Gohmert argued that the mass slaughter would have gone differently if Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung had been armed.
I never get this type of thinking.
My question to this is always. How many more gun did the mother need to own or how many more trips to the gun range did she need to take to stop her son from killing her and ultimately stop the school shooting?
I'm not one to get into these political threads--really I just come here for the music--but I feel compelled to throw my two cents in here. I'm guessing nobody on the strut was closer to this incident than I was; Sandy Hook Elementary is about 10 miles away from me. I've been familiar with Newtown since I was a little kid, and I've driven through, eaten in restaurants, shopped there, etc... countless times. I was driving probably within half a mile of the school the night before the shooting. My wife works in Newtown, and she has two co-workers who each had two kids in that school. Kids who've been to my house, and whose homes I've visited. Needless to say last Friday's events hit me hard and I've been haunted and disturbed by them every day since.
In spite of the way the discussion here devolved there are some good points sprinkled throughout the thread. That Onion article was gut-wrenching to read the day after the incident, but it's an exceptionally powerful and effective piece. I'm all for stronger gun laws, though I think, as other have said, a complete ban is a highly unrealistic goal in this country. More guns as a solution? Teachers packing pistols? Also pretty unrealistic, and seems to me like a step backwards for society.
What happened here isn't really about guns and laws, in my opinion, but that's the go-to scapegoat & bone of contention in these situations. Not to say that it's completely unrelated, but guns or no guns, there's evil in the world and people do horrible things to to other people every day. It's just usually not as inexplicable as in this case, which is bewilderingly senseless. I can't help but think of Tommy Lee Jones' reaction to Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men--it's an evil we can't understand, and it's beyond terrifying. So why did this kid do it?
Was he under mind control? Did he have some kind of mental illness? Asperger's syndrome? I don't think any of these was the case, and he was probably more normal than anyone wants to admit. The best thing in this whole thread is the article bassie linked to earlier(here), which is about the most intelligent thing I've read regarding this tragedy and the causes behind it. In my opinion this was more an issue of the killer's background, family, and particular circumstances. My common sense analysis: here you have an introverted, dorky kid who was probably shunned at school. And he was clearly intelligent enough to be extremely self-aware about this situation. Then his parents separate, his father and brother leave and he's left without any male role models, alone in a big house with his paranoid, conspiracy-theorist, gun-toting mother. Now I know plenty of folks go through similar, or worse, scenarios, and manage to come out well-tempered members of society. But this kid was just turned inward and let his rage grow.
The following quote was floating around the internet, erroneously attributed to Morgan Freeman for some reason, but I agree with it for the most part:
"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.
It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single victim of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.
CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.
You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."
Yes, I think the media is partly to blame, and they were certainly guilty of some shameful shit in the course of their coverage, but what I hear nobody talking about is the internet and easy access to unlimited, unfiltered information. The kid smashed all the computers in his house--what was he hiding? The internet allows everyone to indulge their every interest, good or bad or completely insane, any information you want, anything you want to hear, it's out there. And I think in his rage this kid was very clearly reading things that influenced him to commit last week's atrocities. And this is what he was doing in lieu of interacting with society. Would he have gone down the same path in pre-internet times? I'm not bringing this up in order to start arguing for more internet regulations, but I believe his access to information played as much a role in this as did his access to guns.
Anyway, I think I've written enough at this point. It's something that will continue to haunt me for a long time, I think, but I believe it was a highly unusual, isolated incident and not part of some nationwide epidemic. And in spite of horrors like this, and the bleak picture we get from the media, we need to keep things in perspective: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/8789981/glad-tidings/
Its hard when something like this hits so close to home. You want to make sense of it. You want to quantify it, so you can somehow prevent it from happening again. There will always be haunting questions for those that interacted with both the gunman and his mother.
I don't think its easy as something like "access to information." Granted it is unbelievably easy to gather information on the internet. But even before the internet friends of mine had books like the Anarchist's Cookbook (a great guide on how to blow yourself up if there was ever one), Army Ranger Explosive Manuals, and chemistry texts. With these relatively easy to obtain books my friends in high school made all kinds of dangerous stuff just to see it go boom. This was more out of curiosity than anything else but they figured it out. Had they turned the knowledge to the dark side they could have done a lot of damage.
Adam Lanza, if reports are to believed (and until someone who professionally diagnosed him comes forward, take these reports with huge grains of salt) was both autistic and had a personality disorder. It fits his profile, he is high functioning, intelligent but is completely disconnected from those around him. His age, 20, is the right time for folks to have a break with reality.
