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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."
Take that, republican fags!
Another victory for the Second Amendment!! :P
The gun lobby is untouchable in America.
It is time to amend the 2nd amendment.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
The school is a gun-free campus, plus all visitors have to register at the office.
LIBERALS are responsible for this. THEY are the ones who push for gun control so that good people cannot STOP insane shooters like this. This would have gone nowhere had everyone in that school had good access to deadly enough weapons to respond in kind to that shooter.
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.
... as the economy will continue to spiral down and crazy people get laid off and need to get their grudges out. The "fiscal cliff" is only the starter.
Weapon sales have been through the roof for a while now. The more, the merrier
I'm sure Fox News will try to spin this somehow
Clearly, if we made school shootings illegal, things like this wouldn't happen. Banning drugs and abortions makes them go away too.
The signs aren't working and these kids, teachers, and parents deserved better.
God left them.
Give all kids guns. #gunsforkids
This just makes me incredibly angry and sad at the same time. The shooter was a PARENT of one of the kids at the school? Seriously? As an American, I have to wonder how we can be so screwed up that events like these are a regular occurrence.
It sounds like some adults put themselves in harms way to try to stop or slow down the shooter. They are heroes. To the bastard who did this, you'll rot in hell.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
The Conservatives in this country are already formulating their excuses for this tragedy. They will again refuse to admit that allowing easy access to deadly weapons to anyone who wants one is extremely bad policy. How many innocent people have to be slaughtered so that these right wing nut jobs and jerk themselves off while chanting 'freedom uhh uhh freedom uhhh uhh'? We need to crack down on firearm ownership and do it NOW. I mean, you can't go out and buy hand grenades or bazookas at Walmart. Why is it OK to buy a pistol?
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
Has to be a very low and pathetic individual to shoot up an elementary.
Already started I see... This won't get to the root of the issue, which is that we have a serious mental health issue in this country. If you screen for this at an early age and catch the cases, you can treat these people and these kinds of things will start happening less often. Trying to take all the guns won't do a thing. It is too easy to make explosives and get your mass killing that way and explosives are usually deadlier. Take the guns, the nuts will use explosives instead. Better to get to the root of the problem and start screening those who have problems, getting them treatment and onto no weapon lists early.
The Real Problem isn't guns. Crazy Bastards will always be able to find a way to get a gun illegally, or use something else.
How about we make it easier for Crazy Bastards to get treatment for their Crazy Bastardness?
What is the correlation between mass shootings and the closing & defunding of mental health institutions?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
as much as I'd like to see stricter gun control, better mental health care would make it a bit of a moot point whether the nutcases have guns because then they wouldn't be nutcases.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Should nuclear bombs be banned because people could misuse them?
of which your post is one, funnily enough.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
This is an enormous tragedy, and prayers and help should be sent immediately to the families and victims. However, people need to stop jumping to conclusions about the cause of this tragedy, and stop the knee-jerk reaction calling for gun control. First, the gunman, like the one in Aurora, Colorado probably used semi-automatic weapons which are not the same as automatic weapons that are used by the military. Second, anyone crazy enough to kill numerous human beings, especially children, would find a way to do so if guns regulated like in England (hence a recent report states that gun violence is on the rise in England). For those that don’t know the story of the Bath School massacre, here it is from Wikipedia. The Bath School disaster is the name given to three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, on May 18, 1927, which killed 38 elementary school children, two teachers, four other adults and the bomber himself; at least 58 people were injured. Most of the victims were children in the second to sixth grades (7–14 years of age) attending the Bath Consolidated School. Their deaths constitute the deadliest mass murder in a school in U.S. history and the fourth-deadliest massacre in U.S. history, behind the Oklahoma City bombing, the Mountain Meadows massacre and 9/11. The bomber was school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe, 55, who was enraged about a property tax levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardships which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack. He died in a car bomb he set off after he drove up to the school as the crowd gathered to rescue survivors from the burning school. On the morning of May 18, Kehoe murdered his wife by beating her to death, then set his farm buildings afire. As fire fighters arrived at the farm, an explosion devastated the north wing of the school building, killing many schoolchildren. He used a detonator to ignite dynamite and hundreds of pounds of pyrotol which he had secretly planted inside the school over the course of many months. As rescuers started gathering at the school, Kehoe drove up, stopped, and detonated a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle with his Winchester rifle, killing himself and the school superintendent, and killing and injuring several others. During rescue efforts searchers discovered an additional 500 pounds (230 kg) of unexploded dynamite and pyrotol planted throughout the basement of the school's south wing. Kehoe apparently had intended to blow up and destroy the whole school.
It looks like the first few comments have already been about guns and the second amendment, so I want to throw this out there. There have been spree killings all over the world, even in countries with more restrictive gun laws than the USA. Most of these killings were done with firearms, but many were done with other weapons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers
I think that rather than arguing about gun-rights in general, we would be better served by working to identify the kind of people that feel they need to resort to this type of violence and getting them the help they need before they snap.
150 years ago, there was no running water, few government funded roads, no municipal sewage, and a ton of insane asylums. Why? Because insane people have been recognized as an issue for hundreds of years. There are almost half a dozen abandoned asylums scattered across Connecticut, which is a small-ass state, btw. But people aren't any saner, for the most part. We've just decided tax cuts and overseas wars are a better way to spend money, instead of treatment for the mentally ill and criminally insane.
I for one blame the video games that are available these days. Things like Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Halo, etc encourage violent behavior and blur the distinction between real life and fantasy. We should hold these game companies responsible and sue them so hard that their children's children are still in so much debt they can never repay it. If I were a judge I would require the CEO of the software company to personally meet with the family of each and every child killed this morning to discuss today's violent video games, the realism, and the possibility that they have an effect on the behavior of some people that play them. There is blood on your hands assholes.
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?
Our culture is crashing. What is going on is just unimaginable.
This
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'll happily give you pricks a flu shot for your $800-$2000 guns.
Dumb motherfuckers.
Hey next week we'll have handcuffs for cannabis patients. yeay, they can turn their guns in too
Now the only people with guns will be crazy psychopaths. YEay,,,,
Next week after that we'll do random DSM 5 + TSA testing...
how is this news for nerds ???
Good job asshole.
If we allowed those kids at school to carry guns they would have been able to stop this before so many people got killed.
I want the headline to read, police remove gun from mass child murderer's "cold dead hands"
I can 3d print, or make a gun on my CNC machine. including the bullets. what now gun control? I say fix the social issues first, then gun control becomes a non issue.
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
Not to seem too callus but I think the root of the problem here is that we here in America tend to have bad coping skills. What ever the cause of this person deciding to go on a killing spree it was not that he had a firearm at hand.
According to [1] these are the leading causes of death in America in 2009.
Heart disease: 599,413
Cancer: 567,628
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 137,353
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,842
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 118,021
According to [2] there were only 11,493 Firearm homicides.
And information provide by [3] there were 34,485 motor vehicle deaths
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
[2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
[3] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/acc-inj.htm
Thank you for covering this, slashdot!
Nobody else is!
I looked all over and nobody was running this story.
You rock!
Stories like this are why we read the site.
Batman never uses guns to fight bad guys.
Where's Batman when you need him?
http://thismodernworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TMW2011-01-12acolorlowres-copy.jpg
That's from two massacres ago.
As usual people are trotting out the age old adage: "Gun's don't kill people, people kill people" or some variant. To those that support this opinion, what is it that makes Americans so much more blood thirsty than the rest of the world? Why is it America has so many mass shootings compared to other developed countries? Comparatively, the UK has a far lower homicide rate than the US (The entire country of 60 million has less homicides than NYC (pop 8 million)), if that's not due to gun control, what is it due to?
Each child has sinned. God allowed this to happen in payment for their sins.
Each child's parent has sinned. God allowed this to happen in payment for their sins.
Each adult killed had sinned. God allowed this to happen in payment for their sins.
The killer was simply a messenger of God. It was God's will.
I know this because God is all powerful, all knowing, all seeing, and the Bible tells us that through his will all things come to pass and nothing that he allows to happen is random or capricious, for he is a caring and just God.
(Posting anonymously, because it's too satirical for even my usual rants. If I had a God, it would not allow such man made tragedies.)
N00bs got pWned!
[FPS Doug] Boom! Headshot! [/FPS Doug]
of cowardly, fractional men.
Seriously, you could "try" and take away all the guns...but if you really wanted one, you could always get one. Same with drugs, the black market is ALWAYS there.
And the libs always tend to forget that guns actually help save lies as well. I was reading an article not too long ago about a single mother who was sleeping with her newborn child, when she heard someone trying to break in. She grabbed her shotgun, and as soon as the two perps walked into the house, she shot them dead. Now if she didn't have her gun, she could've been killed and her baby orphaned.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Bullshit.
It's a tradeoff.
If more people had guns, then there would be more smaller incidents (loose cannons who wouldn't have had a gun otherwise, and quickly get stopped by others with guns), but fewer major incidents like this.
Not to mention, who would you want to have the guns?
* The students? Yeah, that'd reduce the killings.
* The teachers? They have enough distraction as it is without the added distraction of making sure the students don't get to the guns.
* The administrative staff? Still a risk of the students getting to the guns - or if they are in a safe, not being anywhere near ready-enough-at-hand for use.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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.
Boy, the knees are jerking like crazy now.
these "fucking lunatics" get their guns the same way so called sane gun nuts do.
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?
Does every American have a constitutional right to amass an arsenal sufficient to kill dozens of his or her fellow citizens? Are we doomed to see more and more massacres like this?
If the students had been armed, this obviously wouldn't have happened. Wake up sissy liberals, it's time to give to our kids the tools to defend themselves.
Let's face the facts: Psychopaths like this do this sort of thing for one reason and one reason only: They have a narcissitic need to get their names on TV and in the newspapers and have the whole country talking about them, and they know from past history that this sort of atrocity will get them exactly what they crave.
If it wasn't guns, it'd be a propane tank -- and if the psychopath knew enough to BLEVE the tank, he could take out ten times as many kids as this one did.
If I may make a modest proposal, if you really want to prevent these things, what needs to be done is shut down the sensastionalistic reporting of these incidents. Don't give the psychopaths what they want, and they won't do it. Outlaw reporting of these incidents. Send any reporters who violate the ban to prison, and shut down the media outlets that violate the ban.
Do it for the children.
(Constitution? What's this Constitution you speak of? Haven't we aready established that it's a dead letter if you intone that "Do it for the children" incantation?
will it take before you finally realize that your impotent little attempts at manhood enhancement are not worth the lives of sane people? Just because you don't have the moral backbone to face up to the damage that people like you are responsible for does not mean that your betters should just sit idly by and be politically correct so you can pretend to have any respectability.
Let us wipe this persons name from the face of the earth. Let us not speak his name. Let us and his family, friends, and anyone else forget that this killer ever had an identity. Do not speak his name.
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.
I am sorry, but I think that you have it wrong. While we need stronger gun laws, the last thing that I want is to give up our rights (plenty of pols continue to nibble at them).
The real issue is that we make it too easy for ANYBODY to own a gun. What is needed is better education for access to hunting and target guns, combined with psych tests for access to automated weapons. We have medicals administered to Pilots for even a PRIVATE license. Yet, giving something far more dangerous as an automated weapon and we have little requirements for it.
What I find interesting is that you even acknowledge that we make it far too easy for nutcases, but want to deny it to all. Far better to do medicals and scan against the nutcases.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... This is another psyc-ops event with the ultimate goal of disarming americans. Given the political bias of enough on slashdot this post is certain to be modded down.
but there have simple been to many such insidences of late for this to be anything other than.
So the question is, what next a hospital of newborns.... as its certain to be targing the young as that is more heart wrenching to gain illusion of public support for violating the intents of teh constitution.
And remember, far more get killed in cars.... so why don;t they outlaw cars first?
It is really sad that we have come to a place in society where anyone would every willingly choose to harm a child and then show the unmitigated cowardice to kill themselves so as to bypass the humiliation and suffering that will be administered to them by way of their punishment.
However.
I know a lot of gun "nuts" and to tell you the truth they think the same way we "nerds" feel about guns. "Why are all computers registered why can anyone do anything anon?" "Most of pedophilia is spread by way of the internet and communications therein so we should be able to track every piece of everything so we can put a stop to those nutjobs". "More people are victimized daily by computer crimes than were killed today by firearms we should track everything". That is the attitude of a lot of Americans, could these crimes on computers be perpetrated without computers? Sure. Should we regulate the Internet more? Maybe. Could these crimes be committed without guns? Sure. Should we regulate the Internet more? Maybe. Its the same logic.
And before everyone rips this for comparing computer crimes to murder, I am not putting them in the same category. I am simply stating that to a group of people with little interest and/or need for guns who immediately shout gun control when something bad happens while the gun owners shout no (as a majority) it is the same as when the world sees bad things happen at the hands of those with computers and shouts Internet restrictions, filtering, and monitoring while the IT crowd shouts no
One looking at it from both sides can't help but see the fact that it is not the tool in the hand, it is the screw loose in the head and our society is causing it. We can filter, we can lockdown, we can control all we want but do you think that stops a hacker? Do you think it will stop a killer? If they want to do bad things I don't think the law is even going to slow them down.
And just for the record, I have been in IT since I could read, and an avid hunter since I could carry a gun, and a father with 4 children 8 and under.
