Dear Connecticut...

[Dave W]

^ ^ ^

Yeah, you're right, Uwe. It's all the guns' fault. I guess that explains why Chicago, with a concealed carry ban, has 3 1/2 times the murder rate of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where concealed carry is legal. Or why Washington D.C.'s murder rate has dropped to a 50-year low since the Supreme Court overturned its complete handgun ban.

Of course, correlation isn't necessarily causation, but that applies to your conclusions too.

[Dave W]

About a week after I started junior high (7th grade) there was a mass killing at an elementary school a few miles away. Three adults and three kids died, other kids were maimed. What kind of easily available gun did the killer use? None. He set off a bomb in a suitcase. I found an article about it, published on the 50th anniversary of the bombing: "We had no psychologists," he said, "no counseling, no lawsuits." It was big news locally, of course. There was some national news coverage. But nothing even remotely like the wall-to-wall media circuses that we see now. There was no "grief counseling" for people with no remote connection to the event, no candlelight vigils, etc. It was a tragedy, and somehow the living went on without people 1500 miles away being interviewed by local yokel reporters about how they feel and local stations offering online chats with psychiatrists.

[eb2]

This is pure evil, and I can't fathom it.  I will suspend myself from commenting on gun control.  It is for another time, and I feel both sides have already been opened up enough. 

But I do feel, having dealt with it personally several times, that there is a greater issue with mental illness that gets overlooked and lost.  Too many families when confronted with an unstable personality tend to deal with it in ways that the need for treatment gets put off.  They are ashamed how others would think of their family member, fear for the loved one's safety in treatment, hope it will go away, figure it won't be that bad, that the things they see or hear were just aberrent behaviors. Many times the parent starts behaving irrationally in response. The thought often is if it were bad, then someone would notice it, and they are already being "seen" by someone.  From what I am reading, there were loads of signals, and the firearms were owned to protect the mom from the child. People with issues of rage and violence typically don't use firearms, but anyone who works in law enforcement knows that the volume of cases involving blunt and edged weapons and chemical attacks is pretty dense. That stuff never makes the news. Every state has some level of protective service. CALL them. Charles Whitman tried to tell people himself. 

[rahock]

Gun control legislation is a non-starter. Even reinstating the assault weapons ban is a non-starter and would have done nothing to prevent a crime committed with handguns legally owned by the perpetrator's mother.

One of the networks had a "mental health expert" blathering about how "this is the face of mental illness." Bullshit. It was an unspeakably evil act done by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

This is a terrible tragedy for the families and friends of the victims and for the town. It is NOT a "great national tragedy," and the news coverage trying to make it so is just encouraging the next evil bastard to kill even more innocent people. I said the same thing after the Aurora shootings, where we saw people with no connection to the victims make themselves part of a spectacle of public grief. Yet people have learned nothing, and the media even more so.

I see this pretty much the same as you   There are a whole lot of sick, evil SOBs out there and every time something like this happens it seems to mean that another month or so down the road there is another sick, evil  SOB who is going to try to top it. I shudder to think what the next one is going to be and I find little comfort in KNOWING the news coverage will take it up a notch too .
Rick

[uwe]

Apples and oranges, Dave, apples and oranges. We're not talking about homicide rates in urban centers, household violence in trailer parks, not about gang wars, not about organized crime, not the Uma Bomber or armed robbery and theft. All the above are relatively insulated against gun control, I agree.

Our scenario is "nutcase doesn't lke Mondays and proceeds to massacre a few people wantonly chosen by him or just unlucky enough to be around". Mostly, those people don't build explosive booby traps in the solitude of their home for months on end nor do they book flights to Syria to buy derelict Sturmgewehre because gun trade has ended in the US. They grab the gun in close proximity or buy it at the gun shop around the corner. Tougher gun laws won't prevent all these tragedies but wouldn't they even be justified if they prevented just one? Philosophical, not political question.

