A gunman has opened fire on a council meeting in the US city of St Louis, Missouri, killing five people before being shot dead, authorities have said. .....
another day, another random mass shooting in a public place... it seems like there's been one of these every couple days or so, lately. what the hell is going on in this country?
A fair question. We've also just had shooting sprees in Los Angeles, Louisiana, Mountain View. RIP to all those. Sad times. Hopefully spring comes soon.
We've let a small minority of kooks convince us that we have to give away our civil rights and our real security to focus on people who wear turbans while the more likely threat to each of our lives comes from the fact that we let every lunatic who wants one have as many guns as they want. And the answer to this that the kooks come up with? Why, it's MORE GUNS, of course. Oh, and you can add the six poor women who were shot execution-style in a womens cloithng store in suburban Chicago to the list. Thankfully, one of them lived so hopefully they'll get the asshole who did it.
There was another one with this woman (school teacher) shooting a couple people somewhere south, I think Louisiana.
In a note on the coverage... the shooter was universally listed in reports as having the nickname "Cookie".Sounds like a nice guy,right? The surviving reporter was interviewed by NBC and during the interview clearly pronounced the shooter's nic as "Kooky".Sounds a little more dangerous,no? Maybe it's a Missouri-Missourah pronounciation thing,but if the media can't even transcribe a guy's name right,I don't know why we trust them on anything else.
It was here. Female student shot her teacher and another student, then killed herself. She was upset about her grades. WTF?
No fan of the pro-gun logic, I - but what can, at this stage of the game, be incontrovertibly presented as a more realistic and desirable path? The point at which the US could seriously consider legislating to reduce the amount of firearms in circulation or access to them passed decades ago. Even if the political will existed (and it clearly doesn't), I don't get what you'd do to make a genuine difference, other than fairly tokenistic stuff like banning AK-47's and whatnot. And by "I don't get" I mean I don't know because I'm not close enough to the issue, as it just doesn't exist in my country. I'm aware that you could up checks and controls, increase waiting times, etc. But what can you do that really stops people reaching for a gun if they've run out of patience with life itself and want to make this sort of last, messy and brutal statement?
Michael Moore p!sses a lot of people off with his movies, but it was fascinating to see him go up north to Canada (in "Bowling for Columbine") where there are millions of guns (mostly for hunting i guess) but an extremely low amount of gun killings. Even in Windsor which is a stone's throw from Detroit, they might have a handful a yr. And kids play the same video games and watch the same movies BTW. The Newark police superintendent was gleeful this week that there hadn't been a killing in a whole TWENTY-FOUR DAYS! WOO-HOO!
There's plenty of people with hunting rifles in Canada, but it's not easy to buy a handgun. You have to join a gun club, pass a safety course and prove you're not crazy, and then you get a license for the gun. (Even hunting rifles now require license & registration.) Some handguns that are legal in the US are banned outright in Canada. And you can forget about carrying a handgun around with you unless you're a cop. Only 450,000 Canadians out of 32 million people are licensed to own restricted firearms like handguns. (6.5 million have regular firearm licenses.) As a result, many disputes that might end in a shooting in the U.S. -- domestic incidents, nightclub brawls, road rage -- don't become deadly in Canada. While murder rates are lower in Canada across the board, firearm homicide rates are much, much lower. Unfortunately, due to the proximity of Canada to the U.S., there are still more firearm deaths per capita in Canada than there are in Europe or Japan -- largely due to gang activity. But it's a good bet that if the U.S. had the kind of gun control laws that Canada has, crazy Missouri man and Virginia Tech psycho would not have been able to get handguns so easily, and their victims might still be alive. That of course will never happen, since we all know the fourth and most powerful branch of the American government is the National Rifle Association, which like some kind of pagan god demands the sacrifice of thousands of innocent people every year at its altar. By the way, Michael Moore is full of sh*t. The most factual movie he ever made was Canadian Bacon.
Ive become convinced that the second amendment fetish is cover for the destruction of the Fourth, What with 'the safety of the Officer' being held higher than the privacy of the Citizen and all.