I carry a handgun with me most of the time. I *hate * college campuses, since most (all?) prohibit the carrying of a self defense weapon. College campuses are Criminal Protection Zones, and hence are dangerous for people who wish to defend themselves.
The way I heard about was that 32 were killed by a single gunman which is a new record.
New record. Wow.
No. Shit.
This has scared the hell out of me. Luckily I’m getting out. People I see everyday I could more than imagine doing something like this. Everyone openly discusses their hatred for the teachers, the classes, the females - everything about anything. When the copy cat crimes eventually come, this place is pretty high on the list of places to avoid.
My only solace is that many people, here, I’d imagine would take their own lives first. But you just never know.
You do realize that if everyone were carrying guns, people would inevitably end up shooting each other in panic in a situation like this. So instead of just having to disarm the gunman, the police would have to deal with a bunch of armed, freaked-out people who have become just as dangerous. Idiot. :rolleyes:
I think it’s less racial than political. Certainly I would feel more empathy for black students being killed at Tuskegee U. than I would for white students at a university in Switzerland. I speak the same language/watch the same TV shows/eat the same foods/know the same places as/have much of the same heritage with the former while the latter, even though I have a lot of Swiss ancestry, I feel no personal connect to (can you end a sentence with a preposition?).
OTOH I was reading Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone about his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone and thinking “My God… I can’t imagine living in a country where there are burned out villages and people hide in swamps from terrorists who brand them with flaming bayonettes”, and I’m very glad I can’t. I think one reason, to tap another thread, why the Civil War is such a relevant part of pop culture 140 years later is because of the impact of a time when our relatively recent ancestors did have such notions of violence and desperation and desolation in their own yards. (I didn’t know the people in my family who survived the War, obviously, but I knew the people who knew them.) It made one hell of an impression on them and the fallout of that is still around.
Perhaps you should be careful and think things through before you call others idiots.
Do you really think that you could walk into a room full of heavily armed people, whip out a gun, order them all on the floor and get compliance?
Any sort of tragedy involving multiple deaths cause mixed feelings. I empathize with the victims and their families. Violent acts puzzle me. Other feelings have developed now that I’m pregnant.
I grew up on a small farm. The chickens and ducks walking in our yard, living their lives, could be dinner any day. My grandfather and uncles hunted. Deer and squirrels that were beautiful living beings would be dead in a shed; I would watch as their skins and organs were removed and the meat cut and cooked. Working for an animal shelter, I saw many loving pets – and some horribly abused ones – met their end. A few grams of a toxin reduce a vital organism to a mass of rapidly cooling protein. As a researcher, I have euthanized and eviscerated many, many rats and mice. I have also meet children with terminal cancer or other life-sucking diseases, and then have pieces of the tumor that was killing them or their defective organ brought into the lab for study.
How could anyone take a life and not see what they are destroying? I do not understand how a person could get pleasure from the death of another living being. Death is something I am familiar with, but I could never raise a gun and take a life out of rage or despair. (However, I can see myself killing in defense of home and hearth.)
Today was the first day the news made me cry. After reading about this massacre I had a doctor’s appointment. Unspeakable acts are taking place all over the globe, senseless deaths and wasted lives, but it all seemed very scary after hearing the heartbeat of my baby.
Do you really think that if more classrooms/subways/sidewalks/public places were full of heavily armed people there’d be fewer gun related deaths per year? (I’m not a gun control nut- I own several from a semi-automatic 9 mm Beretta down to a black powder Confederate cavalry pistol repro- but it never occurred to me to bring them to work because I might need it and I sure as hell don’t want to think the student I’m teaching is packing heat.)
No. That’s a different argument that scornhole made when he called someone else an idiot.
I don’t think arming everyone is an appropriate response either, just not for the reasons Scornhole objects. His reason isn’t very intelligent.
Quite possibly. But it really doesn’t matter. People have a right to be armed and a right to defend themselves, regardless of statistics.
Especially ones with guns.
I don’t think any civilian in Iraq expects to die. They certainly can expect a higher possibility of it, but I wouldn’t say they expect it.
Seems to me that thinking you might die and then dying would be sadder than not thinking you might die and then dying. At least you had some time when you were at ease. No offense intended to you, but I still don’t understand how the idea that people in Iraq ought to expect to die makes it any less sad.
Getting back to the subject of the OP, I agree with everything Sampiro said. On a personal note, there’s just something about that level of self-absorption/narcissism/whatever that just really gets to me.
