President Trump reportedly sought advice on gun control from his Mar-a-Lago guests in the wake of Wednesday’s deadly school shooting in Florida. Sources cited by The Washington Post on Sunday said the president obsessively monitored media coverage of the massacre as he surveyed friends staying at the lavish resort on whether he should take action on gun control. Meanwhile, he has reportedly declined an invitation to attend a town hall on Wednesday featuring victims and survivors, some of whom publicly shamed him over the weekend for accepting NRA campaign contributions. Students-turned-activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have made it clear they want tighter gun control laws, and they say a White House “listening session” with students this week is just a way for Trump to avoid speaking with them directly.
And yet Parkland or Columbine weren’t “2nd and 3rd world niches”.
No one is saying that gun control is the SOLE solution to issues such as the murder rate by gun in Chicago. But it’s part of the overall solution to these mass shootings that are becoming regular features of our daily lives.
That tweet reminds me being in school hearing the news of the Dunblane shooting 100 miles away. I was supposed to be revising for my GCSEs but I didn’t really feel up to it afterwards.
About the only thing I can offer the survivors of every mass shooting in the US is that it doesn’t have to stop them from doing great things with their lives, but that still feels too much like thoughts and prayers for me to be happy with it.
Murray grew up in Dunblane and attended Dunblane Primary School. He and his brother were present during the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, when Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and a teacher before shooting himself; Murray took cover in a classroom. Murray says he was too young to understand what was happening and is reluctant to talk about it in interviews, but in his autobiography Hitting Back he states that he attended a youth group run by Hamilton, and that his mother gave Hamilton lifts in her car.
That is TEXTBOOK Nirvana Fallacy (Also argument from ignorance, argument from incredulity, special pleading, and cherry picking). The Nirvana Fallacy is “Since the perfect, idealized solution to the problem is impossible to implement, any other flawed solution that falls short of that idealized solution should not be implemented because it is not perfect.”
But while eliminating mass shootings at church and gun homicides and mass shootings at school and accidental shootings and mass shootings at concerts and gun suicides and mass shootings at nightclubs and kids killing themselves by accident with daddy’s gun and mass shootings in general would be nice, we’d at the very least like to see a reduction.
Also, argument from ignorance/argument from incredulity: “because I don’t think they will help to combat the problem in any significant way.”
He must have sought advice from his guests during the Studio 54 themed disco party he threw after the 14 minutes he spent with victims of the Florida shooting.
