We have to smarten up and realize that the guy who shot the children in the Amish school left home that day with the intent to get some sort of revenge and the need to commit suicide. The Columbine children wanted the same things; revenge and death. These people will find other ways if guns are not in the picture. Look at any country that bans guns; those country a) still have problems with guns and b) have a much higher incidence of violent crimes via other means (knives, blunt objects, fist fights, etc.), per capita. It shows that people who want to commit violent acts are going to—if you make guns unavailable, they WILL find something else to use or another way to do the violence. There is no society anywhere on earth where violent crime has been removed.

So why not smarten up and hold accountable those that should be: the perpetrators of these crimes. They wanted to commit violent acts and they did. They are to blame; no one else but those people. Blame them. Hold them accountable.

It is not the gun’s fault. It is just a tool. A tool that is incredibly efficient and remarkably good at the task it was designed for, but a tool nonetheless. Without a person to hold it, load it, aim, and fire it, the tool will do nothing more than sit there.

And maybe we can learn something from the Amish against whom this most recent gun violence was perpetrated. One Amish man was quoted as saying, “There is no sense in getting angry.” Another, who lost a family member to the violence and has another in the hospital, said, “I think it was going to happen. God has his hand in it.” These so-called ‘backward’ people understand that people get violent and violence happens. They will mourn their dead and move on.

Maybe the rest of us can, too?