So, let's say for the sake of argument he was a paranoid personality disorder. He presents with all the classic symptoms that we attribute with paranoid schizophrenics, only without the hallucinations. He kept a very light internet footprint (unusual for someone with his computer skills). He destroyed his hard drive physically which is the most likely way to completely destroy data you don't want someone to see. Most people don't realize just how easy it is to recover a HD that has just been "erased" unless done with some government level wipe the drive protocols. He was trying to keep folks from seeing him. It would fit someone living in a paranoid state.
This is all speculation. We don't really know. The press doesn't really know. Adam is a cypher for a lot of folks to project their own fears about our society. The sad fact is we may never know why he snapped.
All I know is that someone that should have been in mental health treatment had access to a tremendous amount of firepower and killed a bunch of people. It withers my heart. It makes me angry, sad, and I feel powerless.
I don't own a gun and never will so I don't have a problem with any/all gun laws, I just can't think of a damn thing that can be done that would actually prevent these tragedies at this point.
There's a tendency towards "can't" here. I thought you dudes lived in a can-do country.
Let's look at all the things we can do...
We can press the Magic Gun Button that will make all 200 million+ guns in our country instantly disappear.
We can pass very strict gun laws like they have in Chicago where there were only 192 shootings last month/
We can make it illegal to ever buy a gun from this day on and just have the 200 million guns that are currently owned in circulation.
We can ask every gun owner to voluntarily turn in their guns, maybe even pay them to do so.
We can go door to door at gunpoint and confiscate 200 million + guns from their owners.
I'm all ears for any other solutions but I'm realistic enough to recognize that closing the barn door after the horse is already out does little good.
no one in our lifetime will ever talk about banning all guns in america... maybe in our grandchildren's...
but, if people want to ban a certain type of gun, like semi-auto rifles, just make the penalty for owning or using them gigantic, like the one for owning a machine gun... when is the last time you heard of a machine gun being used in a crime? those "heat" guys in LA? that was almost 20 years ago...
Just wanted to clarify--my wife's coworker's kids are OK, physically at least, but the thought of them being in that building literally just a few doors down from that massacre really gets to me. I can't imagine what the parents are going through.
Why did Lanza destroy his hard drive? Who knows? Maybe he was into chicks w/ dicks porn and was ashamed of it. You obviously would like the media to find out for you.
The hard drives are of interest not because I think the media needs to expose and sensationalize the contents, whatever they may be (although perhaps that's an unavoidable consequence of that information coming out). I think they might have provided law enforcement and medical professionals with some insight into the killer's problems, that's all.
It seems strange to me that many people look at an incident like this and think "the media should shut up about it." Really? Are there actually sane, educated adults who really feel that way? I can't understand that.
I'm not (and I don't think many are) advocating the media "shutting up" about anything. They just need to use more tact and show more respect for those who've been affected by this tragedy. Don't give little kids the third degree on TV, asking them about every horrible detail of what they've just been through. Also, maybe don't report so much misinformation.
Adam Lanza, if reports are to believed (and until someone who professionally diagnosed him comes forward, take these reports with huge grains of salt) was both autistic and had a personality disorder. It fits his profile, he is high functioning, intelligent but is completely disconnected from those around him. His age, 20, is the right time for folks to have a break with reality.
There's been so much misinformation reported that, like you, I'm skeptical of all these reports, which is why I said I suspected the killer was more normal than we think. But yes, this makes a lot of sense and would go a long way towards explaining his disconnect from society.
All I know is that someone that should have been in mental health treatment had access to a tremendous amount of firepower and killed a bunch of people. It withers my heart. It makes me angry, sad, and I feel powerless.
I'm right there with you. On Sunday my wife and I drove to the area near the school where people have memorials set up, just to lay some flowers and pay our respects. I didn't really want to go, and it was surreal to see the media circus surrounding such a familiar place. That hit me in the gut--to see all the news vans and police barriers and the memorials, to confront the reality of the situation. Reminded me of the first time I drove by the Manhattan skyline with the twin towers gone. You know what's happened but to see the evidence in front of you, that's something else. Anyway strangely enough I felt better after being there. To see so many other people there, also affected deeply, coming together to show support, and to be a part of that, was uplifting in spite of the sadness surrounding the place.
Las Vegas undersheriff Kevin McMahill says at least eight guns were found in the hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel where Stephen Paddock launched his deadly attack.