I've given up caring about the people who die in gun massacres in America.
If you have a friend who keeps on doing stupid things over and over and getting hurt, and he (or she) refuses to take any action at all to address this, in the end you just stop caring.
After every one of these massacres, people say how awful it is, but nobody DOES ANYTHING to change the situation.
I don't care anymore.
Before everyone goes full-retard and uses this to push pro/anti-gun control agendas, Keep in mind that the last time this kind of thing happened it was with the batman thieter nut who shot the place up with firearms that are legally obtainable in Canada (all except the cheap noroco AK-47 knockoff that would count as a standard long-gun if it werent for stupid canadian "looks like an ak-47" law. In this case you cant argue for having someone armed in the school because kids cant be trusted with guns. And if they release info about what kind of firearms this nut was using, id be willing to bet they are legal with a PAL and RPAL in Canada so you cant argue for stricter gun control. (Most would argue that canada has mostly reasonable firearms laws)
The problem lies with the man who for whatever reason rationalized the decision to commit an atrocity of this nature. You gotta be a special kind of messed up to kill a bunch of kids, like taliban shooting girls-japanise guy knifing up a kids school kind of messed up.
So shut the fuck up and support those who lost in this tragity.
for the benefit of other readers: Poe's Law is an internet adage saying it's hard to distinguish parody of extremism from actual extremism..
You seem to be saying it's a parody. However, I have heard the AC's argument form serious pro-gun folks. (Is that a sign of how actually extreme the US gun lobby is?)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
This is about the worst thing anyone can do, I mean, these are fucking children for fuck's sake! :(
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.
https://www.facebook.com/rlanza
The proposals I've seen always turn out to be "give up the right to bear arms for everyone not wearing the right uniforms". But that idea has also been frequently tried, and it doesn't always work well either, and when it fails the ensuing death counts have gone into the millions.
I live in NH and we have some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation and are ranked 47th in incedences per capita of violent crime. Rampage killers don't care about gun laws, but maybe if there was better help to identify and treat this it could have been prevented. This person is a sick fuck and gun laws wouldn't change that. FWIW: I don't own a gun
"A computer is a tool to do work, a car a tool to drive, a CONDOM to kill. THATS ITS ONLY PURPOSE to kill. Equating CONDOMS to anything other than a weapon to harm mame or kill people or animals(?) is a corrupt argument. The fact is CONDOMS ARE ONLY MEANT TO KILL AND THATS THE ONLY PURPOSE FOR THEM."
the suspect was 20 yr old and had a child in elementary school... assuming a 5yr old.. can we talk about a 15 yr old father who is clearly separated (RTFA) and had issues as being somewhat of a problem?
U.S. Mass shooting incidents since Columbine:
1999: Columbine: 14 dead, Atlanta: 13, Fort Worth: 7
2002: Washington DC: 10
2003: Chicago: 6
2004: Wisconsin: 6
2005: Wisconsin: 7
2006: Pennsylvania: 6
2007: Virginia Tech: 33, Omaha: 9, Washington St: 6
2008: Chicago: 5, Northern Illinois University: 5, Washington St: 6
2009: Alabama: 10, North Carolina: 8, Santa Clara: 6, Binghamton NY: 13, Texas Southern University: 6, Fort Hood: 13
2010: University of Alabama: 3
2011: Tuscon: 6
2012: Colorado: 12, Wisconsin: 6, Connecticut: 27
I can't compare this with other countries, because I don't have the data. But his is not a record to be proud of, this is shameful. We are a violent society.
Didn't really know what part of Conn. they moved to recently. Last my wife heard from her was EVERYTHING is in lock down. Her children would be middle school age so probably not at that school but she can't contact them and hasn't seen them yet. (As of 2 hrs ago.) Cannot image how this must feel as a parent. Just, so, so sad.
I'm not pro gun to tell you the truth, I am pro freedom. If someone shouldn't have the right to regulate what I choose to do on the Internet, whom I choose to worship, whom I choose to marry, what I choose to smoke, how I choose to live, then why should the have the right to regulate what tools I possess in my home.
I am making the argument that we need a societal change not further regulations that only ever cost more and never solve the problem.
For instance:
We ban drugs and I doubt that it has had much effect on pot smoking since the 60's.
We had the Clinton gun ban and it didn't to any good, violent crime rates have statistically increased since it began and have climbed just as steadily since they have been removed.
We limit alcohol and I don't remember it every slowing down a party when I was in high school.
We can ban it all we want but until we start changing how society views its relationships and connections with society as a whole it won't do any significant good.
This guy, whatever else was wrong with him had decided that little children were worthless and it would be of no consequence to him or his life to remove their lives. If he however had seen just how important each of us is to this world and truly believed that the life of someone else was worth as much or more than his own, I cannot see that he could have done such a thing.
Maybe if parents weren't getting pregnant and then neglecting their children, their children wouldn't turn out to be "lunatics" and shoot defenseless kindergartners. There's one proposed solution
...high. Probably already diagnosed and on meds, but the committal laws in our country are so week and the health and services budgets so slashed this guy was allowed to walk around along with all the other assholes muttering to themselves on the street.
No way did someone not know he was nuts already. Criminal negligence at best.
You're reading it wrong: you presume that the tag "Stuff that matters" is somehow a parallel statement implying that because what is posted here is news which nerds would find relevant and interesting that, by definition, that material matters. One might make the same "mistake" with the wording of the 2nd amendment, which would imply that the right to bear arms is there as a necessity of the need to have a well regulated militia.
If you read it like the NRA reads the second amendment, however, then you realize that this site contains both news for nerds of a technically interesting nature AS WELL AS news which matters and is completely devoid of all technical content - completely separate things, mashed together for no reason at all.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
guy blew up a school over taxes.. no guns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
169 killed..no guns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
3000 killed.. no guns..
Yep.. some more laws will make us safe!!
I have to return some videotapes...
Let us momentarily suspend our political leaning as to the cause of this and just understand that the cost of a society in which there is such high population density will inevitably result in a certain, hopefully small, percentage of crazy people who will do something like this. Let us track down those crazy people, help them if they can be helped, protect the rest of society from them if they cannot be helped, and move on, grieving for those who we have lost.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I have a question for the Slashdot community: Does this shooting alter your opinion on the issue of gun ownership rights vs. gun control laws? Even a little, in either direction?
Please note: My question is NOT, what is your opinion now; rather, it is, how much did your opinion CHANGE?
We have a large enough community here that I think the numbers will be statistically meaningful.
Thanks, all.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
27 innocents were slaughtered like animals because the government deprived them of the tools to defend themselves from murderous criminals.
Gun control = murder.
https://www.facebook.com/rlanza
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The one thing Americans do with more enthusiasm than killing non-Americans is killing each other. What a bloody country!
Feel free to push your own personal agenda by appealing to people's emotions.
For policy, what do scientific studies say?
Would you still advocate more restrictive gun laws if doing so increases crime?
Would you still advocate more restrictive gun laws if doing so resulted in more children being massacred, on average?
Would you still advocate more restrictive gun laws if it allowed for more abusive police?
Would you still advocate more restrictive gun laws if doing so allowed the country to perform genocide?
Give it a rest already. My sympathies go out to the families and survivors of the tragedy in Connecticut, but using the incident to drive wrong-headed policy will only make matters worse.
We're engineers and scientists, we think for a living. Don't let your heart rule your head.
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.
There are 300,000 gun related deaths in the United States each year. Therefore, by your logic,we can never discuss gun control.
My work here is dung.
President Obama refuses to call for additional gun control today, despite being a DEMOCRATIC party president with major political capital from just being emphatically reelected. The Democrats have abandoned this issue en masse. The gun lobby already has answers prepared (if people at the school had guns the only dead person would be the shooter, etc.) and they have traction among the population. Federal court struck down a concealed carry law in Illinois 2 days ago and it doesn't seem likely that the Supreme Court will roll that back.
It's clear the NRA has won on this issue. I don't think anyone can deny that, no matter what political party they belong to.
When I hear about this, why is it always schools? Is it because only the ones in the schools are newsworthy and the others are just not news anymore? Or is there something that makes people hate schools so much that they want to kill it?
Why not malls or other places?
People here will most likely come up with some reason that will be related to body count: defenseless victims. I just wonder if that is the only reason and I doubt it is.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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?
Think about it, what is wrong with society that someone does this?
Studies show that assassination attempts are more about gaining fame than about hate. I imagine that part of the motivation of going on a rampage like this is knowing that your face will be plastered all over the world, and that if you make it bad enough, people will talk about it for YEARS. Look at Columbine. The DC shooter. How about the unibomber? You can all probably picture his face, or at least the sketch with the shades and the hoodie, but can you remember any of the victims? People that act out like this want attention. We give it to them only when they do something tremendously awful. This is a cultural problem that we have, and one that some other countries are facing. Some countries have anarchists that blow up trains. Some countries have mass stabbings or axe-wielding crazies breaking into schools (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14909839). We have school shootings.
I hope that I never learn the name of the guy who did this, and never see a picture of his face. I only hope to hear about the victims that are suffering greatly from this tragedy.
Gunman Photo
.. you keep exporting weapons everywhere too.
It's not the Constitution itself that enumerates a right to bear arms, but rather the second amendment to that set of central laws.
Some people don't understand that the constitution can be changed by the people it governs via amendments. Some people think that you should simply believe that those laws mean whatever you want, and that people were monumentally stupid about human nature 200 years ago.
Some people believe that rather than going through the effort of actually changing the Constitution to reflect a consensus of what the people deem to be correct, it should mean whatever we want all the time.
I don't *own* any guns yet, although I have fired them before (never at another human, thankfully), but if I *did* own any guns, I'd say that if you have the courage of your convictions, then don't post anonymously. If you want to tell me "fuck you", don't be all covert about who you are...you don't need to be secretive.
There's this great thing called the *First* amendment that means you can say whatever you want, basically, but you probably think that's a silly anachronism, too.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
less shootings by criminals than int he U.S.
That is patently untrue as rates of total gun violence in the United States is based on all shootings. This includes accidents and suicides. Those figures are not used in EU gun violence rates. Furthermore if you compare apples to apples, the murder rate in the US is similar to the EU, just bu different means.
Here, have some numbers:
Land Mass:
Europe- 10,180,000 Sq/KM
US- 9,826,675 Sq/KM
Population:
Europe- 836,398,000
US- 309,496,000
Murder Rate:
Europe- 4.83 per 100,000
US- 4.58 per 100,000
Gun Ownership:
Europe- 12,000 per 100,000
US- 90,000 per 100,000
You are a liar.
Period.
that the people who want citizens disarmed are always the same people who want to run our lives through government force.
I have heard of such donation programs. I figured the value of the meat (whether eaten, sold or donated) was significant, but I wasn't sure whether one came out ahead compared to the cost of the equipment.
I wondered if some people had delusions of grandeur about of their need to hunt. I'm not surprised that it's realistic in some cases.
I have nothing against people who enjoy it whether or not they need to do it, but it's not a personal hobby of mine, and supporting my interests doesn't seem to have such a risk of collateral damage.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Most obviously shooter was using à galaxy S3
As a resident of Connecticut on someone who grew up near Newtown and had serval friends from Newtown, please keep the families in your thoughts and prayers. This is crisis and a traumatic experience for many people, please keep that in mine. This is a very tender time for many folks.
While we sit here and navel gaze at the gun, the shooter, how they obtained the materials, and a zillion other things....
There are 18 children that won't be celebrating Christmas (or the religion of their choice) this year.
There will be 27 fresh graves planted before school is out for winter break.
There will be 27 families that will have an empty place at the table and a hole in their hearts for the rest of their lives.
So, gun lobby - tell it to the mothers of the slain children how your backing of 2nd amendment was such a good thing. How they had to die so you could have your little toy. 49 states are conceal and carry. Lot of good it did.
Too bad the shooter is dead... he should be locked in the room with the mothers. All each one of them have is a bobby pin. And no one comes out until all are satisfied that justice has been served. Better get a mop and a bucket.
FredInIT
The difference that gun control makes is obvious: http://nos.nl/artikel/451509-22-chinese-kinderen-neergestoken.html
In China, man knifed 22 kids, wounding them. NOT killing them. US man kills 27 people, 18 kids.
Nutters exist around the world and around the world we suck at dealing with them.
Try this, about a year ago, a pedophile in court testified that he had asked his doctor BEFORE the offense, for voluntary castration. His doctor refused. Why? Because the doctor felt uneasy doing it, probably doing the leg crossing men do when castration is discussed. BUT it is NOT your penis about the removed, it is someone who has feelings he hates but can't stop and he wants to be stopped. All it takes is a snip. Or even just pills. But the doctor refused because the DOCTOR couldn't imagine being castrated being in that situation, that not being a "man" anymore might be better for the patient, for society then the doctor having to do something he is uncomfortable with.
To stop people from committing crimes, you must take actions on thoughts. That is scary and easy to be scared off. But if you are a hero for saving someone from commiting the crime of suicide, why aren't you a hero if you stop someone from comitting another crime? If I take you car keys away when you try to drink drive, people will cheer. If I lock you up in a mental ward where you can be cured instead of acting on your paranoia, it is a thought crime?
