System Failure

There's an abundance of news (and speculation) all over the media about how this VTech shooting happened, what or who failed, and what can be done to prevent something like this from ever happening again.

As predicted, the anti-gun lobby and the hard left are coming out of the woodwork to ban guns again. This always happens when there's a shooting like this that gains huge media attention, and especially in a year where presidential candidates are popping up everywhere.

While I'm not a huge gun advocate (never owned one myself, not a big fan), I hesitate to jump to the conclusion that stricter gun laws would have stopped the VTech shooting from happening. I don't think that's where the system failed.

While it's still all very preliminary, it's coming out that the killer had a history of mental health issues and in 2005, he was sent to a mental health facility for evaluation. After that evaluation, the judge who ordered it ruled that Cho should visit a mental hospital to get help BUT ONLY ON A VOLUNTARY BASIS. If the judge had ruled that the visits were MANDATORY, Cho wouldn't have passed the background checks currently in place as a requirement to buy a firearm.

From this perspective, it appears to me that the current gun laws didn't fail us; the current judicial system (and specifically, a lenient judge) did.

We seem to suffer from that a lot in this country. There are far too many times when a criminal commits a horrific crime, and we subsequently find out he had done something else before but was let go by a liberal judge.

The speculation and debate over this will go on and on ad nauseum until some other horrific news blows it off the headlines. And unfortunately, it's highly unlikely that anything will change significantly.