May 25, 2022
"The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment..."
"Santos Valdez Jr., 18, said he has known [Salvador Rolando] Ramos since early elementary school.... They used to play video games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty. But then Ramos changed. Once, Valdez said, Ramos pulled up to a park where they often played basketball and had cuts all over his face. He first said a cat had scratched his face. 'Then he told me the truth, that he’d cut up his face with knives over and over and over,' Valdez said. 'I was like, "You’re crazy, bro, why would you do that?"' Ramos said he did it for fun, Valdez recalled.
In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said.... 'He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” [said Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend]... 'Over social media, over gaming, over everything..... One time, he posted a photo of himself wearing black eyeliner, Garcia said, which brought on a slew of comments using a derogatory term for a gay person.... When Garcia [moved away], Ramos dropped out of school. He started wearing all black, Garcia said, and large military boots. He grew his hair out long.... [Garcia said,] 'I think he needed mental help. And more closure with his family. And love.'"
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137 comments:
So all those social-emotional learning videos they had to sit through didn't work?
What a surprise.
I hope this does not displace the Amber Heard trial in the soaps ratings.
They also claim he was bullied in school because of poverty and the clothes he wore. WHERE did he find the money to buy multiple guns and ammo then?? Something doesn't add up.
There's no word on how the 4th graders he murdered had contributed to his bullying.
Speech impediment bullying might account for Biden trying to destroy America. A pattern.
I know this is going to be the least welcome observation, but every mass-murder like this is done by a heavy user of marijuana. I'm not saying that pot will turn a normal person into a psycho-killer. It has long been recognized "that cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, other psychoses, and social anxiety disorders, and to a lesser extent depression." (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017)
Every single mass murderer has been a heavy user of pot. Every single one.
If we truly care about children like the shooter and his victims, then we would redirect all money being spent on radical bullshit propaganda like CRT to training on identifying troubled children and getting them to people who can help them. Also to making schools safer through any number of possible approaches. Anyone using this tragedy to promote gun control is standing in the way of progress and letting their personal hatred for guns outweigh any caring for the children.
If I could live my life over again, I think I might become a speech pathologist.
I had a younger brother who suffered a speech impediment, which was corrected completely during elementary school by therapy from a speech pathologist.
In the late 1990s, I was between steady jobs, and temporary-employment agency assigned me to work for a couple months as an administrative assistant at the University of Oregon's Speech Pathology Department. While there, I browsed through some speech-pathology textbooks and instructional materials, and I learned something about speech pathology.
Speech pathology is very helpful for many people.
But the problem is "gun" violence.
"Gunman was bullied as a child, grew increasingly violent, friends say/Relatives, classmates describe fraught relationship with mother and a troubling pattern of acting out"
Wait, a man was involved? An 18-year old "man"? A bullied, crazy "man"? I thought this was a case of "gun" violence."
Bullying at that age can be one of the worst things to happen to a kid.
And Warriors coach Steve Kerr can kiss my ass.
In 2020 he was a strong advocate of taking police out of Oakland school campuses.
I think this is going to be about gender dysphoria. There is some talk about this over at Reddit and 9gag. I think Brian De Palma's "Dressed to Kill" is on point. In it, Michael Caine plays a trans woman with dissociative identity disorder. He uses a razor blade to kill very attractive blonde women (including Angie Dickinson!). Caine's character is unstable and confused. If you throw in a dangerous cocktail of hormones, maybe you get a mass murderer?
Well...one could write a long column on the sickness that has taken over America. I'll try not to do that here. What we're going to see is the media pounding on us for a week about the need for 'gun control'- whatever is meant by that. Some will mean there should be no guns. Some will demand 'background checks' as if the ones we already have in place would stop anything.
We've seen many recent mass shootings where the killer was a known person to watch, with known mental issues, known threats. And we've done what government departments typically do when confronted with the actual facts- nothing.
Our deaf, dumb, and blind legislators in Washington- particularly those on the screaming Left, will demand that 'action be taken'. OK- what action? What are you truly willing to do? Because we've always had guns in our society. But you used to be able to walk down Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Baltimore was once a livable city. San Francisco was once Paris on the Pacific. Our cities are in ruin, we spend more time picking up human feces, handing out needles, and locking up deodorant in San Francisco than we do praying in church. Our kids are being taught they can be whatever gender they want. We're offering them more pronouns and telling them their parents should not know what they're being taught. That their parents are part of the problem.
We give the kids iPhones at age 7, let them spend their days online playing video games that make killing and maiming look easy, after which they can go to one of the social medias to attack or be attacked by others.
We have always had guns. We have not always been turned into a failing country. This disease we have is something that has come from the inside, out. I am NOT a religious man. But I loved living in a religiously-bound society that we used to have. Because when the society around me had the standards of a people who believed in God, it was a more human society. That's the reality. Yes- there have always been issues, but it's something I've seen in my lifetime. I've seen how we were and I see how we are now.
We are a society unmoored. There are no standards. We have yapping adults in the media, at our universities, and throughout our Government. And none of them have the right thing to say about this today. Not one of them. We are sick. We are unmoored. And we're floating like a cork in a river.
If you think another background check law is going to be the thing that secures us again, you are not only a fool, but an idiot. And you should not be in Congress, let alone the Majority Leader in the Senate.
I've stayed silent for years as I watched religion and a relationship with God disappear from our society. What has filled the void is sickness, and disregard for human life and civil society.
Why, it's almost as if some people wanted it this way.
Mom on drugs, father apparently absent. Depressed to the point of significant self harm. This guy probably grew up with no social skills, poor hygiene, and a creepy vibe. I'll bet he was indeed a target for bullying.
But still, he didn't go after the people who bullied him. He killed a roomful of little kids. That's not just because of bullying. There was something fundamentally broken inside his head.
The timeline is hard to understand. Police engaged with him but he was still able to enter a school? None of those police followed him? He had time to do all this killing before a solo Border Patrol agent took it upon himself to go in and blow him away? The authorities are going to have a lot of questions to answer.
I lived in the same co-ed dorm as Steve Kerr in college. He wasn't friendly with the rabble back then, and I've had no interest in following his career. Seeing his name, his prestige, and that the news wants to quote him, made me stop and marvel. You never know what you'll take away from the Althouse comments, lol.
I am OK with raising the age to buy a gun to 21.
Raise the age to vote, buy cigarettes, and sign contracts along with it.
18-year-olds are not usually mature enough to make smart decisions.
Don't Canadians have higher rates of gun ownership? Why don't they have mass murderers like this?
Sounds like the WaPo needs an update on varieties of "crazy". I have my guesses, but I am not a psychologist.
