27 dead, 18 children

[Starving_Artist]

@cmyk

SA: Whatever brought America to the cultural state I was born into in the 70’s are perceived sins of your generation. I’m just passing through.

1st, there’s 200+% more population in America than in the 50s. Technology has exploded since the space race, exponentially. Shit, knowledge in general vastly broadened since then. Perhaps scores are lower among kids in the ghetto, or overall; yet I’d wager that overall, kids now-a-days learn more, at an earlier age than 60 years ago.

I just don’t understand your beef with how it all played out. If you had a Delorean, would you attempt the prevent the civil rights movement, if you could? The invention of the integrated circuit to keep computers, video games, and the internet from coming into being. Where and who exactly to pin the modern, more secular/vulgar culture on? How are you arriving at these conclusions?

You say you accept that shit happens, and you take that in stride as your philosophy, but you don’t seem to accept that change and progress happen too. And you obviously have little faith, disdain even, in generations beyond your own. Or just the liberal side of that generation?

Not everything is politics. Mostly, it’s human nature.

Here’s the thing - the counterculture ripped apart the social fabric that held American society together and nothing cohesive has taken its place. As a result we’re faced with the problems we have today. And like I said, unless things begin to change it’s only going to get worse because there are absolutely no brakes being applied to the forces that are causing them. If anything, those forces are getting stronger. Drugs? They’re more prevalent than ever and becoming more so all the time. Education? Getting worse all the time. Kids are undisciplined, many teachers are burned out either through bureaucracy or the kids themselves, and teacher unions make it virtually impossible to get rid of bad ones. Crime? There’s some dispute over the murder rate, which in my opinion would be a lot lower still if not for the drug/gang/young-adults-who-never-had-fathers quotient, but there’s no question property crimes are though the roof. Most of these are drug-inspired and they result in a populace that never feels safe. Illegitimate kids being born to young girls with no father around? I don’t see a single damn thing being done to try to discourage this. Nor to try to get their offspring properly educated, instilled with the right values, or kept from a life of crime. So we’re just gonna keep cranking out more and more of 'em, and the crime and burden they place on society is just gonna keep growing and growing.

I could do this all night but I’ve got to go now. But the point is you can’t have a successfully functioning society were everyone just pinballs around doing whatever the hell the feel like, consequences be damned and let the government pick up the slack. We don’t have enough police, prisons, welfare and nanny-state dollars to handle the load, and that doesn’t even begin to address the price we pay in societal friction that comes out as a result of the loss of civility that has resulted from all this, where we now have a populace and political leadership at each other’s throats and seemingly everything is under attack. It’s ridiculous. A time-traveler from the 50’s would never believe this country could get so fucked up so quickly, and at some point something is going to have to be done to get things under control.

Anyway, hopefully that answers at least part of your question. Too bad you didn’t quiz me so reasonably before. You’d have probably gotten a less strident answer.

[Kolga]

Nobody believes you, you pedophile apologist. Rant all you want, grandpa. Your beliefs are dying, good riddance, and I enjoy your suffering while you watch them die.

[Starving_Artist]

I’m not suffering, you silly airhead. I’m just watching in disgust while you and your ilk slowly turn this country into the largest 3rd world nation on the globe. But you’ll never be rid of the likes of me. Even France and Norway have their share of [del]people of common sense[/del] conservatives striving to keep the likes of you in check. Btw, you might want to check in on the other thread, your boy Freeh unsurprisingly is coming in for some accusations of his own. I say unsurprisingly because there’s scant integrity apparent in his Penn State report. By the time this all shakes out, Joe Pa’s gonna be redeemed and Penn State’s Board of Regents are be known as the engineers of the greatest PR disaster in the history of the country. Mark my words, dear.

[Kolga]

You…you are REALLY hijacking this thread to not only discuss your dementia-addled beliefs regarding the nirvana 1950s that never existed, but also to bring up your defense of Joe Paterno?

I hope at the end of your life that you find yourself being cared for by the very people you despise, and that they take the best, most compassionate care of you possible, as you rot away in your own filth and vomit until your bones poke out of your flesh, you disgusting perverted piece of pedophilic filth.

[cmyk]

SA: Here’s the thing.

It’s not counter-culture anymore. It’s modern culture.

You’re an impossible relic. I grew up in the 80s, lower/middle-class in the Detroit area—in this very culture you think will destroy America. I ate violent movies and video games for breakfast. Weed was all around my HS, and this was over 20 years in back then, it’s been another forty years since. When exactly is this brimstone going to fall from the sky?

