My view: Give the people back their pain meds. Let doctors, not cops and government bureaucrats decide what each patient needs. It is beyond insane that people with excruciating pain (possibly like the shooter in Tulsa) cannot get adequate relief, and turn instead to murder or suicide.
As for those who want oxys to get high, or block out unpleasant emotions, or for fun, let them. Let them and their families know about available treatment facilities for their dependency, and let them choose when and if to check in. It's really not the Government's place to interfere or restrict what someone chooses to put in his or her body.
Guns don't make decisions to kill people. People who possess guns make that decision, whether out of rage, depression, revenge, pain or feeling ignored and inadequate in some way, or because they are mentally ill.
To be clear, I don't whether Mr. Michael Louis of Muskogee, OK was offered sufficient pain meds or not. But I do believe that restricting pain meds leads people in excruciating pain to do extreme things. And restricting guns for the purpose of reducing the number of shootings is as effective as putting a band-aid on a flat tire. It doesn't fix the underlying problem. If uncontrolled pain was the cause of today's shootings in Tulsa, had Mr. Louis' surgeon worked to address it, either by additional surgery or prescribing additional, effective pain medicine, four more people would be alive today.
Even if that wasn't Mr. Louis' motive, I can easily foresee a future shooting where the doctor or pharmacy tells the patient in excruciating pain, "We don't write (or fill) for addicts." That is so last century. Training doctors to tell these patients to try alternative techniques like yoga and meditation to relieve acute and chronic pain is not going to cut it. Nor should hospices, where patients are treated for pain but otherwise left to die from their medical conditions be the only choice.
Desperate people do desperate things. I think that if we try harder to notice those struggling around us and then eliminate or treat the desperation, there will be fewer incidents of gun violence.
Restricting gun ownership will just increase the black market in weapons, particularly with respect to assault rifles. Right now loads of AR-15's are shipped to Mexico and Latin America. There's not a huge market for them here. We are a country of 332 million people. According to the F.B.I., there were 40 active shooter incidents in 2020. (There is no standard definition of a mass shooting incident). Even if that number has tripled in 2022, to say 120 active shooters, that's a tiny, tiny portion of the population who are mass murderers. (I'm referring to the number of shooters, not the number of victims who kill multiple persons who are congregated in a single location, like an office building, mall, school, place of worship, etc --not parties where a fight breaks out and one attendee kills another).
As soon as we outlaw and increase restrictions on guns in this country, particularly automatic weapons, the more people will want one and resort to an illegal means to obtain it. With increased demand, there will be more, not less of them available here. That's not a solution, it's an exacerbation of the problem.
The Second Amendment exists for a reason. Historically, it was to protect against a tyrannical government. Since the Third Amendment is obsolete, the Second Amendment is now one away from the Fourth. We should not give up any of our constitutional rights, because once we give the government more power, it rarely gives it back.
More than one million people in America have died from COVID-19 so far. Rarely does the media provide us with details of these lost lives, and the grief their families suffer, as it does for the lives lost in mass shootings. Dying from an uncontrollable, unpredictable constantly mutating virus in the 21st Century should not be happening on such massive levels. But it is happening and deaths still occur every day from COVID. Even if you accept gun control organizations' expanded figures of the number of deaths from a firearm each year (mass shooting, domestic violence, accident, suicide or other) the number of victims pale by comparison to those who have died from COVID.
I don't disagree that there is a reason that the U.S. has more mass shootings than any other country. I won't speculate on the reason, because I don't have a clue. But whatever that reason may be, I highly doubt restricting the sale or possession of firearms will make a difference. We need to look deeper, and not settle for Congress putting a band-aid on our flat tire. The tire will just become flat again.
