Connecticut elementary school shooting

myp said:

Certainly different times, but the massacres happened then just as they do now. Question is if we can limit them without paying too great a price. I think we can.

For one, mental health outreach can be improved for people like Lanza. I don't think arming the whole country solves anything- I think that makes it worse. Instead, make it harder for people with mental health issues to get guns. Also, have greater coordination between states on gun control- having strict laws in one state and then barely any in the next doesn't help matters.

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I actually do not remember any school massacres happening back then. I doubt I would have forgotten something like that being a problem. There may have shootings in the inner cities. But then they just shoot wherever they meet the wrong gang. And both shooters last week stole their guns. People with the mind set to do something like that don't obey anyone's law. And can do more damage not using a gun. Remember Tim McVeigh?

Working at a lakeside campground near McVeigh's old Army post, he and Nichols constructed an ANNM explosive device mounted in the back of a rented Ryder truck. This site was regarded as suitable because a moving truck would not seem out of place, given the transient population of the area.[citation needed] The bomb consisted of about 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, and motor-racing fuel.
On April 19, 1995, McVeigh drove the truck to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building just as its offices opened for the day. Before arriving, he stopped to light a 2 minute fuse. At 09:02, a large explosion destroyed the north half of the building. The explosion killed 168 people, including 19 children in the day care center on the second floor, and injured 450 others.[44][45]
McVeigh noted that he had no knowledge that the federal offices also ran a daycare center on the second floor of the building, and noted that he might have chosen a different target if he had known about the daycare center.[46][47] According to Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh claimed not to have known there was a daycare center in the Murrah Building and said that if he had known it, in his own words:Michel and Herbeck quote McVeigh, with whom they spoke for some 75 hours, on his attitude to the victims:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh

Long story short of it

People that hate guns will blame guns.

People that hate violent video games and movies will blame them.

People also have agendas when it comes to mental health.

It may be one or all of them. But everyone in the country will never agree on any of them.

Did the US not try to ban something before and how well did that work out? The answer is yes we banned Alcohol and enterprising men such as my Great Great Uncle Al Capone figure ways around it did they not? Not only that banning it rose the gun violence as gangs fought over it. So banning this worked out so well did it not? Had they banned guns along with it what do you think would have happened. They would have still had guns and brought and sold them illegally also.

Those kids could have been alive if many different circumstances played out. It could have turned out different if there was an armed guard at the school (which many have their own police). If one of the teachers was armed to defend the kids. Had all the doors had locks on them rather then a handful of doors been able to be locked.

See many different things may have prevented this we will never know though will we because it played out one way

I was think the other day and I mean it was a weird thought that came into my head. I am a conspiracy buff I like reading them and I believe in some. Though this I do not believe.

I am 37 years old in those 37 years we have had bad things happen every year though this year seems to be the worst year I can remember as far as shootings go. Anyway I was thinking I wonder if some of these have to do with the date coming up this Friday.

This Friday is December 21st and supposedly the end of the world. I know it sounds stupid and I don't believe the world is going to end. Though I am betting there are a lot out their that do, and it makes me wonder if this is just not the beginning.

myp said:

I am not suggesting banning guns. What I am suggesting is more sageguards against selling to mentally ill people, possibly getting rid of some of the more dangerous guns, increasing mental health knowledge and access, etc.

Alcohol and guns are two different things. A gun prohibition has worked in much of Europe and an alcohol prohibition might be worse there than it was here. But again, I am not looking for prohibition.

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I don't believe Mac 10's, Uzi's and so on should be allowed. Hanguns (Semi-auto and revolvers), Rifles, and Shotguns are what should be allowed and owned.

Now are you going to be able to stop a creative person from modifying a weapon unfortunately not but it happens.

One must not forget though that these guns belonged to the kids mom not him. It would also seem people have warned her in the past about his behavior but she pushed the warnings aside.

I mean she was warned when Adam was in school numerous times about his social behavior. That should ring some bells. It is now said (but how true it is I don't know) is he had a form of Autism.

If she failed to get her son proper treatment and to see the right people that tells me she did not want to face the truth her son had problems. She swept it under the rug so to speak and it reared its ugly head on Friday.

Now back to the guns they were her guns. Him having them tells me she did not secure them very well. I own guns quite a few. I have two kids that I have taught gun safety too.

