Because spree gunmen aren’t trying to efficiently maximize casualties while living to fight another day like guerrillas. They’re basically committing suicide, while killing victims just to flip the world the finger. It’s telling that they never try to take a few police with them; as soon as resistance arrives, they usually commit suicide.
With many of these attacks being planned well in advance I see no reason to believe that a lack of firearms would reduce the body count.
They do not tend to be crimes of passion.
Fire and explosives have been used quite sucessfully for mass murder in this country.
IMO, you’ve hit the nail on the head quite a few times in this thread. Just picked this post as I could have any number of others.
Just wanted to add a question/point. For all the doom & gloom being expressed in all/most of these gun murder threads – 2nd Amendment, zillions of guns out there already, black market, bad guys will always have them etc. – has anyone really given any thought to the fact hat some/most problems can’t be solved overnight? Obviously this is one of them, the (in)famous American Gun Culture. But if nothing is done, the rather evident conclusion is that will either stay the same or get worse. OTOH, if tough laws tightening the availability, amount and type of guns & ammo that are available to the general public are put into effect, you won’t see any miraculous change over a short spell – but you can bet anything you’d like that things will change simply with the passage of time.
Cite: any and all First World Nation where’s been done. Don’t think for a minute the US was the site of the original OK Corral. Though it seems to be stuck there.
Dead or in prison. Don’t you remember, the Columbine monster’s pipe bombs worked. It was the 20lb bombs that didn’t explode. The moviehouse monster’s bombs failed because police came in thru the windows instead of the door. Again, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
None of the adults in the Sandy Hook Elementary School could legally carry firearms, even to defend themselves, including the monster who decided to murder children and the staff.
I have no idea why monsters do what they do. Only that they plan these attacks and look for unarmed, unsuspecting victims. Psychologically speaking, are you pretending to understand the minds of these sick, twisted turds? Are you speaking for them or are they speaking thru you? I don’t believe any of the mental health professionals are willing to go that far out on a limb.
How can we better prevent school shootings?
Kill everyone. That will prevent school shootings. Guaranteed. Otherwise, you can’t. There is no legislation you can enact which will guarantee that people will act how you want them to act. The question is quite naive, but I get its point.
Exactly the ‘Hollywood Hero’ mentality I was alluding to in my prior post. Shootouts At The OK Corral are NOT going to solve anything – in fact, they are sure to make it worse in most cases. If you can’t/are unwilling to do your own research, I’d be willing to give you a few search hints. But no more. Sick and tired of endless cites that get dismissed simply because they don’t meet gun-nuts’ “freedoms*****.” But here is one to get you started: Penn Study Asks, Protection or Peril? Gun Possession of Questionable Value in an Assault
*****read: bullshit.
Oh wait, I get it now. How can we better prevent school shootings. Eliminate all guns, of course. But the effect will be more knife shootings. How do we better control that? Get rid of knives, of course. But the effect will be more fist beatings. How can we better prevent fist beatings?
Please rate the death rate in each situation.
I realize personal anecdotes account for nothing, but I’ve been involved in two out of your three scenarios – no butthurts in Panama fortunately – and I’d much rather come out of them with a black-eye/broken nose/hand than with a shot to to the head.
That’s just me of course.
What’s wrong with a pair of guards trained to spot suspicious-looking bulges and packages at the entrance? Oh I forgot, parents don’t like their children passing through steel gates and having to submit to a search. Tsk-tsk. More to come.
Of course my scenario of “fist beating” would result in death. And my point is “how do you prevent someone from killing someone else”, regardless of choice of weapon?
And my point is that fights w/out guns rarely result in deaths – much less massacres.
As for prevention, it only follows take/make the most dangerous weapons very tough for civilians to get them legally. Again, it works, surprising as it may be to some posters in these threads.
You, my friend, are ignoring the tenacity of humankind to kill its own. If “the most dangerous weapon” were forbidden, our clever species would create (or use something already created) to kill, thus making that “the most dangerous” weapon. You’ll have to ban everything to be certain.
Just to clarify, I was thinking more in terms of using government agencies to widely publicise the results of the study/studies and make irresponsible journalism of these events more stigmatised, kind of like how drunk driving rightfully became a great social taboo. If you have a feeling that a certain news agency is potentially promoting further incidents of this type they’re going to lose viewers and ad revenues. After all, which media outlet wants to share a portion of the blamed for that?
