Regarding Gun rampage US teen ‘wanted fame’
Couple of ideas:
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Stricter gun control measures
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Stricter penalties on parents of the perpetrators
Would these help?
I don’t see how penalizing the parents will accomplish anything. I do think the people he was living with who knew he had taken a gun from his parents home prior to this incident are total idiots.
Gun control really has no bearing on this matter. Unless you think no one should have any type of fire arm whatsoever.
Instead of publishing their rantings and labeling them “manifestos” replete with menacing pictures, we should find their inevitably lame teenage poetry and read it on the evening news.
Seriously. Did you read the VT guy’s plays? They were terrible. They were chill inducingly awful. If he knew they would be acted out and he would look like a douchebag, instead of made to look like some sort of evil Rambo, would he have hidden them better.
Now, these kids are doing it to be famous. This one even said as much. If instead of making them infamous, we made them look like the impotent douchebags that they are, they would think twice.
The Columbine guys were made into superheroes. I’m sure they had some awful teen angst poems that would make them look ridiculous.
Or we just say nothing about them at all. I don’t want to know who these idiots are, period. I think that we should never say who committed these shootings, no pictures, no names no nothing.
Adopt the ideas Dean Ing put forth in “Soft Targets.” Like the above: Don’t mention their names on the air or in the media, mock them mercilessly, make them look like “total incompetents.” Only show the most embarassing photos, stuff like that.
I agree. The enormous publicity engine around the VT and Columbine shooters must have figured into this most recent asshole’s motivation. Remember how much armchair psychoanalysis was done, by so-called “experts” on TV, as we tried to figure out what would drive these poor tortured souls to lash out at a world that didn’t understand them? An attention-seeking asshole would eat that shit up.
All kinds of explanations were floated for the Columbine/Littleton massacre, but I don’t think anyone can deny it would never have happened if it had been just a little bit harder for those two emotionally disturbed teenagers to amass a small arsenal of automatic weapons and ammunition without it coming to the attention of some responsible adult.
Then it goes back to the parents. They shouldn’t have been easy to get to.
This kind of issue is always going to go back to the parents. If you deny them guns, they’ll just make bombs or poison or something. The parents are the ones who should be monitoring their kids for signs of going nuts and blowing classmates away. They should know how their kid is doing, what he’s doing, who he’s doing it with, etc. You can’t legislate good parenting.
Do you really think it’s in the public interest to not disclose the identities of mass murderers? I recall during the VT shootings, a bunch of right-wing commentators started drooling that the shooter had to be a Muslim. News media should name the guilty parties, and give us some amount of biography on them, just to shut this kind of rumor down, and to help us gain some understanding of what happened.
As for not talking about them and their motivations, again, it’s gonna happen. We’re doing it right now.
I do think that it was irresponsible for the media to publish a shooter’s manifesto. They should report the fact that their was a manifesto made, give a brief paraphrase on any motivation offered, and hand it over to the police. No need to glorify them by showing their rants or scary pictures.
Not in this case. This guy was 19 and not living with his parents. Why should they be held responsible for anything he does?
While this, of course, is unlikely ever to happen when a mass shooting occurs, I was feeling similarly today as I saw (predictably) the latest idiot’s face adorning CNN’s main page, granting him exactly what he’d hoped to gain by committing the murders.
The media may be between a rock and a hard place when it comes to publicizing the stories of those who kill for publicity—but it seems they always handle it by beating our heads against the hard place and shoving the rock up our asses. We need to stop making “tortured soul” celebrities out of these losers.
Post #1! I thought it’d take a little longer.
Granted - there probably isn’t much that can be done once somebody buys a gun and has it in his house. You can’t force them to keep it unloaded or in a safe or something. Still, it’s kind of amusing that every time people talk about mass shootings, there are always a few people who say the one issue that shouldn’t even be up for discussion is access to guns.
News coverage of these kinds of events is despicable, I agree. But the idea of using the news in this propagandistic way, to disparage people who are mentally ill and dead, is a little sick. And covering it up isn’t a great idea either.
Bad uterus! Bad sperm! No! Bad!
Then we can say the sex and race if you want.
I’m not, I thought we were supposed to be talking about to stop them, not motivations.
Though I could be wrong as I didn’t hear much about it I thought this latest nut case said in his note “Now everyone will know my name, I’ll be famous.” That’s what he wanted, to be famous. I don’t want to know anything about him, or her, at all. While I would be interested in their problems so I would know what to look for, but I do not, in any way shape or form care about their name.
They raised the kid, so they are partly responsible. If there were penalties, then parents would have motivation to keep their kids in line. And if the kid might not do it if they know it ruins their family.
But that has to end somewhere. Do we keep holding parents responsible for something their kid does when he’s 25? 30? 60?
Parents don’t have perfect control over how their kids turn out. My parents certainly didn’t manage to make me or my sister turn out the way they wanted- we both stopped practicing their religion and have political opinions pretty much diametrically opposed to theirs.
And if this kid doesn’t care if he dies, why is he going to care that his family will suffer?
The guns were acquired illegally by the Columbine shooters. So obviously the enforcement mechanisms were the problem, not the laws themselves. Making the laws stricter is pointless if you’re just going to ignore the enforcement aspect.
The Columbine shooters were underaged minors and should not have been able to legally buy guns–someone else bought them for them. Unless you want to make all gun purchases illegal there’s really no way to stop an underage person from paying an older person to buy them a gun and give it to them–you see the same problem with adults buying adolescents cigarettes and/or alcohol. That is a criminal act, but just because something is a criminal act does not mean it won’t happen.
Well, they sure helped me have a fruity day.
I’ve adopted that in my postings on various topics. I know who killed Jessica Lunsford, but I’ll never type the asshole’s name.
I don’t think so. There are kids that have the so-called perfect environment, even when the parents have done all they could and people still snap. You can’t hold the parents responsible.