Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting

Well, it?ll be more of a political discussion after 2 posts anyway ...

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my two cents ... another school shooting? The time is near where this will be another one of those news-stories you hear and don?t even look up like "Fights between Israel and Gaza" ... "Floods in/or somwhere near China" ... "killing spree in US" ... so nothing new in the world, basically.

cynicism aside, :(
 
Precisely. It will boil down to two basic debates. US vs the rest of the world and the Americans who think that way on gun control and then whether or not violent video games and movies have any part to play in these situations.

The fact of the matter is whatever we think the situation won't change. Not only is gun ownership too far ingrained in American culture but half of its politicians are opposed both to greater gun control and universal healthcare that might help treat these poor souls before they go over the edge and start killing people.
 
Oh it already turned into something much, much worse......I honestly feel like puking, and I'm not even hungover.
 
Newtown is about 20-30 minutes from my house. I have sold cars to people who live there. One of them is a teacher though she teaches at the high school.

I would move this to the political forum.


It looks like he took the guns from his mother's after he killed her. MWF is right about those two things. Better mental health access and some type of gun restrictions might make this harder. It wouldn't prevent all of them but it would make them less likely.


You are not going to ban guns in the US just not going to happen so what do you do?

No clips more then seven rounds?

Doesn't seem likely.

Restrictions on ammunition purchases?

Also not likely and awful hard to enforce when you can just reload your own ammunition.


Guns should be secured when not in use. A Gun safe and or trigger lock plus not stored loaded.

My head hurts too much try and think about this clearly now.
 
I wonder if we should look to how Japan regulated their guns? Guns are legal, but the stuff you have to go through to get one is pretty thorough.

And remember: background checks are only going to catch people who have been convicted of a crime and have never been in the mental health system. It WON'T catch those who are planning their FIRST massacre.

If I remember correctly, the guns used here, and at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Aurora were bought and registered legally. (will double check that in a sec)

How about doing background checks on everyone who is listed at a certain address. Yes, you're a fine upstanding citizen who means well, but the brother who still lives there is a total whacka-doodle. Or the teen-aged son who's clearly off his meds? Or Grandma who lives with you but is suffering from Dementia?

Should a gun be in those homes? I know nothing is perfect, but this shit has to stop.
 
There is NO way that a law will pass that will entail taking anyone's guns away. Laws can be passed to restrict NEW guns and their sales, but it won't be pretty if people feel like their guns are being taken away.

One aspect of the political conversation: supposedly he used two pistols and an assault rifle...the rifle would have been banned under the federal ban that expired a few years ago (some states have instituded their own since then, but not Conneticut.)

I still just can't wrap my head around the mindset of "I'm going to kill this person [which, ok, fine...you can have that one, but I don't understand the rest:] and I'm going to take a bunch of innocent people with me, children included."

Those are not the thoughts of a mentally-stable human being. (well, duh...that's the whole reason)
 
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I saw this online the other day:

http://www.suntimes.com/index.html

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.
 
First on the actual subject, I couldn't even believe this when I heard it's absolutely horrifying especially because we are talking about small children AND it's almost Christmas time (whether you are religious or not this is a holiday for kids and families).

On the gun control.

One thing that needs to be recognized about any type of law is that a thing being illegal is not the same as the thing being not available or difficult to get. All drugs harder than MJ are illegal but they are relatively easy and cheap to get. Hell speeding is illegal and it's something every single person in the world has done at least once.

Another thing that needs to be kept in mind is that guns are simply a tool, just like cars or planes. For the hell of it I looked up some stats on wikipedia for an earlier conversation and from 08-10 there have been 9.0 cases of gun related deaths per 100,000 in the US, of those only like 3.0/100,000 were homicides the rest were suicides or accidents (less than 1 don't remember the number right now and too lazy to look). By comparison in 11 alone 10.4/100,000 traffic fatalities were recorded. So even assuming all the homicide cases happened in 2010 you are about 3x as likely to die in a car...

This is of course not to mention the fact that terrorist attacks that generally kill more people are carried out using completely illegal and unlicensed explosives and in the case of 9/11 a couple of box cutters and airliners... If a crazy motherfucker wants to kill a bunch of people the laws will not stop him/her, it's a sad fact of life.
 
To be fair, the columbine students called themselves the "trench coat mafia." The news didn't invent that part of it...

I'm officially stopping reading anything else about this, after reading this idiot's comment:
27 people are killed in Newtown, CT. Let's think about this: A man with a mask, a military type vest and black clothes parks his car OUTSIDE the school gate. He walks up to the school right in front of the windows carrying four big guns. He goes to the LOCKED front door where he could be CAMERA CHECKED, and then he gets BUZZED IN. He goes to the principal's office while the announcements are playing, over the PA, to the whole school. Everyone in the school hears shots being fired. The school stays in session? The media does not mention "inside job" or "false flag"?

Now watch the rest of the charade play out. Did you notice how quickly the news went out, and how much detail they had about the shooter? How long does it usually take police to solve a crime? It is much quicker when the crime is staged, and timed to co-incide with a particular piece of legislation.
 