And what’s ironic, is I’m almost the total opposite of the picture you paint, while you eternally pine for an evaporated era, and go on and on bemoaning the current state of affairs in the US… on the internet.

[Kolga]

And the pedophile apologist is shameless in co-opting the death of 27 innocent people in the furtherance of his rants for people to get off his lawn.

[Gary_Kumquat]

Not sure which side of the gun divide this really supports: man goes on rampage with knife in Chinese school, 22 children injured.

22 Chinese schoolchildren hurt in stabbing spree | CBC News

On one side, it shows that even very strict gun laws cannot keep you safe from a crazy person. On the other, this story is about 22 injured children, whereas if he’d had a gun we’d be looking at more dead children.

And for the love of fuck, can people just ignore Starving Artist’s one trick pony show. This event deserves a shit load more respectful deliberation than he provokes.

[cmyk]

So, uh… what’s the scoop on Starving Artist’s pedophilia? I missed that, and I only got like 2 pages in the Paterno thread before I got bored, and that was like a year ago.

Did he touch Paterno’s no-no’s when Joe was a little boy?

[cmyk]

@Gary_Kumquat

…And for the love of fuck, can people just ignore Starving Artist’s one trick pony show. This event deserves a shit load more respectful deliberation than he provokes.

C’mon, man. I can’t ridicule the elderly with this sort of mentality IRL. I gotta get my kicks wherever I can.

[Dave_Hartwick]

@cmyk

I have a good friend (Former cop) who has a several pistols, rifles and at least one M16-A2 (I believe that’s the model.)

And just last year, my cousin-in-law (not a cop, and not what I’d call very bright), with two infants, showed me his arsenal of at least 3 assault rifles he keeps in his cellar, relatively accessible (though the magazines aren’t loaded). I think M16s as well.

They were all quite impressive, and according to them, not all that hard to obtain. So, I know of at least two people in my close circle of friends/family with machine guns, and we all live in quiet, peaceful suburbia.

Depending on where you live chances are that they were semi-automatics, not what people usually mean by machine guns.

On an unrelated point, it would be nice if you stopped responding to SA. I notice that if people don’t talk to him he posts less.

[gamerunknown]

@Surreal

Looks like another case of beta-male rage.

Zeta male, since he’s irrevocably harmed his reproductive chances by committing suicide and taking out several of his relatives. If he were a beta male, he’d wait until his mother were infertile (kin selection) and use her to eliminate competitors for resources. If he were an alpha male, he’d spend all of his time masturbating for sperm clinics, because fecundity is the measure of evolutionary success, right?

@Starving_Artist

My main point is that there is a lot of good both in yourself and in the world, but you choose to focus on the negative and you let it overwhelm everything else to the point that it seems the negative is the only worthwhile thing to focus on, when the reality is that the good in life far, far outweighs the bad.

Yeah, thanks. Takes a conservative to point out how peachy things are in a thread titled “27 dead, 18 children”.

@Martin_Hyde

I think hunting instills a proper appreciation for man’s place in the world, and think people who believe it is awful are retarded and immoral.

Naturalistic fallacy.

@Starving_Artist

The main thrust of the counterculture revolution was to promote drugs, bed-hopping and freedom from responsibility.

Cite? The Trilateral Commission claims that the central thrust of the 60s movement was mass democratic participation, which they termed “the crisis of democracy”.

The feminist movement arose in its wake

Shocking historical ignorance. There were feminist movements in the 18th century. The Second Sex was published in 1949.

I’d much rather be a black parent raising a child in most of the segregated black communities of the sixties, where the schools and daily life more closely mirrored that of white communities, than trying to raise one in the environment you’ve created today.

In 1952 the rate of minority illiteracy was 10.2% (compared to the native white population’s 1.8%), by 1979 that number had declined to 1.6%. In 1935 life expectancy for blacks was 53.1, with life expectancy for whites at 61.7. In 1970 life expectancy for whites was 70.8, with life expectancy for blacks at 64.1.

@Bricker

Most use whatever is at hand. The point I am making is that if guns are not available, other tools can and will and HAVE been used to carry out murderous impulses.

This could qualify as a “two wrongs” fallacy. If gun control isn’t wholly effective, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be pursued if it has a measurable impact.

@Malacandra

It worked for the Dutch and we hired them to help us with the Fenlands too. Alternatively, you could just spend your lives up to your ass in alligators and cry when someone gets eaten.

Gramercy for that.

@RTFirefly

The only thing that the gunnies seem to be offering in the way of proposals to make guns more safe, the way we make cars and pools more safe, is a halfhearted wave at making it more difficult for crazies to buy guns, that might at best prevent some but far from all mentally disturbed people from buying guns from a licensed gun dealer, but wouldn’t prevent them from buying guns from other gun owners. Or (like in the current instance) swiping the guns of someone they knew.

