A New York man distraught that he was being forced to move from his late mother’s home shot and killed four of his family members before turning the gun on himself.
Everyone who makes this absurd argument knows it won’t. They just want to keep their stupid toys and don’t care about the lives it costs, so they muddy the waters to delay actual action on preventing these needless deaths.
“Just arm and train everyone bro [so we can keep being the problem].”
“Just use ‘clean coal’ bro [so we can keep making billions destroying the climate].”
“Just make more plastic recycling plants bro [so we can keep littering the environment with mountain ranges’ worth of single-use trash]”.
“Just use EVs bro [so we don’t have to reevaluate how fundamentally terrible car-centrism is]”.
Every time there’s a systemic problem in the US, someone shows up to make a proposal that puts a very small band-aid on the problem at best while making it much more deeply entrenched in the long-term and consequently more of a problem (in the above examples, we have respectively more guns and gun culture, more investment put into generating energy via coal, more infrastructure for plastic, and more car infrastructure). Basically, “I don’t want my guns taken away ever, so the solution I’m going to come up with is that everyone has them and so the actually effective solution of restricting them becomes literally impossible.” Their solution doesn’t just not work; it actively causes more deaths while serving their own self-interest.
I honestly don’t think, in this specific case, it matters either way. This was a murder-suicide by an insane person. They could just as well have used poison or a knife.
Everyone who makes this absurd argument knows it won’t. They just want to keep their stupid toys and don’t care about the lives it costs, so they muddy the waters to delay actual action on preventing these needless deaths.
Every time there’s a systemic problem in the US, someone shows up to make a proposal that puts a very small band-aid on the problem at best while making it much more deeply entrenched in the long-term and consequently more of a problem (in the above examples, we have respectively more guns and gun culture, more investment put into generating energy via coal, more infrastructure for plastic, and more car infrastructure). Basically, “I don’t want my guns taken away ever, so the solution I’m going to come up with is that everyone has them and so the actually effective solution of restricting them becomes literally impossible.” Their solution doesn’t just not work; it actively causes more deaths while serving their own self-interest.
I honestly don’t think, in this specific case, it matters either way. This was a murder-suicide by an insane person. They could just as well have used poison or a knife.