The school shooter genre lives on because people like to watch the soap opera aftermath, and the news likes to bring it to you for your entertainment. The solution isn't gun control but not caring enough to watch.
Like the other school shooter in Connecticut, this kid was mentally ill. I wonder if evidence will appear that there were warnings ignored in his case like the school shooter in Florida? I also wonder if police (or the Border Patrol guys) waited instead of storming that classroom ? It must have taken time to shoot all those little kids.
Bullying seems to be a common thread bin all of these. There is something that can be done about that.
A lot of factors here that probably contributed to the circumstances. A bullying culture at school, a very dysfunctional family with a drugged out mother. Conflict in the house because the Grandmother was going to kick the mother out due to her drug habit. (Did the son side with the mother against the grandmother?) I see no father or grandfather in the picture. There is a high correlation between young men with violence/crime/drugs and young men without fathers. Could be more issue I am not aware of.
The question is what actual steps can we take that would have a high probability of mitigating tragedies like this? *Consults actuary tables...*
One thing we should not do is waste time and energy on things that have no chance of working, but unfortunately that is often were we spend our precious capital. So much good is left undone because so much energy is wasted on useless advocating, political posturing and windmill tilting.
Gun violence will exist unless we can remove all guns from existence. Won't happen. Not because of our 2nd amendment, but because you cannot put that genie back in the bottle. Guns will exist. but even if it is hard to get one, people can find other ways to kill. An 18 your old with a machete in a grade school could do a lot of damage too. Plus, as others have stated, guns used to be much more "open carry" in the US and there was no higher level of mass shootings at that time.
Bullying in school has existed for a long time. I am sure it drove other young men to crime in the past as well. All I know is my kids mostly were kept out of environments where that kind of abuse could take place (All foreign special needs kids, so they would have been likely targets). Solving this will not come from the schools, it has to be handled by having healthy families.
The Drug war has failed. What do you do with the drugged out mother?
What to do about absent fathers. I know, let's make casual sex fun. Let's subsidize single motherhood. Let's undermine marriage. Let's improve our divorce rate. Let's malign fatherhood and men. I know we've tried this, but we need to do better. Only when we completely eradicate the role of the father and make men feel completely valueless will we solve this mass shooter crisis.
Not sure this is relevant or not, but here goes.
I have been struck by the law enforcement efforts to address the issue of individuals, usually men, viewing child pornography. There are police officers monitoring various porn sites and then tracking these men and ultimately charging them with multiple counts of possession or distribution of child pornography. Each felony count carries a minimum prison sentence of three years. It is not uncommon for men to be charged with 10 separate counts which, if sentenced consecutively would carry a minimum prison term of 30 years in prison in the state of Wisconsin.
Contrast this approach and use of taxpayer monies with the rather laissez-faire approach of monitoring websites, such as those websites used by the young men in Buffalo and Texas. I know there are First Amendment issues involved, but I think that law enforcement and legislatures have to take a look at their priorities and utilization of resources.
Is the photo of him wearing makeup and female clothes real or not?
"Every single mass murderer has been a heavy user of pot. Every single one."
I would love to see your proof of this claim that they were all big users.
I understand that when there's a high school suicide the news media covers the news minimally. Ever since Young Werther, suicide has been shown to be an infectious disease among young people. The best bet is to isolate the bearers of this disease and not give them publicity and glamour....Maybe we should do the same with school shooters. It puts the idea out there, and there are lots of unstable kids in high school who entertain dark thoughts precisely because they are dark thoughts.
Lots of kids are bullied. Lost of kids are abused by their parents, siblings, non custodial caregivers etc. and yet almost none of these people grow up to be mass murderers. The kid was mentally ill. He likely self medicated which made it worse. There are no REAL mental health resources to help families with kids like this. A chat about your feelings once a week and some psychoactive drugs do NOT help. People like this need to be institutionalized until they can be taught coping skills so they can function in the real world or until they die. The rest of the world should not be put at risk so mental patients can “choose their own path”.
Turns out that having an armed police officer at the school did nothing to deter a determined shooter.
A good guy with a gun turned out to be no help at all.
What antidepressants was he on?
What was the death toll in aborted children yesterday? Just trying to understand the scale of our various problems.
Two police (school resource officers) at the school. They heard the gunshots and then set up a perimeter. A border patrol special agent later entered the school and took out the shooter. I hope the perimeter survived unharmed.
Yeah, cutting your own face for fun is a tell.
Where is the dad?
People are trained to blame bullying. Yet there is no evidence that bullying leads to school massacres. None. Psychotropic drugs, marijuana use, broken families, mental illness, yes.
There's a great book by a journalist who went to Columbine and destroyed the "bullying" myth there. Another one about the Matthew Shepard story being wildly misrepresented. Neither journalist thought they would come to these conclusions.
Why mention eyeliner but not an absent father? Shepard and Teena Brannon were killed in drug deals gone wrong, not because they were gay.
Trans/homosexual? Transgender conversion therapy? Were there antidepressants involved, which are known to trigger rage episodes in a select minority of young males.
That said, a depressed individual and children; a rabid diversitist, an suv of mass destruction, and children; a low risk viral spread, Mengele mandates, social contagion; a nation, an opportunity, a Spring in progress; a sexually liberated woman, four choices and self-defense, a wicked solution where a baby is sacrificed for a handmade tale.
WHERE did he find the money to buy multiple guns and ammo then??
A wall aborted. Immigration reform. Open borders. Obama's gun running program. Perhaps a Whitmer/Michigan et al federal directed plot with "benefits".
I don’t recall any crying for the Buffalo shooter. You think he wasn’t bullied? Why would he have threatened to shoot up his school if he was happy there? Funny how the left only runs these “he was bullied into it” stories for non white shooters.
What Critter said. I agree. That was a kid with a lot of anger in a lot of pain who eventually acted on his hatred. Was a preventable tragedy if anyone had taken the time. At the very least he should have been on some mental health professional’s radar.
Hollywood cries out, "how many children have to die?" before we change this. I'd say, off the cuff, about 54 million.
What Vaclav said above about pot it true. One of the first people to speak about that was Alex Berenson from Covid investigation fame. He was a reporter for The NY Times years ago and his wife was an ER doc. She got home from work one day and he mentioned that there had been a mass shooting in a school. She said "the guy was a pothead, of course". He asked - :what do you mean?' Her response was that everyone in the medical world knows that there is an obvious connection between pot and mass murderers but that no one talks about it. He looked into it and found it was true.
There also seems to be no mention of a father with this kid, which I think is also an issue with many of these shootings.
