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Many Dead In Virginia Tech Shooting
nexuspal writes "Over 20 confirmed dead at Virginia Tech. Shooter killed some at residence hall then two hours later killed others in classrooms. Worst school shooting in US history. "
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..of those killed/injured :(
What fucked up animals we are. I wish well to all affected by this.
I was at the University of Arizona Nursing School shootings in 2001, and know what the folks over at VTech are going through.
My thoughts are with you, your loved ones and for this world, which every day seems to spin more out of control.
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Worst shooting spree of *any* kind. 31 dead, latest count. How he got away with it again, two hours later, is a question many will be asking.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
In case anyone has missed it, Jack Thompson has already gone on the major news networks predicting that the shooter's computer will have Counterstrike installed.
How the hell does Jacko correlate the skill of properly aiming and discharging a firearm with moving a thumbstick and pressing a button on a control-pad? There is no link there!
Listen Jack, just because your addled mind cannot disassociate video games from reality doesn't mean that the rest of us can't either. For fuck sake, the bodies aren't even COLD yet, we have no idea who the shooter is, and already you're exploiting this situation to try to push your illogical and ultimatly incorrect agenda?
You are a sick, sick man Jacko. Human filth. The only person worse than you in this situation is the shooter, but at least he had the decency to get killed.
My heart goes out to the victims of this tragedy, but right now I can't help but feel only rage at the baseless lies and unabashed opportunism displayed by this man.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
link. My question/concern is why did the police not lock down the campus after the shooting in the residence hall. 2 hours later, the SAME shooter went into classrooms and started killing students. If this is indeed the case, I believe it was gross negligence on the part of the police and I would be very disturbed if I was a family member of one of the students killed in the second shooting.
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
This is why it is wrong for your second amendment rights to end at the boundary of a school. Nothing is preventing from people illegally bringing guns on to campus. The same argument applies, well, anywhere.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
then how about leaving out the clever tagline altogether?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Yes, because criminals respect the law! [/sarcasm]
Right, because there's no way this guy could have killed 30 people without a gun (say, with a bomb, or something)... No way he could have gotten a gun if they were against the law... etc.
How many fewer people in that classroom would have died if one of the students in the room was carrying?
Best to respond to tragedy with a knee-jerk revocation of civil liberties.
The "firearms" cat is out of the bag. You can't undo technology with laws. Readers of this site should know that better than most people.
Er.. aren't there some stories that transcend the typical boundaries of the Slashdot? What did we do on 9/11? The fallout of this event will affect student civil liberties all over America. Once the "we gotta do *something*" people take over, it's going to get spectacularly ugly. After they find his My Space page, this might even become a YRO issue. This is *very* relevant.
He probably trained on Doom. Someone check to see if he was able to aim up and down.
Bad joke, but one has to wonder. Especially with hollywood seemingingly taking an increasingly cavalier attitude about putting hardcore violence in films. A lot of what is passing for R these days would have gotten NC-17 ten years ago. I bet the movie grindhouse tanks this weekend.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
And still you fight for your right to bear arms
(Score:2, Offtopic)
Take this as (another) wake up call. Vote for the candidate that promise to reform your gun control laws in '08.
Yeah, existing laws - making it illegal to walk on campus with a gun and shoot 30+ people - really did a lot of good, no? What makes you think passing more laws is going to help?
Something like this actually makes me MORE determined than ever to fight for my 2nd Amendment rights. You can do whatever the fuck you want if some nut with a gun shows up and starts trying to kill you, but I want to be able to defend myself. I may not succeed, but at least I won't go out cowering under a desk, praying to a god that does not exist, that the killer won't find me.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
As horrifying as this sickening act of violence is, it's sobering to recognize that this kind of random death toll is practically a daily event in Baghdad. We should be equally shocked and horrified by that.
Thoughts and prayers for all victims of violence.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
IMO you're right. But that's not the point.
It's too soon, and the wounds are too fresh.
Right now, my heart goes out to the families of those killed, and prayers that the injured all recover.
Let the political arguments, the gun control and video game fights, and even the Jon Katz stories just wait until later.
-Matt
I bet a lot of people feel safe in a country where you can be Tasered with impunity if you forget your library card, make a fuss in your library and refuse to leave, however this "security" that is supposed to prevent this kind of crap has no effect whatsoever. Or could it be that this security that is shoved down our throats isn't really designed to prevent this stuff at all?
Yet another example of how most security is MAKE BELIEVE, and apart from keeping the sheep in line and obedient, it does absolutely nothing to prevent the REAL crime. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the security guards were hiding - probably behind the students.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Wish I still had points.
I am also very surprised, and glad, to read that most comments have focused on "what a sick fuck" vs. "guns r bad mmmkay?"
-- My Sig is a P228.
Jack Thompson will blame video games, Jerry Falwell will blame gay marriage, Rosie O'Donnel will say it is the proliferation of guns, Rush Limbaugh will tell us that this is the inevitable result of a a Democrat majority. This is how these people get their faces on TV.
I don't even think it is seen as grotesque by most people any more.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Quote the head: Stuff That Matters. 31 killed on a College campus, a majority in a EE/CS building, well, it just damn Matters.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
Well look at the UK. We've had one such incident in history, commited by a man lisenced to carry arms. He killed 17. In England this has never happened.
While it's true that some people are insane and will go to silly lengths to cause destruction (think 9/11), most crimes of this kind are carried by "ordinary guys". That are very few criminal masterminds. Thousands that have a bad day, get dumped by their girlfriend or loose everything on red. Arm them when they're sane of mind and watch the destruction when they're not.
That's the American way.
I see a lot of gun control comments already...I am interested, what is your solution?
As I recall it only took a couple of guys with some simple box cutters to kill 3000+ people, so what would
a gun ban do?
Got Code?
I suppose the usual gun control debates will ensue, along with the bashing of video games. But none of that really matters. The real question is why did this guy shoot all of these people? What made him so angry/hopeless that he felt the need to commit this mass murder? And the more chilling question in my mind is, why doesn't this sort of thing happen more often? There's a lot of pain and ugliness in the world, more than enough to produce thousands, if not millions of shooters. And perhaps therein lies the hope. As bad as things can be, they haven't reached the point where these mass shootings happen every day. Will we be wise enough to do the things we really need to do to prevent this from happening again?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Being a tech school, I'm sure there are a lot of Slashdot readers that are fellow VT alumni (like myself).
There is, unfortunately, a lot that might ultimately be connected to topics that are normally associated with Slashdot:
- Might this be a disgrunted engineering (including comp sci) student? (Pressure thanks to exams, weed-out classes, etc.)
- As a possible engineering student, it's extremely likely he/she plays video games, so unfortunately that gives opportunity for anti-gaming advocates to thump their chests
- Possible that gun-control (or lack thereof) may have affected this?
For now though, I think it's too early to start the speculation. I hate how people are already using this awful tragedy to promote their own opinions/ideas. There will eventually be a time for this. Today, is not such a time.
-- jchenx
When what is believed to be a single, isolated shooting in a dorm happens on a 2600 acre public, open campus with hundreds of buildings, you can't assume that you're about to have the worst shooting incident (of any type) in US history.
Yet, people are already blaming Virginia Tech.
Would we close or "lock down" a city of 40000 people if there was a shooting? Because that's exactly what a campus of this size and type is (including students and faculty/staff).
No, but people are already calling for siren/PA systems in EVERY of HUNDREDS of buildings, of varying ages and constructions, centralized door locking/control and camera systems for not just outer building doors, but ALL doors.
The University reacted in a reasonable way. Yes, a shooter was "on the loose". Someone who had shot a person in a dorm, and the University immediately sent out notifications that such an event occurred; to be cautious and aware, and to report any suspicious activity to campus police. The area was "locked down", but after over two hours elapsed, there was no reason to believe that a madman was about to go on a random killing spree across campus.
This is not an elementary school. This is not a high school. This is a massive, open research campus with tens of thousands of people spreading over 2600 acres, with private, residential, and other buildings intermixed.
The only person to be blamed here is the shooter. And yes, he's dead. But Virginia Tech is not at fault.
Well, if someone 'sane' in the bldg had been packing a weapon, they might have ended this asshole's rampage a bit earlier....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
right, because if we had the right to chicken arms, nobody would ever shoot anyone else...
and though it has been mentioned in 100 places in this thread already, if someone really wants to go on a shooting spree, no LAW is going to stop them.
JT's immediate bandwagon jumping, shows him for the c**t that he really is. There is no other explanation. The guy is a scumbag, a slimey, bottom feeding piece of trash ready to exploit any tragedy for his own personal agenda.
Civilian firefights are not going to solve the problem unless you get people to wear good guy/bad guy armbands or something.
Sure, there are a few times, like perhaps this one, where a few lives might have been saved if someone had been armed, but there would likely have been more single event shootings (fight over a girl getting out of hand etc). When you work the averages, gun toting adds up to more deaths.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Does anybody know if Virginia Tech has a policy against firearms on campus? If so, I hope people stop and ask: could one student, armed with a handgun, have prevented the death toll from climbing as high as it did?
Last year the VA legislature tried to amend the laws to allow licensed students and faculty to carry concealed on campus. Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Do you still call people Mongoloids too? It's the 21st century gramps, try call an Asian that to his face and don't be surprised if he busts out the chop-suey and puts your old white ass in the hospital.
Ever been in a firefight? Because if you haven't, I can assure you that having a gun doesn't make you grow a big, brass pair all of a sudden.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Look at the fucking timestamps. When I started my comment there were 0 comments in this story.
