Aseahawkfan wrote:I find it odd that when I was growing up, there weren't near this many shootings of this kind and yet we had access to all sorts of weapons. We keep hearing "it's the gun,s it's the guns." Yet the guns were there in 80s and 70s and 60s, yet we didn't see near his kind of deadly attacks as often. Something else has changed in society to cause this, likely a bunch of factors to push these rage attacks up. Likely some combination of medication, family decay, violent games, sheer population size, social media, and individual personality disorders combined with insufficient oversight into weapons ownership to cause these situations to become more prevalent. It's very hard to explain why people are the way they are now. No one factor can account for all these shootings.
I don't recall a lot of gun shops or shops selling military stype weapons back when I was a kid. I'm not saying that there weren't any, but growing up in the 60's, I don't remember seeing any. But guns in general were a lot easier to get and they were not abused nearly to the same degree that they are today.
In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK with a military rifle he acquired through mail order for about $12 (the scope drove the price up to around $20, or $160 in today's money). In the same catalog he bought his Italian made WWI vintage weapon, there were other much more efficient military weapons, albeit about twice the cost as the one LHO bought, that were available, such as the semi automatic M1 carbine, the primary weapon used by the US Army 20 years earlier in WW2, or much more modern than the AR-15. So if you were motivated and had some relatively modest financial resources, you could easily acquire military style weapons with absolutely no background checks, waiting periods, or other measures that have been adapted over the past 50+ years that gun violence has taken center stage.
So obviously something's changed in American society. The root cause is not access to military style weaponry. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be looking at legislation to address the problem we now face, but let's be clear that the main problem is NOT access to weapons, and until we do something to address the root cause of this problem, the shootings will continue.
