a terrible day in Connecticut.

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ZenPirate

Living Legend (and moderator)
Nov 21, 2000
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A shooter went into an elementary school and killed near thirty people, many of them small children. Just horrible, I can't even put into words how messed up this is. This ABC news post is what got me.

2:48 p.m.: Hero teacher Kaitlin Roig tells ABC News that she barricaded her first grade students in classroom bathroom and locked the door when she first heard gun shots. “The kids were being so good. They asked: ‘Can we go see if anyone is out there? … I just want Christmas… I don’t want to die, I just want to have Christmas.’ I said, you’re going to have Christmas and Hanukkah.. I tried to be positive.

CNN.com has live coverage of this terrible tragedy.
 

ZenPirate

Living Legend (and moderator)
Nov 21, 2000
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Count is at twenty children,six adults,and the shooter are dead. All the children were between 6-10 years old.
 

SleepyHe4d

fap fap fap
Jan 20, 2008
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Retards spend billions on TSA and military but can't even have a cop or 2 posted at every school. That's all I can say, other than that I'm at a loss for words.
 
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Sir_Brizz

Administrator
Staff member
Feb 3, 2000
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Retards spend billions on TSA and military but can't even have a cop or 2 posted at every school. That's all I can say, other than that I'm at a loss for words.
What? Oral sex with a TSA agent before flying on an airplane not keeping you safe enough?
 

ZenPirate

Living Legend (and moderator)
Nov 21, 2000
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Stunned and very sad.
Gun prohibition would not have made any difference.

Considering a 30 something year old Chinese man attacked 22 in a chinese school today armed with a knife I don't see where gun control really makes a difference when it comes to insane people on a mission.
 

cryptophreak

unbalanced
Jul 2, 2011
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... how the hell do these shootings keep happening?

Because people lavish each shooting with attention on TV news and Internet forums, thus guaranteeing an audience for anyone willing to kill enough people. It's statistically likely that a couple smaller incidents will follow in the next week or two, given the number of replies in this thread so far.
 

Capt.Toilet

Good news everyone!
Feb 16, 2004
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Considering a 30 something year old Chinese man attacked 22 in a chinese school today armed with a knife I don't see where gun control really makes a difference when it comes to insane people on a mission.

This

But I guarantee guns will now be taken into heavy consideration this time around. My poor blunderbuss :(
 

DarkED

The Great Oppression
Mar 19, 2006
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Right behind you.
www.nodanites.com
... how the hell do these shootings keep happening?

Money. The school systems and local police departments just don't have enough resources to provide a proper standing security force to every school. The majority of the security budget is spent on metal detectors and a standing security force for bad inner-city schools where the students are generally thugs to begin with (notice how this shit never seems to go down in those schools.) Suburban schools tend to have none or very little of that. Schools I went to had no security structures and only had a single 'resource' officer (a Sheriff's deputy) who wasn't even on duty at the school every day. His only real job there was to deal with drug and alcohol use.

The school system would need to employ heavily-armed private security forces as a deterrent to make these shootings stop. It'll never happen because it would cost each state millions.
 
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Jacks:Revenge

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Jun 18, 2006
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somewhere; sometime?
Money. The school systems and local police departments just don't have enough resources to provide a proper standing security force to every school.
that's not what the question asked.

why does this happen?
not how.

if we cannot figure out why this shit happens in the first place, then all the security in the world is null.
 

cryptophreak

unbalanced
Jul 2, 2011
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Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Source: Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.
 

Jacks:Revenge

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Jun 18, 2006
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somewhere; sometime?
education?
parenting?
media culture?

maybe life is too easy sometimes.
the majority of these perpetrators are 20-something males with no prior criminal record. they were able to purchase their weapons legally and without restriction at local gun shops, then order thousands of rounds of ammunition online. they're usually in or fresh out of college with no job and few friends. generally speaking, they come from strong families but are not very well connected to their own parents.

