Crazy shoots 12 dead and injures 25

i think we have qutte a few, relatively speaking, and i attribute most of it to psychiatric drugs. we refer to it as "going postal". sad.

 

Uhhh...we have the second amendment to the constitution. I grow tired of gun control discussions.

 

Just remember, It's NOT the "gun" that causes it, It's the person pulling the trigger.

 

I agree.
In most of the recent mass murder suicides starting with Columbine ,the murderer was using psychotropic drugs.

 

My main concern about these murder-suicides is the time-order of events. Shouldn't the suicide be first?

 

No, this is a highly contentious and polarized issued here too.

 

No, guns are definitely NOT available at supermarkets. But, I always hear in the media that they're easily available at gun shows due to Gun show - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (I don't know the details as I don't follow this stuff and am not political.)

In the Virginia Tech massacre, the shooter that killed 32 people in a day bought his guns legally at a gun store and the quick background check turned up nothing. Where Cho Bought His Deadly Weapon - TIME

 

Look up the lists of mass murder, massacre, and just shooting in your friendly Google references and you'll find incidents of these kinds happening all over the planet across the last century.

What stands out is how the United States compares to the rest of the world in firearm mayhem: it eclipses the entire rest of the planet combined in sheer quantity of incidence. At 5% of the world's population, the US suffers more than half of all the incidents worldwide, and that's just incidents that make it to the press.

Now why would that be?

What differentiates the United States from the rest of the world that its citizens would suffer firearm carnage at a rate greater than the entire rest of the planet?

The gun faction will claim it isn't guns by the hundreds of millions available at the corner super, oh, no, it's bad people pulling the trigger. But for that argument to hold water it would require the citizens of the United States to be almost a separate, more violent species of human being, less capable of dealing peaceably with the vicissitudes of life than the rest of the world. I don't think that's a viable theory, either biologically or psychologically; besides, no US citizen would accept such an assessment of himself.

Well, the discrepancy has to have SOME explanation. Logic would count the number of guns in the country compared to the rest of the world and make an inescapable inference: confronted with a difficulty, a human being without a gun will find some other way to cope, while the human being with a gun might think he doesn't have to. The evidence fills graveyards in every locality from the Atlantic to the Gulf to the Pacific to the edge of Canada.

What the "Guns don't kill, people do" faction fails to recognize is that such inept logic also equates to "Nuclear bombs don't kill, people do". A weapon is a weapon, whether a stick or an a jet propelled air force, and a man with a weapon may believe it powerful enough to use without repercussion.

Even in the United States it is not legally possible for private citizens to possess fully functional automatic weapons, grenade launchers, stinger missiles, tanks, battleships, fighter aircraft with functioning weaponry, submarines, or any of a wide range of armament. If "Guns don't kill, people do" were truly a sufficient check on our tendencies toward violence, there'd be no restriction on what a private citizen could keep as a personal arsenal.

More or less wisely, even in the US we draw a line between a stick and a nuclear bomb and say beyond this line we don't trust people to behave responsibly, the damage that would be inflicted would be too heavy to permit the risk.

At the moment the line is drawn at the one round per trigger squeeze percussive implement. The damage it causes can be horrific, but we apparently consider that level of carnage acceptable, even though it's far above what the rest of the world will tolerate. We've taken the word "arms" in our constitution to mean "one round per trigger squeeze percussive implement" even though it doesn't say that, it just says "arms", and could be just as logically taken to mean "nuclear submarine with MIRV tipped missiles" or "sharp stick", and built over time the mythic notion that a man isn't a man unless he's got a Glock in his pants.

Take a look at what turns up in Google search lists. There is no escaping the grisly arithmetic they portray. And be thankful you reside in a country where, when the occasional nut lets loose with an illicit gun, it only happens in your country three times in a century, not three times every three months as is about the rate in the United States.

 

Like in China, where any guns are almost impossible to get...

"Man stabs 28 children in China nursery school attack"
BBC News - Man stabs 28 children in China nursery school attack

 

Taxi Drivers...eh!!