Once again, it's not the guns but mental health issues unaddressed that led to disaster. I don't know how you identify these issues if neither school nor mental health workers are involved. Usually there has been a preceding law enforcement interface, but apparently not in this case. From the WaPo this was clearly a kid in mental danger and most likely he would have done something equally as bad even if he had no access to guns. Guns were not the problem.
I hate how these things immediately turn into partisan maneuvering. I'm conservative, but I'm getting tired of anti-gun-control people insisting that guns have nothing to do with it. I'm also tired of everyone else insisting that only guns have anything to do with it.
Did he shoot up the same school where he'd been bullied?
When I was in second grade in the KC Public schools, the teacher noticed my lisp and had me visit a speech therapist employed by the school district. I read aloud stories about the thistle sifter. She fixed my lisp. Thank you God. Glad that my teacher was not concerned about my mastery of pronouns.
None of that matters. All that matters is that a gun killed a bunch of people. The guy holding the gun has nothing to do with it.
There couldn't have been more warning signs from this kid if he had flares shooting out of the top of his head.
But sure, let's disarm law-abiding citizens. I recently saw a tweet from a German, saying "As a German,I don't understand the relationship between guns and freedom..."
The best reply I saw was "As a Jew, I do."
'A good guy with a gun turned out to be no help at all.'
Great logic.
People wearing seat belts die in car crashes so let's repeal seat belt laws.
I'm OK with making the libertarian argument against government overreach.
But your remark is moronic.
"We are a society unmoored. There are no standards."
That's what diversity gets you- at least, the diversity being pushed by the left.
Many of the same Liberals/Democrats demanding action after this atrocity are same people who demanded armed police officers or security officers be removed from schools across the country.
Where is the media accusing them of having "blood on their hands"....?
But was he a white Hispanic?
Careful with the media narrative. I expect it is cherry picked. He had killed his grandparents (I believe) and then wrecked his vehicle near or at the school. Entered through a door that had been left open and barricaded himself in the first classroom, killing the class.
That's from my cousin who is former state law enforcement and now a security officer at an elementary school. And staff leaving doors ajar because they are annoyed with having to scan in and out is a problem.
A very troubled kid, but the school may only have been by opportunity.
Beto will fix it.
The School system was part of an AI program that supposedly "rooted out mass killers and monitored social media for threats and potential shooters” It apparently didn't work.
https://republicbrief.com/uvalde-school-was-part-of-ai-program-involving-mass-shootings/
What Jim said (@1:34).
How many classes in Ed school do teachers get on recognizing mental health issues and what to do about them? How many classes on dealing with an active shooter situation? How many classes on paying attention to social cues and their students' interactions with others?
Instead it's CRT and ensuring that pronouns are "correct". Federal funding for school lunches is now going to be dependent on allowing those who "identify" as female to use the respective restrooms, regardless of their biology.
Our society is indeed sick, but not in the way most people imagine.
I suspect almost all of the kids who become mass shooters were bullied. But it isn't the bullying alone that turns them into a mass shooter. Millions of kids have been bullied in school and almost all of them don't become mass shooters. Most school shooters are bullied, but they are also Narcissists and have sociopathic tendencies. So their narcissism leads them to believe that they should top of the totem pole in the social pecking order, and when they are bullied they discover they are bottom of the totem pole, or maybe so low they aren't even on the totem pole. And then because they have sociopathic tendencies they are more likely to lash out violently at society as a whole which has clearly wronged them since they should be top of the totem pole but are on the bottom.
The other thing that is very, very common in school shooters is that they don't have fathers. I noticed the article referenced a fraught relationship with his mother but I saw no mention of dad.
The smartest take that I have seen today. Tulsi is one of the only NORMAL Democrats left.
Tulsi Gabbard 🌺
@TulsiGabbard
·
7h
We grieve for the 21 who were killed in Texas today. But grieving is not enough—we could have, and must now, take commonsense actions to prevent these tragedies, like establishing single points of entry into schools, armed guards, trained staff, mental health services & more
‘A good guy with a gun turned out to be no help at all.’
Good guys with guns don’t set up perimeters. The good guys with guns turned out to be cowards, so not good guys by any definition. Nice try, though…
Jim said
Thank you God. Glad that my teacher was not concerned about my mastery of pronouns.
Today they use your time with a speech therapist. To shame White kids for systemic racism, explaining why some girls have a penis, and masturbation should be a part of the life of a 7 year old. Important stuff that just cant wait.
I think we need to look at social media as a contributing factor to these mass shootings. The prep was reportedly bullied on social media, and he used social media to announce his intentions. Maybe we should keep kids under the age of 18 off these platforms. Or at least have parental controls.
Somehow these crazies never seem to kill the guys that bullied them.
There also seems to be no mention of a father with this kid, which I think is also an issue with many of these shootings.
No parents at all. It sounds like he was living with his grandmother. He also tagged a girl in LA on Instagram and told her he was going to do something. I can imagine how distraught she is now.
I suspect we will learn about more warning signs, probably from UK newspapers since US Media will be all about guns.
Blogger Mark said...
Turns out that having an armed police officer at the school did nothing to deter a determined shooter.
A good guy with a gun turned out to be no help at all.
Why do you say that ? A Border Patrol agent saw him crash his truck and followed him. That is who shot and killed the shooter, sadly too late.
"warning" signs are likely first spotted by non-professionals.
I was born in 1945. We won WW II every third recess, killing Japs and Krauts by the boxcar load.
We doodled guns of all kinds on our notebooks.
Mattel made a disturbingly accurate knock-off of the German Schmeisser, which would fire a roll of caps on full auto.
There was a generic squad auto, bipod and perforated barrel jacket and the whole nine yards. Not sure who made that but you could get one for Christmas. I forgot to say it was a toy, but it could have been used in a movie if you didn't think soldiers would be watching.
I could go on, reminiscence being kind of fun at my age, but the point is...what do the non-professionals think of that culture and what of it required calling the pros?
Ramos' picture didn't look much different from any other Goth you'd see in the mall. Self-harm? Besides that prescribed by with-it parents who want their kids to be more gender dysphoric than the neighbors', it's practically a thing.
Once the US military went all NATO in ammo, the M1 carbine, a small semi-auto rifle firing a jumped-up pistol round became so available the NRA would sell you one for twenty bucks as a prize for joining. That would be about fifteen hours of minwage work. Its ammo was a drug on the market. Took a thirty-round mag.
Would have qualified as an assault weapon under current nonsense.
No mass shootings.
Mental illness is usually on a continuum, beginning with the barely eccentric. There's the philatelist whose only crime is boring his dinner guests into catatonia as they politely view his collection. And there's the guy who bankrupts his family in the pursuit and can't be brought to think it's a bad idea. Somewhere in between, a Fauci-clone is going to use the force of government--without an adversarial proceeding like a trial--to put him into a prison where they mess with his head. What's the warning sign? He was wearing a red baseball cap which looked like a dogwhistle MAGA hat. Think of CPS run by HOA boards.