I mean, say what you will about the 9/11 hijackers–and I’m not defending them at all–at least they were acting in defense of some cause. This was somebody who killed a lot of people because he was having a bad day. I just find that incredibly shocking.
BTW, for those who want to debate the gun issue as it relates to this tragedy, There’s already a thread for it.
I couldn’t agree more if you’re talking about the right to keep a gun in the house for protection with reasonable limitations (I believe in background checks and the like, and I’ve yet to hear an at all persuasive argument about why an urban dweller should have the right to own an assault rifle or armor piercing bullets). But is it your right to enter a college classroom or a restaurant or a doctor’s office with a fully loaded pistol? How about a bar where people are going to be getting drunk and many of them get obnoxious when drunk? Would it make you feel less safe or more safe to think an 18 year old relative is on a date with somebody who has a fully loaded .38 laying around “just in case something happens and I need it”?
Currently being discussed in the “Catsix STFU” thread. I don’t see any evidence that such would have been the case. The more likely outcome of having an armed student populace would have been that an incident like this would have happened sooner.
Agreed. It’s not so simple to equate the Va Tech shootings to, for example, bus bombings in Israel or genocide in Sudan, because the latter two are much less random. While true, they are terrible events, sad to say they are also not entirely unexpected given the political and societal conditions at the time and place of their occurrence. There’s something about the suddenness and randomness of an event like the recent shootings that evokes more profound emotions in people; perhaps it’s because we are reminded that death on such a scale is NOT entirely removed from us, in lands torn by constant war and atrocities. FWIW, and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention this, but the school massacre in Beslan, Chechnya a few years ago struck me as a terrible tragedy as well. I think I was even more upset then than I am now, given that the victims turned out for the most part to be young children instead of armed guerrillas or police. It’s ALWAYS tragic when unarmed students - young ones, no less - are killed, and it shouldn’t matter that perhaps not as many died as in an Iraqi bombing on the same day.
As some people have mentioned before, the Virginia Tech incident affects me because I CAN relate to the students who had to endure this. I’m not so removed from college myself, and I often thought while I was at school what would happen if some armed hell-bent thugs came to campus intending to kill, as the Columbine shooters did. At college you have a lot of things to worry about already, be they exams or grades or getting into grad school or relationships or what have you. Having to be on guard for a mass murder at any moment is likely not on a whole lot of college students’ minds. You just don’t expect this sort of thing to happen in an environment dedicated to the sharing of ideas and self-enrichment. Any time anything happens of a violent nature on school grounds, it makes us take pause. It strikes particular fear in parents, I think, because if their children cannot be safe at school, where can they be?
Hmm. Well I own multiple “assault weapons.” And horrors of horrors, I own a .50 BMG w/ AP rounds. Are you saying I should not be allowed to own these?
On second thought, fergetit. I guess we shouldn’t be debating gun control in this thread.
I’m not American, and this event saddens me deeply. The fact that I was a teacher, the fact that I was standing at the corner when the police cordoned off the area around Concordia a year ago: these might both add to the intensity of my reaction.
Even today, I can’t see the outline of the Twin Towers in a movie or television clip without feeling a chill to the bone, and switching channels. Even though we may have found out later that the acts were motivated in some insane way, the destruction seemed random, attacking some sort of symbol of US power?-- people within the towers were just ordinary people at work. It seemed absurd and obscene. I didn’t feel the same anger and anguish re the attack against the Pentagon, that one made some sense to me.
BTW, one of my best friend’s husband worked in the World Trade Center, he just happened to be visiting his parents in Montreal when the events occurred.
Sampiro, thank you for that post.
I’d suggest taking this to the pit thread, where arguments like this are being hashed out in detail. (thread is: Catsix, STFU)
You can even personally insult people there.
I think I feel sympathy for people in situations like this because I have lost a sister, and I imagine what the families of lost loved ones are going through. I would never criticize someone for not feeling as badly about a situation as I do, though. We each have our own level of sympathy and compassion, for different situations. I feel very little compassion for people who get killed in car accidents from doing something stupid, for example.
Dinsdale, you make a very valid point about not feeling bad about everything that happens in the world. We have never had access to every terrible thing that is happening in the world like we do today, but I think it would cripple us to feel bad about every awful thing that we hear about. I think in some ways we can’t feel bad about things happening half a world away, because there isn’t a damned thing we can do about them, so our self-preservation kicks in and we ignore it.