[BREAKING] School Shooting in Conn. at Elementary School

+1.

I do not own a gun, nor do I plan to buy one. That said, while alcohol, cars can all kill people...it's only when they are used outside their intended purpose that cause harm to others.

I would guarantee you..the real people to blame are the drug companies. They can be blamed for any of the problems this country is having. From obesity to killings.

 

Go on....

 

lol blaming the drug companies... that's hilarious

 

I am pretty interested to hear where you are going with this, please in all seriousness elaborate.

 

lol the drug companies aren't the cause..

they're certainly part of the picture you're trying to paint but to say they're the main cause is a little too reductionist

 

There will always be people troubled with mental/emotional issues. Always. They exist today in every culture of the world. I'm all for finding new ways to address those issues...more comprehensive ways. That's good for everyone.

But the ease of access to weapons that allow for mass killings (automatic weapons, assault weapons, etc) in this country is why these events happen with such frequency and why gun violence in the United States is so significantly inflated compared to the rest of the world.

We've distorted a 200 year old clause written in a context of a fledgling country that didn't have a standing army regarding muskets that took 30 seconds or so to reload after each shot....and we've applied to it virtually anyone being able to buy automatic assault rifles in this fantasy notion that one day we'll be able to defend ourselves from a government that has enough weaponry to destroy the world about 4 times over. For that reason, a kid with all sorts of mental issues has no problem at all finding and acquiring exactly the sort of weaponry to carry out whatever sick, demented fantasy he cooks up. And literally on the day of the event, we'll have a bunch of people standing up to argue how he should have that right in the face of the dead still laying in pools of blood...or rather, that we really can't talk about it because it's all too sensitive.

I'm not sure there's another issue that pisses me off more than this one.

 

Nice post, MadMax.

(switching gears slightly) -- from what I understand in the reporting, the kid stole the weapons from his Mother. So why did she have an arsenal like that? Strikes me as really, really odd. Unless she got them for her boys to use in target practice, or unless she got them for her safety.

 

Clearly becauase she was a patriot standing at the ready to defend herself from a tyrannical government.

All of these guns were purchased legally as I understand it. All of them. Not one gun law broken in the acquisition of all of these.

You can find the Bushmaster on Wal Mart's website. Isn't that neat?

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/1...own-in-connecticut-school-massacre/?hpt=hp_t1

[Updated at 8:45 a.m. ET] The suspect in the Connecticut school shooting may have had access to at least five guns, a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation said Saturday. Three weapons were recovered from the school on Friday: a semi-automatic .223 caliber rifle made by Bushmaster found in a car in the school parking lot, and two pistols made by Glock and a Sig Sauer found with suspected gunman Adam Lanza's body, a law enforcement source said previously.

 

For the record, while he may have had access to them, no automatic weapons were used in yesterday's killings.

This is interesting:


Obama administration, Congress quietly let school security funds lapse

http://www.washingtonguardian.com/washingtons-school-security-failure

 

Aside from the obvious idiocy of comparing guns to cars, if you want implement a strict regulatory regime for guns in the same way that we do for cars I'm all for it.

Strict licensing, annual inspections, mandatory insurance - it will be expensive for gun owners but worth it. You enjoy your guns, the rest of us enjoy a less-gunnish safer world.

 

Very well said, MadMax. Like I always tell my friends, they are merchants of death and violence, and an insane nation bends over backwards to protect their trade at all costs in the name of a so-called "constitutional right". It is time for Americans to seriously re-evaluate what the social contract between government and the people really is in the 21st century.

 

Australia did a gun buy-back program. It worked, and gun deaths plummeted. It is time to re-evaluate the American social contract. Even Israel and Switzerland, the two countries gun advocates like to evoke most frequently in supporting their argument, did not see gun crime decrease significantly until they severely tightened their gun regulations -- Israel for example requires you to have a compelling reason why you need a gun (live or operate business in a settlement, work a dangerous job, etc.), and all these countries require periodic review of ownership.

Even if you don't ban guns, you can regulate them. You can start by enforcing laws everyone pretty much agrees upon. Studies show that US states with at least one meaningful restriction on guns show a strong negative correlation to gun deaths.

Funny enough, the study also shows a minimal correlation between incidences of mental illness and gun deaths.

The truth is, yes, people kill people, but that fact is not location-specific. Ease of gun access is a clear differentiator.

 

Huh? How long has the AR15 been around? Since the 1700's no doubt.

Drugs are designed to deal with illnesses, they're not prescribed to kill you. Guns kill things, that's what they do, that's why they exist. It's just a terrible comparison, dugs/cars/cholesterol (heart disease is the leading cause of death in this country after all) vs guns.

 

I know quite a few folks that own ARs and seems like the only use for them is to shoot them at the range and talk about how they shoot and if they're 'good' or not.

Really, what's the purpose of owning something like this? Guns are used to kill, PERIOD. They don't help you get from point A to point B...they don't help you relax after a long day at work. They are made with the sole purpose of tearing a hole through a living being and they can be used by the owner in anyway they see fit.

We have a society composed of a good portion of mentally unstable individuals that have easy access to these weapons. Is it really a stretch to see how this would lead to the situations that are occuring now? Especially now that they know how easy it is to kill 20-30 people before they can get taken out? They'll be famous and their story will be told and remembered.

There are two reasons why these people of recent have been killed...1) the shooters have had mental stability issues and 2) they have access to firearms. There will always be mentally unstable folks...and thanks to some folks that attach their egos and preceived "freedom" to a mass killing device, there will probably always be firearms too.

