Vigilantes are not the Answer for Massacres

At least two things about guns worth noting in the past week.

Columbine dropped off the list of top 10 massacres, having already more than achieved the overwhelming copycat status predicted that day. I was there. I remember.

Hopes that thousands of concealed carry guns spread throughout the nation would nip massacres in the bud have not panned out.

“The day after former Colorado resident Devin Kelley murdered 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov.5, filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted that the tragedy has pushed the April 20, 1999, massacre at Columbine High School, the subject of his 2002 Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine, from the list of America's ten worst mass shootings,” Westword of Denver reported.

President Trump, with loose lips as usual, said the two men who chased the killer at nearly 100 mph had prevented hundreds from being killed. The church doesn’t even hold hundreds!

As is often the case, the killer shot himself before crashing. He had been hit by at least two bullets fired by the civilians.
No vigilante could have even gotten close to the Vegas skyscraper shooter.

In the past, calls for tighter gun control have been opposed by people who claim the laws already exist. Failure to enforce, they say, is the problem.

The latest massacre, in the church, and the one a month earlier in presumably well guarded Las Vegas, suggest law enforcement isn’t the answer either under current laws.

“The gunman who killed more than two dozen people in a small church outside San Antonio on Sunday had a string of troubling episodes in recent years, including an escape from a mental health facility in 2012 after he was caught sneaking guns onto an Air Force base ‘attempting to carry out death threats’ against military superiors, according to a police report,” the Washington Post reported.

The Post said, “Devin P. Kelley’s young life was riddled with warning signs, mounting during and after his time in the Air Force, including a conviction for beating his then-wife and stepson, charges of animal cruelty, mental health concerns, investigations for domestic assault, threats against his family members and a motorcycle crash that left him with lingering physical pain.”

So far, no one is arguing that the answer is for more vigilantes to be involved.

As much as the right to carry a gun Americans demand the right to privacy and free speech.

Most massacres, even back to Columbine, had “warning signs.”

The biggest response has for millions more Americans to get guns. Massacres show no sign of decreasing, according to sites that track them