WILL COMMON SENSE AGAIN PREVAIL? A Tale of Three Shootings

This past Thursday, a man by the name of John Russell Houser went into a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, and carried out a mass shooting. When it was all over, he had killed two people, and wounded another nine people. After the police had sealed off his escape routes, he then killed himself.

This is the third mass shooting to have taken place this year– the other two being the shooting in a Charleston, South Carolina church on June 17 (of which nine people were killed and one person was wounded), and the Chattanooga, Tennessee shootings on July 16 (of which five people were killed and two other people were wounded).

Houser was mentally unstable, Dylan Storm Roof (the Charleston shooter) was a white supremacist, and Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez (the Chattanooga shooter) was a jihadist.
So far there have been no knee-jerk reactions in the aftermath of the Lafayette shooting, although Houser was able to purchase a firearm despite his mental illness (he was involuntary committed to a mental institution, but this was not reported to the state or federal databases). As a result, his attempt to purchase a firearm was only delayed instead of being denied. So things are yet to be sorted out in this case.

In the case of the Charleston shooting, Obama has brought up the matter of gun control, but the main issue soon became the Confederate flag. Various stores and online retailers removed Confederate flags from their stock, while Confederate flags were removed from public places.

In the case of the Chattanooga shooting, the issue has become military recruiters (and other military personnel for that matter) not being allowed to carry firearms. Various individuals have responded to this policy by guarding military recruiting centers, but now are being asked not to do so by the Pentagon. Whether or not they can be forced to stop guarding military recruiting centers or face any legal penalties for not complying is yet to be determined.

This trio of shootings reminds me of the shootings that occurred in 2012: the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting, the Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. All three tragedies resulted in calls for more gun control measures, amidst other issues (e.g. hate crime legislation in the aftermath of the Sikh temple shooting), but common sense (and support for the Second Amendment) prevailed.

Hopefully, common sense will prevail again this year.

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