Back in the day, I could swap out an M16 mag in about four seconds. Mag size is irrelevant.
These clowns use guns because guns are portrayed as how you kill people. Duh. But, presuming guns are not available, the functioning of a couple of brain cells will shortly conclude you can use a car. Or a hatchet. Hell, a guy with a reasonable set of shoulders could wreak havoc in an elementary school with a short crow bar. And what kind of stuff is hanging from the HVAC guy's harness when you buzz him in?
Frank James--bet you have to look him up--looked like any of a thousand other construction/trades guys on his way to work. You going to call the pros on him?
Nicholas Cruz--do you have to look him up?--got more than a dozen breaks from scary, assaultive, insane behaviors being investigated by law enforcement because we don't want to run the school to prison pipeline.
Point of all of the above is that there is nothing that can be done which will work short of hardening the targets and taking down the gun-free zone signs.
"Every single mass murderer has been a heavy user of pot. Every single one."
Some of them this just seems unlikely.
The Chinese national who took on the Taiwanese Presbyterians was a heavy marijuana user? Seems unlikely.
A good guy with a gun turned out to be no help at all.
Well, that would certainly explain how an armed border agent ended up killing him, wouldn't it.
I read he was in the school for over an hour. WTF
"if he had flares shooting out of the top of his head."
If only. Team Clipboard should require it.
The only good news in this is that a border patrol officer was allowed to be effective.
More on "Where to direct our energy".
In many cases, when things seem to be going well, we start to "find" problems that aren't really problems. Then we direct energy and resources to address those problems. And then when a real problem occurs because of neglect because energy and resources were diverted, we wonder why we have this problem and start coming up with braindead solutions because we don't want to admit that the actions we took before were contributing factors to the problem we have now. And then there is politics. We make such fateful decisions because of politics instead of trying to address real problems. We elect idiots to office because they give lip service to our feel good solutions to unreal problems. As a result we are unwilling to do the hard work of looking at the root cause of problems and fix them there. Instead we get things like diversity hiring to address disparities and ignore the root cause of why there are disparities in the first place. But we can't talk about root causes without being labeled a racist, homophobe, transphobe, terf or any other unpleasing label. The same goes with violence and youth. The disintegration of the social structures leads to gaps in our process such that there is more violence in schools (not just mass shootings.) People talk about finding the warning signs, but who has time to look in the first place? It is easy from hindsight, but hard looking forward. How many loner boys who love HALO ever really kill anyone? you can't use that as your criteria, you have to look deeper, and that takes resources. Teachers and others can barely keep the moderate kids in school engaged, much less have time to give special attention to the marginal ones. I have one child in need of special instruction due to being adopted at an older age. The school gave almost no help. They simply did not have time despite their promises and obligation to do so.
Thus, when you let the social structure decay, abandon discipline, remove structure, you get spillover at the margins. Broken families mean kids are not developing socially, schools are expected to pick up the slack which strains resources and has them doing things they were not designed to do. Then you take away their ability to maintain discipline and have them teaching things other than the "three Rs" and you have more drop outs and lower achievement.
These are all connected. Sow destruction of the social structures and reap the destruction of society. But tell the sowers this and they drive you from the conversation as they merrily toodle their way south in that little handbasket they are riding in.
MikeR put it well at 1:30.
I grow weary of the ghouls yelling, "You see?!" before the victims are buried.
But I note the pattern where someone any of us would say was mentally ill, someone who'd sent one alarming signal after another, had no trouble buying a firearm. Because he hadn't yet done anything horrible, right up until he decided to kill a dozen people or more. And modern weapons make it so easy.
I'm all for protecting the rights of the mentally sound. I wish we could do something to identify the next sick loser before he acquires the tools to destroy lives around him for the sheer twisted hell of it.
Quite horrible.
Unfortunately, we have had the usual response. The gun control people cannot wait for the bodies to turn cold before they start demanding new restrictions, because, to be honest, they care about gun control a lot more than they care about the dead. Anyone familiar with the history of people performing rituals in response to tragedy can see the pattern here, except the people in the past were actually more concerned with outcomes than the pieties themselves. The worst of the bunch declare that anyone who does not agree to all their demands is necessarily evil, which is pretty much just a "welcome to Twitter" moment. The more fatuous variety demand "common sense" gun control, but when pressed what exactly that means the usual response is "common sense" gun control is "common sense" gun control, making it obvious that they are just here to score points and don't give a damn otherwise. The more conscientious will actually make suggestions, then will get offended when it noted that the suggestions would not have helped in any way and that the killer already broke a dozen laws. This, of course, forces the gun rights people to have to respond, and some of that is going to go wrong, not to mention that being focused on guns, for or against, at this time of tragedy is crass.
The fact that there are dead children has become secondary. So it goes.
On the plus side, at least the left cares this time. Dead children caused by inconvenient killers tends to get forgotten within 24 hours. Occasionally, they will try to "rehabilitate" the killer into right-wing terrorist without evidence, then memory hole it once it becomes clear that they are making things up. The joys of fake news.
At least we can be thankful we have such a level-headed, mentally sharp, competent President at the helm. /sarc
WaPo? Hmmmm.... Lies.
“We are a society unmoored. There are no standards.”
How about reinstituting the Constitutional concept of a well regulated militia?
Is bullying biological?
People say "The Lord works in mysterious ways". Well, unfortunately, Satan does too.
The shooter was failed by everyone around him, including himself, in the course of his short life, with the possible exception of his grandmother. We see this pattern over & over.
When anyone proposes solutions -- gun control, guards at schools, better mental health, anything, remember to ask this question --- who's going to do this task? Are the people who are newly assigned to do the new, improved "No More Shooter Fix" any better than those who were their before? Or, isn't going to be yet more government bureaucrats who fail over & over?
Who I'm most appalled by are the guards at the school, who "formed a perimeter" and waited for a SWAT team. Between the two of them, they couldn't get a round into the shooter's legs, arms, or head, which weren't covered by body armor? He was an 18 yr old miscreant, not a fucking Navy Seal leading a charge! One wound would have stopped him. What did they think would happen to those poor kids while they "formed a perimeter"?
The same failure of school security occurred in the Florida school shooting. Yeah, we can hire people to do this, that, or the other. But we can't grab a bureaucrat and make sure that his/her head is full of competence and that a guard's heart is full of courage. That's beyond the ken of any HR department.
Blogger M said...
