Well another school has been shot up. This time in amish country PA. I wonder if these type of shootings are limited mostly to the U.S. I don't really hear about these kind of things in the UK. What a shame and horrible situation. I have two daughters and I can't imagine the fear and pain that the poor girls went through. Why do these type of school shootings seem to be becoming more and more common???
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are altogether!
It is very sad indeed.
QuoteI wonder if these type of shootings are limited mostly to the U.S. I don't really hear about these kind of things in the UK.
We have completely different gun control laws here, so school shootings of the same sort do not happen here.
In the Netherlands a similiar thing happened (not with amish though) some time ago. I find it very disturbing that such thing could happen. I mean shouldn't school be thé save place for children? Why would anyone want to shoot children anyway? Some kids can be anoing but no one disurves to be shot like this.
I also find it very strange that this happened in an Amish community. I always thought amish live a very peacefull live. I could be wrong though. And I haven't exactly followed the news when this was on yesterday, so it could be done by and outsider. I'm not sure on that.
Yeah ... I doubt the Amish were 'training on Doom' for this.
Sickening and Sad.
I'm sure the kids of Belsan would agree this isn't just an American thing. There are psychotic lunatics in all parts of the world. We just have a rediculous amount of media coverage here in the states and so everybody hears about it.
I really don't see a way to stop this kind of thing from happening ... and that's really sad. Throwing out the second ammendment (the right to bear arms) won't solve this problem. There are too many guns and it's too easy to get your hands on one.
Quote from: Darth Mandarb on Tue 03/10/2006 17:41:58
There are too many guns and it's too easy to get your hands on one.
I'm not sure this appliesto the UK (or greece for that matter).
Although in Greece I know that in the country there are alot of hunters... so it does make it easier... Dunno...
It is sad though, and not to blame the Americans on anything. It's just sad and I would never imagine loosing my kids to anything, absolutely anything, not something so violent and stupid and illogical like this, for no good reason, and for no fault...
There are nuts people everywhere... But I think that in the US it's almost obvious how to get a gun. I don' t actually know what to do to get one here.
Anyway, maybe we aren' t a bit too long with this "In the US you can go to the candy shop and get a gun!" attitude? Maybe the laws are simillar and in the US people do the EFFORT of getting a gun? I don' t know, I should compare both (European and American) regulations.
If that is the case, then it' s a matter of culture, and not of regulations.
Any yankee can tell me what to do to get a gun in your country? It changes deppending of the States? Here I think it might be quite easy to get a hunting rifle and not too difficult to get a pistol (With a previous psycological and fisical analysis)
EDIT:
Got it:
· No criminal record
· Making a sport which requires the use of a gun... Hunting, shooting...
· Psicofisical exam
· Exam about the knowleadge of the weapon and the regulation
· Practical exam of the use of the weapon.
How goes in the USA?
RE-EDIT: Anyway, in Italy it's not as hard as in Spain.
· Medical exam
· Say a reason (?)
· Declare to "Questura" that you are not an alcoholic or drug addict...
And similar to the UK, but apparently only for hunting rifles, no guns allowed.
About Amish.
Amish children don't go to school, they go to the community center. Since they think that knowlage turns men arogant they stop teaching children at 13(?) or so. I think when they turn 15 they enter a periode called "rund springen", German for jumping around. During this time they have to chose wether they want to join the community. The interesting thing is that they can wait as long as they want to make this decisoin. Since they have all this money from working since childhood, they buy cars, clothes, get a house, play games and do everything the Amish can't do (they can even have pre-marital sex!). The only problem is that they don't have an education so they are stuck in their community.
Most young men in greece that are frustrated with their life commit a solitary suicide that nobody will forget but their grieving family. This 'kill as many of your peers before doing yourself' thing has yet to be mimicked from the americans... But we got your macdonalds. We got your inane television. We'll get our own underage school shootings, I'm sure.
Quote from: Helm on Tue 03/10/2006 19:06:14But we got your macdonalds. We got your inane television. We'll get our own underage school shootings, I'm sure.
Going Donald. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Oliver_Huberty)
This wasn't a teenage "kill as many of your peers" thing like Columbine. It was a crazed adult man killing a lot of young children in a school, which seems very different, so I wouldn't lump it in together with any other shooting that has happened in a school. Something like this has indeed happened in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_Massacre Which is partly the reason why you can't get handguns here anymore, even with a license.
