Yet another shooting in America

Mr Trick said:
in theory that is what the police are there for.
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It may be what they are for in your country but not here. Police are not meant to prevent crime. They are meant to RESPOND to crime. By the time police respond to the crime of a school shooting several lives are already taken.

And no, it's not the fault of the police, they can only respond as fast as they are made aware. It's about prevention. The killer was spurred to rage from online posts about him never being with a woman, then he posted about being famous by killing people. That the more people he killed the bigger the spotlight would be on him. He identified with IRA soldiers and had their propaganda on his website.

It would not have mattered what or how he opted to seek his fame. The problem is not with the guns but what makes these people want to do it in the first place.
 
I don't remember ever even saying it was the Police's fault to be fair. I just said that the system was a bit screwed up.
 
Mr. Pole said:
It would not have mattered what or how he opted to seek his fame. The problem is not with the guns but what makes these people want to do it in the first place.
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Almost without exception, the people who do this sort of thing want to go out in a blaze of glory, assuring that, in death, if not in life, they achieved a moment of notoriety. If you noticed, the police chief, in his initial statement, stated that he would not identify the killer by name. That, I believe, should be adopted as standard policy whenever something like this occurs. Nothing, obviously, can reduce the tragedy of the event, but, likewise, nothing and no one, especially the press, should give the killer the recognition in death that he obviously never had in life. That one thing might actually be a stronger deterrent than all of the proposed gun control plans, and it has the advantage of in no way interfering with the rights and freedom of honest citizens.
 
Linguistics can give you an interesting picture of a culture by the words that exist or don't exist. For example, some arctic languages have dozens of different words for "snow" because they recognize and need to distinguish various forms whereas someone from the tropics may not see or care about any distinction.

The Americans have added one interesting word to the English language: troubleshooter. It came from the original "troublehunter" who was a technician assigned to find and repair problems with telegraph lines in the 1800's. The word "hunter" can mean someone who looks for things or it can means someone who finds and kills things, so it was a natural progression to troubleshooter. But this is part of the American psyche: trouble is anthropomorphized and then shot as if it were a human enemy. America has always had a shoot first and ask questions later mindset that has worked against it in both foreign relations and internal affairs.
 
Ethan Reigns said:
Linguistics can give you an interesting picture of a culture by the words that exist or don't exist. For example, some arctic languages have dozens of different words for "snow" because they recognize and need to distinguish various forms whereas someone from the tropics may not see or care about any distinction.

The Americans have added one interesting word to the English language: troubleshooter. It came from the original "troublehunter" who was a technician assigned to find and repair problems with telegraph lines in the 1800's. The word "hunter" can mean someone who looks for things or it can means someone who finds and kills things, so it was a natural progression to troubleshooter. But this is part of the American psyche: trouble is anthropomorphized and then shot as if it were a human enemy. America has always had a shoot first and ask questions later mindset that has worked against it in both foreign relations and internal affairs.
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I agree, and its a shame because there is so much more about American culture which I love. This stuff is getting very grim and needs serious action as soon as possible.
 
This is a song by one of my favourite bands released all the way back in 1998:

Dad keeps a gun in the drawer in his room,
My best friend is coming over to play
yeah yeah
We got his gun
We're having fun
Tryin to find where the bad guys are
i pull the trigger and shoot my friend
oh no

run in the house grab the phone and call for help
they said "hold on, we'll be right there"
yeah
now help has come
they got the gun
try to bring him back to life
but its too late he is dead
oh no

I've watched the news
For many days
this happens every week
this happens in your town
dont keep a gun in your house
dont keep a gun in your house

Fast forward 17 years and the children of gun owners are still shooting other children:

Tennessee boy allegedly kills girl in dispute over puppies: 'It's a sad, sad situation'
 
I can certainly understand that point of view. Its a tricky one because he might say he is just doing his duties and trying to show the White House's support to the families, then again it is their choice at the end of the day. I'm not sure how much help these things tend to be anyway.
 
Let's put some context here: many places in the US allow concealed carry. Not that many allow open carry. The open carry crowd has been known to brandish a gun to get a parking spot or jump the lineup at a gas station and generally menace the rest of society. The concealed carry crowd usually goes about their business without anyone knowing they are armed until a situation arises where they use the threat of force. Some people who concealed carry have been out with their families and been accosted by thugs whereupon they open a jacket to show a gun and the situation backs down immediately. These people will never give up their guns.

