THIS is what should be remembered of the Gilroy Garlic Festival
NOT THIS memorial image:
So the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting got me thinking...
First off, people should be lamenting how much garlic they ingested last weekend. Not lamenting the tragic loss of children. I looked up an absurd stat that said there were 323 mass shootings in 2018 that resulted in 1,661 people being shot, 387 killed. (In the United States.)
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Me and my squad of Frisbee Dogs perform at events like the festival often enough to make one worry just a bit about some dimwit choosing some public venue to act out their perceived rage. You can never get comfortable these days. Not when guns are so readily available to idiots and children. Ever.
One problem is that if this dimwit exhibited warning signs, and people ask why didn't anyone do anything? Well, to be honest how many thousands of people exhibit warning signs everyday, whether it be in conversation or stupid ranting posts on social media? All the time.
As good-intended as it is, you can't call authorities on every single person who exhibits dangerous or stupid talk. Most are just people with tiny personalities trying to make themselves seem bigger than they feel. It's the rare a-hole, with no moral restrictions that are the people we need to look out for. But how?
Other countries have minimized their gun incidents through various methods, that I'm sure would just spin up 'gun collectors' or the NRA or whoever may feel slighted that their right to own guns gets threatened. It's one thing to own a handgun thinking you will hopefully be able to protect yourself or your family in your home. But death-dealing, bullet-spraying guns seems rather overboard.
Gun advocates quote their rights to collect guns. Not replicas, but the real thing. All the while, people die because of the freedoms we have here in America. Last time I checked, my hobby didn't kill people.
The latest victims from this 'right' or hobby, from Gilroy, include a 6-year-old boy, 13-year-old girl and a man in his 20s, while 25 more people were injured. How could anyone know that when they woke up Sunday morning, that it would be the last morning parents would have with their child? All because of a 19-year-old PoS boy who legally purchased his gun in Nevada on the 9th of July. How can we still be selling (semi)automatic weapons, to children of all people?
Sometimes, what's legally permissible IS NOT always morally correct.
Right now Americans have more guns than any other country, counting 300 million privately owned firearms, 100 million of which are handguns.
In Japan, if you want to own a gun, you attend an all-day class, pass a written test and perform a very high accuracy rate at a shooting range. Additionally, they must pass a mental-health evaluation, an actual comprehensive background check and must take the exam every three years. Oh, and they can only buy shotguns and air rifles.
In the UK, they've banned the private ownership of handguns, semiautomatic and pump-action firearms.
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Who could imagine that hundreds of people were waking up Sunday morning with plans to go to Gilroy, to only end up with a tale of terror? For now, there's the after-math as peers who were there recount or relive their experience.
Then there's the social media reaction.
One one hand, social media allows us to vent our feelings and let the world know we care enough to be distraught. In one sense it makes some feel better but on the other hand, venting does nothing to help the situation.
Imagine if everyone that vented on social media did something else instead of typing 'thoughts and prayers to the families' and other well-meaning posts.
We could have an impact, even if it would be an uphill battle through all the political and legal hurdles that need to take effect, but we could have an impact if we used that same energy we had to type our thoughts, to do a web search on 'how can i stop mass shootings?'
We not only insist that our local politicians take action, but check in on them and make them accountable for what ever they promise they'll do.
We can fight for more comprehensive background checks at every level across the board/states. We can fight for the requirement of permits to purchase, and many more things. We can fight to have ALL states be held accountable to all the same requirements, instead of vary from state to state.
Or we can fight to ban all gun ownership, period. Sure.. the good people will not have guns in their possession, while the bad people will still have them since they can obtain them illegally. So what, the bad people already have guns in their possession. So what if you owned a gun to defend yourself and your family with? If you don't have the training or experience, you'll probably just end up hurting yourself or a family member in time of duress.
One example that made my jaw drop was a suggestion I read on a website that said...
"Prohibit release of firearms until background checks are completed." Wow.
Then I saw a suggestion that would be tough to enact... "Stop publicizing mass-shootings." I wish, but networks find these events as ratings gold, while the masses tune in slack-jawed to watch the continuing updates of horror... while they're typing their support on Twitter or Facebook.
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Enough is enough. We can't keep wasting time and energy only typing "sending our thoughts and prayers." As one social media site once posted, "Sure, let's put all your thoughts and prayers in a truck and see how much that helps." That's what got me thinking about this.
Social media is a huge sludge on advancement of any kind of decisions that people really need to make! Let's move past that (slaktivism) and take some actual action.
And to be honest, will be ever totally stop stupid, thoughtless idiots from acting out? No, but damnit, we have to start thinking about doing something to reduce the numbers I threw out there at the top of this post.
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Petitions
https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/gun-control-now-1
https://marchforourlives.com/sign-the-petition/
https://www.change.org/p/congress-pass-common-sense-gun-control
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https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1807277
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/16/a_possible_way_to_stop_mass_shootings_139768.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2018/09/27/want-to-stop-mass-shootings-do-these-two-things-physician-says/#ac2b65b55012
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1807277
https://abc30.com/5427063/
https://www.moneycrashers.com/prevent-mass-shootings-gun-violence-america/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gun-deaths-eliminated-america-learn-japan-australia-uk-norway-florida-shooting-latest-news-a8216301.html
https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region
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