"Batman Massacre"

[protege]

I'd prefer it if this didn't descend into insulting people of a certain preference on a matter as idiots or fools.

Raps, that's not what I meant, and I apologize for that.

What I was referring to, were people like the guy Gravekeeper quoted. The shootings were *not* an attack on Judeo-Christian beliefs. The shootings had nothing to do with that! All it was, was some sick fuck who wanted to rack up a high body count. This is what I was trying to get to--some asshole trying to push an agenda. How many people like him twist events to suit their agenda...and how many people will 'convert' to his side? Some people will see exactly what they want to see. Unfortunately, such people tend to be rather vocal, and can stir up trouble unnecessarily.

[Nekojin]

I know I've been one of the biggest culprits taking this discussion towards gun control instead of the victims, please don't think I meant to diminish them in any way. I don't have an agenda, just some opinions and I guess a big part of me just doesn't understand the huge gun culture in the US.

I guess why I bring up the gun control argument is that these incidents keep happening. Not just in the US I know, but more often than not when I hear of this kind of event it's in America. What is being done to stop it? Have people just given up? Are you just supposed to accept that this is normal in a gun society?

It's normal in society, period. There are some people who are whacked-out, but not so whacked-out that they're immediately obvious. Without devolving into an oppressive regime, what steps can you take to prevent someone who has been a law-abiding citizen for their entire lives suddenly snapping and going postal? Or going around normal channels to acquire the otherwise-tracked items anonymously. There is no such thing as a perfect defense; people who are intent on breaking the rules will find ways around any prevention methods you design.

Ban the guns, and they'll either break laws to get the guns (and, if all guns are illegal, they may well go for BIGGER, more lethal guns, since if they're going to break laws, why worry about the scale?), or they'll invent new ways to kill large numbers of people. A theater employee could put a pipe bomb under every single seat in a theater and result in a higher death toll than this guy.

Why isn't anything being done to stop it? Perhaps because it's statistically insignificant - it's noise among all the many ways that people die (and even kill each other), but the media makes a much bigger deal about it because it's unusual.

Maybe my question shouldn't be How is this happening, but Why?

Do you mean, why do people snap in general, or why did this person go and try to kill a hundred or so people? For the latter, we don't know - damned little information has been released about Mr. Suspect so far. For the former... when you know, let us know, eh? Psychology is still nowhere near an exact science. However, there are some few speculations.

1.) A combination of a sense that not only is the person insignificant, the odds that they'll ever be able to do anything to make them significant are absurdly slim; plus the desire to be significant, be someone that people talk about. If you've got such a fatalistic view of the world, it's not hard to decide that if you can't do something so terrific that people talk about you, the only option is to do something so horrific that people talk about you.
2.) Sociopaths, as a general rule, don't have empathy for others. Someone dying, to them, has no greater impact than someone moving away. But they understand that other people place a lot of value on human life, so people's lives become a lever that they can use to influence others.
4.) People with Narcissistic Personality Disorder place their own comfort and ego ahead of everything else. To them, nothing other than their own desires matter. If they incur a debt, the debt is unimportant, since they already got what they want out of the deal. And if what they want is notoriety, they may go to any lengths to achieve it.
3.) Nihilists just don't give a damn, and want to blow shit up, kill people, and generally destroy what others have created. If they're also narcissistic, that means doing the destruction in person, where others can see it.

[Nekojin]

That being said, guns don't need to be banned, however strict regulation works well, Australia has fairly strict gun control, the number of homicides in australia commited with guns has decreased significantly and in proportion to the US it is staggeringly small, the first I could find was for 2002 Australia had 59, for the US was 9369 (and yes I know the us population is bigger, 14 times bigger, however 14x59 is only 826, less than 1/11th) between 1991 and 2001 during which the government implemented a buyback scheme for illegal weapons the firearm related death rate decreased by 47%.

Australia also has the distinct advantage of being an island nation FAR away from other land masses. It has no land routes for smuggling; any illicit substances either have to be manufactured locally, or brought in on boats. That makes things an order of magnitude harder to manage.

Trying to compare guns in Australia against guns in America without considering this point results in a very skewed analysis.

