This link reports 27 people dead, including 18 children:
http://www.pressherald.com/news/Gunman-killed-in-Conn-school...
so sad
edit: just to be clear, I am not a father of one of the children. I was told the shooter was a father of one of the children at the school. Not sure if that is correct.
EDIT: I see my post is being downvoted. I know that it may come across as insensitive to immediately leap to the gun control debate, but frankly I'm more angry than upset by this news. How many times does it have to happen? We have a good 48 hours of emotional outpouring and then everyone forgets it ever happened.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, ...
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Second mass shooting of the week. "Guns don't kill people, ..."? Please.
This shooting is unprecedented in the US as far as the number of children killed, and will mark a point in history. Considering I don't even watch the news or go to any news web sites, if I hadn't heard about it on HN, I probably wouldn't have even known about it to be honest.
Then again, your comment reminded me to flag it...
Where exactly do I make that assumption? You'll notice that I didn't even call for a blanket ban on guns, just that, as a nation, we could actually sit down and have a serious talk about whether people should be able to own weapons like this one for private use:
[EDIT: I regret posting the link to the rifle, there's clearly plenty of debate about it that detracts from the main topic of discussion- and we don't know any details for definite.]
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/12/justice/oregon-mall-shooting/i...
The sad reality is that most people barely heard about it, because "only" two people died.
Everyday on HN there's this drone about the next Instagram or 37 Signals. Or who will produce better email or flamewars regarding the next dominant mobile OS. Time wasted, honestly (Oh yeah, 'I figured out project management, again.')
Where's the debate on HN on how best to handle gun control in the U.S. using technology? Can this community not produce answers for those questions?
Yes, this is of relevance to the vast majority of people in the USA, and it should be of major concern, and that's exactly why it doesn't belong here. Sometimes people need to be reminded of that.
Well, that's my point of view.
An even larger amount just go way off the deep end.
Computers are logical and deal in absolutes. People are the exact opposite. Gun control is an emotional, sometimes irrational issue, and the solutions (I suspect) lie in societal changes. Gun control doesn't need advanced technology, as far as I can see. But I'd be interested to know what ideas people have.
If we really believed in the 2nd Amendment, people would be allowed to own serious weapons of war but not be allowed to own concealable personal firearms.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/14/shooting-reported-at-co...
Then they will find some other means to do their thing. School buses? Malls? Day cares? The list is endless. Not to mention school shootings are far from the only form of mass murder - movie theaters recently too.
Unless you are ready to sign up for a fortified, bunkered America in all facets, "security" is not a solution to this problem. The vulnerable surface area is all public spaces.
I'd be much, much more concerned about the state of mental health care in this country. No one in their right mind goes and shoots children, nor a theater full of movie-goers - these aren't crimes of opportunity, they are indicative of severe mental disturbance.
Inevitably when tragedies like this come up we get into a big fight about gun control and then forget it ever happened. So rarely do we see any real discussion about preventing someone from seeking out the gun in the first place.
There is something to be learned from what the HN crowd's thoughts are on this though, but I'm conflicted.
What does this mean in practice? It can both be an argument for gun control and an argument against. I have no idea where this really comes down. I just know that there are disturbed people in the world, and we need to take a step back and figure out how to prevent them from causing damage in the first place.
So let me ask - given that this is all over every news channel I have access to, and every other tweet in my feed is about it, do you feel that it's appropriate here?
If so then I will reassess my understanding of what you want this site to be. I appreciate that I might be wrong, and I'm willing, even eager, to assimilate more data on this and adjust my views accordingly.
It's your site - I'm pleased to have the opportunity to gain insight.
As for gun control, it's really not possible as you suggest. There are almost 300 million guns in the country. I wouldn't want to be the guy rounding them up.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CONNECTICUT_SCHOOL...
"A law enforcement official in Washington said the attacker was a 20-year-old man with ties to the school and that one of the guns was a .223-caliber rifle."
What a sad sad day.
Even countries with gun control have instances like this (but they're arguably less frequent), and some countries with lots of guns have almost no problems like this at all (Switzerland for instance).
Just trying to imagine dropping a grade school kid off at school to find them dead in the afternoon from an insane thing like this I find that I can't do it, it is just too far from what I can still imagine. And I have a pretty rich imagination...
This world could be so nice, why does it have to be such a crappy place?
We don't know the backstory here, but usually these events are all about someone whose life is spinning out of control for any of a dozen reasons, and either nobody has a clue that anything was wrong or everyone thought that the guy was a timebomb and did nothing.
Here's a semiauto rifle with the same calibre:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Min...
Would that one be more acceptable because it has a wood stock?
Things aren't the problem. People are the problem.
As a nation, we've decided that we don't want to restrict the rights of hundreds of millions of law abiding citizens merely because a few people misuse those rights. This is why politicians have generally decided not to push for more gun control - it's an election losing issue.
Incidentally, I'm confused by the point of that tweet. Here are some other .223 rifles:
http://s845.beta.photobucket.com/user/OldColdWarrior2009/med...
http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/9380/10373165_1.jpg?v=8C...
http://molot.biz/product-e/vepr223-super.jpg
For most calibers, you can find guns with many different form factors that accept bullets of that caliber. So what?
'He will pull out his gun and kill the poor unsuspecting first soul. After that initial shot someone with a concealed weapons permit is going to blow his brains out...'
I truly hope that maybe we work towards a society where mass shootings aren't a monthly occurrence...
And what about that story that in 2011 there have been 85 bullets shot during the whole year by the police, while in US the police has shot one person alone with that many bullets. Surely the easy access to guns, and to automated guns for the police, has made this that much more possible? And that it also created a culture where if someone just pisses you off enough, you're then very likely to just go and shoot them?
Reality is a little bit messier than your fantasies.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57559179/china-school-kn...
Guess we need to control sharp objects as well? It's easy to get angry at dangerous items but in reality it's the people we need to control.