"I don’t recall any crying for the Buffalo shooter. You think he wasn’t bullied? Why would he have threatened to shoot up his school if he was happy there? Funny how the left only runs these “he was bullied into it” stories for non white shooters. "
Life is so unfair to us white guys. Actually no stories about Gendron being bullied because he was the one doing the bullying.
https://worldnationnews.com/payton-gendron-wore-a-dangerous-suit-to-school-was-hospitalized-after-bullying-classmates/
First, about the "victim" here, how many of the folks bullying him were little elementary schoolkids 10-12 years younger than him?
Second, where were the teachers in middle school and high school to catch it and help him?
Many mistakes were made.
I sure wish:
1) the cops had waited to stop him farther up the road!
2) the doors of the school had automatic locks and security cameras. Admin could have locked the doors with one push of a button.
3) the school prohibited even teachers from being armed.
4) the cops had filed Domestic Violence charges (he hit is mother over the years). Conviction would have prohibited him from buying the guns.
If the government wants to do SOMETHING..
I am sure the government that gives BILLIONS to other countries, millions to 'undocumented aliens' pouring in, and pay raises for themselves every few years could...
Fund security cameras at each door, automatic locking doors (heavy duty), and the secuirty screen in the Administration office.
If they see a nutjob coming toward any door one push of a button and all the doors would lock and police called. There are some real good security doors made that are very hard to break. And this would really help if all the school children wore easily recognizable uniforms.
Yea I am sure that could be done... Congress gives millions to research the mating habits of snails.. so why not beef up schools?
Look at the war on men our society is waging, and at how boys are treated differently in school than girls.
Guns ABSOLUTELY had something to do with it. Just like a KNIFE had something to do with the high school kid who was stabbed to death at a McDonalds near here. And a car had something to do with a cab driver being dragged to death in a car-jacking over in D.C.
MikeR said...
I hate how these things immediately turn into partisan maneuvering. I'm conservative, but I'm getting tired of anti-gun-control people insisting that guns have nothing to do with it. I'm also tired of everyone else insisting that only guns have anything to do with it.
Ok.
Propose a solution.
Preferably one that would actually do something to stop this sort of thing fro happening.
Schumer is not going to call a vote in the Senate to pass Gun Control.
The House is not going to vote on gun control.
Too close to an election and support for any new gun control is around Joe Biden's approval ratings.
So the only question is when are the Democrat voters going to realize they are a minority and they are not going to get their way by bullying either?
The fact is that we live in a culture that has little regard for human life.
We've seen it here in these pages. Often. They may not have pulled the trigger or stuck the knife, but they contribute to the mind-set of those that do.
I am OK with raising the age to buy a gun to 21.
Raise the age to vote, buy cigarettes, and sign contracts along with it.
18-year-olds are not usually mature enough to make smart decisions.
The age of sexual liberty? Millions of human lives aborted globally, annually for social, redistributive, clinical, and fair weather causes. 21 would not have curbed the audacity of the SUV driver motivated by rabid diversity. 21 would not have prevented the trans/bisexual's finger on the Pulse. Gun control laws would not have prevented Sandy Hook or Obama's gun running program.
The thing is- nothing could be helped unless the “kid” had done something criminally wrong. It’s a backward setup and has been since whichever law was passed whatever yr ago. People are autonomous.
Our systems are all or nothing. Never individually viewed. Growing up, our schools were local, small of size and community oriented. Now kids are bussed distances away and lumped w/others from different towns. No sense of individual identity other than what groups you fit into and what others label you as.
Throw onto that dumpster fire the fact that parents are kept in the dark so much in terms of sexual health issues and who knows what all- taught to do so now. Disconnected.
We’d better fix this.
It was Monday, right?
The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody's gonna go to school today
She's gonna make them stay at home
And daddy doesn't understand it
He always said she was good as gold
And he can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?
I don't like Mondays
(Tell me why)
I don't like Mondays
(Tell me why)
I don't like Mondays
I wanna shoot the whole day down
The Telex machine is kept so clean
And it types to a waiting world
Her mother feels so shocked, father's world is rocked
And their thoughts turn to their own little girl
Sweet sixteen, ain't that peachy keen
Now it ain't so neat to admit defeat
They can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reasons do you need, oh oh oh oh?
Down, down, shoot it all down
And all the playing's stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with the toys a while
And school's out early and soon we be learning
And the lesson today is how to die
And then the bullhorn crackles and the captain tackles
With the problems and the hows and whys
And he can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die, die, oh oh oh?
Most lunatics cannot be helped with "talk about your feelings " therapy. Some can be helped with drugs. Some get worse with drugs.
Many that are helped stop taking drugs because they feel cured, or because it seems less fun being semi normal.
But sure, let's disarm law-abiding citizens. I recently saw a tweet from a German, saying "As a German,I don't understand the relationship between guns and freedom..."
The best reply I saw was "As a Jew, I do."
My response to those types of comments is: "I believe you. All the Germans that did left and came to the United States long ago."
Someone I read (most likely an Ace of Spades commenter) linked to this 2018 story about two Uvalde Middle School students arrested for planning a Columbine-style massacre at the middle school, which they planned to do in 2022, when they would be seniors. They weren't identified, but I'm pretty sure one of them is our guy. I suspect the other one is the guy who's been interviewed who said he was his best friend until he moved away. How either of them could not be on a list preventing them from ever buying guns, I do not know. Looks like the one of them still in town decided to go it alone, and picked the elementary school as a softer target than the middle school.
I hate how these things immediately turn into partisan maneuvering. I'm conservative, but I'm getting tired of anti-gun-control people insisting that guns have nothing to do with it.
It's not that long ago that kids regularly carried their guns to school and hunted on the way there and back home. Many schools had rifle clubs and target shooting for P.E. Guns are actually far less available to most people than the historical norm.
School shootings continue to happen because there are large amounts of people there and no one is allowed to have a gun.
A good guy with a gun turned out to be no help at all.
If there was an armed man on that campus, it turns out he wasn't all that good of a guy. sadly, it's an old story.
But sure, let's disarm law-abiding citizens. I recently saw a tweet from a German, saying "As a German,I don't understand the relationship between guns and freedom..."
The best reply I saw was "As a Jew, I do."
The Germans of that era were wholly invested in the ideas of "Jew privilege", selective Jew, the Jewish "burden", redistributive change, systemic "diversity, inequity and exclusion (DIE)", Mengele clinics, wicked solutions, and, of course, gun control.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.
"I've stayed silent for years as I watched religion and a relationship with God disappear from our society. What has filled the void is sickness, and disregard for human life and civil society."
