No, no... they uh... what I mean is the obvious.... OK, wait, if they uh... you know... *sigh* fine, you're right, I can't disagree with you (or the point The Onion is making for that matter)

What's it like to be old?

I saw man outside today who wasn't wearing a hat and tie and I had to go to the druggists for an effervescent water to calm my nerves.

Druggist? What's that? Oh...chemist... I see.

Fuck all you fuckers.

Yesterday I told these people that I couldn't go bowling with them because I had sores erupting on my diarrhea.

You most likely have a lot of very conservative friends; they're likely to be highly resistant to curtailing gun rights at all, because it's a far-right truism that guns = freedom. And I'll bet there are more than a few who are worried this is where "it" begins.

Can't we just round them all up and put them in FEMA dention camps, skip the whole "it begining"?

I'm more disturbed by the last-ditch effort to suddenly switch the conversation to autistics.

Does it have a serious problem, though? Every year, there are roughly 50 million kids in our public school systems who somehow manage to NOT get shot. If a classroom with twenty kids get shot up every year (which it doesn't), that's, what? .00004% of our public school enrollees, or about 1 chance in 2.5 million.

Now maybe that IS a serious problem, one that needs sweeping, partisan change to correct. Maybe one isolated incident in a country that spans the best part of a country is too much. But if it is, then we've also got to be ready to admit that a whole lot of other stuff is "too much", too. Kids are far more likely to be killed in car crashes or by US drone strikes or by cancer or, hell, by their own damn parents in their own damn homes because their parents are batshit crazy, than by a lone nut "enabled" by our constitutional right to bear arms and a mental health system that continues to treat nutbags as if they should be entitled to the same safeguards against preventitive detention that you and I get.

If this is such a problem- a real, measurable, fixable, and unacceptably frequent social problem that affects all people equally, with an identifiable root cause that is both known to the actually relevant "experts" and supported by reviewable evidence, and with a solution that costs society less than it would to just ignore the problem- then why not focus our energies on all this OTHER crap, in proportion to how dangerous IT is? If twenty dead white children require us to "hold a national dialogue" and "disarm the people", then surely, morally, a hundred dead Afghani children requires us to "hold a national dialogue" and "disarm the military-industrial state"?

Holy shit, Cena, I'm turning into YOU.

I stand by what I said, though.

EvilHomer,

Are you saying something has to be a frequent occurrence before we should do anything about it? Terrorists only flew planes into the World Trade Center one time. There have been that many major oil spills in our waters.

Or are you saying that we aren't allowed to bother with those problems until we eliminate all the more frequent problems?

I meant to say, "There haven't been that many major oil spills in our waters."

It is that simple, you stupid fuck.

"If twenty dead white children require us to 'hold a national dialogue' and 'disarm the people'" ... nobody's asking for that. What people are asking for is limitations on weapons that can have no purpose besides mass slaughter.

And yeah, it took a massacre of white children in suburban Connecticut for it to hit home enough that there may be some action. But in every incident before this, there have been calls for discussion that just didn't go anywhere. I don't buy the argument that, if none of those incidents spurred wider discussion, this one shouldn't either.

Gun ownership is at all time lows in this country believe it or not. And 99.999% of owners of high cap magazines and assault guns aren't massacring anyone. It's crazy 18-26 year old kids who have autism, are poorly parented and/or play shooters all the time, I don't think you can argue that doesn't desensitize people to gun violence.

Making mental healthcare for those at risk kids free and mandatory would be the smartest tact in addressing this problem. We should also make it next to impossible for mentally ill people to arm themselves, it is currently legal if you have no criminal record despite being crazy, and everyone buying a gun online or anywhere needs to have thorough background checks.

There's mental illness and then there's mental illness. The mom was a survivalist nut, stockpiling the guns right there in her house where her son could get at them (and did, after Dick's refused to sell him an assault rifle). Yeah, we all agree that the son needed help, but what about the mom? When you believe that more guns equals more safety, that's mental illness too -- and even if she probably wasn't about to go on a shooting spree, she certainly facilitated one.

Yeah, we need to do something about the gun problem. Not the big one. Not the violence that happens every day and kills more people than the latest mass shooting every two days.

We should instead focus on the gun violence so rare it actually makes it on the news. Unless this sort of thing starts to become a regular occurrence, in which case we should ignore it completely and start worrying about finding and destroying old sets of lawn darts because some kid died that way.

Personally, I think it's stupid to regulate guns based on which guns are most likely to make the news, as opposed to which guns are most likely to kill people.

"We shouldn't curb the ability to buy high capacity semi-auto firearms at all until we have every other social, economic, and political problem under control."

Jesus christ, you gun nuts. How's about the fact that those things serve zero function besides mass slaughter and penis extension? Every...single...time something like this happens, there has to be someone like you shitting up the place with automobile fatality figures or other objectivist logic nonsense.

I agree mostly. I think they were intending to go after the ones that are screaming that we should 'just fix the economy so people stop going crazy'. Legitimate discussions are good - but I think how fractured the arguments are across the country it just shows that nothing will get done as long as there is no focus on what to actually fix. (And don't fool yourself, there is no consensus.)

I know. They do sort of have a point, which is why I didn't give it a low rating, but it still just doesn't sit well with me.

I see at as more "Just fucking do something about this insane shit, anything!"

the two stories before this one make me think so.

Yeah, instead of being the outside observer jabbing at other people, I think they're expressing the frustration a lot of people (and probably a lot of "Onion" staff) are feeling. In "Onion" style.

It definitely feels mournful to me.

The problem is that too many dipshit, disaffected people want to tell you what kinds of opinions you should have after a national tragedy and when you should have them. Everyone is an expert on mourning and respect after these things, and it gets really, really fucking old.

People react to things. Not reacting isn't normal.

I took this more as a "seriously if this remains the status quo we've failed as human beings" tone.

The purpose of the Onion is to satirize mainstream media. There is no possible way that anything useful can come out of televised commercial news programs. There will be no "discussions" on CNN or Fox News about this shit.