Jesus. What the fuck are you telling your own kids? See post 166. We can make it incredibly difficult for these kinds of weapons to become available. Every other civilized society manages to do it. We just need to find the political will to stand up to the gun manufacturing industry and the misguided 2nd Amendment maximalists like Hobbes who shill for them. And why stop at elementary schools? Shouldn't we have armed troopers in every movie theater, shopping mall and post office?
Well put and unfortunately what we know to be true in the "who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man" sense. We ban automatic weapons tomorrow, all well and good. The problem is that the horse is already out of the barn, that is, mr. "extreme gun collector" *cough* isn't going to turn in his now-illegal AR15. JoeWillieWhiteShoes quoted the number of guns in the U.S. as 300,000,000? In this nation of 300,000,000 just how many individuals own guns? What percentage? .... meaning, that there are far too many people owning "individual arsenals" that are way too big in my opinion to justify any "i just like to collect guns" rational. It's flat out chilling to think that a screwball with that kind of arsenal can live down the block, anywhere.
I dont know all the posts in this thread but as a Vegas police officer in my OPINION gun control is not the answer. I point out the war on drugs and how successful that hasnt been. I dont know if/what can prevent this, I went through my own active shooter scene years ago his name is Zane Flyod. That scene fucked me up for years to be honest....
Pretty devastating portrait of the perp in the NYTs right now. Loner, never had any friends, possibly undiagnosed and/or mistreated Aspergers, people who knew him in HS saying they aren't shocked at all. Sad.
yesterday when they asked why we picked them up early from school, I told them that a really bad man went to the other school and hurt a lot of people including kids.And that I took them out of school because all the teachers and grown ups are figuring out how to make sure this never,ever happens again. Today we are sheilding them from the tv. Waiting on word as to what school will be like on Monday. We're assuming it wont be business as usual on MOnday so once we know what theyre planning, we'll further advise our kids as to the enormity of what happened. I worry most about my 9 year old as she'll eventually be exposed to the full scope. My 6 year old, I dont know what to do. The twins are 4 so they need not know anything and cant understand anyway. I pulled over the side of the road today and cried when I saw all the news people in the parking lot of the church I got married in and christened my kids in thinking about how this might affect them. The images you guys are seeing on tv are the places that were to positively mold my children's lives. The park where the news conferences are is where my kids play soccer....the karate place my 6 year old goes to....the restaurants....everything. This is not near to where I live...it IS where I live. My wife saw me on tv this morning driving home from picking up coffee and bagels. Its just mind boggling. Aas shocked as I was on 9/11, for me anyway, it does not compare to this.
This statement is incredibly misguided. Bad guys don't follow the rules. If a nutjob wants to get their hands on a gun, they can and will do so regardless of how strict gun laws are. All strict gun control does is take firearms out of the hands of law abiding citizens. There are 6 million Americans that carry a concealed firearm legally and lawfully on a daily basis with no issues whatsoever. If Connecticut permitted its lawful concealed carry permit holders to carry a firearm inside public buildings, would this incident have gone as far as it did? Who knows. Any police officer will tell you that 911 is a reactive system. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be walking around toting AK-47's, but disarming the law abiding public is not the answer.
my heart breaks for you and your family right now. as well as all affected by this unreal tragedy. like i said earlier, i grew up in that area. have been in those schools and on those fields. to see this is just brutal. i have shed quite a few tears just watching the news and reading the reports. this is an area where, when i was a kid, the worst crimes (for the most part) were kids smoking weed or mailboxes knocked over. people didnt murder others. people didnt snap like this. people didnt take others with them when they wanted to take there life. if the world isnt going to end on 12/21/12, then it sure as fuck isnt going to last much longer when our society has progressed in this direction.
Your new America, folks. Better get used to it. This is now the "norm" for these idiots who want to kill themselves...It used to be taking a pill, jumping off a bridge or just shooting yourself...Sadly now its become take out a bunch of innocent people in a public place and then kill yourself...
Shouldn't it be, at the least, harder for them to acquire the weapons? 20 year old autistic kid with personality disorder probably doesn't have black market connections.
New York City has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, yet violent crime hit an all time high last year. If bad guys want guns, bad guys get guns.