I agree. I'd say it is the biggest negative societal change since the late 1950s, which change has led to a number of others. The Sermon on the Mount, and indeed, the Gospels, give you a lot to think about. And if you can't handle the Beatitudes, you can grapple with the Ten Commandments. And, what does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
The abortionist suffered from a progressive condition that was clearly visible to everyone. The question is not why he Chose to relieve his social burdens; but, as with many other cases of mass abortion, why no one intervened in the trimesters, years, preceding his Choice. What was the final forcing? Was it depression? Was it anti-depressants (a known forcing of rage in a minority of young men) or another psychotropic drug? Was it social contagion spread during Covid-19, 20, 21, and 22?
Beasts of England said...
Two police (school resource officers) at the school. They heard the gunshots and then set up a perimeter.
************
No doubt they were "trained" by watching every season of Keith Sutherland's "24 hours".
One reason why mental patients were de-institutionalized was that in the Seventies society became aware that there were mental patients who had been imprisoned in institutions since the Thirties, Some of these "mental patients" were deaf, some had been pregnant women on welfare, some were gay and and some were simply somewhat "retarded." The American and British eugenics societies had worked to imprison these types of people for life to prevent them from propagating their kind. This was an enormous scandal when it was discovered in the Seventies and its effects linger to this day, Mental patients: are they mentally disturbed? or are we falsely categorizing a gay man or a woman on welfare? and how does confining them for life help? These questions prevent mentally disturbed people living on the streets from being locked up for more than three days. So - small proposal - the abuses of the Thirties would not have come into being if there had been a program of reiterated testing for real mental illness in place. If there were such a program then mentally ill street people or druggies could be held for longer (not!!!! 40 years) and would get more effective treatment. Allow them to be held for longer as long as they are tested with
and are held with the presumption that they will be released.
(Of course, another part of it all is that in the same decade, drugs were developed which seemed to treat schizophrenia and other mental problems and so these people began to be released with a bottle pills which they merely had to be sane enough to take to be sane.)
Once again, you fall into the trap. Even the 'smart ones' on Althouse. The cold blooded killer is actually the "victim". Rationalize how., if not for society, this cold blooded killer would be working IT at Google, or serving you up delicious coffee with a smile.
Write an expose' on say..8 yr old Elizabeth and her last birthday party. What she wanted to be when she grew up. What her favorite color was....
.....WHAT ABSOLUTE ANGUISH AND DESPAIR HER PARENTS ARE GOING THROUGH, AND WILL FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES
But yea, if only cold blooded killer was loved....
I always wonder if shooters who are motivated by a history of having been bullied consider the worse bullying they will likely face in prison. It's tragic for them (and more so for their victims) that they were unable to imagine a future life free of bullying, in which they could lead a life free of torment. They consign others to death and themselves to a life worse than the one that spurred them on to violence. But, of course, they're not thinking, simply acting out in rage, possibly hoping they will be killed during their spree.
https://twitter.com/AndrewCFollett/status/1529577076419923968
Excellent thread on mass shooting/murders/gun control laws.
Mark said:"Turns out that having an armed police officer at the school did nothing to deter a determined shooter.
A good guy with a gun turned out to be no help at all."
Oh, the shooter stopped killing when? What an idiot.
https://youtu.be/uFNYDVYxAuU
Russell Brand.
I like him.
There are a lot of things that we still don't know about this tragedy. (And a lot of people are making a lot of assumptions about it.) Were the school resource officers armed? If they weren't, that's a major problem. If they were, that's also a major problem because they should have been trying to neutralize the shooter before they did anything else.
Plus, we still have the elephant in the room regarding mental illness and mass murder. In a perfect universe, we would be able to identify a mass murderer before they kill; but just how possible is that?
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.“
Wrong thread, Howard.
I went to the Burgundy Farm school in Alexandria Virginia literally within site of the Washington monument.
In 3rd grade one of my classmates brought in an M3 submachine gun for show and tell. This would have been about 1956.the gun was his father and probly a souvenir from the recent European War or maybe Korea.
OMIGOD!!! A MACHINE GUN!! STATE AND FEDERAL POLICE, EVACUATE THE CITY!!
Umm... No. The teacher, Ms ropshaw, took the gun, racked the slide, verified that it was unloaded, gave it back for the presentation. After which he passed it around so we could all handle it.
The school also had a rifle range where, in 4th grade I learned to shoot a 22 as part of the curriculum.
In 65-66 I did my senior year at Marshall hs in Tysons corner/falls church. Lots of woods around there still at thatime. Kids woul bring rifles to school, keep them in their lockers and go plinking at squirrels after school.
The school also, like most other schools around the country, had a rifle/shooting club and team.
I don't recall any school shootings before columbine. We used to have a normal attitude toward guns.
We need to get that back.
John LGKTQ Henry
I've been wanting to write this somewhere, and it doesn't matter if no one reads it.
People are going to rack their brains and plaintively ask, "Why would someone do something like this?" like they did after Parkland, and Las Vegas, etc.
The short answer is: because he wanted to kill people. Everyone thinks that's not clear enough, that there must be something more.
There is, and here it is. Some people deal with bad situations and choose to hang on, believing it will get better. Most as a matter of fact. People get bullied all the time and suck it up and move on. But some people, for whatever reason, lack the sense of perspective to understand that many things in life are temporary and they think their misery will go on forever. It doesn't help that they do nothing to change their situation.
So they reach a point where they hate themselves, but worse, they see other people every day, moving through their lives with growing confidence and competence, overcoming obstacles, making friends, smiling. They think that should be them, even though they're putting forth no effort. Resentment mixes with hopelessness to form hatred, not just of happy people, but life itself, of existence. Why, they wonder, were they born into a world not only to be miserable but know others are happy?
When they start hating existence, they're ready to kill. If only to wipe the smile of those faces, the ones that mock, even the ones that don't. They just want to cause people to feel the pain they're feeling, and what better way to achieve that than by killing innocent children? You strike at the people who loved life, who thought it was a gift, and wanted to share it. You destroyed those beautiful, beloved receivers of the gift, and in so doing destroyed those who gave the gift. What a twisted, insidious way to strike back. What horrible evil, born of pain and hopelessness. He probably knew, as he was gunning down ten year olds, that the entire country would be talking about him, and he enjoyed it until he was justly gunned down.
It is a shame that law enforcement in those situations is trained to remove the threat. With a little foresight and good aim, the Border Patrol could have incapacitated him, then kneecapped him, and then shot him in the stomach so at least his death could have been an agony instead of a mercy.
I don't know the solution. I don't know if there is a solution.
"I've stayed silent for years as I watched religion and a relationship with God disappear from our society. What has filled the void is sickness, and disregard for human life and civil society."
I agree. I'd say it is the biggest negative societal change since the late 1950s, which change has led to a number of others.
