School Shooting in Michigan

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Drain: I’m with you.

My stepson was here this evening. He’s six. His older sister was here also, and she’s 10. Both of them were lamenting how evil and horrible guns are. I gave them my take.

Guns are not horrible. They are objects, like a chairs or books. Guns just sit there, doing nothing, until someone picks them up.

Most people who own guns are just fine. They are decent, law-abiding citizens who purchased their guns legally, use them legally, and exercise all the proper precautions.

Then there’s a few others who don’t. And when bullshit such as what happened today occurs, people rush to blame an inanimate object, rather than place the blame squarely where it belongs–on the heads of the adults who are responsible for the child.

I don’t own any guns. I don’t like them. But I’m not going to trample on anyone else’s right to have one, legally and safely. Whoever the boy got the gun from didn’t have it somewhere safe–that much is obvious. Same person didn’t have it legally–it was a stolen gun. Whoever had that gun before the kid got to it, IMHO, needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Changing my sig, because Wally said to, and I really like Wally, and I’ll do anything he says, anytime he says to.

22

What makes me sad is noticing how much the dead girl looks like Susie Derkins.

Rilchiam, who turns 30 on Thursday the 2nd of March. Tick…tick…tick…

23

Feel free to flame me if I’m out of line here, but what on earth would be the harm in requiring gun owners to keep their weapons at the gun range or hunting camp?

You can whine all you want about self-defense, but I’ll bet if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night, you aren’t going to have NEAR enough time to unlock a gun cabinet, then go to the seperate location where the bullets are, then load the gun and get down to business. You’d be DEAD by then. And you could have called 911 fifty times in the time it takes you to do all that shit.

I am the user formerly known as puffington.

24

Here’s my problem with the ‘individual responsibility’ argument: it only applies to individuals.

Once we start talking about large numbers of people, macro forces and the laws of statistics take over. Human stupidity, carelessness, moments of irrationality, and so forth happen; if there are guns everywhere, a certain predictable amount of those human qualities will lead to bullet holes through human flesh, as reliably as the sun rising in the east.

And this is one area where the dead people are rarely the ones whose responsible action could have prevented anything, anyway.

25

I’m in favor of responsible gun ownership.

Specifically, the owner of a gun is responsible for what ever crimes or tragedies occur through its misuse. The gun was stolen you say? Tough shit I say; the owner is still responsible for not securing the gun. If existing laws cannot be used to enforce absolute responsibility, then, by God, we need some that will. And don’t start whining about the second amendment; gun responsibility laws do not infringe upon anybody’s right to own as many guns as they want. You can have a loaded handgun under every pillow in the house if you choose, but you are responsible for whatever happens! Whether or not you intended it, or thought about it, or even in your wildest dreams anticipated it, you are responsible.

Irresponsible gun ownership of the kind that led to the Flint tragedy is indefensible. If the gun lobby doesn’t wise up and support gun responsibility laws with teeth, the carnage will continue with even more outrageous (if that is conceivable) acts. The eventual result will be the truly repressive and restrictive guns laws that the NRA rightly opposes.

If anybody can tell what is wrong with such a gun responsibility law, I’d like to hear it.

TT

“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
–James Thurber

26

I usually don’t think this way, because I sympathize with overworked teachers and family service people, but it’s beginning to look like this kid had warning signs all over him. He had already shown signs of being a sociopath. Granted, no one could anticipate a first grader finding a gun, getting it to school and shooting it with enough accuracy to kill someone, but this kid should have been under close observation by someone.

27

Cher: That’s what I’ve been hearing all day. I also heard a report that the boy was supposed to be going to get some therapy next week.

If it’s true, it’s not a surprise. The boy’s father and grandfather are both in prison. The kid was living in a crackhouse, with no bed of his own to sleep in.

This just gets worse by the minute. The little girl’s best friend was standing right next to her. The boy pointed the gun at the friend first, then pointed it at Kayla (that’s the girl who was shot–her name is Kayla), and killed her. Kayla’s best friend watched her get shot. Saw the whole freaking thing.

