Alright,if you live in America,I guarantee you have heard of what happened on Friday in Newtown, Connecticut.
This post is just for general discussion and thoughts and such.

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I think Obama was full of shit during his speech Sunday night but he did make a good point about how people tend to see shootings as the norm now.
Plus he interrupted my football game...

Oh and they have supposedly only had one murder in the past 10 years.
Welcome to America 2012, Newtown!

I have avoided most of the media. I don't want to deal with "Right to bear arms vs Ban all guns" arguement that will come, neither do I want to deal with the jackoffs who will try and connect this to 12/21/12.

I'm with Aurone on this--I've already had more than enough of this whole conversation and have deliberately avoided most discussion on it, aside from reading a few articles here and there. Not sure what it has to do with this coming friday either.

I don't blame you for wanting to avoid media exposure; the reporting on this was complete garbage and the facts were all jumbled up. The shooter was Ryan, no, it was Adam, he killed his father in his apartment, no, it was his brother, no, it was his mother, no, his mother was a teacher at that school and he killed her there, or no she died in her apartment, he used an assault rifle, no, he used handguns, he had argued with teachers the day before, no he didn't and it was a random school with no connection to him, yadda yadda yadda.

Fact checking? What's that lol

And let's needlessly interrogate freshly traumatized children, let's make wild speculations, let's turn this into another reprise of an oft-repeated increasingly grating national debate!!

*lies down*

Just sickening how somebody could do that. I have a three year old daughter and when i heard what had happened at work i couldnt wait to get home and hug her. To think i could lose her to some psycho id probably go nuts too.

Oh yeah, that... fucking hell Anyone who participated in this, directly or indirectly (ordering reports or whatever), needs to be fired. Jesus....

I suppose they're analyzing his music collection and digital library right as we speak...

I don't really have much else to say about this tragedy. Yeah, it was horrible, and my condolences to the families, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really affect me...

^ That's another thing I'm not looking forward too, there's a lot of scape goats that are easy targets when something like this happens, violent video games, horror films, and of couse, Metal. At some point, the fingers will start to point.

This is completely terrible! Since I have to do mandatory community service from my school and work in the kindergarten, to think anything could happen to any of them would be completely awful.

Honestly, I would just like to know what was going on in that guy's head, why did he have to go the elementary school? From what I heard, he killed his mom when she was at his house and later set out to get the kids. There isn't another word for it than true evil. Also, from one of the victims there was a girl who was the mayor's daughter in one of the cities in Puerto Rico (from the town of Maunabo), so it's been all over the news here as well.

Have to feel horrible for the kids who survived it as well, things like that can lead to bad vibes in a kid that young (or for anyone, really).

The whole thing is very sad and I fear that the frightened state of the nation will allow legislation to pass during a time when no one is thinking clearly about it out of emotion.

Tis a sad sad time for those of us in the States, this has become an all to frequent occurrence over the last decade and a half or so.

The real problem is the casual attitude this country has towards firearms. Not even really the availability. It's the fact that people do not regard gun ownership and use as a solemn responsibility. They regard it as a free-wheeling "right", like driving, or being an asshole on the Internet.

America is a car culture every bit as much as a gun culture. Why then does no one have a problem with simple road laws? You can't have all the horsepower you want under the hood, and you can't drive 250 mph on the nation's highways, right? Nobody bitches about the evil gubmint infringing on their driving rights though.

Think about all the laws there are around driving a car. Think about all the licensing rigmarole, the tests you have to take, and the requirements that have to be met. Think about the constant and ongoing national campaigns emphasizing driver safety. Think about the perfectly ordinary and commonplace regulations around what safety features cars have to have, and what ridiculously overpowered features they cannot. Just apply all that to guns.

It never ceases to amaze me how adamant that Americans can get over guns and their right to own as powerful a killing machine as they can. I seriously doubt the "Founding Fathers" anticipated weapons that mow down people in seconds.