There are some deranged people who really need to be locked up, to protect us but also to protect them. But to do so is EXTREMELY expensive, this guy might have been saved and all his victims BUT would YOU have been willing to start paying say 5 years ago for counseling to stop today? Considering most of the west has been CLOSING mental hospitals, the answer is rather obviously: NO.
Right now, it is NOT possible for pedophiles to get voluntary help let alone castration. It is NOT possible to have yourself committed for an extended time, hell even getting locked up for a single night is hard.
We, the "normal" people like to believe everyone can be cured. MUST be cured. That for some people a decent jail cell is just the better option, for their own happiness and ours. We seem to have no problem locking insane people up for life in a hellish jail that will only increase their problems AFTER a crime but NOT protecting themselves BEFORE the crime when it is obvious they are an accident waiting to happen.
Of course, thought crimes, that is scary as hell... but so is letting people who are in obvious need in help fall ever deeper into trouble because WE want to be free.
There is no easy answer to this, it ain't right to punish the obviously insane but locking all of them up also goes against our ideas of justice.
Don't think this is just a US problem. Netherlands saw 2 recent incidents with students killing themselves because of bullying and a while ago, a mass shooting by a nutcase who got a gun permit despite being known to be insane.
It is a world wide issue and it is NOT about guns, guns just make the killings larger, it is about inadequate mental care for those who need it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Even if, with a wave of a magic wand, *all* gun ownership were outlawed, and *all* manufacture of new guns ceased, there's more than enough guns to supply evil, malignant people in their quest to do evil.. There would be widespread non-conformity with registration and/or confiscation (witness Canada's travails with, and final scrapping of the Canadian Firearms Registry)... Hell, gangsters and criminals in Eastern Europe/Russia are excavating WWI and WWII battle sites to recover/rebuilt/reuse what are often much more powerful firearms (fully automatic) for criminal purposes. With an FBI estimate of 200 million privately owned firearms (plus those owned by military/LEO/Museums that could also be misappropriated for criminal purposes) and there would be guns to assist criminals for the next century or two.
Bang Bang Shoot Shoot
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Was the gun running Linux? What's the angle here for a tech news web site?
The problem really is that law abiding people will follow the law and not carry guns when told not too. This has been shown to increase the likely hood of non lawabiding to assault people due to the low risk on their part. No matter the laws criminals will have guns in the US. This is unfortunate but true due to our culture. So the best thing would be to arm the lawabiding people to allow them to protect themselves. Really it is a classic arms race issue, and restricting people from self protection will ultimatly end up hurting more.
Revoking the rights of the public does not stop criminals. It will only embolden them and allow them to assult general people with impunity. Self defense is generaly a right any sane person should support, other wise you are just classifying some people as not deserving to live. I am not arguing freedom as such, just that the time to restrict guns was over hundreds of years ago and there is really not much we can do about the availablity of them. So the only other option is to arm the people at risk, i would support full training and support for those that would carry. Imagine how different these situations would be if each teach was a licensed and trained armed respondent.
Gun Control did not, nor would it have stopped it if there was full restriction like in DC. On the other hand if the school was not a no carry zone and instead allowed licensed adults to carry, things may have been different. The situation may still have happened but not have had such a terrible cost.
Truly the use of guns wrongly is horrible and should be prevented. But the access to guns should be allowed, legal, and maybe even encouraged for those at risk to being attacked. Any no carry zones automaticaly puts a high risk target on those in that area. Restricting guns will only affect those who follow the law, and removing the ability to respond in a dangerous situation is like telling someone they are not allowed to protect themselves or those under thier care. Any attempt to remove the use of guns in the US is truly doomed due to the availabilty long standing culture of the US. Even a door to door raid country wide would fail. Only the law abiding would be disarmed and the criminals would be able to continue harming the public. The situation is unfortunate but that is what is so dangerous about an arms race. Both sides must be armed or conflict WILL occur due to one side pressing an advantage.
the problem is that we really have no capacity to prevent access to firearms, nor edged weapons really. The majority of the protection from having a gun is the likely hood you will respond with it. So just having it prevents crimes. On the otherhand it would seem any type of edged weapon is more likely to get you attacked as people are just not as threatened by them, just as you said nearly any adult could reasonably be able to defend against them. How would you propose protection a disarmed populus from an armed criminal?
Really it seems a lot of the issue with states and countries with a large amount of guns is really a cultural issue. The US is still very much about freedom to carry, even proponents of gun control have been found carrying so it seems a lot of the arguments against right to carry is just people trying to prevent others from carrying (ie protecting themselves as they will be). Since that is true it ends up being self prophecising and endless arm race. Countries like japan have true disarmement of the populus and their culture supports it. Many other countries do not, it is not like we could go to afganastan and just sweep and get rid of the guns (we tried). It doesn't work there nor here it seems. So the reality is we need to arm the public just to prevent a larger loss in life due to the criminal side using weapons. As to the capabiluty to respond, The protection of the gun is not absolute, but peoples accuracy even at five feet is very poor. Most would be able to respond if trained before they are hit (unless obviously the first one hit, which would be unlike
Your impotent attempts at enhancement do not work, otherwise you might have the spine to actually post under your actual account.
sorry about the typo
This doesn't belong on slashdot. It isn't "education news".
captcha: rejoices
that's why we are calling out cowards like you.
in North Korea.
I do believe in ending the drug war, on marijuana at least. However, drug abuse harms mainly the user themselves, and gun abuse harms mainly other people.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
And also not enough...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nra-sets-1000-killed-in-school-shooting-as-amount,28352/
I'm not really making gallows humor. Seriously, does it have to be a thousand before you get some half-decent first-world gun control you smalldick fuckers?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I was listening to the local anti-American socialist/communist radio station, and they had the fat loudmouth Ed Schultz and his sycophant callers hollering about how we need to "stand up to the NRA" and ban guns. It's always the same "people" - the Left, who are always seeking more power for the State.
I for one think that anyone who advocates gun control or gun bans deserves to be killed. Any politician who tries to enact gun control legislation or gun bans as a result of this needs to be killed, preferably after being tortured.
Seriously this is the wrong site to be discussing this topic. There are reddit, dailykos and million other places. Slashdot needs to focus on its mission
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.
Computers were initially invented to calculate trajectories of naval cannons in order to more efficiently kill humans.
this is what innocent victims of drone strikes in Afghanistan have to deal with every single day! It doesn't even make the news anymore. I wonder if such a cavalier attitude to violence ever has any 'blow back' on a society?
This is not a gun control issue. This is a lunatic control issue that seems to be somewhat unique and growing in the United States.
Compare gun control policies in places such as:
Switzerland where the laws are similar to the U.S. and, unlike the U.S., there are over 500,000 FULLY AUTOMATIC casualty rifles in personal possession, yet gun related crimes are very low, bordering non-existent.
United Kingdom where gun laws are very strict and even the vast majority of police officers are not permitted to carry guns, yet they have regular and increasing occurrences of gun crimes.
What these places lack, so far, is a new breed of attention seeking suicidal maniacs who wish to incur large death tolls in schools. For some reason a growing number of these people have shown up in the U.S.
A perplexing exception is the recent Norway gunman who, despite strict gun laws in Norway, legally obtained several semiautomatic weapons before going on a killing spree at a youth camp that killed ~71 people.
Laws or lack there of are not the problem. Lunatics are the real issue.
Enough is enough
The USA is a lost cause. I say we block off the boarders with them as much as possible and just let them slide off in to oblivion. Once they kill themselves off, maybe then we can let them back in to the world.
My country may not be much better but at least we have some sense when it comes to firearms.
So the right to arm bears stems from a fundamental realization that government unchecked rides over people's rights, and armed bears will mitigate that.
The flip side is that now every bear has arms, and, well, might use them. For freedom we are free - and with liberty comes license. It is no crime to ban the mentally ill from having weapons- they are known to not make good judgement; it is a crime to ban the mentally healthy from protecting themselves from each other and from the social compacts gone awry.
Consider prohibition and how well it works for both alcohol and weed. It doesn't. The same logic applies to weapons. If law abiding people can't defend themselves, criminals can - and they have less internal restraint.
Question for all you gun haters -- would you feel better about this incident if the attacker used a homemade bomb instead of a gun? This is an honest question.
...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.
MOD PARENT UP
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Guns are not allowed in Belgium: two days ago there was the commemoration of six people killed by a motherf*cker last year.
There are *many* guns allowed in Switzerland and you certainly don't have the same rate of shooting that you do in the U.S. Same for Canada.
Give up the right to own guns and you're giving the monopoly of violence to the state.
It's in your constitution ffs!
If you outlaw guns you'll have criminals still owning them and you'll have mass-murderers finding either guns or another way to kill a lot of people.
I hope those who are grieving love ones find support in their time of need. As my fiance and I are just entering the phase of deciding whether or not to have children, I can not imagine what the relative of those victims are going through. I actually grew up in that town and while I did not attend that particular elementary school, I did live near by. It's odd to hear of something like this from home and the small-town-feel community will never be the same.
Still not sure why this is on /. though...
How many lives of children (intentionally put "children" there to point out different level of reactions people have with a word) are ruined by corruptions like conflict of interest, regulatory captures, bribery, etc. that lead to loss of jobs, loss of property, and general instability? Heck, maybe we wouldn't have so many serious mental illnesses if the country's finances were more stable.
Just mentioning because almost everybody seems to be clinging to the topic of "guns."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/11/oregon-mall-shooting/1762473/
We can quibble about the gun laws etc, but the real question is how do we become a more humane society. What forces normal people in to this kind of destructive act ? Can be it linked to the fundamental breakdown of the family bonds ? If and when a person is driven to extreme stress do they have some help available ? Could a Universal Health Plan which provides for Mental Health have prevent people from going over the edge ? Why not people have their guns but require them to prove that they are a stable and responsible citizens ? Whats wrong with Licensing ?
An automatic .223-caliber rifle is an item that is already illegal in the United States (unless you happen to have a Class 2 License from the BATF)
Perhaps your perspective could use a little dose of reality.
Do you own a handgun or a semi-automatic? Are you a police officer?
If you answered 'yes' to question one and 'no' to question two, then you are a coward and you're worthless human trash.
I'm glad that assault weapons are banned in Connecticut... oh, whoops.
You had to go all the way back to 1927 for that. How many mass shootings have happened in the United States this year? Heck, I count 23 instances of school shootings in the United States with more than one victim in just the last ten years.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Period?
Funny, Switzerland has and extremely high number of guns to its population, yet does not have that high amount of gun violence.
Seems there must be some other factor at work here.
Period.
Reconsider your right to bear arms in the 21st Century.
There are thousands of weapons collectors, shooting competitors, and enthusiasts who have gone through the process to own Class III weapons. Only two murders have been committed in the last 50 years using legally obtained automatic weapons, and in one of those the perpetrator was a law enforcement officer. But rather than require background checks, fingerprinting, and registration, the NRA and other fanatics want semi-automatic handguns, shotguns and rifles with quick-change magazines to be available off-the-shelf and on-demand for any reason. The system to regulate Class III weapons has shown itself effective at keeping powerful weapons out of the hands of hooligans. But the fanatical NRA is going to ruin gun ownership for everyone because of the irrational fear of the "slippery slope" phenomenon.
There are other countries that enjoy high rates of gun ownership, such as Sweden, but officials simply ask a few basic questions, like 'do you have a hunting license?' or 'do you belong to a shooting club?' If neither, why do you need a gun? Of course, Sweden has a low rate of violent crime so self-defense is rarely a valid reason. Collectors can own weapons also, but they need to show they have a valid collection, not just an armory of heavy weapons waiting for the apocalypse.
Here in the Netherlands I think this is a one way street.
In the Netherlands, you are allowing your own country to be invaded and taken over by the Muslims and doing absolutely nothing to stop it.
And that too, is a one way street.
I am of Dutch ancestry (grandparents), but rarely speak of that anymore because I am now ashamed of it.
Try using real figures, the most listed on the page you reference 31,224 in 2007 - 300,000 is off by an order of magnitude.
By the way, more people die in motor vehicle deaths each year than by firearms, yet we don't require anyone going to purchase a car to get a background check...
Looks like lil' Johny fyuck-fyucks FPS got out of hand. Noooooooooooooo violent vid-games don't cause murder .... Nooooooooo tasty lil' critters don't get dehumanized by sling_slang FPSs. Noooooooooo ....................
Don't ban guns. Doesn't work.
To stop school shootings, ban schools.
Once we ban all forms of guns once and for all, we'll have a utopian society where everything will be beautiful and everyone will live a blissful existence. We can prove this by verifying that there were 0 murders throughout history until those bastards developed the gun.
I am going the nut case route and say this was to distract us from the criminals that run the USA. They allowed the mexican cartels to move guns and drugs around while laundering TRILLIONS of dollars for them... we have all forgotten about this with 18 dead children. How many kids have the cartels and by extension our government killed just here in north america?
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 do what McVeigh did:
You need to have attended a high school level chemistry class, or do an internet search.
You need a truck or van which you can easily rent.
You need some fertilizer from your local superstore garden department or feed/farm supply store.
You need some fuel from your local gas station.
You need a mental illness.
It's not anything that anyone of basic functional intelligence couldn't accomplish in two hours or less. McVeigh was a raving lunatic, he was not a mastermind.
Mental illness is the issue, not guns, not fertilizer, not ANYTHING else but mental illness.
An 8 year old child? Or a teacher who goes to an elementary school with a gun under his belt?
