MASSIVE Elementary School Shooting in CT *12-24 Maybe be dead

[teya]

JarodRussell wrote:

---

Do you mean the ETA part that you added after I quoted your post?

I added nothing after you quoted my post. The paragraphs you ignored were in the original. You just didn't bother to read them.

Any other accusations you'd like to hurl at me?

You've already made the assumption that, because I defend farmers & ranchers having the ability to protect their livestock, I've got an arsenal in the city--when my post said nothing about my owning guns at all.

[MacLeod]

And no one is arguing that nations have their own problems.

But out of those violent crimes how many ended in murder?

The stats for homicide are something like US 4.2 /100 000, UK 1.2 / 100 000, Or almost 4 times higher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._homicide_rate

So even with a higher violent crime rate, fewer people are murdered.

Conclusion whilst less restrictive gun laws might lead to a lower violent crime rate they lead to a higher murder rate.

Whilst no one wants to be the victim of a violent crime, they'll can recover from it. Last I checked you can't recover from being dead. Isn't the right to life more important?


And Chris Grayling is hardly in a position to speak saying his party was in Government for 8 of those last ten years.

[Data Holmes]

RAMA wrote:

---

Gun Deaths - 2011: Japan 48, Great Britain 8, Switzerland 34, Canada 52, Israel 58, Sweden 21, Germany 42, UNITED STATES 10,728

So? End the war on drugs, increase mental health awareness and treatment, shift the social structure to one based around tight families and the concept of family and individual honor as the supreme motivator, decrease the social stigma associated with sex and sexual fetishes...

Our high gun deaths has nothing to do with gun control. It has everything to do with our society, repression, and anger at the perception that "others have" or "others caused" and that those "others must pay".

Frosty the Snowman wrote:

---

This. Personally, I think right now is a great time to be talking about reforming gun control laws. The public is outraged about what happened. Would stricter gun control have prevented this...

Funny. I heard the same thing after 9/11. People are outraged. Now is the time we should talk about curtailing civil liberties and expanding the intelligence and police power of the US. Would more laced wiretapping, greater security restrictions, enhanced interrogation techniques, renditions, and total invasions of foreign countries have prevented this...

Anytime someone uses a tragic event to extend and push a political agenda, it is sickening.

[gturner]

MacLeod wrote:

---

And no one is arguing that nations have their own problems.

But out of those violent crimes how many ended in murder?

The stats for homicide are something like US 4.2 /100 000, UK 1.2 / 100 000, Or almost 4 times higher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._homicide_rate

So even with a higher violent crime rate, fewer people are murdered.

Conclusion whilst less restrictive gun laws might lead to a lower violent crime rate they lead to a higher murder rate.

Wrong conclusion. Look at your list again and note that there are over one hundred counties with a higher homicide rate than the US, and I doubt any of them has more guns than we do. Almost all of the Western hemisphere outside Canada, including Cuba and Greenland, has a higher homicide rate than the US. The US white murder rate is about the same as Canada.

Meanwhile this blog post was interesting.

This problem is too big for me to handle on my own. Sometimes there are no good options. So you just pray for grace and trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense.


I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

What do you do when your genius son is a violent ball of plotting, seething, homicidal rage?

[Squiggy]

NightmareB4Holmes wrote:

---

Anytime someone uses a tragic event to extend and push a political agenda, it is sickening.

It's a political agenda to try and keep the tragedy from happening again.

ETA: I'd love to see you bitch about how Huckabee or Victoria Jackson are using this as an excuse to talk about how there's no prayer in schools. But no, you're only complaining because people are trying to take away your toys.

[cooleddie74]

MacLeod wrote:

---

And no one is arguing that nations have their own problems.

But out of those violent crimes how many ended in murder?

The stats for homicide are something like US 4.2 /100 000, UK 1.2 / 100 000, Or almost 4 times higher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._homicide_rate

So even with a higher violent crime rate, fewer people are murdered.

Thank you.

I'm glad someone is providing deeper context to the "there are fewer violent so-and-so's per this-many-people in America so I'm not really seeing the bigger problem here" routine.

Math can be maniupulated to make many things sound less horrible and encourage us to get distracted once again and not take better and more proactive measures.

