Michel Merlin said:
A confirmation is given by lakies helping that fabrication all the long of this discussion.

Gerritt said:
IOW, it is here suggested an efficient way to prevent anyone from alerting others about the current grave threats: just isolate there in the purest communist way, after sarcasming them in the purest nazi way; for this, suffices to send a few « peers » (and "friends" and "family"!) talk about him as « identified as "possibly disturbed" » (nothing is easier: the only requirement is just the number of accomplices - which never lacks nowadays), after what it becomes quite easy to « isolate them » - then to kill them - which helps prepare the mass killings.

This will get disparaged, sarcasmed, or decredibilized by any other unfair and false ways; as were probably also unduly ridiculed (and killed) the very few ones worried of Hitler when none was (i.e. until ~1936). Remember:

- 27 Feb 1933, Reichstag arsoned; 28 Feb 1933, blame on communist Polish jews, *all* press censored (not only jew and Polish), opinion (and state budgets!) prepared for war against those communist jews; everyone agreeing with gentle chief of gov (remember, none knew then that this Mr Hitler had made WWII and concentration camps: he hadn't yet! and few were worried since the ones worried were getting silently eliminated!)
- 11 Sep 2001, WTC bombed; 12 Sep, blame on islamic Afghan Persians (or Iraqi Arabs), *all* main email servers of the world (all in US) visited same day by FBI who (illegally but effectively) enforced on them a general and systematic scan and save of every email message, opinion (world wide) and budgets prepared for war against those islamic Arabs; everyone agreeing with gentle chiefs of state (remember, none knows so far that any of current state chiefs has made an undue war or concealed concentration camps - Guantanamo is so far presented as an exception, and an allegedly legit one! and few are worried since the ones worried are getting silently eliminated: "accidents", "suicides", etc.)

Versailles, Sat 5 May 2007 02:28:20 +0200, edited 03:30:35

Gerritt,
Its seems to me that you've twisted the topic around to suit your own position to some degree.

This topic was presented because 1 disturbed individual killed 30 people with guns for whatever reasons. Thus, the topic of gun control has been again brought to the forefront.

We're not talking about a serial killer. A serial killer kills several people over time. We're not talking about a war either, where many people fight against many other people and lots of people die. We're talking about a mass murderer.

This individual wanted to take out as many people as possible all at once, before ending his own pathetic life as well. One can only guess if a bomb would have been used had guns not been available to him. Seems to me that he wanted to see the fear in his victims' eyes when shooting them. Had he been using primitive weapons, he would have been overcome before he did anywhere near this amount of damage.

You can't have it both ways. In a society where guns are easily available to law abiding citizens, guns will also be easily available to non-law abiding citizens and crazy people. In fact, its easier to obtain a gun in the USA illegally than legally already. I don't think laws that target individuals will ever prevent this type of incident. Only making it hard for these people to access weapons will have the desired effect. The only way to make it hard for them is to cut down drastically on the amount of weapons in the USA. Some will be turned in while trying to acquire the weapons and some will just think its not worth the effort. Some will succeed.

Since crazy people have been known to blend in with society for decades before becoming known, I think its going to be next to impossible to isolate most of them.

Not that I'm defending this idiot, but a strong case can be made that he snapped due to the abuse he got from his peers. Maybe we should outlaw teasing others. (I don't mean this as a legitimate fix, but want to show how ridiculous it is to think a law could have prevented it.)

If a country is going to provide the right to bear arms to its' citizens, then crazies and criminals will always share the advantage of having these weapons. Either this is an acceptable penalty, or its not. This fact alone has swung many pro-gun people to the other side as they've become aware that it is unavoidable and decided that the cons are not worth the pros.

I'm not against guns. But I'm against certain types of guns. Had this guy been forced to use a single shot rifle, he would have been overcome before doing this amount of damage. He might have used a bomb but he didn't, so its not really a consideration in my opinion. He might have made his own gun, and again, it would have been fairly primitive and not been capable of the damage he caused with semi-automatic 9mm and .22. I see the problem being that easily concealed and easily acquired semi-automatic hand guns were used. I see the solution as making these unavailable to him or anyone else in the future.

dark41 said:
Speculating as to what he would have done had he not had access to guns is pretty much meaningless in any kind of pro-gun/anti-gun debate.

Given his planning, possible motives, and execution, I believe he would have found some way to meet what ever screwed-up internal needs and objectives drove him to do what he did.

Even with a much simpler weapon, with proper strategy and tactics he still could have killed dozens of people. It just would have changed how he did it and he was apparently intelligent enough to think strategically.

