… that the nation’s schools have devoted so much money to procuring:
Gunman Forced His Way Into School
Is it time yet to talk about screening gun owners, their family members who live at home and their residences and perhaps the ramifications of sanctifying gun culture yet? How about having a nation full of parents living in constant fear and their kids having their childhoods snatched away?
Can we talk about the morality of terrifying our families, cashing in on that terror and then allowing the gun industry to escalate that fear and business opportunities with their lobbying efforts? Does anyone but me see the potential conflict-of-interest here that comes at the expense of our peace of mind?
I mean, when would be a good time? Pencil us in.
**********************************
Get well, Hillary. Hillary Clinton suffers a concussion.
Filed under: General | Tagged: electronic doors, Guns, security industry |
The Confluence 
We don’t let people who are drinking drive a car because we know that the combination of alcohol and cars leads to more fatalities.
We don’t let people who own pools get away with no fencing and locked gates because we know that small children have been known to fall in and drown.
But for some reason, guns and young adult males with developing brains are not considered a threat to themselves or others and no additional safety measures are required to keep them apart.
How is that possible??
There needs to be some semblance of logic put into solid laws that address the need to help those that can’t see the harm posed by them and to assist their families in seeing the risks of having guns in the home. We need to teach more self-care skills, cool-down skills (breathing to calm down…some Enya or other calming music) and mutual respect skills. Community skills are a must.
Parents of disabled need to access services and take some classes to help support a safe environment for their loved one(s) and the community at large. The community and its children need to be safe and with acceptance comes responsibility. I often covered ‘RIGHTS’ and ‘RESPONSIBILITIES’, as sometimes the two aren’t covered together. Yes, you have rights, but you also have responsibilities and those responsibilities are to others in the community to be safe. In plain English, they don’t have the right to harm, verbally abuse, threaten or intimidate staff, visitors or others in the community.
This discussion is long over due and people need to know, that guns and disabled don’t mix, when they do terrible and horrible things happen. We need to do better, we must do better as our sense of peace is at risk.
I’m not sure deep breathing exercises are going to help and schools already emphasize the “use your words” thing to death.
When shooters go on these rampages, theres nothing rational about it. The safety mechanisms in the brain have been bypassed. That’s why I think it is important to keep the irrational mind and the guns as separate as possible. The so-called experts say it’s impossible to tell who’s going to go postal but I disagree. I can’t think of one female who has done a mass shooting. Correct me if I’m wrong here. Now, is that a nature or nurture thing? Probably a little of both but we also know that young adult males experience a greater number of psychotic episodes than females. (The research industry has a lot of them but not many are dangerous. I’ve met more than enough in the labs. Maybe it was proximity to their experiments, I don’t know but it’s startling to me when I think back on it.)
The coping skills are taught early on, or once in community living situations, once they (disabled) can’t live at home any more. It may sound silly, but they work, also, respect is essential, respect for them and others.
I just read his mother taught him to shoot and took ‘her kids’ to the range…shaking my head. I don’t know what to say, she certainly didn’t get that advice from anyone that works with disabled individuals.
I don’t think I was very clear.
The shooter is reported to be high functioning autistic or having aspbergers. He is also reported to be very intelligent. He doesn’t sound like he was disabled or unable to understand how to relax or calm down.
My point is that when people get to the point where they’re going to go postal, the emotional part of their brains have short circuited any attempts to calm down.
Giving people coping strategies wouldn’t work for these people. What would work is physically separating these individuals from guns. Sure, they might still be dangerous but they couldn’t be spontaneous.
Females have always been conditioned from birth to be nurturing and by and large males have always been taught to be aggressive. I do think nurture has a great part in this and I am one of those people that do believe that the constant video exposure of killing games that desensitize males in killing and lack of empathy. I recall a senator who was trying to put an age limit similar to that of porn on violent games and he and his staff received death threats, from gamers who would say the games were harmless while threatening them. 😯
I’m not convinced that this falls heavily on the nurture side. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that hormones have a lot to do with it.
Raging hormones in young men plus access to guns = deadly combination
Testosterone has probably caused more human suffering than any externally-derived mind-altering substance, maybe even more than all of the external drugs put together.