"Only 60-70 million out of almost 3 billion people on the planet died during the course of the Second World War, so as you can clearly see the percentage of fatalities is actually quite low. In addition, those 60-70 million fatalities were not incurred all at once but over a period of almost a decade so the per-year death tolls were lower out of a total world population approaching 3 billion. A person's chances of perishing in the conflict were not as great as some would like you to believe, and in fact there were some nations that never even participated in the war."

Now how does that sound? Does it still make you feel any better about it?

[MacLeod]

gturner wrote:

---

Wrong conclusion. Look at your list again and note that there are over one hundred counties with a higher homicide rate than the US, and I doubt any of them has more guns than we do. Almost all of the Western hemisphere outside Canada, including Cuba and Greenland, has a higher homicide rate than the US. The US white murder rate is about the same as Canada.

Meanwhile this blog post was interesting.

What do you do when your genius son is a violent ball of plotting, seething, homicidal rage?

Who said anything about the number of guns? The link I provided to wikipedia was homicide rates per 100 000 people.

And of those countries with higher homicide rates than the US how many have more restrictive gun laws than the US?

[Locutus of Bored]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

---

Huh? What did I do?

Oh, for fuck's sake. I'm clearly talking about the guy who wrote the commentary and attributed it to Morgan Freeman (you know, that thing you linked to and I quoted) and not you. It's not even slightly ambiguous. I swear you do this kind of stuff on purpose.

[gturner]

MacLeod wrote:

---

Who said anything about the number of guns? The link I provided to wikipedia was homicide rates per 100 000 people.

And of those countries with higher homicide rates than the US how many have more restrictive gun laws than the US?

Virtually all of them. Mexico has restrictive gun laws and only one official gun source, very low gun ownership, and a vastly higher murder rate. Cuba's gun restrictions can be imagined. For most of these countries, the government's policy and that of the ruling class has been "For gods sakes, don't arm the peasants."

In the UK, after they tightly restricted firearms, their crime rate skyrocketed. Austria greatly increased firearm restictions after a school massacre, and they got another school massacre.

The world homicide rates vary by a factor of about a hundred, virtually independent of gun laws or firearm prevlance. Switzerland has a fantastically low homicide rate and everyone has assault rifles, even teens, often fully automatic. The US military has a very low homicide rate yet includes large numbers of male teens with machine guns. And of course, the most violent US cities generally don't allow most civilians to possess a gun.

Other factors are at work, and of course the world's violent death rate was vastly higher before guns were even invented.

[MacLeod]

^So your moving onto crime rate, that's ok.

So the UK might have a higher crime rate per capita than the US. Yet even with a higher crime rate per capitia it still has a lower homicide rate per capita.

Something like 70% of the homicides in the US are gun related, compared to something like 10% in the UK.

So using the 2010 figures for the US and the 2011 figures for UK, the US was something like 13 000 (9000 firearm), the UK something like 650 (60 firearm related 300 or so accouting for population size difference). Which means something like 3000 murders in the US weren't firearm related, Whilst in the UK it was 580 as the UK population is roughly one fifth of the US factoring into popultion that would equate to ~2900 or roughly the same as the US.

So tighter gun laws tend to equal fewer gun related deaths. Of course there are exceptions.

And lets be clear having strict gun laws doesn't mean that this type of mass murder can never happen again, it's all about minimising the chance of it occuring again.

What if it was your child that was brutally murdered?

Also countries might record crime in a different way, which might skew the figures somewhat.

And of course other factors can be involved, no one is denying that. But you have to tackle as many issues as you can. In order to prevent tradegies like this. So that might include mental illness, but that doesn't mean you can't also look at reviewing the gun laws.

[Data Holmes]

Festivus Toad wrote:

---

It's a political agenda to try and keep the tragedy from happening again.

ETA: I'd love to see you bitch about how Huckabee or Victoria Jackson are using this as an excuse to talk about how there's no prayer in schools. But no, you're only complaining because people are trying to take away your toys.

I'm against prayer in school. I'm also against the pledge of allegiance in school as well. Those aren't the points of discussion in this thread though. No one here is seriously advocating the government force the introduction of prayer in school. No one is advocating we turn every public school into an "Evangelical school". If they were, I'd be arguing with them in here as well.


