Surely, surely, surely...

Every man and his dog has a gun in the Philippines. Every dutiful father buys his kid a plastic replica gun (rifles and machine guns) for xmas - the shops are full of them. Gun crime is incredibly common and most of it won't even get into a local newspaper. Whole families involved in politics can be wiped out here by rival politicians with their own private armies and it won't get a mention on the BBC. 

I am all for gun control but it won't happen here any time soon and somewhat hypocritically I own a new 1911 9mm and I have taught my wife how to use it. We have taken every possible precaution in order that neither of us ever has to use it - security lighting, alarms and dogs etc. 

Here is a snap I took today - the table below was piled high with replica hand guns (what do you think about the 'hi-fi' speakers in the corner?)

Oh how I appreciate not living in fear.

Tony

Mentally ill people are still people and, as such, have civil rights. The laws on involuntary commitment in almost all US states are very strict -- much stricter than they used to be.  A judge will not act on the advice of concerned family members, and instead will insist on seeing direct evidence of mental illness.  So what can be done when a person acts crazy in private situations, but then gets their act together before being visited by social services or police, or before appearing in court?  Basically, we have created a situation where you have to wait until a person commits a crime before you can get them help.

Civil libertarians view any efforts at making commitment easier with justifiable suspicion.  And personally, I would hate to see us go back to the days of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", when commitments could be ordered on the flimsiest of grounds.  But maybe the pendulum has swung just a little too far in the opposite direction?  Don't know, but it feels that way.

Also, it doesn't help that healthcare costs are through the roof, and that there's going to be less, not more, money funding community health programs in the future.

Like many others, I have no clue what to do to prevent this from happening again.  Much to my own personal dismay, there remains no will for any form of gun control in the US.  Each time something like this happens, the people on the left cry out for restrictions on weapons.  And then people on the right say "but what if one of those teachers had been armed, and could have stopped this"?  Same debate, over and over, and nothing ever changes.  The NRA remains an incredibly powerful lobby.

Would having an armed security guard at the school have prevented it?  Not sure.  I think this all happened very quickly and in just a couple of rooms at one end of the elementary school.  I guess it is possible that an armed guard could have been in the right place at the right time, but it is no guarantee.  Regardless, education budgets are going down, not up, so I doubt we will see any mandate for armed security in schools anytime soon. 

The US is a big place, and until something horrible like this happens right on your doorstep, it remains something that simply happens elsewhere...on TV, but not here, not in our town.   I admit to feeling that way until this past summer, when a disgruntled employee at a sign making company (five minutes walking distance from my front door) came to work with a loaded handgun, and shot and killed six innocent people including our long time UPS delivery guy, before taking his own life.  Yesterday's events felt a lot closer than they actually were.  Maybe it was the flashbacks to this summer.  Or maybe it was because we went over to our Goddaughter's house yesterday afternoon for a few minutes to drop off a couple of little things for her kids, ages 6, 4 and 18 months. I was glad that Mrs. Hook and I were able to hold in our feelings until after we had left, because it was very hard to look at those beautiful children, and not think of the horror that just occurred to other people's kids elsewhere.  Am sure a lot of us had that exact same feeling yesterday.

Hook

 " Basically, we have created a situation where you have to wait until a person commits a crime before you can get them help".

+1.That's horrible.

To a first approximation, Americans kill about as many of each other (and themselves) with their firearms as they do with their cars. I'd hazard a guess that killing people with firearms is usually done with intent, whereas killing them with cars is usually just negligent. Gun laws, mental health support - It all forms part of an urgent strategy to reduce the incidence of people shooting each other. Of course, no such strategy will be effectively supported nor implemented, just as lower (and enforced) speed limits and increased road safety is unsupported. Each infringes on some fundamental "right" in the minds of too many voters. And those voters are well organized and well funded to further their own self-interest.

Just the way it is.

For sure the gun laws in the USA aren't going to change in any meaningful way, regardless of the nature of this crime or Obama's words.

Even if the laws were changed, a nut-case will find some way of committing his crime - viz the UK.

Asking society to masively fund more social care or mental health care is a big ask if all we do is save a few hundred people lilled in mass murders each year.

I guess I'm saying this is a fact of life we simply have to live with. I don't like it, but can't see a meaningful solution.

Cheers

Don

Looks like a teacher in this case was armed (the gunman's mother). What the $&*% is a teacher doing with semi automatic assault weapons. As Governor Malloy was quoted on the BBC website, "These are assault weapons. You don't hunt deer with these things".

Edit: it's now saying that the gunman's mother had nothing to do with the school.

Not sure how old or accurate this is. Some clues in the statistics though. Gun control essential.

+1

++   I don't like it either

Just a thought -  if the school had one legal gun carrying teacher,  we might be saying thanks today.

Wow. So the answer is more guns.

Winky, please don't demean this very serious subject with that cheap remark.

Of course something has to be done

The stats for killings & gun crime in USA are a national disgrace

But banning guns is not the answer, it is probably part of it,  but it has to be expected & included in whatever deterant the US comes up with that someone will carry out these heinous acts, with guns, home made bombs or kitchen knives.

++ (again)  I don't like it. 

First off, I wish the guy who did this were still alive, just so I could kill him (or watch someone else do it), only much more slowly and painfully than he did himself.  Killing defenseless people, and especially children, is as cowardly an act as exists in human behavior.

My father lives outside of Newark, NJ - a state with very tough gun laws.  I can guarantee you within a 10 mile radius of his condo there are literally thousands of guns, and none of them were obtained legally. 

I like the idea of being able to protect myself, because so-called "peace officers" (in this country anyway) are much more interested and committed to extracting cash from otherwise law-abiding citizens for minor infractions (e.g., minor traffic violations, possession of small amounts of pot, etc.) than they are in protecting me or my home or family.  They are in place to protect politicians & bureaucrats, not the public.