If only there were laws about this sort of thing, then everything would be OK. What we need to do is keep passing laws until this kind of thing stops happening. Who's with me?! Call your representatives, tell them we need more laws!
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
raise you one knife wielding lunatic in China who basically just did the same thing.
http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2012/12/14/man-stabs-22-children-at-chinese-elementary-school/
I assure you, removing a firearm from the equation does nothing to inhibit the violence the human race
likes to dispense upon each other from time to time. It is VERY hard to stop this type of violence if the
individual is willing to give up their life in return.
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
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.
It's about protecting and enhancing the profits of the gun makers, and thereby the bonuses of their CEOs, Boards of Directors, Wall Street investors, etc.
They consider a few dozen, or a few hundred, or a few thousand dead childre as unimportant. They really don't care, and their hearts go out to no one, because their hearts have been replaced with cash registers.
The only way to settle the gun control argument is to put all the pro gun people and anti gun people in an arena and let them fight it out.
JoeR
Another mind control victim has gone off like a well placed human time bomb.
It's 9-11, one Manchurian candidate at a time.
I think you can measure the march toward the goal posts by the length of time between these sordid population control events. They seem to be picking up in speed and hysterical intent.
Guns don't kill people. America kills people.
If you've lived in this country for more than 10 years, and haven't had the insatiable urge to go on a GTA style rampage, something is wrong with you. American society doesn't place value on the individual. It's a society of too many different peoples and cultures all competing economically, religiously and culturally over petty material goods.
This country is a battlefield. Nobody gives a shit about anybody else. Everyone around you is a competitor trying to take what you have. So when people want to commit suicide to escape the existential void created by American life they take their competitors with them.
It's very simple.
So I was watching a CNN stream, and some retired guy-who-has-had-experience-with-guns (can't remember, maybe he was a sheriff or something) comes on saying (paraphrasing): "Yeah, I support the Second Amendment, but I think people wanting to own a gun should pass very strong controls to know whether or not they are mentally stable enough to have it." And the newscaster [i]fucking cuts him off[/i] before he can finish the sentence.
Now please tell me where exactly was the guy not making sense. You might want to know I'm Spanish before answering.
Your news outlets are seriously fucked up. And I'm making a generalization here, because if this is CNN, and I can't even begin to imagine how Fox will be.
When I go to the US, I'm [b]fucking[/i] cutting whatever cord it is that goes into my television.
Lets have some sanity about guns as a privileged and not a right
So, treason is cool now? Passing laws in direct violation of Constitutionally enumerated rights is fine?
While we're at it, let's make a list of other Constitutional amendments we prefer to ignore. How about those pesky 13th, 19th, and 24th as well?
How comical! How comical!
One less hugboxer in the world.
Not one, NOT ONE, of the over 100,000 legally-owned automatic weapons in civilian hands has been used to commit a murder in over 70 years. Even murders using illegally-owned automatic weapons are pretty rare.
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 we've ended up with is neither security nor freedom... only tyranny coming at us from both our own government and from dangerous criminals.
As a 15 year police veteran, I urge everyone who lives in a state that allows it to get your concealed carry license and a quality handgun and learn how to use it and carry it with you everywhere you go. And if you live in a state where it's difficult or impossible to get your license, then move. If you only knew half of what I've seen "out there" in the world, you'd arm yourself to the teeth. It's much more dangerous out there than you are led to believe by your government or the mass media. And we the police, yes the government, are not able to protect you even if we had a mandate to do so and actually wanted to do so. All we do is clean up the mess afterwards. You're really on your own... and if the economy doesn't come back soon it's going to get much more ugly out there.
captcha = repress :-/
So long as violence is more accepted in our society than love this will continue to happen. Why are violent movies like "Saw" rated R and Porn rated X. All loss of life on screen should be 18 and over!
"27 Reported Killed In Connecticut Elementary School Shooting"
Slashdot. News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
If finding kids quivering in terror in closets hours after the shooting finished is not the most compelling argument for RFID tagging kids in school... then I don't know what to tell you.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
Where? Where has it been shown that any mass shooter was a member of "a well regulated militia"?
"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."
How many of the US citizens actually have used they guns in self defense or in a situation of danger with positive results? It's a serious question, no joke here. Yeah... I know, here in Slashdot, freedom is the way to go, and I love this page for that, however defend the need of own a tool made especially to kill people, when the only thing that you need to get one is a credit card, it's look to me like the extreme point of that visión. Sorry for my English.
I'm going to type this in all caps for emphasis.
EVERYONE WANTS A LAW(S) OF SOME KIND BECAUSE IT MAKES THEM FEEL LESS HURT AND LESS HELPLESS IN THE FACE OF THIS TRAGEDY.
But a gun isnt responsible for this. It was the person holding it. If a car runs down 12 people in a crosswalk you dont blame the car you blame the driver.
Human beings are remarkably fragile for being so prolific. The number of everyday objects that can kill when used in the wrong way is staggering. A truly deranged person need not go further than the gas station with $20 and a 5 gal. gas can if they want to kill a crap-ton of innocent people.
Significantly spiraling populations and high population density mean that if a dangerous mental illness effects 1/100 or 1/1000 then there are literally hundreds of people walking around as ticking time bombs in every major city.
Dealing with people with dangerous mental health issues is unfortunately the "elephant in the room". Nothing the gun control lobby wants will do anything to solve this problem. They cant seem to wrap their brains around a law that would actually be truly preventative. It is of course illegal to commit murder or to go on a killing spree and if you do so after you are caught the law will deal with you if you don't kill yourself. This is ONLY punitive; it is in no way preventative. Crazy people don't care that the last person who went crazy and killed people was punished.
To prevent a tragedy like this you need to segregating those who are both dangerous and mentally unstable or require the mentally unstable to be licensed and regularly re-licensed as safe to be around the rest of society. Nothing less will prevent future tragedies.
Make all the gun laws you want. They are not going to prevent a thing. There are literally thousands of ways for one deranged person to kill innocent people. Guns are the least of our worries. Taking away people firearms only means people cannot defend themselves in their homes when some psycho pops a cog over their daddy issues and decides to go on a killing spree through their neighborhood.
Is the event tragic? Yes. So are many others. It is somewhat funny that the more the nannies try to control guns the more often we seem to have events like this. Even so, taking a look at any 10, 20 or 50 year period the odds of being kill in a mass shooting (ie, more than 2 or 3 dead) are infinitesimal. Frankly your children have a higher chance of being struck by lighting (or being killed in a car crash or getting cancer) than being killed by a mad (or otherwise) gunman. Of course, none of that is politically correct but maybe thats part of the problem too.
There's someone sending multiple mod points long after the discussion started. Their purpose is to hide this and other anti-gun discussion. Of course it could be anyone, but I know that there are many PR companies that hold multiple moderation accounts on web sites that perform moderation. I can just imagine who they work for.
Bruce Perens.
For 20 years I have watched supposed intelligent, progressive thinkers on slashdot try and justify the pro-gun lobby in the US and the "right to bear arms".
It a mantra that is repeated over and over and over after every massacre - and its insane.
To look at the rest of the world, no one comes close to America when it comes to the frequency of random mass shootings like this.
Australia, for example, is still feeling the affects of its last massacre. 35 people were killed in a horrific incident in Port Arthur, Tasmania - in 1996. 16 years ago.
You can cite other examples from around the world, but no one beats the US for the predictability and inevitability of another event like this occurring again.
As soon as you start asking that, you really have to also estimate how many lives were SAVED by gun-owners stopping violent crimes, for starters. (In the U.S., that's not an insignificant number.)
You also have to ask if the Chinese government would have so much ability to trample on their citizen's individual rights if the masses were armed. That's really the main reason the U.S. Constitution includes the right to keep and bear arms, in the first place. I don't think folks like Jefferson and Franklin were so concerned that people might miss out on the chance to compete in target shooting in the Olympics, or that they'd have to go back to bow-hunting. It was clearly a way to ensure the people were in a "power position" if they had to negotiate with an authoritarian government.
1) I will not be punished for the evil acts of another. Others may have done horrible things with guns, but I did not. I will not submit to being punished by having my rights trampled because of their actions.
2) If you don't want to live in a place where there are lots of guns, move. There are plenty of nations in this world where you can go where there are few or no guns and they will welcome you. Vote with your feet. I want to live in a place where guns are common and freely available. If you don't want to, you are free to leave.
As expected, most of the comments seek to blame guns. Well I've never had a gun so I have no personal axe to grind there, and I'm not even in the US but in the UK where guns are very strictly controlled. And yet, I don't blame this tragedy on Americans having guns.
Instead I blame it on three things that seem far more strongly correlated to nutters going postal:
1) The widespread violence on American TV and in films provides daily role models for the mentally unstable. Television is immensely powerful as an influence on weak or poorly educated personalities. In Europe we have nowhere near the American level of obsession with screen violence, sex is far more our adult cup of tea, which American religious fundamentalism suppresses.
2) A general dislike for social responsibility and extremely wide support for looking after your own interests and nobody else's is endemic in the US, a part of the national culture. Indeed, any suggestion to look after your fellow man is often greeted with total disdain. Clear minds can distinguish between lack of social responsibility and actual hatred of others, but the mentally unstable may not quite see that distinction because it is a rather thin one. It's a dangerous outlook to have on society.
3) The American Way (at least in cities) seems to apply far more pressure on people's lives than is typical in Europe. Our social safety nets like national health are powerful devices for giving people the sense that someone cares about them, and there is no strong cultural pressure to "succeed" in business here, nor to keep up with the Jones's. As a result, it is also rare here for people to feel like they're failures and to lose all hope for the future.
These are all important things that can make the difference between just tolerating another boring day and deciding to end it all and take others with you. Nutters are not created by guns, but by conditions in their environment, and there is no shortage of alternative methods of mass killing. Would anyone feel better if that person hadn't used a gun but instead locked the children in a room and sprayed it with gasoline? I don't think so.
Don't focus so much on the means by which this tragedy was perpetrated. The means are not your main problem.
In America, how do you stop somebody from committing mass murder with a gun?
Can you do it with legislation outlawing guns? Presently, the answer is a resounding NO. You can't just pass a law taking guns away, because the right for a US citizen to bear arms is guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. I think efforts to pass such legislation are a waste of energy because they will never clear the constitutional hurdle.
So, how about changing the Constitution? Well, there are two ways to do that. Get two-thirds, or 34 of the 50 individual State legislatures to request that Congress assemble a national constitutional convention to rescind the second Amendment. Failing that, get Congress itself to assemble a constitutional convention by getting two-thirds of sitting members of both the Senate and House to agree, but then you have to get three-fourths, or 38 of the 50 State legislatures to ratify it. The Founding fathers wanted it to be hard for the constitution to be changed on a whim by popular opinion -- that's the 2/3 part of the requirement for the State-initiated constitutional convention. And they wanted it even harder for the federal government to change it -- that's why a constitutional convention initiated by the US Congress requires 3/4, not 2/3, of the fifty State legislatures to ratify it. I seriously doubt the ability of any movement to accomplish those kinds of majorities in both the Congress and the State legislatures. Fwiw, the former method has been unsuccessfully tried twice, the last being with the Equal Rights Amendment in the early Seventies. I'd have to say changing the Constitution gets a pretty resounding NO, as well.
So what's left? This may sound a bit like a certain modest proposal from Johnathan Swift, but I deliberately quoted everybody's favorite SF author in the subject because his pragmatic observations on an armed citizenry formed the basis for what I think may be (the only) possible solution to the problem of random citizens killing eighteen grade-school kids with guns they can legally obtain.
you mean less than zero? (because that is how many died in China)
One gun does help against many guns.
If multiple armed criminals are coming at you all at once, chances are you're gonna die no matter what becuase if there's a group, they have already convinced themselves they have nothing to lose.
They're not gonna "just scare you" and let you live if you comply with their demands like a good little sheep.
You might as well take out as many of them as you can, else you're a coward.
9-11 proved that hijackers intend on killing you anyway so you'd better fight back. That forever changed how airplane passengers will react to a hijacking.
Any armed criminals are just the same nowdays. If a group of them has targeted you, you're toast.
Case in point: The Wichita Kansas Massacre
Another one: Murders of Channon and Newsom in Tennessee
The whole problem is that all these so-called "gun free zones" are actually target-rich, helpless-victim-rich zones and that's a cold hard fact, jack.
HOW they did it is irrelevant.
You want to put a stop to these things you have to address WHY they did it.
The screaming for "gun control" is a BS excuse for being unwilling to actually address the problem.
Especially you wild west carry every where shittards.
Fuck you because this happened because of you.
Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you.
I am fully aware of that. It seems like a moot point because what could average people with average firearms do against modern military-grade training and hardware? The difference wasn't so great in the late 1700's, so it made sense then. At best, opposing gun control on those grounds is fueled by paranoia and takes the law too literally, to the detriment of common sense.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
made me smile :)
More guns = more odds for gun play. It is quite simple.
I'm sick of the same morons repeating the same thoughtless talking points (on both sides.)
In nearly ALL of these situations the gunmen shoot most their victims so quickly that having people nearby with guns would not lower the count by much. Besides, as has been documented plenty, trained police mistakenly shoot the wrong person often.
