Everyone wants to use Australia as the gold standard for gun control. The actions taken in Australia have been effective and have decreased the amount of gun violence which is going to be inherent if you ban certain types of guns and exterminate guns. This is good Australia has effectively eliminated mass murders due to guns. The problem is that all they were able to eliminate within the first 7 years. Within the first 7 years the homicide rate in Australia either grew, was the same or was just less than the rate in 1996. One would expect that you take away the guns that you would see an instantaneous drop in homicides because you have taken away the most potent weapon of destruction in society. What they saw actually was an increase in homicides in 1997 and 1999. So we eliminated the weapon of destruction so why didn't it decrease? What Australia failed to see is that even though they had the massacre in 1996 gun deaths were by a significant margin the second leading cause of homicides to knives and blades. After the gun bans homicides due to knives and blades in Australia increased.
So all they did is take the homicidal bean and moved it to another column and called it progress because the original column was decreased. If we enact something like this what we will find out is that killers are going to kill no matter what the method is. That kid had deep rooted anger to the point that he was going to kill if it wasn't a gun it was going to be homemade bomb, knife, or any other weapon.
The real questions now are:
1.) How can we better equip schools to identify kids who could be going down this path? What counseling techniques can they provide to help the kid? This kid was disturbed to the point where other kids were saying that if there was anyone to shoot up a school it would be him. How in the world could this be true and not one single teacher identified it and intervened?!
2.) In the interim until we find a solution to number 1 how do we better protect schools. Do we need to equip schools with metal detectors, cameras and locks to where everyone who enters is screened beforehand? This kid was seen as a threat when he was in the school to the point where he couldn't be on campus with a backpack and he was able to just enter the school unnoticed and fade into the crowd? They have video cameras inside the school that the authorities used to capture him with. How was someone not monitoring the camera feeds?
3.) What changes do we make in the FBI to make sure all threats are properly investigated? The excuse I heard from the FBI is that they were unable to trace his post on YouTube back to the original sender. If you can not do that how in the world are you tracking down Russia's supposed cyber threats to the US? Get off your dang vandetta in trying to uncover crap on politicians that may not be there and keep our citizens safe!
Sorry for the long post but this is so frustrating that we can't get our heads out of our behinds to get past the political nonsense and start getting to the real reasons why these keep on happening.