CT school shooting - Horrible

[Zod]

Perhaps it was his intent to maim and not kill that had something to do with the fact that no one died in the stabbings.

Source? None of the articles I read said that he was trying not to kill anyone.

But go ahead and say guns are so much dangerous than knives.

There's 500 years of military history backing us up on this one.

Would free healthcare make a difference to this sort of thing? The NHS isn't perfect, but people in need do get counseling and medication.

[s_stabeler]

Free healthcare would probably help, yes (not least because you'd have far less undocumented mentally ill people- thus patching one of the biggest holes in the current gun control laws w/o making them any stricter) though I doubt it would be enough. Honestly, on current information, this was probably unavoidable.

[Andara Bledin]

It is actually completely fucked up that it is so difficult to get good or even adequate mental health care, but so damn easy to get a gun.

It has nothing to do with priorities and everything to do with supply. Guns are easy to supply and once made don't require any additional resources from the makers. A person's mental health, however, is something that can be excessively time consuming to maintain.

Honestly, the thing that is fucked up in this country is that we persecute and prosecute people committing victimless crimes (mostly surrounding drugs and sex) to the point where our jails are overflowing, yet we throw our mentally ill out on the street for want of a few tax dollars. That is where our priorities are complete unbalanced.

With rights (such as the right to bear arms) comes responsiblity, and it is our responsibility as a society to make sure that deadly weapons, while legal, do not to easily get into the hands of people who are mentally disturbed.

And what laws, precisely, are going to stop a mentally deranged young man (who nobody was aware was mentally deranged prior to his snapping) from visiting his gun-owning mother who had no mental issues and stealing her guns and killing her when she tried to stop him?

Are we just supposed to stop all people who have relatives or friends that might go crazy down the line from having guns as well?

Quoted for truth.

Except that we know he didn't just walk into a gun shop and get a gun, which is why he stole his mother's weapons.

And you are wrong. There are certainly ways to regulate firearms, both fairly and consistently, so that safe people have access to them, and the vast majority of unsafe and irresponsible people do not.

It's not a matter of making sure the crazies don't get guns, but figuring out who the crazies actually are.

Plus, again, he wasn't allowed a gun from a gun shop, so the gun laws actually worked in this instance, so I'm not sure why beefing them up is on the table for this particular event.

Implying that it was because he was using a knife that people didn't die. Perhaps it was his intent to maim and not kill that had something to do with the fact that no one died in the stabbings.

Unfortunately, we don't have any information on the gravity of the wounds to the children attacked in China, so we have no idea as to the severity of the attack beyond pure numbers of victims and their disposition post-attack.

However, given the fact that we know the shooter was specifically working to ensure his victims were dead, and no children died in the knife attack, it's fairly safe to assume that the attacker in China was acting out more for attention than an effort to actually kill people. Also, as that is part of a series of rampage attacks over issues completely unrelated to the victims, the victim count of elementary school children in China has far and away surpassed the US in both terms of total number attacked and total number killed, despite their lack of access to firearms. In 2010, for example, a knife-wielding man, upset over thwarted romance, killed nearly as many as the shooter in CT, and injured another 50.

Again, it's not the weapons but the mental health of the people that is at issue and that we need to focus on. Seriously, focusing on the guns is absolutely the worst thing we can do, even if we do try to couple it with advances in our mental health coverage because it pulls resources away that need to be spent on something other than gun control.

But go ahead and say guns are so much dangerous than knives.

Guns are much more dangerous than knives, and to say otherwise is just silly.

However, as has been displayed before, it's the intent of the attacker that really determines how many are harmed, and how terribly; it's just that guns have a greater facility for making people dead at a distance.

^-.-^

[Greenday]

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headline...-knife-attack/

If he was trying to kill the kids, he could have. Instead of chose to maim his victims. He cut fingers off, he cut ears off. He was mutilating, not killing. So trying to compare the fatality stats of the two cases is just plain wrong.

[Gravekeeper]

Police just confirmed he was using a AR-15 assault rifle for most of it. In an "assault type" configuration. Whatever that means. I assume converted to full auto or something.

