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27 Reported Killed In Connecticut Elementary School Shooting
Several readers sent word of a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. According to most reports, 27 people are dead, including 18 children. The alleged shooter is dead, a man in his 20s. He was armed with multiple weapons and may have worn a bulletproof vest. According to CBS, "It is unclear if there was more than one gunman at the school. Miller reports authorities have an individual in custody who investigators said may be a possible second shooter." (Investigators now say the person being questioned is not a suspect.) One student was quoted as saying, "I was in the gym and I heard a loud, like seven loud booms, and the gym teachers told us to go in the corner, so we all huddled. And I kept hearing these booming noises. And we all started crying." Another, 8 years old, said, "I saw some of the bullets going down the hall and then a teacher pulled me into her classroom."
It is time to amend the 2nd amendment.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
The school is a gun-free campus, plus all visitors have to register at the office.
Our country makes it too easy for nutcases to have guns. I, for one, would give up the right to bear arms for everyone, and not miss it.
Bruce Perens.
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
The cure is worse than the disease.
..don't panic
what's the core problem, here? tools that kill people? we have so many of those. just outlaw anything that could hurt people? go all 'england' as an over-reaction?
the core problem is people are crazy and act out.
if all guns were gone tomorrow, loonies would still kill people.
guns are not the problem.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I cannot believe that someone could target children like that. My two daughters are the same age as the dead and I will have to hug and hold them for a long while tonight. My heart goes out to those parents.
Apparently the White House [1], let alone the NRA, doesn't think it's time to discuss the culture that causes these kinds of shootings - a culture where guns are not only freely available, but generally untraceable and too often get into the hands of folks who should not have them (ie, mentally imbalanced, felons, and domestic terrorists).
If the unquestioning defense of the 2nd amendment means we can't even discuss why disturbed or evil individuals who shouldn't have access to these kind of armaments have the "right to bear arms", then we're fucked as a country.
Let's not even get into the fact that the NRA and gun-lobby have effectively made the process of tracing how these weapons get distributed to the wrong hands is never questioned and the illicit channels aren't closed.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
if all guns were gone tomorrow, loonies would still kill people.
In much smaller numbers.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
As someone posted elsewhere: "I don't want to take your guns away, but if the price of freedom is 18 dead elementary school kids 3 times a year, I don't want to be free. "Gun control" doesn't have to mean "take away guns". Stop arguing against that straw man."
Gun owners jumping right to slippery-slope arguments are not helpful.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
No. The gunman killed the kids. The gun and bullets were simply the tools used. Should all computers be banned because hackers use them to hack?
That depends, do computers serve a purpose other than hacking?
What is the correlation between mass shootings and the closing & defunding of mental health institutions?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Gun laws do nothing in making it harder for "fucking lunatics" to posess. There in lies the logical fallacy. It makes it for "fucking normal people" harder to posess, which is incidentily the root of the problem. It would have taken one normal individual to stop this idiot.
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.
The worst mass school murder in American history took place on May 18,1927 in Bath Township, Mich., when a former school board member set off three bombs that killed 45 people.
Because some crazy fucker walking into a gym with a pipe bomb would be much better.
Maybe a better answer is that we need to treat our crazy people. It's not a matter of expense; either you pay money to treat mental illness, or you pay money to clean up after them. I'd rather spend on getting them help than in burying our children.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I would rather see resources put into identifying and helping the lunatics. That is the elephant in the room.
No, this happened just today in China. No Guns involved. 22 children attacked: Knife attack at Chinese shool.
That's not quite the case. While a maniac could do a helluva lot damage with a meat cleaver, guns, particularly semi-automatic and automatic weapons, allow for very large rampages. As well, one has at least some hope of survival standing up to someone with a knife. A guy packing an arsenal can pretty much kill most people who get in his way, unless they're packing as well, but in any kind of civilian setting, having two or more people firing at each other is going to lead to pretty substantial collateral damage.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I only use my guns to shoot targets, an activity i enjoy thoroughly.
And yet, no one died in the knife attack. Is the difference really that hard to understand?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
if all guns were gone tomorrow, loonies would still kill people.
So, where do you draw the line in regards to things that are lethal weaponry? What is the purpose of a gun? They were designed to kill living things. Why stop at allowing people to carry guns? Why don't we allow people to carry grenades? Or RPGs?
