EXCUSE ME! You mean southern New England.
Up here in the Northern New England states we have even less gun laws than Arizona.
Live Free or Die
SORRY!! kalashnikov. I forgot about the shadowy gun laws in New Hampshire. Quick little story though: I was up north of the Kangamangus (sp?) highway fishing a few years back and I was pulled over by a NH state trooper and one of the first things he asked me up there was if I had any firearms…He didn’t ask in a very concerned manor but he definitely was curious. Luckily I didn’t get a ticket!
I think it was also partly due to the fact that the whole car was full of fishing gear and there was an old canoe on top…we obviously were not bank robbers!! 
I.E. Your right though, NH does have pretty lax gun laws, and I am from southern New England…
's OK. It’s just sort of a pet peeve of mine. If New England was an organization of some sort rather than just a name, I’d be leading the secessionist movement
My younger (by 2 years) sister was tormented all throughout her compulsory education. Tormented. She hated her compulsory education, thoroughly and completely, beginning to end. Yet, I don’t think she could have killed anyone, even if she’d had the perfect opportunity. Some might say I’d just like to think that b/c she’s my little sister, but I dunno about that. I really cannot, despite the torture she endured, see her killing a tormentor. I think that the kids who have gone on these shooting sprees have had incredible mental problems to begin with. Perhaps the problems were exacerbated by the bullying, but I don’t think that they were caused by said bullying.
Incidentally, parents are bugging out over these school shootings to the point of taking their kids out and home-schooling them. I find that interesting…So many millions of kids go to school every year and live to adulthood without school violence-related injuries, yet people are freaking. Interesting. I guess I’d understand more if I were a parent.
First, I just have to say I agree with Kyla. I have never in my life thought of taking another person’s life and when I do now it makes me sick to my stomach. I’ll admit, though, I’ve never really been bullied, though I certainly wasn’t popular. But, excluding self-defense, killing canNOT be justified.
My personal opinion of what’s going on goes more along the lines of what phlosphr says: some kids mature faster than others, and part of maturing is learning the difference between right and wrong. It seems simple enough for me to say killing is wrong but some people actually do try to justify murder.
I would be really interested if you have any statistics on the amount of murders being committed by children over the years, phlosphr. Btw, great topic. I’ve often wondered the same things myself.
Ahem NH has lax gun laws. VT has no gun laws. That’s right: hippy-dippy, Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch-eating, civilly-united Vermont. It takes all kinds…
Cite?
What are “shadowy” laws?
Grey areas?
No, there was no rash of shootings. There was a rash of media coverage of shootings. If you want to understand youth violence, you first need to stop believing what the media tells you. They only want higher sales and ratings, they will promote sensationalist stories in order to get those sales higher.
My favorite example of this came shortly after the Columbine shootings. The media was passing around a government report which said that youth violence had risen dramatically. Of course, all of the politicians and religious leaders expressed the appropriate concern, all the talking heads came up with explanations, etc… The only problem was that juvenile crime declined rapidly between 1994 and 1998. The report that the media cited covered the years from 1989 to 1993. Since the actually facts didn’t say what the media wanted, they just used a report that was five years out of date.
kalashnikov: Shadowy Gun laws = grey areas, yes. What I meant by that is I ‘think’ NH’s gun laws do have a lot of grey area’s of which I know quite little about. But just over the river in VT there are barely any gun laws. we have some property near Wells River VT, which is very close to the border. I should probably find out the ‘exact’ Laws in each state, as I have limited knowledge of them.
What’s your cite, the Department of Redundancy Department?
True, but this is the same no matter where or when you look. Kids have always picked on each other. And they always will. The only way to ensure that you’re not a target is to fight back. Bullies only pick on easy targets, not ones with teeth.
This is also true, but there’s still no excuse. Bad parenting is the bottom line. If you teach your children how to conduct themselves and discipline them properly, they will not react that way. I was picked on plenty all through 11th grade (I was always smaller than the other kids until my junior year, and also smarter than a lot of them. prime target). And I always had access to guns. I owned my first rifle at 10. I learned how to shoot shortly after I learned how to read, and in all those years I never once thought about bringing a gun to school. How was I different from those other kids? Well, my parents ran the house, not my childish desires. I didn’t get to have everything I wanted, in fact I didn’t get to have most of what I wanted – I got what my parents decided I should have. I didn’t get to do everything I wanted to do – I got to do what they decided to let me do. When my father told me that I’d get the beating of a lifetime if I ever touched his guns without permission, I believed him, and I never did. He taught me how to handle a gun safely, but he also made clear the consequences of doing otherwise. Too many parents think there’s a disparity between the reward and punishment systems of raising a child. If you give the child nothing but rewards, he grows up spoiled. If you give nothing but punishment, he grows up bitter and fearful.
