It's the shooter, not the gun

So a liberal FB friend (yes, I still have a few) who is clearly anti-gun, responded to a recent post of mine regarding the Virginia baseball park shooting:

He: How is it that you don't see the MASSIVE number of gun murders in the USA as a security threat?

My response: You erroneously presume that I don't. Where I differ from the anti-gun crowd is that I don't place blame for gun violence on the inanimate object, but rather on the sociopaths who, if they want a gun, can readily get one on any black market, regardless of how draconian the local gun regulations might be. In practical terms, I submit that the greatest cause of gun violence is the misuse and overprescription of certain pharmaceuticals. We see that dynamic at work in nearly all mass shootings.

I'm old enough to remember the days when kids learning early how to respect and safely handle firearms was routine (I learned to handle my first firearm when I had fewer than 10 years under my belt), and we didn't experience the tsunami of gun violence we do today. So what changed, the destructive power or availability of the guns? Nope, semi-autos were around in those days, too.

The true cause of gun violence IMHO is the rise of relativism and a general moral decay in society, not the mere availability of weaponry, which has remained pretty much constant. To clamp down on the rights of peaceful Americans to bear arms strikes me as an emotional, simplistic response by the anti-gun crowd, and does nothing to stem the tide of insane killers, in my view quite the contrary.