Oh look, its happened again

Another day, another American gun massacre.

Some nut gets rejected by his girlfriend, so what is the natural thing to do?  Of course, go and get your assault rifle out of the car and shoot a few people to take out your frustrations.

In Crandon, Wisconsin, 20 year old deputy sheriff Tyler Peterson fired more than 30 rounds from an AR-15 rifle, killing 6 people at a party, including his ex-girlfriend.

Peterson broke up with his girlfriend recently - by some accounts a week or so ago - and she had since dated another police officer. But a close friend of Peterson denied rumours that it was a jealous rage, saying he had broken up with her earlier this year and she was not seeing anyone else. “He must have just snapped,” said the friend.

But the difference between America and most of the rest of the modern world is that in America you can snap and grab yourself some high powered weaponry, and do a lot of damage.  A hothead anywhere can do harm if they are so minded - but ready availability of assault weapons magnifies the lethal impact of their brain explosions on others.

Gun advocates will say guns don’t kill people, people do.  Maybe, but guns make it a hell of a lot easier to do it en masse.  How many mass stabbing rampages have there been where 6 or more people have been killed because some nut exploded?  How many mass baseball bat murders have there been lately?

I just can’t see how any reasonable person believes that their right to have a gun should not be subject to some level of control by the state.  Are they saying that their freedom is worth more than everyone else’s right to live without the largely avoidable risk of being caught up in some madman’s acting out of their rage, real or imagined, against the world?  Surely, if we must have guns it is in everyone’s interests to make sure dangerous or unstable people don’t get them, that they are not immediately accessible for use when someone spits the dummy (ie what might have happened if this guy had been forced to keep his guns locked up in a gun safe at home or at the police station, rather than in his car?  Maybe some cooling off time if he’d had to go home and get the gun?)  And what is it with assault rifles and the like …those deer, ducks, rabbits etc are not exactly known to fight back with heavy artillery, are they?

(And the fact that Peterson was a police officer and did this doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the local sheriff’s department’s recruitment standards.)