Hard News: Awful in more than one way
256 Responses
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MikeE,
The reason they have gun free zones around schools is not to stop massacres but to stop eveyday shootings, which, in the United States, kill a lot more people.
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Not to mention Duncan Bayne:
This would have been preventable with much lower loss of life if the university admins hadn't voted down a rule change to allow students with licenses to carry concealed handguns on campus.
As it was, they deliberately disarmed their students, setting them up for this kind of horrible slaughter ... and then having disarmed them, utterly failed to provide for their physical security.
Disgusting behaviour on so many levels :-(
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WH,
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.Just to pick up on what someone else said about one of the victims, Professor Liviu Librescu. I always feel the need to cling to some sense of humanity in the face of moments like this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/vatechshootings/victims/Liviu_Librescu.html
I thought one of the more worthwhile reflections after Columbine was on the role social exclusion and ostracism plays in these tragedies.
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"But worldwide, there has not been a single school shooting prevent by police or law enforcement."
I would discount Beslan as a terrorist attack in a country with weak law enforcement. The only other cases I can think of outside the US are Dunblane (over in three minutes) and Erfurt (shooter killed himself as commandos stormed the building).
The USA is an anomaly where concealed weapons are commonplace and legal in an otherwise civilised society. I don't know how you can get the ink out of that particular swimming pool.
But back to preventing school shootings: in this country we prevent them by having a gun licensing system and forbidding handguns to all but collectors with stringent lockdown conditions, and having a historical tradition that routinely carrying a firearm for non-work purposes is the mark of a nutjob. By the time someone has brought a firearm to school it is way, way too late to talk about prevention.
Can you imagine what would happen in a school full of teenagers where firearms were accessible? Because if they were accessible to teachers or whomever, they would be accesible to pupils, greatly enhancing the risk of a misdeed. Conversely , if they were not accessible, they would not be useful for disabling a rogue shooter.
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A TOTALLY ARMED SOCIETY IS A FREE SOCIETY! BECAUSE THEN WE CAN ALL LIVE IN FEAR OF ONE ANOTHER!
If you don't agree with that, I'll pop a cap up yo ass.
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Oh yeah, Mike, see this list. Notice a pattern?
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Aside from the American penchant for televised melodrama, I'm not sure why this is such a "tragedy" .... surely it's the natural consequence of the idea that allowing everyone to have a gun specifically designed to kill fellow citizens is an inalienable human right.
It's exactly the same as lamenting the fate of people who are thrown through their windshields because putting on a seatbelt is an infingement on their civil liberties. It's the Gun Toll, rather than the Road Toll. So this has all the cultural significance of a particularly bad bus crash - sad for the people concerned and their families, but yesterday's news already. Give it a week, and there'll be another shooting just as there'll be another bus crash.
America didn't learn a single thing from Columbine, and it's not about to learn anything from V-Tech either.
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OK, so apparently there are 30,000 deaths as the result of guns in the United States every year.
That works out at 82 per day.
Can anybody get any details on the 164 gun deaths that must have occured in the US since the V tech massacre?
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America is designed to hinder serious change at a national level, thats why it has so many states, an entrenched constitution, and also why the Supreme Court is so powerful (a small, easy to monitor authority with universal competance is a rare thing in such a federation). Which is a good thing if one fears tyranny or over mighty rulers, but perhaps not so good when positive social change is needed.
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Can anybody get any details on the 164 gun deaths that must have occured in the US since the V tech massacre?
Chances are they - unlike the stupid example of Aramoana (where more widespread firearms possession might have saved a lot of lives; the unarmed cop who was shot in the head trying to stop Gray, for starters) - the best examples of why gun control is valuable to society as a whole.
Consider the CDC stats for 2003:
Causes of death by age group: ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/ncipc/10LC-2003/JPEG/10lc-2003.jpg
Causes of injury death by age group: ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/ncipc/10LC-2003/JPEG/10lc-unintentional.jpg
The number two injury related death for 15 - 24 year olds is firearms homicides. The number 4 killer for 10-14 year olds is firearms homicides. For the 15 - 24 year old age group the rate of firearms homicides is almost half that of the road toll. Those numbers seem kind of disturbing to me.
(By way of comparison, apparently around 75% of firearms deaths in New Zealand are self inflicted)
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OK, so apparently there are 30,000 deaths as the result of guns in the United States every year.