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
What are 'arms'? Isn't a SAM 'arms'? Why can't people carry them around? Oh yeah, because they can inflict mass casualties, that's why. So why doesn't at least a multi-fire assault rifle fit this definition, because it sure looks to me like that's what happened here.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Gun crime in England and Wales has been steadily declining for years. In 2010/11 there were fewer than 12K recorded offences, and that's including crime involving air rifles and imitation guns.
No, they aren't the entire problem, as other countries have proven it's possible to have widespread gun ownership without widespread gun crime. However the USA doesn't seem to be able to achieve this, and guns are a significant part of the problem.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I can go into a store today and buy everything needed to blow a building to bits. Remember Oklahoma City? If you don't want a big boom, you can always go the bleach and ammonia route. If you want to kill or maim people in mass quantities, you don't need a gun. You can use a car. Or a plane. I suppose banning planes is next?
This is a frequent misunderstanding of the European approach to weapons from your American understanding. You are simply indoctrinated by the gun lobby that Europe is wrong. There is NO shortage of weapons here in Europe. That is a blatant lie that your gun lobby tells you.
However, what we don't have here is weapons aimed primarily at killing humans - like pistols and automatic weapons. You can own guns for hunting. Owning a rifle for hunting is common. You can also own a pistol for shooting in competition but you have to be a registered sportsman - you have to join a gun club and actually compete.
You can even actually have a fully automatic assault rifle at home - but you have to join the voluntary armed forces.
This system works and take out the crackpots. Selling pistol to anyone who wishes to have one doesn't.
I always find it odd how when things like this happen it's "not the appropriate time" to discuss stricter gun laws, yet it's perfectly acceptable for every dude with a John Wayne fetish to suggest that had *he* been there with his gun, things would have turned out differently.
I'm not particularly in favour of liberal gun laws, but in China there are an ongoing spate of mass stabbings in schools, for example here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7710196/China-suffers-eighth-child-stabbing-attack-in-a-month.html
The latest attack resulted in 22 stabbings. The problem doesn't seem to be the guns in and of themselves, its the culture and how it is dealing with problematic individuals. Or something else, I don't know, but its definetely a social issue first and foremost.
http://thismodernworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TMW2011-01-12acolorlowres-copy.jpg
That's from two massacres ago.
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
My thoughts are with those unfortunate parents whose grief must be too hard for anyone to bear
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
To put things into perspective: over the last twenty years, there have been fewer than 200 fatalities in school shootings (including colleges and universities) in the United States. By way of comparison, during that period in the US there have been about 1000 deaths due to lightning strikes, 25 due to (unprovoked) shark attacks, 3000 due to international terrorism, and 200 due to domestic terrorism. So we really ought to be more concerned about lightning and box cutters than about handguns.
Perhaps you should consider the Akihabara massacre.
To quote Penn and Teller, "You can stop insane people from doing insane things with insane laws. It's insane!"
Remember, you can't look dignified when your having fun! Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out of it alive
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.
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?
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.
Teachers hear gunshots, grab their 9 mms, head into the hall. Blast away at the janitors who are shooting back with their AK47s. Both groups start to take casualties from the administrators firing .50 cam Brownings mounted to A/V carts. The lunch ladies lob grenades out from the cafeteria, taking out large swaths of combatants, including the third grader who set off the original firecracker.
Many a gun proponent has been turned by having a spouse or child killed. The rest just don't believe it can ever happen to them.
Many gun opponents have been turned by having a spouse or child killed, while they watched, defenseless. The rest just don't believe it can ever happen to them.
The street - she runs both ways.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Criminals also don't follow laws against theft, murder, etc. And?
They all survived. How many would have been killed with a firearm? How many more could the baddie have injured or killed with a ranged weapon?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Agreed. Guns are made for killing. I don't see why that's a bad thing. Sometimes people need to be killed. As long as bad guys have guns, good guys should have them too. Maybe we should improve our system of determining who's a good guy and who's a bad guy, but we definitely don't need to ban guns. That will definitely only leave them in the hands of the bad guys. Guns are a force multiplier; They can be used to level the playing field. If a 250lb guy with a knife attacks a 90lb girl, she damn well better have a gun. Unfortunately, this does mean one crazy guy with lots of bullets can do a bunch of damage. However, taking away guns doesn't fix crazy. This evil bastard probably could have done just as much damage by rigging an explosive, setting the hallways on fire, or taping a kitchen knife to a broomstick. Crazy fucks will do crazy shit. Treat the disease not the symptom.
