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27 Reported Killed In Connecticut Elementary School Shooting
Several readers sent word of a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. According to most reports, 27 people are dead, including 18 children. The alleged shooter is dead, a man in his 20s. He was armed with multiple weapons and may have worn a bulletproof vest. According to CBS, "It is unclear if there was more than one gunman at the school. Miller reports authorities have an individual in custody who investigators said may be a possible second shooter." (Investigators now say the person being questioned is not a suspect.) One student was quoted as saying, "I was in the gym and I heard a loud, like seven loud booms, and the gym teachers told us to go in the corner, so we all huddled. And I kept hearing these booming noises. And we all started crying." Another, 8 years old, said, "I saw some of the bullets going down the hall and then a teacher pulled me into her classroom."
The gun lobby is untouchable in America.
It is time to amend the 2nd amendment.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Our country makes it too easy for nutcases to have guns. I, for one, would give up the right to bear arms for everyone, and not miss it.
Bruce Perens.
My heart goes out to those people in Connecticut my thought and prays are with you. 18 children among 26 dead in Connecticut school shooting in Newtown Conn this gunman should be burned at the stake cause lethal injection is two good for him. These types of people are the problem in this world.
http://thetechnologygeek.org/
You have to be the biggest fucking piece of shit to pull something like this. They should quit releasing these douchebags names as they are absolute nobodies.
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
I cannot believe that someone could target children like that. My two daughters are the same age as the dead and I will have to hug and hold them for a long while tonight. My heart goes out to those parents.
Seriously? Mentally insane people go to a k-4th grade school and start killing people, and you post how it's related to a political party's stance on something?!?
Republican or Democrat no one wants to see this happen.
You say tighten gun control, did they get the guns legally in the first place? Should we be locking up anyone who might have a breakdown, or might be outright crazy?
It's a tragedy, and as the father of 2 that aren't even old enough for school yet I can't imagine what the families are going through, but pointing fingers doesn't help here.
Apparently the White House [1], let alone the NRA, doesn't think it's time to discuss the culture that causes these kinds of shootings - a culture where guns are not only freely available, but generally untraceable and too often get into the hands of folks who should not have them (ie, mentally imbalanced, felons, and domestic terrorists).
If the unquestioning defense of the 2nd amendment means we can't even discuss why disturbed or evil individuals who shouldn't have access to these kind of armaments have the "right to bear arms", then we're fucked as a country.
Let's not even get into the fact that the NRA and gun-lobby have effectively made the process of tracing how these weapons get distributed to the wrong hands is never questioned and the illicit channels aren't closed.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
As someone posted elsewhere: "I don't want to take your guns away, but if the price of freedom is 18 dead elementary school kids 3 times a year, I don't want to be free. "Gun control" doesn't have to mean "take away guns". Stop arguing against that straw man."
Gun owners jumping right to slippery-slope arguments are not helpful.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
Yeah, if only those kindergartners were armed, right? FFS
of which your post is one, funnily enough.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
That's the problem with people - complete lack of empathy.
The GP believes that he would have been there with his own firearms and gunned down these people. Or if all of the teachers had concealed carry he would have been taken out immediately. Or that if every child had had a gun, he would have been stopped before he even got his firearm out.
Many a gun proponent has been turned by having a spouse or child killed. The rest just don't believe it can ever happen to them.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
[...] but if they were armed, do you think as many would have died in this incident?
Irrelevant. There would be far, far more OTHER incidents (kids getting hold of the guns, teachers unable to cope with the stress of teaching and seeing an easy way out, etc) which would have led to MORE deaths.
http://thismodernworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TMW2011-01-12acolorlowres-copy.jpg
That's from two massacres ago.
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
My thoughts are with those unfortunate parents whose grief must be too hard for anyone to bear
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
Yeah, if only those kindergartners were armed, right? FFS
Yea! I mean, it's not like there's a single adult in an elementary school, right?
