But before emotions get the better of us, lets step back a moment and really take a look at what happened. I've seen many people arguing that "assault weapons" should be banned. But would stricter gun laws have prevented this? This is a guy who had his apartment booby trapped with homemade bombs. He was set on killing and hurting as many people as he could regardless of the method. Just because guns are banned doesn't mean rampages don't happen. In Japan, people can't own guns the same way they can in the U.S. and yet instead they have people going on rampages with a knife. In Akihabara one guy stabbed and killed 7 people. Another Japanese knife rampage saw a guy get on a bus and stab 12 students. In 2001, in Santa Barbara California, David Attias drove his car into a group of people and killed 4.
There is something going on here far beyond gun ownership. The real issue isn't gun control, but why this happened to begin with. James Holmes is clearly a disturbed individual. And that is where the focus should be, on the perpetrator, not the means. What would drive someone to such acts. What would drive Holmes and Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech infamy) to carry out these acts?
To prevent these kinds of rampages, we need to deeper, much deeper than just gun control. Is there something broken in our culture?
I don't have an answer for this one, but I can point out the direction where we need to go to answer the question of why did this happen and how can it be prevented. It's easy to become overcome with emotion in tragedies like this, but acting upon knee-jerk emotions won't prevent it from happening again.
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