Some people just want to watch the world burn. 20 children dead in CT

sandmanCCL

A gunman just killed 20 kids at an elementary school in Connecticut. edit: And a bunch of teachers. Body count at 27 right now.

http://gma.yahoo.com/breaking-conn-school-district-locked-down-shooting-report-151955384--abc-news-topstories.html

I'm sure you could easily find this as the top story on any news site.

I'm actually crying right now. I don't understand this kind of thing.

sandmanCCL

edit: Looks like the post in question got removed. And no, I wasn't the one who did it. I left my house shortly after I initially posted what was here.

Dee

I heard about this about two hours ago.

I'm still at work. Makes it difficult to really take it in. But that school is an hour and a half away from where I grew up.

Chow

It is honestly pretty difficult to understand what could drive someone to do this kind of stuff. I think that instead of arguing about gun laws all the damn time, it would be better to try and understand these people and figure out what makes them tick. Then we could much better prepare for it and make sure it doesn't happen again.

We are too concerned with weapons - whether on keeping them or taking them away - and too little with our general wellbeing.

Syntia13

One of the ways to prevent such things would be NOT to make a big media affair of them.

And I'm not being cold or sarcastic there. I have read several articles (not all of them on Internet) which analyzed... hmm... let's call it a 'media trigger'. Most of it was about suicides, but the principle is the same, I think. And the principle is this - if there is a suicide and medias (TV, newspapers, etc) make a big case of it, talking about it for several days, giving details, interviewing families etc, ... a great surge in suicides follows, most of them in age group of the 'original', and often copying the method.

The slaughter was number one topic in evening news today - evening, because I live in Europe. All across the ocean. What good did it do to show 10 minute long footage of the scene of tragedy? There's nothing I can do help. There's nothing I can do to prevent such things from happening. All I can do is to be a little more scared of the world I'm living in, to be even less trustful of other people, to isolate myself and my family more.
How many parents all over the world will look at their children and won't be able to sleep at night thinking about 'what if ...?'
More to the point, how many quiet sociopaths out there will get inspired?

Chow

@Syntia13 All that matters to the media is that this kind of stuff sells. People watch it. It brings them money.

Even if what you say makes sense - and it does - they will not stop doing it.

Chow

Indeed, now it appears China is another setting for such an event. Knife attack, apparently (and thankfully) not as deadly.

MERLANCE

@sandmanccl was it really necessary to delete what I posted because you didn't like what I had to say?

thedemoninside

I really wish i could drive down there and rip the shooters body apart with a hammer. I hope he doesn't get a tombstone. Its just so sick and upsetting that i really want to rip his corpse apart and hope that somehow it sends him to the deepest part of hell.

This has had me feeling sick for 3 hours now.

Chow

thedemoninside said:

I really wish i could drive down there and rip the shooters body apart with a hammer. I hope he doesn't get a tombstone. Its just so sick and upsetting that i really want to rip his corpse apart and hope that somehow it sends him to the deepest part of hell.

This has had me feeling sick for 3 hours now.

Violence solves nothing. I'd instead recommend trying to figure out what made him do this, because there is a reason to everything - even if it's likely to be a horribly bad one.

We need to spend more time trying to understand people, and less keeping the cycle of revenge and violence going.

Kitteh_On_A_Cloud

Syntia13 said:

The slaughter was number one topic in evening news today - evening, because I live in Europe. All across the ocean. What good did it do to show 10 minute long footage of the scene of tragedy? There's nothing I can do help. There's nothing I can do to prevent such things from happening. All I can do is to be a little more scared of the world I'm living in, to be even less trustful of other people, to isolate myself and my family more.
How many parents all over the world will look at their children and won't be able to sleep at night thinking about 'what if ...?'
More to the point, how many quiet sociopaths out there will get inspired?

Might sound harsh, but I gotta agree with this. Also, I'm very glad my country's got terribly strict laws on guns. I just can't understand how common people are able to just walk into the nearest gun shop and walk out with half an arsenal only to either 1) commit suicide 2) (unintentionally) harm their beloved ones and family or acts of revenge 3) go batshit insane and do things like what that psycho just did.

The thing is, how can we prevent such a thing from happening again? How can one predict that on a certain day, a certain psycho will show up and start murdering people? I honestly couldn't care less about this person's troubles, to be frank. The real issue, to me, is to find a way to prevent such a mass murder from happening again. Idiots shouldn't be allowed to harm others.

thedemoninside

Screw that. Eye for an eye. Rule with fear. This person deserves nothing. There is nothing to understand, and there never will be.

what good would happen from trying to understand this sick person? It certainly wouldn't prevent it from happening again. I think the parents of those children deserve the opportunity to do whatever they want to that pathetic corpse, if it helps them grieve.

