Latest school shooting in the USA

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Bribie G

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Following the breaking news of the latest episode of America's famous sport, it strikes me that not once has the word "terrorist" been used by the authorities or news media.

If the shooter / gunman (as he gets referred to) turned out to be named something like Hussein al Jihadi Islamiya and accompanied his shooting spree with cries of "Allah ha Akhbar" would this conceivably change the terminology currently being served up to us?

One could be forgiven for concluding that to be called a terrorist one needs to subscribe to Islam. Hey Bruce Willis would surely disagree with that.

die hard villain.jpg
 
Over here we would just call them a C*nt.

What a **** move. No right to go shooting random people, not proving a point other than how useless you are as a human being.
Sucks that he is dead, easy way out and doesn't have to face the real music.

RIP to the victims, condolences to the families.

D80
 
Listening to Obama talk about this morning

He is right on the money. He has had a gut full of it and the pro gun lobby

A very good straight to the point speech

He put the ball firmly at the feet of the pro gun lobby and I dont think they are going to be able to justify it as much as they used to
 
That's 294 mass shootings (four or more people killed or injured) in the USA this year. There's not even been 294 days this year.
 
welly2 said:
That's 294 mass shootings (four or more people killed or injured) in the USA this year. There's not even been 294 days this year.
Click to expand...
There is something seriously wrong with that amount of shooting.

How can anyone even try to justify it
 
I bet that the majority of the parents, teachers and other citizens who are wailing about this and "pulling together as a shocked community" have their own private (no doubt legitimately licenced) arsenal at home - Walmart shotgun and revolver or two or three.
 
As I'm moving up to the Mountains I'd considered buying a rifle for rustlin' up some goat or roo meat for the curry freezer, so I had a look at what was required. The necessity to join a proper club, attend training course, pass tests, cooling off periods etc etc - man that's a big process before I'm even allowed to set foot in a gun shop.

I believe (Forum members of American origin might be able to fill me in on this) that you can just walk into a walmart and come out looking like Arnie on a mission... although there might be some token cooling off period at the food court while you are waiting, whatever.

Clearly troubled teens have no problem getting their hands on assault rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, tactical nukes whatever.
 
I already heard somewhere this morning that "this only happened because the campus had unarmed security... if security had been carrying guns, or if all the students were armed...."

**** me sideways (pardon the French), there are some messed up heads over there.
 
Historically the difference between the USA and Australia is that while we built the nation on the idea of mateship and cooperation (read Henry Lawson) the USA was built more on rugged individualism and any moves towards European or Australian style civil society has always been fiercely resisted in the USA.

Just wait for the inevitable comments from the gun lobby over there labelling any moves to restrict them as "fucken red commie traitors".
 
294! Holy crap. I knew it was bad but that is mental.

Just waiting now for the spin tsunami.
 
Yes Airgead, in almost every state you can just walk in and buy however many guns and as much ammunition as you want. It's called freedom, according to some people.
 
It's hard to understand the gun culture. One of my best mates has lived in Texas for the last 8 years and is still amazed by it. When looking to rent a house when first there before buying he was suprised that all the houses he looked at had secret gun rooms, filled with all sorts of weapons. The house he eventually rented had one and the owner offered to leave the weapons there and couldn't understand why my mate wanted them gone. The owner also left some storage boxes in the garage, mate found his 4 year old daughter with a loaded revolver she found in one of the boxes.
Eventually bought his own place in very affluent area. When it was apparent Obama was getting in for a second term, his seemingly intelligent next door neighbour got a bobcat in and dug up his backyard and buried 20,000 rounds of ammo in case Obama changed the gun laws. He did say that there is no road rage in Texas though.
Locally we have our own gun nut in the senate, David Leyenhjolm, who after the Lindt cafe seige said it wouldn't have happened if Aussies were allowed to carry concealed weapons. What a ********. He has also done a deal with the government to allow the Turkish Adler leverarm shotgun into the country, the importer being Bob Katters son in law. Hopefully with the leadership change it's revoked or at least the classification changed so it's hard to get one.
 