20,000 of those are suicides, although clearly it's reasonable to argue that the availability of a quick pull of the trigger to end's one's woes certainly removes that moment of reflection that must come as one takes the time to hook up the hose to the car, or climb the bridge.
Yeah, logically, handing each hot blooded male (the sort that career wildly up and down the roads of most nations) an Ak 47 each, is clearly going to reduce the bloodshed in schools.
Sometimes I wonder about the ramifications of the first amendment too...
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Also, VTech has highly-wired students who do stuff like setting up survivor clearing houses on Facebook. That story got a lot of coverage, and the student cellphone video (which was made compelling by the steady series of gunshots echoing on its track) was aired on CNN.
Yes, I saw the item on Campbell Live tonight, and I had a rather mixed reaction to it and Facebook in general. And anyone who has access to Triangle should make an effort to catch the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Sneer all you like at the American media, but if TVNZ or Three were producing anything half as good I'd be a very happy chap. Don't know about anyone else, but as someone who's had recourse to professional psychiatric counselling the amateur profiling of Cho Seung-Hui, going on is pretty disturning.
JEFFREY BROWN: Let me ask you, staying with you, the harder question here. And it was raised in Gwen's discussion, as well. If you can look at a lot of common traits like this and study a lot of cases, is it predictive at all?
STANTON SAMENOW: You see, I don't think we're there. Again, after the fact, sure, we can put the pieces of the puzzle together.
But what are you going to do? Every time a student writes a troubling essay, something that is dark and violent, you're going to refer him to a counselor?
I mean, I think that there really is a problem here of balancing, and I think we are heard this earlier on your program, between balancing the rights of the individuals and leaping to conclusions. You don't want to swat a fly with a cannon.
About the most sensible piece of commentary I've heard all day... I don't want to step on the punchline (so to speak) of my PA Radio piece, but I wonder what bells a certain alumni of the University of Maine would have rung if the novel he wrote his freshman year - and published over a decade later under a pseudonym - had been handed in as a creative writing assignment forty years later.
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You just knew that Instapundit and Michelle Malkin would respond to the Virginia Tech massacre by implying that it wouldn't have happened if VTech hadn't been a gun-free campus, but you'd think they might have been able to wait more than a couple of hours after the deaths to start the politicking.
Yeah, funny how it's 'okay' for the wingnuts to immediately say that this massacre proves the case for more gun freedom; and yet godforbid anyone from the left should state the obvious: how bogus is the WAR ON TERROR when ONE person can walk into ONE school and kill 30 people within minutes??
Bushco has spent billions trying to "protect Americans from terrorist attack on American soil", and yet the simple truth is that if Al Quaeda really wanted to they could just send out a dozen martyrs armed with legally purchased and constitutionally protected weapons to inflict a dozen VT's.
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The gun thing in the States is a bit hard to understand, but one thing is for sure, the cat is well and truly out of the bag and there is no getting it back in, there are cultural and practical reasons why it wont happen.
When I first arrived here I was all in favor of strict gun control, or even banning guns, but now I am not so sure. Even if you could ban all guns and had a magic wand that could make all guns in the US disappear overnight, the next day guns would be coming across the border by the container load. Whether it is alcohol during prohibition or drugs and illegal immigrants more recently, the US has such long borders that it really can't every control.
The fact is that all those guns would end up in the hands of people who aren't worried about firearms convictions. All that would have been achieved in this scenario is that you would have disarmed the 95% of the population who are decent honest law abiding people, but enabled the 5% of the population who are bad guys (maybe it is 5% or 1%, I don’t know) to have a lethal advantage over everyone else (except cops, but they can never be everywhere all the time), which is hardly a desirable outcome.
My big change of heart about gun control came about in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. The aftermath of Katrina proved to me that bad stuff really does happen, it is not just in the movies, there really are circumstances when law and order breaks down and without the means to defend yourself and your family, you are well and truly screwed. The thought of being a sitting duck and not being able to protect my family struck me pretty deep down, I really do think that it is a fundamental right, and in fact a duty to defend, and be able to defend yourself and your family against an aggressor. If you can’t or won’t do that, what the hell is the point of you? I know my wife would tell me to go to hell in an instant if I told her I wouldn’t or couldn’t defend her and our son against an intruder or attacker.
