Shooting at CT Elementary School. WTF AMERICA?!

[Faust]

In other news...
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html

That needs to be shown to every single person that keeps saying that it never would've happened if he didn't have a gun.

while the word never is in err it would have greatly reduced the chances of it happening, it's the ease that it can be performed, guns are the rascal scooters of rampages.

[AFK]

Yeah, I think it is far less likely he would have been able to kill as many as he did with a knife.  It just would have taken more time and given one of the adults a better shot at stopping the guy. 


Sounds now like the Mom wasn't an employee at the school, but that she was a gun enthusiast so the kid was clearly brought up in a gun culture.  Of course, most kids brought up in that kind of culture don't go on killing sprees (well, not of humans anyway) but it is kind of chilling to hear how well armed this home was.

[Sita]

In other news...
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html

That needs to be shown to every single person that keeps saying that it never would've happened if he didn't have a gun.

while the word never is in err it would have greatly reduced the chances of it happening, it's the ease that it can be performed, guns are the rascal scooters of rampages.

I have talked with people who honestly believe that no one would have been hurt if he didn't have a gun. As in if his only choice of weapon was a knife or such he wouldn't have gone to kill anyone.

[Faust]

In other news...
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html

That needs to be shown to every single person that keeps saying that it never would've happened if he didn't have a gun.

while the word never is in err it would have greatly reduced the chances of it happening, it's the ease that it can be performed, guns are the rascal scooters of rampages.

I have talked with people who honestly believe that no one would have been hurt if he didn't have a gun. As in if his only choice of weapon was a knife or such he wouldn't have gone to kill anyone.

I honestly believe if he did not have access to guns he would have killed less people. I also believe he would have reconsidered going through with it if it wasn't such an easy method. in fact though it is a miserable thought I think he may well have chickened out of an attack at all but thats just ifs.

the fact is America loves its little rat-a-tat toys and these children's lives were just the price paid for the privilege of having them.

[AFK]

Well, it COULD be true.  If he was acting out some fantasy in his head that involved mowing down people with guns, he would not have been satisfied until he had a gun, he probably would not have done it with a knife.  Of course, that just means he would not have done it until he had the guns.  And indeed it sounds like he was turned down at a Dick's Sporting Goods where he tried to buy a gun, because of the state's gun laws.  Which goes to show that gun laws do work, just not very well.  As they are now they are just a delay. 


I'm guessing when buying the gun didn't work, he said, "Oh yeah, Mom's got LOADS of guns", and when Mom said "Fuck No!" shot her in the face, loaded up, and yeah we know the rest.

[Cain]

There is a psychological aspect to the weapons chosen.

Guns make it far easier to kill, simply because one is further from the target, and because of the relative/percieved lack of blood in comparison to knife attacks, where blood is everywhere, and one has to commit the visceral act of shoving the knife into the body.

It doesn't necessarily apply in this case, and there are plenty of caveats but in general someone with a gun is more liable to use it than someone with a knife.  However, someone who is actually willing to use a knife is probably more dangerous than a reluctant person with a gun, because it means they likely enjoy the visceral aspect of the weapon. 

The psychology of weapons used in murder is a very interesting one, and seems to have some evidence backing it up.

[Sita]

There is a psychological aspect to the weapons chosen.

Guns make it far easier to kill, simply because one is further from the target, and because of the relative/percieved lack of blood in comparison to knife attacks, where blood is everywhere, and one has to commit the visceral act of shoving the knife into the body.

It doesn't necessarily apply in this case, and there are plenty of caveats but in general someone with a gun is more liable to use it than someone with a knife.  However, someone who is actually willing to use a knife is probably more dangerous than a reluctant person with a gun, because it means they likely enjoy the visceral aspect of the weapon. 

The psychology of weapons used in murder is a very interesting one, and seems to have some evidence backing it up.

The way my brain works is that if you are gonna kill someone it doesn't matter what you use.
The fact that someone might feel less reluctant to the kill because it's a gun instead of a knife is something I've never thought of.

[AFK]

From what I've read about this guy, he never would have used a knife because it is a much more up-close-and-personal weapon.  As Cain mentions, someone would probably have a certain bloodlust to want to use that kind of weapon, and probably also someone who feels very comfortable and adept at using it.  This kid sounds like your typical socially detached aloof-egghead who probably started sweating bullets anytime anyone ever talked to him.  So a gun (well guns, plural) in his way of thinking, would have been the only way to do this.  Although, it sounds like some of the kids were killed at fairly close range, which really makes me think there are some kind of psychological issues at play.  I just can't imagine how someone can have it within themselves to shoot a 6 year old, multiple times, at close range.  It really sounds like something really really went wrong with this guy. 

[insideout]

I'm sure someone here has an answer to this one, but I don't:  Why have there been no school shootings in Switzerland?

Evidently, Switzerland has an avid country-wide gun culture.  the following article discusses this:
http://www.stephenhalbrook.com/articles/guns-crime-swiss.html

My hypothesis(really just a guess, but whatever) is that part of the issue in the United States of America is that there are pockets of gun culture and pockets of anti-gun culture.  I think that if the whole country were anti-gun, much like Japan, that we would have fewer problems with gun violence, and also that if the whole country were more like Switzerland with high level of consensus in its gun culture, that we would have less violence.  I think we create a situation that makes gun crime more doable by having a mix.

Of course there are a huge number of societal factors that this naive little comparison doesn't take into account, but still I wonder how much having pockets of gun culture and anti-gun culture mixed together in the same larger society contributes to the overall level of gun crime.