The sad truth is, oppressive regimes exist in the first place because more powerful nations benefit from it. My own country lived for 17 years under an oppressive regime backed by the gun bearing, world's freedom and democracy flagship.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKsWGuLzsWk&list=PLC4FDC3...
Was the Oklahoma-city bombing a wake-up call for "explosives control"? Was the 2009 Chengdu bus-fire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Chengdu_bus_fire) a wake-up call for diesel control? Was the Osaka school massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre) a wake-up call for knife-control? Was the 2012 Toronto mall shooting a wake-up call for gun-control in Canada, which already has extremely stringent gun-laws?
It's all too easy to blame the gun in these situations, but guns are just tools, as are knives, and diesel fuel, and even explosives.
It's not the gun. It never was the gun. It's the person.
How many times are we going to find out someone had a history of mental issues and nothing was done? How many people are reluctant to take proper medication because they view the effects of the medication worse than what it trying to treat. We have a lot of people coming back with PTSD, we need to get better at this.
I remember OK and that was farm products (which some companies still sell at automated machines). IEDs, pipe bombs, propane canisters, Molotov cocktails are all capable of killing a lot people and are easier to build or acquire than guns.
Ruger's 1 Million Gun Challenge http://www.ruger.com/micros/million/about.html
Yes, treating our schools like we treat our prisons is a great paradigm to adopt for our educational system.
Nice stuff happens. It just doesn't make (or sell) the news. But that doesn't mean the world isn't nice.
Schools don't need armed guards. That is kind of ridiculous for every school and a person on a mass murder mission with the element of surprise is very likely to be able to take out a single armed guard before moving on to anybody else. Two or more armed guards is a massive expense especially for small schools. Plus if you put tens (hundreds?) of thousands of armed guards into schools across the country that is likely to bring its own problems too.
Absolutely locked down perimeters have their own problems and still don't help when someone is buzzed in on pretext - "I've got a package to deliver..."
Edit to add: Was very tempted to vote you down for idiocy/wrongness but managed to resist as this is HN and wrongness is not the proper criteria for downvotes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Colorado_YWAM_and_New_Life...
When you have a population size of 300 million you're going to get a lot more outliers (crazy people) than if you have a population of 7 million. Statistically, you will also have crazier people.
1) The way our prison system works. It makes people worse. It makes them better criminals. It removes much of their opportunity to get better (try getting a decent job as a felon). It creates desperation. 2) the way we treat mental illness. By that I mean it is demonized and ignored. Does health insurance even cover mental health exams or treatments? Probably not basic coverage 3) Disparity of wealth. In the town I live in there are people living in absolute poverty and people driving around in lamborghinis and million dollar churches. The cost of that car could feed 50 people for a year.
In thiscase there is no telling what the root cause was yet. I suspect a case of someone just losing it.
Sorry for your loss.
Getting legal access to high-performance rifles similar to military weapons is pretty trivial. Easily concealable weapons like pistols usually are more difficult to get a hold of legally.
The legal environment doesn't always translate into reality. I live in a small upstate NY city where we unfortunately have lots of shootings, mostly between poor high school kids. The local drug gangs make "community guns" available in public places like parks.
I would never want to own one, but for someone like me to own a handgun for target practice, there's an onerous process. I'd be required to get training, get background checked and go through a permit application process. After that's done, it's up to a county court judge's discretion, and in this county, the answer is usually "No."
Ideally.
As a side note, she shouldn't shoot for the head anyway, especially if the bullet is going to go propelling out of the man. That's a great way to have unintended collateral damage.
But mental illness itself has no check point. How can we ensure that people do not have untreated Schizophrenia? Mandatory checks for everyone once a year? I'm really not sure how it could be done.
By the same token, it's harder to kill a dozen people with a knife, if that's all you have to work with.
If you have to use a knife to kill someone, you are going to have to get very close to them to do it. You're going to have to be very aware of what you're doing. With a gun.. not so much.
Little old ladies with guns are typically not present in grade schools, nor would you want them to be because their weapons could be taken away from them and used against others.
Just look at the people on Twitter and even here on HN. You act very differently than you would in real life. I almost wonder if there is something to this and has an effect on some people, which leads to less empathy in real life.
IIRC, the talk after the shooting in Toronto was for more countermeasures against illegal guns being smuggled in from the US.
However, our world isn't any different than it was. There's hope in everything. Crazy, murderous people have always existed and will always exist. Life has always had tragedies, even ones bigger than this. As humans, we're designed to look at the most recent thing and go "oh my god, this is the worst thing ever" in order to deal with problems - it's just how we're designed.
What I'm getting at is that the world will be here tomorrow, and it's not ending any time soon. There's plenty of hope in this world, we just lack the proper context sometimes:
1) Your children are more at risk dying in a car accident or eating crappy food than a school shooting.
2) You're more likely to die of a lightning strike than a terrorist attack.
3) If we couldn't have guns, he would have used a knife.
Be hopeful for the world.
This kind of zero sum game attitude is a problem in my opinion. yes, Guns are used by people and they don't shoot by themselves. But better controls must be put in place to at least try and keep it away from crazy people. I am saying try, make it harder. If you have a toddler in the house and he starts playing with knives, would you blame it on the toddler ? No, I would say that you need to ensure that the toddler does not get his hands on the knife. Is it possible that he could still do it ? Sure. But is it harder if u hide them? Sure.
So consider the EU, with a roughly equivalent population.
Statistically, once you hit a few million people, you've got enough people involved that the proportion of outliers has stabilized pretty well.
(Actually, I prefer Chris Rock's idea for bullet control. Make it too expensive to buy enough for mass shootings.)
Switzerland is interesting in many ways, one of which is the degree to which the government is very close to a true democracy, the fact that they don't waste a ton of money on their defence (which has a lot to do with them being in a geographically special position) and in the way that they have guns but abuse is low.
