Your Gun Debate is Stupid, and So Are You For It — Here’s Why:
Originally seen on All The Things
My FaceBook friends have been trying to get me into their gun debates for the past few days, and quite frankly I’m tired of it. All of your gun debates are stupid, and so are you for it, and here’s why:
We want to focus in so much on guns as the vehicle for violence. You all are obsessed with it. It’s like this outrage porn you subscribe to whenever a shooting happens. “Well if they didn’t have a gun…” And then we spend 3 weeks rehashing the same arguments we have every time, with only a small tiny handful of people talking about the real smoking gun (pun intended, because I do what I want.)
You wanna have a debate on something that matters, let’s take a look at all the signs we chose to ignore in Florida about this particular individual. Multiple schools expelled him for his proclivity to violence and for repeatedly bringing weapons on campus. His own mother regularly contacted law enforcement to talk some sense into him. After she died, Nikolas was sent into downward spiral. The kids who knew him and followed him on social media were the first to say how unsurprised they were. He eluded to killing and harming animals on his Instagram, bragging about his expanding gun collection. Even his YouTube was a point of concern, being reported to the FBI. He had a string of arrests for violent activities. The list goes on.
Yet despite this, no one acted. No one intervened. He was not getting psychiatric help. They rumored about it to each other. And even when authorities were contacted, it was largely ignored. Look at all the signs. This was completely preventable. Not by stopping him from getting weapon(s), not by some law, or signage to prevent violence. We had ALL the pieces to make a logical conclusion here and say “this guy is in trouble, and his all of the signs he’s going to do something bad.” Yet nothing was done.
17 people died, not because “there should be better gun control,” but because no one wanted to speak up, or do their jobs to intervene before he walked into a high school and fired the first shot. You all are total morons if you think more laws are going to change those outcomes. Insanity is the practice of doing the same thing expecting different results. We as society need to be looking out for and taking care of each other. It’s not a part of our culture to care, or to speak up about these things.
Change the paradigm, champion mental health, encourage it, seek it, and say something. I would rather be wrong about reporting something, than dead wrong for saying nothing.
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