I'm sure that if they had their heads down to the daily grindstone with a real purpose amongst a supportive community, such outrageous reactions to life would be out of the question. there's healthy stress and there's unhealthy stress just like there are healthy and unhealthy ways to alleviate that stress.

obviously nothing accounts for severe mental illness or true psychopathology.
if you're crazy, you're crazy. we just have to be lucky enough to diagnose you and get you into a medical home before you act on your paranoid delusions.

but there are people we can catch.
I'm thoroughly convinced that instances like today and Columbine and Virginia Tech were 100% avoidable. I don't claim to know how exactly. the issue is definitely complex. but we do not have to settle for shit like this; as though it's simply the new norm.

perhaps if the 24-hour news cycle didn't glorify these events we would also see less of them.
whenever this happens, the news media response is like CLOCKWORK.

- plaster images and video of the event around the clock for days.
- identify the killer and profile his entire life story around the clock for days.
- talk about the weapons the killer used in extreme detail, right down to the each attachment, modification, and magazine capacity.
- relentlessly analyze the killer's actions during the event, including what mistakes made and how he could have killed even more.

you don't think this has an affect on disturbed individuals out there who might have already thought about committing a shooting?
they haven't followed through yet, but that kind of infamy must be appealing. especially when you KNOW for certain that the media will turn you memory into an eternal legacy. aside from family, no one remembers the names of victims. but EVERYONE remembers the names and faces of the killers.

maybe the news media should take a look at itself and realize that they have completely failed in their job.
covering events like this for more than a few hours is irresponsible in a variety of ways. it's not journalism. it stops being informative and starts being tragedy/disaster porn. it's pornography for people who claim they don't like pornography because it's exploitative. but they'll watch CNN interview crying, devastated, and utterly despairing parents of children who whose bodies are still lying dead at the scene. they'll watch that shit all afternoon.

maybe the next time something like this happens, the news people should say "A tragedy occurred today when a cowardly, spineless, pathetic young man decided to open fire on innocent people before killing himself. The investigation is ongoing, the survivors are safe, and the killer is a despicable excuse for a human being who will never be identified. We hope you and your loved ones were not affected but our thoughts and prayers are with those who were. Now, let's move on to the rest of today's news."
 
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TWD

Cute and Cuddly
Aug 2, 2000
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members.lycos.co.uk
Determining the why is a pointless quest. Every time this happens we ask why. Hasn't helped much has it? We feel somewhat responsible as a society. That's why we feel the pain. "Why does our society do this?" We believe that if we can understand why, we can fix ourselves.

But the unsavory truth is that there is no why, and our society will never be fixed. Evil exists, and it always will. The sooner we accept this fact instead of trying to find excuses line videogames, the sooner we can go about actually preventing these tragedies.
 

Jacks:Revenge

╠╣E╚╚O
Jun 18, 2006
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Determining the why is a pointless quest.
are you kidding?

I know we disagree sometimes but that's gotta' be the dumbest thing you've ever said. just fly off the cuff, eh?
determining why - if we could truly say why - is not pointless. it's the most important aspect of these tragedies.

Every time this happens we ask why. Hasn't helped much has it?
no we don't, not really.
we profile the event and the perpetrator to the ends of the Earth. we grovel for petty, gruesome details and gut-wrenching interviews. we don't really ask why.

we grandstand and make politically expedient statements.
we say "now is not the time to look at gun laws" or "now is not the time to find blame." so instead we just gloss over our tragedy porn for a week, the interviews and sob stories, until people lose interest and then we move on.

the conversation never comes.
if the aftermath of a horrific tragedy is not the right time to talk about horrific tragedies, then WHEN IS??

when will it ever be the right time?
this is nonsense.

the unsavory truth is that there is no why, and our society will never be fixed. Evil exists, and it always will.
that is not the truth.
that is such a bullshit cop out and it makes me nauseous to know that someone as (otherwise) intelligent as you could espouse such a feeling.

of course psychopaths and the mentally unstable exist, and always will.
I've already conceded that there's not a lot we can do to prevent their delusional outbursts if we don't catch them beforehand.

but psychopathology and mental illness are not "evil" defined.
I'm not sure if you meant "evil" in the religious sense or as a crude description of society at large. either way, it's not a revelation and it is a disservice to the conversation.

this is not the new norm. we don't have to accept that this shit will just happen once a month. how can that be your answer? what kind of sick way of thinking is that? you're part of the problem if that's what you truly believe. there IS a "why" and there ARE steps we can take to cut down on the prevalence of these events.
 
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