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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."
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.
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
The cure is worse than the disease.
..don't panic
what's the core problem, here? tools that kill people? we have so many of those. just outlaw anything that could hurt people? go all 'england' as an over-reaction?
the core problem is people are crazy and act out.
if all guns were gone tomorrow, loonies would still kill people.
guns are not the problem.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
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
if all guns were gone tomorrow, loonies would still kill people.
In much smaller numbers.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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
No. The gunman killed the kids. The gun and bullets were simply the tools used. Should all computers be banned because hackers use them to hack?
That depends, do computers serve a purpose other than hacking?
Because some crazy fucker walking into a gym with a pipe bomb would be much better.
Maybe a better answer is that we need to treat our crazy people. It's not a matter of expense; either you pay money to treat mental illness, or you pay money to clean up after them. I'd rather spend on getting them help than in burying our children.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I would rather see resources put into identifying and helping the lunatics. That is the elephant in the room.
That's not quite the case. While a maniac could do a helluva lot damage with a meat cleaver, guns, particularly semi-automatic and automatic weapons, allow for very large rampages. As well, one has at least some hope of survival standing up to someone with a knife. A guy packing an arsenal can pretty much kill most people who get in his way, unless they're packing as well, but in any kind of civilian setting, having two or more people firing at each other is going to lead to pretty substantial collateral damage.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And yet, no one died in the knife attack. Is the difference really that hard to understand?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
if all guns were gone tomorrow, loonies would still kill people.
So, where do you draw the line in regards to things that are lethal weaponry? What is the purpose of a gun? They were designed to kill living things. Why stop at allowing people to carry guns? Why don't we allow people to carry grenades? Or RPGs?
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
What are 'arms'? Isn't a SAM 'arms'? Why can't people carry them around? Oh yeah, because they can inflict mass casualties, that's why. So why doesn't at least a multi-fire assault rifle fit this definition, because it sure looks to me like that's what happened here.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Gun crime in England and Wales has been steadily declining for years. In 2010/11 there were fewer than 12K recorded offences, and that's including crime involving air rifles and imitation guns.
No, they aren't the entire problem, as other countries have proven it's possible to have widespread gun ownership without widespread gun crime. However the USA doesn't seem to be able to achieve this, and guns are a significant part of the problem.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I always find it odd how when things like this happen it's "not the appropriate time" to discuss stricter gun laws, yet it's perfectly acceptable for every dude with a John Wayne fetish to suggest that had *he* been there with his gun, things would have turned out differently.
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.
To put things into perspective: over the last twenty years, there have been fewer than 200 fatalities in school shootings (including colleges and universities) in the United States. By way of comparison, during that period in the US there have been about 1000 deaths due to lightning strikes, 25 due to (unprovoked) shark attacks, 3000 due to international terrorism, and 200 due to domestic terrorism. So we really ought to be more concerned about lightning and box cutters than about handguns.
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?
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.
Many gun opponents have been turned by having a spouse or child killed, while they watched, defenseless. The rest just don't believe it can ever happen to them.
The street - she runs both ways.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Criminals also don't follow laws against theft, murder, etc. And?
They all survived. How many would have been killed with a firearm? How many more could the baddie have injured or killed with a ranged weapon?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Agreed. Guns are made for killing. I don't see why that's a bad thing. Sometimes people need to be killed. As long as bad guys have guns, good guys should have them too. Maybe we should improve our system of determining who's a good guy and who's a bad guy, but we definitely don't need to ban guns. That will definitely only leave them in the hands of the bad guys. Guns are a force multiplier; They can be used to level the playing field. If a 250lb guy with a knife attacks a 90lb girl, she damn well better have a gun. Unfortunately, this does mean one crazy guy with lots of bullets can do a bunch of damage. However, taking away guns doesn't fix crazy. This evil bastard probably could have done just as much damage by rigging an explosive, setting the hallways on fire, or taping a kitchen knife to a broomstick. Crazy fucks will do crazy shit. Treat the disease not the symptom.
