Twenty-six people died today in a horrific tragedy...

Friday, December 14, 2012

Twenty-six people died today in a horrific tragedy at a Connecticut elementary school - six adults and twenty children. According to news reports, one of the weapons found on the scene was a legally obtained Bushmaster .223 semi-automatic rifle (pictured above), a weapon described by a retired U.S. Army sergeant major as a gun for “those who want the general feel of a military weapon.” One of the witnesses said over 100 rounds were fired.

Sandy Hook Elementary School is not the only school that experienced major violence today. In China, a man attacked primary schoolchildren with a knife. Gun control does not stop violence, and it does not stop people who are determined to attack children at school.

But here’s the thing: none of the kids in the school in China died today. Twenty-two children were wounded, two of them seriously, and while that is surely a horribly traumatizing experience for them, they are all alive. In Connecticut, there was only one injury. One. All those deaths, all those bullets, and only one person who was attacked made it out alive. Maybe the gunman was an excellent shot. Maybe he was just really determined to kill a whole bunch of little kids. Or maybe, just maybe, his weapon, described by the retired U.S. Army sergeant major as so easy to use that “almost an eight-year-old child can be taught to do that in an hour, an hour-and-a-half,” performed exactly as a weapon designed for killing should.

People want to say that guns don’t kill people? I say bullshit, but sure, fine, whatever, I’ll give you that: guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But semi-automatic assault rifles, designed to kill and available at your local Wal-Mart, make it a hell of a lot more efficient to take out a classroom full of five-year-olds.

tl;dr: fuck anyone sputtering defensively about the Second Amendment; those little kids had the right to go to kindergarten without getting gunned down by a military-style semi-automatic assault weapon. Fuck that so hard.