What you are describing is a symptom, and a dangerous one at that. How about comparing it to a non-functioning liver due to alcohol? You're dying because your liver doesn't work. Your liver doesn't work because you drink. In this case the alcohol is diversity.
Studies have shown that the more diverse a community gets, the more trust and consideration break down. So now, not only do mothers let their children run around unruly in the store, they get upset if you tell the kids to behave. (I lived in the era of the neighbors giving me a swat on the butt when I started acting stupid.) We don't live in communities anymore, we live in blocks of houses. I've lived in my house for thirty years. There are people four and five houses down that I've never spoken to. We don't look out for each other anymore because we don't know each other. Take a couple of hours one afternoon and sit in a public spot and take care to note how often people behave like assholes to other peole, and how often they show consideration, and who they show it to.
That's also how kids like this one slip by. It's somebody else's problem. I bet there are dozens of adults who upon hearing the news weren't surprised at all. Yeah, he's creepy, and probably a little dangerous, but I don't want to make waves, and the kid's probably just misunderstood...
Guns didn't kill those children (RIP). What appears to be a monster, driven by demons, did it. A monster we allowed to roam the streets and have access to guns.
"But yea, if only cold blooded killer was loved..."
It's about trying to learn something, in hopes of recognizing and preventing future harm.
"Why do you say that ? A Border Patrol agent saw him crash his truck and followed him. That is who shot and killed the shooter, sadly too late."
He entered the school at 11:30 and died around 1. That Border Patrol agent who saw him before the school took his sweet time to do something about the armed guy walking into a school.
"I've stayed silent for years as I watched religion and a relationship with God disappear from our society."
Religion still seems to be around.
"At issue is sexual predation by Southern Baptist pastors and the further abuse of victims by indifferent and hostile church officials. According to the “Report of the Independent Investigation,” credible accusations of sexual abuse that came to Southern Baptist leaders were routinely ignored to avoid legal liability or were referred back to unprepared local congregations."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/23/southern-baptist-sexual-abuse-culture-of-misogyny/
wendybar cited Tulsi Gabbard's tweet. As much as people don't want schools to become "armed camps", I don't really see an effective alternative. "Sensible gun control" is just a slogan. Banning guns is impossible. "Access to mental health treatment" probably wouldn't help a guy like this unless he were motivated to avoid doing what he did. Raising gun ownership age to 21...would that really have stopped this guy? He bought the first rifle right after his birthday. He knew what he was doing.
Schools as armed camps. Society as an armed camp. This may be where we have to go to prevent mass shootings.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones but...oh fuck it, I'm a gonna kill those little squirts."
Gahrie said...
"It's not that long ago that kids regularly carried their guns to school and hunted on the way there and back home. Many schools had rifle clubs and target shooting for P.E. Guns are actually far less available to most people than the historical norm."
*************
My 1962 Portsmouth, NH high school yearbook has photos of "Rifle Club" members. IOW a school-sanctioned group.
They must have brought their weapons to a designated place, if not on school property, to do whatever their club did.
But for some...unexplained reason...those kids did not go on to become mass murderers.
p.s. : the moronic Mark assumes without evidence that the armed officer at the school aggressively moved to thwart the attack. False construct, Mark.
Gahrie said...
"Studies have shown that the more diverse a community gets, the more trust and consideration break down"
Total Cracker bull shit.
Maybe next you morons will over rule Brown vs The Bd Of Education.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_diversity_makes_us_smarter
https://gbsge.com/en/news/newsroom/newsroom/how-diversity-makes-us-better-stronger-and-more-successful/
https://tcf.org/content/report/how-racially-diverse-schools-and-classrooms-can-benefit-all-students/?agreed=1
I think weird but brilliant Thomas Wictor is right in saying there was only one mass shooting in American history before the mental hospitals were emptied out in the '60s. (New Jersey in the late '40s, with 6-8 dead, if I recall correctly.)
There was also an elementary school massacre twice as deadly as this one (38 students, 6 adults) in Michigan in 1927, but that guy packed the basement of the school with dynamite. (Wikipedia calls it 'Bath school disaster'.) So there were some spectacularly homicidal maniacs who escaped detection until too late, but they were far rarer than today. It's amazing how many modern shooters were obvious lunatics who everyone knew should have been locked up, but we're not allowed to do that any more. Did anyone follow the link I gave at 5:33pm? It looks like the guy in Uvalde (I will not say his name) was one of them.
Well, hopefully the fall of Stare Decisis this term will ease the overturning of Heller, a decision inconceivable when I was in law school.
Meanwhile readers outside the US scratch their heads at the collective inability of Americans to spot the actual reason the US is uniquely plagued by mass shootings.
How about reinstituting the Constitutional concept of a well regulated militia? - Left Bank
Not even you can be this daft.
"Meanwhile readers outside the US scratch their heads at the collective inability of Americans to spot the actual reason the US is uniquely plagued by mass shootings."
Yeah. Because some emo, cross-dressing dude acts on behalf of more than 200 million American gun owners who don't go around shooting up grade-school kids.
Seriously. Fuck you.
cfkane1701 said... at 7:58 pm.
Maybe one of the best posts I've read. And not just on this horrible event.
Think of how many are out there who think this way.
"But yea, if only cold blooded killer was loved..."
It's about trying to learn something, in hopes of recognizing and preventing future harm.
Let us all know your conclusions from your academic exercise. Could be groundbreaking, saving hundreds of lives.
I'm sure the families would love answers someday, but are a tad preoccupied at the moment burying their dead children.
“Religion still seems to be around.”
If it’s followed w/the reverence of Pelosi- it is a noisy gong.
Just like her.
I have some relevant life experience.
First, my father was present at the UT mass shooting in 1966. He graduated and volunteered for the draft in 1967. The groundskeeper who led the cops to the tower entrance got my dad and other students behind cover. My father eventually got a PhD and retired as an 11b in the army reserve.
Despite over 50 years of ever stricter gun control laws this still happens. It happens more often. My father didn't think gun control was the answer.
My life: my parents got divorced when I was young and I moved away from my father.
I had a horrible time in junior high and high school. Constant violence, like real violence, not talk. I was odd and hadn't learned how to act.
I never killed anyone. It didn't occur to me. I went to Chat field HS in Jefferson County near Denver in the early 90s. The neighboring high school is Columbine. The student culture in that area was sick. When Columbine happened, my reaction was sadness but I was not shocked. I got out by moving to live with my father. Life improved.