[HYHYBT]

Any chance of getting practical ideas for preventing this sort of incident that DON'T involve gun control or searching everybody everywhere we go?

[AdminAssistant]

3.) Nihilists just don't give a damn, and want to blow shit up, kill people, and generally destroy what others have created. If they're also narcissistic, that means doing the destruction in person, where others can see it.

I don't want to Off Topic a serious thread, but I also really really really want to make a Big Lebowski reference. :/

[Nekojin]

Any chance of getting practical ideas for preventing this sort of incident that DON'T involve gun control or searching everybody everywhere we go?

Psychological profiling in grade school would have a chance of identifying and treating sociopaths before they really have a chance to do any damage (and also before they really learn how to hide their sociopathy). That, of course, would be resisted as an invasion of privacy by most people.

On another tack, serious crackdowns on school bullying might make a dent in it - quite a few of the more recent spree shooters (Loughner, Cho, Harris and Klebold - for starters) were victims of bullying before they went on their respective shooting sprees. I don't know how bullying is dealt with these days, but from what I've heard, it's not much better than when I was a teen - and I was suspended more than once for getting beat up.

[BlaqueKatt]

The difference being that hammers, knives and cars are tools with a main purpose that are used for something else, a gun has a main purpose too, that is to kill. Australia has fairly strict gun control, the number of homicides in australia commited with guns has decreased significantly and in proportion to the US it is staggeringly small, the first I could find was for 2002 Australia had 59, for the US was 9369 (and yes I know the us population is bigger, 14 times bigger, however 14x59 is only 826, less than 1/11th) between 1991 and 2001 during which the government implemented a buyback scheme for illegal weapons the firearm related death rate decreased by 47%.

yes but the overall murder rate is still not much lower than the US(data from 2008) Source United Nations, which proves take one way to murder away people that want to kill will find another way.

murder rate per 100,000
Australia =1.23
United states=5.22

Honduras has a rate of 82.1 and a population of 8,296,693
Jamica is at 52.1 with a population of 2,889,187

So apparently population doesn't have a whole lot to do with it.

Any chance of getting practical ideas for preventing this sort of incident that DON'T involve gun control or searching everybody everywhere we go?

Gun accessory control? Seriously hi-cap drum magazines serve no purpose outside a range, if you can't hit a deer, squirrel, rabbit, quail, other food creature with 6 shots, you should not be hunting.

[Nyoibo]

yes but the overall murder rate is still not much lower than the US(data from 2008) Source United Nations

murder rate per 100,000
Australia =1.23
United states=5.22

Honduras has a rate of 82.1 and a population of 8,296,693
Jamica is at 52.1 with a population of 2,889,187

So apparently population doesn't have a whole lot to do with it.

I'm not sure how you consider a murder rate 1/4 not much lower.

[Andara Bledin]

The most likely why is something I mentioned several posts back, but everybody was so interested in the whole "OMG, GUNS!" argument, that it was lost in the shuffle. Seriously, shut up about the weapons; it's not about them and the more noise that gets made about them, the less useful the conversation becomes.

This man is 21. He's already got his masters and is going for his doctorate. He's obviously highly intelligent. But he's been promised his entire childhood that if he worked hard, went to college and got a degree, he'd be handed a high-paying job for his troubles, yet the reports mention that he was having difficulty finding employment.

I know it's trite, but society is to blame.

We spend so much time and effort playing up the American Dream, but for most of the nation, the damn thing is stillborn and getting worse every day. Opportunities are getting slimmer and social stratification becoming more rigid. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the people in the middle get pushed down until they are the poor.

We're lying to ourselves and to our children, and we continue to do so because it's easier to face than the truth that the current situation is intolerable. And the more it continues in this vein, the more likely we are to see more of this type of behavior as more intelligent people get hit with how little chance most of us actually have to do better than our parent with no support system to keep them together as their world-view is destroyed by harsh reality.

^-.-^

[Rapscallion]

Unfortunately, the immediate jump to "Guns are BAD!" that is often taken after these events is a notably simplistic and ultimately counterproductive action.