I'm not going to go into details, but humans are fragile, and strategies and methods to kill each other in these numbers have been around a long long time.

As callous as this may sound, he seemed capable of coming up with a gun-less plan that could have produced much worse results.

All speculation so...



pretty much meanless.



To which I come back to he wanted to see the fear in his victims' eyes as he did his thing. Only guns could have provided his forum in that respect. Since he was so smart, so calculating, and planned this so well... he was sure capable of killing more people without being there and having it immediately known that he was behind it. I suspect he knew exactly what he was doing. He fully intended to martyr himself and watch his victims suffer before and during.

This is absolute un-contestable fact???...I don't believe so.

dark41 said:



But, addressing the claim vis-a-vis guns...."Only guns could have" done that? I've seen MUCH scarier things and up-close situations in real-life and in the movies.

Some anti-gun proponents even go so far as to claim that one reason guns are so bad, is that they distance the killer from the victim...physically and emotionally, thereby making it "easier" to take someone's life.

Seems like all the "facts" can be tailored to fit whatever argument one cares to make. Toss in speculation and all bets are off as far as gun control arguments go, whether one is pro or con.

dark41 said:

I'll grant that my comments in the top paragraph regarding his specific capabilities is speculation, however, the second paragraph is not speculation. Any physically and mentally capable person, with the right strategy and tactics could inflict large casualties using simple weapons. All that changes is how it's done. Someone bent on killing people doesn't need a gun to do that. As Gerritt said earlier, people have been sans firearms killing large numbers of people for a long time, and that's a lot of history. The very recent invention of repeating firearms didn't spontaneously cause mass murder to appear on the scene.

Michel Merlin,

My quote was:
“In conclusion: Are there people out there that shouldn't have firearms? Absolutely! Should these people be "out there" where they can cause harm? That’s a more difficult question (see "Minority Report" by Phillip K. Dick). In the instance of the recent College shootings here in the US, the individual had already been identified as "possibly disturbed" by several peers and professors, prior to the incident. So instead of taking firearms away from everyone, maybe we should focus on giving more help to the folks that are being identified as risk, and if necessary isolate them.”

I identified that was a difficult issue. And did not state that I totally agreed with the isolation, just that it was an option in the most extreme cases that needed to be discussed.

Read the story before you call me a Nazi….please.

Dark41,

You stated in part:
“Not that I'm defending this idiot, but a strong case can be made that he snapped due to the abuse he got from his peers. Maybe we should outlaw teasing others. (I don't mean this as a legitimate fix, but want to show how ridiculous it is to think a law could have prevented it.)

If a country is going to provide the right to bear arms to its citizens, then crazies and criminals will always share the advantage of having these weapons. Either this is an acceptable penalty, or it’s not. This fact alone has swung many pro-gun people to the other side as they've become aware that it is unavoidable and decided that the cons are not worth the pros.”

I did not twist the topic, or at least not purposefully. One of the things I was shooting for is that if given a certain level of psychosis and a degree of sociopathic behavior as a given in a population, that the instances of this type of behavior would increase, external to the method used, in this case firearms. You did bring up a good issue, in that this particular instance, and most psychopaths, are picked on to the point that they break. I pointed out that this guy should have been HELPED, and as an extreme measure, possibly isolated, though even there I pointed out it was a problematical solution. As is the removal of firearms from those that don’t use them to shoot up banks, schools or any other environment (something approaching 99.9% or greater given the gun ownership in the US) would be restricting the rights of most citizens for the assumed mitigation of the 00.1% of the people that actually use firearms against law abiding citizens.

John,
Even though you indicated that the separation or “distance” may be a contributing factor, and then went on to disagree with it, your initial premise is true. That’s what was sold to me when I worked for SAC. It was called MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) in my day, and was way beyond a firearm or 30, 300, 3,000 or even 3,000,000 people, per shot. Given the casualties caused by the USAF bombing, vs. direct firearm generated casualties, the USAF wins/looses by a long shot! It remains that killing people with bullets is way less efficient than bombing them into submission, but an unarmed populace is ripe for a takeover. It is my understanding of the one off type of destruction that permits me to understand how it came to be, and my resistance to this as a defining situation.

All,
We have to take all of this into consideration. It is our right to rebel. As a matter of fact the people that wrote the Constitution of the United States of America, stated that is was an obligation to rebel against a tyranny.
Referencing an earlier posting, more people are killed by IEDs than bullets, hell, worldwide, more people are killed by automobiles than bullets!
Come on people, I’m not some sort of right wing sociopath here! I just want to have a good dialog.