[Faust]

I'm sure someone here has an answer to this one, but I don't:  Why have there been no school shootings in Switzerland?

Evidently, Switzerland has an avid country-wide gun culture.  the following article discusses this:
http://www.stephenhalbrook.com/articles/guns-crime-swiss.html

My hypothesis(really just a guess, but whatever) is that part of the issue in the United States of America is that there are pockets of gun culture and pockets of anti-gun culture.  I think that if the whole country were anti-gun, much like Japan, that we would have fewer problems with gun violence, and also that if the whole country were more like Switzerland with high level of consensus in its gun culture, that we would have less violence.  I think we create a situation that makes gun crime more doable by having a mix.

Of course there are a huge number of societal factors that this naive little comparison doesn't take into account, but still I wonder how much having pockets of gun culture and anti-gun culture mixed together in the same larger society contributes to the overall level of gun crime.

those differences can be summed up quite quickly. Switzerland is a first world country. the U.S. is not. 

[Cain]

Switzerland has a very different gun culture.

I worked there for a while, and one aspect of it is that every Swiss male citizen has to undergo military training.  Secondly, apart from the major cities, which are virtually independent city-states, most Swiss live in villages or small mountain towns.  It's much harder to kill most people if you know them pretty well and cannot abstract them in some way.  And finally, Switzerland plays out political and social issues at a very local level.  Swiss citizens feel if they are having problems, they can actually do something about it, via the official municipal channels, not that they are subject to vast bureacracies they cannot control (they are...but in their case it is Credit Suisse, and not government departments).

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm sure someone here has an answer to this one, but I don't:  Why have there been no school shootings in Switzerland?

Evidently, Switzerland has an avid country-wide gun culture.  the following article discusses this:
http://www.stephenhalbrook.com/articles/guns-crime-swiss.html

My hypothesis(really just a guess, but whatever) is that part of the issue in the United States of America is that there are pockets of gun culture and pockets of anti-gun culture.  I think that if the whole country were anti-gun, much like Japan, that we would have fewer problems with gun violence, and also that if the whole country were more like Switzerland with high level of consensus in its gun culture, that we would have less violence.  I think we create a situation that makes gun crime more doable by having a mix.

Of course there are a huge number of societal factors that this naive little comparison doesn't take into account, but still I wonder how much having pockets of gun culture and anti-gun culture mixed together in the same larger society contributes to the overall level of gun crime.

those differences can be summed up quite quickly. Switzerland is a first world country. the U.S. is not.

Pretty much this.

It has fuck-all to do with "gun culture" and "anti-gun culture" and everything to do with a healthy society with adequate mental and physical healthcare and a very, very different relationship with both work and poverty.

Frankly, I think that America's heavily individualist ethic is an elixir that has turned into a poison. Every man for himself may have worked well enough in a frontier country (depending on your definition of "worked), but it's been a long, long time since this was a frontier country.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Wait...mom was a gun nut with a house full of guns and it was her gun?

And the guy had a diagnosis?

So this was a case of mom dropping the ball a la Andrea Yates husband? "It'll be fine..."

And everybody's trying to use a bunch of dead kids as leverage to push legislation when what should have happened was SOMEBODY NOT BEING A FUCKING MORON?

Am I understanding this correctly?

[Dildo Argentino]

Wait...mom was a gun nut with a house full of guns and it was her gun?

And the guy had a diagnosis?

So this was a case of mom dropping the ball a la Andrea Yates husband? "It'll be fine..."

And everybody's trying to use a bunch of dead kids as leverage to push legislation when what should have happened was SOMEBODY NOT BEING A FUCKING MORON?

Am I understanding this correctly?

I happen to think you are.

I even toy with the idea of these killing sprees somehow being indirectly encouraged or at least negligently being allowed to happen by an administration/law-enforcement community that would like to see the population disarmed. I realise that this kind of thinking borders on paranoia... I realise that the statistics tell a different story (comparisons with socio-economically very similar but unarmed cities), but still...

Reminds me (rather remotely) of Krokodil in Russia. Activists are calling for codeine to be made a prescription drug or to be banned in Russia. (Like calling for stricter gun laws, or prohibition.) Only the authorities in Russia are adopting a different tactic: they are not doing anything. This is "solving" their heroin problem.

Of course, ultimately, the solution is not prohibition. It's having a society that doesn't fuck up the majority of its inhabitants.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Wait...mom was a gun nut with a house full of guns and it was her gun?

And the guy had a diagnosis?

So this was a case of mom dropping the ball a la Andrea Yates husband? "It'll be fine..."

And everybody's trying to use a bunch of dead kids as leverage to push legislation when what should have happened was SOMEBODY NOT BEING A FUCKING MORON?

Am I understanding this correctly?

I happen to think you are.

I even toy with the idea of these killing sprees somehow being indirectly encouraged or at least negligently being allowed to happen by an administration/law-enforcement community that would like to see the population disarmed. I realise that this kind of thinking borders on paranoia... I realise that the statistics tell a different story (comparisons with socio-economically very similar but unarmed cities), but still...

Reminds me (rather remotely) of Krokodil in Russia. Activists are calling for codeine to be made a prescription drug or to be banned in Russia. (Like calling for stricter gun laws, or prohibition.) Only the authorities in Russia are adopting a different tactic: they are not doing anything. This is "solving" their heroin problem.

Of course, ultimately, the solution is not prohibition. It's having a society that doesn't fuck up the majority of its inhabitants.

I am hølist, and I approve this post.