And Dave, for a man as smart as you, it pains me to see you taking up the populist "blame the media!"-argument. Based on that argument, we should ban all literature and films on the Holocaust, caterpillar Auschwitz into the ground and just pretend it never happened, life goes on after all except for a couple of unlucky jews. Otherwise we risk repetiton genocides. Evil goes away if you just ignore it.

[rahock]

The media definately has a place here in reporting what has happened and the world has a need to know. It just gets WAY out of control and gets so over covered, and again , the end is result is the nutcase that feels obligated to go for the new nutcase record a month down the road and do something even worse.
Rick

[Highlander]

Sorry, I didn't really mean to make it political.

As you can see, an apology was not necessary...

A weapon of any kind, from the pen to the nuclear, once released from the (Pandora's) box, is in the public domain from whence it will remain... all we can do is try and protect the innocent, and the only innocents here are the children... every single one of us knows right from wrong and the only difference here is the choices we make...
We all have opinions, some stronger than others, but lets keep this a place for even-keeled discussions and remember this thread for the reasons Denis started it: to offer simple condolences to those who have suffered most...

Good grief... common sense... and from me of all people...

[Blackbird]

Why does a person even need a gun?

[Highlander]

In certain societies, in certain environments, where hunting for survival is required, I can fully understand the need for one... a darn site more efficient than a knife or a spear...

[rahock]

Why does a person even need a gun?

If the bad guy has one, and rest assured he does, then I should have one also, and rest assured I do.
A big part of the problem is that the law abiding citizen with a concealed carry permit is regulated on where he can carry his gun. Schools and most movie theaters are no carry zones, so the law abiding citizen taking his kids to school or going to a show leaves his gun at home while the bad guy shows up and massacres dozens of people knowing the law abiding people will be unarmed.
I would love to see extensive media coverage on a bad guy walking in to a school or movie theater with an assualt rifle and a soccer mom or a 75 year old woman pulling a Glock out of her purse and empty a 15 shot clip into the bad guy. This media coverage may actually stop the next bad guy.
Rick

[Rob]

I have to "target" and agree with Gary's comment about the notariety of these sub-species. Apparently that is what motivates them to perform such an acts of evil. 

Secondly, Dave an I are about the same age so cranking back to when I was 10 (1960) the population in the US has nearly doubled from about 165 to 330 Million people.  Don't have any idea how that impacts the situation but it seems plausible that the larger the sample the more mutants are created.  That is all.

[westen44]

Tragedies like this will keep happening, probably increasingly, until the mindset dealing with them changes.  Recycling old ideas which obviously don't work seems pointless. 

[the mojo hobo]

Why does a person even need a gun?

Americans need guns so they can revolt against a tyrannical government. Remember the Founding Fathers were revolutionaries and they formed our government in a manner to attempt to limit the opportunity for a tyrant to gain power, but the final preventative is the liberty of the citizens to arm themselves and revolt if necessary.

[the mojo hobo]

This is a terrible tragedy for the families and friends of the victims and for the town. It is NOT a "great national tragedy," and the news coverage trying to make it so is just encouraging the next evil bastard to kill even more innocent people. I said the same thing after the Aurora shootings, where we saw people with no connection to the victims make themselves part of a spectacle of public grief. Yet people have learned nothing, and the media even more so.

Dave has it right. While this is a great tragedy, it is not a national tragedy. I will not obey the presidential order to fly the flag at half staff.

And that is all I will say about it because any more would be seen as political discussion.

[uwe]

Americans need guns so they can revolt against a tyrannical government. Remember the Founding Fathers were revolutionaries and they formed our government in a manner to attempt to limit the opportunity for a tyrant to gain power, but the final preventative is the liberty of the citizens to arm themselves and revolt if necessary.

Yeah, right, tell that to the Connecticut parents. Their children have died as collateral damage so you can continue to revolt against tyrants. No doubt a small price to pay. No, that ain't political, it is collective insanity.

Regards from Old Europe (and how Hitler would have been prevented if German households had been better armed in 1933, simple as that)

Uwe