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be less shootings by criminals than int he U.S.
This is the simple fact opponents of gun control simply cannot deal with.
Less guns mean less gun violence.
Period.
Ban knives too, 22 kids were also the victim of a mass stabbing at a school in china.
Guns are not the problem. Fucking nutjobs are the problem.
if someone who is unhinged wants to do mean and violent things, they will.
when we are ready to start blaming our society instead of tools it owns, then we can move to a solution.
we have a 'war on drugs' as if that does any good. we have a 'war on poverty' and that does no good. we like to declare war and have easy solutions. but the underlying causes are not readers-digest concepts and voters and lawmakers can't read more than a few paragraphs before being bored.
banning tools is rarely going to get you the result you are really after. its easy to blame tools but this won't help.
the anger with so many, runs so deep.
our country is boiling over with hate. bursting at the seams. and we seem to encourage it, if anything! look at the constant fighting with D and R in washington. look at the news. they don't report good things, those don't 'sell'. they report violence and people LOVE that shit.
our society is kind of fucked up. some serious soul searching should be done.
but it won't happen. and more like this will continue while we turn a blind eye. short-term is all we can think about. 'long-term social stability' is a forgotton concept in the western world.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I know people who feed their family for the winter by using guns as tools. Get some perspective.
Good-bye
I have an IBM Model M keyboard with a 5lb steel plate on the bottom. Most assuredly I can kill someone with a computer.
However, killing is one of (not the only) the primary purposes of a gun. You cannot say the same of a computer.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Every time these incidents occur, there is a tremendous and instantaneous outpouring of these same old arguments "guns don't kill people..." "outlawing guns is not going to prevent crazy people from getting them..." The arguments never change, the politics never change, and these incidents happen again and again.
The definition of 'crazy', or one of them, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. HOW MANY TIMES do we have to hear about shooting rampages in our own schools, malls, movie theaters, workplaces, before people will begin to ask themselves if maybe their outlook is simply wrong? How many people would have to die before you, Mr. 2nd Amendment Defender, would reconsider your own viewpoint? Just do this exercise for me - say a number out loud.
Doubt is essential in a deliberative society. If you can never doubt your own viewpoint, then the freedom to discuss and debate it is worthless.
The question to ask is: if guns were freely and readily available in China, would there be FEWER deaths from these incidents?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah, more people firing weapons with panicky children running around, what could go wrong?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know people who feed their family for the winter by using guns as tools. Get some perspective.
Those people probably didn't need an automatic .223-caliber rifle. I have plenty of perspective today.
The guy's already dead. Personally I think they should just never release his name or any pictures. To twisted wastes of life like this guy, infamy is all they think they can achieve. Take it away from them.
But that is hard... You are telling me that we should care about our fellow man and help him? That costs money...
As did I (in the UK around 20 years ago) - the guns were kept in a safe in the gun club, in a safe bolted to the inside of a car while being transported to a safe at another gun club, or were in use on the range. No other place. Worked fine. If you want to have a gun in a public place then it's for killing people, whether in defence or offence, can't think of any other reason (apart from threatening to kill people, which is much the same thing).
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
In the UK we had strong gun laws introduced each time a crazy did something like this but the truth is that each of those crazies had done lesser crazy shit before they went postal. The guy who did the Hungerford massacre in 1987 had take a gun into work to threaten someone and the police had not taken his guns or his license away from him. It should have been the police that were looked at for not enforcing the law as it was rather than introducing new laws. New laws will not make things better. Teachers should not be carrying guns, that is more stupid. Do you really think that teachers never go crazy? I am one and I often want to kill a student. We should have more steps to look at who, good or bad, has a gun. It should not be right, it should be a privilege that can be revoked.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
More guns will solve the problem!
Fewer guns will solve the problem!
When, in reality, each has it's own set of problems, and both sides are more interested in the idea of being right, and having things a certain way, than what is actually best.
Get the fuck over yourselves, people are hurt and you are using it to fucking proselytize. Enough playing devils advocate to a lot of this shit, pointing towards a more moderate view. You're all a bunch of arrogant bastards who don't give a damn who the fuck gets hurt, so long as you can twist it towards your pathetic agenda.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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.
I do. It's much more relevant now than any other time.
Criminals don't abide by the laws, but with good enforcement and harsh sentencing for criminals using a gun the chance they'll carry one (and use it) decreases.