Say that every teacher had a gun in their desk locked up and it took 2 minutes for them to respond-- this would become widespread knowledge and even a crazy person could adapt their rampages accordingly. Nutcases manage to do far more complex things than work around such simplistic policies... especially the paranoid types.
If there is a GOD;
GOD BLESS THESE CHILDREN
The adults too
and
All the Families
It's ok to cry now.
Arguing about gun laws after a mass shooting is a waste of time. The US is already saturated with guns and an outright ban wouldn't suddenly stop or lower gun crime. It would help but take decades to have an effect. How often is a school shot up? Even if there are a few shootings a year its a spit in the bucket compared to the number of people (including children) killed each year by random gun violence in the US. Poverty and ignorance are two of the worst "diseases" the country is dealing with that often lead to gun violence. And they often go hand in hand.
We should instead be talking about what triggered this guys rampage. The modern world is a tough place to live, the rat race of life. There are plenty of people who are stressed out over money, relationships and social appearance who become pushed over the edge. That or they were mentally unstable to begin with. You cant stop things like this from happening, only hope to curb them.
Guns do one thing though, they turn an otherwise weak individual into a force to be reckoned with. I am sure if you took guns away completely, the murder rate would drop. stabbing or bludgeoning someone to death takes a lot more effort than squeezing a trigger.
Screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/TqXhG.jpg
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Mental health is worse here than anywhere else. In other developed countries the mentally ill get access to therapists and medications. In the USA if you can't afford your Abilify ($600 in USA, $160 in Canada [price for US citizens without Canada's universal health coverage], $25 mail-order from India) this month, then you just don't get to have any.
Combined with no-questions-asked access to lethal firearms and a cult-like obsession with 'personal responsibility', you can see why we have these kinds of atrocities. Medically needy people in America see people just like themselves doing fine or thriving in "socialist" European countries, while in the USA they either pay 50% of their income on health care, rack up medical debt, forced to quit their jobs and "spend down" all savings - including 501k and 401k plans - just to qualify for the few situations Medicaid actually covers them (mainly children and their parents - single adults without dependents are out of luck until 2014 when Obamacare kicks in).
Something just seems off when the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth leaves its most vulnerable suffering sometimes worse than what is seen in third world countries. Suppposedly there should be enough philanthropists to magically fill in the gaps, but it is often quite deficient. There are non-profit hospitals with executives earning record salaries and bonuses, and endowments from donors that add up to billions, yet more and more often they are turning away those with limited ability to pay, or they suck dry all savings from a struggling family, even forcing them first to max out their credit cards and home equity lines before offering any charity care. If there is a delay in making these payments the hospitals are halting treatment, even for cancer. If they suspect you can ask or beg for money, they will halt treatment on a regular basis until you pony up the cash, and this is after you have already made several lump-sum payments of tens of thousands of dollars. Bill collectors will walk in with physicians in the middle of examinations and halt the exam if you "refuse" to cough up more thousand-dollar bills. If you doubt this just search Google about how hard it was for one family to afford treatment at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. And no, this isn't an issue just for the uninsured, there are too many cases where insurance denies essential coverage or limits are maxed out.
Another disconnect is the cost of a bachelors degree, which is free or low cost for many Europeans, but many in the US are overwhelmed by student debt and living worse than if they just pursued a skilled trade through an apprenticeship. The only thing government has done in the past 10 years is to close more escape routes from desparation situations, such as bankruptcy reform that leaves anyone earning $1.00 more than median income absolutely screwed for five years - and that's only if they stick to the plan and pay 100% of their disposable income to creditors, who are usually medical providers with billing practices totally out of sync with the actual costs for services.
This sort of disparity where you can have wealth beyond your wildest dreams if you are smart, work hard, know the right people and have good luck, or due to random misfortune, regardless of how hard you work or how educated you are, you can still find yourself struggling the rest of your life to provide your family's basic needs. If you're wealthy you pursue asset protection planning, including medicaid planning [that's right - the rich have plans to transfer their wealth so they can qualify for medicaid to pay their nursing home bills - Google it! ], to protect your fortune, so the wealthy can withstand such calamity. But there are no such plans to help those just starting out and haven't created or protected their wealth in time for when the SHTF.
This artificially created scarcity and disparity in the US economic system no doubt pushes many people over the brink. Our system has become much less about capitalism (which isn't all bad) to a system of survival of the fittest. In a country with too many guns and too many untreated mental nutcases, trust me, you don't want to play the survival-of-the-fittest game.
After this sickening unconscionable tragedy I'm certain that the 2nd Amendment will be looked at with some more rational eyes.
However, all that is very complicated to get anything done.
What can all us regular outraged people do?
Demand that Walmart stop selling guns an bullets! They are probably the biggest sellers of guns in the US. They can just stop selling them.
There is no law saying you have to sell guns. They often don't sell things, like music, based on moral grounds, this should be the biggest moral ground there is.
I'm sure they wouldn't like:
"Our products helped kill 20 kindergarten children at close range"
Guns for self-defense can make sense, but that seems balanced out by its own set of problems, and not solely mass shootings. If a physically smaller person is armed, they could defend themselves against someone bigger - or attack someone bigger. A dangerous big guy would be even more dangerous when armed. If they're both armed, I don't see how that's any better than neither of them being armed.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'm beginning to suspect there's more to this than the press is letting us know. Seems like every few months someone in their lower 20's goes on a shooting rampage. Started off small with the columbine shootings and has progressively gotten more popular. Its like its a cult following. Maybe they're not telling us all the facts because they don't want to send everyone into a panic.
"Ryan Lanza". Heard on TV news that perpetrator is/was Adam Lanza, and that the police are questioning his brother. Maybe this is the brother.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The crux of the issue that everyone is missing here is your healthcare system. If you aren't employed, you don't get very good healthcare - that is a sad fact that precipitates these events. Mental health is a healthcare issue. When people just start having mental issues, they often go undiagnosed, performance issues happen at work and you get let go from work. You have no extended coverage. So now you have people slipping through cracks, undiagnosed, and likely unable to pay for ongoing medication or treatments, in a society that has relatively easy access to firearms. Notice how many of these murderers are men in their early 20's? That's usually when schizophrenia manifests itself. It also coincides with the low point of the income/age line of your life - when healthcare available money and insurance coverage is also likely lowest. So yes, you can try to make guns harder to get, but you need to address the mental health problem.
I'd also like a clear amendment to the 2nd amendment, but I figure the gun nuts would be just as unreasonable about that.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
My question is why all this hate against children?
Jack of all trades,master of none
If an attacker is threatening violence, there is no guarantee that the victim will not die. Even a punch to the face can result in death. In order to safeguard ones own life, the death of the attacker is an acceptable resolution.
The situation at hand is not about guns.
The situation is that our culture promotes violence and stupidity everywhere.
This needs to stop. We need to put more emphasis on cultivating a healthy society. It is culture that shapes men.
Gun control will not fix the problem. The real problem lies much deeper.
The disease needs to be cured, not the symptoms.
Captcha: Stifle.
Promote values that you wish to see in a society, and give those who excel in them prestige, and society will shape itself.
Why and how did he get entry to the school? After all the murders why are our schools not locked down tight? Doors that allow for exit while stopping entry. The elementary next door ya cant get in unless you get buzzed in and theirs a camera and they do look. If he was so heavily armed it should have stood out. I don't know its just a horrible thing, time is needed in order for things to be thought out right
Jack of all trades,master of none
Judging by the charts here it looks like there were about 200,000 homicides with guns in the last 20 years (not counting suicides). So... a little more concerning than lightning strikes.
What do you mean maybe that's what we should be asking? That's exactly what we should be asking.
Agreed. The reality of the 2nd Amendment can't be ignored. We (United States) have an established process for amending the Constitution. If you think we should change the Constitution, fine -- but follow the law. And it's not okay to disregard the parts of the Constitution that you don't agree with.
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.
...that you had been there with a weapon to stop this asshole. Fucking coward, killing his mom's class of kids.
If the other brother had anything to do with it, I say waterboard that fucker for the rest of his life, amputate every limb and dangly bit and make him eat it, and bury his body at the bottom of a latrine.
A single armed person at that school could have saved lives.
I can never browse /. again because it's clearly for people how can't see beyond knee jerk emotional reactions or think critically about problems beyond "More gun control will fix this huurrrr." When facts prove it would not. I hate to put it this way but I feel like someone should get a "high score" without using firearms, because there are far more efficient/cheaper/easier ways to do it just to make a fucking point that crazy people are crazy.
I would be dead if not for my legal right to carry. Come tell me to my face that I shouldn't be allowed to carry a firearm because I'm not military or police.
Fact is this is a tragedy but it's not the gun committing the act, it's a mentally ill human being that has been hurt by a society that doesn't want or know how to help. Increasing gun control won't help the social/cultural issues behind the reason why they are doing what they are doing.
...or hell, any machine tools whatsoever.
It's almost as if you believe that scarcity is a problem when it comes to getting weapons. For fuck's sake, a bunch of asshats with *box cutters* destroyed the twin towers - shall we start outlawing any sharp and pointy object?
The discussion our government needs to have - but likely won't have because "it's too hard" - is of mental health and mental health care in this country. We still live in a country were people with mental health issues are chastised and treated as irregulars to be shamed. We have the ability to help these people but we don't do anything, and end up with this.
... well, possibly ever. I would favor leaving gun laws alone for decades if we instituted universal health care immediately. We are dealing with people that we can help, but we instead as a society opt not to.
And of course this is all made a thousand times worse when these people lose their jobs - and lose their health care as well. This leaves them in a place where they are no longer able to get the help they need to become healthy and contributing members of society. Eventually, they end up doing this.
I am far more liberal than any president this country has elected since
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How many Americans here own or have access to some type of firearm?
I'll take a rough guess of 70% of Americans on this forum have access to a firearm
(Feedback requested: Would you say that is an under or over estimation??)
OK now's the kicker!
How many of you are "PART OF A WELL REGULATED MILITIA"?
I'd guess around 10% (I'm including Ex/army and police as "militia style" entities)
So 60% of Americans here illegally own or have access to a firearm!
Read your 2nd amendment and correct me if i'm wrong...
it's not new laws you need. It's enforcing of current laws around the 2nd amendment!
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
You want to take my gun away from me because someone else abused his gun.
Fuck you.
Americans live in and help create a culture of FEAR. These angry people have some sort fear under emotions uncontrolled by their lack of sanity and in many cases LEGAL, PROFITABLE drugs. We hear more of the gun fight with the controlling lobby than about the drugs many nutcases take which helps to mess their minds up even more; but our TV sponsors and big donors do not like such conjecture or scientific investigations (that isn't privately done by people with conflicts of interest.)
Americans can't even find their problems; if you can't find the causeS you can't solve them. They only focus their short attention spans on 1 topic at a time excluding all others -- real life is complex and our current childish approaches have no hope of solving them. Hell, the whole aim for a perfect solution is foolish in itself; one can only hope for a good approximate "solution."
Gun control debate? That's all you dogfucking shitrags can do?
How about some sort of mental health system to help people long before they go off like time bombs?
Motherfucking geek loser piles of pig ignorant shit. Fuck all you geek fuckers.
When are you dumb arse Americans going to pull your heads out of your arse and do something about allowing guns to be own by retards?
Right to bear arms by arse! Right to kill innocent would be more accurate.
Making gun ownership illegal isn't the same as denying a substance. For one thing, there has to be a manufacturing base behind the making of a gun that isn't just soil, water and a seed. For another, once you have a gun, that isn't the end of the story. We could do more to regulate ammunition. We could do more to screen people getting guns. We could check those who are registered as having guns, to make sure they still have their guns. We could regulate the very repair of a weapon, they do not last forever. We could do so much more.
Your comment was labeled as insightful, a terrible mistake. Your comment shows a terrible lack of imagination. There is a great deal that could be done. Almost always there is some sign that real mental screening would have detected. You can argue that we won't catch everyone, you can argue that "they'll still find a way". But we'll catch most, and those that will "find a way" probably won't find one as effective as this.
That translates to lives. All else is nonsense.
In this country seeking help for mental health issues is taboo. It's deeply ingrained that people who suffer mental health issues are either to be blamed, shunned or laughed at. It's woven into the very lexicon of our culture. "Nutjobs", "wackos", "loonies" - the list is nearly endless. It's a deeply ingrained bias that needs to be dealt with.
The gun debate may be important but it is distracting us from that larger issue of creating a healthy, happy, and safe society. Mental health needs to be treated like physical health. Regular (annual?) checkups should be something everyone does.
Seriously. I think the media coverage of these events inspires these guys. They have to stop reciting every little detail over and over. These shooters are not just raging against something, they want to become infamous. And CNN is making these guys infamous. The media should just report some basic facts and then change the topic. Don't show video, don't show pics, don't play 911 calls and most important stop leading witnesses through each moment of the crime. The shooter's fantasy is people reciting the horror over and over on prime time TV. Please stop!
Now lets see, if you ban guns and reduce their numbers, you also effecitvely increase their prices, especially on the black market.
The price increase rules out A LOT of the crazies because they can not afford to buy a gun, or take much longer and have a greater risk of getting caught for other crimes if that is what they are doing to get said guns.
Guns are a bad thing and always will be. Just because you think you have the right to something doesn't make it good. Guns aren't a tool to most people now, it's a piece of 'sporting equipment' and I'm sorry but the line was crossed when that happened.
