4.5 million versus 300+million. Things like that make a big difference.
Hell a bad house fire or a car crash (2+ dead) can make the national news on a slow day.
When the guy down the country somewhere was whoring his handicapped daughter out for the price of a pint that made national news but only for a day or two. That’s the worst story in Ireland I’ve heard in the last 10 years or so (ignore the 500lb gorilla in the room called the Catholic Church that is 
)
I don’t really see your point. I said "The pride in some of their faces.
That cunt right in the front just left of center with a drink in his hand. Smiling and proud. There’s a face I wouldn’t get tired of kicking.
Holy crap! Another paddy comes out of the woodwork!
You’re right, though. A single murder, or even a particularly vicious assault or rape, is national news here. I know there’s only about 4.5 million of us here, but I grew up in the Boston Metro area, with a roughly comparable population, and violent crime there was so frequent that it eventually became background noise for the most part.
We’ve a bit in common then. I’ve been yojimbo since I played Doom from about the same time. We share our liking of Japanese names.
It IS front page news in the local paper.
It was Wizardy: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord for me. 
And I’d gladly hold that guy’s drink while you give him a good thrashing.
“Local” being the relevant word here.
Lamenting the bad behavour of ‘young folks’ is a sure sign of old age.
‘Young people today’ aren’t generally better or worse behaved than young people in any other generation.
Don’t let that one news story get you down.
You would happen to have a cite on this, of course.
What does local mean to you?
The town’s local Newspaper?
Did this make FOX News? CNN?
I’m talking about Nation Wide Full on 24h news coverage, where it blocks out everything else.
We had a much smaller incidence of gang rap here (and yes it happens here as well) and it was all over the news.
This news even made our PRIME Newspapers over here http://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/world/us-teens-charged-in-school-gang-rape-case-432092.html
http://www.eecho.ie/news/index.aspx?c=world&jp=eymhcwausncw
Google’s news feed has over 600 news articles on the topic, and I’ve seen it on NBC’s national news and such. That enough for you?
So, let me get this straigt… getting gang raped at a school dance is a common thing and not to worry about?
And this is normal practice everywhere?
I can’t remember hearing this ever happening in a school as such, but maybe I just live in the wrong country for this to happen.
But maybe stealing an apple or throwing a stone is the same thing as a gang rape with a live audience.
Well, I was told that it was on the frontpage of the local Newspaper.
But yes, getting on NBC is big enough… is it? So they really analized it there, really… a fully 10 seconds, right? The whole nation is talking about it?
Maybe the US society still has a long way to go… Things like this do not happen everywhere else, with such a regularity in a 1st world country. But maybe a new classification must be found, like 1st world country with 3rd world behaviour.
I’m guessing that you are not talking about the US or any other 1st world country, more like 3rd world.
But is this a reason for it being ok to have a gang rape? If this is so “not my business” we might have a party with your ass some day, since “who” cares anyway.
It is front page in all Bay Area papers, not just Richmond, and it was in the Times yesterday also. However, I don’t think the girl was a blonde, so Nancy Grace won’t be touching it.
It happened in a fairly dark and out of the way place on campus, so I think few people would be just passing by without being invited. Someone who was called 911, which was how they caught at least some of the perps.
I’ll also mention that fencing to secure the campus, which had been requested for some time, never got put in. I don’t know the exact excuse, but with money being yanked from schools left and right, I’m sure it was considered a lower priority than keeping teachers.
Not to get off-topic, but was there some time I’m unaware of in America’s modern history when our society viewed rape and pillage as de riguer en la guerre?
As for our soldiers “occasionally arraigned on abhorrent charges,” we’ve had nearly 200,000 pairs of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly a decade. I’d be willing to lay money that the crime rate, and violent crime rate, of said soldiers is less by far than that for a similarly sized American city.
As for the topic at hand, I concur with many – the bystanders who did nothing but watch is the most disturbing part of this for me. We’ll always have barbarian criminal thugs; and just need to put them away before they can hurt too many people.
Where was the person in the crowd who thought this was wrong, and acted to do something about it? It’s incomprehensible to me.
Ewww, that really is a crap sentence, isn’t it? I was tired when I wrote it and went to bed immediately after I posted; I can’t remember what I was thinking about when I typed it so am unable to clarify, sorry.
But that’s the only sentence I’ll retract from that post; I’m still pretty happy with the rest of it.
This story also got a long segment on the local public media radio station Thursday morning. The officer they were interviewing is confident they will convict those who taped it under anti-child porn laws. He made a big deal out of bystanders, and those he referred to as “secondary participants”.
Well, Europe and North America took a long time stopping wartime pillage, looting, and rape when it broke out during the Yugoslavian wars of dissolution in the 90s.
No excuse, but this took place in Richmond, near San Francisco, a pretty brutal area by all accounts. These kids may not have even been taught to call the cops in case of emergency, lest they be doubted or arrested themselves (especially if they were drinking or doing drugs). They may have also feared repercussions from snitching. Plus someone mentioned the bystander effect.
Part fo the tragedy may be that, once witnesses do talk on the record (if they haven’t already), their sheer number may be the only thing that gets this girl any justice. If this had happened behind closed doors, at a party in an apartment rather than on a park bench while waiting for her father to give her a ride, she may not have been so ‘lucky.’