train 'em young, cause, merica!
We seem to be facing quite a problem with gun violence in the US. Mass shootings are becoming more an more common, and it seems that the only solution is for law makers to revisit gun laws in the US.
Mass shootings are WAY more prevalent in the US than any other developed country. Why is this? I think it's because it's way too easy to obtain automatic weapons in the US. It's easy to purchase an assault rifle in the US. Automatic weapons are technically illegal for civilians, but most assault rifle's can be easily modified to be automatic. This is what's happening. The AR-15, AK47, Fn-Fal, etc can all be modified as fully automatic weapons. These weapons are allowed to be sold in the US because without fully automatic capability they are seen as the same as hunting rifles - similar or the same caliber, and single shots.
wtf, guys?
The truth is, these are not hunting rifles - they are assault rifles that are designed to have automatic capability and can be easily modified as such. I think some serious attention needs to go into this topic and gun laws need to be revised to make it much more difficult to obtain/build a fully automatic weapon.
So, you say, we'd still have shootings even if automatic weapons were difficult to obtain? Yes, probably so - however, we probably wouldn't see headlines about mass shootings killing and injuring 30+ people from a single shooter. Especially in schools. Thinking about it logistically, if the shooter did not have an automatic weapon, he might have been able to kill or injure a few people before the school's resource office (every school in the US has one, afaik) would have been able to take down the shooter or call for backup to help take care of the evolving situation.
I'm all for people having access to whatever they need, but, sometimes we need to protect people from themselves. I think having stricter gun laws is a fair trade off to protect our children from mass shootings.