Quote:
Originally Posted by Grapesoda
this headline at the Huffington
"Drumpf?s Attempt To Link Gun Violence To Mental Illness Exemplifies Hypocrisy"
so it's not mental illness?
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Anyone who is willing to pick up a firearm and shoot and kill strangers obviously has a mental illness. However, this ONLY happens in America. It's very simple - Americans make up 4% of the world population but own 42% of the world's firearms.
Our gun homicide rate is 33 per million. Compare this to Canada with 5 per million and the UK with .7 per million.
Take a look at mass shootings in Canada by year...
2007 - 0
2008 - 0
2009 - 0
2010 - 0
2011 - 1
2012 - 0
2013 - 0
2014 - 1
2016 - 2
2017 - 1
It's not a mental illness issue - all countries have problems with mental illness. In the United States it's too easy for someone who has mental illness to get a firearm.
Take my friend John. I talk about him all the time. He has "water on the brain" and a dozen operations on his brain. He now operates at the level of a fifteen year boy. His life has been taken away from him - he will never live a normal life, girlfriend, wife, family, etc. He knows this and understands he is different but cannot understand why. He has been on disability for twenty or thirty years now and if you spend more than ten minutes with him in conversation you can quickly figure out he can only talk about three or four subjects. Yet he is armed with an assault rifle and a hand gun. Everyone knows he has mental problems, and everyone knows he is frustrated because he is "not normal" but... No one can do anything about it.
The President just said "Thank god gun laws didn't stop the bystander from taking out the gun man". What about having gun laws to stop the gun man in the first place? The logic is "gun law saved lives". No, gun laws allowed this to happen in the first place.
We just had two of the worst mass shootings that in recent memory, all of them have the same exact thing in common, and we are doing nothing to stop this. This will continue and we will have the same conversations over and over again.