I have my own mind and can make it up on my own. Welcome to my foes list.
The Libertarians' website thingy tells me that I am an upper left centrist. Make of that what you will.
Accusing people who don't agree with you of following someone else's agenda is a sorry excuse for an actual debate. Mudslinging is easy, but it still makes you look like an ass.
Fact: Some guy shot a bunch of people.
Fact: You are not permitted to carry guns on campus.
Fact: Someone with a gun would have been in a better position to shoot the shooter than someone without a gun. In fact, once the event was confirmed, they called some men with guns and those men came and shot the man shooting people.
Fact: You are making stupid assumptions. One of them is that he had no facts before you did.
Ah yes, compare me to Rush in order to discredit me. That will work fine on the idiot sheeple who respond predictably to such stimulus. But it will not work on rational individuals who are not afraid to make up their own minds.
Also, if Rush takes the same stance on carrying firearms, then I am not afraid to stand up and be counted as someone who agrees with him on the individual point, because issues and people are different things. Congratulations on being a sheep who does not understand this, and who even attempts to use that confusion to paint me as intolerant.
Never mind that denying someone their constitutional rights is what's genuinely intolerant here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm shocked by the number of people on here calling for more guns in schools. That's horrible!
If you feel it necessary to carry a lethal weapon in order to feel safe, something is very very wrong.
- Computer games
- Music of some sort
- Lack of gun control
- Religion
- Lack of religion
- Educational system
- Lack of mental-health counseling
- If the person turns out to be an engineering student, expect blame to fall on H1B visas for providing too much competition for local engineers
- If the person turns out to be foreign, I can imagine a whole slew of others to blame
In short, blame everything/everybody except the person who did the deed. Personal responsibility is not even a concept in America any more."-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Yeah, great. Let's visit this alternative reality for a minute. Word goes out that a 'young guy with a handgun' is wandering around campus killing people. In response, all these students break out their handguns and start popping off at anyone matching that description. Hilarity ensues.
Sorry, I'm not willing to give up my freedom for the illusion of safety. We have enough of that going on over here already, thanks.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Are they looking any better to you guys in the US yet? Seriously, this needn't have happened.
If by "gun laws" you mean the laws, regulations and statutes that create Defenseless Victim Zones like
Virginia Tech, then no, they're not looking any better.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Michael Moore's 'Bowling for Columbine' documentary looked into this and didn't actually blame the ready availability of guns in the US for the high level of gun crime. He showed examples of other countries where lots of people carry guns, such as Canada and Switzerland, countries that don't have such a culture of violence. He claims that a culture of fear is what drives Americans to arm themselves to the teeth in such big numbers, and you end up with the ludicrous situation where you can go into a shop on just about any high street and buy an automatic assault weapon, something that is not needed for self defence or hunting or any of the other uses that gun advocates frequently come up with.
There seems to be a cultivation of fear, where violent crime seems to get a disproportionate amount of coverage on the news that's way beyond the actual importance of it. So there was an armed robbery at the gas station earlier this morning. Do we really need a live outside broadcast from the scene of the crime at 7pm where all the activity has long finished?
On the radio this morning someone made a very good point about people in their neighbourhood driving their children the short distance to school for fear of abduction, even though the number of abductions in that area in the last ten years is zero. TV shows talk about an 'epidemic' of road rage, an epidemic being five reported incidents in the country in the last year. Remember the SARS outbreak? About five people in Asia died from it and it was reported as a 'worldwide pandemic.'
I don't know if gun control is the complete solution to the problem, it runs much deeper than that, but it has to be part of it. There's no way any random person should be able to walk in off the street and buy an AK47.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Your are so right. I wish the students and teachers had been packing. The shooter might not have gotten so many. It is time to remove gun restrictions and gain back our constitutional rights. Funny that free speech is given more weight than the right to bare arms despite being equal rights.
Guns make people safer! That's why America, with the highest guns per capita of any first-world nation, is the safest nation on Earth, right alongside such sterling examples of crime-free zones like Costa Rica and Colombia.
Get a goddamned grip. The US has more guns -- and more gun deaths -- than any other developed nation.
Clearly the solution to today's situation would have been for everyone to have guns, then people could have started firing recklessly into the fray and that would have been really fucking great!
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Because anything can be a weapon. Surely someone from Japan would understanding that a ban on guns just causes other weapons to become more important. Why do you think the Samurai class continued to have power into the 20th century? Because they were behind the ban on guns. Their choice of weapon required their level of training, so it was not available to the general public. A gun makes everyone equally powerful, so you can't have Samurai pushing people around. (of course, the Samurai ethics, just like the knight's code of honor, served to prevent the worst abuses.)
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Gee, I don't know. Maybe the fact that the US population is 40 times the size of the Swiss population?
Because there is no way to prevent crazy nuts like this guy from VT from getting guns. And some people want to be able to defend themselves when these nuts show up and start shooting.
Oh, I agree. I mean, it's not like the US has seen far far more of these sorts of killings than any other nation. And you know why? Because of the high level of gun ownership, of course. It is these very weapons that have prevented these sorts of things from happening time and again.
Right?
When Asians object to "oriental," it's usually on the grounds that "I'm not a rug." This gripe is as obtuse as it is inane. As the literate among you know, the term means nothing but "Eastern." You don't here them objecting to phrases like "Eastern culture" and "Eastern philosophy," so there's nothing objectionable about the direction alone.
Sure, "oriental" collocates strongly with "rug" (this means that the words appear together frequently), but that shouldn't kill the word.
Last year, a bill that would have allowed concealed carry on the Virginia Tech Campus was killed off in committee.
If that bill had passed, there is a chance this could have been curtailed.
Strangely enough, the killer did not seem to mind breaking the law in this regard.
If guns were banned in America tomorrow, do you HONESTLY think guns will just "go away"? Tens of thousands of illegal aliens cross the border monthly. Tons of illegal drugs enter the country regularly. Laws are in place banning both of those. All restrictive gun laws do is create a safe environment for violent criminals.
But, why do I bother? You can look up both sides of the issue and make your own mind up. But, please do look at BOTH sides of the issue. Contrary to what you might hear otherwise, there really are two sides.
Students have enough problems with getting to class on time and making terrible decisions with the largest deadliest weapons at their disposal: motor vehicles.
It doesn't take too much imagination to envision the mayhem with them carrying firearms and making decisions about shooting them.
Illusion of safety? You mean, like the illusion that owning a handgun will somehow protect you from violence? Or the illusion that, in a truly violent situation, you will have the wherewithal to use your gun safely and effectively?
Well, if someone 'sane' in the bldg had been packing a weapon, they might have ended this asshole's rampage a bit earlier....
Or found their weapon stolen and had been used to kill even more people. Or been outgunned in a hall shootout in the same manner as the armed guard at Columbine.
This is breaking news, can we please all put down our politics until the story becomes more coherent?
Because all other countries in the world without the right to have guns have terrible gun crime.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
This reminds me of a shooting at a rock and roll venue in my hometown a few years ago and reading on one of the forums about a guy who allegedly was there and remarked that if you could conceal and carry (this is Ohio) in a liquor establishment, then the shooter would of been lucky to kill only one person because this person (the poster on the forum), could of drawn his weapon and taken out the madman.
Having armed guards or police at every entrance to a college campus is pointless, but if some of the professors or other faculty (perhaps even some of the students within reasonable parameters) were at least allowed to have weapons on campus, then crazy gun toting madmen will be put down before they can do too much harm.
Of course the gun control fanatics will say we need to ban all guns, but then what do you do against someone who walks into an undefended campus and starts throwing homemade pipe bombs everywhere?
The reason the United States doesn't live in fear 24/7, like in some places of the world is that we have good guys with guns protecting us from the bad guys with guns who want to harm us for any number of reasons (not to start any flame wars on U.S. foreign policy, but by good, I mean the people who protect this country from invasion).
Nobody yet knows what the motive of the shooter happened to be, but realistically, terrorist cells could kill a whole lot of people by just going to a highly populated area with strict gun control laws and only a handful of armed law enforcement officers and kill a hell of a lot of people before the authorities could respond.
I mean, who needs bombs to kill people when the only people fighting you don't even have knives to protect themselves.
"I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus"
I don't see the problem. It's the same as the fight against terrorism. The government screwed up that one too. What's important? Safety? No. Read the comment above closely. Safety is irrelevant. "Feeling safe" is what's important. The US people don't care if they are safe, they care whether they feel safe. They aren't smart enough and logical enough to do a risk analysis and address the actual safety issues. They want the issues that cause them stress to be eliminated, like the guy next to them carrying a gun or people with beards on planes.
Learn to love Alaska
You're right, it IS the 21st century and new era in which everyone and anyone doesn't actually get offended but goes out of their way to be offended. What makes the word Asian so much better than Oriental anyway? Because it is generic? Well you can go ahead of feel offended about what IS and ISN't 21st century while the only denomination that will continue to matter is the green in the banks of all those who laugh at you for going out of your way to feel offended (or if you're a neo-hippie...being offended on everyone else's behalf).
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
You can't conceal a shotgun or Rifle which I'm sure is what he was using.
False, the shooter was using 2 hand guns.
Banning a concealed weapon wouldn't have changed the outcome of this in any way.
False, ANY law abiding citizen with a CCL shoots this motherfucker before he kills 31.
Go look at the crime rates for any state with a Concealed Carry Law - the crime rate plummets for all violent crimes except rape - which just means that more women need to carry guns.
Cars also kill "infinitely" more Americans every year than terrorists and WMDs, yet your country is still in Iraq for some reason.
The car comparison is flawed at best.