I work in one of these "killing zones." While I have a handgun carry permit in the US state in which I live, my Second Amendment rights under our Constitution somehow seemingly don't apply where I work. If just one person in the path of this destruction had been legally armed (which is fully Constitutional), the slaughter *might* have been avoided. It might not have. But there would at least be a chance, statistically.
I live in a "red" state; yet, the legislation barring any educational institution from barring handgun carry permit owners to legally carry firearms on campus was tabled and not even voted on. There are prominently posted signs around the campus saying that weapons possession on campus is a felony. Small consolation if a pile-o'-crap gunman chooses to pick our particular killing zone to express his/her frustrations.
You have no actual rights if you cannot defend them yourself. So many millions of people have died, trying to educate us on this elementary principle.
How about needing to successfully pass a psychological test in order to have the right to a gun?
This is absolutely tragic and horrible. That said, why must the pacifists always go straight to the gun control issue? Let's imagine a world where firearms in the U.S. have been totally abolished, from ownership to manufacturing. Do you really think the government is going to give them up too? Laughable. So now you've got a situation where the government can abuse its power and all you'll be able to do in response is throw rocks. To make matters worse, you've also given a huge shot in the arm to criminals who sell guns on the black market. Yeah, that sounds like a much better world to live in. You think we would have learned this lesson from prohibition. Think things through to their logical and realistic conclusions.
This reminds me of so called missing white woman syndrome. When something similar or even worse happened in Iraq or Vietnam by US soldiers, the killers didn't usually even face any serious sentences (these are just two examples of the cases that news reporters bothered to report, but there has been countless other cases that were never reported):
Haditha killings
My Lai Massacre
As always in these situations, there are multiple hundreds of posts on both sides of the gun control issue. There is the inevitable discussion on whether or not having armed teachers would make a difference or not. Here is a useful link and some information about "Active Shooters"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shooter
"SEALE Police Academy (Bedford OH) manager Ron Borsch reports their research has determined that aggressive action — by even a single individual — is the most effective countermeasure in stopping the active shooter. For example, initially single unarmed civilians have accounted for half of mass-murder preventions."
Guns suck, but they are a fact of life in America. We have to deal with that reality. We cannot disarm the entire population. There will always be nut jobs out there with the willingness to harm others. The only sane and compassionate response is to allow people to defend themselves, while doing everything possible to create a loving society that diminishes the likelihood of these behaviors emerging in the first place.
Is there any reason to think that mental health in this country is much worse than anywhere else? Not really.
Actually, I think that there is. People in other countries with accessible guns don't go on rampages nowhere near as often, even adjusting for population and number of guns available.
Is it as easy to kill someone with a tool designed specifically for that purpose or with something else?
You're asking the wrong question. Is it easy to construct a tool designed specifically for the purpose of killing many people at once, which is not a gun? The answer is yes, and they have seen widespread use by terrorists already.
That guy is just using his god given right to carry arms and shoot up anyone he deems a threat, like school kiddies, America is a free country it's just another day over there.
I think we need to focus more on taking the people who do this off the street than trying to take the guns off the street. Like one poster said... look at how the war on drugs has gone. The fact is that in places where gun owenership was relaxed there is drastic lower crime rates. I didn't believe it was true but then I spent time to research it and it is true... When the public is armed crime is lower. You can google the results of the FBI crime reporting and check it agaist places that have relaxed gun laws.
I agree with you entirely. The problem is, you are one of those nutjobs for spouting that old line. How many of those 22 stabbings would have survived because stabbings are not as lethal as shootings? I bet at least one. That's one more future for some kid. Isn't that worth it?
I'm almost sick at myself, for spouting another old line "think of the children," but for once I think this is a time we should think of them.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
There is clearly a problem here and shouting at people isn't helpful.
America has numerous problems, one is general violence, another is the multiplier effect of freely available guns: A crazy with a gun is more deadly than a crazy with a knife. Ergo, guns are a problem, no matter what gun lovers want us to think.
Also, the "moderate" view, which I guess is "meh", doesn't move us from the status quo, so nothing is fixed. Either of the radical views will change things, but which one to pick?
I think it's obvious that strong gun control and heavy penalties for gun use in crimes would be a positive step. The fact you have gun lovers fighting this just means you will never have safety in your lifetime. Good luck with that.
American loves guns, the trouble is the way that they love guns.
There are no words. So I won't be posting any for awhile.
Alright, I'll do it... it's right there in the Hall of Fame:
Voices From The Hellmouth - Slashdot - Posted by JonKatz on Mon Apr 26, '99 08:26 AM from the Geek-Profiling dept.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
He needed to try a lot harder to beat the high score. Also he should of broke into Wikimedia's server rooms and killed some abusive deletionist admins.
People who study statistics and understand elementary Game Theory should not be surprised. When you have pockets of helpless individuals who cannot defend themselves, sooner or later someone will attack them and cause tremendous damage. Given the population size, large school shootings are likely to happen every so many months on average. Controlling society to such a degree that no one has the power to attack has never been a good idea, and new technologies (ex. 3D printers and other cheap tech than can turn any garage into a gun manufacturing plant, Bitcoin and the Silk Road for distribution, etc) make it nearly impossible.
Governments can't even keep drugs out of their own prisons! A society where bad guys can't get guns would have to be so tyrannical the cure would be a thousand times worse than the disease! Gun Control is like the belief that the earth is flat - intuitive but just plain wrong!
The way to reduce the odds is dead-simple - don't have those pockets where no one can defend themselves; don't have blind faith in a centralized power center in a police station across town. Whether this means arming school administrators, hiring armed security guards, or utilizing reputable parent volunteers is a matter of implementation that remains to be studied. If parents had more choice in where their children are educated, then security concerns would receive more attention, and, in addition to academics and other factors, schools would compete based on their security policies as well. This creates an evolutionary system where the best and most cost-effective security ideas are sought out and spread from school to school.
---
The root of the problem with school shootings is the forced schooling of all children by one government-controlled system. When kids are herded against their will into government indoctrination centers and are forcefully socialized at random, this creates angst and other negative emotions, bullying, and the desire to strike back. Social pressures of school tend to overwhelm all other concerns, especially academics, which begs the question - what's the point of all this?! This is the 21st century - you'll learn more if you cut school, stay home, and just read Wikipedia all day!
Why lock kids in a building with mediocre local teachers, when through the Internet they can watch the best lecturers in the world, safely participate in online student forums, take online exams, etc. Technology also reduces the cost of monitoring kids through in-home cameras (where monitoring can be cheaply outsourced / eventually AI-based) and GPS tracking, so government-subsidized babysitting of all kids in the same building no longer makes sense. Homes with a stay-at-home parent could make extra money by hosting their neighbor's kids during daytime, while they do their schoolwork via laptops - in a much safer, healthier, emotionally supportive, and parent-controlled environment than government school!
More homeschooling choices would lead to a better, more focused education for each child, less negative peer pressure and teen angst, less undermining of family authority, and improved safety as well! Kids would then socialize with each-other on the basis of mutual interest (although some randomness, if desired, can still be thrown into the equation), build healthy hobby-driven friendships (that can evolve into career connections later in life), and learn to treat each-other like fellow human beings rather than fellow caged rats!
School vouchers and exam-controlled homeschooling options are definitely a step in the right direction.
--libman
All these arguments I read about guns being "freely and readily available" - they're neither "free" nor "readily available" if you've actually ever tried to purchase a firearm. Using that phrase betrays a person's ignorance of how gun laws really work. I wish guns were free; I'd own a whole lot more! Guns are expensive!
be careful with the term clips, gun nuts get kinda crazy about it...
Be careful with the term "monitor", computer nuts get kinda crazy about it when you call it "the computer"...
I'm uncertain that attempting to promulgate correct definitions by explaining incorrect usage qualifies someone for a "nut" epithet. Unless, I suppose, you intend to paint with a *very* broad brush that covers most of the population with any level of education.
We watch people killed by 10's if not 100's each day on the TV, and it usually involves guns. Real or dramatized, we witness them.
We participate in killing online in a hundred different games. usually with a trigger-based device. We practice and perfect it.
In the context of so many killings we have witnessed and performed, isn't this behavior just a part of our mental norm?
Sent from my ENIAC
This happens in other countries as well. You could get rid of guns but they will find other ways to commit mass murder.
This is what happens with over population, people alienate themselves and feed off of there thoughts and do not listen to anyone else. Even when people know there is something bothering that person, once they are at a certain point there is really no way to stop what they feel or think.
This could be a case of lets get a thrill, get some payback, we have nothing to live for anyway. This is something this person let stew in there mind for sometime, I am not going to say ban guns but I am not going to sign up to the retards known as the NRA either. Really do not understand this shooting at all due to kids being involved (murdered), is the school in a wealthy neighborhood? If so then there may be your motive.
That is the only thing I can think of for one person to intentionally target kids..
Sign 'm up for Afgan duty. Obama's USA needs every abled bodied trigger in Afgan to kill Afgan's and Niggers.
Bullshit.
You
I just read this.. this... I cant even imagine Why something like THIS must happend to Schole 'God' they just kid
The world has survived and even prospered WITHOUT computers and can do so again. They are NOT "indispensable for the life of everyone". They are useful tools just as are cars, guns, washing machines and all other tools.
Also, the original reason for the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution was clear and well understood by those who added it to the law of the US. It was felt then and still holds that there may be a time for the citizens to exercise that ability and right.
...but I know that there are many PR companies that hold multiple moderation accounts on web sites that perform moderation. I can just imagine who they work for.
Ah, it's "them", of course. Yesss, clearly. <slowly takes two steps backward...>
You know, I do feel safer because you've given up any firearms you may have ever owned. I hope you've also given up sharp objects, given your apparent mental state.
No doubt I'm part of the conspiracy as well. I mean, obviously this is exactly the kind of smear campaign that someone running a double-reverse counter-astroturfing program would do, and those are *everywhere* now. Hey, have you checked your threads at chemtrailscentral.com in the past few hours? My associates have been busy suppressing your ability to spread The Truth there, too (the sylphs are a lost cause man, they can never win against the chemtrails... give it up already).
Excuse me, I have to go to a mandatory, all-hands meeting at the subterranean volcano base now...
Here's some hard data for the number of murders per 100k citizens in various countries. The US has a murder rate over 2.5 times that of any other country with strict firearms control so it does not seem to do anything to improve that. However the same article also has stats for property crime which suggest that the US does seem to do better there than other countries. Finally there is child abuse and neglect where again the US has a rate over twice that of other countries with firearm control.
So while are argument could be made that firearms may suppress property crime they seem to have an appalling effect on the rate of murder. Given that if I have to be the victim of a crime I would much rather be robbed than murdered it seems that firearms make things worse not better.
Sorry the link to the article got omitted: here it is.
Man....
I have a daughter that is 9...
I have a son that is 7...
Either one could have been there today... and I could dealing with the thoughtless, pointless loss of either...
If there had been a teacher, principal, any adult there today who was armed, lives "would" have been saved.
However, lives still would have been lost.. no doubt there.
Yes, the anti gun advocates could argue that if there were't guns to begin with, this never would have happened.... but I argue, then the crazy individual could/have would have used gasoline in the form of a molotov cocktail, or fertilizer and some other chemical combo in the form of a bomb.....
Weapons/guns are not our problem, people with destructive mentalities are!
In today's day and age, you're not going to get rid of the nut cases -- they are here to stay... get used to it. ...
But think about this -- where are the shooting occurring? Locations that are easy targets -- locations that do NOT allow conceal carry -- theatres, schools, etc
How long are we going to allow our children, friends, and family to die at the hands of these psychopaths and stand aside unarmed while they do it????
Wake up people.....
I am a foreigner living in the USA. I don't understand. We don't have guns back home. Why do you? I can't believe this stupidity.
What is the president going to achieve by pretending to cry? Just ban all the guns already!
The only question is: how do we contain the amount of guns in circulation, and how do we contain the violence when a gun gets abused?
That's the wrong question(s).
The right question is "How do we reduce violence and murder, especially among those innocent victims who did not start the violence?"
By phrasing the questions as you did, you've made several false assumptions. Among them:
- Reducing the guns "in circulation" will reduce violence.
- Violence with-gun is all that matters. Violence with-axe, with-baseball-bat, with-car, with-fist, etc. is somehow just a creampuff-toss.
What if reducing the number of guns in private hands INCREASES violent victimization and increasing the number of guns out there REDUCES it?
If that is the case would you be willing to work to get more guns into the hands of people?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There are millions of guns in private ownership right now.
How exactly would one ban them? It just doesn't seem any more possible than sending all the illegal immigrants back to Mexico or stopping the flow of narcotics.
Never mind the fact that large number of people don't want guns banned. So at best, we might get a watered down half measure that costs a bunch and does nothing to address the problem and unjustly annoys innocent people.
I mean we could stop this sort of thing altogether if we just monitored every citizen 24 hours a day and proscribed exactly what they can and can't do and where they can and cannot be.
It is a complex problem and the answer is not in any way as simple as some are suggesting. In perspective, as horrible as this tragedy is, as freakonomics has pointed out, many many more children die every year from swimming pools than from guns. And I am not necessarily in favor of gun ownership. It's just don't see a ban a) happening and b) working.
with a firearm could have stopped this.
The essence of the constitution is to determine your own destiny, for the individual.