Gerritt

Gerritt said:
And, more people in the US are killed by medical mistakes than by bullets. That doesn't even include deaths due to nosocomial infection...also related to medical care.

Another approximately 40,000 people in the US per year are killed by what are called nosocomial infections. Some think the number is currently much higher. Nosocomial means diseases you picked up at the medical facility when you went to be treated for one thing and got infected while you were there. Go in for a sprained ankle, come out with a fatal case of flu. (yes, people still die even from the "normal" flu)


Source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosocomial_infection

John,
There is no way that I'm going to disrespect your statements.
I love the fact that we talk.
Peace out!
Gerrittt

I don't disrespect anyone else's comments either. In fact, I enjoy seeing the differing points of view, even though some are completely against my beliefs. That being said, no post on this topic has bothered me much. I've heard most of it before and its no surprise to me.



Of course its not. It wasn't intended to be fact. You're the one who claimed speculation was meaningless, and then went on to speculate.

Any speculation on what Cho Seung-Hui might have, would've, could've done is not meaningless to me, and I guarantee you that law enforcement officials are speculating their butts off to come up with ways to prevent similar tragedys. In fact, without some speculation, there is no way to even attempt to prevent similar situations in the future. But then this is how I prefer to think, outside the box, how things can be changed instead of why they can't, etc., etc.. Speculation is our friend.

Whether or not Cho would have looked for alternative methods had he not had easy access to guns remains to be seen, and again is speculation. It doesn't require much for brains to google up how to make a weapon. But he used guns, and that's what this topic is about. I still believe many people would be caught or give up if guns weren't so easily available.

When fixing a leak, you go to the source. If the leak springs up somewhere else, then you deal with that. On and on, until the leak is completely defeated. Sometimes the next leak is predictable, sometimes its not. If we didn't fix leaks because they might occur elsewhere, we'd all be living under water. In the same respect, stating that people might use alternative methods to kill if they can't get guns, is not a valid argument IMO.



So the people listing other ways people die and in greater numbers have justified their opinions by trivializing the school shootings with a comparison of greater magnitude. The casualties from guns are an acceptable drawback to them, in order that the rest of the "good" people can own guns.

I don't agree that any casualties are acceptable on any level, but maybe that's the USMC training/brainwashing in me. I'd like to see each and every reason for casualties addressed one by one. Since this topic is gun control, that's where my focus remains. And for this topic, listing other ways people die in greater numbers has nothing to do with whether gun control is needed or not.

Re: trivializing deaths
I would humbly suggest that no one was trying to trivialize the deaths of any one by talking about numbers, and saying so was an inappropriate response. The point of introducing such data into a discussion such as this is to demonstrate that other things take human lives on an even larger scale, yet a comparably great outcry isn't heard addressing those deaths and the question arises...why? Talking about one set of numbers in no way trivializes the other. All the deaths are tragic.


Re: speculation
As for the speculation being generally important, I never said it wasn't. It's a very useful tool in general. On that we agree completely.

However, you didn't accurately or fairly qualify my statement on speculation in your responses, and that skews things and can mislead people. I didn't say all speculation was meaningless. Speculating and then using that unproven speculation to claim a specific set of remedies in a given situation is not meaningful in actually fixing that problem. In this case the proposed remedy happened to be about applying more laws re gun-control. The issue isn't speculating, it's using that speculation as fact to justify specific action, and that distinction apparently wasn't clear.

I hope that cleared it up.

I apologize in advance if the following analogy isn't perfect, and it's not intended to mislead or upset anyone, but it's what I came up with to discuss taking action based on unproven speculation. Something better could doubtless be authored by someone else...

It's a bit like one is growing a crop that is suddenly ruined, and one speculates that the crop was damaged by bugs, because you see bugs eating some leaves...a common, logical cause, and a well publicized problem. So one buys and keeps applying insecticide to stop or control the bugs. But the damage continues to occur. Turns out, the crop was actually damaged by excess fertilizer run-off from an adjacent field and using pesticide to kill bugs doesn't fix the problem. The speculation without knowing the details of how the crop was actually damaged, didn't fix the problem, and the "fix" even introduces new problems like killing bees that are needed to pollinate the crops and needlessly jeopardizing the health of other people.

Gents, and Ladies,
I did use statistics, I did not intend to trivialize the deaths of 30 people, anymore than I was attempting to trivialize the deaths of untold civilians in war or class warfare, or by psycotics over the ages of civilization. I'm trying to equate the deaths in Darfur, Germany, Cambodia, USA, or even the US Military, where a much higher enemy or "other" deaths TRIVIALIZED or totally overlooked because they are not US citizens....we're not the only ones in the world, and even if we were, this is nothing NEW, just rare. As a matter of fact rarer than expected.