It is very discomforting to see media that are invasive towards grieving families and the community in general being patronized and supported by the public. They have no regard for the impact of this, they show no sympathy, only a selfish need for information to publish at the expense of shoving a camera in a child's face or showing up at someone's home and asking for information. There is no consolation for the community in being swarmed by ravenous media.

Secondly, before the public knew anything about the circumstances, only that a mass murder of children occurred, every damn person was on their soapbox preaching about how they could stop it, mouthing off about their long-established beliefs. This wasn't confined to one side of any issue, it was every person taking this opportunity to preemptively preach about the aftermath, preemptively reacting to what they thought the reactions of other people would be because they knew they would use this to preach about what they believe. That comes from all around and it is disgusting. The same thing happened in a slightly different form when Obama spoke - the reflections didn't regard the content nor context of the speech, only what people already thought of him.

Most people are too removed from Newtown to do anything for the town and people beyond offering sympathy and donations, which are meaningful. It is difficult to know this happened and be unable to do anything about it.

Please read this completely as to not misunderstand it - Something that concerns me is how people express their contempt for the shooter, someone dead and gone who we have learned very little about. There is nothing left there to grasp, but the fragments of his identity that we now know of are being projected onto others as a means to give this something tangible. The disgust and contempt is understandable, but it can do nothing good at this point. As we learn a few things about him, people try to identify someone who is still alive that they can label in their mind as being like the killer. All this does is make the lives of troubled people more difficult when what they need is for people to not feel uncomfortable with them, rather to be open to them and not think of them in a bad way.

Finally, we need to stop making killers into icons. You will recognize the name of nearly every spree killer, school shooter, or other infamous villain who shocked the nation. The victims are forgotten, the killers are remembered. This happens because before they create their legacy in a sick way, they have seen it happen countless times before. One person can't change that, only millions of people can.

so sad...these children were truly innocent. my heart goes out to all the victims, parents, teachers/staff and first responders. we have had a rash of these events recently so i must comment on the unspoken elephant in the room - mental illness.

check out a article by liza long the anarchist soccer mom entitled 'thinking the unthinkable'. be forewarned, it is a long article. you can find it here under the title previously mentioned (current the second from the tiop: http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/

she is the mother of a child with mental illness. towards the end of the article, she says this;

"...I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness...."

gut reaction is to blame guns, video games, movies, parents, bullies, etc. but way down the list is mental illness. all these topics may share blame, but the fact is we as a society, dont hone in on mental illness as being the top issue.

and that is your right to do so. i am not trying to force your hand.

but reality is now is the time to talk about this. the powers that be are. the "I don't want to deal with this now" statement is made after every one of these atrocities - when do we talk about it? after another tragedy? after the next one?

i will say this much - i am pro-gun. i own 'em and use 'em. that said, its time for discussion.

When I first heard about this, I was at work talking with a co-worker. It was a totally shocking thing to hear just in mid conversation, so I was certainly stunned for a bit. I know this certainly isn't the first time that kids have been the victims of senseless or random crimes, but this to me seems different. Usually, it's kids shooting other kids, or adults shooting other adults, or kids getting hurt or killed by a parent or relative, but this totally different to me, in context at least. I can't imagine what the mixture of crazy and chaos has to be to cause a person to snap on the extreme that he did. I can't imagine a 5 year old girl begging me not to shoot her so she could see her parents and have Christmas, and then put 5 rounds in her, and then 19 of her classmates and 6 of the faculty. That’s another thing about this particular situation, no wounded, only fatalities.
I totally understand the statement about control being too casual at home, but I don’t think parents teaching their kids gun safety would have made this massacre any less brutal. I honestly think that this particular shooting won’t be a good argument for the anti-gun nuts anyway, but we’ll see. And I agree with Zodijackyl about the making the shooters into icons. People care way too much what the gunman was thinking, or what his home life was like…it doesn’t matter. The more we focus on the shooter, the more the victims’ faces blend together. That’s why I found that movie called Rampage so disgusting; it was just a movie about some guy who’s view on things was “I disagree with a lot of how things are!” and so he massacres a town. Do we need to be seeing that kind of stuff? It happens enough in real life all around the world, I don’t need to see a movie dramatizing it.

