Shooter's Willingness to Commit Suicide Demonstrates Futility
of Deterrence, Restricting Access to Firearms is
the Only Way to Prevent Future Tragedies
WASHINGTON, March 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday's mass shooting at a
Minnesota high school in which a lone shooter killed nine and wounded more
than a dozen before taking his own life was the worst school shooting since
the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, where two students killed 13 and
wounded another 23 before taking their own lives.
In the wake of this most recent shooting, Kristen Rand, legislative
director for the Violence Policy Center (VPC) states, "America must face the
fact that we have a love affair with guns that exacts a tremendous and
unacceptable cost in human lives lost. Mass shootings like that at Red Lake
High School are the future for America's children until policymakers decide
it's time to enact real gun control. Other countries have found the solution
to mass shootings, and it consists of severe restrictions on the availability
of specific classes of firearms, such as handguns and assault weapons."
Noting that, as was the case at Columbine, the Minnesota high school
shooter was prepared to die in order to perpetrate the shooting, Rand adds,
"There is simply no way the criminal justice system or a series of security
measures -- such as the guard and metal detectors present at Red Lake High
School -- can prevent a shooter determined to kill and willing to die."
The shooting at Red Lake High School is the latest mass murder-suicide to
occur in the United States and follows, by less than two weeks, a murder-
suicide at a Wisconsin hotel that resulted in eight dead. These shootings,
like the vast majority of such incidents, were perpetrated with a gun. A
study conducted by the VPC in 2002 found that guns were used in 95 percent of
all murder-suicides and estimated that at least 1,300 lives are lost each year
to murder-suicide. (For a copy of the study, American Roulette: The Untold
Story of Murder-Suicide in the United States, as well as gun violence
information for Minnesota, please see http://www.vpc.org).
The Violence Policy Center is a national educational organization working
to stop gun death and injury in America. For more information, please visit
http://www.vpc.org.
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SOURCE Violence Policy Center
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Related links:
http://www.vpc.org
CONTACT:
Marty Langley of the Violence Policy Center,
+1-202-822-8200, ext. 109
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