Thus I think you make quite a valid point: killing 33 innocent kids with a knife doesn’t appear quite as likely.
Just sayin’ my own self.
Meanwhile my heart goes out to one and all who have been directly affected by this insanity. Times like these I understand the need for solace that religion might provide for believers. OTOH I can only manage to see madness, evil, rage and how how lives are literally hanging by a very thin thread…almost no matter where you are.
Just all so fucking random.
And although I haven’t had time to read the other threads on this tragedy, I can’t, for the life of me, understand the actions of Virginia Tech’s administration.
PS-Can anyone inform me as to the legal difference – in plain English – between a suspect and a “person of interest”?
Which is exactly what was done on abcnews.go.com in the blog section when a headline on the front page linked to a screed against high capacity magazines and how Congress ‘failed’ to renew the so-called assault weapons ban, right below the link inviting everyone to watch the live webcast complete with continual repeats of gunshots-on-mobile-phone.
And it’s been kindly linked for us here:
I guarantee my posts don’t have the readership of abcnews.go.com.
Oh my god, I mentioned that the victims were without any legal means to defend themselves on a message board.
Get over yourselves. Really. You’re acting like I called their families and read them the riot act for not arming their kids.
It’s a damned message board.
The non-stop news coverage complete with mobile phone videos and the sounds of gunshots all damn day is likely going to tear at a lot more people than some two-line post I made on a message board.
My employer does not expressly forbid it, and there is no law against it. We had ‘bring your gun to work day’ when several of us went to the range after work.
I’m not in any sense at all blaming the victims. I’m saying it’s a shame that the law made sure they’d never have a chance.
And they’re already doing it on abcnews.go.com when they blame Congress for its ‘failure’ to re-up on the so-called ‘assault weapons ban’ that outlawed the manufacture of new high capacity magazines, complete with photos of a semi automatic rifle and magazines.
There is a strong possibility that you already do. Only right now, the ones who are carrying guns are most likely those who don’t legally own them.
It is my sincere belief that, if guns are banned and people are deprived of the right to defend themselves, innocent people will die as a direct result. It’s an issue that has been debated ad nauseum, and I really don’t want to get into it here.
I tend to agree. IMHO, what gives most gun nuts their weird hard-on is not the guns themselves, but the Second Amendment. What they get excited over is the flattering delusion that merely owning a firearm and being willing to use it somehow makes them a modern Minuteman, a heroic defender of liberty, a pillar of the Constitution, etc. etc.
This is horseshit. Gun ownership is not a good thing in and of itself, any more than it’s a bad thing in and of itself: the positive or negative value of gun owning depends on the trustworthiness and competence of the owner. Personally, I have nothing against guns in themselves; they’re not my hobby but many people like them, and in the hands of responsible people they can serve a useful practical purpose without increasing the risk of ordinary life to an intolerable extent.
So I say we keep gun ownership legal but just toss out the Second Amendment (which is an ambiguous and anachronistic holdover from colonial lifestyles anyway). That way, reasonable and responsible people can still have guns all they want to, but gun ownership will lose a lot of its appeal for the swaggering fools who just want to feel important.
It is my suspicion that were it not for the 2nd Amendment gun ownership would be a thing of the past. The fact that it is enshrined in an inviolable document is what keeps it around. Remove that protection and it goes away.
Some of you may consider that a good thing. I do not.
Innocent people died today, moron. There’s no hypothetical here. More than 60 people were shot and 33 people are dead. And I don’t recall anybody here even suggested we consider banning guns.
My bad. I thought because you posted something, you might have an idea or expect comments on it.
Not me… the existence of my right to keep and bear arms has absolutely nothing to do with the Second Amendment. So I never bring it up (when discussing my right to keep and bear arms).
While the *existence * of my right to keep and bear arms has absolutely nothing to do with the Second Amendment, an argument could still be made to keep the Second Amendment around. Because without it, Congress is free to infringe on this right in any way it sees fit. (But then again, we already have 20,000 gun laws on the books despite having the Second Amendment.)