The problem of bullying in schools is being met by... empty rhetoric. If I was in a school where I was being threatened (and the modern threat is a swarm where the attack is maybe ten people on one person), I would definitely carry - what you don't see about fights is quite often the person is crippled for life, a worse fate than death. The teachers at a school can do nothing because they know that if they intervene, they may be injured or killed and they will certainly be charged, fired and sued, so they look the other way. School boards have responded with "policies" written in diplomatese that give the appearance of being proactive but in fact do nothing but get people off their backs. Fix this problem by rewriting the law to make teachers able to respond and some of the gun violence will go away and it cannot go away until this is addressed. One teacher at a local school had a student spit on him and when he carried the student out of the class by the lapels, the teacher got in trouble. How f***ed up is that?
 
Most bullying in schools however is non physical, it's verbal and emotional. It also happens in all countries not just ones where guns are legal.
 
Ethan Reigns said:
Let's put some context here: many places in the US allow concealed carry. Not that many allow open carry. The open carry crowd has been known to brandish a gun to get a parking spot or jump the lineup at a gas station and generally menace the rest of society. The concealed carry crowd usually goes about their business without anyone knowing they are armed until a situation arises where they use the threat of force. Some people who concealed carry have been out with their families and been accosted by thugs whereupon they open a jacket to show a gun and the situation backs down immediately. These people will never give up their guns.

The problem of bullying in schools is being met by... empty rhetoric. If I was in a school where I was being threatened (and the modern threat is a swarm where the attack is maybe ten people on one person), I would definitely carry - what you don't see about fights is quite often the person is crippled for life, a worse fate than death. The teachers at a school can do nothing because they know that if they intervene, they may be injured or killed and they will certainly be charged, fired and sued, so they look the other way. School boards have responded with "policies" written in diplomatese that give the appearance of being proactive but in fact do nothing but get people off their backs. Fix this problem by rewriting the law to make teachers able to respond and some of the gun violence will go away and it cannot go away until this is addressed. One teacher at a local school had a student spit on him and when he carried the student out of the class by the lapels, the teacher got in trouble. How f***ed up is that?
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Well if the teachers really do look the other way then they are not doing their jobs as far as I'm concerned. Yeah the whole thing is ****ed up, the power needs to put back in the hands of people like teachers.
 
Mr Trick said:
Well if the teachers really do look the other way then they are not doing their jobs as far as I'm concerned.
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Teachers HAVE to look the other way as they are not allowed to do their job because too many right wing liberals get offended when they DO do their job.
 
Mr Trick said:
Well if the teachers really do look the other way then they are not doing their jobs as far as I'm concerned.
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Unfortunately, regardless of which way the teachers are looking, the simple fact is that they are very limited in what they can do, even in the case of extreme violence. Teachers today have little or no authority to enforce any sort of discipline in the classrooms, and the students have little or no respect for them..
 
white avenger said:
Teachers today have little or no authority to enforce any sort of discipline in the classrooms, and the students have little or no respect for them..
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It's systematic.. teachers had lost control in the 90s and just got worse from there. That's what people that just 'blame' guns for everything fail to see. Guns aren't the problem.
 
Mr. Pole said:
It's systematic.. teachers had lost control in the 90s and just got worse from there. That's what people that just 'blame' guns for everything fail to see. Guns aren't the problem.
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I know that I sound like an old man talking about the "good old days" when I say this, but I'm allowed to, since I am an old man, and they were good old days, but here is one fact about then and now.

Today, somebody goes to a school with a gun, and everybody runs away and tries to hide. When I was a kid, if one of us had brought a gun to school, the first teacher we met would take it away from us and send us to the principal's office. And that wasn't just the students. Any adult who walked onto school property knew that the teachers were in charge, and what they said was to be obeyed. It was their world, and everyone respected it, and respected them. Somewhere between then and now, we lost that. The parents have no respect for the teachers, and undermine their authority. The students lose respect for them, and that bleeds over into the world outside the school, so there's no respect for anyone in authority.

And I'm gonna hush, now, or his is going to turn into a novel about what went wrong in this country.

But it sure as hell ain't the fault of guns.
 
white avenger said:
The parents have no respect for the teachers, and undermine their authority. The students lose respect for them, and that bleeds over into the world outside the school, so there's no respect for anyone in authority...
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For all intensive purposes the teachers were, or used to be, an extension of the parents. I think many of the issues you talk about occur or began occurring if I am not mistaken, around the same time it become 'wrong' to punish kids. The parents lost control to discipline their kids the same time, or shortly after, the teachers did.
 
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