On the other hand alcohol-related traffic deaths have dropped significantly over the past 30 years or so, after DUI laws started being more aggressively forced.

Not a perfect analogy, but still.

I think you have to factor in the law.

Also you make out like Texans have some uniform ideology. They don't. 43.2% of Texans voted for Hillary Clinton. So if you think your typical jury is going to be uniformly good 'ole boys, think again.

When you look at a list of school shootings. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/..._United_States#1990s

You can see that a majority of them are committed by people under the age of 21. Especially most of the really bad ones like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Santa Fe.

I'm postulating that if kids aren't mature enough to handle alcohol until they are 21 years old, maybe they aren't mature enough (as a group in general) to be given carte blanche with firearms.

I'm thinking that if that group still lacks the maturity and impulse control to keep them from wanting to shoot up a place whenever they get the sads, that maybe we should start looking at more stringent age requirements.

Our attitude towards guns is different than our attitudes towards one political party vs the other.

First, it would be very unlikely to even get an indictment. Any District Attorney (elected office) would have a political problem for bringing the charges. Then there is the jury. Unlikely to be able to convince 12 Texans that owning/possessing a gun was inherently irresponsible. The act would have to be egregious.

He used his father's shotgun and his father's .38 revolver. The father is responsible for this shooting, too. Now, whether he's legally responsible will of course be argued by lawyers, many of whom will come up with reasons to mitigate the father's responsibility. But there's no doubt that the shooter's father is morally responsible.

Also, if the dad didn't know there was something seriously wrong with his son he should have. He's the damn father, for God's sake, and should have known. Because he had a duty to know and be involved in the life of his son. So parents have a moral responsibility when it comes to their children, and one of those responsibilities is to ensure their kids don't go off the reservation and try to massacre everyone around them.

By definition and act, this shooter was a monster, and evil as well. And there's no way he didn't give off signs that any parent even halfway involved in the life of their child couldn't have picked up on, if he'd been paying attention, that is. Any parent who says they didn't know that their kid was dangerously psychotic is a liar, in my opinion.

1. The mentally ill shouldn't be allowed anywhere near guns, plain and simple. Society has to get over this hesitance to address the crazies among us and get them the help they need. As well as prevent them from coming anywhere near a gun.

2. Whether we like it or not, schools are one of the softest of soft targets and our refusal to harden them -- out of some high-minded, and sadly misguided, set of principles -- is going to invite even more shootings. I respect teachers (and I did some substitute teaching not long after retiring from the military, so I saw up close how dedicated many of them are), but they don't have even close to the final say on how the facilities in which they teach and kids learn need to be protected. Sorry, but that's the bottom line. Schools need to be protected. And that means by well-trained people who carry guns and operate metal detectors, for one.

3. These shooters are a symptom of a culture that's become progressively less-restrained and increasingly ill. Failing to acknowledge this plain fact is going to allow more of these killers to be born. These shooters (almost all of them male) are shaped by the dominant culture in which they live. And right now, the culture is programming many of them -- untethered as they are from parental control, in many cases -- to believe that life is a casual thing and that it's no big deal to grab daddy's shotgun and revolver and just go pick out the kids that you don't like and pump a shell or a round or two into them, including the girl that spurned your advances.

Since Columbine in 1999, these school shootings are becoming an increasingly more common fact of life for American schools and they're telling us things about ourselves and the culture in which we live that may be uncomfortable for us to confront. Every single parent with whom I've talked when it comes to their kids (including my sister, who had six of them) has one common refrain: Raising kids is HARD WORK. And leaving these kids, especially boys -- who act on rage in certain instances, especially in their later teen years -- to be raised by a culture that doesn't seem to value life overly much is simply asking for even more trouble down the road.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

I would think also making access to alcohol more difficult for underage kids helped too. I know when I was in high school in the 80s there was no problem with other kids my age with fake IDs or just because they looked older getting everyone alcohol. My impression is that is much tougher now.

Agreed and I'm not arguing it hasn't had a positive effect. It's just if you think about it even with stiffer penalties it's still somewhat prevalent. My reply was more in response to this part of that post

"If something like that was enforced (and was actually effective?), it would have prevented almost every school shooting in the last 2 decades."

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"I think I've cracked the code. double letters are cheaters except for perfect squares (a, d, i, p and y). So Leddy isn't a cheater... "

I completely agree


Wow, I think here you jumped the shark. You do know this school had a false report a month or so back that was investigated, and they dug through backgrounds and identified students at risk, who had some form of the normal indicators, this kid did not make that list.

By several accounts, this kid did not demonstrate the normal markers, The conversation 30 min before the shooting with his friend was interesting.

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Just Triing
Triathlete since 9:56:39 AM EST Aug 20, 2006.
Be kind English is my 2nd language. My primary language is Dave it's a unique evolution of English.