The *only* reason making guns illegal would not work is because there's already so many in circulation.
Forcing everyone to carry a big 5 lb lump of steel throughout their lives to "ensure their safety" from what's probably a 1 in 20,000 lifetime event is utterly idiotic - especially considering that in places like Canada and Europe the likelyhood of being shot dead is already LESS THAN your rate of gun-crime.
It's so interesting to see everyone all year long decrying the "1984" orwell state appearing in the UK, but as soon as something like this happens you have dozens of people in the forums calling for everyone in the country to be armed and for a hundred HD cameras to be placed throughout every single campus and 100 people to watch all these HD cameras - just to catch that one guy every 30 years who kills 30 people.
All this while drinking while driving is a minor first offence and 40% of everyone doesn't fasten their seatbelts.
God damned morons, all of you.
There will be a time and a place to discuss the theoreticals of "would doing X have helped?" scenarios. Every anti-something lobbyist is going to try to find something to hinge this on, from video games to guns (or lack thereof).
Good god, this incident only happened a few hours ago. People (like myself) are still shocked, grieving, mourning for the loss of our fellow classmates, faculty, etc. To hear people, like yourself, using this incident to lobby their particular beliefs, is just sickening.
-- jchenx
I agree.
I think everyone should take a course on safe gun handling and basic shooting.
It takes a lot of fear of the unknown out of the equation.
A lot of anti-gun types may come to realise they are just tools. Nothing scary or magical, just tools.
It would be a hell of a stretch to claim that Chinese, Japanese and Korean Americans need the level of protection that we extend to African Americans. There's a whole lot less racial hatred directed at immigrants from Asia than from Africa or even Mexico.
"Oriental" doesn't remotely compare with "nigger." Try to imagine a government employee being let go for saying "oriental."
I find your comment to be disingenuous grandstanding.
Move to Iraq. Everyone has a gun in Iraq. Safest place in the world.
Software patents delenda est.
Jack Thompson uses this to promote his anti-video game agenda and we are all disgusted (and rightly so). Yet we find it acceptable for people on here to push their Second Ammendment agenda. Not making any judgement on whether they are right or wrong (if someone was carrying a weapon they might have been able to stop this guy vs. if everyone was carrying weapons would gun crimes in the classroom go up thus increasing the total number of gun deaths on campus). Can't we just give our agenda pushing a break for day and just feel bad for these kids and their families? Can't we just worry how the politicians (all of them) are going to over react to this and try to push stupid laws just so they feel like they are doing something? This is another sad day we have to live through. Wake up, pull your head out of your asses, and see if there is someone around you that is showing signs that they are mentally distraught. Who knows, if one person would have helped this guy out we might still be complaining about the Imus thing.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
VT has a no gun rule. And
Virginia Tech also has the backing of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police. In a policy position paper dated April 1, association executive director Dana Schrad wrote that the presence of guns on college campuses "adds a dangerous element to an environment in which alcohol is a compounding factor." Students should not have to be concerned about guns on campus, Schrad wrote.
She helped the victims a lot. Like sitting ducks they were.
Perhaps universities should implement mandatory counseling for high pressure students. At the university I graduated from (top engineering Ivy), the engineers have some of the hardest majors on campus. Although I majored in physics, I was exposed to a lot of this as well. At one point I remember waiting to talk to a professor while he was talking to a student who did nothing but play video games and code. The student had no friends or interests. And this isn't uncommon from what I've seen. I was on the edge of this sort of behavior myself. It's not surprising that these kinds of people, who are completely removed from society, could easily crack. I've seen enough problems like that.
I once joked with one person I know that maybe everyone should be assigned a counselor when they first start at a university such as this. Normally I'd say the professors/teachers should notice this, and while that may work in a high school, I know how little most professors care about their students. I know it wouldn't go over well, but maybe mandatory counseling is something that's necessary. Granted, it won't catch everything, but maybe requiring a 15 minute long meeting with a counselor every few months could stop people from going over the edge and either killing themselves or going on a rampage like this. Especially for the people in stressful majors. Even though counselors at universities often aren't the best, I'm sure its not too hard to figure out someone needs extra help. Who knows, maybe it won't do anything. But on the other hand, maybe doing this will save 30 people, and that's worth it.
I agree, and I don't think any police agency is typically prepared for something of this scale at once, given this is the worst single shooting incident in US history.
In an open and free society, if someone really wants to go on a rampage, there's not a lot that can stop them.
In some of the towns I lived in at least 30% of males on the street were carrying. Luckily almost all of those had been through military training and knew a few things about guns, target assesment, risk mitigation etc. Go into the kmart equivalent and the guy helping folk select a tie had a 357 on his hip. Quite a few people got shot by mistake.
In USA there's the problem that so few people with firearms have real firearm training. I am not that opposed to *very* well trained people carrying weapons, but am suggesting that the idea that it should be a citizen's right is broken.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Predators go after WEAK PREY. Most criminals who might threaten others with violence tend to prefer targets that offer less risk to them. This is why people rob banks and not police stations, and mug old ladies more than bodybuilders, etc.
Anyone that has seen "Reservoir Dogs" will understand that even an unskilled person with a weapon can be a serious threat to a criminal's welfare. If people know that they have a 1 in 5 chance that the person they're accosting will be armed, and can either wound or kill them, rational criminals will either ratchet up the level of force (kill first, then steal), or will be more careful about their targets. Irrational criminals (such as anyone IMO nuts enough to go on a killing spree) will likely be undeterred by this (though they may take different precautions).
The thing is, an armed populace ensures that people KNOW that others can hold them responsible for actions (in an ultimate sense). As a potential victim, whether you're armed makes little difference in the attacker's actions (since they don't know you are armed), whereas YOUR personal chances are greatly improved by being armed (and competent w/ the weapon).
From an informal game theory perspective, the attacker will face the least risk by assuming all victims will be armed. Victims will face less risk by BEING armed, in that they have a chance to neutralize or deter an attacker (whether solely or by numbers).
You might have the occasional cluster-bomb of death when a room full of panicked people pull guns and no one knows who to shoot
Japan has very strict gun-laws, but does that stop Japanese gangs in the major and smaller cities from using guns? Also an interesting side note is that while gun related deaths in Japan are notably less than the US its suicide rate is double that of the US...
Fact is that crime in general (not just gun crime) is pretty rampant throughout America and I for one would feel a lot less secure if you took away the ability for me to protect my home if someone were to break in or carry a weapon if I had all the pre-requisite training to do so. (I am 100% for mandatory training for people who want to carry a weapon and I also don't believe fully automatic weapons are a necessity for the general populace.) But I do believe handguns, rifles, shotguns and the like are not overboard.
All that being said this is pretty much sidebar back and forth to what is a very unfortunate event that was caused by a very, very sick individual.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
-- jchenx
I actually own a copy of the solution to this problem. The Thompson/Center Contender makes a distinctive "Clack" when the action is closed, thus it is easy to imagine a professor or indeed a few students in a classroom carrying these in belt-holsters fashioned such that the open breech faces forward, similar to the friendly way in which break-open shotguns are carried around at a trap/skeet range. Your neighbors would be at least alerted when you lock the action. The downside is making the boyfriend-kills-girlfriend type of thing easier, say from 95 to 99 percent probable, once the guy makes his mind up. The upside of course is that the single-shot design allows open deterrence of mass-killings, without facilitating them. Suicide-bombing - in Southern Arizona at least the answer is easily feasible since there is no need for bulky winter clothes. Merely, a dress-code of skin-tight clothing such as Danskins. The Arab clothing style, beneath which one can conceal a large explosive belt, probably leaving room for an assault rifle, has no future, at least not once you come in out of the sun. Leaving only the design of the locker-area for depositing such clothing, when entering a public building.
...Asians are people, and Orientals are rugs.
paintball
Look, whatever. The issue at hand isn't terminology. It's the murders.
If the students were armed, as provided for by the 2nd amendment, someone could have dropped that guy early on and saved 30 or more people. Chalk up another bunch of deaths to the pussification of American citizens by the mommy government. There will be no correction, though; instead of people going "well duh, I should be armed in case some crazy bastard shows up in my face somewhere", they'll just take a bunch more of your civil rights away at the schools - restrict your movements, require papers, stick RFID tags to you earlobes, x-ray your colons... and a year or so from now, some crazy will do the same thing again, perhaps slightly more cleverly.
Ah, it's so frustrating to hear news like this. All those people did not have to die. Learn to defend yourselves, and be willing to. Seriously. The government cannot protect you from crazies; you have to do it yourself. The government always arrives after these events - only you can stop them as they happen. Get licensed. Practice. Carry. Be a protector instead of a victim. When the government says you can't carry here or there, fight like wildcats to reject this weakening of your ability to defend yourself and those you care about. The government is not your friend.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In reality there is no clear and permanent classification of people into "good" and "bad". The "good" person from yesterday might be a "bad" person today because of the circumstances they were put in. The "good cop, doing his job at work, might go home and beat his wife", and so on. Our society, our legal system though wants to make that binary classification because it is less painful for us to admit that we could also do "bad" thing once in a while and we surely like to think of ourselves as "good people".
A lot of the criminals when asked why they commited the crime would answer "I don't know why I did it." Notice I am not advocating that we should not punish the offenders or that individuals should not be responsible for their actions (those damn genes made me do it!), but rather that we shouldn't hastily judge and categorize people with permanent overgeneralized labels such as "he is evil" and "I am good". In case of a habitual offender or were a clear pattern of bad behavior occurs perhaps such labels are valid, however there are moments and circumstances were even the sanest and "best" of us can do pretty bad things.