Sheesh...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
of cowardly, fractional men.
target shooting? hunting? both seem like amusements that maybe we could afford to lose in the name of safety. (How many people really need to hunt for their food in this day and age?) Also, they might not have to go - the restrictions could be on firearms ill-suited to those activities, not to mention forms of those activities without firearms.
If it's something else you'd miss, sorry, but those are my best guesses.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I see a lot of posts in here about banning guns. They are far more controlled where I live (Canada), but rest assured shootings that happen in Canada are always with black-market guns. It's not the people who legally purchase and register firearms doing these things, it's those who obtain them illegally.
You may argue that making guns harder to get, like here, reduces this kind of thing. That may be correct. But no matter what, people can get anything, and they will, if sufficiently demented, do something bad.
What's the answer to that?
Criminals also don't follow laws against theft, murder, etc. And?
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be less shootings by criminals than int he U.S.
This is the simple fact opponents of gun control simply cannot deal with.
Less guns mean less gun violence.
Period.
Thank you for posting this.
All I see is bickering about whether or not to ban guns, but nobody willing to look at WHY someone would do this. In all likelihood, the shooter was mentally disturbed. Mental health care is sorely lacking in this country(and probably almost all other countries as well).
Living with two family members with mental illness makes it easier to see that these people are not heartless monsters who kill for fun. They have serious issues that need to be addressed. Unless you are filthy rich or have awesome insurance(which probably means you are rich), you cannot get access to the health care that you need.
[citation needed]
Every time these incidents occur, there is a tremendous and instantaneous outpouring of these same old arguments "guns don't kill people..." "outlawing guns is not going to prevent crazy people from getting them..." The arguments never change, the politics never change, and these incidents happen again and again.
The definition of 'crazy', or one of them, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. HOW MANY TIMES do we have to hear about shooting rampages in our own schools, malls, movie theaters, workplaces, before people will begin to ask themselves if maybe their outlook is simply wrong? How many people would have to die before you, Mr. 2nd Amendment Defender, would reconsider your own viewpoint? Just do this exercise for me - say a number out loud.
Doubt is essential in a deliberative society. If you can never doubt your own viewpoint, then the freedom to discuss and debate it is worthless.
Yeah, more people firing weapons with panicky children running around, what could go wrong?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
More guns will solve the problem!
Fewer guns will solve the problem!
When, in reality, each has it's own set of problems, and both sides are more interested in the idea of being right, and having things a certain way, than what is actually best.
Get the fuck over yourselves, people are hurt and you are using it to fucking proselytize. Enough playing devils advocate to a lot of this shit, pointing towards a more moderate view. You're all a bunch of arrogant bastards who don't give a damn who the fuck gets hurt, so long as you can twist it towards your pathetic agenda.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
fallacy.
1) Gun laws aren't an oxymoron by any definition.
2) Being a criminal does not equate to getting a gun.
3) Gun laws make it harder for criminal to get guns,. And it keeps getting harder.
4) Crime drops when gun laws are enacted.
5) If having a gun was illegal, you would have an opportunity to know someone was going to kill people when you found them with a gun.
6) Same thing if someone was getting Ammo.
7) teacher firing a someone one in a panic situation means more people would have been likely to die.
8) How many gun deaths are their in Japan?
All the evidence shows, overall, people are safer with very strict gun laws. You can make trite logical fallacy all you want, becasue that's all you have.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Irrelevant. There would be far, far more OTHER incidents (kids getting hold of the guns, teachers unable to cope with the stress of teaching and seeing an easy way out, etc) which would have led to MORE deaths.
Oh, so now teachers are the sociopaths and we don't know how to make a working safe? Lovely.
The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them. There's nothing to indicate that this would be any different in schools, and quite literally - we have most massacres occurring at schools. It does not take a genius to see that madmen are incentivized to rampage where they can expect no return fire.