That's gonna spurn the gun control issue forward even more.

[protege]

And what laws, precisely, are going to stop a mentally deranged young man (who nobody was aware was mentally deranged prior to his snapping) from visiting his gun-owning mother who had no mental issues and stealing her guns and killing her when she tried to stop him? Are we just supposed to stop all people who have relatives or friends that might go crazy down the line from having guns as well?

That's the point that I was trying to make. The nuts are going to do whatever they have to, to get what they need. For example, what about all the assholes with multiple DUI convictions, who are still getting caught? Sure, they might lose their license/car, or have an interlock device installed in their vehicle...but what's to stop them from stealing a relative's car?

[Andara Bledin]

"Assault" configuration means that the gun was set to fire in burst mode as opposed to single shot. The main difference would be that in burst mode (especially at close range) would ensure the death of the target as oppose to being required to pull the trigger more than once for each one.

Speaking practically as regards this event, it is likely irrelevant what mode the rifle was in as he was going inside classrooms and his targets were generally trapped inside the rooms with him. He had to have changed clips repeatedly due to the mode of fire. In fact, taking that into consideration, the fact that the gun was in burst mode likely reduced the number of victims due to excessive ammo use per target.

^-.-^

[Duelist925]

Implying that it was because he was using a knife that people didn't die. Perhaps it was his intent to maim and not kill that had something to do with the fact that no one died in the stabbings.

But go ahead and say guns are so much dangerous than knives.

Yeah, I mean, thats why all our armed forces are armed with the latest and greatest bladed weaponry.

It's not like you have to be within arms reach of someone to kill them with a knife, or anything, as opposed to the ranged ability a gun gives you.


Hey, its not like knives have other uses, as tools and the like, other than killing, whereas killing and inflicting injury is the only use a gun has.

[Hyena Dandy]

But go ahead and say guns are so much dangerous than knives.

But... But they are. I mean, that is obvious. They are.

They totally are. Now, you can make arguments about whether or not we should be controlling guns or not. And you can make an argument about whether or not it would help.

But I think it should be obvious that knives are more dangerous weapons than guns. >_<

[Greenday]

I just find it so absurd that people harp on how dangerous guns are, but make no effort to go after all the other deadly weapons. How come no one is going after knives, bows, nightsticks, swords, tazers, etc.? Rage porn is what this is.

Police just confirmed he was using a AR-15 assault rifle for most of it. In an "assault type" configuration. Whatever that means. I assume converted to full auto or something.

That's gonna spurn the gun control issue forward even more.

Just means it can fire single fire or burst (Three rounds normally). The AR-15 is a very versatile gun that can have all sorts of modifications and additions to make it a very efficient weapon.

[Duelist925]

I just find it so absurd that people harp on how dangerous guns are, but make no effort to go after all the other deadly weapons. How come no one is going after knives, bows, nightsticks, swords, tazers, etc.? Rage porn is what this is.

Bow: needs a metric fuckton of practice if you want to reliably hit anything from any distance. At that, unless you are the quickest damn person with a bow in the world, any gun with a clip can out more bullets in a minute than a bow can in ten. Don't even bother.

Knives: Have to get up close and personal, and requires a modicum of training to use effectively. getting up close and personal, by the way, requires a much, MUCH more investment into the killing--killing from a distance gives one, no pun intended, range from the death. Its over there--not right up in your face. So, psychological edge as well.

Nightsticks? Designed to be non lethal. And even if it wasn't, its a fucking baseball bat at best. Same up close and personal problem as a knife as well.

Swords: Same up close problem with knives, requires MORE training to use effective actually, and damn hard to hide.


Tasers: Designed to be non lethal, and acts thusly in most cases--just happens to be more lethal than we thought.

Bombs and chemical weapons: Requires far, FAR more effort to get or make than a gun, and can EASILY blow up in the killers face while being made if the killer doesnt know wtf he's doing.

As far as etc...what etc? Catapults maybe? Or the vast swathe of nunchucks that kids collect after seeing their first kung fu movie?


