Friday, February 22, 2019

One year anniversary of the shootings in Parkland, Florida

It’s been a year since 14 students and three adults were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The Miami Herald wanted to know how many children have been killed in the year by gunfire since that day. Their total: 1,157. They ran short stories of each of these victims in the paper February 12.

My opinion: It’s too easy to get a gun and bullets(!) in this country, especially those with a known mental illness or a felony conviction. In many cases, the problem is not a lack of of laws, but lax enforcement. I don’t want to take away the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns; I want small, incremental changes made in the existing laws and better enforcement until the problem is reduced to a level society can live with — and I have no idea what that level is.

[This was originally posted on my Facebook page February 17. The comments from that post are included below.]

4 comments:

  1. From the Facebook post: How many have been killed in car accidents? Let's regulate cars maybe too? And somewhere (I'll have to see if I bookmarked it) there was an article that more kids in that age group die by drowning--like 8x as many, and the push in that article was for swimming instruction. We cannot walk around in a bubble. We cannot protect everyone from everything. We can't even control earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and natural disasters. Life is a gift, treasure each day, and quit regulating the bejeezus out of our lives.

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  2. From the Facebook post: Cars are regulated. You need a license to drive one and have to wear a seat belt. Cars also have safety features. Pools and beaches have lifeguards and probably should have more. Calling for additional measures to prevent gun violence is reasonable.

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    Replies
    1. Again, there is lax enforcement. In many accidents in Ohio, one or both drivers have no license or a suspended license. Those with licenses often don’t have insurance. Yet, the penalties are minor until a driver kills someone — then they usually go to jail.

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  3. From the Facebook post: I'm not going to beat this up--I feel there's a lot to the education portion of gun ownership by the parents. I would like to say some things, but this is not the place. But I should not have said "car accidents" on my original post....rather "intentional injury by car". We have had incidents of parents driving the car of kids into the lake, or over the cliff, or into oncoming traffic, people driving cars into crowds, with the intention of killing and ending life. Okay, I'm done.

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