Britain has harsh gun laws: it's pretty much an automatic minimum-five-year jail sentence if you handle a gun without a license. Shootings are rare, mass-shootings + suicide far rarer, and accidents (child getting gun, etc) very rare too. Knife crime is possibly more common that the US (I haven't checked), but I prefer it that way.
Some criminals have guns, but they're careful with them. They're kept hidden somewhere (hidden in a relative's house, and carried to and from the scene by a young gang member in an attempt to avoid the penalty for possessing a gun).
For example, 12 years for possessing a firearm, ammunition and knives with intent.
Or 18 months for a 13-year-old holding a gun for an older gang member.
citation provided asshole
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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...
You Sir are an idiot. Computers have multiple primary uses that are indispensable for the life of everyone. Hacking a computer to kill somebody requires significant skill and fair amount of luck. In contrast beneficial use of guns in our society is extremely limited. Apart from law the enforcement and army, they are used exclusively for entertainment (hunting, target shooting, propping the confidence of people with small dicks). Yet they do not require any skill to kill anybody you wish to, particularly random by passers and elementary school kids. So spare us the stupidity of the "guns are tools, guns do not kill people, etc". So people should have access only to the armaments they have a reasonable use for. They should be licensed, and inspected regularly. We do this for cars, why aren't we doing this for guns?
Well, not immediately, but sooner. The question is, if all, or more realistically, some number of people in schools had ready access to a firearm, would there be more deaths or fewer?
Right, it does. How much did we just spend on the election? Let's tax that. Stupidest waste of money I've seen yet.
This system works and take out the crackpots.
What probably helps too is that we take more care of the "crackpots" here. Free (ish, depending) medical care, including mental health care.
Close the "gun show loophole" and then we'll take the "It makes it harder for fucking normal people" line seriously...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
No. The gunman killed the kids. The gun and bullets were simply the tools used. Should all computers be banned because hackers use them to hack?
That depends, do computers serve a purpose other than hacking?
Yes they do and guns have more purposes other than killing innocents.
That's a straw man. Guns have no purpose other than *killing*. So maybe we should ask ourselves, who has a legitimate need to kill, and what tools do they need to do it? A hunter might need a hunting rifle. A police officer might need a hand gun. I'm not sure why anyone outside of deployed active duty military or on-duty swat team members need an assault rifle.
We already have the legal framework for making it illegal for a "lunatic" to possess firearms. The problem is our system for detecting, handling and treating such people is seriously deficient. Alarms were up everywhere for the guy at Virginia Tech, yet nobody pushed it through.
Yes because it's unfair to the gun lobby. How are they suppose to pretend that gun violence isn't a problem during times like this.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Guns elevate the power of the powerless. A 90lb 5ft tall college girl isn't going to be able to fight off a gangrape with her strength alone, with a gun she can. You may never be able to match the power of an oppressive government, but you can become more equal by being armed.
If I look at the cross section of my friends who are NRA members, most are Republicans. Of those, most are for limiting all government programs, but especially those which treat "fake" illnesses like mental instability. They post about how the government shouldn't be providing social services because it raises the taxes which chip away at the money they work for every day in their jobs.
Nobody in the NRA ever seems to be asking Congress to fund programs to evaluate and assist the mentally unstable. Quite the opposite, they're more likely to call them weirdos or outcasts or cheats, living off the government dole and asking for service after service for nothing. These are the same people who made fun of the little kid in high school, or hurled epithets from their truck window at the way they dress or called them godless fags as they walked by on the street.
And, for the record, a crazy fucker walking into a gym with a pipe bomb would be better. (1) the total death toll would have been lower and (2) the chance of the person going through with it would have been lower, as it's hard to light your own death fuse. It's why most suicide bombers don't actually activate their own explosives - they're remotely detonated by handlers.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
PROTIP: Correlation is not causation.
The US simply has a very high level of desperate and crazy people. Masses and masses of insane religious schizos, extreme poverty gradients, generally being an anti-social dog-eat-dog society (Which is the cause for the former two.) aka. ultra-capitalist law-of-the-jungle feudalism, extreme obsession with wars and murder and hate...
Under all those things, the actual effect of the people losing the freedom because they can't stage a revolution anymore simply becomes invisible. And the possibility of staging a revolution was the whole point of keeping the population armed. If anything they are not armed enough... with weapons and defense against social engineering (aka lobbyism aka politics aka marketing aka PR aka news aka propaganda aka churches)!