The fact that this is very different to the situation in the US might hold some clues to what could be done about this.
Everything will be okay.
guns owned in America have mandatory geolocation installed. guns lock if geolocation is disabled or hacked, an alert is autosent to local people and authorities with the last known location, and law enforces speedy investigation of the guns whereabouts and reinstallation of the geolocator. i'd like an app that tells me where the nearest guns are to me and some info about who they belong to, i.e. police, citizen, military etc. if a gun is brought near public spaces, schools, theaters, etc., it should tweet, sms, or otherwise alert local police and anyone who would like to know. i'd like to also set my own alerts, such as alert me if a non-police gun is within a few hundred feet of my location, or my kid's location, etc. the constitution says there is a "right of the people to keep and bear arms," but does not use the word "right" to defend privacy.
For example: think about speed bumps. Sure, we could just blame any drivers who crash into pedestrians in parking lots, but by adding speed bumps, we are reinforcing what people already know --- that speeding through parking lots can be dangerous.
Same thing with seatbelts --- you know that annoying chime that won't stop until you've buckled your seatbelt? Why do we need that? Why not simply blame any drivers who crash? Because it reminds people to do what they already know they should be doing. It reinforces safe behavior. It helps to reduce a burden on society --- the negative effects of fatal car accidents.
So I have a hard time whenever I hear someone say 'the problem isn't guns, it's the people who use them', because I think that's only part of the solution. Should people be allowed to purchase firearms "same-day" at gun shows? Should people be allowed to purchase and own as many guns and as much ammo. as they please? Is there something wrong with at least discussing possible reforms to make it more difficult for people to buy guns?
We haven't put the money into brain research to figure out if there is a test we could do. Checkpoints are the easy part. Look at all the places we test for drugs (employment, school sports). If we figured out the mythical dipstick that tells if your brain chemistry is broken, I would imagine it would come up in a lot places that drug testing does now and probably be part of peoples regular checkups. We just don't have a clue and no amount of dealing with the how will fix the problem, we need to get the courage to look at the why.
A mass of civilians aren't going to be able to stand up to a column of tanks easily, but just a hundred civilians armed with AR-15s are going to be able to stand up even to massed police forces. And if an insurgency is supported by the public at large then life is not going to be easy for the police and the military. This is the way that all guerrilla wars go, and there are many examples of successful insurgencies when they have widespread popular support, even against very well armed government forces.
Uh, we're talking about people who are frequently suicidal and are mentally ill enough to shoot up a kindergarten. I suspect they're not weighing odds in a logical manner, somehow.
So where do we go from here? How do we prevent this from happening again? It seems that there are two schools of thought (generalizing obviously): 1. Disarm everyone, and 2. Allow everyone to carry weapons. Regardless of which side you fall in, neither work perfectly unless they are complete (i.e. all weapons are gone thus criminals don't even have access, or everyone is armed and no one has the upper hand). The problem with both absolutes, is a deranged person will always find a means to carry out their ill will, whether that's a gun/knife/driving a car into a crowd.
The safest computer is encased in concrete, and buried 6 feet underground. Much in the same way, the safest society would have each of us locked in a room, with no interaction. What we have to figure out is this: How much liberty do we all give up, to limit the devastation of the senseless acts of a few?
The Clackamas shooting was a perfect example of an incident that gun control likely would've prevented. It was not premeditated, it was a bad kid on a very bad day that found a gun easily. If he didn't find it, I think it's safe to wager he wouldn't have done it.
My family home schools our children. It coincidentally helps solve this particular problem. (Perhaps it also reduces the likelihood that we spread viruses like the flu).
Making public education more distributed by the use of technology could certainly help with security.
1. Easy availability of guns 2. Lack of a family based society. In my opinion, insanity gets aggravated by loneliness
The situation over here is a tragedy, because all school shootings were commited by sons of fathers who were members of a shooting clubs (and therefore had access to guns). Even though it was not politically possible to ban those clubs and weapons.
But the situation in the USA is even more a tragedy. The USA have shooting after shooting with so many dead kids, and still the political forces are not able to ban guns. Or even slightly control them. Sickening.
There's absolutely no way to prevent people from losing it, so the focus should be on minimizing the damage and finding a good process for dealing with the aftermath.
Politicians don't want to touch it because of votes. There are idiots who vote solely for whoever is against guns, or for them, or against abortion, or for it. That's what really drives every election, very select issues that they abuse to extremes. The media doesn't look for the truth any longer, because why do something new when you can just repeat the same pattern every cycle and milk the shit out of it. When a politician takes a stand, and tries to discuss something real, they are sidelined and derided by their own people. They don't want an honest debate because then they'd have nothing to pretend to argue about.
Guns aren't going anywhere, ever... Any attempt at additional control would only lead to violence. Abortion isn't going anywhere, ever... Not even the supposed anti-abortion politicians have any intent of changing those laws. People need to realize this.
The answer is probably more guns, not less. Any number of armed school personnel could have lessened this nightmare. If you're tasked with protecting children, shouldn't you be prepared for a gun fight?
However, the idiocy of the tweet, designed only to spread FUD, the mindless retweets and ignorant comments, really piss me off. A few people have pointed out that .223 is a calibur, or 'shell size', and one of the mindless retweeters said she thinks shell size is gun specific.
i mean WTF... such epic ignorance...
Nice strawmen. There are obviously options in the middle, namely, increasing traceability of weapons and ammo and shutting down channels that where weapons are allowed to change hands anonymously.
The proliferation of weapons is one thing, but the fact that these tragedies occur and we don't have a way to follow the chain back to the disreputable dealer who sold these armaments - and shut them down - is just non-sensical.
The 2nd amendment fundamentalists who don't even want question how these weapons can get in the wrong hands - often use that same strawman you pose above - which is rediculous - many folks support the 2nd amendment yet find the need for further action to prevent these events from happening.