Doesn’t the fact that Hinckley got off all six rounds from his handgun before any Secret Service people could react make a mockery of the idea of defending yourself against surprise attack? Hinckley wasn’t some mastermind nor a Special Forces superman, just some doofus. Do individual gun-carriers conceive of themselves as more alert and better-trained than Reagan’s bodyguards?
I don’t think any of us believes that carrying a pistol makes us invincible. It’s still an option that I like to have. I might still die if something like that happens, but I have one more option with a gun than I do without one.
But you don’t. It was over by the time anyone got out his Uzi or Mac-10. And those were the best-trained, most-alert people in the world, on the clock, not distracted by routine chores, defending arguably the world’s highest-priority target.
You don’t have the option. The trigger was pulled before you could see or identify or react.
That sounds familiar. Oh yeah, it’s the same hypothetical that got catsix pitted in the first place. Perhaps less people would have been killed if the guy hadn’t been sold a gun in the first place.
Oh wait. That’s almost definitely true.
It’s unknowable if guns would have helped. Maybe, if the kids in the class were eligible to carry guns, some of them would have. Maybe one of them would have been able to get a shot off under pressure. Maybe one of them actually could have pulled it off even though the killer was apparently wearing a bulletproof vest. Then again, who the fuck knows. But since you’ve got that brilliant “maybe” thing going, heaven forfend anybody hears about dozens of college students being gunned down and wonders if maybe the problem was a bad guy getting a gun instead of good guys not having one.
The idea of defensive use for a gun is predicated on the idea that you will have a few moments to think the situation over. Naturally, if someone shoots you in the back of the head or walks into a room guns blazing you never had a chance anyway, but barring that circumstance you have a small window of opportunity to take action. That small period of time is often enough to take measures to save your life and potentially the lives of others. If you are unable to do so and you die, what have you lost? Nothing. But if you are able to take action you have preserved the lives of innocent people at the expense of a person who has no regard for those same lives.
That’s what it’s all about. I think that, in spite of all the scorn and name calling, that is a very rational thing.
While I admit I was horrified by the incident - as any rational human would be - the display of evil did not come as a surprise. Evil has always existed, and will always exist. The most shocking aspect of this event is the (apparent) complete lack of response from the victims. Had the students been armed - or at the very least fought back - this tragedy might have ended before the second round left his muzzle.
That’s why I personally carry a big handful of razor blades around with me at all times: for personal protection. Sometimes people say, “Hey Terrifel, isn’t that kind of stupid? Isn’t it a lot more likely that you’re just just going to injure yourself or others, before you find yourself in a situation where you’ll be-- AAUGHH! Goddamn it! I just stepped on a razor blade!” But I remember reading about some guy who was able to fight off an amphetamine-crazed attacker with razor blades. Or maybe that was a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, I’m not sure. But whatever. Let’s face it, if more people had been armed with razor blades on 9/11, those terrorists would have never stood a chance with their box cutters. Anyway, I feel more secure knowing that I’ll be better able to protect the kids at daycare with my hands and pockets full of razor blades. Plus, people on the street tend to look at me with respect, and that’s nice too.
Maybe, maybe not. You’re looking in hindsight at a situation that happened hundreds of miles from me while I was still a kid.
The future can’t be predicted in that manner. I might have the time to draw and I might not. I had the opportunity and the means to defend myself when a crack-head was breaking into my home in the middle of the night. Because I was armed, I will never know what he might have done to me.
Do you know for a fact that the gun(s) he used was/were sold to him? Do you know for a fact that he was legally prohibited from owning guns at the time? I’ll tell you one thing though: he was legally prohibited from bringing them onto a college campus. Fat lot of good the law did, eh?
That genie is out of the bottle and not going back in. You and I both would like to live in a world where nobody ever gets murdered and there is no violent crime, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t. We’ve all got to do the best we can in the world we live in, and knowing that guns can never be uninvented, I’d much prefer to have the means to defend myself than to not have them.