Pushing the Incredulity Envelope

I promise to blog more about Nashville and post some pictures when I download them from my phone, but I tore this piece out of the newspaper the day I left. It was a story about the young man who killed 8 people and then himself in a department store. Here is the part that left me incredulous:

"[The] woman who with her husband took Hawkins into their home because he had no other place to live, told the Omaha World-Herald that the night before the shooting, Hawkins and her sons showed her a semi-automatic rifle. She said she thought the gun looked too old to work."

Huh? So if she thought it would work she might have intervened and taken the gun away? Even if it was too old to work, did she really want her sons and the young man with problems so deep that no one else wanted to take him in to have a gun to be toting around? What if he just walked into the mall with a semiautomatic rifle that DIDN'T work, he would have terrified people, causing incredible distress and certainly law enforcement involvement.

I don't care what the NRA says...Mom, take the gun, any gun, away from these kids!!! Yeah, I know guns don't kill people, people kill people and all that...but if that was the gun and it was taken away from him when he calmly showed it to the people with whom he was staying, maybe he would have changed his mind before he was able to get another gun, maybe he wouldn't be able to get another gun, maybe he would have found a gun that required reloading at some point and some of the 8 people would have been able to escape while he was reloading. I don't know enough about guns to be discussing this.

BUT I KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT BEING A PARENT THAT ANY CHILD SHOWING ME ANY KIND OF WEAPON IS NOT ASKING FOR MY ADMIRATION OF THE WEAPON, BUT IS CRYING OUT TO BE STOPPED OR HELPED OR SOMETHING!!!

Di

Comments

[Mom]

AMEN, Diane. Great post.

I was just watching the Philadelphia news, and the NRA is protesting passage of a package of bills in PA that, among other things, would prevent any individual from buying more than one handgun a month. WHAT? Anyone needs to buy more than one handgun a month? in what universe????

[JoAnn]

OOOPS--- "MOM" was me. I post as MOM on my daughter's blog and guess TYPEPAD remembered me.