Report from the front : the shooting of 20 children

Maple Leaf Rag , our transplanted Canadian now living in texas , gives us his views on gun control and violence and the recent shooting of 20 children down there and what he thinks is causing it all. Since he actually lives down there every day , rather than just reading a few newspaper articals like the rest of us, I thought his opinion might be worth more than mine.

I remember you once asked me to give you some Canadian views of life in America.  Here's my view on America's reaction to the horrible massacre of little school kids in Connecticut by a mentally ill 20 year old who used powerful semiautomatic weapons.

First thing you need to understand is how incredibly polarized between Left & Right America is.  The Left and Right have moved to very far extremes and there is NO middle ground.  Each side dismisses out of hand everything the other says and insists that their way is the only way.  A President from one side gets in for a few years and undoes or tries to undo what the other party did.  Repeat every 4 to 8 years ad infinitum, and the two sides never work together. 

I don't know if it is that apparent from Canada's viewpoint, but I think if ranked on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being total peace and harmony and 10 being outright Civil War, the USA would sit at around 6.5 to 7 now.

About this mass murder (and the many many similar massacres in recent years), the Left insists it is entirely due to readily available guns and wants strict controls on them.  Good idea in theory as far as I am concerned, but there are so many guns and real gun fanatics in the USA I don't know how they would ever implement it).  The Right insists it is entirely due to lax morals, poor parenting and lax mental health laws and the spread of uncensored violent entertainment, which are all also very real factors.  Anyone with common sense would recognize that all these factors work together to promote these mass killing sprees. 

The Left Wing's leftover Hippie sacred cows of relative morality, "revolutionary" Baby Boom era lax parenting styles, lenience to criminals, the "rights" of mental patients to refuse treatment, refusing to accept media censorship, all these create the spoiled, desensitized, deranged young killer, who, upon hitting the hard brick wall of adulthood where trophies and awards are no longer given out just for showing up, decides he hates his life where he is not the star of his own reality show, and wants to take his toys and go home in the most outrageously violent manner possible.  Then, the Right Wing's pigheaded obsessive insistence that every American has the God Given Right to own high capacity military style firearms with little or no obstacles to obtaining them, enables the killers.

So both sides contribute majorly to the problem and utterly refuse to accept that their side has any guilt whatsoever.  I made a couple of posts on Yahoo News about how ridiculous this situation was and people from both camps immediately leaped down my throat.  Lefties called me a fascist, Righties called me a commie.  I call me sensible.

America's extreme political polarity has basically crippled its power to make any positive changes in its very sick society.  America will shout and rant and rave about doing something about this horrifying problem of mass killings, but nothing effective will ever come of it.