Before Katrina I had never owned a fire arm in my life, a week after Katrina I bought a shotgun and from now on, I will never not have a gun in my house.
So, if gun control or gun bans are not the total answer, what is?
I think the first place to start is to acknowledge that in this human race of ours, in every culture, nationality and race, there are some people who are fundamentally evil or disturbed individuals who are prone to doing bad things. The killer at VT fits both criteria. We need to focus on identifying these people and intervening before it is too late. Cho gave off plenty of signals that he was a walking time bomb and whether there wasn’t the procedure or ability to intervene at VT, the fact is that he wasn’t stopped when he could have been. Read the article below for the type of stuff that can and is being done, but apparently wasn’t done at VT. Cho should have had a compulsory psyche assessment and counseling and whatever other treatment was deemed necessary by a shrink immediately after he wrote those disturbing plays that we are all reading about now. Not only might he not end up killing a bunch of people, but he would have had a much better chance of having a satisfying and constructive life.
http://www.campussafetymagazine.com/Articles/?ArticleID=20
I saw a video clip of Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, showing Dylan Kelbold all the places in his room where he was hiding guns, ammo and pipe bomb materials. Where the hell were his parents? When he heard of the shooting at Columbine, Harris’ father called the police and told them that he thought his son might be involved, so he knew that his son was potential killer. And what had he done to intervene in his son’s warped world? Apparently not much, and obviously not enough. Parents should be held accountable for their children’s’ actions if bad parenting contributed to the situation. There should be another class of crime, something like, Negligent Parenting Contributing to Homicide, because that was a major factor in the Columbine disaster.
There are problems with culture as well. As a society and as a world we are far too ready to tolerate, even excuse and justify appalling behavior. We shouldn’t be surprised that if we excuse bad behavior, more follows. The following article below does a better job that I ever could of looking into this issue in the US.
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The fact is that all those guns would end up in the hands of people who aren't worried about firearms convictions. All that would have been achieved in this scenario is that you would have disarmed the 95% of the population who are decent honest law abiding people, but enabled the 5% of the population who are bad guys (maybe it is 5% or 1%, I don’t know) to have a lethal advantage over everyone else (except cops, but they can never be everywhere all the time), which is hardly a desirable outcome.
'Bad guys' are always going to be able to get guns. The mayor of Nagasaki was recently shot by a yakuza gang member. Drug dealers, hitmen and others involved in organised crime will be able to get guns no matter what the laws say.
But they're not usually the people who go crazy and march into their school or workplace with guns blazing. Would a 23 year old undergraduate loner be able to obtain handguns if they were illegal? If so could he afford them?
Criminals will always be armed, and that's why the police have guns. The real debate is whether you should make guns freely available to every unstable nut in the country so that the second they snap they can strap up, walk outside and start shooting.
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Danyl,
My point is that if you ban guns completely you leave law abiding citizens defenseless. If you banned guns completely you may well end up with fewer shooting like the one at VT, as those kind of nuts would have a harder time get a gun, but you would end up with a lot of other crime and murders as criminals take advantage of the fact that other citizens can no longer stop them coming into their houses etc.As an example, home invasion type crimes that I seem to read about all too frequently in NZ are rarer in the US, in fact I can only recall one. I don't know anyone who has been burgled since I have been in the US, meanwhile my sister's house in Auckland has been burgled twice in since I have been in the US. Would you break into someone's house if you thought they may well be armed? Probably not. Even before I bought a gun, the fact that others did have guns in their houses substantially reduced the risk of someone breaking into my house. That is good.
Remember, when I first came to the US I was all for gun control, I thought the US gun laws were insane and to reduce crime and murder in the US it was critical to reduce the prevalence of guns. But it’s just not that simple.
It is not guns that are the problem, it is who has the guns that matters. Maybe there should be some kind of national mental health registry, where if you have been identified as having mental problems you are not allowed to buy a gun or ammo etc., that might have kept guns out of Cho hands, or rather made it harder for him to get them. Drugs are illegal, has that made them impossible to obtain?
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i think this thread just godwined.
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Even before I bought a gun, the fact that others did have guns in their houses substantially reduced the risk of someone breaking into my house. That is good.
