The Tipping Point

Saturday morning, after I heard about the shooting in Pittsburgh, a mere day after the massacre in Binghamton, I posted my reaction/thoughts on my Twitter:

Yesterday Binghamton, today Pittsburgh. Is there ever a tipping point where gun control is the answer?

Of course, I knew the answer to my rhetorical question. There is no answer or Tipping Point. After all, as I've written about before, the NRA & its adherents believe in the Last Man Standing theory of gun control. As long as there is one man standing, that man has a god-given right to bear arms.

Cenk Uygur expresses my thoughts more cogently at the Huffington Post, Have We Reached the Tipping Point on Guns?:

How many shootings does there have to be in the news before we wonder about the wisdom of allowing just about anyone to get a gun in America? Our gun culture is completely out of control.

In just the last two days we have had 13 people killed in Binghamton, NY with a 9 mm and a .45-caliber, three police officers shot and killed in Pittsburgh with an assault rifle and two other guns, and a five children killed with a shotgun in Washington at the hands of their own father. How many will it take before we say enough is enough?

How about the eight people killed in a nursing home in North Carolina a couple of days before these shootings? How about the ten killed in Alabama a couple of weeks earlier? Is there any point when gun rights advocates would admit that we have too much gun violence in America? What will it take for them to acknowledge the most obvious thing in the world?

Of course, their answer is that we don't have enough guns in the country. If we just allowed concealed weapons at schools, nursing homes, work, bars, airports and just about anywhere else you can imagine, then we would have less gun violence. Yes, maybe in bizzaro world, but in this world the more guns we have had in this country the more people have been shot ... with guns.

Right. It's the Last Man Standing philosophy.

(Poster via Phawker)