Connecticut Elementary School Shooting 27 Killed

[Slurpee]

I was actually a bit off put by Slurpee's posts, not because I disagree with him, but because I think that debating gun control as a solution to the problem is another thing that should wait a bit.

okay, one, I was actually politicizing the gun violence from July and August in aurora and the sheikh temple, and I think you'll find the appropriate amount of time has passed that I no longer have to respect those victims.
 second, I paid my dues:

But seriously though, dead kidnergardeners. Wow. Hm. Wow. Makes u think. 8c

so back off.

at what point does it become OK to discuss making sure this never happens again? or did we throw that possibility out the window? is this something that we just live with now, since getting rid of the problem is apparently a political call to arms, and we no longer have more than a few months' worth of wind down before another spree killing?

respect for the families of the victims, yeah, sure, gold, but it's gross for me to say we as a species should be discussing not creating MORE victims? then I will gladly accept being gross. what that make you? not gross? well say goodnight to da gross guy. last time you gonna see a gross guy like this again, let me tell you.

[PhantomCatClock]

Heroin and meth ruin lives, we can save thousands of people if we made those illegal

[Kombucha]

second, I paid my dues:

I thought that post was cynical, sorry.

at what point does it become OK to discuss making sure this never happens again? or did we throw that possibility out the window?

Definitely not. I think it needs to be discussed, but not now.

Let the media circus wind down a bit and give the families/friends of the victims some time to recover from the shock of this (they'll never fully recover but you know what I mean). It won't take long, no one is going to forget about this in that amount of time, and people shouting about gun laws will not do much good right now given how noisy everything already is. Any arguments will probably be better off a few days from now when this can be better appraised.

But since you were also talking about the victims of other shootings: fair enough, but do you think you should maybe take it to another thread?

[NintendrCkolc]

so on CNN every 5 minutes they play sad piano music and post snazzy and exciting graphics "Connecticut school shooting."

[Slurpee]

I thought that post was cynical, sorry.

Oh, whoops. That actually was cynical, and so was the followup.
I was making fun of the lip service being paid in lieu of actually changing anything. At this point I honestly prefer the Huckabee prayer strat to the people poopooing every thought anybody expresses about stopping this sort of thing from happening again as the heartless pontifications of political vultures.

Alas, you wound me with your sincerity.

Here's a video:

[Kombucha]

Oh, whoops. That actually was cynical, and so was the followup.
I was making fun of the lip service being paid in lieu of actually changing anything. At this point I honestly prefer the Huckabee prayer strat to the people poopooing every thought anybody expresses about stopping this sort of thing from happening again as the heartless pontifications of political vultures.

That's what I thought.

I'm not saying it's heartless to express desire for stricter gun laws and I'm not poopooing every thought that anybody expresses about stopping mass shootings. I'm saying I think it would be a lot better if people waited a few days to get into that, at least if they want to use the Connecticut shooting as an example.

As far as that video goes, yes, the way that event was covered was sickening and incompetent. That's one of the things I've been saying.

[Slurpee]

I'm saying I think it would be a lot better if people waited a few days to get into that.

Why?

[Kombucha]

Why?

The Connecticut shooting doesn't need it right now, shit's already too noisy and ridiculous. It needs to be reserved and respectful, because helping the victims is first priority and it's also obvious that giving a killer celebrity status isn't good. Politicizing it, even with good intentions, is just adding more inappropriate bullshit.

You mentioned the shootings in Aurora and the Sheikh temple. That's good. Using them as examples is good because it's definitely been long enough to discuss them. It's not talking about gun restrictions right after a shooting has happened that's the problem, it's doing that and specifically using that shooting as the primary example.

If you wanted to talk about gun restrictions now, if would be obvious the reason inciting the discussion would be the Connecticut shooting, but it would be acceptable if you didn't put it in the spotlight. Your posts were general, but they are in this thread, about the Connecticut shooting. If you made a thread about gun restrictions and mentioned shootings other than Connecticut, that would probably be pretty cool.

[PhantomCatClock]

I don't think this guy was Herostratus, but yeah, listen to Aretha Franklin

[Slurpee]

The Connecticut shooting doesn't need it right now, shit's already too noisy and ridiculous. It needs to be reserved and respectful, because helping the victims is first priority and it's also obvious that giving a killer celebrity status isn't good. Politicizing it, even with good intentions, is just adding more inappropriate bullshit.

You mentioned the shootings in Aurora and the Sheikh temple. That's good. Using them as examples is good because it's definitely been long enough to discuss them. It's not talking about gun restrictions right after a shooting has happened that's the problem, it's doing that and specifically using that shooting as the primary example.

If you wanted to talk about gun restrictions now, if would be obvious the reason inciting the discussion would be the Connecticut shooting, but it would be acceptable if you didn't put it in the spotlight. Your posts were general, but they are in this thread, about the Connecticut shooting. If you made a thread about gun restrictions and mentioned shootings other than Connecticut, that would probably be pretty cool.

I fail to see how it's inappropriate. Reacting to a tragedy by wanting to stop it from happening again is human nature. Every spree killer has been an undiagnosed mentally ill person with easy access to firearms. I'm not going to apologize for having basic problem solving skills and a desire for notmurder.

Would it be impolite to politicize a death in the family by pointing to it as evidence that we should look for a cure for cancer? Or would that only be if we had an NRA-sized pro-cancer lobby in the United States?

[Kombucha]

Reacting to a tragedy by wanting to stop it from happening again is human nature. Every spree killer has been an undiagnosed mentally ill person with easy access to firearms. I'm not going to apologize for having basic problem solving skills and a desire for notmurder.

