18 dead in Texas school mass shooting...your thoughts ? 😔 💔

@CookieCrumbs But that is just the thing. Accessibility is how people get guns. You can get guns from the streets. You can get guns from an auction. You can get guns from a next door neighbor. Its not that hard.

@Zonuss Some used by criminals are stolen from owners who are themselves law-abiding but lax with their security, making theft easy. A lot of accidental gun deaths too, might well be traced to such negligence.

It also appears (from the results of studies by an American professor interviewed on this afternoon's BBC Radio Four news) that it is too easy to remove serial-numbers from weapons, and that often, little or no forensic investigations are carried out to match used ammunition to gun, where this can be valuable evidence one way or the other.

However, surely it's not only that so many guns are so readily available, but also why people outside of military conflict, are willing and prepared to use guns solely for their only designed purpose, of killing other people in cold blood.

The same academic gave us the thought-provoking statistic that overall, a child between 5 and 14 in the USA is twenty times more likely to be shot in an unprovoked attack than one in any other developed, well-off nation such as (he named) Norway, Germany, Britain, Japan or Australia. He added that this age range is the least likely to be blamed, saying that blaming the victim has become very common in America.

@ArishMell America's culture is raised and taught to be violent. Guns are everywhere in the US. You can get them at anytime from anyone who is willing to sell. It is human nature to kill. It may not be right, but this narrative has stood the test of time. Just look at whats going on with Russia and Ukraine. Now prove me wrong. 🤔

@Zonuss Oh,, yes violence has stalked humanity for thousands of years.

(Intriguingly, archaeologists have found no sign of battles in traces left by much earlier people, but perhaps because there were far fewer around and virtually no need to compete for resources and room. It's as if fighting grew with "civilisation".)

Nowadays though, it's how society deals with it that counts, such as the explanation you give of American culture. Yet many other countries, other than in wars, have become less violent and less tolerant of violence, generally and very gradually, over the years. That doesn't mean they have no violent crime, but that the idea of violence as a stock answer to anything has become anathema to far more people.

A peculiar aspect of buying weapons in some States was told me by a friend. The cashier in a
small shop readily sold him rifle rounds to replace those he'd been invited to expend on a local's private range, but refused to sell him beer. She could not understand how his driving-licence number holds his slightly-disguised date of birth, so he could not prove his alcohol-buying age. And he was a visitor to the USA - not an American visiting from another American State, but a foreigner!

@ArishMell Wars existed since the Creation. Read about King Ogs empire. Alexander the Great. King David's army. And so on and so on.