"Going to war to preserve the peace is like ducking to preserve virginity."

One of the problems with the focus on gun control is that the shooters were typically bullied. So when you say:

You don't try to preach civilisation to your attacker, you block the person attacking you first,

You are very selectively deciding who the victim is here and you are also being a hypocrite. Your approach is actually very in line with that of the people who go postal because they have concluded there is no peaceful answer and they just need to pit a stop to their bullies.

I see this as incredibly problematic and as turning a blind eye to the real problem. I have every reason to believe that the focus on gun control actually undermines the pursuit of a real remedy. Because it says what was done to the shooter that made them go postal is fine. In fact, it tends to become a justification after the fact for the bullying because the media and the world at large talk about it like it is just this one mentally unstable guy who behaved really badly.

I get attacked for wanting to talk about the root cause here. I get decried as being a sympathizer with the shooter.

So when we focus on gun control is The Answer, we don't stop and question that narrative. In fact, we validate it.

In the far east, when governments forbade peasants from owning weapons, the invented martial arts to turn their hands, feet and farm implements into deadly force. If you don't remedy the root cause, the bullied kids who want revenge will just need to get more creative. This can be worse.

One of the reasons it can be worse: the handling of these cases sends a message to all the other bullied misfits that after society has spent years failing to protect you from torture, we are going to make you out to be the bad guy and send you to prison. So it just spreads the idea that you are fucked anyway and no one will ever care about your side of things and there is no hope for you, so you might as well take out as many as you can as the only message you can send the world that bullying the misfits is not okay and if you choose to be a bully you better watch your back.

The focus on gun control here is a focus on the wrong thing. It is a position of the beatings shall continue until morale improves.

I have already said I am not for letting people have assault weapons. But both replies to my comment ignored that fact to argue with me. Most of the discussion I am seeing about gun control is de facto going a lot further than addressing assault weapons. I am seeing zero discussion about "What the hell went wrong in this kid's life that it got to this point?" The president and media are both characterizing him as a disturbed nutcase.

I raised two difficult children. One has most of the personality traits of your typical serial killer. The other has a violent temper. Neither has assaulted anyone, in part because I pulled them out of a horrifying school system full of bullies and asshole teachers and administrators who did not care and I homeschooled. Watching my son come home from school in tears every day while the system did nothing to help was not acceptable to me.

So I have firsthand experience with how you prevent an outcome like this. And it starts by expecting civilized treatment of the difficult kids.

My oldest was having fantasies of driving a tank through the school when I pulled him out, a thing I only learned years later. His father had the keys to a military motor pool full of Bradley fighting vehicles. I am sure that for an angry adolescent, that would have been close enough to a tank to satisfy him.

To me, there is nothing hypothetical about what I am saying. We rise up as a nation and decide the bullying must stop or we continue to see variations on these incidents. If you take the guns and don't stop the torture of the misfit kids, then all you have done is change the mechanism by which they go postal and the conversation becomes "how do we stop the bombs/tanks/whatever?"