Pardon me, but I grew up in a country where 'oppressive regime' was not far off at all, and where brutal murders happened in my neighborhood all the time. I knew my Dad didn't own a gun and it scared me to death. So how dare you belittle my beliefs in the need for armed civilians. Disagree with them, by all means, but do you really think I'm arguing children should be murdered en masse?
What you're proposing is, in my opinion, that same thing as arguing that the government should regulate or perhaps even ban internet access because of all the child pornography. Screw civil liberties, think of the children!
edit: Also, I would argue that confiscating laptops at airports will save as many lives as trying to ban guns in the US at this point.
I agree, using technology to understand brain chemistry and further mental health research is a step forward.
The guns used in shootings are usually legally bought. There are no disreputable dealers here.
Regardless of ones position on guns, it's almost universal that not nearly enough who need mental health care get it. And, our national attitude is still one of "Therapy is for crazy people!" - yeah, just like "the ER is a viable form of preventative healthcare" and "you only go to the mechanic when your car is on fire".
I'm a libertarian but in practice I'm not sure of a solution that isn't more government involvement.
There are a certain percentage of people in the world who will kill people for no reason, molest children, order executions and market crystal meth to young mums. This has always been the way, and will always continue to be.
Now I'm not belittling it as a tragedy, but we have to accept that some terrible things just happen and cannot be prevented or deterred. They always have, and they will continue to do so.
Sometimes there is no lesson to be learned, and we have to accept that what we've seen is a manifestation of human nature, in the same way that lightning is a manifestation of nature itself. Neither are predictable, preventable and both will happen forever.
So what if it's the person? How can you find those people and stop them from getting guns? All the people who knew the shooter in the Oregon mall shooting a couple days ago said that he showed no signs of being anything other than a kind and friendly person. He showed only a marginal interest in guns. But that could describe hundreds of millions of Americans. You would never be able to find the ones that might do this and make sure they don't get guns.
http://www.policemag.com/list/tag/friendly-fire.aspx
(Do note that many of the incidents there involve an officer intentionally firing on other officers. But there are accidents there.)
Also, you don't have to be either for banning guns or having no regulations at all. Instead, a compromise of allowing regulated gun ownership would be better.
If you can determine in advance who the "wrong hands" are, I'm sure the TSA would love to speak to you and dump buckets of money over your head.
Support for gun control is extremely shallow, a lot of people are for it if asked a yes/no question but the activist population of people who would change their vote, volunteer time, or donate money is tiny.
Similarly, is taking a crazy person's gun away going to stop them trying to kill people? Probably not, but it'll be much harder for them to kill anyone.
You imply that I am trying to police the site. Policing requires some degree of authority and/or power - I have neither here. I have no control over anything here except my words. I simply quoted the guidelines to remind people of what they say, and added my opinion.
PG has said that the words "most" and "probably" are relevant, and I accept that therefore, in his opinion, this is exceptional. I have no problem with that, and I am interested to see if he chooses to expand on that.
This event is a tragedy, and it is right that it provokes debate and awareness. I can wish that it didn't do so here, but that doesn't seem to be the prevailing point of view, nor the point of view of PG. Fair enough, that's the way it is.
Previous interactions with you leave me with the impression that you really don't like me, but I believe that to be the result of significant misunderstandings. It's most likely too late to change that, but please don't accuse me of being unaffected by events like this.
EDIT: That article you linked to discusses a 3d printed lower receiver. That part of the rifle does not have the barrel and chamber. The part of the ar with the barrel and chamber is called the upper.
> How much liberty do we all give up, to limit the devastation of the senseless acts of a few?
Liberty? What about the liberty not to get randomly shot down and you or your loved ones' life taken away from you and the people who know you? Isn't the gift of life the supreme liberty taking precedence over the need of some to worship guns?
The ability to take away someone right and liberty to live at a moment's notice borders on a superpower and should be handed out very sparingly to those who absolutely need it to do their job.
You can't ensure that every single person that has a mental disability gets treatment, but as a society we do not support easy access to mental health treatment. Mental health services, like physical health services, are pay to play and that provides a huge barrier for people with mental disability, esp. since some amount of those people will have a very hard time affording such treatment and/or medication. Consider also that folks with mental disability tend to have less robust support networks of family of friends and that mental health care has stigma attached to it for most of the US population.
The best option is to reduce the difficult of getting mental health care treatment as much as possible: universal health care, public awareness campaigns to fight against social stigma, and more robust social services.
It's not the gun.
Guns are tools, they aren't the problem. We need to be better at being able to detect these individuals who are likely to go on these rampages. But more than that we need to have a society that is better able to defend itself. If even 1 in 20 or fewer teachers at a school were people who were responsible and trained and carried guns for self-defense then these sorts of attacks would be far less common. Because the attacks would be ended sooner by armed citizens acting in defense. And because then schools and other places would no longer be defenseless. The reason why these crazy people go to schools to commit mayhem is because they know that they aren't going to be stopped. They know that it's just going to be unarmed teachers and defenseless children. If that stopped being the case, if there started to be more of a risk to the shooter in these situations then maybe these sorts of shootings would be less common.
We've spent the last half century in the developed world progressively making ourselves more and more defenseless and less and less empowered, on the premise that doing so also disempowers the bad guys. The rage killers, the school shooters, the terrorists, etc. But the exact opposite has come to pass. We've disempowered the individual and made ourselves defenseless and even more vulnerable to these monsters.
No, not everyone should own a gun, or be allowed to own a gun. But if we started to cultivate more of a culture of self-reliance and personal responsibility, and if we started increasingly empowering individuals to take care of their own self-defense by becoming more aware, more trained, more prepared, and to carry weapons if they so choose then maybe we'll actually end up with a safer society.