This was not a "bad guy" in the strictest sense. This was not a drug dealer or a gang banger who may have had access to a black market. This was a 20 year old too young to buy a gun legally who had mental problems, appears to have tried to buy a gun in a sporting goods store the day before the shooting and was turned away. He then took a number of semi automatic guns and rifles from his mother's gun arsenal and used them to kill 20 5-10 years olds. Why should a citizen own guns like this and why so many of why do citizens need semi automatic and automatic rifles with clips that fire multiple bullets in a second? Crime and murder rates in NYC have been going down for 20 years and are much lower than cities in states with a gun ownership culture. Your facts on crime in NYC are just wrong. The homicide rate is down 16% this year.
I'm confused why his mother (supposeddly a subsitute kindergarten teacher) has all these weapons. Most woman don't even own guns and if they do it's a simple handgun for for self defense. Some fishy stuff in the story the media is giving to us.
As I think about this statement from Huckabee some more, I can't help but say how dare this misguided religious zealot even imply that these children died and these families suffered this awful tragedy and loss because they were not as pious as him. Or is that these children died and families were made to suffer as an example of what our society's lack of piousness brings on? Did God make an example of these innocents to teach us a lesson? What an awful, horrible, misguided, insensitive, dangerous, and arrogant statement. We are told by politicians and others that "this is not the time for politics or to have a debate on guns" because these families are suffering, but then you get a statement like this, which is 1000 times worse than any gun safety conversation.
How different this may have been had the principle confronted the shooter with her own fully loaded Glock 9mm. Bad people with guns are only stopped by good people with guns.
So we're gonna ask the same government that couldn't control rum in the 20's or marijuana in the 60's 70's 80's 90's 20's to scratch a few words on parchment paper and voila! Guns are gone! Ok. YOUR gun might be gone, but the asshole down the street will just smile and nod.
Exactly... we should go a step further. If you are a "responsible" gun owner then your gun should never be stolen so if by chance it is and it is used to commit a violent crime then you as a "responsible" gun owner should be punished as well. If your gun is stolen then that means you are not a responsible owner. I have been to too many homes in which the owner wants to show me their gun and it's in a shoe box in the fucking closet. A flaw in the argument that "an armed citizen leads to a safer society" took place ironically in Connecticut just a few months earlier when a father thought his son wearing a mask was a burglar so he shot and killed him. Another innocent child killed by this nonsensical notion that everybody needs to own a gun. The NRA is a fucking cancer in our society regardless of how people on the right spin it. I'm so sick of hearing "you can't legislate people" argument. We seem to do a pretty good job of legislating drinking and driving and yes there obviously are cases in which people do drink and drive but imagine if there were no laws against it? How many more of these do we need to witness before something is done? Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) tried to blow up a plane using a bomb in his shoe so every time I fly I have to take my shoes off. There have been 31 school shootings since Columbine yet we have done nothing to even attempt to curb the issue. We continue on like nothing even happened a few days after the media attention slows down. People will continue to spin the 2nd amendment like it applies in 2012 and in the meantime the parents of 20 fucking 5 and 6 year olds have had their lives destroyed forever. a town of 27K and an entire nation rocked by one person because of his mothers "right to bear arms" . As a parent my life has changed because of this. There is no spinning it, it's time to change things in this country.
Yes, they are paid with my tax dollars. They are called police officers. I suppose the young kid in Connecticut a few months ago who was shot and killed by his father because the dad mistakenly thought his son was a criminal should have lost his life too?. Brilliant, let's give more untrained people weapons.
Its entirely possible to limit the supply of weapons that serve no useful purpose. Just about every other industrialized nation does it. Think they have no bad guys in Canada, Britain, Spain, or a hundred other countries where this kind of thing rarely, if ever, happens? Or is because in those places everyone is packing heat? Who's the incredibly misguided one? Nobody's "disarming the law abiding public" or whatever other shrill nonsense the gun manufacturer's lobby is drilling into your head. We are just going to have to make it very painful to be involved in the manufacture, sale and distribution of semi automatic assault rifles. Which is entirely appropriate given that these things are designed for maximum mayhem and when deployed that's what they produce.
