Arizona Murder Suicides

I'm still working my way through the A's for murder suicides by state, just looking at recent murder suicides that involves shootings.  While I see the occasional stabbing, strangling, nearly all of these have been incidents involving gun violence, overwhelmingly so.  In every case one or more people are the victims of a shootist who later kills himself or herself - the shootists are mostly men - or tries to shoot themselves.

Guns are clearly being used frequently to take the freedom to life and liberty and the pursuits of happiness away from other people by gun carriers.  Some of them are legal gun owners, occasionally even a member of law enforcement, and some are not.  Clearly, we are not keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals who are acting on an impulse, who are acting in anger, or despair, or some other toxic combinations of emotion.  But whether they are killing themselves, or other men, women and children, they are taking lives that are not theirs by right to take. They are injuring other people with those firearms.

The number of Defensive Gun Use are rare, are minimal, and often could be accomplished with other means.  The argument that we hold people accountable AFTER these events instead of preventing them from occurring is not an acceptable resolution to this problem.  Stricter, more stringent gun regulation IS a fair way of establishing a fair and effective balance between competing rights.  No one is willing to admit they are not the right person to own guns, they are not safe; but clearly there are people who are not safe, who do not respect the rights of others when they are emotional.  Enough is enough; we can stop this.  Maybe not every single one, but many of these can be prevented.  These are primarily crimes of GUN VIOLENCE, far more so than any other instrumentality.  That cannot and should not be ignored, just because gun nuts don't want to face facts.

It's time and past time we do so.