You cannot compare guns to ANY other commonly available weapon in the US in any way. Not in terms of lethality, not in terms of ease of use, and not in terms of how little protection the common man has against it.

With the right gun, a one armed half blind man could slaughter a room full of people in the time it takes a chainsmoker to suck down a cigarette or two.

OH, one more way you can't compare guns to other commonly available weapons: Sheer number of deaths.

How many shootings have we seen since 1999? How many this fucking year alone?

How many mass knife attacks have you EVER heard about? Or mass sword killings? Hey, how many times has a geek gone berzerk with a bat'leth at a convention, hmm?

Name. One. Time.

And even if you can, even if you do the research, heres a tip--compare the number of mass killings with knives, or bows, or fucking swords to the number of mass killings with guns.

Compare the body counts.

Compare the number of lives stolen, and familys shattered.

Then come back here and talk about how fucking dangerous knives and swords and fucking bows are compared to an assault rifle with burst capability.






We need better gun control laws in this country. Ban? Would never work. Too many reasons some people DO need guns--legit reasons too.

But we need better gun control. Or else this will happen again. And again. And again. As more fucked up sickos try to get their name on tv and get famous, or spread their hatred and bile around, and people will die. Innocent people.

[Hyena Dandy]

Previously, I've been against gun control laws. But the more I see these in the news, the more something becomes obvious to me.

What we are doing right now is not working. We need to be doing something other than what we are doing right now, because if we keep doing what we've always done, we'll get the results we always got.

[Greenday]

So because guns are the best option for killing people, they are the only ones we should focus on. Got it.

The UK has proven that stabbing people is quite easy. Yet they cry so much about how horrible the US with guns.

Why are guns the only ones being focused on? Because media porn.

Duelist, you act like the things you listed are impossible to use to kill lots of people. You could certainly do it with knives, swords, or bows.

You're right that guns need to be more regulated. People shouldn't be able to go to a show and buy a gun without being checked out. But on the other hand, those of us who are mentally sane, have no criminal record, and are responsible people should be able to own guns and carry them. There's no balance in the US. In most states, it's one extreme or the other.

[Jetfire]

The focus tends to be on guns because:

1) The other items have other, legitimate uses beyond doing harm.
2) The other items take a lot more skill and/or risk to be as dangerous as guns.
3) The other items are already heavily regulated.
4) The lethality of the other items are orders of magnitude less than guns and what guns are capable of.

By trying to point out other deadly things, most of which are much less deadly statistically than guns, you're only trying to divert, if not obfuscate the issue.

As for the issue itself, I have no clue what to do about it. It's clear something has to be done, but what is clear as mud.

I suspect the biggest problem is cultural; it feels like more than any other country on the planet, the US has a love affair with guns. Lord Remington and Sir Colt have been elevated and promoted to such a degree that any attempt to look realistically at what should be done gets mired down in rhetoric.

It's taken generations for the Boomstick to be elevated on its pedestal to it's current effectively untouchable perch, and if there is ever going to be any change, it's going to be generations before that change is effective. Somehow, the gun has to be knocked down from that perch, back down to being just another tool in humanity's tool box, with no real special aspects. But how to do that is tough to figure out.

[Andara Bledin]

How many mass knife attacks have you EVER heard about? Or mass sword killings?

Actually, we've already had several mentions of mass knife attacks in this thread. China is suffering an epidemic of guys going off their nut and taking a knife to their local elementary school. The 2010 incident I mentioned above had a victim count of about 70, with just under 20 of those killed outright and another 50 injured.

That said, we shouldn't be slapping bandaids on the methodology and should be going after the root cause. If we could take all this hysteria over "OMG Guns!!!" and re-direct it towards our mental health failures, then we might actually make a change for the better.

By trying to point out other deadly things, most of which are much less deadly statistically than guns, you're only trying to divert, if not obfuscate the issue.

The problem is that focusing on the guns is the obfuscation.

Forget the guns. Forget the knives. Forget the other weapons. The media and public are so busy foaming at the mouth to do something about them while just sweeping the one unifying factor under the rug as if regulating all our rights away will somehow keep people from going crazy and going on a rampage.

^-.-^