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If a crazy motherfucker wants to kill a bunch of people the laws will not stop him/her, it's a sad fact of life.

The goal is not to make it never ever happen (impossible to do), but to reduce the frequency, and possibly the extent. You mentioned cars, stuff like ESP and airbags don't make accidents impossible or un-deadly, but they reduce the frequency and the extent of accidents.
 
The goal is not to make it never ever happen (impossible to do), but to reduce the frequency, and possibly the extent. You mentioned cars, stuff like ESP and airbags don't make accidents impossible or un-deadly, but they reduce the frequency and the extent of accidents.

ESP and airbags are a completely different safety measure than trying to legislate a device out of existence. I mean, the philosophy isn't even remotely comparable. What would be more comparable is trying to make it illegal to drive a car without traction control.

It seems pretty clear to me that both sides of the gun debate are wrong. You cannot reduce violent crime by throwing armed citizens at the problem. You cannot reduce violent crime by banning the implements. Japan has no guns, crime is low. Mexico has outright banned guns, tons of violence. Texas and California, exactly the same violent crime rate in 2008, very different gun policy. I've looked at data for all 50 states, and most European and Asian countries. I can't find a correlation between gun control or lack of gun control and violent crime.

Crime is a result of social and economic factors that are way, way too numerable and chaotic to fix with a piece of legislation. Banning guns or arming citizens is like trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella.
 
Here's the point that is exactly the same: Each measure doesn't fully wipe out the problem. It just reduces the frequency and/or the extent.
Throwing out some measure for the sole reason that it won't fully wipe out the problem is a fallacy. This applies to many things, not just violence or cars. If you have a vaccine that reduces the death rate for some disease by 50%, should you discard it because it fails half the time? :no:
 
First of all I grieve for those who were killed in this horrible event. I can't even start to think how it must feel like as a parent or relative.

I won't get into the gun debate, but I have something somewhat related to add to the conversation. There are many examples of so called "suicide bridges" and many studies show that installing barriers or other preventive measures help reduce the overall number of suicides in that area. I.e. people are not killing themselves on another bridge or in another way. The same principle may apply here: make it harder to get hold of a gun and events like these might become less frequent. I should add though, that legislation alone is not enough to achieve this.
 
I will not sacrifice my liberty any farther for some perceived notion of "safety". If I could I would do away with most firearm laws already in place. Those who would curtail our rights are tantamount to oppressive dictators.
 
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Here's the point that is exactly the same: Each measure doesn't fully wipe out the problem. It just reduces the frequency and/or the extent.
Throwing out some measure for the sole reason that it won't fully wipe out the problem is a fallacy. This applies to many things, not just violence or cars. If you have a vaccine that reduces the death rate for some disease by 50%, should you discard it because it fails half the time? :no:

Except you do not see a fall of 50% in violent crime when either more citizens are armed or you restrict guns. I told you, I cannot find any, any correlation between violent crime rates in places that have various types of gun laws or lack of them, much less any causal link between violent crime and guns or lack of them. Even the idea that either measure reduces crime in any meaningful or worthwhile way is a blind assumption.
 
Except you do not see a fall of 50% in violent crime when either more citizens are armed or you restrict guns. I told you, I cannot find any, any correlation between violent crime rates in places that have various types of gun laws or lack of them, much less any causal link between violent crime and guns or lack of them. Even the idea that either measure reduces crime in any meaningful or worthwhile way is a blind assumption.

It's not a blind assumption. If you take the examples of Japan and mexico, you could almost skew it either way.

But I think the difference is: Mexico has supposedly strict gun laws, but lets face it...they don't exactly enforce them. Or even care honestly.

Japan has strict gun laws...but they DO enforce them. I think that's the difference.

I understand that a lot of people don't like the idea of anyone telling them what to do, or like the idea of "their toys" being taken away. But we've forgotten that while yes, we do have the 'right' to have guns...that every right comes with responsibility.

And we as a whole here in America (not pointing at every person individually) have shown that we cannot handle the responsibility. Not when even in the face of horrors like this, people still clutch their guns in their hands and scream "YOU CAN'T HAVE THEM! THEY'RE MINE!!"

My opinion is that what we have created as a gun loving society is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
 
I will not sacrifice my liberty any farther for some perceived notion of "safety". If I could I would do away with most firearm laws already in place. Those who would curtail our rights are tantamount to oppressive dictators.


No offense dude, this this sort of attitude frightens me.

In the wake of atrocities like this, you really think that doing away with gun laws would help? In what way exactly?

You want teachers to be armed next? You want even more guns in schools? What happens when a kid who is out of control at school takes one away from a teacher and they hose down their classroom? Then take their own life just because they were having a bad day?

Oh wait...that sort of WAS what happened. :cry:



Instead of worrying that you might lose the ability to arm yourself like the neighborhood Rambo, lets start thinking about how to keep the guns already out there out of the hands of whacka-doodles like this. These guns were bought and registered legally, but that didn't help.

So, lets maybe start thinking about ways to prevent things like this from happening again, before we try adding more guns to the mix. I don't have stats, but I can guarantee it wont help. It's just common sense.
 
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