WTF? (NRR)
Jonny_Paycheck
17,825 Posts
Damn folks what's going on in the world? Lining little girls up and shooting them in the head??!!?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5400570.stm
A gunman has shot dead three children and injured seven before killing himself in an attack on an Amish school the US state of Pennsylvania.The attack happened in a one-room schoolhouse in the village of Paradise near Nickel Mines in Lancaster County.The gunman entered the mixed class and ordered all male pupils and some adults to leave. He then tied up the girls and began shooting them in the head.[/b]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5400570.stm
Comments
w t f???
MARK SCOLFORO
Associated Press
A group of Amish men wait at a roadblock near the West Nickle Mines school in Bart Twp., Pa., where an armed man held students hostage and later killed a number of them and himself.
NICKEL MINES, Pa. - A 32-year-old truck driver took more than a dozen students hostage in a one-room Amish schoolhouse Monday, barred the doors with boards and fatally shot at least six people including himself, authorities said.
The gunman, identified as Charles Carl Roberts, had been in the school about 45 minutes before police got the call, State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said. Officers had to break windows to get into the school. By then, three young girls and the gunman were dead, he said.
Police said earlier the gunman sent the male students outside while keeping the girls in and blocking the doors.
It was the nation's third deadly school shooting in less than a week, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history.
"So far, six confirmed dead, and the helicopters are pulling into (Lancaster General Hospital) like crazy," Coroner G. Gary Kirchner said.
Three girls, ages 6-12, were admitted to Lancaster General Hospital in critical condition with gunshot wounds, spokesman John Lines said. Officials at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center confirmed that victims also were being admitted there.
Police late Monday morning surrounded the one-room schoolhouse, a tiny building surrounded by a white fence and farm fields in southeastern Lancaster County. The Lancaster County 911 Web site reported that dozens of emergency units were dispatched to a "medical emergency" at 10:45 a.m.
Hours after the attack, about three dozen people in traditional Amish clothing, broad-brimmed hats and bonnets stood nearby speaking to one another and authorities. Others gathered with a group of children at a nearby farm while investigators stretched out in a line across a field searching for evidence.
The school is just outside Nickel Mines, a tiny village about 55 miles west of Philadelphia.
On Friday, a school principal was gunned down in Cazenovia, Wis. A 15-year-old student, described as upset over a reprimand, was charged with murder in the killing. Just two days earlier, an adult gunman held six girls hostage in a school at Bailey, Colo., before killing a 16-year-old girl and then himself.
Nationwide, the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., remains the deadliest school shooting, claiming the lives of 15 people, including the two teenage gunmen. Last year, a 16-year-old shot seven people to death at a school on Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation, then killed himself.
Seriously, it's just so hard to make sense of any of this. I started doing research on school shootings for my class (I'm currently teaching a course on social issues/problems) and the one thing that stands out is that there's little consensus around what are the "causes" of this kind of violence (though it's dangerous to try to pathologize a series of separate incidents into an all-encompassing set of theories) EXCEPT that one thing many agree on is that it comes back to masculine identity (though not everyone agrees on where to go from there).
Especially in last week's CO case and today's, the isolation of female victims was deliberate and sickening, to say the least (i.e. sexual assault and execution-style killings).
what's going on?
but my words
this is a synchronous event
a paralell door to hell that we have created with american death culture .....worldwide
this is a penal deathcamp that enslaves and colonizes here and abroad
every now and then there will be symptoms of rigor mortis from the corpse of society
these so called random violent manifestations are diametrically opposed to all perceptions of"reality, order or civilility".
the random eruption of said violence in the least likely of places is par the course for
added shock value in this horror flick.
"it was like a stephen king novel"
one woman was quoted saying at another school shooting sight in montreal a few weeks ago
There it is
boxed ,packaged and stamped with a upc code for your consumption.
The milkman himself a loser,pathetic human garbage,who already knew that he was not fit for life
r.i.p little girls
ps ;home schooling is the next big thing
Glorification of Violence B/W Legal Guns
In a nutshell:
There's HUGE problem with violence in Philly right now. Even with the street marches, local rallys, community leaders speaking out, Mayor Street putting more cops on the beat, and literally pleading on television a few weeks ago for the volience to end; the death toll is higher now then it was at this time last year.
White folks are looking from the surrounding outside area at Black folks like, "This is your problem. We should still be able to posses and arm ourselves without these proposed restrictions."
But it should be pretty clear now that this is deeper than just the senseless violience that goes on in the heart of the city.
Those who think gun control is just a Black crisis issue need to check themselves.
where was this said?
nothing crazier than a white depressed teenage boy. ask chris rock.