I've been shooting guns since I was 10 years old, and I've been carrying a pocket knife since middle school. I take these things vary seriously. I maintain my certifications and training in first-aid and CPR. I have well stocked first aid kits in my home, car, and backpack (when I ride the bus or bike), including things like hemostatic compounds. I also have a concealed carry permit (which means that my info and fingerprints are on file with local law enforcement) and own firearms. If you make a law which limits my capability to defend myself or others then you are not making society more safe. And almost any gun-control law is going to preferentially disempower good people like myself while having much less impact on the bad guys who don't care about living within the law.
Edit: the concentration on guns as an item which "enables violence" is no more sensible than the TSA's concentration on liquids or nail clippers. It's just another form of security theater.
Modern society seems to be good at creating situations where people feel powerless or like lashing out. The offender obviously makes an awful choice, but maybe we should think about how to make things so that society isn't so brutal?
I say that gun control is the "easy" answer because it is a response to a specific event. That doesn't mean that I think that gun control is "bad". I'm just saying that the underlying issue that leads people to do awful things has other negative (but not as horrific) effects too.
As an unrelated illustration, the 14 year old inner city kid walking around with a gun or knife feels miserable and powerless. The weapon makes him feel empowered, but in a negative way -- if he grows up that way, that's going to leave him vulnerable to substance abuse and that mindset will be passed on to his kids and his social circle too.
What about security technology? Maybe if the school had smaller, less expensive and less obtrusive metal detectors? Improved inter classroom comm systems for coordinating lockdowns? Cheap, integrated access systems ensuring only qualified personnel and students access the campus?
On the margin, all these could improve the situation without the need for lofty dreams of a societal paradigm shift or pouring hours into a solution that is already exhibiting diminishing marginal returns.
Any number of armed school personnel could have made this situation WORSE by firing into a wild crowd in an attempt to attack the shooter, whom they might not even identify correctly in the first place.
Keep in mind that school personnel are NOT tasked with protecting children from violent assault threats. They are tasked with education and a kind of child care for 7-8 hours a day. School systems already have tremendous difficult providing support for larger scale issues that fall outside of those realms, and we shouldn't expect that arming school staff would make for anything other than a climate in which those weapons will be used against students. We already have enough problems with making school systems more like prisons, arming the staff is not a solution to fixing that.
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html we have:
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
That fits this story.
Though that seems about as likely as "1.Disarm everyone".
It seems to me that there are two problems here. The first is that we suck at finding/handling the mentally ill. These mass shootings are rare, but the connection between crime and mental illness in this country is anything but.
The second issue is of course that we do a piss-poor job of keeping guns away from the people they need to be kept away from.
Ideally both issues should be tackled.
A few days ago someone posted a web site called http://www.banthecar.com where they laid out detailed arguments for banning all cars, because of all the problems they cause, including accidental deaths. Obviously banning cars is not reasonable or realistic.
We have a process for who is and is not allowed to drive a car, and we are fairly comfortable with it, even though it still fails to prevent thousands of deaths. The process of firearm ownership could use some adjustments, but ultimately we cannot prevent all deaths. The best we can do is prevent those who are obviously unsuitable(1) from owning firearms, and ensuring we have a system to remove the rights of those who abuse them.
(1) this is very dangerous due to the history of gun control being used to enable racism and genocide. The criteria must be objective, not subjective.
Despite what pg says, this article does not belong on Hacker News. This has absolutely no relation to hacking in general. There are a multitude of sites that will provide content like this article. There are precious few sites limited in scope to what Hacker News should be about.
[1] Canada/the US, at least; I'm not familiar enough with other cultures.
I think these are actually two extreme positions to which almost nobody seriously subscribes.
I don't believe the shooters are mentally ill. There is simply sad, evil people in the world that think that shooting a lot of people will get them some attention/fame/recognition. In a society like the current U.S. society where being unknown and alone is worse, in the mind of some people, than being known as a serial killer this kind of thing is bound to happen.
Due to the nature of your society, you will never ban firearms. They will always be available and those wanting to kill can always find another ways.
In mu humble opinion, your problem lies in the fact that some very weird and sad people there find that serial killing is a glamorous life/ending. The worship or desire of a thug life or being known/recognized as a criminal by the media and society drives these wackos towards this behavior.
When consumerism is king and money/oportunity/perspective is low, when not being the most popular thing ever is worse than dying, when parents don't impose limits to their kids and just keep pumping meds into them, this disaster will keep happening.
edit: In case it wasn't clear, I don't actually believe the South African government was doing what it claimed - but believe when I tell you we had no idea just how bad the government was until after it was all over. My point was that safeguards aren't always what you think they are, and they they won't always be there. You can't decide to give citizens rights only when the government decides they need them.
this is such a bad argument. of course its true that the person is responsible, but that's not an argument against gun control.
we can't just lock up everyone that could possibly go on a shooting spree, but we sure can make it harder for a person to go on shooting sprees. make it harder for people to get guns!
> Guns exist, that can't be stopped any more than preventing alcohol from existing
great, but if access to guns was restricted, it would be harder for crazy people from going on shooting sprees.
nobody thinks that all access to guns can be eliminated, but its pretty reasonable to say that if it were hard to get guns, fewer shooting sprees would happen.
> guns are just tools, as are knives, and diesel fuel, and even explosives
this comparison is so clearly bad:
the tradeoffs for society are obvious in each of these cases. knives are pretty dangerous, but they don't really enable someone to rampage through an elementary school to kill 27 people. diesel fuel is pretty dangerous, but it's also really useful to society. i'm pretty sure we already have controls on who has access to explosives.
I was surprised(not shocked) to learn of the contest for one manufacturer to sell over a million guns in one year with the goal of increasing funding for lobbyists.
1.2 million guns is a lot of weapons to sell in a year.
The best we can really do is tighten all of the bolts that we can see, and hope the leak slows down to an acceptable level. Improve gun ownership laws, improve our handling of the mentally ill, assist those experiencing crippling poverty, etc. Attack all the angles reasonably to get crime down to a reasonable level.