We haven't really had Columbine school shootings though, certainly one big reason is the lower availability of weapons of course. In America lots of people have parents with guns in the house. I don't think teenage life is all that different here, a few would probably blow up like that if they could.
I'm not suggesting america should give up guns... that'll never happen, but it shoudn't be such a surprise that there are crazy people who will do a lot of damage with them.
I'm not convinced guns are the culprit here, but rather a means to an end.
Without guns, there are still bombs, knives, etc.
A look at history shows us that even a group of Frenchmen can go apeshit with a something as non-portable as a guillotine.
There are lots of ways to kill your schoolmates but none quite as easy as guns. You don't, as far as I know, get large scale high school knife attacks, or bombings (lots of hoaxes though). Knives require you to get up close and are easier to run away from, they're a weapon for muggers. Bombs generally require a lot of technical ability, planning, and suspicious ingredients... so you get them but only from obsessives like McVeigh or the IRA over here. It seems clear that available guns do enable a lot of these lone madman massacre type things. Maybe some day some guy will come to school in a trenchcoat and shades with a guillotine strapped to his back, I might be wrong.
Funny thing, weapons though. I just read some comments on things like this, and in one of them someone said he had a gun of his own in a locker or so. This is Finland, my country, I'm talking about. he, was the only one to say that. Actually, I have never met anyone who would have held a gun apart from the army. basically hearing that someone has a gun home makes me, and the people I know a bit uneased around him/her. I wouldn't like to visit smoeon who had a gun, seriously. It's just the presence of it that gives me some awkward feeling. Like, there's something here thats purpose is to kill someone. Same goes for knives. Of course, everyone has a knife in their toolpack, or at least in the country, I did too. But I don't carry a knife outside the woodshop.
Well, I don't know how many of you would be afraid if they saw a police officer stopping you for speeding and he had a pistol on his waist/belt. I did. Even though I trust them a lot and I know they wouldn't use it for killing. Most of them never need to use it. Ok, well, not afraid, but tensioned or so...
Does anyone remember that Canadian psyco? wasn't that long ago. shot up a canadian school Ã, just goes to show that gun control laws really don't make too much differance. Psycopaths will be psycopaths.
[EDIT]
Quote from: scotch on Tue 03/10/2006 20:10:49
Bombs generally require a lot of technical ability, planning, and suspicious ingredients... so you get them but only from obsessives like McVeigh or the IRA over here.
I hardly think fertilizer counts as suspichious
Come on, Low res... Don' t be so picky about Scotch's post. True that Cloratyte is terrible easy to do, but you gotta recognise that Scotch is correct. It' s basically easier to kill with a gun in a school that with a bomb.
Or a guillotine.
If we start doing the smart ass (sorry if the words are too offensive in English, in Spanish they are very coloquial) we will never advance in a thread.
Quote[you don't]get large scale high school knife attacks
Actually you're wrong. There are knife threats and attacks in schools far more often than guns, it's just that the media and people in general place a lower threat level upon someone with a knife, despite the fact that both can kill. There was a nut going around at a local college recently raping women at knifepoint and cutting them. It's just not as
media wow as a kid/adult going berserk with a gun.
Here we have a terrible problem of "husbands" (If they can be called so...) killing her wifes. And almost 100% use knifes.
And to agree a bit with Low_res (after the slight scolding) the formula of a bomb can include something so easy to find as a clorate of something (*) really easy to get in a drugstore, sulfur and sugar.
(*) (I won' t mention what it is... ^_^)
(*) Viagra?
I would just like to say sorry if I came of a bit bitchy. I was just pointing out you don't have to be a techno wizard to make a bomb. Heck, wikipedia has recipie for
nitroglycerin (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chemical_synthesis/Nitroglycerine)
as well as
TNT (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chemical_synthesis/Trinitrotoluene)
read on mini unibombers, read on
fertilizer is no suspicious. Enough fertilizer to make a decent sized bomb, as far as I understand, is.
decent enough to do what? blow up a school? kill students? make a bang?
say your a farmer, or say your a farmer, or are part of a garden club? what then?