Yeah, I can’t help but see confirmation bias (same with suicides actually). Only a crazy person would commit mass murder. This person committed mass murder, therefore they’re crazy. Then extrapolating from personality traits to try and create a profile. However, we can’t really derive the chance someone with personality x will commit crime y from the information that the proportion of people committing crime y exhibit personality x. We’d get plenty of type one errors. For instance, would gun owners support legislation banning gun ownership in the house of someone that was quiet in class? That’s the only thing which’d have been effective in this instance, since the shooter wasn’t even diagnosed with a mental illness. Well, that and requiring guns are secured in a place where adult family members cannot access them.

@Starving_Artist

I’m talking about a country where most kids were raised with a father in the house.

In other words, your country today? Unless you want to claim that 70% of kids aren’t “most kids”.

All I can say is that, for minorities and the underprivileged, with friends like you who needs enemies? Black kids in the 50’s and 60’s got much better educations than they do today. Hell, everybody got better educations than they do today.

Bullshit.

Their illegitimacy rate was nothing like it is now, and the adults weren’t burdened financially and emotionally, watching their children having children by absent fathers who then disappear and leave those children to grow up disadvantaged and uneducated and virtually guaranteed to live a life of crime and/or financial deprivation. I’ll guaran-damn-tee you it was easier and far less stressful to try to safely and properly raise a child to adulthood in most black communities in the 50s and 60s than it is now.

Utter crap. Illegitimate birth rates were always higher for nonwhites and illigetimate birth rates increased each census year from 1940-1958 for nonwhites. Working hours have been decreasing steadily (influenced by Marxist thought) since the 1900s (though the US has the highest working hours in the world and are increasing in some states). This is tempered somewhat by women’s participation in the workforce, meaning the figures are somewhat skewed: the working population hasn’t declined, but the percent of the work being done by men has. Evidence shows no adverse effects on child outcomes when mothers return to work.

[RTFirefly]

@ExTank

Correct. And then they want more. And more still. And yet more still after that.

And even when they get 99.9% of what they want, it’s not good enough, and, sooner or later they’re back, saying we need more.

I forgot to include, in my examples of the gun-nuts never having enough and always wanting more, the laws passed in at least 17 states where gun rights now override property rights, where an employer, for instance, doesn’t have the right to require employees to keep their guns off the employer’s property.

I mean, how ridiculous is that? Any property owner should be able to tell the world (excepting of course law enforcement personnel in the line of duty), “no guns allowed on my property.”

I’m waiting for the law that says private homeowners can’t even tell their guests not to bring heat with them to the dinner table.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. And it isn’t the gun-control side that keeps on wanting more and more, and is never satisfied.

[Hbns]

@gamerunknown

Yeah, I can’t help but see confirmation bias (same with suicides actually). Only a crazy person would commit mass murder. This person committed mass murder, therefore they’re crazy. Then extrapolating from personality traits to try and create a profile. However, we can’t really derive the chance someone with personality x will commit crime y from the information that the proportion of people committing crime y exhibit personality x. We’d get plenty of type one errors.

If psychological profiling isn’t wholly effective, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be pursued if it has a measurable impact.

[Hbns]

@RTFirefly

I’m waiting for the law that says private homeowners can’t even tell their guests not to bring heat with them to the dinner table.

Except the “guns-to-work” law has nothing to do with allowing weapons in the workplace. For most proponents it is cast as a personal property issue. That your employer has no business getting involved in what you transport in your personal vehicle.

I’m neither here nor there on this law. I think it is a silly reaction to other silly reactions. If Billy Bob wants to go hunting after work and his weapon of choice is locked up in his trunk out of sight, his employer is none the wiser as long as Billy Bob keeps his lips zipped.

[Mixolydian]

@Kolga

@Mixolydian

As long as we’re ranting…

Beyond the gun control issue, how about getting to the real reason this (and so many of the other violent killings and suicides in the past 20 years) probably happened - another individual on anti-depressants whose dosage or prescription changed.

And guess what? All the victims’ families now get prescribed their own meds! Another win for big Pharma.

There is no evidence of any of this except in your deluded thought process. Are you off YOUR meds?

What’ya got?

Note that I made this “prediction” before any hints of Adam Lanza’s mental health history had been reported. I waited a bit to reply to see if any confirmed reports would surface regarding medications our boy may have been taking, but nothing specific AFAIK.