Wow, I don’t agree with you at all on this. I think zero tolerance is just an excuse not to exercise the judgment that administrators are paid to exercise. A zero tolerance policy would treat a kid who beat somebody up over stolen lunch money the same as a kid who beat somebody up because he wears glasses. There are good, rational reasons to fight. Another part of the reason these kids explode the way they do is that all their normal channels for venting aggression and frustration are all closed off by the administration: You can’t write about your anger. You can’t draw pictures depicting your anger. You can’t defend yourself (when my brother was a senior, he was suspended for 3 days for fighting. The punchline? He never threw a single punch. Another kid grabbed him by the shirt and started hitting him. He didn’t fight back because he didn’t want to be suspended, but he was suspended for getting beaten!! grrr…). You can’t do anything that’s not approved. Talk about your first amendment violations. When I have kids and if somebody steals from them, I will EXPECT (and prepare) them to fight back, regardless of consequences from the school. I’ll be damned if anybody besides myself is going to raise my kids. ESPECIALLY a school.
[huff, huff…rant mode off]
Phlosphr:
NH doesn’t have any grey areas. No permit is required for the purchase, possession, or open carrying of a handgun or rifle. No owner licensing or registration is required. And for concealed permits, NH is a shall-issue state: Once you fill out the forms, if you are not a felon and you can come up with the $10, they MUST issue you a permit, good for 4 years. The main difference is that in VT, no permit is required for concealed carry. Kalashnikov almost has me convinced that NH is the place to be.
And one more time, with feeling: EASY ACCESS TO FIREARMS DOES NOT CAUSE CRIME. PSYCHOPATHS WITH NO SENSE OF PROPORTION OR RIGHT VS WRONG CAUSE CRIME.
Only two grey areas in NH gun law that I can think of offhand,
-
carry permits are to be issued to anyone who, according to the local police, is a “suitable person to be licensed”.
That technically makes us a “may issue” state, but in fact I have never heard of anyone being denied a permit. The Nashua cops did say they wouldn’t give one to Tom Alciere if he applied, but I can hardly blame them for that! -
Private sales (with no background check required) of handguns are allowed only if the buyer is “personally known” to the seller, but they don’t define “personally known”.
NH law is here:
http://sudoc.nhsl.lib.nh.us/rsa/
Joe, I think you really misread the intent of my post. You seem to say that you were picked on, not tortured and tormented continually over 3 years. There is a difference in degrees here.
Any adult in “outside society” that did what these 15-18 year old criminals did would be behind bars. Instead, bullies got away with - and get away with - inhuman acts on a daily basis. I see no reason why this must continue.
And I in no way support “zero tolerance” in general - only for the extreme cases of bullies. I could throw out multiple personally witnessed and experienced anecdotes, but I see no point, and a couple of people will just come in here and jump all over my ass like they always do when I share them. So I’m quitting this conversation before that happens.
I must say, it strikes me as really bizarre that actions that, among adults, would clearly deserve a prison stay, are totally accepable among schoolmates, while actions like pointing a chicken finger at another student, require punishment.
I just don’t get it.
I concede that.
Ok, I’m still with you here. It’s here that I have my complaint:
And I’ll tell you why. Any instance of 2 kids getting in a scrape for any reason will be prosecuted under the “Bully clause”. Two kids fighting over a G.I. Joe could be treated the same as a 22 year old sophomore running a prostitution ring and protection racket out of the janitor’s closet. Proper enforcement of rules has to come from examining each case and evaluating it on its own merits. Kids who actually commit crimes should be prosecuted as criminals, not suspended from school for a couple days. But then, two kids who get in a fight over something else should get a lecture and maybe a suspension, if that. But not treated like criminals. And given the abuse of current “zero-tolerance” rules (ex: an 8 year old child led out of the classroom in handcuffs, just a few blocks from where I used to live in Irvington, for folding a piece of paper into a gun-shape and saying ‘bang - bang’ last year; an honors senior suspended and denied a scholarship for having a kitchen knife IN HER CAR; etc) I’m just not confident that any zero-tolerance in any form is a good idea.