 

Serious question: what happens if someone borrows my car and causes $400,000 of damage by running into a storefront, and what if the borrower even kills someone. I know he is up on manslaughter charges, but what happens to me, the owner of the car, and my insurance?

You can see the obvious path I'm making towards the idea of firearm insurance.

 

this guy writes very well:

Essay: Americans, united in horror for a moment
Posted Friday, Dec. 14, 2012
BY TED ANTHONY
AP National Writer

Now and then, thanks to the strange intimacy of technology, there are times in modern American lives when our most momentous and harrowing experiences have been shared.

In the days when radios were still furniture, we listened and poured out into the streets on V-E Day and V-J Day. Comforted by Walter Cronkite's voice, we mourned around the collective video campfire when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Through the eyes of correspondents in the desert, we watched during the first Gulf War as the Scuds and Patriot missiles streaked through the skies.

The world is more fragmented now, the national watercooler a relic of another, rapidly receding age. Now we can choose, sometimes right down to the word, what information we receive. We can surround ourselves with the likeminded, or we can dive into oceans of opposition and try to hold our own. Where once we only listened and watched, now, by the millions, we shout.

Sometimes it seems that we share so little. And yet, amid all of this fragmentation, some things still stop us in our tracks, make us think, make us talk, make us look to each other, make us feel as if, somehow, we're one in shock and tragedy.

"There's no words," said Richard Wilford, the father of a second-grader who survived. But, of course, there were. In the post-my-status-update, have-my-say America where we now live, there are always words.

A president, the father of two daughters, tried to summon them, delivering a statement on behalf of the country and struggling not to weep. The familiar, antiseptic words of police officials and the stammerings of shaken parents played out on multiple cable networks. And, of course, Americans talked amongst themselves, too: Tweet after tweet and post after post - millions of them by midafternoon - united people in an inadvertently crowd-sourced attempt to make sense of the unfathomable.

Why? Because, as Barack Obama said Friday afternoon, "these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children."

Words like "our" and "we" - the "we" of that famous phrase "We, the people," not incidentally - can sometimes seem hard to come by in America these days. Division, not unity, feels like the dominant trait.

But one of the pieces of common ground we still seize - no matter how much we differ on the methods - is the welfare of, and deep love of, our children. And the abrupt loss of 20 of them seemed, for an afternoon, to stop a nation cold.

Twenty children who will not have children, who in turn will not have children, who in turn will not have children. Dozens of parents who will not watch their child grow to adulthood, graduate, come home for the holidays, walk down the aisle. Scores of grandparents who will look across the generations and see less than they would have 24 hours before. Hundreds of accomplishments that will go unaccomplished. Inventions that will not be invented. Good deeds that will not be committed. Ideas that will not be expressed. Romances that will never happen and kindnesses that will never be shared.

As we watched and talked about those losses amid the cacophony of millions of people saying millions of things, it was hard not to notice the people who converged upon Sandy Hook Elementary School so quickly to do what needed to be done - to help.

Years ago, Fred Rogers - you know him as Mr. Rogers - identified those people as the ones to watch when bad things unfolded on television.

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping,'" he once said. "To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers - so many caring people in this world."

The central American narrative casts us as a nation of individualists, a people rugged and intrepid enough to go it alone. We love that imagery. Yet the republic's most fundamental tagline - e pluribus unum - means "from many, one."

That includes a one, yes, but also a many. And when death and tears and scenes of fallen children come calling upon America 11 days before Christmas, the many try to become the one, if only for a moment.

And the 21st century's ways of connecting - the social networks that allow us to talk to strangers we never would have come across even 20 years ago - both help and hinder that effort.

They permit us to watch a horrific event like this in a strange chamber - with a crowd but alone, conversing about shock and grief through fingers on the keyboard and the smartphone. Trying to connect but, in the end, merely contributing another fragment of conversation in an ocean of opinions more roiling than ever before.

"Remarks are not literature," the writer Gertrude Stein once said. We still haven't found out precisely what to do with the millions of remarks our age can generate instantaneously. But events like Friday's shootings, and the way we experience them nowadays, summon questions with which we still wrestle:

When millions of people have the power of global opinion, how can it be harnessed? At what point are the words turned into something tangible? Or, in the end, are the remarks all that there is?

Now that we can all talk, what should we all do?

http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/12/14/v-print/4485762/essay-americans-united-in-horror.html

EDITOR'S NOTE - Ted Anthony writes about American culture for The Associated Press. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted

 

I just got out of our kiddo's Little Gym class. It breaks my heart that these kids were just three years older than the precious souls I saw today.

We've lost. I have no faith that this will ever get any better. We just have to hope and pray we're not around when another one of these people freaks out and decides to take a weapon they can get too easily and kill innocent people. When one side refuses to even acknowledge that there might even be an issue with the accessibility of these weapons and instead a lot of them want to blame God being removed from schools, it's exhibit A that this will never get better. Good luck everyone.

 

You're missing his point. Entirely.

People talk about weed being a gateway drug. It's nothing compared to these opiate/amphetamine based drugs being prescribed kids to 'fix' behavioral issues.

 

I think this is what they where using in the 1700s

 

I don't think they knew his role when they took him in. I'm guessing it's procedure or simply a precaution. Probably got cleared as a suspect after being interrogated.

The guy entered the school at the only time the doors weren't locked or monitored. Yeah, gun control, and not school security/safety, should totally be the main topic here

I dont think people have an issue with it being discussed, but with posters who get too into it going back and forth multiple times and turn it into just a gun control thread. It's hard to discuss anything else when the gun control posts are coming in great numbers and speed.