If you do not want to do this, and you trust government to protect you, then you will find yourself dead on the floor as the government arrives to clean up the mess.
I read the stories of people cowering in the corner, and praying. Has our country come to that where a bunch of adults cower in the corner and beg for their lives because they lack the courage to defend other people?
Our society is dying. Everywhere you look you have people wanting others to take care of them, to make the future safe and that means removing all freedom to the individual.
You can live safely as a slave and be treated like an animal, or you can live free and determine your own destiny by taking care of yourself and stop cowering in the corner waiting for the government to arrive to solve everyones problems.
Look, either you wait for the government to come and shoot the guy, or you do it yourself.
At least if you do it yourself, fewer people will die.
Until people basically change, guns will be a requirement for all free people. To be free to make your own decisions, to be free of government tyranny.
But most importantly, people must defend and protect each other in their communities.
You depend on the government to do it and you will watch helplessly as your community members are executed in cold blood.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Meh. Another day in the USA. There have been 31 school shootings since Columbine. The 31 doesn't include other mass shootings, like in the theater, in the temple or other shootings that have happened just this year. The gun nuts will yelp for the next week that "Today is not the day blah blah". Yesterday, when the 20 kindergardeners (now dead) were still alive wasn't a good day either. Roll up your sleeves. What do you see? Bare arms. That's what's in the US constitution, the right to bare arms. And since they can go sleeveless, they can also shoot each other with the biggest craziest guns you've ever seen. Other people in other countries don't have this problem. They hear these stories and in stunned silence think WTF?!? But in the good old US, more people buy guns. No health care, but guns guns everywhere. This year we had what, 20 mass shootings? Next year my bet is for 30. Can't tell exactly where (you will get maybe 1 every 2 or 3 years in the rest of the western civilized world, but in the US, my bet for 2013 is about 30). Even more wacked: people argue that more guns would solve this problem. Except that bull shit logic failed about 20 times this year alone, and last year and the year before. One thing is certain. Americans will fight like hell against any changes to their gun laws, and so mass shootings will continue. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Hey America: you've been fooled hundreds of times. Shame on you.
Pretty much everyone is cool with bypassing the framework for legitimately changing Constitutional protections when the system is inconvenient for them. Doesn't matter if it's Republicans and privacy rights or Democrats and gun rights. Anyone willing to do so is in the same class as everyone else willing to do so, and none of those people should be allowed near government. Unfortunately, that's a pipe dream since government is full of people elected for their willingness to be corrupt by lots of people willing to look the other way when that corruption benefits them.
You have to admit, having the explicit thread lightning-rodded a lot of comments that otherwise would have cluttered other threads.
AFAIK, each time such a tragedy has happened, the NRA immediately rallies to protect gun ownership (something that even Bowling for Columbine already pointed out, and that was God knows how many years ago).
I lived in various countries where gun ownership is not banned, but fairly tightly controlled. Two of those countries are known as the safest in the world, so there is as far as I can tell no POSITIVE correlation between gun ownership and safety..
"The only people with guns are people in the military"
Apparently you live in a different Switzerland than I do. Must be some alternate reality.
First, lots of people hunt, and they hunt with their privately owned rifles. Second, basically anyone can own a gun. You are just required to register it with the local police. I know, because I have two, and the registration process was pretty simple. I don't know the rules about carrying a gun in public, because it's not something I've looked into.
That said, there is no trace of the American "cowboy culture" here. Owning a gun is not a manly requirement, like it seems to be in the US.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
When cunts post ghoulish crap like this.
Are you arguing that this isn't 'stuff that matters'?
I can see the US making their schools similar to how UK schools are now after Dunblane. They all now bare a remarkable resemblance to Stalags !! ie: High security fencing all round security doors CCTV EVERYWHERE You can't play on the school fields like we used to be able to do. Everyone has to be "buzzed in" A sad indictment on todays society. Also... In the days when the 2nd amendment was drawn up Muskets were the dominent firearm. A musket probably takes a skilled militia about 30 seconds to reload Each round The second amendment needs ammending or at least enforcing.. ie: You only have the right to bare arms re: 2nd amendment If that firearm is a Musket !! Just as deadly, but to all intents and purposes..Single shot ! Can't see that happening mind but ...
Switzerland's firearm-related suicide rate per population is about the same as US but 140 times larger than Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
US has a HUGE gun fatality rate. That doesn't mean that any country with somewhat smaller gun crime rate has "hardly any".
Welcome to the lunatic fringe Mr Huckabee...
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/huckabee-schools-place-of-carnage-because-we-systematically
"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"
Law enforcement has released few details on the alleged gunman, but Huckabee suggested that the separation of church and state may have spurred his rampage.
"[W]e've made it a place where we don't want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability -- that we're not just going to have be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before, you know, a holy God in judgment," Huckabee said. "If we don't believe that, then we don't fear that."
He said those suffering from a crisis from faith should look to God in the community's response to the violence. But he added that "Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done at the back end."
And Mr Huckabee is not alone in his evil version of Christianity..
Christian radio host Bryan Fischer took to his American Family Association radio show this afternoon to say that God didnâ(TM)t stop the horrific Connecticut elementary school shooting spree because he does not go âoewhere he is not wanted.â
Fischer made the case that, in his mind, God would have protected the shooting victims had there been a system of school prayer and a respect for the Ten Commandments in public classrooms.
âoeWhere was God when all of this went down?â Fischer began. âoeHereâ(TM)s the bottom line: God is not going to go where he is not wanted.â
He explained: âoeWeâ(TM)ve spent 50 years telling God to get lost. Telling God we do not want you in our schools. We do not want to pray to in our schools. We do not want to pray to you before football games. We do not want to pray to you before graduationâ¦. We donâ(TM)t want your word read in our schools.â
---
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It belongs to the entertainment industry. The problem is the coupling of justice with violence. I've seen this bloody development in movies, tv, and computer games over my lifetime. The hero is done bad to by some bad guy or guys, the hero takes it over and over again until he decides not to, then he goes on a bloody over-the-top rampage of justified violence against the bad guys, against those who have tortured him. The audience roars in approval, feeling the good guy is finally getting justice and his violence against the bad guys is fully justified. We all feel good. We all feel good about it from a young age and over and over and over again. This is the way to do it. The body count increases in each decade. The "creative" ways that masses of people are killed becomes more clever and more sick. We are a society spinning downward by elevating psychopathy to a position of the norm in our entertainment and we all act surprised when it spills over into the real world. It isn't guns. There have always been guns. What has changed is our toleration of bloody murder and revenge as entertainment. Holding up guns as the problem is cowardly. Let's accept the obvious: children learn from the entertainment they are soaked in from birth. Let's stop admiring the producers of violent revenge themed movies and games. Let's stop the Rambo Effect on society.
E Proelio Veritas.
Predictably for a society that thinks you can borrow your way to prosperity this tragedy has immediately devolved into an argument about guns. This is quite depressing and utterly pointless.
If you believe that removing any given inanimate object from the population with change human nature you are irredeemably incapable of critical analysis; unfortunately you can still vote and are therefore a threat to society because of your constant wailing of nonsensical distractions.
If you believe that some sort of pre-intervention can identify these individuals or that any sort of physiological counselling can stop these events (a la Minority Report) you are at least trying to address the actual problem. But you are unrealistic in the extreme and destined for absolute failure..
Taking the Security Theater of the TSA as a real world example, several trillion dollars have been spent. The Constitution is in slightly smaller shreds than it was before. And flyers are being exposed to untested and possibly deadly new forms of radiation. Meanwhile the real world threat has NOT been eliminated. But it has been NEUTRALIZED by the simple (and free) expedient of the other 100 plus passengers on the plane taking responsibility for their own lives! There have been several high profile psychotic episodes and even the infamous "shoe bomber" - who single footedly is responsible for the gut wrenching stench now permeating the security areas in every American airport. Not a single one of these incidents at any time threatened the safety of the flight nor did any perpetrator ever reach the remarkably expensive and sensationally over hyped secure cockpit door. Put bluntly a statistically significant portion of the people who were there (boots on the ground as it were) simply rendered the individual physically incapable of completing his plans.
So
Can you eliminate guns, bombs, or ANY other item that can be used as a weapon?
No. It is not physically possible. Once something has been invented it exists.
Can you eliminate crazy people?
No. Crazy strikes on it's own schedule.
Can you at least separate these two groups?
No. Not with absolute certainty.
Can we then add heavily armed specially trained government officials tasked solely with preventing these events.
No. Regardless of their training and commitment these super-men can only point their weapon in one direction at a time. And they are beyond question assured to become the first target in any attack. With the added problem that whatever mob stopping, generally unobtainable super weapon you gave them for the performance of this impossible task is now the property of the guy who just knifed him from behind while he was taking a piss. (for example).
Literally the ONLY solution is the one used by Google to power a huge minority of the Internet (Search, YouTube, Maps, etc). Massively distributed processing - in this case not fewer guns but many many more!!
In the case of schools, require every employee to have a concealed weapon on his person at all times. Make it a condition of employment. Perhaps a Taser is good enough. But you shall not sit idly by and hope nothing bad happens to the children whose parents left you responsible for their well being.
The irreconcilable flaw with this solution is that it does not add more power to the centralized government. Exactly the opposite it boldly states for the world to see that there is a finite limit to what The Government can do for you. And that there comes a point in the real world where you either take responsibility for your own existence or leave its continued state to the whim of other parties who may have a very different view of the future.
We are making the wrong choice. Insanity - repeating failed actions and expecting a different outcome.
I keep on noticing, that in the last several years we have had an increased notice of these paramilitary style attacks on innocent people for whatever twisted reason the attackers have. I know I am treading in shark-infested waters, but I think the real culprit that is emboldening these sociopaths to these actions is our youth adopting the military "Call of Duty" lifestyle. We have spent the last decade glamorizing the military, and all its cool facets, that we are making it a positive thing to explore malignant uses for all sorts of weapons, and all sorts of tactics for inflicting pain and misery on an enemy. Now, I am not saying the military is at fault, not by a longshot, but I think the marketing and our (USA) society's passive training to obtain more soldiers from it's youth is becoming quite a catalyst for all sorts of these armed attacks. Weapon Control, is not completely the answer, and one must only look to China's mass stabbings, including the school stabbing rampage to see that banning certain weapons only moves the crowd to another choice. We must look deeper into the psyche, and we will probably reach a close, or the same conclusion. I hate to attack gaming, I am a gamer of all sorts.. But I think we need to research the mental state of all the youth who play Call of Duty and Halo, etc, etc, and find out if there is a powerful impression on how they act out on retaliation from different adversity from society.
The solution is to close down all the schools problem solved
Then there is no school children to shot
Why won't someone think of the children plus
Think of all the money city's and towns could save not having to pa
Teacher's, schools and what not
Meds. Anyone know the real numbers/percentages of these mass murderer chickenshit cowards who have been on psych meds? They're all clearly hopelessly fucked up but are they getting a next-level tragic boost from engineered brain chemistry?
Does fucked-up human PLUS performance/coping enhancers EQUAL enhanced fucked-up human?
An interesting point that has been mentioned so far: When dealing with persons of a criminal mindset, you can be sure that even if guns were outlawed, the criminal would find a way to cause harm/obtain a gun.
Whilst this is true, it does not take into consideration persons without a previous history turning bad; and persons of an angry "nature" not quite willing to track down and deal with the black market. Even by the time they did, they might have had time to cool off...
They may resort to knives and blunt objects for melee attacks, but that kind of damage, compared to a long-range rapid-fire weapon, yields a much lower chance of high body count.
As to the argument of the "tool" not being the problem - no, it's not the initial cause I suppose, but accessibility makes it extremely easy for the mentally unstable, who proponents of this argument like to hold up, to cause the damage they do - indeed, there are Bad People out there, suffocating their children in cars, and bludgeoning their wives with baseball bats... but come on, haven't we seen enough shootings in the history of the USA (and the world) where other persons had guns but it failed to prevent a massacre, or only made it worse? I still don't see how you could repurpose a firearm to be of any use other than making more dead people. And as said before - the alternative assault methods don't easily offer the instant-high-body-count which so addles us.
How can I phrase this better... of the set of people who have the mindset and will to kill people, the body count is different when all have access to guns, as opposed to when only a highly restricted subset have access (namely, those willing to deal with the black market or other illegal route).
There are plenty of other ways to kill lots of people without purpose-designed tools (read: items designed primarily to be weapons), as any diligent chemistry and physics student can demonstrate, or even just a crafty person. Funny that the crazed killers always opt for the pre-made weapons (guns, knives, legal or illegal) whatever the country.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
I think this is a terrible tragedy and should be treated as such.
With that said, I cannot believe the idiocy of some of these comments.
Some you believe you are so educated and have this all figured out. You think that by taking guns away and giving up rights that it will all go away. If you believe that you are a fool and a worthy victim. You are also an irresposible citizen and a drone.
Giving up rights does not stop crime. And Murderers already break several laws in the act of commiting the crime. So why the "Educated" always want to "Feel" safe by putting up no gun signs, rather than BEING safe and learning methods of self protection are totally beyond my comprehension. Adding new laws and restricting firewarms is not the answer, as evidenced by the tragedy we have here.