Yeah of course. You can even talk about it.

Just avoid making it all about Connecticut for a few days.

[FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK]

WBC just announced they're gonna picket the funerals of these kids. Ughhhhhhhhhh.

[miracle fruit]

Heroin and meth ruin lives, we can save thousands of people if we made those illegal

you are the dumbest motherfucker in this thread

[miracle fruit]

they are playing liberty stands still on channel 16 right now ahahaha

[AlbinoClock]

Restricting gun ownership to the degree required to prevent guns being occasionally used in killing sprees is not only unconstitutional, it's ineffective. Guns are a bit difficult to manufacture, but anyone can make a bomb. Bombs, of course, tend to kill many more people than guns. Take, for example, the Bath School disaster of 1938, which killed 38 children and 7 adults. Getting rid of guns won't stop people from snapping, but it would infringe on our constitutional right to armed defense.  If you want to stop spree killings specifically, you have to address the actual causes, which go beyond the fact that you can go buy a gun.
 
If you ask me the real causes are the stigma attached to mental illness that encourages people to hide it or deny it rather than deal with it and the social pressure for men to suppress their emotions. Generally these people seem to either have an untreated mental illness or have snapped under pressure that they don't now how to cope with emotionally. The solution is to address the general lack of awareness about mental illness and what it means for different people as well as the sexist treatment of men in our society. We need to be able to feel comfortable crying into our ice cream, and that means burning that expendable protector/provider bullshit and all the machismo that comes with it to the ground.

you are the dumbest motherfucker in this thread

Actually, he(?) has a damn good point. Black markets are always worse than legit markets. Criminalization creates crime. Of course, this is all immaterial because registering the gun wouldn't have changed a damn thing and an outright ban is unconstitutional, i.e. illegal and will never happen unless we abandon the document entirely.

[Slurpee]

the second amendment is an amendment to an existing document that was written for a world that no longer exists by imperfect sllaveowners and was ammended because it can be ammended.

the guns in question were registered to the victim.
you take the guns out of the equation, you get what happened in china- a lot of stabs, but not quite so many dead people.

if bombs are so easy to make and so much more effective, why didn't he make a bomb?

guns do not grow like heroin, and they can't be manufactured in your kitchen like meth. guns are made by companies- a lot of them in the United States. black market trade would not offset the significant harm reduction of removing the grotesque number of legal firearms, as we can see from the number of shooting deaths to occur in every country to institute a nationwide ban. people breaking a law is not an argument against making that law, by that logic nothing should be illegal.

obviously there are contributing factors to incidence of spree killers, but investing in mental health treatment, reducing media glorification, and reducing the stigma against mental illness are not mutually exclusive from not manufacturing death machines and selling them to anybody who has the small amount of capital they demand

[AlbinoClock]

If you think the constitution doesn't matter to US law there's really nothing I can say other than that you're mistaken.

[Slurpee]

It matters a fucking lot that's why we were given the ability to change it.

[AlbinoClock]

Do you really think any politician in this country can try to repeal the second amendment and survive? They'd have to be damn idealistic to try it, because it's definitely not the pragmatic thing to do. In 2011 there were roughly 8,775 gun-related murders in the US. The actual number is probably higher because the data used to gather that number is not complete. Let's call it 10,000, then, just to be safe, assuming that Illinois and Florida are the most violent places in the country. The US Census Bureau says that in 2011 there were 311,591,917 people living in the US. This means that in the US in 2011 you had a 1 in 31159 chance of being shot to death if Illinois and Florida are places that you should really avoid at all costs. Now my numbers on the suicide rate might not be quite right, because they're from the CDC in 2009, but I estimate that unless people have suddenly become much happier or much more depressed over the past few years you have a roughly 1 in 8,442 chance of killing yourself. Yes, that's right, you are three and a half times as likely to kill yourself as you are to be shot to death (and 2.84 times as likely to kill yourself as to be murdered by any means). Based, again, on statistics from 2009 (sorry) you have a 1 in 9,216 chance of getting into a car crash and dying within 30 days. Apparently we're still slightly better at driving than we are at not killing ourselves. According to the CDC tobacco kills a whopping 443,000 annually, constituting  one in every five deaths. That's 1 in 703. Fifty times more likely to kill you and it's not even constitutionally protected. Tobacco can't even protect us from invaders, though apparently it can kill shitloads of them after the fact.
 
1 in 31,159.
 
The 1860 census put the population of the US at 31,443,321. The Civil War killed approximately 625,000. That's 1 in 50 with fucking muskets and bayonets. If today's population had a proportional conflict that would be 6,231,838 deaths. Now whether or not a second American Civil War would scale in quite the same way with the larger population is anyone's guess. It might well be that a few cities might just erupt into warzones. If you want to find out though, trying to repeal the second amendment is a fucking great way to do just that.
 
So no. Fuck repealing the second amendment.

[Slurpee]

it doesn't matter if something is political suicide if it's the right thing to do. the gun lobby in the United States is extremely powerful, and its advocates are violent psychotics that would rebel and murder their countrymen? that's your argument against gun control? "we can't get rid of guns because of the second amendment, and we can't get rid of the second amendment because of guns, oh and p.s. right and wrong are defined by forceful intimidation."?

and now you're not even arguing that banning guns wouldn't reduce harm you're arguing that it wouldn't reduce it enough. ten thousand human lives for no reason isn't enough? how many human lives is your toy worth, cowboy?