People are seriously advocating, promoting, and pushing for the removal of rights from law abiding citizens, and adding more gun laws.

[Gryffindorian]

SantaEddie74 wrote:

---

People such as myself get a bit tired of hearing weak statistical excuses made for roughly 10,000 gun murders happening in this country each and every year. ”Well if the U.S. had the population of Britain or Belgium and there were just [insert random number] guns per person in the country and the Moon was in its Gibbous phase with the Comet Kohoutek traveling through the Constellation Lyra....”

Just stop it. By almost any metric the U.S. has one of the highest gun murder rates in the world and the worst in the advanced industrialized world. Every year we lose more people to pointless gun violence than we have in Afghanistan and Iraq *combined* since 9/11. Every year. All the numbers cooking and deft twisting of them to try to make them sound nowhere near as bad isn't going to change reality and we can't base our national gun crime policies on manipulating the numbers to protect the gun lobby's interests.

10,000 people a year is a statistic that's far more important than what the gun lobby wants and thinks and we as a society need to grow up and face what our culture has become over the years.

I would like your permission to print and laminate this post. I'd like to give copies to all my friends and family for Christmas this year. Thanks.

[Squiggy]

NightmareB4Holmes wrote:

---

I'm against prayer in school. I'm also against the pledge of allegiance in school as well. Those aren't the points of discussion in this thread though. No one here is seriously advocating the government force the introduction of prayer in school. No one is advocating we turn every public school into an "Evangelical school". If they were, I'd be arguing with them in here as well.


People are seriously advocating, promoting, and pushing for the removal of rights from law abiding citizens, and adding more gun laws.

Yes. Because honestly we could give less of a fuck of your right to pretend to play Army than the rights of people to live.

Personally I think it's a stupid right. An archaic right. A right that has no place in a modern society. A right that already has a metric shit-ton of encumbrances on it. It's a right that belongs to be casually ignored like it's equally irrelevant cousin, the 3rd Amendment.

It's time for us a country to put our loud toys away instead of shrugging our shoulders and saying "well, it's the cost of freedom.

Fuck your freedom to shoot stuff. That's all you want, and I don't give a shit about it.

*gasp*

Want to own a gun? Join the National Guard.

[Data Holmes]

Festivus Toad wrote:

---

Yes. Because honestly we could give less of a fuck of your right to pretend to play Army than the rights of people to live.

Personally I think it's a stupid right. An archaic right. A right that has no place in a modern society. A right that already has a metric shit-ton of encumbrances on it. It's a right that belongs to be casually ignored like it's equally irrelevant cousin, the 3rd Amendment.

It's time for us a country to put our loud toys away instead of shrugging our shoulders and saying "well, it's the cost of freedom.

Fuck your freedom to shoot stuff. That's all you want, and I don't give a shit about it.

*gasp*

Want to own a gun? Join the National Guard.

Your really allowed to say that in Misc?

[gturner]

But one year the UK had zero firearm homicides back when everyone there carried guns. Now it's one of the most violent countries in Europe.

One of the problems is that virtually no gun law would've prevented the Newton massacre because the mother owned the guns that were used, and she wasn't on anyone's radar. You could try banning guns, but the cities that did that are always vying with each other as murder capitals. The massacre in Newton would be a good week for Chicago, Washington, or New York, where guns are banned. In contrast, most US towns that have guns coming out of their ears have a lower murder rate than the UK.

When a psychotic killer is targeting first graders he could use a hammer and do just as well, perhaps better because a hammer wouldn't have alerted the whole school, but more likely they'd just do more planning and preparation, like the theater shooter in Colorado who was making bombs and booby traps.

More productive responses would be for schools to assume that they will be targeted by a psychotic killer under any scenario of gun contol, since SWAT team members have mentally unstable relatives as often as other families do, and go from there. Why can't the principal's office have a panic button that locks all the classroom doors so nobody can get into them? Why not make sure those doors can stand up to some severe assaults? Why not take some basic disaster mitigation steps, because the last gun in town is almost guaranteed to be the one in the hands of the nutcase.