Mardoo said:
Yes Airgead, in almost every state you can just walk in and buy however many guns and as much ammunition as you want. It's called freedom, according to some people.
Click to expand...
Ahhh... freedoms.

This is going to get a bit philosophical for a Friday.... but if you look at Isaiah Berlin;s concept of the two freedoms, Thre are two kinds if freedom - the freedom to - I have the right to... bear arms, have absolute freedom of speech and so on, and freedom from - I have the right to walk down the street without being shot at/abused/vilified/whatever. So positive freedoms are individual in nature while negative freedoms are general societal in nature.

Negative freedoms often set limits on positive freedoms. We limit individual freedom for better collective freedom as a society. The big problem in the US is that their concept of freedom is almost entirely positive. they reject any limits in individual freedoms so they have this hyper individualist, every man for himself concept of what freedom is, rather than the more balanced view that the erst of the world has.Well the rest of the world outside David Leyenhjolm's head anyway.

So in the US the response to danger is not a collective response - better policing etc but an individual one - I need a gun to protect myself.

If the US wants to go down that path, so be it... but I really wish the idiots trying to push American style freedom on us would just shut the **** up.

I could trace all this right back to the ancient Greek city states and the early concept of citizenship (with both rights and responsibilities... guess which of those we have forgotten) but I'll get off my soapbox now....
 
There are non-Islamic terrortists in the US, for example, the Oklahoma City bombers.

The gun lobby's argument after incidents like this one is that armed citizens would have cut down the shooter. More guns are the answer, they say.

But there many problems with re-creating the wild west. For one, I'm trying to imagine myself teaching a class of armed students: "I have your tests ready to hand back. Half of you failed."

Having said that, there are neighbourhoods where one does not want to be the one of the few citizens who are not armed. I never lived in one in the U.S., but I'm fairly sure the goal of the Natioal Rifle association is to convince the whole country that they do. It's a very powegrful lobby.
 
Fools and communists all. There is no connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it.
 
Bottom line is mass shootings account for a drop in the bucket in relation to actual firearms homicide in the US. About eleven thousand per year. By far and away the most deaths are the result of suicide, almost twenty two thousand. Why the outrage now? People are dying via firearms at the rate of give or take ninety two people per day.
Obama, is full of ****. Honestly, he can sign off and mobilize the most powerful army on the planet to fight on multiple fronts on foreign shores, yet cant ban automatic weapons in his own country?
Is that what the office of president is worth?

My guess is this will last a few news cycles. There will be the typical hue and cry from the usual suspects, the retort or 'guns dont kill people', then it will be back to business as usual.

This seventeenth century second amendment right to form militias and bear arms is simply ******* ******** and has about as much relevance in modern society as first century religion.
Just so long as 'rights' aren't infringed upon, thats all that counts.
 
A story circulating on US gun sites and the rightwing blgosphere is that gun-related crimes went up in Australia following Port Arthur and the buyback. They arrive at that conclusion by cherrypicking years and by not adjusting for population growth. To the contrary, the trend in per capita crimes was down.

The worst tragedy in the US is not school shootings, but accidental shootings. The number is not known with any precision, because the gun lobby got Congress to force the CDC to stop collecting the statistics, but the annual toll is in the thousands.

Some pro-gun people like to troll stories of deaths cause by cars, saying ban them, ha ha, as if one has anything to do with the other.

Or they go on about knives, as if the reach and killing potential of an AK-47 does not exceed that of a cleaver.
 
Interesting article on the 2nd:

Many are startled to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t rule that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun until 2008, when District of Columbia v. Heller struck down the capital’s law effectively banning handguns in the home. In fact, every other time the court had ruled previously, it had ruled otherwise. Why such a head-snapping turnaround? Don’t look for answers in dusty law books or the arcane reaches of theory.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-second-amendment-106856#ixzz3nMvl9eT6
 
It's insane how many mass shootings happen over there and even more insane is the standard response. That if more people were allowed to carry guns to protect themselves, these massacres would be less likely to occur.

That being said, I reckon if I lived over there, I would own a gun. To protect myself............. :blink:
 
Don't try and apply logic to gun laws and gun culture in the US.. the two seem to be mutually exclusive
 

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