When it comes to bad people doing bad things, everyone has an opinion. Usually it's some form of: "I don't understand why someone would do something like that. It's terrible. I feel so bad for the victims. Something should be done to stop this from happening." Generally, I would agree with the sentiment.
But here's where a problem comes up..... when an airplane goes down, it's terrible. There is often a staggering loss of life and the public is sad and wishes it to not happen again. But I have heard no relative of a crash victim go back to school for aerospace engineering and try to help solve whatever problem happened. The on the scene reporter does not approach someone and start discussing the issues involved with solving problems of fatigue wear on metal/composite rivets, the vibrational harmonics of semi-rigid bodies, or multi-layered redundancy programming of instrument control systems. Why? Because the general public know absolutely zilch, zero, and zip about these things. A victims brother who perviously worked at a sporting goods store does not testify to Congress about the need for tighter thermal process control for ceramic turbine fabrication.
So why is it that violence seems to initiate the exact opposite response? Joe-Bob down the street says he wishes how was there so he could have blown the bad guys head off with "Thumper". Someone who knew the victim says the perpetrator was "disturbed. Relatives of the perpetrator can't believe such a nice guy would do something like this. A slightly narcissistic busybody decides they are going to tackle the social issue. Even more people write their senator with draft legislation to make killing people illegal. Self promoting, professional activists show up like flies to shit and hold rallies and pass out signs. In short, everyone is now an expert on what happened, how it happened, and what needs to be done to solve it. And often it's (coincidentally) so simple that the evening news even screws up the "facts" and the average person can understand it.
When someone dies on the operating table, it's sad and I feel bad the person and their family. Even worse when it is a young person. And even if I have a suspicion about what happened, I keep my trap shut. Outside of discussions with friends, I have no place to make any opinions known or take any action unless I waddle my ass down to John Hopkins University and emerge many years later with a lot of debt and a small piece of paper saying I do.
As a society, we will understand what happens when un-knowledgeable people start making important decisions. Disaster. So when it comes to violence, why do we allow novices to impact the decision making process. The forefront of the issue, being highlighted recently by the tragic case of a 3-year old find an unsecured, loaded gun, and accidentally killing his 1-year old brother. There is a cry to make guns safe.
So what happens? Everybody and their brother is crying for safe guns. Others want to help but only understand one small part of the issue. So their solutions (while well intentioned) are nearly worthless. Here's the take away: It's a futile effort. Know how you stop all freeway collisions? Take all the engines out of cars. That would undoubtably save lives. Now "cars" are safer.... but not really "cars" anymore.
The same is true for guns: A gun is specially designed to be dangerous. It's is not designed to be safe. A firearms' entire purpose is to effectively and efficiently cause as much massive and catastrophic damage to organs and tissue as quickly as possible. In fact, "safe" guns have been invented and I posses many of them and keep them close by at all times: a cell phone, coffee mug, table cloth, hot dog bun, TV remote, my pet rock, a pair of socks, double bacon cheeseburger (one of my favorite firearms), etc.