 

sorry to hear your situation. as far as the US we probably have a dozen mass shootings every year. last fall, 20 miles down the road from me, an idiot walked into the local doughnut shop and killed 4 City of Lakewood, WA police officers... ya, armed officers doing getting together for coffee before the start of their shift...

its one thing to gun down unarmed innocents, but to take on trained armed personal is beyond lunacy. i find that as the middle class rapidly fades away and the divide between the "haves" and the "havenots" widens while the ability to provide basic needs becomes a monumental task, we will only see more of these events.

this past winter, 15 miles in the other direction from me, a guy was laid off from his job. he went home killed his wife and 4 children and put a gun to his head. its hard to even imagine why he thought that was the only solution. as for me, i have been in pretty dismal situations. i have lived in my car, been evicted for inability to pay rent, i have stood in line at the food bank, etc. you name it, i have done it.

but people do crazy things and will continue to do so.

 

15 minutes of fame and forced suicide. The media makes a big deal out of these things, and the nut cases see it and think that they too can be a big shot (so to speak). Likewise, once you kill the first person your fate is pretty well sealed, so it makes it easier to carry out your plan to kill yourself, or in some cases, commit suicide by cop.

It depends on your definition of supermarket. Many of the big box stores in our area carry firearms in the sporting goods section. You can pick up some groceries, new pajamas, and a 12 gauge shotgun at one convenient location.

If you just want a firearm there are plenty of hunting and fishing stores, or dedicated gun shops.

The comment about gun shows comes into play as a loophole for getting around many of the gun laws. People selling guns at gun shows are not regulated as tightly as those working from a real store.

Tom

 

There have been cases of Taxi Drivers committing suicide here in Dublin,it's one of those professions that are in the higher risk...sitting around for long periods on ranks with maybe too much time to think about things...that's why i don't sit on ranks,i'm sure all it takes is for a few factors to collide and one might feel that there is only one way out,
And no,i don't think it's too deep a question and those answers might..just might help you sometime.

 

People are not rational beings. We have a big brain which is capable of employing logic to solve problems, but we seldom if ever behave logically. And that big brain can go haywire sometimes. The process of evolution requires mutation, and most mutations cannot survive. Where we exceed other animals is in our adaptability, but that adaptability arises from differing response to situations by different individuals. Just as genetic mutation usually is fatal, so also an adaptable brain will sometimes follow a self-destructive path, and sometimes that path will be more widely destructive.

In other words, these things will happen because of what we are.

On the other hand, environment plays a tremendous role in shaping our behavior, and the U.S. is a very violent and individualistic culture. We race to war much more eagerly than most countries, and we are much more enthusiastic about killing people we hate than are most cultures. More than most other cultures, we see killing people as a way to solve our problems.

Bowling for Columbine noted (surprising to me) that gun ownership is as widespread in Canada as it is in the U.S., and yet the murder rate is many times greater in the U.S., and came to the conclusion that a factor is the culture of fear in the U.S. Citizens of the U.S. tend to be more afraid of their fellow citizens and the world in general than are Canadians.

So combine desperation due to personal circumstances, defective brain function, a culture of fear leading to a me-vs-them mentality, and a shoot first, ask questions later cultural predisposition, and the result is the occasional rampage. The surprising thing is that with 350,000,000 (???) people in the U.S. that these things only happen about once a month.

 

Daniel, I'm not so sure the U.S. is that much more aggressive than other countries. We were reluctant to join WWI and WWII (altho we take a lot of credit for ending those wars). We have thrown our weight around since then, but we have a lot of weight to throw, comparatively speaking.

On a more individual level, our media sensationalizes any mass or serial murder. We have maybe 3 events a year where more than 4 people are shot (just a WAG), but that's always big news. China is facing the same thing with their recent copycat killings of suicidal people taking a knife to a day care and killing a bunch of kids before themselves. They can control the media however, and recently stopped reporting those events, it'll be interesting to see if that ends now. We also need to treat mental illnesses more seriously, and hospitalize people who can't take care of themselves and may become violent. That's not favored by the Republicans however as it's expensive.

If you look at the list of top mass murderers, the U.S. has 39 of the top 190 killers, according to their various charts. Which are actually pretty interesting, according to that the last 40 years are a couple orders of magnitude more violent than the previous 80, but it could be just better record keeping. In the mass murder category, Uganda and Indonesia have several entries; workplace killlings it's U.S. and Russia; school killings it's U.S., Germany and China; hate crimes has a lot of entries from Israel, not surprisingly (although they don't include terrorism in this page). South Africa, France, U.K. and Yemen also show up more than expected in general for the population (just by casually eye-balling it).

The Canada aspect you mention is interesting. I imagine most of their personal arms are deer rifles and birding shotguns, as opposed to handguns (which work best in close quarters, ie. against other people). If a Canadian doesn't like people, they have a lot of room for solitude up there, that might count for something.