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.
Ban knives too, 22 kids were also the victim of a mass stabbing at a school in china.
Guns are not the problem. Fucking nutjobs are the problem.
if someone who is unhinged wants to do mean and violent things, they will.
when we are ready to start blaming our society instead of tools it owns, then we can move to a solution.
we have a 'war on drugs' as if that does any good. we have a 'war on poverty' and that does no good. we like to declare war and have easy solutions. but the underlying causes are not readers-digest concepts and voters and lawmakers can't read more than a few paragraphs before being bored.
banning tools is rarely going to get you the result you are really after. its easy to blame tools but this won't help.
the anger with so many, runs so deep.
our country is boiling over with hate. bursting at the seams. and we seem to encourage it, if anything! look at the constant fighting with D and R in washington. look at the news. they don't report good things, those don't 'sell'. they report violence and people LOVE that shit.
our society is kind of fucked up. some serious soul searching should be done.
but it won't happen. and more like this will continue while we turn a blind eye. short-term is all we can think about. 'long-term social stability' is a forgotton concept in the western world.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
However, killing is one of (not the only) the primary purposes of a gun. You cannot say the same of a computer.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
The question to ask is: if guns were freely and readily available in China, would there be FEWER deaths from these incidents?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah, more people firing weapons with panicky children running around, what could go wrong?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know people who feed their family for the winter by using guns as tools. Get some perspective.
Those people probably didn't need an automatic .223-caliber rifle. I have plenty of perspective today.
The guy's already dead. Personally I think they should just never release his name or any pictures. To twisted wastes of life like this guy, infamy is all they think they can achieve. Take it away from them.
But that is hard... You are telling me that we should care about our fellow man and help him? That costs money...
As did I (in the UK around 20 years ago) - the guns were kept in a safe in the gun club, in a safe bolted to the inside of a car while being transported to a safe at another gun club, or were in use on the range. No other place. Worked fine. If you want to have a gun in a public place then it's for killing people, whether in defence or offence, can't think of any other reason (apart from threatening to kill people, which is much the same thing).
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
In the UK we had strong gun laws introduced each time a crazy did something like this but the truth is that each of those crazies had done lesser crazy shit before they went postal. The guy who did the Hungerford massacre in 1987 had take a gun into work to threaten someone and the police had not taken his guns or his license away from him. It should have been the police that were looked at for not enforcing the law as it was rather than introducing new laws. New laws will not make things better. Teachers should not be carrying guns, that is more stupid. Do you really think that teachers never go crazy? I am one and I often want to kill a student. We should have more steps to look at who, good or bad, has a gun. It should not be right, it should be a privilege that can be revoked.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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).
You Sir are an idiot. Computers have multiple primary uses that are indispensable for the life of everyone. Hacking a computer to kill somebody requires significant skill and fair amount of luck. In contrast beneficial use of guns in our society is extremely limited. Apart from law the enforcement and army, they are used exclusively for entertainment (hunting, target shooting, propping the confidence of people with small dicks). Yet they do not require any skill to kill anybody you wish to, particularly random by passers and elementary school kids. So spare us the stupidity of the "guns are tools, guns do not kill people, etc". So people should have access only to the armaments they have a reasonable use for. They should be licensed, and inspected regularly. We do this for cars, why aren't we doing this for guns?
Right, it does. How much did we just spend on the election? Let's tax that. Stupidest waste of money I've seen yet.
This system works and take out the crackpots.
What probably helps too is that we take more care of the "crackpots" here. Free (ish, depending) medical care, including mental health care.
Close the "gun show loophole" and then we'll take the "It makes it harder for fucking normal people" line seriously...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
No. The gunman killed the kids. The gun and bullets were simply the tools used. Should all computers be banned because hackers use them to hack?
That depends, do computers serve a purpose other than hacking?