Luckily, I’ve never had the pleasure of being prescribed antidepressants. Also, let me state that I do not own a gun; the only firearm I have ever held/used was a small caliber rifle in Boy Scouts in my early teens. My opinion on gun control in the US has no bearing on my earlier post.

Nevertheless, if guns were crux of the problem, where were the stories of mass (school or otherwise) shootings before Charles Whitman? (Whitman was prescribed Valium and was in possession of amphetamines around the time of the U of Texas Tower Shooting, according to Wikipedia.) From that time through Columbine to today, the number of incidents has increased exponentially, no? Far faster than the proliferation of guns in the US, and (guessing) much more in line with the number of antidepressant scripts being written.

IANAD, but there have been too many reports linking antidepresssants and violent behavior. Even if half this list is exaggerated, it’s still too much to ignore:

http://ssristories.com/index.php

I understand and agree that antidepressants have saved lives and continue to help a great many folks, and yes, it’s entirely feasible that in more than a few of the SSRI Stories, “you should have seen them before they were medicated”. At the same time, it’s apparent to me that rapid drops in seratonin levels, whether due to patients ignoring their physicians and not taking their meds, or being weaned off too quickly while switching meds, combinations with other drugs, etc., has not been studied enough, or results have been hidden enough that the public outcry isn’t where it should be. We want the quick fix, we don’t want to lock our kids up in institutions, and we want everyone to be “normal”.

Here’s some good reading for those who might have missed it:

“I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”

Also, do you think pharmaceutical companies WANT that big black box on their meds?

It appears likely that gun advocates will take the helm re:inquiring about the causal relationship between SSRIs and violent/suicidal behavior. That should get interesting.

Something may come out regarding Adam Lanza’s drug history, or it may not. In any case, this country has to address its mental health problem(s) first and foremost, and be willing to spend money (hopefully wisely) to make it happen.

[RTFirefly]

@Hbns

Except the “guns-to-work” law has nothing to do with allowing weapons in the workplace. For most proponents it is cast as a personal property issue. That your employer has no business getting involved in what you transport in your personal vehicle.

I’m neither here nor there on this law. I think it is a silly reaction to other silly reactions. If Billy Bob wants to go hunting after work and his weapon of choice is locked up in his trunk out of sight, his employer is none the wiser as long as Billy Bob keeps his lips zipped.

Or until Billy Bob gets mad at his boss and co-workers, and his arsenal is ready and waiting in the parking lot.

ETA: the parking lot at work is the employer’s property. Why your right to carry guns in your car should trump the employer’s right to forbid everyone to bring guns onto his property is beyond me.

[amanset]

@Hbns

+10,728

For the smug UK’ers, how soon you forget:
Michael Ryan
Thomas Hamilton
Derrick Bird

Can I just point out, in case no one has, that it was precisely because of two of them that the UK ended up with the laws that they have, not despite them.

Michael Ryan in Hungerford in 1987 resulted in the Firearms (Amendment) Act of 1988 and Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane in 1996 resulted in the two Firearms (Amendment) Acts of 1997.

[Der_Trihs]

@RTFirefly

Or until Billy Bob gets mad at his boss and co-workers, and his arsenal is ready and waiting in the parking lot.

ETA: the parking lot at work is the employer’s property. Why your right to carry guns in your car should trump the employer’s right to forbid everyone to bring guns onto his property is beyond me.

Because in America, guns are more important than everything else. Neither our civil rights, our property rights or our lives are as important as that apex of all that exists: the gun.

[Hbns]

@RTFirefly

Or until Billy Bob gets mad at his boss and co-workers, and his arsenal is ready and waiting in the parking lot.

Certainly a possibility. Not so sure it has been an issue though. In the workplace shootings that I can recall the shooter went home and came back immediately or some days later.

ETA: the parking lot at work is the employer’s property. Why your right to carry guns in your car should trump the employer’s right to forbid everyone to bring guns onto his property is beyond me.

Can I forbid you to carry coca-cola in your vehicle on my property? Forbid car seats? Maybe I am a good Catholic, should I be able to terminate you because you had condoms in your car?

It is all a bunch of meaningless philosophical masturbation that draws attention away from the real issue. How do we reduce the ready availability of firearms?

[Hbns]

@amanset

Can I just point out, in case no one has, that it was precisely because of two of them that the UK ended up with the laws that they have, not despite them.

Michael Ryan in Hungerford in 1987 resulted in the Firearms (Amendment) Act of 1988 and Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane in 1996 resulted in the two Firearms (Amendment) Acts of 1997.

And I would like to point out that the number of murders continued to trend upward until the early 2000’s and has since trended back to mid 1980’s levels.

Draw what conclusions you want.