Like I was referencing in my post above, this is the outpouring attitude of those around Philly proper.
Im saying, here all of the other girls have managed to keep their mouth shut and names withdrawn from the papers. Yet this girl is running her mouth on national TV about some seriously personal shit that went down. It is none of our goddamn business to know what happened in that class room.
There's definitely something to be said about that observation - students in urban schools get killed all the time with nary a mention in the news - the main difference are the ways in which suburban school shootings are inevitably characterized as "rampages" which suggests a different kind of violence; one that is out of control and to no small degree, inexplicable. Absent the kinds of pressures we ASSUME exist exclusively in urban settings (i.e. drug-related, poverty related causes for violent acts), a separate school of thought has cropped up to explain suburban/rural shootings.
Personally, I do think there's a difference but it's not necessarily qualitative (i.e. one is worse than the other). There are many, many inner city students killed every year that never merit mention but it's also rare that a student in that situation will flip out and stroll into a school cafeteria and start opening fire indiscriminately. We're talking about disturbing acts of violence whose causes are likely different. The problem is one of coverage - 4 students who die over the course of a few months in an inner city school are invisible victims whereas 4 students gunned down simultaneously in the 'burbs become front page news. Both are lamentable it's just that one gets attention and the other is seen as "someone else's problem."
In both cases though, the kind of violence against women in particular is very troubling and that dynamic tends to get underplayed in all realms. The timing of these two cases (CO and PA) will likely bring this into more attention than it typically gains and I have no doubt that we'll see a lot of analysis talking about the "masculine crisis." I'm not hostile to that approach insofar as I think gender needs to be talked about in this context (I mean, what kind of sick fuck takes school girls hostage to sexually assault then or execute them?) but my larger point is that that should ALWAYS be part of the conversation around school violence rather than just based on a timely coincidence in horrific events.
By the way, I highly recommend people check out the documentary "Tough Guise" by the Media Education Foundation. http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaGenderAndDiversity/ToughGuise
shit is senseless
Great post Oliver, and the preview of that documentary looked good. It reminded me of this article in Esquire from earlier this year.
http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2006/060611_mfe_July_06_Boys_1.html
It's well worth the read.
this reminds me of this article which was in reaction to the Dawson College shooting in Montreal. perhaps it is a bit of an over-simplification of a very complicated thing, but it does raise a good point on how a situation is defined decides how (effectively) it is dealt with.
it is also written within a Canadian context, so it does not address the gun issues that exist in the US...but we are catching up...
____________________________
Why do we keep asking why?
Get real. It???s male violence we???re talking about, and it won???t stop until we learn to track lost boys.
By SUSAN G. COLE
A shooter goes on a rampage. Sickening? Yes. Inexplicable? Not really, I thought, watching the wall-to-wall coverage of just another wounded boy lashing out.
It is the oldest story we know.
Almost every mass killing and suicide bombing has been unleashed by some alienated guy who goes out in a hail of gunfire or a devastating explosion.
What is outrageous is that we haven't found a way to stop it.
Not that some of us haven't tried. For over 30 years feminists have been speaking out about the epidemic we call male violence.
For almost all of that time we've been vilified for trying to make the key point: we all live in a culture of bullying and brutality, and yet men and women do not commit violent crimes in equal numbers.
Ho hum. Feminism today is routinely dismissed as so last millennium, almost snoozeworthy. Either that or we're called man-haters whenever we point to these lost boys and comment on how little interest the system shows in retrieving them. And so we retreat to run the rape crisis centres and the assaulted women's shelters in what is the equivalent of a mop-up operation.
In the meantime, almost gleefully, observers write about how catty the girls are getting on the playground and, when the occasional female does something nasty, the headlines trumpet the new female violence.
Get real. The rape crisis centre phones are still ringing off the hook, the women's shelters are overflowing, the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, unfortunately, thrives. There is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that male violence has decreased.
It's true that some new and useful work has been done on the issue of bullying, but not much of it deals with the issue in gender terms. We're still afraid to go there, afraid to upset anybody.
The response to the Dawson College shootings typifies our collective fear of confronting the truth.
We're asked to deal solely with the pathology of a single person, "an unstable individual" in the words of the prime minister ??? words chosen to explain why he's still intent on scrapping the gun registry.
People do get hurt one by one ??? but taken together, we can see patterns. Girls who are abused go through life being re-victimized unless they're lucky enough to experience some kind of intervention, while boys who are abused grow up to be abusers. How does this happen? Why can't we talk about it?
