Sorry, this isn’t the middle ages. This idea is patently stupid. You don’t punish relatives for the sins of a family member, that reminds me of the old practice of punishing an entire family for crimes committed by one person for generations to come in the middle ages, it’s barbaric and stupid.
Sure, if the person was a minor, and their legal guardians were negligent and that directly led to the crime, I can see charging them with something. This young adult was not a minor, his parents were no longer his legal guardians. My understanding is he did not even live with his parents anymore.
Your last sentence would logically lead to all kinds of inhuman legislation. “…might not do it if they know it ruins their family.” Okay, well, let’s say anyone, at any age, commits a murder, we charge their family with a crime. That way we get retribution, get to punish the family, and maybe deter a future murderer from doing the same thing.
Obviously that wouldn’t fly. And, of course, these kinds of things already ruin families can you imagine what the parents of the Columbine shooters feel every single day? Not only do they have to deal with the loss of their children to suicide, they have to grapple with the fact that their children were monsters and killed many other people before they killed themselves.
People like this don’t care that their actions will ruin the lives of their families, or they wouldn’t commit them.
As I’ve said before when these things happen, we don’t need more gun control, we need more weirdo control. In just about every one of these cases, there were people who noticed their behavior prior to the killings but said nothing, or said something and it was ignored.
Still nearly useless, unverifiable information without getting the killer’s identity. We need to know who did the killings, if only to be more sure that the authorities aren’t running some kind of cover-up. Besides, human morbid curiosity would publically out the killer sooner or later (and what if they survive? They’d get a public trial, wouldn’t they?), and the early attempts to hide their ID would simply add to his panache.
Not that a killer needs to be named to gain glory. We’re still talking about Jack the Ripper, aren’t we?
You can’t talk about preventing people from becoming shooters (unless you stick to purely practical barriers like gun control) without discussing motivation. Saying that shooters are motivated by a desire for fame is an analysis of their motivation.
Dead right. Guns are really hard for disaffected youths to come by over here, and we’ve had any number of school bombings and mall poisonings and so on.
Its pretty hard to enjoy the attention and fame when you’re dead. I’m not a proponent of guns at all but I occasionally face reality.
This kid was troubled, he should have been living at his parents but apparently they licked him out. His neighbors took him in. He got fired by McDonalds. That’s pretty low. The people he was living with knew he had taken a gun from his parents house and didn’t think to do anything about it.
Until our culture loses its obssession with firearms and violence these things are going to continue.
In my experience, people who are depressed or suicidal often feel they’re a burden to their loved ones. You’re talking about someone who thought shooting up a mall and dying was okay because it would make him famous; I don’t think his thought process was that rational.
The teen in this instance was 19 years of age which makes him an adult. We don’t generally hold parents responsible for the actions of their adult offspring.
Sorry, I have to pick at this nit. Do you have any information backing that up? I haven’t run across any such medieval practice. I remember a bible verse with the words “unto the seventh generation” but I don’t think it was crime related.
No more than posting signs on the entrance doors indicating weapons are prohibited. :rolleyes:
If I recall, the last time something like this happened (in Utah I believe. Maybe Idaho) the perp was stopped by a citizen with a handgun. That seems to be more effective in these cases than liberal knee jerk reactions.
Yes. Once a kid is an adult, parents have no legal control over him. If you want to punish parents for the actions of their adult children, you’d need to give them some legal control over them. But then they wouldn’t be adults.
If you want to raise the age of majority to 21, that’s one thing. But you put parents in a terrible position if you punish them for something they have no control over. They could even be blackmailed by their adult children-- give me money, or I’ll commit a crime and you’ll be punished, too.
I don’t think this really needs pointing out, but we’ve had how many teen gunman rampages this year? Two? It might be hard to significantly cut down on that number.
While I’m opposed to the ideas some people have mentioned, fiveyearlurker especially hit the nail on the head: news outlets tend to make these people into such superhuman creatures of pure evil, little bits of Satan let loose on college campuses and shopping malls. Gimme a break. Cho’s writing was horrible to read, and it wasn’t because it drew you into his twisted psyche or whatever. It’s because it was horrible, immature writing. Signs of a problem, maybe, but mostly the work of a dickhead with problems. Same thing with the guy in Omaha - he shot up a mall because he lost his job at McDonald’s and his girlfriend dumped him? That’s more pathetic than anything else. You don’t even need newcasters to make fun of them; just stop building them up and endlessly scrutinizing them and the rest will take care of itself.
You don’t suppose a person who is bent on committing cold blooded murder would have qualms about stealing a weapon from somebody else who had it legally, do you?
The media is reporting that the guy was armed with an “assault rifle,” but unless he had acquired a full-auto capable selective-fire weapon (which would be highly illegal if he had not undergone the federal background check and requisite paperwork, or if the rifle was not registered prior to 1986), then what he had was just a run-of-the-mill semiautomatic rifle, with a cartridge substantially less powerful that your average hunting rifle to boot.
Gun control’s not going to do a thing to stop this sort of incident, unless you want to try to completely ban firearms of any kind, which will never fly here. Not to mention effectively enforce such a prohibition, which would be impossible. (As it damn well should be.)
Bingo. It’s funny how most of these whackjobs seem to choose locations for their rampages where they have the least likelihood of being stopped: schools, shopping malls with those oh-so-effective “no gun” signs, et cetera…
It’s already extremely difficult (and prohibitively expensive) for any citizen to get their hands on an assault rifle. You’re looking at a federal background check, tax stamps, and a $10,000+ price tag, all to get a weapon no more recent than 1986. Any assault rifles manufactured after 1986 are strictly illegal for civilians to possess. Mr. Hawkins did not have an assault rifle.
To expand upon what Marley said, I’m not sure about the underlying OP’s implied premise, that everyone wants to lower the current level of such actions - or at least would be willing to make any significant changes in their lifestyle/convenience aimed at such a reduction.
On the one hand, I suspect the number of mass shooting deaths is pretty close to insignificant when compared to any other category of death - violent or natural - in the US. If less than 50 people die form a particular cause in a given year, how many resources should we want to direct towards reducing it further?
Also, I think a whole lot of people actually enjoy this type of thing in a perverse manner. Well, they aren’t exactly eager for some nut to go off with a gun, but they sure eat up everything the can find about it when it happens. The first I heard of this was this a.m, when a co-worker was talking to someone else outside my door about how she had been in this very same store at some time or another. She’ll probably be leading off conversations with that topic throughout the whole holiday season! If folks weren’t hungry for it, local news shows wouldn’t have follow the adage “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Spices up our miserable little day-to-day existences, doesn’t it? And anyway, I don’t personally know anyone in Omaha, or Columbine, the next block over, etc.
Wait a minute - when my mom was in grade/high school, she used to live in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I just realized, if this had happened 60 years ago, and my mom were still alive, and they had happened to drive the Hupmobile across the river to shop at a store that didn’t exist then… Sheesh, these things strike so close to home, you know?