Sorry that reality doesn't fit your fear conditions, but we ought not base policy on your misunderstanding of how the world works. Especially a policy that takes away a teacher's right to self (and mutual) defense. I, for one, would be much happier if my kids' math teacher had a gun (in a safe) at school (I know he's an excellent shot). I'd gladly contribute to the school armory fund.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Case in point http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/in-china-22-school-students-stabbed_816680.html
If I look at the cross section of my friends who are NRA members, most are Republicans. Of those, most are for limiting all government programs, but especially those which treat "fake" illnesses like mental instability. They post about how the government shouldn't be providing social services because it raises the taxes which chip away at the money they work for every day in their jobs.
Nobody in the NRA ever seems to be asking Congress to fund programs to evaluate and assist the mentally unstable. Quite the opposite, they're more likely to call them weirdos or outcasts or cheats, living off the government dole and asking for service after service for nothing. These are the same people who made fun of the little kid in high school, or hurled epithets from their truck window at the way they dress or called them godless fags as they walked by on the street.
And, for the record, a crazy fucker walking into a gym with a pipe bomb would be better. (1) the total death toll would have been lower and (2) the chance of the person going through with it would have been lower, as it's hard to light your own death fuse. It's why most suicide bombers don't actually activate their own explosives - they're remotely detonated by handlers.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
PROTIP: Correlation is not causation.
The US simply has a very high level of desperate and crazy people. Masses and masses of insane religious schizos, extreme poverty gradients, generally being an anti-social dog-eat-dog society (Which is the cause for the former two.) aka. ultra-capitalist law-of-the-jungle feudalism, extreme obsession with wars and murder and hate...
Under all those things, the actual effect of the people losing the freedom because they can't stage a revolution anymore simply becomes invisible. And the possibility of staging a revolution was the whole point of keeping the population armed. If anything they are not armed enough... with weapons and defense against social engineering (aka lobbyism aka politics aka marketing aka PR aka news aka propaganda aka churches)!
Because the reason they didn't already have multiple revolutions is because they are grown to be passive-thinkers without an actual free will, completely under the control of social engineers.
A gun in a safe may not be of much use. It would be almost a worse tragedy if you had to resort to throwing a safe at someone. Before this misery in Connecticut today, I saw a surveillance video from earlier in Spring. Two guys try to hold up what appeared to be a slot machine parlour. One geezer was out of his seat and shooting the bad guys about three two five seconds after they announced the holdup. No trying to remember a safe combination for him.
Their they're doing there hair.
Note that it says "injured", and not "killed."
Cynical Idealist
In order to kill somebody with a knife, you need to really, really want to. You need to consider the biology, see them as a person. You need to work at it.
To kill someone with a gun, you need to be in the vicinity of the person and you need to point at them. You don't need to humanize them at all.
There is a difference.
Not sure what you're arguing. Are you saying that no laws were made after these events regarding bomb material or ability to get into cockpits? Are you saying that all of the laws put into place after these events had zero effect?
I can think of at least one law that was put into place that had great effect - the requirement that cockpit doors are reinforced and locked from inside the cockpit. Are you really willing to go down this road?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
A lot better than 20+ dead i imagine.
Asshole eh? Wow.. somebody has sand in their vagina...
Yet Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the U.S. and oopsie...
I say this as a moderate Dem with a libertarian bent: civilian gun owership will not be outlawed in the US within your lifetime. Witness this and this. We need to disarm criminals, close the gunshow loophole, and find a mechanism to weed out the mentally unstable with respect to weapons purchases. The last is the trickiest, especially considering doctor patient confidentiality.
No, they don't. They're also used for target shooting, competition (think martial arts), collecting (I know a guy who has swords on the wall at his place of business), and probably more if I think about it. The overwhelming majority of weapons owners are not and never will be violent criminals.
I have mod points at the moment but not enough to knock down all the boneheaded arguments of the form "it's a problem of poor (insane) behavior, not the ease with which people can act out" - and the related, equally foolish argument "knives kill people too".
Is there any reason to think that mental health in this country is much worse than anywhere else? Not really.
