My own thread title since NP is incapable of generating their own. Either way a great article. Not sure how many remember the Amish shooting, but the way they responded made them better human beings that everyone on this board, since I'm pretty sure all of us would incapable of doing the same. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com...technique-massacre-amish-lessons-in-mourning/ I know there are a lot of people on here that are not religious at all, and hold nothing of people like the Amish who are deeply religious, but after touring Amish homes in Washington State a few years ago, and making many great friends, the shootings hit me pretty hard. The response by the Amish community afterwards hit me even harder. Either way, the article speaks of Canada, but the US seems to suffer from the same thing. Whenever something like a shooting happens, the knee-jerk reaction is often to ban this, and regulate that. The government WILL protest us all. The Amish response teaches us different.
The article talks about the Polytechnique shooting which led to the gun registry here in Canada, a program that cost us a few billion and was never really effective at all. As for the Arizona shooting or the shooting in Denver, you must live in a box if you don't hear people talking about wanting the government ban 'guns' after the shootings took place.
I have no idea how the Gun Registry in Canada works. As with most things in Canada, don't really care. But you said that in the US the tendency to such tragedies was to 'ban this, regulate that.' I'm wondering in the last ten years (Beltway Sniper, Virginia Tech, Ft. Hood, Arizona, Theater, etc) which one of these tragidies ended up with bannings and regulations? Ah... so b/c some 'people' 'talked' about it, it's now national policy?
Damn, that's petty. I know America's gone hyper-partisan the last decade or so, but they can put aside their issues for stuff like this.
It may not be national policy (a good thing, I daresay), but we certainly have members here that would be very quick to demand strict gun control laws, and when countered, claim we want to be able to have our machine guns
There's a great documentary about the Amish called The Devil's Playground, its about the years when an Amish kid leaves school and spends his/her time in the world the rest of us know. The kids profiled in the documentary are a mixed lot, and you see some aspects of Amish society that few outsiders know about, and frankly, on a few things, the Amish are absolutely dead right.
Well, it's also a half-truth. They were protesting the "Status of Women" Minister who oversaw cuts to her own department, in addition to opposing the gun registry. Not to mention, none of the families of the victims actually attended, nor did they attend in the past. The whole thing was a government photo-op.
I don't agree with the article's nihilistic perspective that public policy is impotent, that there are no societal reasons for mass shootings, that they will always happen because of the existence of "evil".
Well, in America everyone makes a big deal about "we are a nation of laws, not of men". With that in mind, it's no surprise that the instinct is to turn to new laws when a tragedy occurrs.