Yes they do and guns have more purposes other than killing innocents.
That's a straw man. Guns have no purpose other than *killing*. So maybe we should ask ourselves, who has a legitimate need to kill, and what tools do they need to do it? A hunter might need a hunting rifle. A police officer might need a hand gun. I'm not sure why anyone outside of deployed active duty military or on-duty swat team members need an assault rifle.
We already have the legal framework for making it illegal for a "lunatic" to possess firearms. The problem is our system for detecting, handling and treating such people is seriously deficient. Alarms were up everywhere for the guy at Virginia Tech, yet nobody pushed it through.
Yes because it's unfair to the gun lobby. How are they suppose to pretend that gun violence isn't a problem during times like this.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Guns elevate the power of the powerless. A 90lb 5ft tall college girl isn't going to be able to fight off a gangrape with her strength alone, with a gun she can. You may never be able to match the power of an oppressive government, but you can become more equal by being armed.
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.
Yes, I know. It's the absolute wrong time to talk about things like this
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
Before this was the Empire State shooting. Before that, the Aurora shooting. Before that, the Tulsa shooting. Before that, the Chardon High School shooting. And that's only 2012. We're quickly coming to a state where gun control discussion is silenced the whole year because there is always a shooting nearby.
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
Who would you rather face? A knife wielding attacker or a gun wielding attacker?
I thought so.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Let me be clear here. I'm very much against guns being as prolific as they are. The bullshit defeatist "if guns are illegal, only criminals will have them" argument is so abundantly wrong-headed it defies belief, IMHO. Just look at the gun statistics in England compared to the the US and you have a compelling argument.
However.
When you're looking for reasons why one society in particular has a record of atrocities like this, the first place to look is what makes that society unique. The famous NRA quote "It's not guns that kill people, people kill people" was an attempt to deflect criticism of the penis-extensions^W^W guns generally available (to which my and Eddie's retort is "sure, but the gun helps!"), but like all good propaganda it contains a kernel of truth. The real question then is "why are these people killing each other ?"
The real reason people are using guns to kill themselves and others is the society that they live in. The cold hard truth is that guns are available worldwide, and yet it's a peculiarly American thing (with some outliers) to go crazy and kill a bunch of children/people using your personal arsenal. What's wrong is deeper, I believe.
IMHO American society is in a slow but inevitable death spiral...
It's hard to reconcile that Americans give generously to charities with the first two points above, unless it's just Democrats doing the giving; which is unlikely :). I'd have to posit a discontinuity between the act of giving, and the way of living. It's as if people are ok with being nice to others if they choose to, but refuse to have the general good of society imposed upon them. That's a very odd form of independence, and smacks of biting off your nose to spite your face, but since I don't understand the motivation, I may have it completely wrong there. What's clear is that charitable donation is important to Americans, but charitable society is not.
Religion also plays its part. The society is highly religious, relative to the developed world but religion here in the US is a business like any other. The prime goal is not to try and guide society in the right direction, it's to funnel cash to the higher-ups in the religious power structure. People are told they're doing the right thing as long as the cash is flowing upwards,and the "church"'s goal is simply to continue to make sure that is the case. Upon examination, it's a good metaphor for what's wrong in the more-general society.
It adds up to an uncaring society, and I can see how anyone stuck on the lower rungs with seemingly no prospect of getting higher up could reject it, and similarly reject the rest of the social rules we all expect to be obeyed. There's no golden solution here, no panacea, you're not guaranteed anything will ever be perfect, but if the society had more general welfare built in, it's my personal belief there'd be less atrocities.
A society is by definition a group of people collectively living by a set of rules. As
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
Citation?
Yet you do not require this of the GP.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Gun laws seem to prevent lunatics in most 1st world countries from doing this same thing with the same frequency. For some reason we have more deaths per capita than most other civilized countries.
The simple existence of guns denotes that there will be situations like this. Remove the fucking guns and the legality for owning them and there simply won't be any guns available or such a reduced number that it is no longer the significant problem we have today.