Guns.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Or, more likely, you'd have more numerous single-casaulty shooting incidents as more weapons would result in possibly more ivolent flareups.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
You shouldn't fear people with guns, you should fear not having a gun when crazy people want to kill you.
Actually, I fear crazy people who can just walk into K-Mart and arm themselves.
You can look at this situation and say that the problem is that none of the other students had guns.
But you can just as easily look at this situation and conclude that the problem is that the nutjob DID have a gun.
So your solution is 'Give everyone a gun!'. My solution is 'Don't give crazy people guns.'
Your way the crazy guy only manages to kill 3 or 4 people before someone else shoots him. My way, nobody gets shot.
paintball
Except you're wrong.
:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1953425.s tm
Here's a list of school shootings from the past ten years, Europe and the States included
In most states you do need a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
Yes, because the presence of a gun is what causes violence. Logically, if more people have guns, there will be more flare-ups.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I would mod the parent up if I had points. Note that VA Tech does not allow students or faculty to carry guns on school property, even if they have a concealed weapon permit. One armed student could have ended this right at the beginning.
There are many things that make me sick about this story, and others like it (the fact that there are "others like it" is one of the things that make me sick).
Please, DO NOT add to it with talks of "worst" or not worst, of "top three", and of "body counts". This ISN'T a game. There is no high score. There's no achievement or rank involved.
This kind of talk always bothers me. I guess it's natural to try to categorize and make sense of it - but it even bothers me for natural events like earthquakes or floods. The difference is, natural events don't care one way or another.
I guess we'll never know the shooter's motivation. But is it that far-fetched to assume that the immense amount of attention previous shootings got played at least SOME role in his mind? That the temptation of immortal infamy made him choose THIS way to go, rather than another?
And now we put him in a "top 3"?
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
No, but having a gun on you if you happen to "flare up" strongly increases the chance that you will use it. If you don't have a weapon you can hurt someone by punching and kicking, but the chances are that you will not kill them. When you bring a gun into the situation, the chances that someone is going to get killed greatly increase.
Do you really think if everybody was armed this couldn't have happened? Just think about it for a minute: You are somewhere and you hear shots. You pull out your gun and see 15 other people with guns. Who do you shoot?
I don't know what the solution to mass killings is, but arming everybody is not it.
...do people at your school seriously bring guns to class? OSU didn't have a gun policy and was in a state with a conceal/carry law without requiring a permit. Pretty much as lax as possible. Yet, no one I nor any of my friends knew *ever* brought a gun to class, and this is in an urban campus in a relatively shitty part of a relatively big city. So, basically, it doesn't matter what law virginia tech had. Frankly, I'd be frightened of anyone so worried about a random massacre happening to them that they feel they need to carry a gun around in the middle of the morning to every class they go to in a school in some backwoods town that almost never sees a murder and has 1/4 of the countries per-capita level of violent crime.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Short on time, so short comment:
;) ) - while gun control can probably not help US gun crime stats in a major way in anything approaching the short-ish run, gun access is incredibly important to events such as the Virginia Tech massacre. Kids snap all over the world over lots of silly (and not-so-silly) things - but those that have access to semi-automatic weapons when they snap are many, many times more dangerous. In the larger scheme of things, however, massacres make up a tiny proportion of murders, although they are much more spectacular (and hence garner more media attention, feeding future massacres, etc.) than the average drug hit.
Michael Moore goes wrong in a number of areas with his "culture of fear" model of US gun crime. Highlights follow:
- First, while many nations (including my own, i.e. Sweden) have plenty of legal guns (hunting is a huge movement here and tens of thousands of reservists have FN-FAL assault rifles at home), those are usually of models not well suited to crime, are registered, and required to be stored in a safe fashion. The same goes for, say, Canada (his chosen comparison).
- General US gun deaths are extremely concentrated to certain demographic groups (Read: black & latino bangers in inner-cities.). For instance, a little more than half of all US killers are black, despite making up a bit more than a tenth of the population. (I.e see the bureau of justice statistics: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm) The gross murder rate for US lily-white suburbia is much closer to Europe than stats would let on, despite spillover from the inner city wars.
- In short, the main general problem with regards to guns in the US are not trigger happy rednecks in Arkansas or scared soccer moms killing people by mistake. The "culture of fear" theory just comes up short when confronted by reality.
- Gun accessibility, however, is probably important. The banger wars are hardly helped by the plentiful and easy access to guns. It is unrealistic at this point, however, to see how even a total gun ban could yield short-term results in this department. Bangers would hang on to their illegal guns no matter what laws are passed, and only a long battle of attrition could bring major crime-drop windfalls. In the meantime, the law-abiding population would be stripped of percieved and real protection, and political pressures to ease gun access would mount.
- Making things even more complicated, the main benificiaries of a gun ban would in the end be white city liberals, while the hunting 'n guns culture of the rednecks would pay a big chunk of the price. The political problems are obvious.
- Finally (lots more to be said, but I have to go to bed...
That it for today. Goodnight!
The solution to school shootings is *more* guns in the classrooms?
That kind of escalation strategy is what kept the cold war going for so many decades, have you learned nothing?
Holy crap! I was thinking of sending my son to the states to uni, but if that's the kind of response you come up with for this tragedy then I'll be rethinking that.
First and most importantly, how do you stop him from illegally obtaining a gun? As another poster pointed out, we still have large amounts of drugs in the country, which is just as illegal as you want to make this guy having a gun. (Did he even legally obtain the ones he used in this case anyways?)
Secondly, how do you determine who a "crazy person" is, and how to you stop that definition from becoming politically "malleable"? Are you crazy because you are justifiably upset at your child getting killed by a drunk driver, even if you don't (currently) intend to kill anyone? Are you crazy because you hate George Bush, even if you don't (currently) intend to kill him? Are you crazy because you exercise your right to free speech regarding guns, as you just did in your post?
Omnes stulti sunt.
Defenseless Victim Zones
- psycho students around me? Yeah sign me up for classes... in some other country. Fortunately I'm already there.
Nice. So when all of my fellow students are packing guns, who defends me exactly? All the stressed-out/teen-angst-ridden/misfit/jock/random
I don't shoot anyone for holding a gun. I only shoot if I see someone shooting unarmed students.
If someone runs into your car in a parking lot, who do you blame? Everyone with a car? Of course not. Only the person you know hit your car. Stop trying to caricature armed citizens as twitching bundles of indiscriminate reflexes. We can think as well as you can, and about the same things.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I would bet money that this person was not liscensed to carry a concealed weapon.
I think it would be better to say that no person should *want* to be able to walk in off the street and buy an AK47.
Assault rifles are not self-defense or hunting weapons. They are assault weapons. They have a very specific purpose: killing and wounding large numbers of people at a very fast rate.
This doesn't mean they should be banned. Why should I, a police officer, be allowed to have weapons like that while you can't? America is supposed to be a government by, of and for the people: if the people's words aren't enough to effect change, they have to be able to back it up. Trust me, you do not want people like me dictating your lives.
What happens if the government stops taking no for an answer?
We need to eliminate the causes of violent behavior, not the tools for doing it. If the citizens are only allowed to have small arms, then the army and the police should be banned from using them too.
If the gunman had pulled his psycho bullshit in a crowded Virginia mall, the shooter's life may have ended a lot quicker, but that does not mean that fewer people would be dead. If someone started shooting back, there would have been more bullets flying around, and with more bullets flying around, there's a lot higher chance that people will get hit, especially if this is taking place in a mall with a lot of people.
This isn't a video game. In real life, bullets do not mean instant death. Random bullets may hit some people but I'll bet the chances of living from a stray round in that environment are a lot better than being lined up against a wall and shot point blank in the head.
Furthermore, for those that go get hit in an exchange like that, they have a lot higher chance of survival because paramedics can reach them sooner, if people in the middle of the situation know the shooter is down they can flag in the police in and tell them it is safe so the paramedics can come in right away without having to take the time to do a full sweep first.
Not to mention that it's a ridiculous assertion that "bullets would be flying everywhere", at most a handful of people at any time would have a weapon on them and also be trained in the proper use thereof. You forget that people who carry firearms legally are generally not batshit insane and therefore less likley to just spray lead everywhere.
I actually have a relative attending the school as a grad student. She is OK as it turns out but it makes me mad to think the school was just an open playground for a shooter like this with only law enforcement able to stop him.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the students were armed...
But what if the assailant WASN'T armed?
Maybe you shouldn't say anything until you know where he got his gun. If he bought it at K-Mart at 7AM and was shooting people at 7:30 AM, that might be a pretty strong indication that the problem here wasn't the availability of guns to the other students, the problem was the availability of guns to the assailant.
Also, it's premature to blame the law for the lack of guns in the possession of the students. Not only would the law have to be different, we would also need to know if there were any students present who would have been carrying a firearm themselves if it was legal to do so.
But, the reality of the situation is we're screwed either way:
Not all gun crime is the same. Some gun crime is impulsive - people who are impulsively violent are more destructive when they have ready access to a firearm. In these kinds of gun crimes, eliminating ready access to firearms would reduce the effects of gun crime. And some gun crime is premeditated - the criminal is going to get the gun they need to commit the crime. In that kind of crime, reducing ready access to firearms creates an opportunity for the criminal.
So you can't solve the gun problem, you can just favor one kind of gun violence over another.
paintball
NO GUNS - NO DEATHS its as simple as that, how many people can you kill with just sticks and stones?, in the same amount of time you can take out 30 people with a semi automatic? US society is based on fear and buying a gun only adds to it, until someone flips and kills 30 innocent.