Not only did I call it on the gun controll arguement, but it's gone beyond that. Some Tea Party chick who was actually on SNL has compared the shooter to.....wait for it....


Abortionists!

http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/ent ... 7/b372016/

Fuck her.

I was genuinely distraught when the news broke out... and I was even more upset with all the Facebook and Twitter witch hunting and generally shitty reporting by the media. Disgusting.

sorry, but obama called it first when he interrupted my niners game last night. not only that, but gun control was an obvious argument since friday.

I wouldn't worry about that. Due to faulty and incoherent research that argument will die down as fast as it came up.

The problem is that it rarely actually gets discussed. Instead, it just gets tossed around like the political football it has become.

Besides, barring some truly monumental shifts in America, I highly doubt that any meaningful gun control laws will pass.

Did the US Administration pay for that TV network time, or are they just able to use it whenever they like? Kind of off topic I guess, but I've always been curious about this. Was the speech really longer htan your average block of advertisements?

And I'm not sure why gun owners are more the targets of proposed control legislation than are gun manufacturers. You'd think the onus would be more on the latter bodies, and the retailers, to make sure their weapons don't fall into "unsafe" hands. And there are ways manufacturers can take steps to make their weapons more secure...hell, I can think of a couple right now, so I'm sure brighter minds have come up with plenty.

As someone who works at a school, it was pretty surreal to be at work on Friday. Of course, the little ones had no idea of what happened, and it was pretty rough for me and my colleagues to just go about our day normally, knowing what had happened. How do you even begin to explain to a bunch of kids something that terrible? I just can't bring myself to comprehend what was going on in that dude's head. I'm all for reaching out and helping people with mental illness, but honestly, motherfucker should've just ate a bullet and spared the lives of the kids and staff... unbelievable.

I was just fucking around when he said he interrupted my football haha. I think they pay for it as it was on a bunch of major channels at the time and then regular programming was resumed.

Politicians will argue anything for the sake of simply arguing. After every tragedy people go crazy about gun control and it all goes away in 2 months when people forget.

and now, let's not leave westboro outta this, I heard those trolls are tryna get more notoriety out of this tragedy too. And as always, our state sponsored media just LOVES to prey on the emotions of the rest of the country on issues like this... Now I'm not one to believe all that Loose Change conspiracy bullshit, but IF I did, I'd be a little wary at just how quickly the issue changed from the fact that almost 2 dozen 6-7 year olds were gunned down to "How soon can we get rid of firearms in America?". I smell a set up.. let's not forget that there's still NO motive to why he killed all those kids, I get that he snapped and killed his mother, but why drive out of state just to waste the entire class she taught too? something doesn't smell right here, it's too early to call New World Order conspiracy on this, but it wouldn't be the first time in recent history a government allowed several dozen children to be massacred like this *cough* Beslan 2004....

No they didn't, television networks choose to cover special events like this, and the President came on late because he was spending time with children and the families of victims. The speech was eighteen minutes long, you can hear it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfaYUrgcCrY

Aaaaand this thread just went full retard.

Agreed.

But hey, maybe we can make a few bucks selling tinfoil.

You know, I sometimes see things that are so ungodly retarded that I just cannot find any words at all to address the unrelenting stupidity. This is one of those moments.

You know why he killed all of those children? Because he was fucking insane, that's why. You should keep that conspiracy bullshit to yourself. Better to be silent and look like a dumbass than speak up and confirm it, you know?

Hahahaha. Fuck you.

Wow. You are truly, seriously fucking stupid.

I was thinking the exact same thing except for everything you just said.

Can we please stop gawking at the obvious idiot? Please and thank you.

Zodi's most recent post says it all, really.

Someone else who kind of feel sory for is actually Obama. He has to deal with this both as the President who's incharge of our safety and also as a father who no doubt loves his children and couldn't imagine what the parents are going through. Both those, plus the demand to handle this just right thanks to our current political climate gives him by far the hardest job imaginable.