So yes gun laws themselves don't stop lunatics and criminals, but if the guns aren't there legally in the first place there will be far far fewer guns available for the criminals...or are you saying that's a bad thing?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/08/us/soldier-kills-4-people-and-hurts-6-in-a-restaurant-in-north-carolina.html
My cousin and his wife were in that restaurant when Sargent French went on his rampage. He's a gun owner and is extremely responsible and law abiding. But at the time, concealed carry was illegal and just out of respect and common decency, he didn't take his gun with him. But I remember him telling me that, while he was huddled behind an overturned table with his wife, he wished he had his gun with him.
He never goes anywhere without it now.
What happened today was a tragedy. The real problem isn't the guns, it's people. Even if you could completely outlaw and eliminate guns tomorrow morning, sickos would still find some way to hurt others. No, it might not be a mass killing like this, but if you're the one on the receiving end of a sicko's attentions, whether you're in a group of hundreds, or all by yourself in a one-bedroom shack, is irrelevant.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
My wife was shot and killed ten years ago by a maniac who was previously convicted of another felony. The pistol was sold to him by his uncle so his uncle knew he was a convicted felon. It was then transported over state lines without a permit by said felon. He was going to comit a crime regardless of rather there was gun control or not, especially because he and his uncle had already broken two federal laws known as the Brady gun laws months before the murder took place.
I still dont carry a gun and I actually do believe in gun control. Would it have saved my wife? Nope. The maniac still would have had an illegal weapon. But you know what, it might actually save someone elses life. If the choice between saving someones life because of a stupid law or letting people carry weapons that are designed to kill other humans is what get to deal with then I am all for gun control.
Thank goodness you said "many" and not "all."
I also dont believe in capital punishment. Make them rot in prison for the rest of their lives. I will happily pay for it. Provided of course we stop giving them all the great things in life, they get nothing. Two reasons;
1. If by chance they are actually innocent, then I dont want blood on my hands for killing an innocent person. And yes there are some innocent people on death row.
2. If they are guilty then death is a very easy out. Make them wish they were dead. Make them pay for the victims children to go to college or get decent medical care. Make them do something productive that helps the victim(s) of their senseless crime. It wont ever bring back my loved one, but it sure would help this single parent of two over the past ten years survive a little easier having another income that I would have had if my wife hadnt been taken by some lunatic with a gun he shouldnt have had in the first place.
But hey, thats just my $.02
I find it hilarious that on one hand, gun advocates argue that gun-control laws only affect law-abiding citizens, because criminals already all have guns. On the other hand, all the scenarios they play out to show how awesome guns are for self-defense involve either no guns on the criminal side, or criminals who do not pull their guns first. The first scenario is just a failure in logic, and the second scenario is just wishful thinking. The advantage always lies with the criminal, because they know their victim, while the victim doesn't realize they're about to be victimized. Unless there is an advantage in ability on the side of the victim, the attacker always has the upper hand.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
A 90lb 5ft tall college girl isn't going to be able to fight off a gangrape with her strength alone, with a gun she can.
Might.
Also, goes both ways. One guy might not be able to rape two women by himself, but with a gun...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The parent post was "+5 informative" but also incomplete. Yes, McVeigh was able to kill many without using a gun. But we're arguing about ease of acquisition here.
To do what McVeigh did you have to be pretty smart, do some clever planning, get large quantities of materials, and basically put a lot of stuff together.
To kill a bunch of school-age children like this all you need are assault weapons and a credit card, both of which are readily available and take little smarts, planning, or money.
That's the issue at stake here. Yes, making guns harder to get doesn't solve the problem. But it sure as hell raises the bar on being a casual mass murder (plus coward: I'm so sick of these guys offing themselves so they can't be punished for what they do. I want technology that brings them back to life so we can feed them into a wood chipper, feet first, dammit). Suddenly, in an American world where' it's f*king hard to get assault weapons, if you want to go cause mayhem in a kindergarten you're going to have to spend more money and time, do a lot more planning, and so on. Some of these nutcases will surely say, "nah, not worth it." Instead, one quick phone call and a credit card number, and you've got a murder on deck.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
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.