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
Imagine everyone opening fire in self-defence and no one knowing who the gunman actually was (sounds like the US Army in Iraq today!). Where you've got a lot of people carrying guns, it's been known to happen.
Why not link us to a story where thirty people died because of this.
Someone shooting is, (a) shooting at someone they saw shoot someone else and now coming towards them menacingly with a gun, and (b) aiming for non-vital areas as the intent is more to stop than to kill. That is the difference, the killer is in fact aiming to kill while those with legal handguns will generally be aiming to wound and therefore mistakes may not be fatal. I'd rather have someone shoot me in the side or leg because they thought I was the shooter, than to have the shooter make sure I was dead because that was pretty much his whole plan.
A crowd of people with guns being attacked by one man is a self limiting problem and means far fewer fatalities than a crowd full of unarmed people lined up against a wall by one man.
People against guns act like every single person with a gun is exactly the same, crazy killer or well-trained mother of four.
I don't even own a gun myself, I just grew up around a lot of gun culture and know what responsible gun use is like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The question, I think, is if you are more frightened of someone that goes through the process to carry a concealed weapon (and infact does so) than you are of some fuckin' nut who goes around shooting people? I for one can gladly say that I'd rather have the former.
Also, to date, no legislation has been very effective at keeping firearms out of the hands of criminals (you might note that historically no prohibition has been effective). Most legislation is more of a burden to an honest person owning a gun than to a criminal (who often will just steal a gun). And at most, such legislation only cuts down on the number of accidents involving firearms. Note, drowning kills more people and no where in the Constitution does it mention a "right to swim."
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
The Second Amendment was drafted in 1789 and much has changed in the world since then. To hold a section of the Bill of Rights above your head and declare that it should bestow a particular right upon a group of humans forever just because they happen to have been born in the middle third of North America is utterly illogical. There were no automatic or semi-automatic weapons in the 18th Century, and it was conceivable that a group of a few thousand armed and motivated farmers could sack the White House should the need arise. Those days are long gone, unless you're willing to ensure that private citizens also have the right to drive battle tanks and possess tactical nuclear weapons.
It's like the mis-use of the term African-American. African-American is a cultural distinction. Not all blacks are African-American some are from the Caribean, some are Pacific Islanders, some are African. The term 'black' is offensive very few people... and very useful in describing race and society.
But what do you do about Asian/Oriental? You could try to be specific on country of origin... but Chinese isn't very good as there are many different races/ethnicities from China. If you're going to distinguish between Han Chinese and Korean, you might as well distinguish Tibetan too.
My vote is to simplify skin color just like eye/hair color: Whites, Blacks, Browns, Yellows, and Reds.
oh... and for those of you on this thread who think 'oriental' is as bad as the n-word... you have not seen/experienced real full-force dehumanising racism if you can honestly claim that. There are racist terms equavalent to the n-word, but 'oriental' isn't one of them.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Until the next time
Absolutely correct and shown by numerous real world (Abu Ghraib) and even a couple of experimental situations like the Stanford Prison Experiment. Some of the 'animals' who perpetrated crimes against the other prisoners in the SPE were exactly the same kind of college kids who died today.
It is precisely what was described by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Its people who think they could never ever do that who are the most dangerous.
If New York City and Kennesaw, Georgia had the same population, New York would have hundreds of times the number of shooting homicides
Guns are tightly controlled in New York. In Kennesaw, every household is legally obligated to keep a gun. So explain to me again how gun control saves peoples' lives?
Or maybe, just maybe, you can't compare two very different places and assume that gun control is the difference!
I'm not arguing for or against gun control, but as someone once said, "your argument is trash".
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
*snicker* Heh, yeah, guns for everyone would have solved *this* particular problem. And yet, it would have created a million other problems. Such as, every minor quarrel could turn into a block wide shoot-out. Look, your approach has been tried. It was tried right here, in this country, and not even that long ago. It was called the Wild West. Where "law and order" was enforced by which group had the biggest/most guns. Where heroes were made out of people for such things as bringing federal order to remote towns.
People like you have no idea what it means to live in a society where everyone has a gun. All you have is your little pornographic power fantasies. Yeah, completely banning guns is no recipe for global peace. But neither is giving everyone a gun.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Doubtful that this guy bought the guns for the massacre. His effectiveness with them indicates he probably had them for quite a while, and practiced shooting fairly frequently.
Seriously though, people bring up this bizarre "man gets angry, buys a gun, shoots people, all in the same day" scenario quite frequently, but I have yet to hear of a single incident where anyone has actually done that. Most shootings are committed by people who already have guns, and have usually had them for quite a while. Face it, the time it takes to go buy a gun is usually long enough to cool off any normal "hothead". If the law considers a couple hours ample time to "cool off" when making the distinction between 1st and 2nd degree murder, then why do some people think it should take 3-14 DAYS (varies from state to state) to "cool off" when trying to buy a firearm? It's absurd.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The illusion that the availability of firearms or the lack thereof will have anything to do with the desire of one person to kill another. The desire to murder is a far greater problem in an individual or a society than the capability to follow through on that desire, and so long as we insist on ignoring this sociocultural problem and instead focus on reactive, stopgap measures that seek to prevent access to lethal tools, those desires will always be able to find a new outlet.
As an analogy, which is worse: someone using drugs, or someone's life being so miserable that they turn to drugs?
I was reading some info about crime stats and one interestign thing: Victims of crimes who possessed guns/weapons during the incident had a good chance ... of having their own weapon used against them.
Check your stats - and your sources.
Victims of crimes almost never have their own guns used against them.
The primary people who DO have their own guns used against them are police who carry their guns in a belt holster. Typically this happens when they're focussed on one crook and have to close with him (or on some other distraction) and a different crook grabs their gun from behind. (There is training on avoiding this, but most departments don't pay for it.) This is why uniformed officers (who open-carry) must disarm in courtrooms (to avoid hostage situations when a crook tries to get away) but plainclothesmen (who carry concealed) are encouraged to carry (so they can assist the bailiff if such a situation develops.
Such training is available to civilians, too. (In fact, I have taken it.) It's called "gun retention". It includes training in attempting to disarm your opponent - mainly to show how hard it is to actually do so, partly to teach you to identify the very few situations where it's even remotely possible AND improves your chances over hanging around and hoping you don't get killed, and what to do then. (Main one is when the bad guy has the gun poked into your spine from behind.)
According to FBI statistics, resisting an attempted crime with a gun is the ONLY way to reduce your probability of death or injury below quiet cooperation - and it cuts it by a bunch. Anything else (including trying to reason with the crook) raises the probability of injury to the victim. (Knives are particularly bad.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Given the extremely rare circumstances when one would be shot at by a random stranger on a college campus?
For someone who was out to shoot people, armed students would've been obvious targets, not a guaranteed end to the situation.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
What happens if you see someone with a gun shoot someone else with a gun, then turn and point their gun at another guy with a gun? Is that person the original shooter, or did they just kill the original shooter? Should you shoot that person to protect everyone else in case they are the original shooter? What happens if you're the person they point their gun at next, do you shoot them because they just shot someone else and now they're about to shoot you? Or do you lay down your gun because they're just confused because you still have your gun out after they shot the original shooter?
Oh yes, and did I mention, you have approximately 1/2 a second to evaluate and answer the above questions.
Speak before you think
Train to act when needed, to have the peace of mind to destroy your aggressor and the medicine to help others around you. wu, ch'an, yi. War, Meditation, Medicine. Five and half years after 9/11 and Americans still line up to die? Our ancestors must be ashamed, we have become sheep.
.357 under your arm, go for it. Carry a knife or Leatherman. Take CPR and trauma classes. Practice Kung Fu. Call your Representative. Everyone should know how to "safe" a hot gun. Do whatever it takes. Be Ready. It's your duty as Americans.
These students today, I don't want to be harsh on the injured, but they should have been READY. Everybody should be ready for anything. If this means carrying a
Fight back!
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
In turkey, only licensed people can BUY guns for having them in their homes, and to acquire a license for this is hard.
Acquiring a license for CARRYING a gun, is HELL.
as a result, gun ownership is at very low levels compared to usa.
but, as in all countries, criminals have no problems about acquiring any type of small arms. they cant acquire semi automatics, automatics only, as there is terrorism threat in turkey and state pays much attention to this. but, small arms and rifles can be acquired quite easily.
and EVEN if you have a gun to defend yourself, as once a police officer had put it, when he was investigating a burglary at my house "If you have a gun, and see a burglar, shoot it towards the ceiling, shoot it towards the ground, shoot it away from him. if he EVER gets harmed, injured, or heck, even dead, you will serve at least 2 years, while he will get out in 2 months. Its no use having a gun, only maybe if you can scare him by showing it to him, and then they are not scared these days".
so, in turkey, even if you can acquire a gun, you better shove it up in your arse than use it in your own defense.
and, as the exact opposite is being valid for criminals, criminals are getting much more bolder in turkey, there are even burglary cases when burglars sense that the owners of the house are actually awake in their beds, but just imitating to be asleep not to be harmed, they say "paps, ma, we know you are awake. but just lie there as you were asleep, so noone will get harmed". and they get away with this.
final word : never ever ban guns, or bar it from being used in self defense. criminals WILL be acquiring guns as they always did, the difference is that when you ban guns, you wont.
Read radical news here
Well, I'll tell you what. Why don't you go tell these kid's parents and friends that it was ok, because it was rare. Go ahead. I'll wait here for you. With a first aid kit. Hopefully, that'll be sufficient.