Though it is quite difficult to get my weapons. They are in a cases. Each has two masterlock key locks on the case each with a different key. Two of the keys are on my key ring 1 for a lock on each case. The other is locked in a combination key case. Not only that then each case has a combination lock that needs to be put in for it to open if they somehow get the locks off.

Someone breaks in I have other means to dispatch them if I can't get to my guns in time.

myp said:

Eh... from Y2K to the 1998 thing to countless others, that conspiracy theory has relived itself too many times. No scientific backing and just arbitrary speculation- I don't buy it at all.

As for gun crimes happening around it- coincidence has to happen sometimes; if it didn't that would be the statistical anomaly (not the actual coincidence itself).

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We will truly never know though because we will never fully understand why he did it. What his reasons were died with him.

myp said:

The thing is that if you can find a way to limit guns to the point where even those who want it can't get it on the black market or find it very hard to get it, you might reduce these crime rates. The European numbers can't be ignored here. Of course the US is past the point of no return there with too many guns already out there, so it is a different problem here than it was there.

But ignoring this problem doesn't do anything either. Something should be done if it is feasible. Maybe limit the number of more deadly weapons. Or as I said access to mental health- people have agendas in everything including in protecting gun rights (the pro-gun lobby outspent the gun control lobby by some 10X this past election), but you can't really say that there wasn't something wrong with Lanza from a mental health perspective.

And there were such crimes in the past including the Bath massacre in the 20s to University of Texas in the 60s to California state in the 70s. This is not an all-inclusive list- there are more. Unfortunately.

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All true enough. But there seems to already be enough guns out in the public to supply the bad guys for years to come. I heard an FBI guy on TV say that "the genie is out of the bottle".

As for me, I have all the guns I can afford. I am home more than not, but still don't leave my guns in the house to be stolen. I usually only have my carry piece home. That is also the one I sleep with.

myp said:

Yea the "genie" does seem to be out of the bottle with guns overall, but I am not so sure when it comes to some of the more powerful rifles, etc.

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Ever Gun is powerful. It is not so much a matter of power all guns can kill. One has to take an over all look at all the events that transpires like Friday and see how the people got their guns.

You will never be able to stop events like this from happening as sad as that day was for all Americans. One has to look at Society as a whole.

I am 37 when I was a kid this was unheard of why? I think it come down to dynamics of people. What was so different when we were younger to now in the age my kids are growing up in.

I see several differences right from the start. Family does not have the same meaning now as it did when I was a kid. Many of the parents in the Neighborhood I live in now which is a little rural and Suburban mixed together. Those parents don't interact with their kids. I do interact with my kids. They go out they need to check in every hour or so to let me know they are all right. They have to ask if they can go over someones house before they go over there. The other parent must say it is ok before I let them go.

The kids that hang out with my son their parent with the exception of two don't care what their kid does. John will ask if one of them can come in I am fine with it but they need to ask their parent and let them know. I been told by several I don't' have to my mom or dad are fine with it. Well the problem is I am not.

My son gets bad grades he gets grounded in a way for the semester. Grounded in that he can not go out on school days until his next report card and the grades are brought up. His friends they run around from the time they get home till after dinner time. Two of them are failing in a bad way but yet the parents don't seen to care.

I don't see the interaction between parents and kids like when I was a kid. I am unemployed my wife is a Preschool teacher. One of the kids in her class a nice boy if you treat him right but can be violent if something does not go his way. I have had the opportunity to work with the boy very nice kid. Though he does not know how to talk like all the other children. He is a slow learner (nothing wrong with that) so her and the staff who are trained in this went to school for it told the parents they feel he has a learning disability which impedes his learning. The parents told her there was nothing wrong with there son. Now I sat with this boy and he is hard to understand and he is 4 in VPK and going into Kindergarten next year. He does not know his letters which they been trying to teach. Does not know any key words that kids his age should know. I believe his parents don't want to face reality and what will happen is it will hurt their child more.

I see this with a lot of kids today from experience with my children's friends. To experience that have happened to my kids at a school they attended once. People want to blame everything the laws that allow guns into the person hands. The gun manufacturer for making the guns. They don't want to blame what I believe it really is a failure on the part of society for not caring as much as it once did and parents for not giving a crap about their kid.

I think today is a failure of parents and society nothing more nothing less. It was not a failure of any laws that put the guns into Adam's hands. It was the failure of his mother to heed warnings given to her over the years. It was a failure of his mother to properly secure the weapons from him. The failure was hers and unfortunately she paid with her life for those failures as did many other innocent people.

