I find it disgusting how the media uses these situations to take actual victims of this to propagate an anti-gun narrative when we KNOW that the FBI received a warning about this kid and did nothing with it. But guns are the SOLE problem? Same with Omar Mateen. Guy had red flags. Was put on lists. But nope. The government isn’t even doing its job here. But somehow more laws will fix things? How was he not flagged when purchasing? That’s the REAL question.
You know why the government isn't doing its job? Because of the same fucking people that prevent any and all gun control legislation.
There are over 370,000 requests annually that come into the ATF trying to source or assist in identifying gun registrations in order to assist local officers in solving or following through on inquiries about gun purchases they have the information on. That would help solve crimes, prevent crimes, or help the process of identifying problematic gun buyers. On top of that, it is ILLEGAL to use a computer to organize those registrations into a searchable database. So they have to manually look through millions of files to try and answer any inquiry. You know how many people are staffed to do that job? 50 fucking people.
You know why? Because of that same fucking NRA that disseminates those talking points. Because in the 80's and subsequently they passed legislation that capped the amount of spending agencies that deal with gun crimes are allotted, that made obvious advancements of efficiency illegal. They then went on to pass legislation that made it illegal to conduct most sorts of gun trace data collection to identify patterns, like a legal firearm seller in say Georgia, selling a large number of firearms that end up on the streets in Chicago, where 60% of guns recovered in crimes are from out of state. Made it illegal to coordinate or pass on what information they can trace in bulk to agencies like the FBI. So you have skeleton crews that are unable to even do their basic jobs, with purposeful legislation meant to prevent law enforcement from doing the sort of coordination and tracing that would make their agencies more effective at preventing and monitoring trends in gun violence.
Than yokels get on the horn and try and blame the government because they didn't take two fucking seconds to perhaps question the talking points they wanted to believe are true.
I'm sorry, but I lived blocks away from Columbine, have had friends killed by guns, so I get a bit miffed when I hear the same bullshit arguments and regurgitated propaganda over and over again.