Kitteh_On_A_Cloud

@thedemoninside: Agreed. Nobody, even a madman, should be 'allowed' to shoot down innocent kids. It's sick, twisted and horribly selfish. The selfishness is even more apparent in his committing suicide. It's like screaming for attention without giving anyone a chance to find out your troubles and help you, you're only dragging innocent souls with you to the other world. For what reason? It escapes me.

thedemoninside

Ever see the movie I Spit On Your Grave? She gets those guys back worse than they did to her. People would think twice about doing bad things if they could get caught and have it done back twice as harsh to them.

The carebear system of putting people in jail needs to go. Those people want to be there. Is all they know and they don't have to worry about a bed or meals. Its just stupid.

Chow

thedemoninside said:

Screw that. Eye for an eye. Rule with fear. This person deserves nothing. There is nothing to understand, and there never will be.

what good would happen from trying to understand this sick person? It certainly wouldn't prevent it from happening again. I think the parents of those children deserve the opportunity to do whatever they want to that pathetic corpse, if it helps them grieve.

A woefully short-sighted view. If this is all we do, then we end up doing so to the end of days when this happens again.

There is always a reason for why he did this. There is a reason for why he became sick with whatever strange mind illness he had. And if we bother finding this reason, we can take steps so that it will not happen again, make all of us healthier in the long run and reduce the overall number of victims.

What use is eye for an eye? It does not bring back the dead, and it certainly does not teach this man anything he does not already know: he is too out of his mind to understand punishment and violence like this. Any fear it would put to other people will be likewise forgotten when the same bloodlust hits them, when they are brought to such violence for the same or similar reasons. Do you really think that when they are so far out as to kill children, they would stop doing so because it will bring pain and death to their end too? Would it not be much better to save some lives, by taking pre-emptive steps to other things such as these?

But humans are more wired to violence than peace, so it is more likely that they would want to respond to violence with more violence. And hence it will keep happening. Someone will do this again, eventually, because people like you are just too common.

MERLANCE

An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

The prison system is flawed, not because its too easy on "criminals" but because it doesn't focus enough on rehabilitation.

It happens every day, every single day, just not usually on such a large scale. Either way, this stuff will continue to happen even if we had no guns. What is it the NRA says, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns?

thedemoninside

I'm not a violent person. However i believe what is deserved, should always get served. If understanding sociopaths and other forms of sick people really was a solution, then mental institutions would actually work instead of being a jail with medicated psychos

Chow

thedemoninside said:

I'm not a violent person. However i believe what is deserved, should always get served. If understanding sociopaths and other forms of sick people really was a solution, then mental institutions would actually work instead of being a jail with medicated psychos

Maybe the USA, the country where prisons are bloated with criminals and everybody sees as their right to hold a gun, has simply not tried hard enough?

Check out how Norway does things:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2000920,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html

As compared to the States:
http://rt.com/usa/news/usa-prison-conditions-worse-guantanamo/

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/07/norwegian-v-american-justice

Metal_Hurlant

I've found a lot of Americans seem to avoid the gun issue.

rufus_hobart

Ugh...just heard about this and feel sick. Very sorry for all those grieving families. As the OP said, i really don't understand the depths of hatred and malice that could drive some pathetic wretch to acts such as this.

claudius

I doubt mutilating my enemies corpse would lead to an improvement in my state of mind.

The death penalty has been proven to be useless in terms of a deterrent, and actually costs the tax payer more money that just jailing them. So there's one aspect of it.

The death penalty has more to do with vengeance than justice. It serves only our interpretation of justice, and has nothing to do with divine justice (karma). As people, we want to see others suffer for their sins. We want results. We want to see justice in action and we want it to meet our standards. And that's all the death penalty does. It soothes our (angry and afraid in the face of such evil) ego for a little while. It doesn't truly "justify" or rectify or change anything.

Frankly, this is the most horrifying thing I have heard for a long time. It's just awful. Awful. In so many ways. But I still would not advocate for the death penalty were the shooter still alive.

thedemoninside

Would you want to cuddle him and tell him he is still an important part of society, and eventually release him in his reformed state to babysit your children?