::::shrug:::
You ignore the world at large and submit that nothing can be done – when that is factually proven a wrong premise.
Which is why Japan, where they have like 3 guns to share between the whole of the population, is collectively scratching its head to find way to prevent their incomprehensible rash of senseless mass fist beatings…
…hold on.
I’m being told that’s just bukkake porn. Nevermind, then.
Possibly they should instead look at their suicide rate, which is one of the highest in the world (and they do it mostly without guns somehow, which seems to be a mystery to some anti-gun folks), while our European chums might want to look into instances in several of their countries of large numbers (MUCH higher than in the US as a percentage of their population) of motorists being ‘slaughtered’ every year due to accidents involving alcohol. There are always ways that we find to kill ourselves or each other.
That’s neither here nor there, XT. You fond of flinging spaghetti at the walls ?
[QUOTE=doorhinge]
I have no idea why monsters do what they do. Only that they plan these attacks and look for unarmed, unsuspecting victims. Psychologically speaking, are you pretending to understand the minds of these sick, twisted turds? Are you speaking for them or are they speaking thru you? I don’t believe any of the mental health professionals are willing to go that far out on a limb.
[/QUOTE]
No, far from it, although I do think trying to understand their psychology is an important step. I’m just pointing out some simple facts. There are extremely few crazed water supply poisoners, be it in the US or anywhere else in Western countries. I’m sure some nitpicker can find a couple news stories that would correspond to that if you squint just right, but that’s by and large not the MO of postal killers, even though it would result in more deaths by a few orders of magnitude. There are however some crazed knife slashers where guns are harder to come by than in the US… which results in even fewer deaths.
I would suspect there’s a psychological mechanism tied to this, and that postal killers aren’t only interested in body count.
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
Because spree gunmen aren’t trying to efficiently maximize casualties while living to fight another day like guerrillas. They’re basically committing suicide, while killing victims just to flip the world the finger. It’s telling that they never try to take a few police with them; as soon as resistance arrives, they usually commit suicide.
[/QUOTE]
And yet none (make that “almost none”, I’m not setting myself up for nitpickery) are committing their suicide by bombing, or driving buses off cliffs. Why is that ? Note, I’m not expecting you to actually provide an answer, I just thing that’s an intriguing question.
[QUOTE=Kobal2]
That’s neither here nor there, XT. You fond of flinging spaghetti at the walls ?
[/QUOTE]
Seems relevant to the question that you were responding to from my perspective. Why do you feel it’s neither here nor there? To me, it’s all interrelated, and gets back to a rational assessment of risk. You are more likely to die by a gun in the US than in Japan…no doubt. You are more likely to commit suicide in Japan, however, especially if you are a male. In Europe, you are much less likely to die from a gun than in the US…and more likely to be killed in an auto accident involving alcohol.
Mince, both here and in one of the Pit threads, seems of the opinion that controlling guns is pointless, because people who want to kill people will just find something else to kill just as many people with - down to their fists if they have to, apparently.
But we just don’t see that happening. Ergo his theory must perforce be wrong, and Japan’s suicides have sweet fuck all to do with that rebuttal.
But we’re not just discussing [gun deaths] here. It’s almost tautological to say that with more guns there’s gonna be more opportunities for guns to kill. That’s, again, neither here nor there.
We’re talking school shooters, or the broader category of people who just snap and start mowing down perfect strangers, seemingly for no reason. People like that exist everywhere, have probably existed since the burning bush - but America looks to have more of them by a large margin these days, even factoring population size. Is it because y’all are more crazy ? Or because your crazies have easy access to things that enables going postal in that specific way that other countries by and large do not ?
I think it was **Absolute **or possibly **Magiver **who in one of the other Newtown thread was going on and on about how Lanza could have killed those kids just the same by plowing a car into them. That might be true, that might not (for my money, a car is somewhat less efficient a killing tool than a combat rifle, else military actions would look like demolition derbies :p) - but the fact is, that doesn’t really ever happen. Not in the US, not in Europe, not in Japan, not in China, not in Russia.
And no, drunk driving is not the same - there’s no deliberate component to it.