Originally Posted by
joesixpack
I don't see it as meaningless at all. If your issue with the easy access to guns is as a result of your concern for the safety of children, then you should focus on the things that actually are dangerous to them.
But your point is really "No one tries to assult someone with a swimming pool. These are accidental deaths, not criminal acts." And I would agree with you there as well, so I'll make another comparison. More children are killed by abusive parents every year than die in gun violence. Parenting is still pretty unregulated though, and while there has been a real effort on the part of society to protect children from abusive parents, no one has ever seriously suggested the idea of prior restraint for potential parents.
Have children taken guns to school and used them to murder their classmates? Yes. Is it a horrible crime? Yes. But horrible crimes tend to result in horrible laws. I don't want to see anything like Colombine ever happen again either, but increasing the restrictions on firearms will not prevent these crimes from happening. As a number of people here have already stated, it's already Illegal to murder someone. There are plenty of laws in place that seek to prevent that. Adding another law that makes it illegal to bring a gun to school won't stop someone who is already intending to commit a crime.
I don't look at gun crontrol laws as evil, and I don't think that thew people who advocate them are evil either. People want to prevent bad things from happening to children, or anyone else for that matter. Hell, so do I. But making it harder for me to buy a gun won't make anyone safer. There were already laws in place to prevent Kleebold and Harris from doing what they did, but they managed to break those laws before they fired a single shot. Those guys committed numerous felony violations of state and federal law, including the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act of 1968, even before the massacre began.
Sorry, this is a long post.