Agreed. No guarantees. However, at least they would have had a chance, one that improved in direct proportion to the number of armed and trained people in the group. As it was, however, they had none, because the rules required them to be defenseless. Now they're dead, and we're not talking about "chance", are we? No. because we're certain they're dead, and we're certain they had no way to defend themselves.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I find it amazing that even in the face of such horrible events, human nature is such that it can find humor.
Because this is the thing: Life isn't terrible. Yes, very bad things happen. People do horrible things. Always have, always will. This one is worse than many. But we cope, and continue, and manage to find beauty and companionship and humor despite it all, and that's amazing.
So, thank you for your humor. I think that it is a necessity in tragedy, a good grounding to prevent us from getting wrapped up in our mourning, or at least to prevent us from being swept away in wave after wave of media-induced panic - they tend to not report the good things, you have to use your own eyes for that.
I know this post is old, so there's little chance of people reading this, but somebody needs to recap the gun argument. It's gotten short-changed. First, for those who say "It's too early to use this tragedy for political purposes" I call bullshit. For any other political purpose -- violence in games, the Iraq war, boxers or briefs -- yes, you are correct. But all of us (and I speak as someone who lives close to VT) can put ourselves in those student's shoes. We can imagine being hunted down and killed while we wept, shaking against a wall. This emotional feeling, this empathy, is _exactly_ what is required to understand the gun argument. If we wait 'till later it will be too late. I don't own a gun. To me, they're a good way to hurt people accidentally. But I undertsand that the purpose of gun ownership is to empower the citizen. It's not crime control, it's not to prevent the evil overlord from conquering the world. Guns are about freedom and personal power, and they represent everything that is right with the United States. In this country we proudly give people the power to hurt themselves and others. We drive cars, we fly our own airplanes, we skydive, we smoke, we own guns, and we eat cheeseburgers. We give these freedoms freely, understanding that, yes, people are stupid and citizens will misuse them and some harm will occur. We do NOT weigh the deaths that would occur one way or another in some sort of better-than-you morality equation to take our freedoms away. The greater good is served by the productive chaos of people having greater personal powers. That's the theory of our government. Yes. If we had a prison society there would be less crime. But if we had a prison society our society would be about as useless as some of those old European countries that we left to begin with. We left them because -- they took away too many freedoms. How quickly people forget. The reason that today is exactly the right time to have this discussion is that just like you, I would want a gun if I were one of those kids. I might hurt somebody innocent. I might run like a frightened child (most likely). All sorts of bad things _might_ happen. But I know that if I were going to die, I would want the personal power to stop that from happening. Looking at our constitution and our wars for freedom, we should be absolutely ashamed that we would sit idly by with our thumbs stuck in our mouths while we take that power from folks and then say something to the effect of, "well, people are stupid, so we know we can't give them dangerous things. They'll just hurt each other." Such paternalistic balderdash! It's a load of tripe that can't pass the real test -- how the commenter would _really_ feel if they were in those kidss' shoes. That's why the gun argument, of all arguments, is the one that is most appropriate for today.
"The simple fact is that our well trained army of about 1 million men could easily and without breaking a sweat, subdue all 299 million of the rest of the United States population, even if each one had a bolt-action rifle, given technology, resources, tactics and general training, if it came to that."
You're a soldier. You're ordered to turn your weapons on your friends, cousins, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers. Chances are that a good 90% of the military would refuse those orders, and a good percentage of that 90% would use their training to help the 299.9 million stand up against the 100,000.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I work under the assumption that people who are properly trained, as I advocated, will act correctly due to that training. Generally, that's a good assumption. That's why everyone in the army and the police force doesn't go shooting each other left and right. Just the way my martial arts students don't go firing off kicks and punches at other people in public. So yes, I can extend that level of trust without thinking about it. No problem. Could I be wrong? Yes. But the odds favor my being correct. The existing armed and trained groups make my point very well.
As I said, you shoot the fellow you know started the show, or who is shooting at you. If you don't know who that is, you don't shoot. End of evaluation. That's what training is for. I do not advocate arming people without training them. So stop trying to validate situations that involve untrained, armed people. If you can't understand what competent weapons use is, you're not competent to argue weapons use at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm not saying it was OK because it was incredibly goddamn rare. What I'm saying is that to allow students to arm themselves for the 1 in 1 million chance of a school shooting, or attack on campus is insane.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I was waiting for this kind of non-thinking attitude to surface, and I didn't have to wait long.
Sigh....
The firearms industry, throughout the world, is already one of the most highly regulated industries. The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right, not a privilege, and it comes with grave responsibilities. It is a right born unto every American citizen, save for those that have forsaken their right due to felony conviction, domestic abuse, drug use, or mental incapacity. Gun control laws have repeatedly shown themselves to be ineffective, and even worse, they allow oppression to go unchecked. If you think that the current political climate is oppressive, what with the Patriot act allowing for warrantless searches, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, "National Security Letters", etc., just wait until you've given up your right to fight back. Time and time again, states have passed concealed carry laws, and the lies from the anti-gun crowd have been shown to be just that... lies. At worst, there is no increase or decrease in crime (by people who don't care about gun laws), and at best, people have been freed to protect themselves when necessary, without having to fear prosecution.
Just this weekend, the NRA annual meetings occurred in St. Louis. Do you know how many people were shot?
That's right... zero. Anyone want to guess why? Because potentially everyone there was armed. Perhaps no one was armed, but at least criminals were kept guessing.
I'm quite sure that my retort to your ill-thought-out post will be met with visceral reactions from people who believe that the government knows best and is most capable of protecting me, but I'm not buying any of it. I have respectfully refrained from cursing at you and calling you names, because I believe that to be unproductive. My best allies in this argument are truth and history. History shows, that the best way to control a populace is first to disarm it. The only way the anti-gunners will be successful in disarming this populace will be to lie and spread FUD.
If you wish to waive your freedom in the interest of a little perceived security, you deserve neither. I, on the other hand, will protect my freedom and security by practicing ALL of my rights under the constitution, and would fight to the death to protect yours as well.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
However the USA has fallen behind with the rest of the world with it's attitude to gun ownership. It's definitely behind with it's "fear" of tougher gun regulation.
Numerous other countries have introduced tougher gun laws(England, Australia, Canada, etc) and introduced programs that allow certain types of weaponry but not extreme items such as semi automatics, which aren't required to hunt deer for example.
The trend that has been observed in these countries is this:
Increasing gun related crimes leads criminals to seek more aggressive weapons to stay ahead of the curve.
The gun restrictions are introduced with programs to cash in guns for money or desirable items (such as the Guns for Guitars program.)
Criminals begin to brandish lesser weapons such as knives, because they are cheaper, easier to obtain, and the criminal realises that their target won't be packing a semi-automatic.
The strongest upside to this is that you can't massacre a crowd with a knife in the same way that you can a semi-automatic weapon.
What is observed here is instead of one-upmanship: where individuals are trying to get more sophisticated weapons so they stay on top of the arsenal game. There is an erosion of the basic level of arsenal held by the community, defense is still possible with simpler items, but the ability to do massive damage such as rampage shootings is reduced. The easy access to wilful weaponry is removed, making it difficult for a regular person to carry out large scale massacres. Yes, a massacre can still be co-ordinated, but it requires a great deal more work, often with elaborate criminal connections to obtain the weapons, this gives policing organisations time to prevent the act from happening(and a psychologically enraged person is not likely to complete these steps before calming down). This contrasts to a situation where excessive weaponry is freely commerced, where an enraged person has easy access to a high-end weapon, which allows them to quickly carry out a massacre.
Regardless of where you stand on gun control, it's at least worth asking why high school kids are taught about condoms and STDs -- and at my school there is even a swimming requirement -- and yet they are somehow allowed to graduate without ever knowing so much as how to turn the safety on and off on a gun. Even if students don't plan to be gun-owners themselves, if they should ever come across a gun, I think it would be a pertinent thing for them to know how to handle one safely, if only so far as to ensure that the safety is on.
Why are people so goddam paranoid about guns? I mean, conservative parents are so often chastised for not teaching their kids about sex, and they're accused of being unrealistic. And at the same time the liberal parents get away with pretending that guns don't exist. Gun training should be part of public education, as much as driver's ed. People say things like, we have licenses to drive, but what about guns? Ok, well, we have classes for driving, so let's get licenses and classes for guns. Deal?
The other stereotype you see about guns is that "some yokel" is going to accidentally shoot people by carrying guns. Here is a fact: most gun deaths occur in densely populated urban areas. That means "city folk". In other words, YOU are the ignorant bumpkins in this case, because you're the ones who haven't spent more than 5 minutes in learning how to handle a firearm. The "yokels" have been learning how to handle them since they were kids. I trust a redneck to handle a firearm a lot more than I trust, say, an IT manager. But again, that has to do with the lack of general education that is offered on guns. If schools made gun training required curriculum, these accidental shootings would be less of an issue.
What gun control has done is it's taken away both guns and education about guns away from the public. Yes, guns are dangerous when you aren't educated about them. And since people generally aren't educated about them, they are dangerous. So what's the root of the problem here?
Look at the circumstances surrounding this incident. The university banned guns on campus in the name of safety. The police claim that they had a "sufficient" presence on campus to protect students... so how did 33 of them die on their watch? Watch the cell phone videos that were taken as the incident was occurring. How much time passed between the first shots and the last shots fired by the gunman? What was the police response?
Their response was to wait for the gunman to shoot as many people as he wanted and then voluntarily kill himself. You would do well to remember one thing: police wear guns to protect themselves, NOT to protect you. Anybody who is willing to surrender their rights to defend themselves in the name of "public safety" are no better than the Bush admin convincing you that loss of civil liberty is necessary to guard against terrorists.