Blame the video games, say some, as if everyone who plays kills. Video games or any other products of pop culture have nothing to do with it, say others, as if a multi-billion-dollar ad industry weren't depending on the persuasiveness of media images. Obviously, these images support the victimizers, but they don't create them.
Our embrace of war as a global strategy also promotes a particular kind of mayhem.
Not coincidentally, the Dawson College shooter had a brief flirtation with the Canadian Armed Forces in 1999, and doubtless the new blow-'em-up-good recruiting ads will attract others like him. But he came into the army already wounded and if stats are any indication, frontline workers say, probably by another man.
I've spent the better part of my professional life trying to figure out why we resist the term male violence. Using it is not the same as saying that men are inherently aggressive ??? although, come to think of it, the world wouldn't end and we actually might get somewhere if we considered that. No, usually we talk about how the system promotes masculine aggression and the way society is profoundly gendered. Still, the resistance is huge.
And as awesome as it is that services exist to help female survivors of violence to get on with their lives, we're way behind when it comes to tracking young boys who are in trouble, developing some meaningful data and helping them to break the cycle.
It's called male violence. Name it. Use the term. That's the beginning of change.
It was only when Mothers Against Drunk Driving named the crime and the dynamic that they were able to curtail the slaughter. Many people stopped drinking and driving. We need to do the same thing with this tragedy.
Does it sound like I'm beating an old drum? I wish I didn't have to. Feminists wouldn't seem so dreary if we didn't have to talk about the same thing all the time.
Are you a moral relativist or something? I'm not sure what your point is...
Not sure why we're trying to throw a racial divide into this, either. Of course gun control isn't just a black crisis; however, did you know that young black males are five times more likely to be victims of firearm injury than whites of the same age group? Did you know that young black men are 10 times more likely to commit homicide with a firearm than whites of the saem age group? Did you know that firearm homicide is the leading cause of death for young black males? A death is a death no matter how sick the murder. When you have generations of young black men killing each other disproportionately to whites across the entire gender and age spectrum, I would say that's a larger problem.
Again, I think people are misreading Drewn's point: too often, violence isn't treated as a "social problem" until it moves out of the inner city and begins to affect people in rural and suburban neighborhoods. That these geographic distinctions also follow segregated racial patterns is not a coincidence.
Drewn's not saying we shouldn't take the issue of violence (and gun control) in Lancaster seriously. He's saying that we also need to realize that young boys and girls are getting body bagged in Philadelphia long before some sick psycho fuck decided to hit up Amish country...the problem is that there's rarely national handwringing over the Philly fallen.
I'm not reading that at all. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if Drewn's saying that the outlying white community is pointing the finger at the black community for their gun control crisis, aren't they, in effect, saying that it is a social problem? And maybe it follows a racial pattern because of the lopsided statistics? I can't believe that anyone could say with a straight face that the white gun control crisis is even on the same plane as the black gun control crisis.
Further, I'm not really sure that people are wringing their hands over this guy in Lancaster, Wisconsin, or Colorado, as the media's feeding frenzy proves. While these suburban fatalities push more papers, they are certainly a rarity. If anything, the media should be exposing the crisis in the black community. Perhaps I'm being too cynical, but I remember when the major metro area in my state had nearly a homicide every third day in the black community. This is when death becomes a number and a five minute news story, not a tragedy.
So, again, what's the point? Does a community need media coverage of their gun crimes before they start to fix it? And would this community with such grim statistics even want the lens focused on them?
I know inner-city kids are often vcitims of violence, but I'm under the impression that this takes place outside of schools, do you have info on school violence in major cities that we haven't seen on the news?
I won't argue that our media is racially biased, but I think the outrageous thing about these recent events is that they took place in school, the supposedly safest place we have.
This was in NOW wasn't it??? I remember reading it. I liked the gender perspective. It IS something that isn't talked about enough. Addressing Male Violence is an important step to understanding these kinds of catastrophes.
There's a great deal of violence IN urban schools though I think you're probably correct, most murders tend to take place near or off campus rather than in classrooms (the fact that so many urban schools have visible police and metal detectors likely has much to do with the differences in site-related violence). The point here though is that we're still talking about student communities being victimized through violence. The conventional wisdom has been that urban students are victims of larger patterns of violence within their environment, usually pathologized as being a result of drug or poverty-related forces.
This is contrasted with suburban/rural school violence which is often treated with a wide-eyed, "oh my god, who could have thought it would happen here?" incredulity even though, if you really think of the pervasiveness of violence and permissive attitudes towards violence (in the media, at the level of the nation-state to name just two obvious institutions that practically celebrate masculine violence), these environments may not be villfied the same way inner city schools are but there's still a culture of violence (combined with easy gun access as someone else pointed out) that's operating.
