What more can one say about the horrific recent massacre at a "Dark Knight Rises" midnight premiere, in Aurora, Colorado? It is as unthinkable as it is totally believable, sadly, and the frequency of militarily-armed lunatics running rampant and railing against society is on the rise. Yet we still tend to feel that it's always an isolated incident, and it always happens in another city or town than our own, until it does happen.
This time the criminal was supposedly one of society's brightest, a science PhD candidate, a career path that both owners of the Evergreen Umbrella brand can identify with very well. We both know how frustrating an investment over several years in basic biomedical research can be, not least as one is paid peanuts for often working seven days a week. But the whole point is that it is a passion, and even if frustration in achieving success is part and parcel of the game, that passion overrides the tough times. How someone in such a noble and intellectual pursuit as neuroscience research could begin to plan a local massacre is beyond me, and beyond even the wildest of imaginations.
There is something wrong when a private individual can go online and have several deliveries over just 60 days of ammunition, explosive materials, gas canisters, and detonation components. After 911, one would think that even a PhD student ordering 6,000 rounds of ammunition online and having them delivered to his door would have triggered an alert of some sort. Apparently not. This is wrong, and is indicative of the whole problem of gun control in the US.
That such massacres are still possible after Columbine in 1999, and the other shootings that followed it, is a damning indictment of the fact that gun control is totally out of control. The NRA can bleat all it wants about statistics showing that there is less crime since America armed itself, but that should fall on deaf ears. If you look closely at the responses of Barack Obama, Mitt Romney or even Denver Mayor, Michael Hancock, you will notice two key words missing: gun control. In my opinion, these are the two first words that should be on their mind.
But as they all know, those two nasty little words are a huge turn-off to voters (they say), and as we all know, Obama doesn't ever take a stand for anything that could lose him ten votes here, or eleven there. He only jumps political stances to get votes, never to lose any. I think he should be ashamed of himself for letting an election stand in the way of making a clear statement that gun control was back on the table, as of yesterday. A total of 70 people either injured or dead, but we can't have a little thing like that forcing him to bring up a poisonous issue which could cost him his cosy berth in the big old white house, can we?
While it is easy to think of this as primarily an American problem, there is one fact about this massacre that is as devastating as it seems basically impossible. One of the people murdered in Aurora had been a survivor of the recent Eaton Centre mall shooting in Toronto, Canada. Yes, Canada. Jessica Ghawi, 24, had narrowly escaped another similar event in early June where two people were killed and more were injured, by sheer good luck, and/or her own instinct that something didn't feel quite right.
As she stated in her own blog, she felt that she had been blessed and had cheated perhaps death itself, and came out of it with an even greater sense of both the fragility as well as the preciousness of life. What would the chances be of being in another venue-related shooting massacre, in another country, mere weeks later? That she was present at both massacres, survived one, and was murdered at the other, just seems to be an incomprehensible fact that the odds were stacked so massively against.
But therein lies the problem. Gun control is so out of control that these type of events and the chances of experiencing them more than once in a lifetime appear to have gone up, significantly, and that is a problem for each and every one of us. The only way that anything remotely positive could come out of such a tragedy would be for the US and Canada (and everywhere else) to get real serious, real quick, about the capacity of your next door neighbor to stockpile a mountain of weaponry to execute a masterplan that exerts their resentment of the world in the form of executing people. So doing, in the most cold-blooded and cowardly fashion possible, I might add.
However, living in the real world, I think that we all know that little will change, especially in the US. It's gone gun crazy. There are an estimated 300 million guns out there in the hands of the American public: more or less one gun for every person living there. This is such a ridiculously frightening statistic that it alone could be seen as the nail in the coffin for any hope of eventual gun control. It's a truly depressing fact, and one that just made a significant impact on the lives of 70 people in Aurora, and all of those in and around their lives. All we can do is offer our condolences to them and their families; it is the President's and government's job to actually start doing something about it. - Kevin Mc
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