WASHINGTON, D.C. Sept. 17 (DPI) — Comment boards once again provided an instant outlet for millions who tracked yesterday’s mass shooting at The Navy Yard, much as they have with previous shootings.
And with hundreds of posts in the ensuing hours – the first before the shooting spree even ended — the consensus remains that America’s easy-access gun culture will allow such shootings to continue. A small but growing number of comments, though, are focusing on mental illness as a prime cause of the carnage.
Comment from wsj.com:
“Not unlike Columbine, Virginia Tech, the Colorado theatre shooting and Sandy Hook, the common link may very well be mental illness. Yet the progressives will hoot and hollar about guns and the right to privacy about mental illness when the underlying problem may very well be the individual’s mental illness. Yet that is a netherworld of secrecy even at the expense of public safety. I haven’t heard any serious debate in my home state of Connecticut even with the recent Sandy Hook shooting about protecting us from the mentally ill. It is only about the guns. For our leaders in the state capitols and DC, it is high time to work on the protection of the public from those that have mental illnesses. Let the debates on protecting us from those mentally ill predators begin!”
More than 1000 comments accompanying a main news story hit the NYTimes.com site yesterday, most reflecting resignation that American society will remain awash with firearms because of both political gridlock and opposition to more gun restrictions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/us/shooting-reported-at-washington-navy-yard.html
A 34-year-old former Navy enlistee with a lengthy history of run-ins with authority shot and killed 12 people at the Navy Yard in Southeast Washington on Monday morning. Several more were wounded. The shooter was killed by police.
Follow-up articles today focused more on the shooter’s personality, and on general lapses that allowed the gunman to procure a pump shotgun — although the killer was apparently unable to purchase an assault rifle. For more than a day the press reported that the killer had used an AR-15 assault rifle.
From washingtonpost.com today:
“Dear anti-gun activists,
What gun background check could you perform, given equal level of bureaucratic incompetence in handling his DOD security clearance, that would have flagged this guy? He would have slipped through.
This is a problem of an incompetent and complacent bureaucracy, not guns.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/us/washington-navy-yard-shootings.html?hpw