THIS ALL SAID: it must be noted that these kinds of rampage school shootings are still extremely rare. Based on studies conducted in the 1990s, the odds of a student dying IN SCHOOL (again, note the site specificity) was somewhere between 1 in 1,000,000 to 2,000,000. The odds of getting struck by lightning is 1 in 400,000 by contrast.
Obviously, these kind of horrific events stir up a lot of public concern (I saw that Bush is convening a national conference on school violence next week...gee, I feel safer already) but for the most part, unless we start seeing this happen on a weekly basis, it's more likely that what we've seen this past week is a tragic, terrible, unfathomable set of coincidences.
In short, I'm not clear what quite to make of this. I'm wary of overblowing things out of proportion out of public hysteria. At the same time, I think it's essential that we spend some hard time, as a society, talking about the pervasiveness of violent idealism and how this blows back on youth in environments - as Anna notes - where we should feel like they can be safe. As I kept emphasizing, I also think it's important to frame this for what they are: male violence (not always with female victims) but there is an obvious gender element to these acts that can't be brushed aside.
I think you may have misunderstood my point, Mike. I was speaking from a local perspective - what's been going on in Philly for the last several months. Of course, the problem with gun violence with young Black males is overwhelming, you don't need statistics to convince me of that. I live in Philadelphia, and hear about it every day.
My point is that there has been a push for stronger gun legislation in Philadelphia (read Black) because of the increased homocide rate. But this would also affect those in surrounding communities (read White). Those are the people who have been pointing the finger saying it's not their problem, when incidents like what happened yesterday make them look silly for thinking that way.
I couldn't locate the exact article I was looking for, but here's a Surburban Philly Blog post, quoting an Associated Press article on the issue that may give you a little insight:
Gun supporters say crime is Philly???s problem
According to the Associated Press, ???The mayors of Philadelphia and New York City on Tuesday urged Pennsylvania lawmakers to pass tougher gun laws as the House of Representatives began an unusual session on crime and violence.???
The session drew about 100 gun owners, all protesting any new laws that would limit their right to own and bear arms.[/b]
They were heard dispensing precious nuggets of information to the local media such as:
- ???The highest rate of crime occurs in cities with the toughest gun laws,??? said John Brinson, chairman of the Lehigh Valley Firearms Coalition. ???Citizens don???t have guns. That means criminals have free reign to do what they want.???
- ???It???s a fact that when you allow people to carry concealed weapons, crime goes down, because criminals don???t know who???s carrying a gun,??? said Mike Cancel, a gun owner from Washington, Pa.
Wow. I need a moment to absorb this flawless logic ???
???What happens in Pennsylvania or in any other state doesn???t stay in Pennsylvania or any other state,??? Bloomberg said. ???We can???t fight illegal guns from behind state lines. This is a national problem requiring cities and states to work together.???
Gun-loving Pennsylvanians don???t feel that way ??? they see the rise in gun violence as Philly???s issue and believe it will never affect them.
???It???s their children that they didn???t raise right,??? Cancel said. ???Who don???t know who their father is - it???s strictly a Philadelphia problem.??? [/b]
I guess they think there???s an invisible electric fence that exists just past Lancaster.
PhillyBurbs.com link
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/03/BAGD6LH7KR1.DTL
Oakland's daily tragedies surpass school shootings
City's soaring homicide tally fails to elicit the public outcry, official action it deserves[/b]
- Chip Johnson
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
America is reeling over school shootings in Pennsylvania, Colorado and Wisconsin that have killed five innocent victims in a week -- but Oakland trumps them all.
Seven people were shot and killed in Oakland in the same period, including two women gunned down on the street and a Brink's guard slain in a robbery attempt that his partner allegedly plotted. In September, 18 people were slain. And on Monday night, police were investigating yet another slaying, bringing the city's runaway toll to 117.
Over the past three months, 47 people have been killed, including Gail Breda, 52, and her friend Shirley Hill, 53, last week. While the cable TV news channels spent considerable time on the school shootings, Oakland's deadly march went on without so much as a hiccup in the national media.
And not much else has been heard from Oakland's City Hall. Certainly not from outgoing Mayor Jerry Brown, who is running for state attorney general. In an interview Monday, he expressed alarm that the city has hit a 10-year high for homicides, but he didn't seem outraged by the week's gunslinging.
He wanted to talk about the Police Department's latest electronic surveillance devices -- one that uses sound to track gunshots and another that automatically scans license plates for possible stolen vehicles -- as strategies that will have a long-term impact on the city's streets.