Sorry for the ramble. This thing has knocked my whole city on its ass.

Changing my sig, because Wally said to, and I really like Wally, and I’ll do anything he says, anytime he says to.

28

I just read today that this little boy was living in a crack house for the last 10 days. His father was back in jail for parole violation and his mother had gotten kicked out of the place they were living. I’m sorry, but if that was me… the last place I would take my kids is to a crack house. She could have gone to a shelter or the Red Cross or family or something. This kid didn’t have a chance.

More gun control laws aren’t the answer. Education about gun safety is the answer. People need to educate their kids as to the purpose of guns. They are for hunting and self defense. Not for show and tell!

And newtron star… if someone was breaking into my house my gun would be in my hand before they made it into my living room. It is easily accessible to me but not my kids. I have had this gun for 7 years and almost had to use it once… it only took me about 30 seconds to get it, put the clip in, take the safety off and get it ready to fire. When it comes to your safety and/or your family’s safety… you can move quicker than you think.

That John Denver’s full of shit man!

29

I’ve never understood how educating my kid about guns is going to protect them from someone else’s gun.

Again, when the responsibility and the consequences reside with different people, ‘individual responsibility’ is only useful for punishing those responsible after the fact. It doesn’t stop the killing.

30

That’s probably true, but it applies equally as much to swimming pools, automobiles, aircraft, household chemicals, and a zillion other things. Guns are not alone in their ability to cause senseless tragedies.

When I was in high school (many moons ago), 2 students were killed and one left as a vegetable in an automobile accident caused basically by sheer stupidity (not their’s - somebody else’s). This might not have the emotional impact of a 6 year old dying for most people, but still, human lives were lost because somebody fucked up - these were people I knew (in the next grade up from me at the time). I see this as a reason to get people to use better judgement, not as a reason to not use automobiles. Granted, if nobody owned cars, they’d probably still be alive today. But I don’t think that’s the direction we should go, no matter how much of a tragedy it was.

It’s a big world, and really shitty things are going to happen. There are no easy solutions. But just because the real solutions are hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

–
peas on earth

31

I don’t know the facts of this particular case, so I won’t make a connection to it here. But I have a huge problem with this line of reasoning. It doesn’t place the blame where it belongs.

If somebody were to steal your car and then run down a group of schoolchilden, how would you feel if we put you in prison? Granted, you didn’t want it to happen, and you’d never do such a thing yourself. But you didn’t secure your car adequately, and we’re going to hold you responsible for what a homicidal maniac did with something he stole from you.

To me, that’s blaming the victim of one crime for something they didn’t do. I for one do not want to live such a society.

If somebody in this case really stole the gun and gave it to a little kid, THEY bear the responsibility here and need to be dealt with appropriately.

–
peas on earth

32

Which is why we regulate all of these things extensively - much more than we regulate guns.

33

In today’s Washington Post column, Richard Cohen discusses the problems with the ‘individual responsibility’ aproach to gun safety, far more eloquently than I would be able to. He says:

A Post editorial adds some interesting statistics that seem to belie the argument that guns, on balance, protect a household: according to FBI data cited by the Violence Policy Center, a resident of a household with a gun is three times more likely to die by homicide, and five times as likely to die by suicide, than a resident of a gun-free household.

34

We regulate swimming pools, automobiles, and household chemicals more than guns? Surely you are not serious?

You need a license to drive a car on public roads, but no background checks, and no locales where people are not permitted to own them. Anybody can buy a swimming pool or a can of oven cleaner.

–
peas on earth

35

Let’s see: most jurisdictions require fences of a certain height around swimming pools (that was probably my weakest for-instance).