..and by the same token, when a Japanese student gets stressed and goes postal, he can't simply go get his gun and shoot a bunch of innocent people.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
As an Australian where gun control is in effect a gun -being fired- makes the state, possibly national news. THAT is what happens when you have gun control its not exactly mysterious guys.
"And to this day, US citizens generally understand that if the government ever becomes tyrannical and repressive, "we the people" have the right (and must have the means) to overthrow it."
I seriously doubt that mate. A random armed rabble will not overthrow your government by force. You have invented the most powerful Military on the planet. Each time I see something like this happen over there it just reinforces the fact that we have made the correct decision. I don't in the slightest fear my government to the point that I'm willing to support the decay of my community in order to support what someone a few hundred years ago called 'inalienable rights'. It probably sounded like a good idea at the time given recent events that had occurred, but today it's a burden that costs you. You and your families safety.
The argument that 'bad guys have gun' is fairly ineffective too, because from what I observe over here, if they have them, they don't use them as anything but a threat. In fact, right here in Sydney I have ONLY ever seen guns holstered on the belts of police and security guards. In fact, the though that someone might be carrying a gun doesn't even occur to me any more.
Its unfortunate, but I suspect that the only way Americans will ever view the preservation of their society as more important that the ineffectual feeling of safety that arises from owning a weapon is when they start becoming too afraid to travel their own streets. Even then I doubt it. Before you shoot me down in flames, ask yourself why this always happens in the US. Why is this even news over there? From memory it seems to have every single year, or at least seems that way. Without gun control you will just have to get used to it.
Personally I loved playing soldiers when I was a kid. I lived on a military base and got to use the ranges all the time. I grew out of it though and am glad that our government listen to the people and not the lobbyists. Now we have a homicide by gun rate of 0.3073 per 100,000 vs. the US with 3.6000 according to <URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence>.
Apple to Apples you Americans die more than 10 times more often than us from guns. We however lack your 'inalienable rights' to bear arms.
3 engineering majors at once would break most people. Guaranteed. The gunman may well have been stressed, and 3 engineering majors at VT may well be very hard, but seriously... a lot of people in the world get to deal with much more -- academically, domestically, financially -- in their lives. 60 hours a week of work is hardly a justification for becoming a sociopath. I know, as I'm sure you do, people -- students included -- who work much harder and longer than the gunman probably did. Do they open fire everytime they get stressed? Comments like yours are well-intended in speculating about the problem's cause, but they're in danger of almost justifying the incident. Anyway, I heard that the guy was looking for his girlfriend, and shot everyone else out of rage. Any idea if that story is right?
Thank you, for saying what I think most people are not aware of. If you could be modded +6 I would do it in an instant.
I am currently going through 3rd year in an engineering school in Canada. We are known to be the best eng school in Canada, and also known to be the toughest, though I perceive this as true for most engineering schools that I have seen.
An engineering degree is no joke. For us 60h work weeks are quite common. Where with other degrees occasional all-nighters are required, for us guys in engineering it's a weekly affair, if not more often. It's crunch time all the time, and most of us learn to take our relaxation like timed medical doses, giving us just enough to move on and stay sane, but not so much that we slack off.
My classes routinely average under 40% going into the final, and curving on the marks are never quite guaranteed. Meet an unlucky prof and 60% of the class gets to repeat the course. Couple that with a pretty hardline fail policy and you've got a lot of people on the edge.
Most of us in engineering dislike the system. We would rather extend our degrees and spend more time in school than dealing with this virtual gulag. Unfortunately there is a lot of "well in my day we did the same thing" thinking going on in the administration which perpetuates this philosophy. This false engineer's pride that there's something *good* about these living and working conditions. Hell, some of the students believe it too - if you don't work like a dog for 60-80h a week you're not a *worthy* engineer. Bullshit of that sort.
All of the engineering students I've met have developed some psychological curiosity or another. I hesitate to call them illnesses, but everyone has developed their own odd psychological defense mechanism to deal with the crushing stress, which is also why many engineers come off as such odd people. It's no surprise to me that one of them would snap and take out their rage like this.
Why do you anti-gun people keep pulling that one out? Do you really believe it? This isn't the movies; the bad guy can't "use the Force" to grab a gun.
The gun wouldn't have any bullets by the time it could be grabbed, and grabbing is only possible if I'm really bad at aiming. It works like this:
Only have the gun if you'd be willing to shoot an enemy. This is only an issue for pacifists.
Only show the gun when violence is likely.
If the attacker could grab the gun or could shoot you, then you shoot immediately. You try to shoot before the attacker even sees the gun. Otherwise, you may give the attacker a chance to follow orders and/or flee. Any movement toward you (to grab the gun or hurt you) means you shoot.
When you shoot, you aim for the easy target that will stop the enemy. Nearly always, this is the center of the upper chest. (heart, lungs, liver, spleen, spine, etc.) You don't mess around with targets that would be hard to hit, such as the head or knee.
When you shoot, you fire many rapid shots. You can empty the gun. You may reserve a couple bullets if you fear that the enemy may have an accomplice who might also need to be shot. If you know there is only one enemy, you empty the gun into him.
Now imagine that you are the bad guy. How exactly would you have grabbed the gun?
Limiting gun access generally affects only those people who weren't criminals in the first place, so you only impact the honest people.
What is your evidence for that statement?
If gun access is limited, how many honest people are affected?
To what degree are they affected? Count both would-be gun owners who are inconvenienced, and people who don't end up the victim of a gun crime.
How many criminals are affected?
To what degree are they affected?
I don't know the answers to those questions, but you don't either. And your statement seems to assume that gun restrictions will ONLY inconvenience honest people and have no effect on criminal's access to guns. That doesn't make much sense. It's a convenient argument, but it's unlikely to be a true one.
How were you planning to do that? Randomly search people and their houses?
The same way we enforce any other law - good police work, probable cause, search warrants. You figure out who sells guns illegally. You figure out who they sold them to. And then you go and arrest all those people. And you've arrested them before they went on to commit a violent crime - because you were able to arrest them on the basis of just getting the TOOLS to commit a violent crime.
Who says access is unfettered? Just and try to get a rifle when you're a convicted felon.
It's relatively unfettered. Getting a rifle when you're a felon is easy. You do it illegally, but since it's so easy to legally acquire a firearm and then 'lose' it, it's easy to get them illegally as well. If you make guns harder to get legally, then they also become harder to get illegally, as the dealer who is selling them illegally is going to start charging more to reflect the increased cost/risk of him being in that business.
paintball
You can run away from a knife. A weaker person with a knife can be overwhelmed. It's also difficult to quickly kill someone with a knife.
who has noticed the pervasive We Obviously Need More Cops Around Our Higher Learning Facilities message being looped on tv?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Mod parent up.
As a fairly normal college student, I think that most people in a 9AM lecture aren't wearing proper pants, let alone hauling around a gun.
Actually an armed rabble overthrowing the U.S. government is quite feasible. Look at Iraq as an example of how well an armed rabble can stand up to our military. Throw the potency of guerrilla warfare on top of the fact that at least some of the military would refuse to shoot their own citizens in their homeland, and you have pretty decent odds of winning. Also there are limits as to the degree of force that would be used as no ruler wants to destroy their own infrastructure. I doubt even Bush would nuke Atlanta to maintain power.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
One armed student could have ended this right at the beginning.
Well, one armed man just killed 20 people. The solution isn't to have MORE guns, but to have LESS. Instead, have MORE SECURITY at these buildings. Weapon detectors, security officers, i.e. people KNOWN to be safe with guns.
Yeah, because that Military is doing so well in Iraq right now. There are 250 million guns in the US. There isn't a military on the planet that could impose military law.
You seem to think that the goal of an opressive government is to kill its citizens. It's not.
Perhaps that should scare you. We live in a society where good people outnumber bad people by a wide, wide margin. I don't want to trust the police with the preservation of my rights and my safety. I want to trust the 25% of the population who is ready and equipped to back up my rights.
In an opressive government, it is the police who are used to subjugate the masses. Why should the police be the only individuals with the right to have firearms?
Perhaps we see the right to arms as part of the preservation of our society. And we have some pretty damned good historical evidence to support that belief. Perhaps you believe that military technology has rendered that advantage moot. But occupations are still fought on the ground, and when your army is outnumbered 300:1 by armed civilians, suddenly all of that hardware doesn't look so effective.
We die 10 times more often than you from crimes committed with guns. Perhaps we should ban knives. Perhaps we should ban diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate. Perhaps we should ban chainsaws. All can be used to commit horrible, horrible crimes. But the fact is that the vast, vast majority of guns in the US are used legally and safely.
People die. We all get wrapped up in tragedies. But over 2000 people died today because of heart disease. Perhaps we should ban fatty foods? Perhaps we should ban cars, which killed more than 100 people today. We live in a world of danger. It's all a matter of risk vs. benefit. Perhaps you don't see the benefit. But the 80 million gun owners in the US do.
It's very easy to point fingers at the US. But forget comparing us to Australia - compare us to our neighbors to the north. Canada's gun violence rate (0.53 homicides per 100,000) is far, far lower than the US - but their 21% gun ownership rate is not.
Perhaps you don't think our right to own guns is important. But here, it's so damned important that it's in the Bill of Rights. It's in the same category as freedom of speech and the press. We can't pick and choose which parts of the Constitution we want to uphold. If the advocates for gun control want to propose an Amendment, so be it - then we would get down to the real question of whether or not the right to bear arms really should be a right. But trying to erode the Bill of Rights is a particularly dangerous activity - if the Second Amendment no longer is worth the paper it's printed on, what about the rest of our rights?
