John Gruber blogs that it’s the guns:
The truth is that our nation, great though it is in so many ways, has a horrific history of political violence and a seemingly innate obsession with firearms. […]
Tomorrow morning Chuck Schumer should put on the floor of the Senate a law mandating strict background checks for all gun purchases. Perhaps tie it to a reinstitution of the 1994 assault weapons ban that Republicans allowed to expire in 2004.
AR-15s shouldn’t be legal. Here in Texas, the minimum age to buy one is still only 18, despite families in Uvalde pushing to raise the minimum. The velocity of a bullet from an AR-15 is ridiculous and multiple rounds can be fired quickly before anyone even notices. Trump is extremely lucky that it just barely grazed him.
A couple years ago on the train, I had lunch with a random passenger. Amtrak will often sit people together for meals. This passenger loved the outdoors, camping and hunting, and he said something that will always stick with me: he doesn’t use such powerful semi-automatic weapons for hunting because they do too much damage to the animal.
We shouldn’t be okay with these weapons of war having become so commonplace. It’s tragic.
