For recent items about gun massacres, and the public response, please see (starting with most recent):
- “Show Us the Carnage, Continued”
- “Only in America”
- “Show Us the Carnage”
- “The Empty Rituals of an American Massacre”
and before that: - “Why the AR-15 Is So Lethal”
- “The Nature of the AR-15”
- “Why the AR-15 Was Never Meant to be in Civilian Hands”
- “More on the Military and Civilian History of the AR-15”
and - “The Certainty of More Shootings,” from back after the Aurora massacre
- “Two Dark American Truths from Las Vegas,” with included video.
An ongoing theme in many of these items is the responsibility—practical, political, moral—of the responsible gun-owning community in the face of ongoing massacres.
A veteran who owns AR-15s writes in on this point, with emphasis in original:
I read your suggestion that current assault-rifle owners (particularly of AR15 rifles or derivatives) might begin to recognize that the they don't actually need to own such a weapon and possibly even turn them in.
I happen to own two similar weapons myself, and I readily admit that I do not need them. They are pleasurable to shoot, which I do not do all that often. Other than that, they lay in the top of my closet. My Revolutionary War reproduction Brown Bess musket gets far more use.
It also happens that I am a school teacher. I spent yesterday afternoon in class assuring 14 -year-old students it was okay to text their parents that all was well, after I observed several students earlier in the day replying to anxious missives from parents.
I told them their parents were a little freaked out. I told them I was a little freaked out also.
I did not tell them that I was livid with anger. I did not tell them I had not been able to sleep the last two nights because I was alternating between depression and rage. I did not tell them that otherwise rational adults were now insisting that I and other teachers should now bring handguns into our classrooms and pretend to be infantrymen on a potential battlefield in school every day, because it was even more unthinkable to simply not sell any more weapons of war to civilians!