(And an acceptable level cannot be "no incidents". To accomplish that would require a police state. We must accept that once in a while horrific things will happen, and there was nothing that could reasonably be done to prevent it. i.e., shit happens.)
http://www.murderuk.com/mass_murderers.html
Other attacks have occurred at schools without guns including this one with a machete that resulted in injuries but no deaths: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/8/news....
I would suggest that perhaps there is also a societal issue in the US compared to Britain causing these things (in addition to the affect of the larger population) but the most important aspect may be the greater availability of firearms that gives opportunity to people that may not carry out the act if they need time and preparation AND it greatly increases the lethality of attacks that do take place.
Note this excludes terrorism where numerous incidents have had a bigger death toll but those planned coordinated attacks and I think a different category from the sort of incident today.
Ultimately it's impossible to be knowledgeable of the bad intentions of every single warped individual on the planet. And some of those folks will have the capability of harming people, perhaps many people. Look at 9/11 as an example of how a handful of well trained and highly motivated individuals armed with only box cutters were able to take control of jumbo jets and ram them into buildings and kill thousands. That's an extreme example but it's worth remembering, because there are many, many examples of similar situations. Look at the unabomber, for example. A brilliant loner who was able to fashion bombs from household materials in a shack in the middle of nowhere and kill several people. Or look at all of the other bombers throughout history. You can't legislate away the ability to build bombs, they're already illegal, but anyone with enough knowledge and a little money can make them and kill people. The same goes for arson, which kills hundreds of people every year.
In my view the solution is not to try to disempower the entire populace by taking away guns and hoping that this disempowers the bad guys enough to make it that much harder for them to kill. I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others. I think it's also worth concentrating on social and cultural changes which make our society more accepting and hopefully make the creation of these violent individuals less common, but that's a much harder problem to tackle.
I ask you: if this trend continues, where do you think it leads?
Our guns are our final check against the formation of a potentially oppressive regime; they are our assurance that we will never become helpless, that we will always have the capability to fight if fighting ever becomes necessary. Though it is certainly a great tragedy that these children have died today, how much greater were the tragedies throughout human history that resulted from the excessive centralization of power and a populace that was unable to fight against it? You think that human nature has changed in the last half century; you think that something like that cannot happen again, that it won't happen here? People have not changed; sociopaths still seek power, and when they find it, if the masses have no way of fighting back, they will find themselves dealing with problems many orders of magnitude more horrific than the occasional school shooting. I am familiar with all of the arguments for disarming the people of the United States, and they are all fundamentally flawed, because nothing is worse than being at the mercy of tyrants.
Even so, this represents, very optimistically, a dozen or two hours of interaction with others a week. It cannot hold a candle to the interaction children going to schools experience.
It's shocking but it's not surprising, because it's almost a predictable event in the US today. Hardly a year goes by in the US without a shooting spree, at schools and otherwise.
But when it comes down to it, if a crazy person can easily get a hold of a gun, then there will be more shootings. There are two requirements for shooting sprees, 1. Crazy person, 2. Easy access of guns. Try to limit both.
The problem is that he had access to guns when he was mentally ill. Thats the problem. You cannot isolate the two.
Actually, I see 9/11 as an example of TLAs refusing to share information when doing that could have easily stopped the hijackers long before they could do anything. I also see it as something the US brought upon itself with its dependence on oil and constant meddling in the Middle East. So I don't think it's a very good analogy for mass shootings by (usually insane, or at least disturbed) white US citizens.
And just because you can't stop all crime doesn't mean you shouldn't stop any crime. There are simple steps that can be taken. For example, the sales of guns at gun shows needs to be stopped immediately. Ex-felons should not be able to get guns. There are a lot of holes in gun control law that could be easily closed if it weren't for people like you making it political suicide for any politician to even suggest that we need stricter gun control laws.
> I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others.
How would you propose to "empower" elementary school children? How about people in a mall or movie theater were the possession of firearms is not allowed?
Then we just have an order of magnitude more of that kind of person than Western Europe. If it's not the guns, then Americans are just worse people, statistically speaking, than our more civilized neighbors around the world.
Of course you want to disarm everyone!
That is the only sensible option! There is absolutely no need why anyone, save members of the executive branch enforcing the government's monopoly on violence, would ever need to carry a firearm.
"Self defense" and "liberty" are totally crazy arguments, that are only ever brought up in America and are based purely on historical reasons.
_At least _ two seriously wounded.
"Guns don't kill people..."
I'm a US citizen, and generally consider myself liberal and progressive. I favor much stricter gun control laws. But I'm not sure I do favor complete disarmament of the citizenship. I do believe that the knowledge—not the use—of citizen's arms does provide a reminder to the government in times of crisis.
But am I simply experiencing large cultural bias? Is there any research on this? Any evidence I can look to? I'm very curious.
A classic anti-technology strawman. It is like saying "Computers only use numbers, you can't do graphics or text with them".
At the very lowest level computers are entirely logical, but you can program one to deal with uncertainties and probabilities.
In fact that argument isn't quite relevant, unless you are arguing against the computers making the policy decisions, which I think was never under consideration.
Computers/technology can certainly be a strong tool to assist gun control.
One idea completely off the top of my head would be to data-mine as much info as possible about past shooting/shooters and then use this to help guide granting (or not) of gun licenses. With Bayesian this-and-that, the computer could give a number "estimated 0.000001% chance of serial killing" and refer the application to the appropriate person (e.g. a detailed analysis for people "at risk" (large probability), or a quicker check for "safer" people).
But you are right, no reason to resort to this.
Reference? (Genuine question.)
Look at example 2.5 here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Structure
By reducing the argument to one extreme vs. another extreme, these are strawmen arguments... very few support either extreme, so the commenter can then knock down the arguments and look reasonable saying pretty much anything.
