You know its funny, but as soon as I read this article I figured that exactly the kind of responses we are reading here would already be on the O club board.
A few observations:
1) "Red Lake Fire Director Roman Stately said the gunman had two handguns and a shotgun. The shooter may have obtained his weapons from his grandfather, who was a long-time police officer in the area"
The shooter in this case illegally obtained his weapons from a law enforcement officer, no gun control law other than one aimed at disarming the police (which to date I haven't heard proposed on either side of the aisle) would have made one wit of difference in preventing the shootings.
1) "The alleged shooter believed he was the "angel of death" and a Neo-Nazi. School officials reportedly were afraid he would do something violent in April 2004, which was the month of Adolf Hitler's birthday"
Does anyone really think its odd that a nihilist with a predisposition to violent behavior would kill his classmates and then himself?
Lest we forget, Klebold and Harris's main plan of attack was a series of giant propane bombs which were supposed to take out the entire cafeteria of Columbine highschool. As one official put it at the time, it was only by the grace of God that they didn't go off because the final death toll would have been much higher than 14. Do we seriously think the solution to that problem is to ban access to propane?
As was the case with this fellow we had two nihilists who dressed in black and who had nothing but teen angst, total self-absorbtion, and an absolute moral vaccuum to direct them. With that kind of philosophy on board, its only providence that prevents these massacres from happening all the time.
As has been pointed out, 100 years ago guns were considered a tool in most American households, not very different from a hammer, and children were raised around them and taught to use them. And yet we didn't have school massacres back then. What has changed? Well, what's different is that today our kids are by and large spiritually moribund and morally adrift if not simply amoral. I encounter kids on a fairly regular basis who have no concept of an objective right or wrong and simply weigh decisions on the basis of "Do I want to do it? Will the perceived upside be greater than what I perceive to be the downside?" And since the average teen has a limited capacity to assess long range consequences, even that grotesque means of decision making is inherently flawed (witness the sterling decisions made by teens both in the drivers seat or the back seat of cars).
What needs to be emphasized is that by and large this wasn't the case 100 years ago, "ethics and morals" had not become dirty words that send ACLU lawyers in to a legal feeding frenzy.
So it seems to me that we only have 3 possible courses of action to choose from as a society:
1) Accept that these massacres are going to occur as amoral mini-barbarians do what is right in their own eyes and get used to them.
2) Accept that what President John Quincy Adam's stated is true "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion" and concluding that we will no longer tolerate morality and religion in the public square, accelerate the inexorable move towards a 1984-like socialist police state where all individual liberties are subsumed by the government.
3) Realize that we are tearing apart the very fabric of a free and civil society by removing every vestige of religion or morality from the public square and begin the painful process of reforming our way of thinking about the importance of the disemination of ethical instruction both corporately and individually.
Sadly, I believe that because we cannot endure choice #1 and detest the very idea of #3, then #2 will eventually become the defacto choice.
"Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them or by a power without them, either by the Word of God or by the strong arm of man, either by the Bible or by the bayonet."[/i] - Robert Winthrop, Speaker of the house of Representatives.
- SEAGOON