...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
If a normal person suddenly becomes unhinged which do you think they'll be able to do immediately, buy a gun or build some sort of explosive?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
That's what it comes down to, isn't it? There are plenty of people who want to own guns for whatever reason, and value this higher than a few dead kids every now and then. "For the children" only works as an argument when it's someone else that gets hit with the direct consequences.
Strip all the bullshit away, and what's left is "I want a gun more than I want other people not die from gun-related crime."
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yeah, it's just so hard to drive an ammonium nitrate bomb up to a building.
Driving is easy. Building your own bomb is harder.
Why did McVeigh have to build his own bomb? Because bombs aren't sold in bomb stores, or at bomb shows. Because society recognizes that bombs are too dangerous to sell to the general public.
Why do so few other crazy people follow McVeigh's example? Because it's a lot of work. Buying a gun and shooting people with it, on the other hand, is relatively easy to do.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The 2nd amendment exists to guarantee the people of the united states retain the capability to wage war against the government.
Tell that to the people at Ruby Ridge.
Try acquiring your own Predator drone. Assert your right to keep and bear personal thermonuclear weapons. You might be able to buy a tank if you have the cash, but chances are it would be thoroughly gelded.
In 1776, a well-regulated militia could band together and cast its own cannons, bore its own rifles and pretty well put itself on an equal footing with a unit of the British Army.
These days you can't even come close. A lot of military technology isn't buildable by any single person or small group. But even when it is, it's often illegal to acquire it. There are more and more places where even the most basic weaponry is forbidden. Try asserting your Second Amendment Rights at an airport or courthouse.
The stereotype of the brave Patriot brandishing his gun at the US Government is a cartoon. A pitiful, pathetic joke. The reality is a mouse waving around a toothpick at a horde of cats.
So pardon if I laugh at the brave heroes. Our primary defenses against an unjust government lie in other areas these days. Including the fact that we've brought up the children who become members of the nation's armed forces to believe that the protection of the nation is more important than the protection of the government.
It's just as well that we don't have real 2nd Amendment rights, however. We live in a highly-leveraged age. It no longer takes an army to wipe out a city, just a suitably deranged well-armed individual. Four people can take down a skyscraper and they don't even need to buy or build weapons. And we get frequent reminders that there's no shortage of suitably-deranged individuals.
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.
Really? Because my home state of New Hampshire, with some very relaxed gun laws, has a rate of 0.43 gun homicides per 100,000 people.
Compared to New York's 2.67, and California's 4.82 per 100,000... I'd actually say you'd have a hard time concluding that from the data you presented. California & New York both have much stricter gun control. Yet their per-capita rates are 6x and 11x the rate of New Hampshire, with its fairly relaxed gun controls.
In other words: Maybe the NRA has a point, and you can't just draw a straight line equivalence between "strict gun controls" and "lower gun homicide rates."
In other words: Maybe we need to look at the effectiveness of specific gun control laws (or, conversely, look at where the bulk of the maniacs committing mass murder are getting their supplies from), and develop sensible and effective gun policy that will actually lower the rate more than just saying "enact the harshest, strictest controls you can, and the problem will solve itself."
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.
Don't be a dick. "Prayers are with you" is shorthand for "I feel powerless to help this situation personally and I'm hurting, so I'm doing the one thing I can to help me deal with this horrible situation." Yes, we get it that your lack of religion makes you a more intelligent, enlightened, and good looking person. Golf clap for your superiority. But one of your neighbors is grieving and the best you can come up with is to demean his coping mechanism?
Did telling him his religion is stupid make the world a better place? No? Then gloat in private, please.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.