“This is a day I wish I never had to see in my 27 years of law enforcement,” he told CNN.
He said the scene was the most disturbing he had ever seen in his career. “We just didn’t see it coming,” McMahill said.
The fact that a single person was able to hurt or kill almost 600 people is staaaaaggering.
But if all those 600 people were armed, surely the would have been able to stop him... /s
There was a country singer there, that renounced his stance on being pro-gun. He said that he and his band were carrying, but couldn't touch their weapons for fear the police would shoot them.
The one thing that keeps going through my mind is how is it a thing, that one man's right to bear arms trumps fifty-nine people's rights to live and five hundred people's rights not to be maimed and or wounded?
You can say he was crazy. Sure but no one saw it coming. He was a regular guy according to all who knew him. So, as far as I know, there is no way to test the whole population to work out who is going to go out of their minds and kill people. So the only sane thing to do is limit the population's access to firearms.
You can talk about having better security at hotels, you can say that if people really want to murder people they will use cars, knives ect but if the guy had a knife how many people would have died?
If regulations stopped or deterred Stephen Paddock from obtaining automatic weapons (which he clearly wanted but chose to modify 12 semi-automatics instead) , then regulations could have stopped or deterred him from obtaining semi-automatic weapons. I'm not saying take everyone's guns away, I'm saying applying regulations works for automatic weapons therefore it can work for other weapons.
Comments
Mortal Kombat, American Psycho and Natural Born Killers.
Wow. Just wow.
Guns don't kill chickens. People who fuck chickens with guns kill chickens.
I never get this type of thinking.
My question to this is always. How many more gun did the mother need to own or how many more trips to the gun range did she need to take to stop her son from killing her and ultimately stop the school shooting?
Apparently, as of today, this is the NRA's official position.
:beerbang:
In spite of the way the discussion here devolved there are some good points sprinkled throughout the thread. That Onion article was gut-wrenching to read the day after the incident, but it's an exceptionally powerful and effective piece. I'm all for stronger gun laws, though I think, as other have said, a complete ban is a highly unrealistic goal in this country. More guns as a solution? Teachers packing pistols? Also pretty unrealistic, and seems to me like a step backwards for society.
What happened here isn't really about guns and laws, in my opinion, but that's the go-to scapegoat & bone of contention in these situations. Not to say that it's completely unrelated, but guns or no guns, there's evil in the world and people do horrible things to to other people every day. It's just usually not as inexplicable as in this case, which is bewilderingly senseless. I can't help but think of Tommy Lee Jones' reaction to Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men--it's an evil we can't understand, and it's beyond terrifying. So why did this kid do it?
Was he under mind control? Did he have some kind of mental illness? Asperger's syndrome? I don't think any of these was the case, and he was probably more normal than anyone wants to admit. The best thing in this whole thread is the article bassie linked to earlier(here), which is about the most intelligent thing I've read regarding this tragedy and the causes behind it. In my opinion this was more an issue of the killer's background, family, and particular circumstances. My common sense analysis: here you have an introverted, dorky kid who was probably shunned at school. And he was clearly intelligent enough to be extremely self-aware about this situation. Then his parents separate, his father and brother leave and he's left without any male role models, alone in a big house with his paranoid, conspiracy-theorist, gun-toting mother. Now I know plenty of folks go through similar, or worse, scenarios, and manage to come out well-tempered members of society. But this kid was just turned inward and let his rage grow.
The following quote was floating around the internet, erroneously attributed to Morgan Freeman for some reason, but I agree with it for the most part:
"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.
It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single victim of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.
CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.
You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."
Yes, I think the media is partly to blame, and they were certainly guilty of some shameful shit in the course of their coverage, but what I hear nobody talking about is the internet and easy access to unlimited, unfiltered information. The kid smashed all the computers in his house--what was he hiding? The internet allows everyone to indulge their every interest, good or bad or completely insane, any information you want, anything you want to hear, it's out there. And I think in his rage this kid was very clearly reading things that influenced him to commit last week's atrocities. And this is what he was doing in lieu of interacting with society. Would he have gone down the same path in pre-internet times? I'm not bringing this up in order to start arguing for more internet regulations, but I believe his access to information played as much a role in this as did his access to guns.
Anyway, I think I've written enough at this point. It's something that will continue to haunt me for a long time, I think, but I believe it was a highly unusual, isolated incident and not part of some nationwide epidemic. And in spite of horrors like this, and the bleak picture we get from the media, we need to keep things in perspective: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/8789981/glad-tidings/
I am really sorry for your, and your communities, loss. Losses.