There are alternative ideas like "Gross National Happiness" that attempt to measure what could arguably be called the end, as opposed the means (economic). This is generally presented as an alternative goal, to raise the "GNH" of a country. And it's certainly a valid one.
But what if, even more importantly, it's not the gross "national happiness", but rather its distribution?
The perpetrator in this horrible tragedy was clearly horribly unhappy, and almost certainly with severe mental problems. But this isn't a private concern, because in cases like this it becomes a national problem.
When are we going to stop concentrating so much on economic progress and GDP, and start considering how our society and institutions provide for people at the bottom rung of the "happiness" ladder? When are we going to move mental health from a "side issue" about "sick people" that "doesn't concern me", to a central national priority?
There's so much work to be done, and it's barely even a blip in the conversation.
I call BS on this. In such a situation there's a lot of confusion and panic about what is exactly happening. It's not like everyone knows how many shooters there are and how they look like. Someone pulling out a gun can easily mistaken to be an attacher and could be attacked himself by someone else trying to be good samaritan while himself being mistook for an attacker by the original good samaritan resulting in chaos. This is not like the movies where everyone knows who the bad and good guys are.
What parallel absurdity?
A number's meaning is entirely arbitrary and dependent on the context: a bit-string that is a pattern for a firearm in program A might be a perfectly valid music file in program B.
Firearm is a piece of metal that had to be precision shaped to throw small pellets of metal at very high speeds.
(I'll agree that 3D printing muddies the waters though.)
So everyone who wants a gun will do whatever they need to get it? No one who wants a gun will be deterred by any possible prevention measures?
Measures such as background checks, safety class requirements, mental health checks, restrictions on high-capacity or high-throughput weapons, higher taxes, manufacturer and supply chain oversight, spying on domestic traffickers, or closing the gun show loophole?
The problem is how we treat mental illness. It's so stigmatized that people feel extreme shame and a sense that they just have to want to be better.
Every single person should be able to walk into a doctor's office, be screened and treated for their illness without the stigma that we attach to it. "Why should I have to pay for it?" This is one, among many, of the reasons. Will it eliminate these incidents? Nope but the result will still be a better society.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922380
PG himself has chimed in to point out the words "most" and "probably".
I'm with you, but we seem notto be in accord with the site owner.
Drain your frustrations with those who destroy our future, not those who will build it.
But yes, I agree that guns are only a tool, and that the underlying cause is psychological and/or cultural. No matter what we do with guns, it won't prevent future incidences; I just don't see how people can view a situation like this and think "oh, if the teachers had guns, everything would be all right."
But looking through the thread, most people aren't posting information. They are debating policy at a time when emotions are (validly) hot. There are lots of places on the Internet where one can debate political policy (and I love doing so), so it seems weird for it to be here.
> I definitely was insinuating that, along with lots of other things. So everyone who wants a gun will do whatever they need to get it? Measures such as background checks, safety class requirements, mental health checks, restrictions on high-capacity or high-throughput weapons, higher taxes, manufacturer and supply chain oversight, spying on domestic traffickers, or closing the gun show loophole?
You can help control/prevent, yes, but I'm strongly in the camp that if there's a will, there's a way.
(EDIT: listening to CNN in the background, Dr. Drew Pinsky said something along the lines of what we have here.)
The gun lobby has money, which is available from bodies like gun manufacturers. There is no equivalent on the other side- there are no anti-gun manufacturers to give money.
Would people be coerced? Would it be voluntary? If voluntary, I suspect only a fraction of those who had serious issues would seek help. On the other hand, there would be serious issues with legally compelling people to be treated involuntarily, if they have not violated nay other major laws which would make their treatment compulsory.
For a shooting, yes. But the 1995 Oklahoma bombing included 19 young children among the 168 killed, including all 17 children in a daycare in the building.
This level of death is, sadly, not unprecedented. And I guarantee you that in 20 years it will be even less remembered by the general public than Timothy McVeigh is.
You are arguing against something few, if any, people believe. Americans think they should be allowed to own guns despite a need to have guns.
If that is reasonable or not is frankly irrelevant. Politics and legal realities make the elimination of all guns impossible. You are not being realistic if that is what you propose.
I can only speak for my family, but we spend lots of time with other families and children. Church, Boy Scouts, Soccer, etc.
Ask yourself, have you ever been in public and recognized a home schooler because of the way they act?
The inverse is true too, how many socially awkward people do you remember from your public schooling? I sure remember a lot.
From my personal experience, I don't see a relationship between home/public schooling and social relationships.
Your argument is that the two absolutes are not the only options, which is pointing out a false dichotomy. Of course, even that's not an appropriate response, since JoeCortopassi had already pointed out the potential problems (like excessive loss of personal liberty) with absolutes.
The simple fact is that Americans are exceptional, so anything that happens outside the US is irrelevant.
As far as arming teachers, it's not a perfect solution, nor is it going to "make everything alright". When you have people like this who end up being so bent on destruction and violence things are not going to be alright, it's a matter of degrees. However, there have been several incidents of teachers and civilians putting a stop to mass shootings, likely saving many lives. These often don't get as much news coverage precisely because the body count is lower and thus the events are less newsworthy. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_High_School_shooting
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/28/guns-ownership-aroun...
"In 2007, the U.S. had the highest gun ownership rate in the world - an average of 88 per 100 people. But the U.S. does not have the worst firearm murder rate - that prize belongs to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. In fact, the U.S. is well down the list with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people. Below is a list of countries with available firearm data from 2007 starting with countries where firearms are most common."
Note that I am not advocating getting rid of all guns. But we need to have an honest discussion about them, and that starts with being truthful with ourselves about their very nature.
People are understandably upset about what happened and emotions are getting the best of people. I guess today isn't a good day for rationale debate.