I would like to suggest that everyone here at HWA that has weapons, and those opposed to us, get the UN to sanction and underwrite a "meeting of the minds" between the two opposing camps, with the firearm owners bringing what they own, legally, to the conference, and put them in the middle of the table. My expectation is that during the debate, the likelyhood of a "non-gunner" picking up a weapon to shove it in the face of a "gun owner" is MORE likely than the owners doing the same. I have NO scientific rational for this viewpoint, but I view it as a very likely outcome.
The fellow at Virginia had no weapons or ownership background, yet I'd be willing to bet that some of the folks killed had families that were military, or have hunted.
It's only a short road to actually pulling the trigger, if you don't have a history of working with the power that is inherent to a firearm or any other weapon. A longterm understanding of a weapon usually leads to a reluctance to use it in an invalid situation....something I wish some Presidents could understand.

Another rant by me. BTW, I am unaware of any civilian that has a legally defined "arsenal", that has gone on to this type of behaviour.

Gerritt

Nirmal Kejriwal said:

Quite eloquently spoken!

I'm opposed to eliminating guns from the hands of law abiding citizens, but I'm all for stricter gun laws, such as if you have ANY criminal record, no gun for you! I think all people should be required to have a liscence for ANY gun, concealed carry, assault weapon, hunting rifle, the works. i think if we want to reduce violence we need to provide the means for regular citizens to protect themselves, not get rid of voilent videogames. outing videogames isn't gonna do anything but make people angry.

Chalk 1 up for the violent game promoters/supporters.

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22208813-16123,00.html

The whole Violent game situation has been under the microscope for many, many years. There are several instances of it being approached, including during the original "Star Trek" series in the 1960s.
During a specific Star Trek episode, it was put forth that someone that failed in the "GAME" would be less likely to carry on an actual war....something worth concidering.

Gerrit

Funny. If the law were to be passed, parents would have less say in what's appropriate, because of regulation.

Think about it. With a law, the responsibility is taken out of the parents hands, and put into the hands of the government. Every child is different. Some kids can safely play Doom 3 at the age of 15 (myself, for example) others should probably wait until their 17 or 18. The a government law, it rules out individuality. (Yes, I'm horribly liberal like that, deal with it.)

I see it completely the opposite. Any kid is entitled to their opinions. But making some decisions is quite different and is still governed by law according to age for good reason. I don't feel that 15 yo's are smart enough to have some decision making rights, which is why 18-21 is the legal limit for making decisions in some situations. To me, there's much more important things in life for 15 yo's to be doing, such as learning the correct context for "they're, their, there" etc..

I have no problem with games being rated in the same way. If games that were deemed highly violent were rated (say) X, where only someone 18-21 or over could buy them, it would put the responsibiliity back to parents to determine which games they would buy for their kids, or not. I'm not for banning any content, but I'm all rating systems.

Of course kids could still get someone to "carry out" for them as they do with booze, or play them at a friends house as they can view movies that they aren't allowed to watch at home. There's always a way around laws if someone looks hard enough.

At any rate, the movie ratings systems were put in place for a good reason. There's also a good reason why people can't drink until they're 18-21. Parents who don't see the value of these systems can buy/rent any movie they want for their children or feed them alcohol at home, but at least it's an adult making the decision. If I thought my 15 yo was smart enough to make that decision for himself, I could purchase anything for him that I want and disregard the rating system. As it is, I'm quite happy that someone older and a bit more mature is making those decisions for him.

Having said that, I bought Half Life for my son when he was like 11 or 12, me not really knowing what it was about at the time. I think the game is totally stupid, but he loved it. The blood and gore, along with the ability to shoot security guards as well as the monsters just takes away from the game to me. On the other hand, my son used to shoot the same guard over and over (long after he was dead) and laugh like crazy. I don't think it has made him a threat to society, but I sure question his judgement since then, and watch more closely which games I buy for him.

dark41, you said that much better than I could have even attempted. Hats off.

And I'd watch out for your son, too. *note to self: don't become a security guard*

I kid, I kid.

Dave said:


problem solved.

if you personally have to live out a game in real life then you're just an idiot. thats how i feel. if you do not see the difference between fiction and really, you deserve to be in a strait jacket. i like how b*tches like jack thompson believes that one outburst from an idividual is ALWAYS directly related to video games and now dr.phil is on that bang wagon as well. losers. i dont think they relize how many people they're actually disrespecting and affending when they open there mouths and bash this industry. i personally take that sh*t as a slap in the face. they both can go to hell