Because the reason they didn't already have multiple revolutions is because they are grown to be passive-thinkers without an actual free will, completely under the control of social engineers.
Yes, I know. It's the absolute wrong time to talk about things like this
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
Before this was the Empire State shooting. Before that, the Aurora shooting. Before that, the Tulsa shooting. Before that, the Chardon High School shooting. And that's only 2012. We're quickly coming to a state where gun control discussion is silenced the whole year because there is always a shooting nearby.
A gun in a safe may not be of much use. It would be almost a worse tragedy if you had to resort to throwing a safe at someone. Before this misery in Connecticut today, I saw a surveillance video from earlier in Spring. Two guys try to hold up what appeared to be a slot machine parlour. One geezer was out of his seat and shooting the bad guys about three two five seconds after they announced the holdup. No trying to remember a safe combination for him.
Their they're doing there hair.
Note that it says "injured", and not "killed."
Cynical Idealist
Who would you rather face? A knife wielding attacker or a gun wielding attacker?
I thought so.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Let me be clear here. I'm very much against guns being as prolific as they are. The bullshit defeatist "if guns are illegal, only criminals will have them" argument is so abundantly wrong-headed it defies belief, IMHO. Just look at the gun statistics in England compared to the the US and you have a compelling argument.
However.
When you're looking for reasons why one society in particular has a record of atrocities like this, the first place to look is what makes that society unique. The famous NRA quote "It's not guns that kill people, people kill people" was an attempt to deflect criticism of the penis-extensions^W^W guns generally available (to which my and Eddie's retort is "sure, but the gun helps!"), but like all good propaganda it contains a kernel of truth. The real question then is "why are these people killing each other ?"
The real reason people are using guns to kill themselves and others is the society that they live in. The cold hard truth is that guns are available worldwide, and yet it's a peculiarly American thing (with some outliers) to go crazy and kill a bunch of children/people using your personal arsenal. What's wrong is deeper, I believe.
IMHO American society is in a slow but inevitable death spiral...
It's hard to reconcile that Americans give generously to charities with the first two points above, unless it's just Democrats doing the giving; which is unlikely :). I'd have to posit a discontinuity between the act of giving, and the way of living. It's as if people are ok with being nice to others if they choose to, but refuse to have the general good of society imposed upon them. That's a very odd form of independence, and smacks of biting off your nose to spite your face, but since I don't understand the motivation, I may have it completely wrong there. What's clear is that charitable donation is important to Americans, but charitable society is not.
Religion also plays its part. The society is highly religious, relative to the developed world but religion here in the US is a business like any other. The prime goal is not to try and guide society in the right direction, it's to funnel cash to the higher-ups in the religious power structure. People are told they're doing the right thing as long as the cash is flowing upwards,and the "church"'s goal is simply to continue to make sure that is the case. Upon examination, it's a good metaphor for what's wrong in the more-general society.
It adds up to an uncaring society, and I can see how anyone stuck on the lower rungs with seemingly no prospect of getting higher up could reject it, and similarly reject the rest of the social rules we all expect to be obeyed. There's no golden solution here, no panacea, you're not guaranteed anything will ever be perfect, but if the society had more general welfare built in, it's my personal belief there'd be less atrocities.
A society is by definition a group of people collectively living by a set of rules. As
Physicists get Hadrons!
Citation?
Yet you do not require this of the GP.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Gun laws seem to prevent lunatics in most 1st world countries from doing this same thing with the same frequency. For some reason we have more deaths per capita than most other civilized countries.
The simple existence of guns denotes that there will be situations like this. Remove the fucking guns and the legality for owning them and there simply won't be any guns available or such a reduced number that it is no longer the significant problem we have today.
So yes gun laws themselves don't stop lunatics and criminals, but if the guns aren't there legally in the first place there will be far far fewer guns available for the criminals...or are you saying that's a bad thing?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Asshole eh? Wow.. somebody has sand in their vagina...
Yet Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the U.S. and oopsie...
I say this as a moderate Dem with a libertarian bent: civilian gun owership will not be outlawed in the US within your lifetime. Witness this and this. We need to disarm criminals, close the gunshow loophole, and find a mechanism to weed out the mentally unstable with respect to weapons purchases. The last is the trickiest, especially considering doctor patient confidentiality.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/08/us/soldier-kills-4-people-and-hurts-6-in-a-restaurant-in-north-carolina.html
My cousin and his wife were in that restaurant when Sargent French went on his rampage. He's a gun owner and is extremely responsible and law abiding. But at the time, concealed carry was illegal and just out of respect and common decency, he didn't take his gun with him. But I remember him telling me that, while he was huddled behind an overturned table with his wife, he wished he had his gun with him.