From that, a huge majority supports some new restrictions on gun ownership (background checks, no guns for felons or the mentally ill, require gun registration) but almost nobody supports "no guns, period".
(source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/n...).
However, I'm only willing to take those as anecdotal evidence for promoting less gun control: they are all written by people and groups who are heavily invested against gun control, i.e. a very high risk of motivated thinking, research and writing.
(Sure, one might point at all the references and evidence they provide, but what are they not saying? What about a discussion of the countries around the world with gun control that has (as far as I can see) no racist or genocidal purpose (e.g. most of modern Europe, Australia, New Zealand)?)
Overwhelmingly guns are owned and used by peaceful, law-abiding civilians. That they can be misused does not mean we should punish those who have done no wrong.
And the idea that we can live in a simple world where we can divorce ourselves from violence, death, responsibility, and from tools of lethal force is simply naive. Pacifism is a luxury of those who have never experienced the threat of violence. In the real world there are violent men with bad intentions and being able to forestall such men by using lethal force can save lives, your own life and the lives of others. You can either turn away from that truth or foist it off on the responsibility of others or you can face it directly. But you can't make it simply go away.
Do all of that, and anyone who tries to buy a gun without a license can safely be assumed to be up to no good. You don't even need to license firearms themselves, which is unpopular.. just the owner themselves.
Most of these nutters are buying their guns legally. Hell, I bet a lot of them buy their guns not even fully realizing what they will eventually do with them.
Illegal sale/ownership of guns is just an issue for the police to handle. I don't think there is much progress to be made on that front.
Do they get to plead insanity in court? Should they be sent to mental hospitals or prisons?
I'm not being facetious, I'm asking seriously, what definition of sanity are we running on here?
I don't care if they are placed in prisons or mental hospitals, so long as they are not set free. People who are interested in revenge will likely prefer they be sent to prisons, and those interested in helping the individual will likely prefer they be sent to mental hospitals. I don't care, so long as there is a lock on the door.
I live in a country(Lebanon) that went through a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Guns are a fact of life here, they are very easy to get and lots of people have them. And yet nobody has ever gone into a school and shot children and parents that I know of.
We've had bombings, assassinations, terrorism, and even a war now and then. If it's violent, we've had it. But not this. Are Lebanese people better people? Hell no. But our societies tend to be more closely knit and more traditional. That has many many drawbacks but it also means that people very rarely get to such extremes in terms of mental well-being(to the point where they could do something like this) without being noticed.
I'm not saying traditional societies are the answer, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying, it's not just a choice between "bad people" or "too many guns". Reality is much more nuanced than that.
The point is the efficiency. The magnification of force is so great with guns compared to other weapons as to render the comparison moot. If I had a weapon that could instantly vaporize a person of choice with the push of a button, this tool would rightly be condemned far and wide. Yet the same tool could be used in a purely defensive manner. We all subconsciously understand the importance of considering the magnitude of force magnification.
I completely agree with your second paragraph. I am far from a pacifist. The point is that these conversations seriously lack nuance, each side takes points to the absolute extreme as a tactic to validate their side. There is much nuance in the middle that needs to be considered. Acknowledging the nature of guns is a starting point.
Knives are simply much slower and less efficient for the task, especially against forewarned opponents (e.g. most of the potential victims in many mass-killing situations, and potential defenders), and it's vastly more likely the attacker will be stopped quickly even if he manages to kill a few people.
The US would still be under British rule if it weren't for the support of the French government during the American Revolution. It was not the muskets of American farmers which won that war (though they helped); it was a fleet of French ships, 6,000 French soldiers, a steady supply of French gunpowder and muskets, and approximately $13B (in today's dollars) of direct aid from the French--more if you count French defense spending.
If the goal is to fight untimely death, we should take a hard look at the cold numbers. One will find for instance that smoking scenes in films kill far more people than those shootings. [1]
No, it should not happen ever again. However, we should not forget about the other priorities.
[1]: Regular exposure to smoking scenes makes children and teenagers far more likely to smoke later on. Smoking makes you far more likely to have cancer and such. And having cancer most likely shorten your lifespan. Despite the 3 layers of indirection, the numbers are so massive that a single smoking scene in a blockbuster is probably more lethal than a fully loaded gun.
I'm just not buying it. Even with their massively over-inflated budget and their guilt-elimination drones there is no way the DoD could maintain an armed occupation of America. They are having a hell of a time doing it in a country less than one-tenth the size with less than one-tenth the people, filled with people who have been thoroughly dehumanized by popular media, people with far fewer connections to the outside world, and people for whom the soldiers have no tribal connections.
Thinking they would do better occupying America than Afghanistan is a really strange form of patriotic hubris.
(Lest you get the wrong impression, I support gun control and think that worrying about the possibility of Americans having to fight the American army is incredibly silly.)
I'd love to see some innovative thinking from HN, but this thread is mostly the same pro anti gun ravings; confusion about mental health and mental health treatment; etc.
It's intensely interesting, but mostly shallowly so.
We need to develop a cure, and when we do, days like this will be far less common.
Serial killers in general are perfectly aware of what they are doing, they just don't care about the judgement imposed by society on such actions and at the same time the personal payoff is too great to ignore.
What we should be concerned with is how we as a society handle mental health as a medical condition, not as a legal defense. I am talking about early detection, treatment, and if necessary preemptive detainment, not about how we handle the people we who have already gone Rambo.
This is literally the most callous justification for nuking someone I have ever seen.
"It's not that bad guys. It's habitable now, 70 years later! If you didn't know better you would swear 80,000 didn't get instantly incinerated in nuclear fire, with over 125,000 more who died in slow agony over a few weeks of burns and radiation poisoning!"
I know Stalin said that a million deaths is just a statistic - but you weren't supposed to take Stalin to heart. Just sayin'.
From what I've heard, it doesn't seem like the shooter in this instance had things planned.
I don't know though, lots of questions.
