Again....But it's never the guns!

[Annik]

The fact is that everything I've suggested is that guns don't kill people; Americans do. Even though countries like Switzerland have alarmingly high gun possession rates, they seem to have far fewer murders with guns than we do; in fact, in 2006 the entire Swiss nation had a total of 34 gun-related homicides. The US? 12,632. Hell, in my home state of Illinois alone there were 625. Hell, in Chicago there were 373.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I think that Americans are being subjected to something like sick-building syndrome, except that it's the entire country, which causes us to be violent instead of sick.

This is what I mean about curing the cancer with cough syrup. It's not the guns, it's the culture. We need to keep better tabs on our mentally ill better and provide more places where people can go about these problems. The stigmas involved with mental health issues need to be worked out (and if we stopped glorifying these shooters by giving them intense media coverage, that would help, too). Furthermore, we need to give more aid to the poor, who are the most likely to commit gun crimes. No, the answer isn't more guns, but it isn't less of them, either (and, as Creed pointed out, you can get a gun off the streets, numbers filed, for less money than it takes to buy a weapon in a store, where they keep records and hopefully do background checks). We need to correct the underlying problems of the violence in the US or it will continue.