When I first learned of the shooting in Aurora Colorado, I was appalled that yet another tragic
event by a mad man was to be remembered in American history. I first prayed for the families of
the deceased, their families and for the recovery of the wounded. Yet, right away I remembered
election year + fatal shootings = 2nd Amendment rights coming under fire.
As I always say guns don't kill people, people kill people. As long as there is a sick demented
mind there will be chaos and destruction with or without a gun.
James Holmes, 24, is seen in this undated handout picture released by The University of Colorado on July 20, 2012.
On Friday at 12:30 am, at the midnight premiere of the newest Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, at a Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, a shooter set off a smoke bomb and opened fire, wounding 50 people and killing 12. It wasn’t twelve hours before the issue of gun control was raised; even the shooter’s suspected identity, 24-year old California native and University of Colorado PhD student James Holmes, had not been released at the time.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called on November’s presidential candidates to detail their stances on gun control, operating off the assumption that guns were the problem, and the reason for the shooting. “And this is a real problem. No matter where you stand on the Second Amendment, no matter where you stand on guns, we have a right to hear from both of them concretely, not just in generalities - specifically what are they going to do about guns?”
Others pointed to the fact that the shooter owned an assault rifle as one of the four guns he owned, raising questions of what type of weapons should be legal for a person to possess. They question whether it serves any positive purpose to keep such weapons legal.
The neglected fact when addressing gun control issues in the wake of a tragedy, however, is that there are two ways to achieve the equality of power which could have prevented such a tragedy. The discussed solution is to remove all potentially dangerous power in the form of gun (and later, in some places, knife) control. The UK, for instance, has had severe gun control laws in place since a 1996 school shooting in Scotland prompted the legislation’s passing. This did not, however, stop a shooter in 2010 from killing twelve people before taking his own life, a rampage which neither civilians nor police were able to stop.
The other option, however, is for everyone to have more power to protect themselves, through encouraging rather than discouraging people who would use guns as positive tools from obtaining them. When one person with harmful intentions has a gun, it becomes a tragedy, but, as a 2007 Colorado church shooting showed, when another armed person is prepared to stop them, such situations can be averted or severely lessened. The reverse of this situation is the 2010 Ft. Hood shooting, in which 13 highly trained military personnel were gunned down in a situation in which their being armed was forbidden.
Guns make the news when they are the tool of a tragedy, but not when they avoid it, because an avoided tragedy is rarely news. Even discounting immediate and ridiculous finger pointing, the politicization of tragedies such as the Aurora theater massacre does not lead to as nuanced an understanding of issues as is needed to form an informed opinion on them.