He never goes anywhere without it now.
What happened today was a tragedy. The real problem isn't the guns, it's people. Even if you could completely outlaw and eliminate guns tomorrow morning, sickos would still find some way to hurt others. No, it might not be a mass killing like this, but if you're the one on the receiving end of a sicko's attentions, whether you're in a group of hundreds, or all by yourself in a one-bedroom shack, is irrelevant.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
really, one case against the piles and piles of data in other countries that show, overall a clear reduction?
You are nothing but a cherry picking bastard. not that I expect much more since no data support your position.
2004:
* 16,750 suicides (56% of all U.S. gun deaths)
no, they wouldn't have found another way. Some may have, but probably about 25%. Most suicide deal wth the moment.
* 11,624 homicides (40%)
* 649 unintentional shootings, 311 from legal intervention and 235 from undetermined intent (4%).
~80 people a day die from guns
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My wife was shot and killed ten years ago by a maniac who was previously convicted of another felony. The pistol was sold to him by his uncle so his uncle knew he was a convicted felon. It was then transported over state lines without a permit by said felon. He was going to comit a crime regardless of rather there was gun control or not, especially because he and his uncle had already broken two federal laws known as the Brady gun laws months before the murder took place.
I still dont carry a gun and I actually do believe in gun control. Would it have saved my wife? Nope. The maniac still would have had an illegal weapon. But you know what, it might actually save someone elses life. If the choice between saving someones life because of a stupid law or letting people carry weapons that are designed to kill other humans is what get to deal with then I am all for gun control.
Thank goodness you said "many" and not "all."
I also dont believe in capital punishment. Make them rot in prison for the rest of their lives. I will happily pay for it. Provided of course we stop giving them all the great things in life, they get nothing. Two reasons;
1. If by chance they are actually innocent, then I dont want blood on my hands for killing an innocent person. And yes there are some innocent people on death row.
2. If they are guilty then death is a very easy out. Make them wish they were dead. Make them pay for the victims children to go to college or get decent medical care. Make them do something productive that helps the victim(s) of their senseless crime. It wont ever bring back my loved one, but it sure would help this single parent of two over the past ten years survive a little easier having another income that I would have had if my wife hadnt been taken by some lunatic with a gun he shouldnt have had in the first place.
But hey, thats just my $.02
I find it hilarious that on one hand, gun advocates argue that gun-control laws only affect law-abiding citizens, because criminals already all have guns. On the other hand, all the scenarios they play out to show how awesome guns are for self-defense involve either no guns on the criminal side, or criminals who do not pull their guns first. The first scenario is just a failure in logic, and the second scenario is just wishful thinking. The advantage always lies with the criminal, because they know their victim, while the victim doesn't realize they're about to be victimized. Unless there is an advantage in ability on the side of the victim, the attacker always has the upper hand.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
A 90lb 5ft tall college girl isn't going to be able to fight off a gangrape with her strength alone, with a gun she can.
Might.
Also, goes both ways. One guy might not be able to rape two women by himself, but with a gun...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The parent post was "+5 informative" but also incomplete. Yes, McVeigh was able to kill many without using a gun. But we're arguing about ease of acquisition here.
To do what McVeigh did you have to be pretty smart, do some clever planning, get large quantities of materials, and basically put a lot of stuff together.
To kill a bunch of school-age children like this all you need are assault weapons and a credit card, both of which are readily available and take little smarts, planning, or money.
That's the issue at stake here. Yes, making guns harder to get doesn't solve the problem. But it sure as hell raises the bar on being a casual mass murder (plus coward: I'm so sick of these guys offing themselves so they can't be punished for what they do. I want technology that brings them back to life so we can feed them into a wood chipper, feet first, dammit). Suddenly, in an American world where' it's f*king hard to get assault weapons, if you want to go cause mayhem in a kindergarten you're going to have to spend more money and time, do a lot more planning, and so on. Some of these nutcases will surely say, "nah, not worth it." Instead, one quick phone call and a credit card number, and you've got a murder on deck.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
In order to kill somebody with a knife, you need to really, really want to
I think the guy who did this latest shooting really really wanted to kill people.
