20 dead in Orlando gay club shooting

[Esquilax]

Who likes to accept the pointing finger? Gun-owners reject it because they feel such makes them complicit.

I'd love to have a system like they have in Japan where people are able to own guns, so long as they can prove they're responsible enough to be entrusted with a deadly weapon. The problem we're having is that irresponsible people don't want regulations that will prevent them from owning guns, and there are too damn many irresponsible people.

The Japanese, it should be noted, also seem to have a healthy respect for guns and what they represent, too. They don't treat them as toys, or rhetorical chest-thumping devices, like Americans do. They aren't something you buy on a whim to carry around to feel big, they are what they are: deadly weapons that shouldn't just be flaunted because you feel like it.

I was watching a Japanese show once which illustrates the difference quite aptly. As opposed to American media, where it's almost trivial to possess a gun, and procuring one is only a tooling-up montage away, in this show, just finding a gun for a particular character was treated like a big deal. It was a scavenged gun from a crime scene too, and when it was given to the guy, it was super clear that it had to be that specific gun because it just wasn't possible to roll into a Walmart and get him one that day. The damn thing was a murder weapon and yet it was all they had while inside Japan, so they wiped it for prints and made sure it was untraceable, before handing it over.

As a guy used to Western media, it was quite shocking to see.