Not so good is the number of people who die in the US because some hopped-up-on-scray-TV-news homeowner blows his wife or kids away when they get home late, thinking they're a burglar. Doesn't happen so much here.
But hey, if your VCR is that important to you that you'll trade someone stealing your stuff for thousands of firearms homicides a year, I guess you've moved to the right country.
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My house in Atlanta got robbed. The conversation with the investigating officers went like this:
Cop: We'll let you know if we find anything.
Me: Thanks. Do you ever find anything?
Cop: No.This suggests to me that burglary is not an uncommon crime in the US. And the guns as a deterrent argument against home-breaking is absurd. People rob your house while you're away on holiday or at work. Your gun isn't any kind of deterrent if you're an hours drive away while someones jimmying open your back door. If you want to protect your house get a big dog, not a glock.
And here's a google news search for home invasions in the US - it returns 9027 hits with the oldest dated two weeks ago. I haven't checked them all but I don't think they're all stories about how that crime isn't a problem in the US.
http://www.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=home+invasion&btnG=Search+News
And the statistics suggest that the gun you're relying on to defend your house is about fifty times more likely to end up killing you or someone in your family than some crazed intruder, so be careful with it.
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But hey, if your VCR is that important to you that you'll trade someone stealing your stuff for thousands of firearms homicides a year, I guess you've moved to the right country.
Heh.
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Nobody Important said:
Bushco has spent billions trying to "protect Americans from terrorist attack on American soil", and yet the simple truth is that if Al Quaeda really wanted to they could just send out a dozen martyrs armed with legally purchased and constitutionally protected weapons to inflict a dozen VT's.
Exactly. The fact that they haven't managed this, or even - say - a single suicide bombing in a crowded train station in one of the cities of the northeast during the morning commute, makes me suspect they are not really much of a force to be reckoned with anymore.
I am not entirely sure how easy it is for non-US citizens to purchase guns legally. I suspect you need either a greencard (as in this case) or US citizenship. Assuming not too many terrorist operatives are also "resident aliens" (delightful term) or US citizens, they might not be able to purchase guns in the US legally. All this is rather beside the point though.
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Bushco has spent billions trying to "protect Americans from terrorist attack on American soil", and yet the simple truth is that if Al Quaeda really wanted to they could just send out a dozen martyrs armed with legally purchased and constitutionally protected weapons to inflict a dozen VT's.
Alternatively, they could dispense with all the cost and complexity of martyr's training camps, buying AK47s and recruiting suicide bombers, and simply buy shares in Kraft and General Foods and wait for America to eat itself to death. Americans seem to have made a good start on their own - think how much more they could do with some terrorist encouragement!
The size of some of the cops responding to the shootings was simply astounding - "Hey, check out the TV, honey - there's me and my enormous gut waddling in the direction of the gunfire ...."
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i think purchasing guns legally just means you're on a security camera somewhere. apparently its very easy to buy guns illegally in most states.
i heard somewhere (or maybe it was a german doco? i forget) that a lot of crims use ex-police weapons, which were sold by the police, then sold into the black market.
i think what we outsiders forget is that we're talking about a culture that literally worships guns. it's so ingrained there's no turning back.
ever hear that joke, "how do you know you're a redneck? your gun rack, has a gun rack"
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When I first arrived here I was all in favor of strict gun control, or even banning guns, but now I am not so sure. Even if you could ban all guns and had a magic wand that could make all guns in the US disappear overnight, the next day guns would be coming across the border by the container load.
I fear you're right. As I said earlier, there are simply too many guns in circulation, and too many more where they came from.
And iirc, you're right about different forms of crime. The burglary rate in NZ is high, and the rate in the US is lower than NZ, Australia, the UK, etc.
OTOH, the US murder rate is much higher than that of any comparable country and the rate of forcible rape is very high. The US robbery rate has fallen off the top slot in recent years, probably as gun prevalence in the UK, Spain and Portgual has increased.
But I can't buy the idea that you can fix it by predicting behaviour, or keeping a mental health register. That's a hell of a lot of poking around in the heads of citizens. How many Americans are on prozac?
We've seen this turn into a kind of fear of youth after previous school massacres (goths copped it after Columbine), but the fact is many adolescents get a bit dark on it and most of them don't commit mass-murder.
So, no, I can't see a solution.
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someone better check tarantino's place for a gun collection, right now.
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