I'll Never Be a Fan of Gun Culture - An Example of Why

Listening to a podcast about the San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre left me angry, disturbed, and stuck on how many warning signs were ignored before James Huberty killed so many people.

This absolutely crazy man took time to tell people to quiet their children because it was making him anxious. What a piece of work. He spent over an hour shooting people, and to me this was a hell of a dropped ball. Seventy-seven minutes of this man shooting people, and they finally got a shot on him only when he came to a broken window. I am not going to dump all of that on the cops; they had no idea if he was alone, and they could not see inside. The psycho coming to that window is what ended his killing spree.

What keeps standing out is that there were massive signs that Huberty was dangerous. He told so many people he wanted to kill a bunch of people, and he talked about it for years. A lifetime of threats and violence against his family was ignored. He was not often in trouble in his life. He was not a gang member. He was not in a cult. He was just a violent, unstable man with the ability to own a hell of a lot of guns.

That he was allowed to buy so many guns and collect so many rounds of ammunition is an absurdity to me. I do not get gun nuts in the first place. Yes, I used to own a few, but why does anyone think they need a van load of them? At some point, the system should be able to flag that something is wrong.

Sure, in this case it was before the internet and mass use of computers, but what is the excuse now for not having a national database that allows dangerously unstable people to be investigated before they can gather the tools needed to harm a lot of people? There are just too many times when completely unstable people had far too much access to the weapons they needed.

The survivors are changed for life, physically and mentally, with damage that will last to their last day. It is amazing, given how long this went on, that there were not even more dead people. Some survived only because he fired blindly. If he had been calmer, the loss of life would have been even worse. I will never understand hearing children crying for their lives and still pulling the trigger.

To make the tragedy worse, Huberty’s widow took McDonald’s to court because she alleged they had sold him a large amount of chicken nuggets and that this somehow contributed to what he did. He had beaten and threatened his family, and yet the blame was shifted onto chicken nuggets. That remains one of the most absurd things I have ever heard.

I pray for the victims of this kind of madness, and I hope there is true accountability for the people who step over that line to take lives and harm others. For me, owning guns stopped making sense once I no longer competed or hunted. I have not owned one since I was 24, and I never felt the need to keep them around “just in case.”