With respect to your car, though, do you have any idea how much safety-related stuff goes into manufacturing a car these days? Safety belts, air bags, standards for how little damage is allowed in front-, rear-, and side-collisions at various speeds, and a whole bunch of stuff that few people besides the manufacturers, the regulators, and a handful of other automotive-industry experts know about. And partly because of that, we have substantially fewer deaths in car crashes than we did thirty years ago, despite the fact that there are far more of us, driving far more miles, and (when we can) at higher speeds, than ever before.

In Cohen’s column that I linked to in my previous post, he compares guns with cars. I recommend reading it. (I would have quoted more from him, but the Post seems to have a way of preventing C&Ping from a lot of their stuff. What I quoted above, I had to type in by hand.)

I honestly don’t know what they’ve done with oven cleaner specifically, but there has been a lot of regulatory activity regarding similar stuff over the past few decades to make it more safe. For instance, they’ve figured out how to make radiator fluid that is much less toxic than the standard stuff, and works essentially as well. (Children and pets occasionally think it’s good to drink.) I’ll bet the old stuff will be outlawed within the next few years.

My point is, this isn’t the first time that something of this sort has happened - outfits like the Consumer Product Safety Commission have been busily requiring that household products meet increasingly rigorous safety standards over the past few decades.

Sure, you can buy them, but you can buy a gun too. But I’d be willing to bet that there are a lot more requirements that your average household cleaner do what it does in the safest possible way, than there are for guns.

36

Yes, but we do not regulate who can buy them. No background checks (other than for credit), no waiting period, no major cities where people are not allowed to buy them, no nothing, and even with all the safety equipment in the world you can still run into a pedestrian at 85 MPH with one. You can still leave a gallon of toxic chemicals on the kitchen table where a child can get into it, and anybody can buy the stuff at Walmart.

I’m all for making products safe where that does not compromise their functionality, but at some level, people have to be responsible for abusing dangerous things. The world cannot be made idiot proof. Some of the ideas floated around for “smart” guns, BTW, have fatal flaws. This probably isn’t the right place to discuss that though - GD maybe?

–
peas on earth

37

There is a thread in GD about this: “Joe Bloggs and Guns.” www.boards.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum7/HTML/001276.html I posted there and I’m starting to regret some of the things I wrote.

But I don’t regret the post I just made over there.

“Manslaughter Charge Sought for 19-year-old Linked to Michigan School Shooting.”

><DARWIN>
_L___L

38

They were just showing the arraignment live on Channel 7. A 19-year-old man who apparently lived in the home and was the person who brought the gun into the house was charged with involuntary manslaughter, a 15 year felony. He was also charged with contributing to the deliquency of a minor. They stated that further charges may come in the future against the uncle and maybe the mother too.

The whole case is just so sad. My daughter is almost six and bears a rather striking resemblance to the little girl. It almost makes me afraid to let my kids go to school anymore.

Shadowfox

“The dead have risen, and they’re voting Republican!” - Bart Simpson

39

But we regulate who can use them, which is where the rubber meets the road :wink: with respect to cars. You can get your license suspended or revoked, even without committing any felonies.

And yes, you can still buy a bucket of ammonia and leave it on the kitchen table. So? If I had a child, I could protect that child from swallowing ammonia. I would be completely unable to protect that child from a million other people’s guns. That’s the difference. The ‘individual responsibility’ that must be exercised to protect my child lies in the hands of a plethora of strangers, and I’m not the sort to trust in the responsibility of strangers.

That’s why government intervention in the matter of guns is called for. It’s the only way I can take ‘individual responsibility’ for all of my fellow citizens, which is what I must do to protect a single child.

40

Another key difference between a car, for example, and a gun, is that the main purpose of a car is to transport people and/or objects from one place to another. The main purpose of a gun is to kill people and/or animals. That’s why if I see my neighbour driving around I’m not as worried as if I see my neighbour walking around waving a pistol.

And of course, the children in this case could have been hitting each other with baseball bats. But it’s a lot harder to kill someone with a baseball bat than it is to kill someone with a gun.

And this statement

seems dubious to me. When I was a kid, I looked in every nook and cranny in my parent’s house when I was bored.