I blame the government and the State of Connecticut for this and forcing teachers and students to be unsafe. These things have happened before in places like UTAH and Isreal and the teachers were allowed to own concealed weapons and bring them on campus for safety. Guess what, the murderers that tried to harm people in those schools died themselves and that was the end of it. But you don't hear that in the news do you. If one of those teachers had been armed at this school, we would have had a hero instead of a tragedy.
Wake the hell up.
I'll be frank. I am sick and tired of the nice people trying to be "civilized" and "Disarm" ourselves, caving in to the unfounded thought that less guns equals being safe.
Lets put this in to perspective.
People, they want to "Feel" (Not be..., but feel) safe. Having a gun, concealed or not doesn't make you safe. It gives you a tool (if you have the training) for a possible incident that you may encounter in this very "civilized" world we live in. You know, the one where you can get robbed at gunpoint, and then are told by the company to lay down and "pray" you don't get shot and die. Screw that, I've got a family to feed and care for and I will protect myself regardless of the law, or the policy. If the person attacking died, then his judgement will come from god as will mine. It may create hardships and I may even go to prison for doing it because of our countries new lack of worth that it's citizens place on life, but I would have brought awareness to the issue locally and I would have prevented the same deed from happening again. They will continue to do it because if they succeed, it re-affirms an easy way to survive.
So here are the steps that people take to "feel" safe.
1.Politely tell people to leave guns at home. Tell them it is so we don't scare or offend anyone.
2. Post signs in public places telling customers that guns are not allowed on the property (Which they have their right to do. I then don't shop there and then call or write them to tell them why. Those signs are telling criminals it is safe to harm others there. You don't see this happening at gun stores do you?)
3. Put metal detectors at the doors and spend thousands of dollars other security scanners and devices, etc and such to protect kids at schools, prevent guns in stores, etc. etc.
4. Ban guns because they have now become a social stigma because they are no longer "Normal" in society.
Tell me which of these steps stops any criminal from perpetrating an act of deadly or severe injury? Name a country that has implemented all of this and has solved the problem. It may feel good, but it doesn't work. It is a flawed thought process.
Ever heard the phrase cum hoc ergo propter hoc?
Thought not.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The main source for illegally owned firearms is the stockpile of legally owned firearms
3d printed guns are purely ornamental
Well, if you keep up with the news, turns out the guy was an Honors Student and a nerd who ran LAN parties with his friends.
So be glad that they're still in the "ban guns / ban psychos" phase before they inevitably move on to the "ban nerds & nerd activities" phase. We're certainly going to be hearing more of this here.
People need to know. People have a right to know. Without knowing, who can tell that there is a problem? Shutting up the media wont stop the demented. It may even encourage a grander scale of an atrocity to get that attention.
A lot of Italian newspapers (for example http://www.ilmessaggero.it/primopiano/esteri/strage_usa_connecticut_armi_madre_killer_obama/notizie/238271.shtml ) are reporting that the killer had "Asperger, considered a serious autism form".
Drug 'em up, ignore the warnings on the drug inserts that state clearly the drugs should never be administered without conjunctive therapy...
2 "seriously" injured, 20 others lightly wounded, no deaths (so far). This is what happens without easy access to automatic weapons. You're going to have sociopaths and psychotics everywhere, but only in the US (and maybe Afghanistan) will they have such easy access to such lethal weaponry. Absent this lethality, it's a lot more difficult for these people to create such efficient carnage.
You want your "right to bear arms" organized around individuals and not through State militias? Give everyone access to a 1776 -era state of the art musket. See how many kids they can shoot on a rampage then...
Da Blog
The gun-nuts of America are working on getting this pitiably poor record of massacres up to standard. there'll be a new massacre along soon, just as soon as someone gets hacked-off enough with life to take a new crack at the record.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
A 20 year old can't just easily get multiple firearms and a bulletproof vest unless there's a large enough legal market to make a huge supply. A psykopath was arrested last year here for assaulting multiple caseworkers. He said he wanted to kill all of them, but he was too chicken to use a knife and while he tried to get several firearms, it was just too difficult for him to get, so he as a desperate last effort tried unarmed assault. Many lives were saved because guns were hard to obtain.
Everything has its price.
Second amendment freedoms are paid with blood of innocents.
Lower local/state/federal "debt" is paid with less of a safety net to catch and care for the mentally ill.
Tough-it-out, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, self-made-man mentality is paid with shame and violent reactions when reality can't support the tough-guy ideal.
Keep your right to bare arms... but how about we BAN ALL BULLETS? Sure there will be enough bullets stock piled for 100++ years - but... someday there will be no more bullets in this country.
All this talk of "well we need to screen people better before they get guns" is utter bullshit. There is absolutely no way to predict what someone is going to do in the future. Insane people were sane once.
Funny, Bruce... for someone with as many intellectual accomplishments as you have, how is it exactly that you missed the fact that you're advocating taking away someone else's right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Explain to me how depriving each and every one of your countrymen of a right endowed upon them by their Creator based solely on the actions of a person who clearly stepped beyond the boundaries of the social contract does not constitute blatant hypocrisy?
I have the same right to Life as everyone else here, including you, does. Derived from that right is the right of self-defense against all entities who transgress against us in proportion to the severity of that transgression. Should someone attempt to use lethal force against me, I am morally and ethically permitted to use the same in response: Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back! As a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record, for you to exercise prior restraint against me, to deprive me of the ability to defend myself in a proportional manner to the threat, you are directly violating my right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. You are also purposefully giving the transgressing party an advantage they would not possess were I to have the Liberty to arm myself accordingly and as such are setting up the situation where the transgressing party is far more likely to kill me.
So, by advocating unjust prior restraint, you are:
1. violating the right to life
2. violating the right to liberty
3. violating the right to pursuit of happiness
4. violating the right to due process
5. aiding/abetting the initiation of force/use of violence against an innocent party
6. aiding/abetting the murder of an innocent party
So, in light of 1-6, can you explain to me how your actions, were they to become more than simple words, do not constitute a transgression against every person who is subject to your whims? Do you know what's ultimately sad about this? The crazy sonofabitch who shot up that school was crazy; presumably you aren't.
Last I checked, we're supposed to respect each other's rights, not stomp on them in an emotion-driven tit-for-tat to soothe our own bruised egos. You're supposed to be smarter than this, Bruce. It's not rocket surgery.
No sir...they are as free to spout nonsense as you and I.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Lets have some sanity about guns as a privileged and not a right
So, treason is cool now? Passing laws in direct violation of Constitutionally enumerated rights is fine?
While we're at it, let's make a list of other Constitutional amendments we prefer to ignore. How about those pesky 13th, 19th, and 24th as well?
The idea that the 2nd Amendment means that all Americans should have an unfettered right to own whatever kinds of modern armaments they want is a pretty recent one. I don't have the source in front of me right now, but my recollection is that there was a campaign in the 1970s or so to change the popular interpretation from "to form a militia (ie, army) you need guns" to "every single American should own an assault rifle."
If you actually read the 2nd Amendment, while I can understand how the current interpretation came about, it should also be pretty easy to see how the previous interpretation was formed.
Furthermore, I challenge you to explain what the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is.
Is it to ensure that America can be defended from outside threats? If so, then the US Army surely does a much better job.
Is it to ensure that every average American can have the ability to defend themselves from criminals in their home? If so, I challenge you to support that without twisting the Amendment's wording significantly.
Is it to ensure that average Americans can have the ability to overthrow their government if the government is seen as no longer representing the will of the people? If so, then the Amendment is quite obviously hopelessly outdated and its purpose no longer possible to fulfill without going to lengths that I think most Americans would find absurd (eg, permitting any random nut to own a tank, fighter jet, or cruise missiles).
The idea that questioning the unrestricted individual right to bear arms in the 2nd Amendment is treason is ridiculous. Such was almost certainly not the intent of the Founders, and statistics seem to seriously call into question the wisdom of continuing to uphold it (the NRA's talking points notwithstanding).
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I am appaled at peoples ignorance when this information is so readily available from multiple sources. The sad fact is that killings in schools happen in multiple countries with diverse cultures and laws.
I included the Belgium one to demonstrate that the type of person who would commit such an act will use whatever they can get a hold of.
March 1996, Britain: A gunman burst into a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, shot and killed 16 children and their teacher, then killed himself.
April 26, 2002, Germany: In the town of Erfurt in eastern Germany, 19-year-old Robert Steinhauser opened fire after saying he was not going to take a math test. He killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two pupils and a policeman at the Gutenberg Gymnasium, before killing himself
Sept. 23, 2008, Finland: Student Matti Saari opened fire in a vocational school in Kauhajoki in northwestern Finland, killing nine other students and one male staff member before killing himself.
Jan. 23, 2009, Belgium: A man with a white painted face and blackened eyes fatally stabbed two infants and a woman at childcare center in western Belgium
March 11, 2009, Germany: A 17-year-old gunman dressed in black combat gear killed more than a dozen people, including nine students and three teachers at the Albertville Realschule school in Winnenden. He fled and later killed himself after a gunbattle with police
Deletionists will eventually decide that their lives are "not notable" and go on a spree with abusive admins to try and revert their moms.
Yes it's Americans; Americans who rely on pills to solve their problems, and live in denial about their egregious side effects:
http://medicalwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2011/09/mass-violence-caused-by-anti.html
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030372
https://www.google.com/search?q=ssri+violence
The core of American society now centers around pills, violence as entertainment, and disintegrating families ("the kids are good with it") - oh - and denial. It's not a wonder there is so much apparent confusion about the cause of such an event. The scientific evidence is available, Americans only have to accept it and deal with the reality that drugs are drugs, whether it comes in the form of a prescription or in a bag in a back alley, and personal accountability is at an all-time low.
Sent from my ENIAC
So, treason is cool now? Passing laws in direct violation of Constitutionally enumerated rights is fine?
It's been done for generations now, what's one more? Also, I never saw them advocate violating the Constitution. It wouldn't be a violation of the Constitution if the Constitution was changed first.
Learn to love Alaska
I keep hearing this as if it were some nefarious organization. What is the gun lobby?
It's millions of Americans who don't want to see further erosion of our rights, and we support organizations that lobby on our behalf, and contact politicians directly to tell them our feelings on the subject. Politicians are rightfully afraid of going up against millions of constituents of both parties who have very strong opinions on the subject.
Ever heard the phrase cum hoc ergo propter hoc?
Oooh, Latin, you win.
Causation requires correlation. Because two things are correlated does not mean there cannot be causation.
To determine which is which, we need statistical methods. Look into the work done at the University of Chicago and the review done by the National Academy of Sciences (paying attention to the panel reports). This particular link has been shown to be causative. "Field trials" of new gun bans have shown exactly the predicted outcome as well.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Well, if you keep up with the news, turns out the guy was an Honors Student and a nerd who ran LAN parties with his friends.
So be glad that they're still in the "ban guns / ban psychos" phase before they inevitably move on to the "ban nerds & nerd activities" phase. We're certainly going to be hearing more of this here.
Where's Jon Katz with another whiny "Hellmouth" article when you need him?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Designed to be built with the level of machinery in a 1930s bicycle repair shop in five man-hours. With third-hand, untraceable, 20 year-old tooling a person could easily crank out two STENs a day from his garage.
The police are only minutes away.
Dear readers, in middle of cool tech news, interesting stories about Raspberry PI, Cisco, Apple, etc we find a sad story of a shooting in the US. I believe it has been thoroughly covered in all popular news media and besides the fact that Slashdot is a US published media this story its of none what so ever relevance to modern technology. Its sad that you have to drag the story also here into this place.
And they're just as free to own up to their false accusations in court and be barred from reporting on anything until a court determines otherwise, just like you and I.
That doesn't change the fact that this company, its subsidiaries, and its owners are all well-known liars that should be shut down.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
We sacrifice to the altar all the time.
First Amendment principles mean we have to allowe the Westboro Baptists to protest, even if it means hearing their hate.
Most of us here would like to keep the 4th Amendment principles on search and seizure even if it means some terrorists and criminals slip through and kill people.
I know the 5th Amendment's principle of no double jeopardy has let criminals go free, yet I still support it. I don't want anybody tried twice no matter how obvious the guilt appears to be.
Freedom of speech does not imply freedom from the consequences of one's speech...for instance, yelling "faggots" at a group of bikers because you thought it was a cute joke on Southpark, or telling your wife what you really think about her hot friend. Fox and the rest of Broadcast News have gone the way of dead tree editorializing: there is bias, spin, sketchy fact-checking, and occasionally some outright fabrication. I watch Soledad in the morning on CNN, but it's still clear to me where her personal political beliefs lie on the spectrum. "Scooping" unconfirmed facts could well result in a libel suit, although in this case I'll wager the Connectinut's brother will shy from the spotlight for a minute. The essential thing is that no speech, which hurts nothing but feelings, can ever be banned.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
There's a town in Georgia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw,_Georgia) which requires every house to have a weapon and a person trained in its use. It's about the same size as my town, which is pretty liberal biased (college town) and about the same size (30-35k pop).
It turns out that their violent crime rate is almost identical to ours, and their property crime rate is 25% higher. Anecdotal, yes, but arming the town seems not to have reduced crime at all. By your recommendation, there should have been zero violent crime, and only a small fraction of property crime.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Nope. The first electronic computer was developed to prevent people being killed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/colossus_computer
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Body armour for all kids in USA hanging on every classroom wall and bulletproof lockable doors that cant be shot out please
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?