The guy that shot up a college in Montreal last september had all his guns registered.
You can't take the sky from me...
This is ridiculous!
Don't you realise why things like that happen more often in the USA than in Europe?
"What happens if you see someone with a gun shoot someone else with a gun, then turn and point their gun at another guy with a gun?"
Well I'd hope I'd first run for cover, even if I did have a gun strapped to my waist, and once i felt less vulnerable I'd probably pull out my gun and shoot anyone pointing at me.
Think that's the issue here. We're not talking about a random hero in a classroom, we're suggesting if someone that was killed happened to have a gun and was targeted, perhaps they could have defended themselves.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Don't distort arguments with stupid emotional appeals. If more people would die due to low profile incidents on a highly armed campus that people that die in these high profile incidents with unarmed campuses, then arming students is a bad idea, period. I don't think that situation is unreasonable to suspect considering 10's of thousands of gun related deaths a year and less than a fifty or a hundred coming from school shootings. And guess what, those people would have families too.
I am a believer in arming well trained law abiding citizens to deter crime, but the revelation that people that die have families isn't very awe inspiring. Either a policy saves more lives or it doesn't. Don't bullshit around with emotional appeals to crying parents.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Also, if you go from having one student armed to having all students armed, then the rarity of such events drops as a result.
Here's a better idea: why not go from one student armed to no students armed. It's absurd to solve a gun problem by throwing more guns at it.
Actually, yes they did. Unless you're willing to go for unlimited escalation of force carried by each and every individual person, you have to call it quits at some point and just trust that strength in numbers is going to overcome whatever weapon the assailant is carrying. If you want to be accusing people for "pussification" because they refuse to live in world where they have to carry guns around because others do so too, consider that it might have been courageous of some sufficiently large guys to just rush him. Some might die, but it would do the trick -- I don't think he was carrying an assault rifle. It takes some bravery but the people in a certain airplane did it.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Just FYI, before you pull comments out of your ass again: Probable causes of death (US) Heart Disease 1-in-5 Cancer 1-in-7 Stroke 1-in-23 Accidental Injury 1-in-36 Motor Vehicle Accident* 1-in-100 Intentional Self-harm (suicide) 1-in-121 Falling Down 1-in-246 Assault by Firearm 1-in-325 Fire or Smoke 1-in-1,116 Natural Forces (heat, cold, storms, quakes, etc.) 1-in-3,357 Electrocution* 1-in-5,000 Drowning 1-in-8,942 SOURCES: National Center for Health Statistics, CDC; American Cancer Society; National Safety Council; International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies; World Health Organization; USGS; Clark Chapman, SwRI; David Morrison, NASA; Michael Paine, Planetary Society Australian Volunteers How would someone 'steal a gun' if no-one was permitted to carry a gun? Kinda self defeating argument there.
Launchy.net changed my world.
Great. When you have figured out a law that will keep a criminal from acting, let us know.
I think, by definition, a criminal doesn't obey laws. That seems to be the real problem.
Now, add to that an estimated half a billion guns in the US.
Tell me how you are going to get them back and what kind of bloodbath that will involve. How many people do you think will die during that gun sweep?
You really need to work on your comprehension skills.
We should start referring to processes which run in the background by their correct technical name... paenguins.
Seriously, how many of you people decrying the political motives and angles used the phrase
"The bodies aren't even cold" "Let the bodies get cold" or some souless variation?
You don't care anymore than they do, this is some idle conversation point for you to stroke your ego on, so stop pretending you're superior to that filthy goddamn Thompson.
These are people, they have families, and are not bodies for you to build arguments out of.
Great googily moogily.
Freakin vultures.
You need more psychedelic art in your life. rhesusmonkey.deviantart.com
You guys can count deaths by gun shoots by the thousends per year.
Killing people is lifestyle choice in your country.
In the UK it is national news when somebody gets stabbed to death, even more so when guns are involved (they are banned in the UK). We only have a few dozens of incidents per year in the whole country, most of them gang violence.
After the only serious school shooting incident in the UK guns were banned. Guess what? We have had no reocurrence.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Q: Did it really matter what race he was?
A: No.
Try explaining to them that in the rest of the civilized world (and most part of the not so civilized one) "school shootings" are not a familiar term.
School shootings are like apple pie, Coke, and McDonalds: all American icons.
Explain that to the parents of the kids if you possibly can, if you can't see the clear correlation between the crappy gun controls in your country and the applaing acts of random violence then you need to question your sanity.
I do understand if US people have the right to bear arms, but if you think that the people that worte the constitution had in mind every person having free, unlimited access to any weapons of their choice, well, I can say no more and let that poor logic speak for itself.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Right To Swim? The constitution doesnt have the part about bearing arms to prevent ppl from shooting themselves. I am very sure more people die from being shot by others with guns than people dying from other people drowning them when they are in the water already.
I'm not here to critisize other nations, but i simply do not understand Americas obsession with carrying guns. Here in Australia gun laws are very tight. I can only think of one School shooting for example we ever had (2 fatalities). You can say i need a gun for protecteion against the other idiot who has a gun for protection against the other idiot who has a gun for protection, but simply the more guns in circulation the more they will get used. Even in a "gun free" (exageration) pl will bring in a gun to do shoot someone, but it will be a much more rare event.
I think you are approaching this from the wrong perspective:
When some moron goes apeshit with a gun, I would like the ability to be able to defend myself. I really could give a flying fuck if you are "afraid" that *I* might be the one going apeshit.
I am 39 years old and have never carried a weapon off-duty (I occasionaly work as a security guard), however, I want to retain the ability to do so. I am currently surrounded by people who carry assault rifles openly at all times. As a matter of fact, they are _required_ to carry them everywhere they go, even when they eat or go shopping at the store. While there have been a few accidental discharges, I feel very safe.
Tell me, wouldn't you want the ability to defend yourself. Do you feel so strongly about not being able to defend yourself that you are willing to give up your life to prove it? Would your opinion change if you were one of the students being shot at?
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
If someone starts shooting and I shoot them dead, the first thing I do after making sure they still can't shoot me, is put my gun away. Then, I call the police and tell them what happened. They show up and ballistic evidence, eyewitnesses, etc. can prove who shot whom.
People are there to learn, not defend themselves, leave that to the security dept.Neither campus security nor the police (if these are separate) has the capability of defending you. Nor, is it their responsibility. The police have no legal obligation to respond and stop crimes even when they have been notified of the crimes and told you they will respond. This was very dramatically demonstrated in the landmark case where several women were held prisoner and repeatedly raped and beaten and the police never came despite having been notified and telling the caller they would come. One of the women even managed to get access to the phone to call the police again, but still they did not bother to show up. The police don't have the manpower to defend you and if you expect them to do so, you're an idiot.
I was talking to a guy whose brother was on a SWAT team, just the other day. He mentioned that they specifically arrive at violent confrontations with their lights on, and then wait 10 minutes before entering the scene of a violent confrontation to allow the criminals time to leave, as a matter of policy. They do this to reduce the chances of injury to any responding officers. Their job is to hunt down and capture the criminals for punishment, not to defend you. Ask any cop if it is his job to protect you or if you should protect yourself. Also, take a look at the statistics on 911 responses. I think they arrive in time to actually stop a crime from happening less than 10% of the time.
Obviously there has to be a rethinking of how security is handled and a way to know what kind of weapons are being carried in bags or in pockets. I'm all for gun banning.Guns were already banned there. Worked real well huh? For some reason the mass murderer did not obey the law, who would have thought that could happen? Laws apply only to the law abiding and passing them restricts only the law abiding. We cannot and should not turn the US into a police state. Gun bans, statistically, increase violent crime and murder. Proposing them as a solution is the worst kind of emotional crap. People search for some easy, simple answer that they can believe will solve the problem and so they can feel safe, so they support gun bans under the blind assumption that maybe it will help when it only hurts. I expect as much from the average citizen who has never taken a logic course and does not apply the scientific method to their own life, but I hoped for better on a forum full of supposed nerds.
As a former alumni of Va. Tech and former resident of Roanoke, VA, I would like to thank the Va. Tech talking heads, other liberal colleges around the state, campus police, Larry Hincker and all the other anti-gun crowd pundits who had a hand in striking down (illegally IMO) sound legislation (House Bill 1572); legislation proposed by the honorable Del. Todd Gilbert that would have allowed students and teachers, who hold a state-issued concealed carry permit, to carry a concealed gun on campus(es).
u m+HB1572
I CLE_ID=55226
o nal/main2693365.shtml
By there very unconstitutional actions they were complicit and abeted Cho Seung-Hui in the killings of 33 students yesterday at Va. Tech. There is no guarantee, but if the students/teachers of Va. tech would have been allowed to lawfully carry a concealed weapon on campus (without the fear of ejection from the college) this tragedy may have been averted. My sympathies to the families who have been affected by this insane action by a seriously disturbed murderer.
HB 1572
http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?061+s
Virginia Tech's ban on guns may draw legal fire
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wb/xp-21770
A bill being considered in the House of Delegates challenges the authority of public universities to restrict weapons on campus.
http://www.roanoke.com/politics/wb/49915
Gun bill gets shot down by panel
http://www.roanoke.com/politics/wb/50658
College spokesman celebrated 2006 defeat because it would help make campus safe
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ART
Va. Tech: Gunman Student From S. Korea
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/17/ap/nati