F those jerks. If’n they wanna talk smack, I’ll give 'em what fer.
Unfortunatly, that’s a rather dangerous oversimplification. Good and bad parenting might help lean it one way or the other, but the child’s “core” mentality has a lot of sway over it, too. Most of my friends came from rather “bad” parents, and yet they’re some of the all-around best people I’ve known. And I know at least one “school shooter” had what seem to be wonderful parents that even -knew- he had a problem and were actively working to take care of it.
They were such wonderful parents, but they didn’t know what was going on in their own house? I’m sorry, but my parents (while not Ward and June Cleaver) would have known if I got a gun or took it to school, would have known if my pressure from school was reaching the boiling point, etc. Just being happy, feely people isn’t what makes good parents. They might have been trying to get him help for his problem, but if they didn’t know that he owned a gun, then they’re bad parents for not getting involved in their kid’s life and not knowing what he’s up to.
Example: The parents of the Columbine shooters. How the *@#$ did they not know that their kids were stockpiling guns and bombs in their own &#@%!%& garage??? No matter how nice they might seem, they were bad parents. Teaching and making your kids happy isn’t all parenting is. You need to control them and control what goes on in your home. If you can’t do that, then you’re responsible for what happens. The same way you’re responsible if you have a vicious dog that gets loose and kills somebody.
They DID know what was going on in their own house. Now, a kid can hide a fair deal of stuff quite easily (What, never hidden a toy or other treasured item from your parents?), but they were well aware of the problems with their son. And he -didn’t- have a gun beforehand (In fact, him trying to buy one AT SCHOOL and getting caught is what set the whole final chain of events off). He did have some self-made explosives, hidden in a air duct (Which remained unfound untill SWAT did a very thorough search of the house, clued off by a booby-trap he’d set up).
It’s easy to hide stuff, you know. Unless the parents are to do a routine trash-the-place search of the room, there are always easy places to hide stuff where they’d probably never find it. Heck, I had great parents, who taught me quite well, and I could have hidden a small -arsenal- without them ever finding out.
You seem to just follow the media’s word about them being bad parents without actually knowing anything about it. I don’t know much about the Columbine shooters’ parents, but you seem to be quite willing to jump to conclusions about things without any solid information on it, and that’s no better than any of the other media blame targets (Movies, videogames, music, etc). This isn’t a problem that can be generalized and stereotyped into a singe simple catch-all “answer”.
I’m a little torn here. I have read all of what you [Joe] have said, and all of what you [Phoenix] have said as well…I am going to have to go with what Joe is getting at. I will try to shed a little more light on it if I can. Basically, it does boil down to parenting, how could it not. Just because the media says a shooters parents were Ozzy and Harriet doesn’t at all in any way mean they were. If you think about it. When the media had got a hold of a shooters parents they are already quite distressed, I mean come on…think about it, you child has just shot and killed numerous other kids, the first thing the neighbors think is “what kind of parents could not have known?” and I think the answer is multi-faceted.
What kind of parents could not have known what their own son/daughter was doing? Well the answer is most parents don’t know. On the other hand most parents do know and don’t truly know how to help, or are too busy to help, or are working so much to meet the needs of the family, or unfortunatley as it is, there are parents who don’t care. [bastard parents that don’t care for their own GRRRR!!! that pisses me off]
Any way there are a lot of variables in these cases that I am sure we do not know about. But what JOE is saying is also very true. If parents raise self-aware, self-loving, responsible kids, kids who are willing to learn from mistakes, get hurt and bounce back, they generally would not have to worry about their child bring a firearm into a school.
Its the parents who don’t have the answers for themselves that find it hard to help their children at a time of need. And its the parents who can’t or don’t for one reason or another recognise the warning signs etc…etc… that end up infront of the camera being asked the question:" So Mrs. Smith why do you think young billy killed sevral of his classmates with a gun he bought at a garage sale?"
Good parent/ Bad Parents? I definitely think environment and biology have a huge part in what is going through these kids minds. But ultimately Joe I agree with much of what you’ve said. Parenting and the conditions you grew up in have a lot to do with it. I was always from a very young age taught that if I needed something I had to work for it. It didn’t matter how much I needed [monetarily] there was always a task my father could think of that would suffice the value. Anyway, I’m writing a bit of a novel. I’ll end it here. Sorry for any miss spelled words, I’m a bit tired even though its early…
kalashnikov wrote:
Chickens have fingers??!?