Fox News Bill O’Reilly & Gun Control (opens in a new window)
This type of argument by Bill O’Reilly really misses the friggin point: yes, there will always be “maniacs” (not my word choice) out there and while it may be nearly impossible to prevent people like this from committing murder, we can prevent MASS murder by controlling the purchase of guns AND ammunition.
A misguided person who does NOT have access to guns/fire arms, most likely will NOT buy 100 knives (or a bow and 100 arrows), and try to throw each of those 100 knives (or shoot each of those 100 arrows), but if they do, it would be much easier to gain control and stop the person from throwing/firing the second/third knife/arrow.
Guns (and ammunition) are the ONLY easy to purchase (and easy to obtain) weapon that the majority of misguided people use to commit MASS murder.
Think of any other weapon they can buy or use, guns are the only weapon that give people the opportunity to commit MASS (which is the keyword here, by the way) murder. Yes, there are a small number of other misguided individuals who want to harm large quantities of people, and who will create a bomb (or bombs), or who will hijack an airplane – we’ve put controls into place in order to prevent (or REDUCE) those types of things from happening. There will always be people who want to hurt others on a massive scale. By controlling the purchase of guns (and ammunition), we are TRYING to reduce the number of PREVENTABLE mass murders.
By the way, the majority of these mass murderers do not have criminal records, and may or may not have a history of mental health issues. There is no sound way of telling whether a person is capable of committing MASS murder. The only time we become aware of them being able to do this type of thing, is AFTER it happens and by that time, it is too friggin late – “oh crap, I guess we might have been able to prevent this, if we looked at his mental health history”. HorseFeathers! There is a friggin reason why we CONTROL access to detonation cord and explosives: because we cannot read people’s minds in order to truly know what their intention is to do with those materials. It is the SAME with assault guns (or semi-automatic weapons, etc.). Is the person buying it because he likes to collect them and look at them on his shelf, that could be very true – on the day he bought it. But, a day, a month or a year later, when someone bullies him at school or work, or says something disrespectful to him, or God forbid, just makes fun at him, that person now has access to a weapon of MASS murder (even if he was “fine” when he bought it).
This is what we are trying to prevent – the “stuff happens” is PREVENTABLE.
Thank you for listening.
