There is truth in what you say, but that does not preclude a multi-pronged approach to a pressing problem.
Great. Where are the other "prongs"? All I see and hear about is the one-pronged approach of targeting guns and their owners.
...is what you want to see and hear. Sure, the dialogue is about gun control in large part, but it is not limited to that facet. Root cause has been discussed time and again. The Right's resolve is as tepid there as it is about gun control. At this rate, your children will live in interesting times.
How about we make a little wager? I'll put up all the articles and studies showing how gun control needs to be stricter, and you do the same for all the "root causes" articles. Since they're discussed time and time again, this should be an easy bet for you. The winner sees the loser leave ET (or in your case, leave again).
Who wants to improve education and access to it, better and more affordable access to physical and mental health care, better chances at employment at living wages so that lower income earners can at least afford to spend more time with their family, genuine equality under the law and so on? Never heard any of those discussions?
Sorry, but in the context of gun control, those things aren't ever mentioned. When someone shoots up a school, you don't hear about the mental health of the shooter. Every single day, when blacks kill each other in Chicago, the media doesn't report - at all - the breakdown of the family and how it's the parent's (or lack of) fault. And so on, and so on. The only thing the left mentions is controlling guns.
It's true, these issues have been addressed time and again, so far without any positive results. It can easily be argued that our attempts in these areas are a net negative. Hundreds of billions spent, countless man hours, hard working dedicated people sacrificing careers trying to help, and still the bodies pile up. While I whole heartily agree that all of these areas need more improvement, there are deeper issues. We're a violent society. Of that there is no doubt. Why is that? We cannot pretend that lack of discipline at home and in the school isn't having an impact. We cannot pretend that glorified violence in media, film and music do not twist the young mind. We cannot pretend a we must tolerate the intolerable mindset doesn't exacerbate the problem. We cannot pretend that trying to appease the mob doesn't feed the mob mentality. We cannot pretend that a criminally corrupt congress, one snuggled up real tight with corporate America, doesn't facilitate all of the injustice that makes people say screw it all. Sorry, a smaller classroom, and government heath care ain't going to fix this. Neither will taking away all the guns. A society gone this far off the rails will improvise. We'll hack each other to pieces with machetes if that's all we have.
Regardless of how effective these attempts are (and they're not, as you pointed out) whenever the topic is gun control, the left does not point to any of these issues as the potential reason for the shooting. It is always about restricting firearms. Always.
I don't disagree. The slant is always heavily towards gun control. I was just trying to expand the conversation.
I understand. My point is that if we could move the slant from controlling guns to more about those issues - even if the attempts to address them in the past have been sub-par, we might be able to begin to make traction given the vast amount of life at risk in killings. Tying deaths to mental health, instead of just trying to address mental health needs is far more effective. No one concerns themselves with mental health issues unless it affects their family. But if you suddenly start tying mass shootings to them, it's important to everyone. If liberals were truly about the issues like they pretended, then they'd do this. Instead, it's just about an agenda, which is why it's just about control.