I will always walk around unarmed, as do the overwhelming majority of people in modern day America (let alone the UK). With that in mind, I'd rate my survivability as far higher if I were attacked by a lone crazy person with a metal club or a knife than I would if I were attacked by a lone crazy person with a semi-automatic handgun.
Can I imagine life with a caved-in skull? No more so than having my brains blown out. But can I imagine life after being smacked in the ribs with a crow bar? More so than after getting a couple of bullet-shaped holes in my chest.
...is that folks are using this story as a political foil.
18 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN ARE DEAD! VIOLENTLY.
However, the very first thing that people think of is the age-old political battle about guns.
This kind of abstracting our fellow humans into avatars is not something that I particularly like about modern times.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
If a normal person suddenly becomes unhinged which do you think they'll be able to do immediately, buy a gun or build some sort of explosive?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
That's what it comes down to, isn't it? There are plenty of people who want to own guns for whatever reason, and value this higher than a few dead kids every now and then. "For the children" only works as an argument when it's someone else that gets hit with the direct consequences.
Strip all the bullshit away, and what's left is "I want a gun more than I want other people not die from gun-related crime."
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yeah, it's just so hard to drive an ammonium nitrate bomb up to a building.
Driving is easy. Building your own bomb is harder.
Why did McVeigh have to build his own bomb? Because bombs aren't sold in bomb stores, or at bomb shows. Because society recognizes that bombs are too dangerous to sell to the general public.
Why do so few other crazy people follow McVeigh's example? Because it's a lot of work. Buying a gun and shooting people with it, on the other hand, is relatively easy to do.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The article you quoted mentions that gun crimes in Chicago are down 9% overall. 438 deaths this year. Article mentions 900+ homicides in the early 90s. I think you may have accidentally posted an article that agrees with the person you were attempting to refute.
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.
The 2nd amendment exists to guarantee the people of the united states retain the capability to wage war against the government.
Tell that to the people at Ruby Ridge.
Try acquiring your own Predator drone. Assert your right to keep and bear personal thermonuclear weapons. You might be able to buy a tank if you have the cash, but chances are it would be thoroughly gelded.
In 1776, a well-regulated militia could band together and cast its own cannons, bore its own rifles and pretty well put itself on an equal footing with a unit of the British Army.
These days you can't even come close. A lot of military technology isn't buildable by any single person or small group. But even when it is, it's often illegal to acquire it. There are more and more places where even the most basic weaponry is forbidden. Try asserting your Second Amendment Rights at an airport or courthouse.
The stereotype of the brave Patriot brandishing his gun at the US Government is a cartoon. A pitiful, pathetic joke. The reality is a mouse waving around a toothpick at a horde of cats.
So pardon if I laugh at the brave heroes. Our primary defenses against an unjust government lie in other areas these days. Including the fact that we've brought up the children who become members of the nation's armed forces to believe that the protection of the nation is more important than the protection of the government.
It's just as well that we don't have real 2nd Amendment rights, however. We live in a highly-leveraged age. It no longer takes an army to wipe out a city, just a suitably deranged well-armed individual. Four people can take down a skyscraper and they don't even need to buy or build weapons. And we get frequent reminders that there's no shortage of suitably-deranged individuals.
Which is exactly why most firearms hobbyists, like myself, choose to get a concealed carry permit, if available in their state. Ideally, teachers would be allowed this option as well.
Really? Because my home state of New Hampshire, with some very relaxed gun laws, has a rate of 0.43 gun homicides per 100,000 people.
Compared to New York's 2.67, and California's 4.82 per 100,000... I'd actually say you'd have a hard time concluding that from the data you presented. California & New York both have much stricter gun control. Yet their per-capita rates are 6x and 11x the rate of New Hampshire, with its fairly relaxed gun controls.
In other words: Maybe the NRA has a point, and you can't just draw a straight line equivalence between "strict gun controls" and "lower gun homicide rates."
In other words: Maybe we need to look at the effectiveness of specific gun control laws (or, conversely, look at where the bulk of the maniacs committing mass murder are getting their supplies from), and develop sensible and effective gun policy that will actually lower the rate more than just saying "enact the harshest, strictest controls you can, and the problem will solve itself."
Those are the number for accidental deaths of children. You know, children going into the gun cabinets of responsible gun owners and killing themselves or eachother? Or people who watched too many action films trying to save somebody's life?