Chow

thedemoninside said:

Would you want to cuddle him and tell him he is still an important part of society, and eventually release him in his reformed state to babysit your children?

Not in those words, not as fast as you say it would happen, and definitely not with children. Indeed, it would be very possible he would still remain locked up for the rest of his life.

But it would teach us matters, it would help us to deal with things more productively than with violence, and as was already stated, it would cost us more to kill him anyway and would drive no purpose whatsoever.

And finally... you will probably not understand the words here, but I am sure the message is clear.

Nazad

And think of the shooter's brother, initially misidentified as the killer. Do we need to move so quickly to accuse in the information age? Guy just lost his entire family to his psychopathic brother.

ajwz

School shooting are always horrifying, but the fact that the targets here were just 5-10 years old makes this even more tragic. My heart goes out to the victim's families.

VikingR

I have no doubt the research on the shooter will some of these tendencies:

- problems within his own family
- lack of social integration / isolation
- sexual frustration
- signs of depression
- bullying / exclusion

Todays society breeds its own children, I guess. This massacre was yet another final cry for attention and the guy obviously wanted to take it one step further down the line by going after children.

moopy

@Kitteh_On_A_Cloud

If we had gun control laws and that would stop people from using guns...

Couldn't we just make murder illegal? And that would stop people from murdering?

It seems like an easier solution.

Wait you mean he didn't care about the don't murder people law? Hrm, I really doubt he'd care about the don't have guns law and would get one illegally.

Also, how about option 4) I want to own one for protection against crazy people who will get one legally or illegally anyway? 5) I want to own one because I enjoy target practice and its a hobby, or 6) I live in the middle of 640 acres and would like to be able to protect my family and livestock from wild animals.

Case and point: Ridiculously strict gun laws in Chicago or Washington DC, and yet they have some of the worst gun crimes in America, because the law breakers break the law (duh) and get guns anyway, and are emboldened by the fact that they know their victims.

I guess strict gun laws would have stopped this man in Bejing from hurting 22 kids at a elementary school?

http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-man-slashes-22-children-near-china-school-20121214,0,6383015.story

Oh... wait... he used a knife?

Maybe we need to make knives illegal to own also?

Chow

@moopy: Owning a gun for self-defense really doesn't work quite as well as one might think. Guns are not defensive things, they don't protect lives, they just kill. Maybe that someone killed by a gun could have killed someone else with his own gun, but there are still better solutions.

I'd rather go for a good security system, or perhaps a mace you could pick up and a bullet-proof vest to wear if you hear someone breaking in at night regardless. It'd probably help things just as much, with much less odds of you killing someone by accident and having to live with it for the rest of your life.

Zanian

I am against the death penalty, but all for life sentences. And when I say life, I mean LIFE. Not like here in Denmark where a life sentence is 6-12 years in a nice little apartment with the possibility of actually visiting your family. (Yes, not them visiting you, but you visiting them... outside).

Statistics say that more than half the people who get released from jail, ends up back inside in less than 2 years. Would you like to have the death of 20 more kids on your conscience when it could easily have been avoided?
My opinion: Any form of first degree murder = Imprisonment for life. (Possible exceptions for those acting in "justified" vengeance. Ie murdering the killer/rapist/etc of a familymember/etc. Give those people 20-30 years instead.)

Ít might sound harsh, but it's all for protecting the lives of innocents. The cause do sometimes justify the means.

EDIT:
@moopy So according to your theory, making murder legal wouldn't result in people committing more murders?
Making it illegal to have guns won't mean noone will have them anymore, but it damn well will help tremendously.

moopy

@chow

These events would disagree with you:

My wives grandmother shot a mountain lion jumping at my wife when she was 10 years old. I like that my wife is still alive.

Lets continue.

Uhoh son saves mothers live with gun -

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/27/channing-thorpe-florida-kills-mother-save-father_n_2198857.html

Uhoh 14 year old boy protects sisters lives hes baby sitting with gun -

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/14-year-old-shoots-armed-intruder-while-babysitting-his-younger-siblings-in-phoenix/

Uhoh 11 year old boy protects younger sister from bear with gun (Yeah some of us live in the country) -

http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/hunting/2009/11/11-year-old-idaho-boy-shoots-problem-bear-front-porch

Here is a gigantic list of events like that -

http://www.keepandbeararms.com/information/XcInfoBase.asp?CatID=301

Zanian

@moopy Do you know why there isn't a list with cases where a gun resulted in someone needlessly losing their life?
Because there isn't a server in the world that could hold that big a text document.