Is it as easy to kill someone with a tool designed specifically for that purpose or with something else? If you followed the link to the knife attack in China (http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html), you'll see that 22 children were wounded, none reported dead. So, 22 wounded is the same as 27 dead?
There is a valid argument for legal gun ownership, but neither of these come close.
In order to kill somebody with a knife, you need to really, really want to
I think the guy who did this latest shooting really really wanted to kill people.
I will always walk around unarmed, as do the overwhelming majority of people in modern day America (let alone the UK). With that in mind, I'd rate my survivability as far higher if I were attacked by a lone crazy person with a metal club or a knife than I would if I were attacked by a lone crazy person with a semi-automatic handgun.
Can I imagine life with a caved-in skull? No more so than having my brains blown out. But can I imagine life after being smacked in the ribs with a crow bar? More so than after getting a couple of bullet-shaped holes in my chest.
In a Steven Segal movie, here's what happens: the brave teacher pulls out his own gun and takes the bad guy down before he can shoot any of the kids.
In reality here's what happens: armed citizens rush to take down the gunman. Some of them miss, injuring / killing more kids in the process. By the time the police arrives at the scene, they're incapable of distinguishing the perpetrator from the well meaning people also holding a gun. One of them is possibly shot by law enforcement.
Adding more guns to the situation is just a recipe for disaster.
...is that folks are using this story as a political foil.
18 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN ARE DEAD! VIOLENTLY.
However, the very first thing that people think of is the age-old political battle about guns.
This kind of abstracting our fellow humans into avatars is not something that I particularly like about modern times.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
I am sick and tired of the NRA knee jerk activists that are first to scream, don't call attention to the fact that we want to keep our guns, lots of guns, semi automatic people killing guns because of a flawed Supreme Court decision, in the face of yet another MASS shooting of innocent people in public areas, Theaters, Malls, Schools. Its not just the people that do the killing, its the guns, the gun culture, the easy access to guns. Criminals can get easy access to guns because there are so many around to buy or steal. If they were rare, the price would be higher and you would have fewer criminals being able to afford guns (free market supply side economics at work, how can you argue with that). The specious argument that it is people not guns that do the killing, I would argue that a person without a gun would not be able to go into a school and kill 20 children , or into a theater and mow down rank after rank of people in a easy, impersonal way.
Lets have some sanity about guns as a privileged and not a right or if you like a right that is regulated in a sane way that prevents or make this kind of travesty rare.
The gun lobby has no solution to this problem. They are silent on the matter and want you to be silent too.
The overlooked word is 'countries' which is significantly different than city or state. Gun crimes would likely decrease if the entire country were locked down. Given the porous borders of cities and states in America, strict gun laws in one area would only have a minimal effect.
I'm not talking about overall violence.
Given the choice between the two, I'd rather live in a world where there a good chance of getting robbed than a good chance of getting shot.
The occurrences in Japan and China are exceedingly rare. A few knife massacres in a nation of >1billion is not the same as having a mass murder per week with guns in the US.
And you did not refute my point.
LESS GUNS = LESS GUN VIOLENCE
but if they were armed, do you think as many would have died in this incident?
The shooter apparently had body armor, so likely yes.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Incorrect. Europe has extremely strict gun laws. Could you point me to a few dictators of which you speak in Europe?
Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, Germany...all have strict gun laws.
They do not have dictators. Your assertion is disproven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
that's right and how many people's lives were saved by firearms? shitton more than 121. And 121 is less than 1 per million people, i'll take my chances with letting law abiding citizens own guns.
Banning weapons would patch the symptom, but not cure the disease. (If weapons should be banned, it's another discussion - I don't wanna touch this issue now).
The main problem is that we allow all kind of nutcracks to go loose without restrictions at the same time we fail to uncover these nutcracks before they do any harm.
I understand I'm dangerously flirting with absolutism here. However, I don't like the way this is going neither.
I don't want kids being murdered (by weapons of any kind) at schools, and I don't want to see them jailed inside schools that looks like prisons neither.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
And you don't even have to ban guns.