In my younger & crazier years I could get all kinds of drugs, every one of which were illegal.  So much for making things illegal in an effort to curb the possession of them.

Funny how no one seems to be bothered that Obama and Eric Holder sold guns to the Mexican drug cartels that were used to kill people, but they do not have to answer for it.  "Move along folks, nothing to see here..."

Mark,

Totally off-subject, I have just noticed the amusingly and potentially fatal nature of the action in your Avatatar.........presumably he survived ?

Cheers

Don 

I don't know Don - I found it somewhere on the web and thought it funny (as I am sure it is a setup of some sort meant for humor.)  Kind of a  metaphor for my life in some ways...

The actor Morgan Freeman's brilliant take on what happened yesterday :

"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.

Good quote from Freeman. Has he ever been in a film that has glorified/romanticised gun violence I wonder?

Dr Mark has a view that I cannot share (see the Swedish gunman thread for debate about the death penalty). Hoping the gunman has a lingering death is barbarity that reduces us to the same level in my opinion.

As with 9/11 America appears to respond to these episodes by examining the how rather more than the why. That is my impression anyway.

Bruce

There's even a name for this: Herostratus syndrome, from the person who burnt down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BC. Despite attempts not to mention his name, he obviously succeeded.

In reality, almost all these gunmen will be forgotten in a year or two. Who remembers the names of the people who committed massacres at Aramoana, New Zealand, or Port Arthur, Tasmania?

It could help not being able to buy weapons at leisure.

M.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/gu...-20121217-2bjdd.html

These people live in a different world to me.

Please for Christ's sake no. This attitude is part of the problem. Where's Wyatt Earp when you need him?

It ain't the Wild West any more.

I received this email yesterday. I tried to respond but the email could not be sent.

Some sick and twisted people out there.

"The primary-school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, approximately 45 miles from the Colt Arms Factory, is just another one in the long line of government psyops designed to persuade the public to allow the government to take away their guns, and their means to defend themselves against the government and the banksters that the politicians really serve.

The small children murders are designed to create hysterical emotions in women to get them to demand that guns are banned. If that doesn’t work they will continue with their evil agenda with worse and worse atrocities on younger children, until they get their way and disarm the people, so that they cannot fight back against government tyranny.

Newtown is the U.S.A.’s Dunblane, which was orchestrated in Scotland in 1996 by the British establishment, to whip up hysteria in order to ban all handguns from the U.K. It was a follow-up to the Hungerford Massacre in England in 1987, which was carried out by mind-controlled Michael Ryan, who then shot himself so he could not be questioned, and it was used to ban semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.

It’s always the same people behind it – the gun-grabbers who want the people to be defenceless against the gun-grabbers’ employers – the banksters who own all of the politicians. They get their politicians to pass legislation for them, in order to remove the people’s freedoms and means of defending themselves, and enslave them in a draconian police-state, under a mountain of debt, and then exterminate the useless-eaters.

The Dunblane  massacre was supposedly carried out by Thomas Hamilton, who was a paedophile and procurer of children, for a high level paedophile ring involving senior members of the Tony Blair Labour-Party shadow-cabinet and others. The massacre served two purposes, it achieved their desired handgun-ban and killed the abused children, so they could not be witnesses against the elite-paedophiles. They then had the findings of the inquiry sealed for 100 years, which is proof of the above.

Like Newtown there were two shooters, Hamilton and a hit-man who shot Hamilton and made it look like Hamilton committed suicide after shooting 16 children, so that he couldn’t be questioned. Hamilton was found in the school gymnasium slumped against a wall and still gurgling, when an off-duty policeman PC Grant McCutcheon entered the gym and saw two semi-automatic pistols, one on either side of Hamilton’s body.

The autopsy revealed that Hamilton was killed with a .38 revolver. These people always slip-up with their crimes. There was no .38 revolver for him to have shot himself with. Thus, there was a second shooter who killed Hamilton.

Similarly, the first reports from Newtown were of two shooters, just like mind-controlled James Holmes in the Denver Batman Cinema massacre, the story then quickly changes to just one.

Columbine was similar, in that a team of shooters in black outfits were seen there and the two accused were on mind-altering prescription-drugs.

Wake up and see the pattern and their modus operandi and don’t fall for it. Never let them take your guns, except from your cold dead hands.

All of these are staged events to whip-up hysterical public support for banning the people from having guns. It works the same in every country – Hungerford in England, Dunblane in Scotland, Port Arthur in Australia and the list in America is endless, because of the Second Amendment and the people having a pro-gun culture. That makes it much more difficult to break the Americans’ love of guns and the Second Amendment, which was put in place to protect the people from the government.

Gun bans work well for tyrants. They worked well for Hitler, Stalin and Chairman Mao, to name just three.

"If you want to stop these massacres, wake-up and get rid of the banksters, their puppet-politicians and all gun-grabbers; arm teachers and ban gun-free zones.

From one who can see the pattern and hopes to enable you to see it too."

I could not believe what I was reading.

That is just the sort of extremist conspiracy nonsense that can be found at either end of the debate (and indeed most debates) and it really does not mean anything.

The problem in the US appears to be that mainstream America is against gun control. The generally silent and ordinary majority are those who need to change I think. In the past promoting gun control has been electoral suicide for any party.

Bruce

Banning  auto and semi-automatic weapons would at least be a start. Buy them back like Australia did 8 years ago and crush them. Expensive but it worked, they haven't had a massacre since the ban. Then run a campaign to try and change public attitudes towards firearms. It worked in NZ with drink-driving and smoking, both are no longer socially acceptable.