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

[Amaris]

And yet in spite of that and the adoption of sidearms by many British police officers on the beat their nation still registers just a handful of gun murders per year.

Now how do you explain that?

It has to be mindset. Look at how England, Australia, Canada, and how they choose to view guns. Then look at the U.S.

We've made guns an integral part of our way of life, and not just in a protective sense, but in a rebellious sense. We want our guns so that we can always threaten the government with retribution should they somehow decide to take away our rights. It's the level of paranoia present, and massive pro-gun lobbying groups like the NRA play on it in order to fatten their coffers, while those very same people swallow every word they say.

 

[gturner]

And yet in spite of that and the adoption of sidearms by many British police officers on the beat their nation still registers just a handful of gun murders per year.

Now how do you explain that?

And when British criminals and mental patients could buy guns freely, they had even fewer gun murders, one year hitting zero. Their gun murder rate went up when they restricted guns. How do you explain that?

As far as your random invocation of Luxemborg. It's great they're homicide rate is more than Germany. Their rate is also half of ours.

From the Harvard Law Review, their murder rate is twice ours, at nine point one per hundred thousand, but their rate bounces around because the data set is so small, whereas Russia always has a higher murder rate than the US, and handguns are illegal there.

That's why the US Supreme Court not only couldn't find a positive public safety effect of DC's gun restrictions, which they sought to weigh against Constituional restrictions, they pointed to data showing the ban made things worse. When top government lawyers a criminologists can't make a case than gun restictions clearly decrease the homicide rate, and can't refute arguments that widespread gun ownership correlates to decreased homicide rates at the county, state, and international levels in countless studies, you really run out of coherent arguments that don't invoke magical thinking and childlike ignorance.

Thus the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution grants Americans the right to own useful, commonly used guns as a personal constitutional right. Good luck getting the Constitution amended.

 

[cooleddie74]

This is a bit of a tangent, but I need a place to rant...

Maryland's senior US Senator, Barbara Mikulski, came out with a statement today saying that the NRA should "come to the table" and be part of a discussion gun control. Not a particularly radical statement, IMO. Anyway, the part that's bothering me so much is people's reactions on Facebook and The Baltimore Sun's site. In addition to the expected vitriol that at least focusses on the subject, people have insulted... her weight, her hair color, her age, and her alleged "ugliness". Seriously, someone said we need "ugliness control, not gun control."

Talk about ad hominem attacks! What the hell is wrong with people?!

Yes, I've been on the internet long enough that I shouldn't be surprised. But it still upsets me.

Not that I want to encourage acting the same way in retaliation, but have some of you guys seen one of the country's leading gun lobby spokesmen and apologists for gun-related murders and violence?

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgYMOZD6xtc[/yt]

They have the gall to call Barbara Mikulski unattractive when that side has this misanthropic, dishonest fool as one of its premier spokespersons? I called him a "B & B Forehead Alien of the Week" in another thread. Call that rude if you like, but the man's extraordinarily unpleasant and a liar if you've ever seen any of his appearances in TV debates on gun control and violence....even moreso since last Friday.

Just saying, Gun Advocates. Check the air in your own tires before you go making fun of the other car's.

 

[gturner]

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?

 

[Starkers]

Apologies for reposting this from the man shoots girlfriend after watching Walking Dead thread but it seems appropirate. When people start talking crime rates going up relative to the ban on guns in the UK I find it a bit spurious really given that the banning of guns in the UK is unlikely to have had much of an impact on crime rates. We weren’t like the Wild West beforehand, it isn’t like every granny had a Saturday night special in her handbag and every homeowner had an M-16 under the bed, and for the majority of the population the post Dunblane legislation would have had very little impact on their daily lives.

I could quote stats from this year that shows crime rates in the UK continuing to fall as they have since ’95 (though any stats are open to interpretation, on the one hand there’s the question of whether people are reporting all crimes, but on the other it’s worth noting that something daft like 38% of reported gun crime in Scotland relates to air rifles!)

Still this is interesting

Overall, Branas's study found that people who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher.

…

http://www.newscientist.com/article...ncreases-risk-of-getting-shot-and-killed.html

This dovetails neatly with the view in the UK that carrying a knife makes you more likely to be stabbed.

This isn't gonna change your views, any more than your arguments will change mine. All I know is that I live in the UK and have never felt unsafe because I didn't have a gun. I haven't grown up around guns so I have a hard time understanding the viewpoint of many Americans regarding guns, in the same way I imagine many Americans wouldn't understand my viewpoint.

Oh yeah, and I live in Nottingham which, if it's to be believed, is the gun crime capital of the UK (or at least was portrayed as such a few years ago)

 

[Dick Whitman]

I called him a "B & B Forehead Alien of the Week" in another thread. Call that rude if you like, but the man's extraordinarily unpleasant and a liar if you've ever seen any of his appearances in TV debates on gun control and violence....even moreso since last Friday.

Yeah, that guy is fucking creepy. Its like he had a bad facelift or something.

 

[RJDiogenes]

And so much for the mental health discussion....

 

[gturner]

Apologies for reposting this from the man shoots girlfriend after watching Walking Dead thread but it seems appropirate. When people start talking crime rates going up relative to the ban on guns in the UK I find it a bit spurious really given that the banning of guns in the UK is unlikely to have had much of an impact on crime rates. We weren’t like the Wild West beforehand, it isn’t like every granny had a Saturday night special in her handbag and every homeowner had an M-16 under the bed, and for the majority of the population the post Dunblane legislation would have had very little impact on their daily lives.

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.

 

[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]

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]

Apologies for reposting this from the man shoots girlfriend after watching Walking Dead thread but it seems appropirate. When people start talking crime rates going up relative to the ban on guns in the UK I find it a bit spurious really given that the banning of guns in the UK is unlikely to have had much of an impact on crime rates. We weren’t like the Wild West beforehand, it isn’t like every granny had a Saturday night special in her handbag and every homeowner had an M-16 under the bed, and for the majority of the population the post Dunblane legislation would have had very little impact on their daily lives.

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/bushmasters_horrible_ad_campaign/

 

[SmoothieX]

^I can't get the quiz to load.

 

[datagal]

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.