If the week's slayings had happened in any middle-class neighborhood in Oakland, there would have been calls for immediate action. But in the tough neighborhoods of East and West Oakland, there was only sadness and grief.
The same day Breda and Hill died, a third woman, Akiba Finister, 29, of Hayward, was stabbed to death in an apartment building in the 6900 block of Fresno Street around 11 p.m., police said. Authorities said they are searching for an ex-boyfriend in connection with the fatal attack.
Since the city's homicide rate climbed again in 2002, Brown has initiated literally a dozen task forces to address the problems -- everything from placing curfews on parolees to passing a bond measure to fund more police officers to hauling in the city's 100 most violent offenders for last-chance discussions with law enforcement authorities.
So far, none of those ideas has done much to slow the killings. Unless things change in the next three months, he will leave Oakland with its highest homicide rate during his eight-year watch as the city's leader.
Brown argues that ongoing efforts to reduce crime, including new technology scheduled to come online in coming weeks, will make a long-term impact.
"The (homicide) rate is high, like it was in the 1990s; it's also higher in Richmond, Compton and a half-dozen other cities in the country," he said.
He also said the federal court order that placed a greater self-monitoring burden on the Oakland Police Department in the wake of the Riders corruption case has reduced the number of officers on the street.
For Olis Simmons, the executive director of Youth Uprising, a city-funded youth center in East Oakland, the spiraling crime rate is not a matter for the police but an alarming social trend that's being underplayed and largely overlooked.
"There was a time when kids who had fights ended up being friends later, but they don't fight like that anymore," Simmons said, referring to the interactions between adolescents.
"These kids live in an era of instant gratification, and their pride can't take the blow," she said. "They seek respect and revenge just as instantly. ... You add easy access to guns, and you have a deadly cocktail."
Surveys taken of the 1,500 youth members who show up at the center every week show that about 75 percent of them had a friend, relative or school chum who has been murdered, Simmons said. "The bulk of them know between three and eight" victims.
One of her clients, Cyrioco Robinson, 19, is all too familiar with the availability of guns in the neighborhood where he grew up.
"I can usually tell when someone has a gun on them because I'm someone who used to be that way," Robinson said. "I didn't leave the house unless I had one, so I can kinda tell, by the way someone walks and talks to other people, when someone is carrying."
He said he stole his first weapon, a 20-gauge shotgun, from a drug dealer when he was 14 years old.
Robinson avoids house parties because it's impossible to know who will show up or what will happen. He prefers to spend time at the youth center -- putting together dance moves and rap songs or just hangin' out with friends.
For the residents of neighborhoods hardest hit by the surging violence, the slayings won't come and go like politicians and crime-fighting strategies -- the violence is a living nightmare with no end in sight.
"Most people don't appreciate the fact that there is a level of interdependence between us and most of these kids," Simmons said. "Their success is our success, and their failure is everyone's failure -- and it affects our property values, our schools, job opportunities and the local economy.
"This isn't a social problem. This is an epidemic."
BLAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
now, again, why is this such a major news story? is it shocking that there are crazy people in this world? is it unbelievable that a tiny amish school would not have armed guards to prevent such an attack?
the only thing news coverage does is give another crazy man/child a reason to go out and do the same thing: fame.
not only are there kids dying in the inner-city every day from guns, but we can actually do things to prevent those deaths (awareness for one). so lets stop painting this as just a black/white issue (which it might be) because the inner-city issue is also much more worthy of discussion if the purpose of discussion is to prevent future deaths. i'm not even saying that every child killed deserves to have his own national headline. i just think covering these Columbine copycats is not only unimportant (compared to real world issues which have been neglected in the past 24 hours), but it leads to more deaths.
I agree with much of your sentiment here and it basically comes back to this:
Welcome to life in a 24 hour cable news reality.
Tabloid news IS the new reality - people want the sensationalism of something like the PA shootings or what IMs Foley sends out. We're in an era of enthralled outrage.
I agree.
I might get blasted here. But, this is the world we live in. Humans have become numb to events. For example, after a certain amounts of club shootings, it no longer is a "story". It just becomes "Oh, just another shooting at a club. The media knows this... There has to be some sort of dynamic aspect for people to take notice. Hence why urban violence doesn't really take centre stage.
This summer a girl I dated in high school was point blank murdered. Pretty much executed in cold blood. The incident was barely even shown in the media.
I would like to point out tho.
I do believe humans have made strides in dealing with violence on a whole. The world we are in, is far better than say pre-1900's (Not that much more doesn't need to be done). The only difference now, is we get almost full out live and direct news from all over the world. We are inadated with so much in such a small amount of time. It probably really doesn't help with people becoming numb to a point where many don't care much to all these issues.