Its hard when something like this hits so close to home. You want to make sense of it. You want to quantify it, so you can somehow prevent it from happening again. There will always be haunting questions for those that interacted with both the gunman and his mother.
I don't think its easy as something like "access to information." Granted it is unbelievably easy to gather information on the internet. But even before the internet friends of mine had books like the Anarchist's Cookbook (a great guide on how to blow yourself up if there was ever one), Army Ranger Explosive Manuals, and chemistry texts. With these relatively easy to obtain books my friends in high school made all kinds of dangerous stuff just to see it go boom. This was more out of curiosity than anything else but they figured it out. Had they turned the knowledge to the dark side they could have done a lot of damage.
Adam Lanza, if reports are to believed (and until someone who professionally diagnosed him comes forward, take these reports with huge grains of salt) was both autistic and had a personality disorder. It fits his profile, he is high functioning, intelligent but is completely disconnected from those around him. His age, 20, is the right time for folks to have a break with reality.
So, let's say for the sake of argument he was a paranoid personality disorder. He presents with all the classic symptoms that we attribute with paranoid schizophrenics, only without the hallucinations. He kept a very light internet footprint (unusual for someone with his computer skills). He destroyed his hard drive physically which is the most likely way to completely destroy data you don't want someone to see. Most people don't realize just how easy it is to recover a HD that has just been "erased" unless done with some government level wipe the drive protocols. He was trying to keep folks from seeing him. It would fit someone living in a paranoid state.
This is all speculation. We don't really know. The press doesn't really know. Adam is a cypher for a lot of folks to project their own fears about our society. The sad fact is we may never know why he snapped.
All I know is that someone that should have been in mental health treatment had access to a tremendous amount of firepower and killed a bunch of people. It withers my heart. It makes me angry, sad, and I feel powerless.
no one in our lifetime will ever talk about banning all guns in america... maybe in our grandchildren's...
but, if people want to ban a certain type of gun, like semi-auto rifles, just make the penalty for owning or using them gigantic, like the one for owning a machine gun... when is the last time you heard of a machine gun being used in a crime? those "heat" guys in LA? that was almost 20 years ago...
The hard drives are of interest not because I think the media needs to expose and sensationalize the contents, whatever they may be (although perhaps that's an unavoidable consequence of that information coming out). I think they might have provided law enforcement and medical professionals with some insight into the killer's problems, that's all.
I'm not (and I don't think many are) advocating the media "shutting up" about anything. They just need to use more tact and show more respect for those who've been affected by this tragedy. Don't give little kids the third degree on TV, asking them about every horrible detail of what they've just been through. Also, maybe don't report so much misinformation.
There's been so much misinformation reported that, like you, I'm skeptical of all these reports, which is why I said I suspected the killer was more normal than we think. But yes, this makes a lot of sense and would go a long way towards explaining his disconnect from society.
I'm right there with you. On Sunday my wife and I drove to the area near the school where people have memorials set up, just to lay some flowers and pay our respects. I didn't really want to go, and it was surreal to see the media circus surrounding such a familiar place. That hit me in the gut--to see all the news vans and police barriers and the memorials, to confront the reality of the situation. Reminded me of the first time I drove by the Manhattan skyline with the twin towers gone. You know what's happened but to see the evidence in front of you, that's something else. Anyway strangely enough I felt better after being there. To see so many other people there, also affected deeply, coming together to show support, and to be a part of that, was uplifting in spite of the sadness surrounding the place.
Las Vegas undersheriff Kevin McMahill says at least eight guns were found in the hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel where Stephen Paddock launched his deadly attack.
“This is a day I wish I never had to see in my 27 years of law enforcement,” he told CNN.
He said the scene was the most disturbing he had ever seen in his career. “We just didn’t see it coming,” McMahill said.
FACEPALM.
But if all those 600 people were armed, surely the would have been able to stop him... /s
The one thing that keeps going through my mind is how is it a thing, that one man's right to bear arms trumps fifty-nine people's rights to live and five hundred people's rights not to be maimed and or wounded?
You can say he was crazy. Sure but no one saw it coming. He was a regular guy according to all who knew him.
So, as far as I know, there is no way to test the whole population to work out who is going to go out of their minds and kill people. So the only sane thing to do is limit the population's access to firearms.
You can talk about having better security at hotels, you can say that if people really want to murder people they will use cars, knives ect but if the guy had a knife how many people would have died?