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A judge on Thursday ordered former prison guard trainee Zephen Xaver, 21, held without bond, one day after he barricaded himself in a bank in Sebring and opened fire, then called 911 and announced "I have shot five people."
Xaver recently relocated to central Floridafrom Indiana. Alex Gerlach told WSBT-TV in Indiana she had an on-and-off relationship with Xaver for two years, and had kept in contact every few months since. She said he often talked about wanting to hurt people.
"I never understood where it started," she told the station. "For some reason (he) always hated people and wanted everyone to die."
She said he bought a gun last week, but that she and others had shrugged it off because he alway liked guns.
“Every single person I’ve told has not taken it seriously, and it’s very unfortunate that it had to come to this,” Gerlach said.
"Sebring Mayor John Shoop said his close-knit community was rocked by the attack and that "tragedies like this are not supposed to happen here."
"Acts like this cannot deter us from living our lives freely from fear and deprivation," the mayor added. "The path turned dark today, but as we move on we will grow stronger."
The supposed gun control, that has been reiterated on, is pretty much, an apparent, non existent illusion, as long as first time gun violence crimes continue to sadly be committed, along with criminally perpetrated gun violence crimes as well?
No bounty to speak of, but 5 more families in the US, now have 5 funerals to plan.
I wonder how they might view the empty talk, that continues to reiterate, about how gun control, kept that individual from taking the lives of 5 more innocent people?
After the horrific slaughter of 12 people at a movie theater last summer, I was hoping it would be a few years before the next crazy American armed himself with legal guns and opened fire.
Unfortunately, it was only 6 months.
And this latest massacre is even more horrifying than the Colorado tragedy, with 20 children and 8 adults shot at point-blank range by a boy-man who, before Friday, d id not appear to have been particularly deranged.
Of course, the Sandy Hook bullets had barely stopped killing people before everyone opened fire in the ongoing gun debate.
The no-gun-control folks, who never seem to be the parents or relatives of people killed by gunmen (or are remarkably undisturbed by this), calmly weighed in with their standard talking points:
I've listened to these points for years. And I have considered them carefully.
The pro-gun argument that resonates most viscerally with me is this:
Given that there are at least 300 million guns in this country, I don't relish the thought of an armed gang barging into my house and shooting my family without my being entitled to have some means of protecting them.
And I really do not relish that."
"But then I remember that more people are shot in houses with guns than in houses without guns — from accidents and moments of rage. And I think through how readily available my guns and ammo would have to be for me to successfully protect my family after being awoken in the middle of the night by an intruder pointing his own guns in my face (I'd basically have to sleep near a loaded pistol and somehow manage not to shoot it in the dark at my wife, kids, pets, or friends). And that logic tempers my emotional desire to keep "protection" around.
The other no-gun-control arguments, meanwhile, just seem naive, self-serving, and/or ridiculous:
The alternative to supporting tighter gun control, it seems to me, is accepting that random mass shootings and tens of thousands of gun-related deaths each year are just a "cost of freedom" ... and accepting that cost.
I'm not ready to do that.
Other civilized countries have "freedom," and they don't have anywhere near as many gun-related deaths as America does.
Banning all guns in this country isn't practical: We love them too much.
But can we please finally talk seriously about banning some guns?
I'm just not ready to accept that we just have to have regular mass shootings and tens of thousands of annual gun deaths in this country. And I don't see any other practical way to try to reduce the number of these incidents without reducing the availability of assault weapons. And I'm sick of our national policy of standing by and doing nothing while we all wait for the next massacre."
An article that covers both sides of the gun control debate/ conversations.
One of the arguments invoked by those who think we should keep assault weapons freely available in this country is that the Constitution says we have a right to own and buy them.
The Constitution actually doesn't say that.
All the Constitution says is that we have the right to "bear arms."
And that "right to bear arms" is actually supposed to support the existence of a "well-regulated militia," an important qualifying clause in the Second Amendment that those in favor of free access to assault weapons usually ignore.
But even leaving aside the "well-regulated militia" clause, the Constitution doesn't specify what "arms" we're allowed to bear.
And we have long set limits on the type of arms we are allowed to bear, thus establishing clearly that we have the Constitutional right to do that."
For example, we're not (individually) allowed to own aircraft carriers, tanks, ballistic nuclear missiles, fighter aircraft, or attack submarines.
We're not even allowed to own fully automatic machine guns.*
All of those are "arms."
"And yet we have established that, despite the Second Amendment, we're not individually allowed to bear them.
So if we decided to establish that we are not individually allowed to bear semi-automatic assault rifles and pistols while still being allowed to own single-shot hunting guns, this would be perfectly in keeping with how we have interpreted our Second Amendment rights under the Constitution.
But it will still make lots of people scream that we have tromped all over the Constitution, even if we haven't."
So, how about if we limit access to something that factors into every gun massacre that the Constitution doesn't address at all:
Ammunition.
What if we keep semi-automatic weapons freely available but strictly control the manufacture, distribution, and sales of bullets?"