Dude was 18. He was an adult. School was over. There's no excuse. Fuck him. "Mental illness" isn't a cause of violence. Almost no one murders anyone, let alone that many people, let alone children. My father was shot at, not just by the UT shooter, and I got cut and knocked unconscious. So what? Bad shit happened. That doesn't give anyone the right to hurt anyone.
What I keep seeing in these cases is someone who wasn't told no. I cannot imagine letting my child act like this, or be bullied like this, or grow up like this. I have a son with a significant speech defect who acts oddly. He isn't bullied because I spent the effort to make damn sure he doesn't go to a school where that happens.
And I tell him no and set limits and don't let him sit on the internet. His logins and devices have time limits and his phone has no browser. And I take it at night. There is no social media. I learned that I have to do all this if I'm serious about limiting the damage the culture will do.
He's a great kid and a decent person. His speech is finally progressing. He'll be ok. He makes good choices. That's him.
Mostly, I am a father who will never leave him before I die. Parents have to give a shit.
The mental health thing is a real problem. I don't see an easy solution. I know some mentally ill people that are not dangers to themselves or others that would likely get swept up in forced institutionalizations. And with FBI entrapment, I can see a lot of 'we saved Gov WIhitmer from the lunatic: 'He's never seeing the light of day!' Or all the Jan 6 protestors are mentally ill, need to put them in an asylum! Or this inconvenient wife is really insane (which was a thing in the 1800s).
And then there is CA or the 9th Circuit giving the right to live on public lands (Boise decision). What the hell is the solution?
Despite over 50 years of ever stricter gun control laws this still happens. It happens more often. My father didn't think gun control was the answer.
What country do you live in? If anything, gun control is looser now, and with the ready availability of semi-automatic weapons, much more deadly.
Freder....tell that to the citizens of Chicago which HAS the strictest gun control laws in the country.
Freder Frederson said...
"Despite over 50 years of ever stricter gun control laws this still happens. It happens more often. My father didn't think gun control was the answer.
What country do you live in? If anything, gun control is looser now, and with the ready availability of semi-automatic weapons, much more deadly."
Go try and buy a gun and then get back to us. I'm serious.
"I hate how these things immediately turn into partisan maneuvering. I'm conservative, but I'm getting tired of anti-gun-control people insisting that guns have nothing to do with it."
Well. I'm tired of being told any behavior is permissible and there is no moral right or wrong. It's all conditional. It's all relative. This is what you get. So f*ck off with your moral preening.
I'm waiting for the parent or guardian to chime in with, "But he is such a good boy.".
People, like animals, sometimes go bad. They have to be put down. The men of Uvalde didn't put him down quickly enough.
People, like animals, sometimes go bad. They have to be put down. The men of Uvalde didn't put him down quickly enough.
As a thought experiment, imagine that you could wave a magic wand and instantly disarm the entire civilian population of the US, criminals, law abiding citizens, and crazy people alike. Imagine further that all patrol level police officers were also disarmed (as is the case, I believe, in the UK and China). What would the consequences be? The number of murders would go way down. That’s because guns are very efficient. You’d eliminate the risk of mass shootings by crazy people, although there would probably still be the occasional attacks with knives or bombs. You’d greatly reduce the number of killing committed by criminals and gangs. Ordinary citizens would lose the ability to protect themselves against armed criminals, but there wouldn’t be any criminals armed with guns. Hunters would have to use bows and arrows. Recreational shooters would have to find another hobby.
If I could vote for this alternative, I would. Alas, the transition costs in the real world seem prohibitive to me. I worry about the long period (maybe decades) when ordinary citizens would be disarmed and criminals would not be.
You are witnessing, in real-time, the creation of another fucking victim and the simultaneous casting of a bigoted, uncaring school system as the villain.
Well played.
@farmgirl 7:11pm, I like Russell Brand too, and I appreciate his heartfelt message, but when he started talking about a 'civilization in decline' and expounding on the topic, I couldn't help but reflect that he is precisely the type of person who would satirize / criticize / demean our culture when it was in its supposed heyday. And of course, this type of outsider's rejection of culture is what leads to its ultimate coarsening, desensitization, and loss of moral structure, and collectivism. What does Russell propose to correct this with - what is his buy-in, I wonder?
Maybe if those head-scratching foreigners had an articulate American like Jim to explain things.
A good guy with a gun turned out to be no help at all.
So it was a good guy without a gun who shot the shooter?
"Bad shit happened. That doesn't give anyone the right to hurt anyone."
Uh...no one is arguing that "anyone (has) the right to hurt anyone."
It's terrible you had to endure violence growing up, but you had either external support or internal strength of mind (or both) that allowed you to survive your miserable youth without developing the urge to react violently. You were, essentially, emotionally and mentally healthy. Not everyone has the internal strength and/or the external support that you had, or that many do have.
The question is: why do some tormented few, (tormented either from others or simply internally, or both) explode into homicidal violence, when many more others, equally troubled (or moreso), do not? How can people at risk be identified? How can intervention help? How can such acts of violence be stopped? (This is the question that leads to the to and fro over greater vs. less gun controls, but it should encompass finding means to prevent troubled persons from getting to the point of acting out.)
Obviously the answer is stricter gun control, if not outright gun confiscation. Because not only is it important to disarm the people who don't kill other people; but it's important to give more power to the biggest, baddest, bloodiest gun-slinger of them all--Der Staat.
Blogger Readering said...
" Well, hopefully the fall of Stare Decisis this term will ease the overturning of Heller, a decision inconceivable when I was in law school.
Meanwhile readers outside the US scratch their heads at the collective inability of Americans to spot the actual reason the US is uniquely plagued by mass shootings.'
As I understand it Ginny Thomas is advising her husband on reviewing Heller as we speak.
." You’d greatly reduce the number of killing committed by criminals and gangs."
No you wouldn't.
Mutaman's so cute with the cherry-picked "studies" that purport to find value in the very exact thing that those doing the studies value. They're classic sociological BS where the ideology determines the study results.
Here's a clue for you Muta: It is now all the rage to publish studies that show that there are no measurable positive effects for diversity (such as the "business case" studies from the past few decades) and it's now "forget the business case, racism in the name of diversity is just the RIGHT THING TO DO".
Anthropology has shown over and over and over that increased diversity reduces community cohesion. If you listen to the diversitists, the decreased cohesion is the PURPOSE of pushing diversity. Behind the slogans of "us" and "we" and "rainbows" is a push to break down community cohesion in favor of state control.
TheOne Who Is Not Obeyed : 2+2 =5
Mutaman: That's not true-2+2=4 and here's a study that shows it.
TheOne Who Is Not Obeyed: Cherry-picked "studies". Anthropology has shown over and over and over that 2+2 = 5. Of course I'm not going to cite anything supporting that statement, you'll just have to take my word for it.
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