Accidental deaths for adults are ten times higher.
And none of these 27 who died today are part of any of these numbers, they're in the "homocide" category.
Combined homocides are 100 times higher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ushomicidesbyweapon.svg
Accidental injury rates are *much* *much* higher.
The MAD philosophy of the Cold War era worked - even with regimes which were not what we would consider the most stable.
Yes, it did work. And it worked because the men with access to "The Button" were aware of the real consequences of those actions and could think to the future to how those consequences would pay out. IE, the mindset of very very few teenage high schoolers.
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.
Don't be a dick. "Prayers are with you" is shorthand for "I feel powerless to help this situation personally and I'm hurting, so I'm doing the one thing I can to help me deal with this horrible situation." Yes, we get it that your lack of religion makes you a more intelligent, enlightened, and good looking person. Golf clap for your superiority. But one of your neighbors is grieving and the best you can come up with is to demean his coping mechanism?
Did telling him his religion is stupid make the world a better place? No? Then gloat in private, please.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
So why don't these madmen randomly attack police stations and monster truck rallies?
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
The Aussie laws were changed some 20 odd years ago to ban automatic weapons, it has not made a significant difference in the number of gun deaths (~200/yr). However it has made a repeat of the massacre that triggered the laws virtually impossible to anyone but a trained sniper. There are plenty of legitimate reason to own a gun, here in Australia "self defense" is not one of them. There is (currently) no legitimate reason for owning a semi-automatic weapon in Australia. Hand guns have never been culturally popular in Australia even when you could buy them at the hardware store. However you can still own one if you join a registered gun club.
Gun laws are not black and white, it's not an binary choice between guns and no guns. If Uzi's are available to the general public then you will get more people dying at these kind of massacres simply because that is what those weapons are designed for. When semi-auto are available you will get massacres like this one, simply because they make it possible. When all that is available is a musket, someone will just take it off him after the first shot.
Arming primary school teachers won't deter anybody, nor is it a sign of a healthy society. These nutters have decided to go to war with society, they know it's a suicide mission and that's often part of the goal. If they had a nuclear missile they would use it, so it's probably best not to give nuclear weapons to the general public, I agree with the laws here and draw the line at semi-auto's, others will place it elsewhere. The culture of the country affects normal people, nutters want to blow it all up. Where US/AU differs culturally with guns are the attitudes surrounding shooting people to protect property, most Aussies think people are more important, even if they do deserve to be shot. Carrying any sort of weapon for self defense is seen as a somewhat cowardly behavior, but someone living in the bush should still keep a shotgun handy to scare off drunken troublemakers.
We still have just as many nutters, there was one in the news the other day, he whacked a cop with a hammer without warning, stole his gun, then ran off to a nearby park and shot himself in the head.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I have to reply to your comment even though I promised myself to stay out of this thread.
Don't become too bitter and try to understand that not everyone is simply trying to win arguments, although some are. Everyone is enraged as you are at this tragedy. However, people have colored perceptions and that affect how they will respond to what just happened. For example, if you see my posts, I'm more left than right, and my first reaction to this afternoon was, "This is terrible!" and after my emotions were riled, my next gut feeling was, "enough is enough! how can anyone justify these lax gun laws anymore?..."
However, a right-leaning person might see this and their first reaction is "This is terrible!" and after their emotions are riled, their gut feeling would be, "enough is enough! why weren't any of the adult allowed to bear arms, they could have stopped this asshole!..."
My first though wasn't, "this will score me points on slashdot!" and I'm sure no libertarian or rightie thought, "shit, now I have to make arguments on slashdot." We're all fucking mad and we're all just being emotional in our own way. At the end of the day, this didn't need to happen, and we all agree on that.
PROTIP: Correlation is not causation.
But it can be a bloody big hint. And this one is a neon sign two stories high flashing "IT'S THE GUNS!"
For example: Australia severely restricted certain classes of firearms after a particularly bad mass shooting. The number of mass shootings in the 16 years since the change dropped by at least an order of magnitude. Prediction, experiment, result.
There were no significant complicating factors, we didn't have a major reduction in poverty, or improvements in mental health, nor changes in law enforcement which could explain the result. This is demonstrated by other crime rates not changing significantly during the same period.
Same country, same culture, same crime rate; single change in the law, single result.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
One of the teachers was a gun owner and owned multiple firearms.
Her son used them to murder twenty children.