STOP SENSATIONALIZING IT.
These people who do this sort of thing has issues, one of them is typically a deep unsatisfied need for attention and people to pay attention to them. The fact that it'll be in the news for a long time to come just reenforces that need. Sure, they guy who did it is dead and it really doesn't get him any useful attention, but in his warped mind he got the attention he was craving.
Continually making this shit so high profile just encourages others to do the same thing. You HAVE TO DO IT BETTER THAN THE LAST GUY OR NO ONE WILL GIVE YOU ANY ATTENTION. If you aren't bigger with a more gruesome crime, the news will pass you over, then you don't get the attention you crave.
Stop blasting it over and over on the news. Don't say his name on TV or the radio. Don't acknowledge the persons former existence. Other loonies will take notice that doing so is no longer the way to get attention.
We do this too ourselves by broadcasting it to every radio, tv and cell phone practically WHILE ITS HAPPENING so that EVERYONE starts paying attention.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
so instead of just losing the money (and getting it back later through insurance) the geezer escalated the situation by actively using violent action through the use of a weapon.
is that a positive outcome?
did the two guys die?
Which is exactly why most firearms hobbyists, like myself, choose to get a concealed carry permit, if available in their state. Ideally, teachers would be allowed this option as well.
The MAD philosophy of the Cold War era worked - even with regimes which were not what we would consider the most stable.
Yes, it did work. And it worked because the men with access to "The Button" were aware of the real consequences of those actions and could think to the future to how those consequences would pay out. IE, the mindset of very very few teenage high schoolers.
This is how an american responds to suggestions that work in other countries: "But we're like, so .. different man. You can't possibly understand the challenges we face."
It's horseshit.
"Old man yells at systemd"
You have to be the biggest fucking piece of shit to pull something like this.
Sigh, I wish Slashdot had a minimum age.
Has it occurred to you that someone who goes to kill a large number of children might be mentally ill? Spend some time reading up about insanity in the legal sense.
They should quit releasing these douchebags names as they are absolute nobodies.
His name is already out, less than 12 hours later. What's the rush, aside from vigiliantism? His family and friends will be vilified, even though they probably had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Please help metamoderate.
I think it's highly indicative that you chose a misogynist insult in relation to a gun violence discussion. Women-hatred and violence have been vile bedfellows forever
I have to reply to your comment even though I promised myself to stay out of this thread.
Don't become too bitter and try to understand that not everyone is simply trying to win arguments, although some are. Everyone is enraged as you are at this tragedy. However, people have colored perceptions and that affect how they will respond to what just happened. For example, if you see my posts, I'm more left than right, and my first reaction to this afternoon was, "This is terrible!" and after my emotions were riled, my next gut feeling was, "enough is enough! how can anyone justify these lax gun laws anymore?..."
However, a right-leaning person might see this and their first reaction is "This is terrible!" and after their emotions are riled, their gut feeling would be, "enough is enough! why weren't any of the adult allowed to bear arms, they could have stopped this asshole!..."
My first though wasn't, "this will score me points on slashdot!" and I'm sure no libertarian or rightie thought, "shit, now I have to make arguments on slashdot." We're all fucking mad and we're all just being emotional in our own way. At the end of the day, this didn't need to happen, and we all agree on that.
PROTIP: Correlation is not causation.
But it can be a bloody big hint. And this one is a neon sign two stories high flashing "IT'S THE GUNS!"
For example: Australia severely restricted certain classes of firearms after a particularly bad mass shooting. The number of mass shootings in the 16 years since the change dropped by at least an order of magnitude. Prediction, experiment, result.
There were no significant complicating factors, we didn't have a major reduction in poverty, or improvements in mental health, nor changes in law enforcement which could explain the result. This is demonstrated by other crime rates not changing significantly during the same period.
Same country, same culture, same crime rate; single change in the law, single result.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
One of the teachers was a gun owner and owned multiple firearms.
Her son used them to murder twenty children.