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

[Starkers]

Well it's important that we prepare for a zombie apocalypse rather than protect little children from being gunned down Seriously after that comment I'm not sure you're someone I want to debate with.

I'm not sure I understand your comment about us exporting our potential troublemakers?

And I'm also not sure you even get the logic of your argument re prison. You lock a bunch of violent men in a confined space and are then surprised when they're violent to one another?

[Tora Ziyal]

Interesting article on mental health and violence in today's New York Times.

[Squiggy]

gturner wrote:

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The Newton killer didn't use an assault rifle, which are rarely used in mass murders {only 6% of the time}. They use fire in 12% of mass killings, and get a higher death toll per attack with fire than with guns. Only a very non-representative subset of mass murders make national news, leading to all sorts of wildly inaccurate impressions, bordering on media fads. Serial killing was virtually unreported and unknown under J Edgar Hoover because he had no interest in psycholoical profiling. As soon as he left, serial killers were everywhere. Sometime in the 80's the media decided that mass killings largely began in the mid-60's, which is wildly inaccurate. Kentucky had school shootings prior to th Civil War. The 1920's and 30's were a bloodbath of mass murder. Very little about the attacks have changed since at least 1900, other than the reporting, which is driven by ad revenue, and more recent school attacks carried out by students instead of adults, which may be an aspect of media obsessed kids and a violence obsessed media working in a feedback cycle.

The worst attack on a US elementary school was by a school administator who spent months packing the building with dynamite and pyrotol, then beat his wife to death with a hammer, set his barn on fire to distract the fire department, blew up one wing of the school {another wing had 500 pounds of explosives that failed to detonate}, and then while the building was burning drove up to the other administrators and responders and detonated his car bomb, killing twice as many kids as the Newton massacre and about the same number of adults. That was in 1927. There's still no way to stop such a well planned attack, but the following year we stopped letting people have pyrotol, so school kids are safe now...

ETA: info on pyrotol at google books. Eight cents a pound for war surplus smokeless powder packed like dynamite. Won't someone think of the children?

Again with the goalposts.

We're talking about shootings. In the United States. Today.

[MacLeod]

gturner wrote:

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Part of that is that you largely exported your potential troublemakers, sending them to places that now have much higher homicide rates than the US or UK. Interesting factoid: US state and local prisons have the same homicide rate as the rest of the country, even though weapons are completely banned and everyone lives in a literal police state with guards watching every move.

Other interesting fact: Under no scenario does the UK survive a zombie apocalypse because they don't have a high enough concentation of firearms and people trained for head shots. France, Germany, Italy, and Poland, however, will make it and rescue the few surviving British holed up in bars, and make them their chumps.

Fact never to be spoken: British Americans probably have about the same murder rate as the UK, and African Americans have about the same murder rate as Africa, hitting 50 homicides per 100,000 in the nineties, whereas the overall US rate is 5, the white US rate is 2.5 to 3.5, and the European rate is 0.9 to 10. Hispanic rates are also high, as were Italian rates in the past.

So what we invariably do whenever a white nutcase kills a bunch of whites is pass new gun laws so we can round up and arrest blacks and hispanics, which seems to be the consensus in this thread.

I think you're the one bringing ethic background into this, if theortically a ban an assult rifles became law it would impact everyone equally.

It doesn't matter what colour the vitim is or the perpetrator is, the end result is still a needless death. If a ban on assult rifles saved even one life wasn't it worth it?

After all when the US declared independance from the UK part of that declartion was "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", note how Life is listed first.

You would still have hunting rifles to go hunting with, pistols for personnel/home defense.

And the US 2nd Ammendment makes no mention of ammunition, just the right to bear arms. So in theory ammunition could be resticted without violting the letter of the 2nd ammendment.

And you still haven't answered the question would you still feel the same way regarding guns if it was your child that was brutally murdered with one in a incidnet similair to this one?

[JarodRussell]

Just what is it with this obsession to own a gun? I don't get it.

[Hound of UIster]

Symbol of manliness.

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/17/bush...e_ad_campaign/

[SmoothieX]

^I can't get the quiz to load.

[datagal]

JarodRussell wrote:

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Just what is it with this obsession to own a gun? I don't get it.

I have been asking that same question for years.
I still don't underestand myself.

[Scout101]

Overcompensating for something? Paranoia? Fear that their 'stuff' is going to be taken by someone else (although usually their stuff isn't very much to begin with), so the gun gives them measure of safe feelings, or maybe in general the feeling that they are rather small and insignificant in the grand scheme, so the gun makes them feel that they have a measure of power and control that's otherwise missing?

Not that they're all gonna go nutcase and rampage, but knowing that it's there gives them a feeling that they'd have some sort of control if King George came to take away their stuff.

In theory, the line about having guns to protect citizens from the government overstepping their bounds is tossed out a lot, but in realtiy, it's about 150 years behind the times. Up until around the first World War, having a few hunting rifles and training MAY have put you on equal with the military's arms, and likely you could do something about it. Since then, the military tech has gotten a TINY bit more advanced than that, and the army increased 1000-fold. If Uncle Sam comes to get your gun, he's gonna get it. If he wants to just kill you, you'll be overrun by a tank brigade, taken out from miles away by a predator drone, or just rounded up by the large standing army. Your trusty hunting rifle won't even slow them down. Not even with all your hunting buddies holed up with you. Not even the crazy ones with body armor and multiple machine guns. Not sure how the illusion of any power in this situation still holds up. I'm going to last exactly as long as the most prepared gun nut, and all i've got is a paintball gun. At least a couple guys are gonna look silly with pink paint on their uniforms when they drag me in...

[Gryffindorian]

Guns are only good to have around in case of an alien invasion, just like in War of the Worlds or the The Sign.

[Scout101]

Of course, alien invaders that successfully travelled light-years to attack us are likely to be a LITTLE more advanced than we are, so bullets probably aren't gonna do much but make noise...

[Squiggy]

Bacteria or water though...that'll get'em.

[Data Holmes]

Miss Chicken wrote:

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How do you know that she choose her 'kids' over him, or are you are just pulling a theory out from your arse.

They are now saying that his mother died at the house, and that she might have worked at the school in the past as a volunteer not as a teacher.

Huh. Adam Lanza may have snapped because his mother was going to have him committed, and targeted Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown after killing his mother early Friday because he believed she loved the school “more than she loved him,” and was committing him so she could spend more time there.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/12/18...#ixzz2FRO96hZQ

[gturner]

^ That sounds likely. The perp in the Bath Michigan school bombing wanted to kill all the town's children as vengeance for not electing him to some city office, so he spent a year in preparation and even left a sign saying "Killers are made, not born."

It's not unlikely that the mother had the weapons to protect herself and others from her son in case he went on a rampage, and any measures she might have been using to keep them secure were methodically undermined by the determined psycho. That would imply that she'd also had lots of contact with public health officials and the police, which we might learn about as the investigation procedes.

[RJDiogenes]

Tora Noel wrote:

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Interesting article on mental health and violence in today's New York Times.

That's weird. Lots of contradictions and mixed messages. But they have it right in the second-to-last paragraph, at least.