re: #9 lawhawk

I wish to register that I’m not politicizing this current school shooting, but am responding to the previous school shooting, and the anniversary of the Newtown massacre in that Congress and Americans in general need to reconsider the easy access to firearms that makes these mass casualty events far too common.

That means addressing easy access to weapons that are designed to maximize firing rates, high capacity clips/magazines/ammo holding devices, licensing/registration, and mental health aspects.

But for the easy access to firearms, these kinds of situations would be extremely uncommon. And that is reinforced by the fact that so many of the mass shootings involve legally-owned firearms.

Mass shootings - defined when 3 or more people are shot, occur like clockwork. At least one every two weeks. But that’s a small percentage of the overall fatalities and injuries due to firearms use in the US overall.

Other facts and statistics relating to firearms in the US.

When I was attending school in the 40s and 50s, I witnessed only 1 incident, in jr high, that involved a gun. That was when a student brought a gun to school for himself and others to play Russian roulette. One boy shot himself in the head and died. The school, in Charlotte, was going to be closed (this would have been around 1954-55) and parts of it were closed off and not in use, and kids would sometimes go there for various forbidden activities. Even though the school was less than 40 yrs old (built in 1920), the location, near downtown, was not considered suitable for the upper middle class kids who attended there from Myers Park and a new school was built on Runnymeade Ln, the older one being torn down in the late 1950s. A large residence YMCA was built on the site a bit later.

However, school shootings are not new, even occurring during the 1800s (1850s was probably when they started keeping tabs), but in the 20th century, they became fairly common. This doesn’t even appear to be an exhaustive list, either, since the one I experienced is not listed. I think because of the identity of the kid, the family kept it pretty hush-hush and within the school itself.

en.wikipedia.org