Any attempt to pick a single cause seems to be missing the point....to me. This is a reality in our country, be it children, general public, drug runners, or a freakin' cheating spouse.
The access to a gun makes it a hell of a lot more likely a shot will be fired. We will never get rid of guns, nor should we (IMHO), but no one wants to see what we just did.
Logically, we come to a conclusion:

If Possible, we should at least make it more difficult for someone to kill a bunch of other people because they feel like it!

Agreed?....Good.

Now, figure out how to do it.

myp said:

Every gun is powerful, but some are more powerful than others. If the kid had an AK-47, god forbid things could have been even worse. If he had a powerful bomb, even more so. It is all about the margin and marginal changes can lead to notable differences in aggregate outcomes.

I don't think you will be able to stop events like this, but you sure can limit them.



While family values may play a role, I don't think that is the only issue at play here.

For one, you said this didn't happen when you were a kid, but it did. Maybe it was less heard of, but I would say that is more because mass media wasn't as established as it is today (what with the Internet and all). As I posted earlier, it has happened several times in the US from the 20s onwards including in the 60s and 70s. If you extend the scope to the entire Western world- even more so. And when you see the US gun crime rate per 100,000 people at around double that of some countries who enacted tougher gun policies in response to this sort of thing in their own countries, I am led to believe that those policies had an impact. I don't think you can attribute the divergence in such events only to cultural changes such as family value- a lot of European cultures are less big on the family unit than the US anyway.

But even with your family values point, I think the deeper point is that these people have mental issues (due to whatever cause) and that is something we can try to solve too. Not just to reduce gun crime, but to increase the health of the populace and to bring down healthcare costs.

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You are correct I should have worded that part better. It has happened in the past even when I was a kid though not in such a frequency as it has in the last 15 years or so.

I am all for a ban on assault rifles. Though on the flip side had the School had an armed teacher or security guard far less would have been hurt. So though you are correct there is always a flip side to that coin. It could have been far worse if he had an AK-47 or UZI but the flip side is an Armed Officer at school or teachers.

A Perfect example of this is Pearl City, Mississippi I think though the state maybe wrong. A 16 year-old was stopped from performing his own school massacre. How the Asst. Principal had a .45 Gun on him at the time. They were not in a Gun free Zone and it saved the lives of who knows how many kids.

myp said:

The country was also not as populous when you were a kid, so you would expect more overall gun deaths as the population grew (all other things held constant). It takes a deeper statistical analysis to see whether we have more of these events now or back then. I don't really know of the numbers over the years to be able to comment on that, but I think 2012 is certainly an outlier- this year has been bad.

And I agree that having a police officer inside each school might be a decent step forward. I know some school districts in the country already do it.

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I know all the District I have come from and the one my kids are in now have Officers in them. At least one.

I agree as the population gets bigger you will see more of a rise in crimes in general. Though most school shooting are not at the fault of the kid but of the parent. Last Friday's was not because he gained the weapon through purchase but because he mother did not properly store them from his reach.

Though my feeling is she did not properly store them because she failed to see what many other saw. She was told and she forced blinded herself to the fact something was wrong with her boy.

Had she not blinded herself to the truth of her son and gotten him the help he needed and locked those guns up properly that may have prevented this from happening also. At least I think she handle the entire situation wrong.

chris7375 said:

They were not in a Gun free Zone and it saved the lives of who knows how many kids.

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...hmm, gun free zone....where have heard that before.

Regardless, you have a very good point.
WHO KNOWS..how many kids would still be alive...NO ONE.

WHO KNOWS..how many kids would be killed by a lunatic teacher...NO ONE.

tecoyah said:

...hmm, gun free zone....where have heard that before.

Regardless, you have a very good point.
WHO KNOWS..how many kids would still be alive...NO ONE.

WHO KNOWS..how many kids would be killed by a lunatic teacher...NO ONE.

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Yet that Asst. Principal save how many lives had he not had that gun. He was no lunatic teacher he was a hero. Can you account for every nut case no. Even if you ban guns altogether other means of getting them will arise. A police officer who is armed can go off just as easily as a teacher. So the risk is no greater.

You can ban gun all you want but they will always be around.

chris7375 said:

You can ban gun all you want but they will always be around.

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Isn't that pretty much what I just stated?