With the mod hat still on, there's been a notable move towards being more personal in the debate on here. Trying to nip it in the bud.

Without the mod hat on, it's been interesting to me that the usual anti-gun people aren't protesting loudly about this. I've not seen one person on FB or in this thread say 'guns bad!'. What I have seen have been lots of people saying, "More guns!"

I think the US has found itself willing to pay the price of a very open gun availability. Unfortunately you have to pay that price all too often.

Rapscallion

[Canarr]

Here's the rub with that. It's really, really fucking easy to change the rules once the scheme is in place to make anything 'wrong'.

Let me give you a nice example. After the 7/7 terrorist bombing in London, new laws were passed that were ostensibly meant for anti-terror policing. Sounds good, right? No one could complain about that, right?

Well, the laws ended up being used for just about anything but terror investigations. People not picking up dog poop, for instance.

So seriously, don't sit there and spout rubbish. People in power want more power. They will abuse the emotive reactions to tragedies to get more power. And the power they get will be orders of magnitude harder to take away than it was to get.

You mean, like the Patriot Act? How did that go... "Congress would have blood on its hands if there was another terrorist attack while we deliberated" [Lynn Woosley (D-Calif.)].

So, the righteous indignation *does* ring a bit hollow here, methinks.

[siead_lietrathua]

Any chance of getting practical ideas for preventing this sort of incident that DON'T involve gun control or searching everybody everywhere we go?

in cities or areas of high crime: bullet proof glass or solid steel entry and side doors for theater buildings, (emergency exits within the theater are already steel with no exterior handles that i've seen) and have a few security people on the late-films armed with nonleathal, legal defense weapons.
for event showings like batman was, have someone stationed at all main building exits as well as the exits within the theater to make sure noone riggs the doors, and rent out a police or armed security force for extra manpower.
in small towns and low-crime areas: the expense VS risk of stronger doors may not be worth it. definatly the non-leathal security at night. for event showings, again having the door guarded. hiring armed guards may not be nessesary, but beef up the non-lethal security.
in both cases, let local law enforcment know of an event. they may choose to have someone be kept on a close patrol to have a first responder in short distance.

now getting a corperation to pay out for those expenses, GFL! ha.

[lordlundar]

I would have to speculate that normal people don't decide, "holy shit I'm bored I need to go rob and kill to pass the time"

Well, not all criminals are declared legally insane either, even in the batman continuity (though as I said, that depends on the writer). Catwoman has never been in Arkham (Arkham city game notwithstanding) and early on the Penguin was not put in there either though that was changed. In fact, the Arkham Asylum game dealt with Blackgate where the more conventional criminals go.

[crashhelmet]

I've been staying out of the gun control issue here because it's like beating a dead horse. Not just here on this board, but everywhere.

As I've stated in other threads, one of my "side jobs" is private security for a group of friends of mine. Some of them ask me to carry and I do. But I am one of those that believes in Gun Control. I believe that there are certain people that should not be allowed to own guns. I also believe that military grade weapons should not be made available to the general public. I'd make exceptions for Honorable Discharged military and law enforcement, but that isn't why I'm commenting here.

The problem with this and the reason why the "OMG GUNS!!!" debate continues to pop up is because events like this.

And this guy
And this guy
Can't forget these two
Or these two
This guy
This guy

/sigh

This kid
These two kids
or
This teen


And then there are idiots like
This guy
and
This guy

Shit... I'm seeing a trend here. Only women should be allowed to own guns

My point is though is that because of these numerous incidents, and this is only a fraction of the many in this country, the debate will never die. People will always cry out "OMG GUNS!!!!"

[Mikkel]

I think I want to throw this into the debate:
Norway have gun control. Remember what happened a year ago?
I don't know. Obviously criminals and crazy people can get their hands on guns even if there is a great deal of control, still anything that will make it harder for them to get guns must help a bit. If every law-abiding citizen own a gun, any criminal can easily get one by stealing one (running the risk of being shot, of course).
If you, as here in Denmark, can't buy ammunition without showing a permit, it makes it harder to use the gun you bought illegally.
Crashhelmet, I've known some crazy and murderous women. I don't think your proposal will work .