Just reading the Sunday paper and lo and behold, a supplement in the paper is a flyer from Gander Mountain. And on the back page is a SALE for a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle .223 with a picture of the rifle. My mouth just dropped open. The exact same picture that is used in all the news stories of the assault type rifle Adam Lanza used. And you can save a $100 if you buy it now! It will only cost you $899.99. Just in case you are wondering how much a killing machine will set you back. You can order it onlinebut have to pick it up in person. Such an inconvienence to us “hunters”. What will I do with myself until I can get it?
it is a mistake to sarcastically refer to gun enthusiasts as people trying to pass off ownership of these weapons as for hunting. They don’t use the excuse of hunting to justify owning such a weapon. Can we stop now and try to solve the problem rather than going to our respected corners and sniping at each other?
Following the logic, we should not allow relatives, neighbors and friends of alcoholics to have cars because they may steal their cars and kill someone while driving. Frankly, we should do away with cars altogether. Even sober people have accidents while driving. After a century of laws, safety measures, and driver training, people still kill people while driving.
What happened in CT is heart wrenching. It stunned our nation not only because of the events were despicable, but also because it is not the norm. While there are absolutely lessons to be learned, guns are less of an issue than mental health here. Guns were just a tool… a quick search of the web, the library, even science class will show that there are many more ways to reign terror on a group of people.
Obviously, you don’t have a teenager living at home with you or a spouse or roommate with a bad driving record or a DUI. YOU don’t have to be the culprit, just living with someone who is young, irresponsible or alcoholic can negatively impact your auto insurance rates. It’s the reason my daughter doesn’t have a permit. I have one car and no steady job. I can’t afford to let her get behind a wheel.
If similar scrutiny was applied to gun owners, I’m betting fewer people would have their weapons at home.
I agree that there are many ways to reign terror on people and that there are e lot of delusional Americans. I’d start with making sure Glenn Beck was bumped into blogtalkradio land but that’s just me. What we don’t need is to continue to build fortresses around our schools. We now know those defenses can be breached and so will the next set of hurdles and the next and the next. Enough is enough. We have to stop coddling the ultra conservative mentality.
I have heard news reports that the guns were owned by the shooters mother, not by the shooter himself. If true, then the screening measures you advanced in the last post would have registered false-negative for this shooter.
So the question arises, just how unsecured were the shooter’s mother’s guns? How might gun owners be required to keep their guns genuinely secured against their live-at-home children, for example?
well I see more recent posts do cover the “mother’s guns” problem so nevermind.
I guess the question here is do gun licenses extend to ‘OTHERS’ using those guns, including ‘kids’ as her friend reports she took her ‘kids’ to shoot at the range. HEAD DESK!
Many parents do take their kids to the range and teach them shooting. Most of those kids don’t run amok with those guns. Then again, maybe many of those parents keep the guns strictly locked up between uses and range-visits. So perhaps gun-security needs to be emphasized and enforced along with other approaches under discussion.
I see a bit downthread that the shooter was apparently high functioning autistic. Perhaps databases of high-functioning autistic and depressionised and otherwise mental-function-compromised youth
should be cross-correllated with databases of whether any other people living in the same dwelling units keep guns on site. If so, those other on-site co-dwelling gun-keepers should be legally required to keep those guns firmly secured against the function-compromised person in question.
yes, if you have crazy people in your house you should have to keep your guns locked up or perhaps not be allowed those high powered weapons in the first place. a small five found pistol for self protection is one thing and everyone should have a right to that. But with a troubled son, Mrs Lanza was reckless having the weapons she did.
She taught him to shoot? Why would she do that?
She was a Republican member of the NRA? Just a guess.
she might have been a democratic member of the NRA.
My heart goes out to the children’s families and to the teachers/staff and their families. Heartbreaking loss…heartbreaking to see the small children who lost their sense of safety and are now suffering/grieving their school mates, teachers and staff.
Allegedly, Anwar Sadat said to Golda Meir, “When we love our children more than we love our lands, then, there will be peace.”
Substitute guns for lands.
It is time to talk about GUN REFORM!
OK, so the guns came from the mom….he is alleged to have been wearing a bullet-proof vest. Where did that come from? Do gun enthusiasts also stock up on vests? What’s up with that?
The comments on that Fischer video are almost all against him, it brings a smile to my face.
Showing my age here, but what is a ‘Fischer video’?
The video of that “preacher man” from the previous post.
This article crashed the servers, it is going viral…consider reading the whole article, there are statistics links, but more importantly she gives a front seat account of having a troubled child in a broken mental health system.
If the dementos who go berserk with automatic rifles every other week (or so it seems) quit shooting their families and neighbors and co-workers, and started shooting the 1% instead, how little time would it take for the 1% to shove the strictest gun laws on the planet Earth down Bubba’s throat?