"There are knife threats and attacks in schools far more often than guns" Yeah I expect so, that's certainly the case here... I did say large scale knife attacks. If you're a thug that's threatening or attacking one person, or a rapist wandering around at night, then it may as well be a knife. I didn't mean to imply that you don't get violent crimes committed if there are no guns. It's just when it comes to the topic of large scale random psycho incidents such as this school shooting, the availability of better killing tools is the main reason (imo) that they occur more often in America.
As a proportion of total violent crimes these big newsporthy things are pretty insignificant. I didn't mean to suggest anything other than that explanation for the higher rate of these specific types of crime.
Incidentally, 8 times more people are shot to death in america than stabbed to death, a large majority of that being handguns, it's certainly what I'd choose too, if I was violent and had a choice. Just because "people get stabbed here" or "I know how to make a bomb", doesn't mean they appeal to the average nut considering a mass murder+suicide.
I would also think that someone with a knife would be much easier to incompacitate then someone with a gun. A lot of people could rush the guy with the knife and over power him. But then again the 9/11 hijackers only had box cutters......
Very sad, I don't think gun laws would have made it any different, it seems to be one of those one off odd killing sprees that only the killer knew what he wanted to do and had probably planned it long ago, and any intelligence could not have known it was going to happen.
Just on gun laws in any country: gun laws can make it harder to get weapons, but if someone really wants a gun they can get one in any country, there is a huge black market out there.
I know one of my friends got a gun just for the sake of it years ago, he's also on medication for bipolar disorder and he wasn't on medication then. It was a bit freaky but he did get rid of it.
Another one of my friends bought a gun illegally, and it was the same gun that the cops carry around here, His house was robbed, and that was one of the items stolen.
Media does have a lot to do with making these things known a lot more these days. There are quite a lot of Drive by shootings in Sydney, Australia these days and a lot of them don't make the news, I don't know if that's to make it seem safer or they are becoming that common that they don't make a story. This is a more recent trend and seems to mimic LA. But stats will show how many more shootings happen in the USA than anywhere else by such a huge margin that it's just obvious that the less guns there are, the less people will resort to using them. Simple as that. (the stats I'm thinking of were in Bowling for Columbine I think, not sure on specific numbers and can't be bothered looking it up)
I've got a friend out here at the moment from LA and some of his stories are quite scary, even stuff about the competitiveness of gangs in other cities to make their city the most violent. It's like a competition, and the media drives it.
One of my mates from here was visiting some friends in Detroit a couple of weeks ago and there were quite a few drive by shootings while he was there, one only 2 doors down from where he was staying. The last time he was in Detroit last year, his mate got stabbed repeatedly in the neck with his own carving chisel in his own hotel room, luckily missed every major artery by millimetres.
They changed the automatic weapon laws here (Australia) about 10 years ago after a guy massacred random people in a famous tourist spot in Tasmania for no reason, including small children. He didn't turn the weapon on himself either, and chose a spot that he could not possibly escape, a piece of land only attached by an Isthmus (thin strip of land surrounded by water connecting 2 larger bits of land)
There was another massacre in a shopping centre in Sydney about 10 or so years ago as well which was another reason they changed the automatic weapon laws.
I don't think there has been any other major shootings like that for quite some time now, just a lot of gang related one off shootings and domestic shootings, but it's a sad world out there and getting worse. I do feel safe walking around the city but sometimes you hear about a shooting that happend outside a place you were the week before, it seems like only a matter of time before you actually see one and hope you are not unlucky enough to be in the way, It would be pretty unlucky though.
Quote from: Timosity on Wed 04/10/2006 07:13:13Just on gun laws in any country: gun laws can make it harder to get weapons, but if someone really wants a gun they can get one in any country, there is a huge black market out there.
If I were myself and wanted to go on a killing spree, I'd have no idea how to get anything more than a hunting rifle, and maybe a pistol. Well, except from going to America, buy some shotguns and stuff there, and head back. I've had friends doing this.
Seriously, I don't see why anything stronger than a handgun is legal. If someone's breaking into your property, you don't need your latest Deth-Bringa 3000 K-57 34.2mm Mini-Gun with automatic condom dispensers. I'm sure a decent .22 is more than enough to atleast cripple the guy.