I can get why someone might want another person dead. I don’t truly comprehend murder as a coping mechanism, but I’ve been angry at people from time to time and pondered awful things for half a second. Someone who ponders such for longer might be inclined to carry it out, I suppose, especially if their morals are less than strong.
What I can’t comprehend, though, is killing your entire family. A spouse killing a spouse? I can understand, even if I can’t imagine feeling that way. But your kids? Honestly?
It’s clearly something we need to understand better so we can combat it better, but don’t worry, folks. It seems the problem is, like every other problem in the universe, just not enough gun control.
The US is often known globally for its shocking levels of violence, but acts of “family annihilation” or “familicide” rank among the most disturbing of crimes.
Like the editorializing right there in the first paragraph? Never mind that there are places much more violent than us. A lot of them, actually. Oh no, it’s “shocking levels” here.
They occur when an assailant kills four or more of their own family members and often see the killer also kill themselves. These types of crime have increased dramatically this year, according to data from Northeastern University.
The still rare but shocking mass killings have occurred across the country, including one this week in Texas, in which an alleged shooter killed four adults in a family that had taken him in, and one last month in Montana, in which an assailant killed eight relatives, including four children.
After six such attacks occurred last year, the lowest number in at least two decades, there have already been at least 17 this year.
Experts say they often occur after family estrangement or due to financial stresses, often on a father, or marital disputes. But, crucially, in the United States, the perpetrator is more likely to have easy access to a gun than many other parts of the world.
Such familicide is preventable, experts argue, but happens, in large part, because of the country’s high gun ownership rate and lack of firearm regulations, which makes it more likely that an assailant will impulsively shoot their family.
“There are way too many guns around and easy to pick up, and when someone is in some sort of a rage place, guns get picked up in anger,” said Jacquelyn Campbell, a Johns Hopkins University professor of nursing who has studied domestic violence homicide.
Campbell’s comment suggests that she thinks we all just keep guns lying around the house, in plain view, so anyone can help themselves, almost like they’re the bowl of mints sitting on the coffee table. “Take a 9mm and help yourself to murder.”
See, through all of this, the goal is to take one of the most genuinely shocking of crimes and put the onus on guns, but they forget that the average man is significantly stronger than the average woman. It’s supposedly why so many women prefer the bear for some idiotic reason. Because of that, though, a man is fully capable of annihilating his entire family without any firearm at all, especially since every household in the world has some kind of knife.
Couple that with a pretty loose definition of “family” and “annihilation,” and you’ve got a recipe for typical anti-gun nonsense.
For example, the Texas shooting? He wasn’t actually family. Plus, there were three children left alive inside the house after the rampage ended. Now, it seems like a bit of a stretch to call him a family annihilator when he didn’t annihilate the family. A brutal, sadistic SOB who murdered a family who had let him live with them for four years, but not a family annihilator.
In other words, this is what anti-gunners do. They pump up the hype that something awful is driven by guns, then pump up the numbers to make it seem like the problem is even worse than it is.
Which, of course, means the problem can’t be that bad as a whole. Otherwise, why would they need to lie?
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