US Connecticut Shooting

Different motivation, same craziness.

For mass murders like a lot of school and workplace shootings, they seem to have a long period of planning and fantasizing. Remove guns as a factor, and I do honestly think they'd try to accomplish deaths via a different method - for example, automobiles.

But I do think our culture makes guns very attractive as a method of revenge, and of empowering individuals, and that does contribute greatly to the amount of gun violence. Guns are cool, to some degree, or at least that's the impression you'd get by watching mass media.

Then again, mass murders are relatively rare. For regular homicides, domestic violence and crime seems to be comorbid factors. If you look at domestic homicides, a history of violence is frequent. If you look at non-domestic homicides, there's a pretty good chance that either the murderer or victim has a criminal record. Fixing that is going to be partially cultural, and partly legislative. As I said before, legalize drugs - it removes a lot of money from criminal enterprises (and if you're for gun control, the same networks that smuggles drugs can easily smuggle weapons). Then attack the culture.
 
mlp said:
Is the person who kills his/her SO because the SO is leaving him/her mentally ill? How about the adult who slams a child's head against the wall to stop the child from crying? Isn't pretty much every murderer mentally ill by your definition?
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I think a lot of them are. Most parents don't kill their children. Most people don't kill their partners. Most people don't snap during a road rage incident and kill someone.

It's not a healthy action to kill someone because you are mad at them.
 
Freesia said:
I am so sorry to read that MLP (((((((hug)))))) though a hug seems futile. I cant imagine what it must have been like to have had these things happen, especially in such a short space of time.
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Thanks, Freesia. In the case of my vet and my friend, I was on the periphery. In the case of my stepson and his mother, I was definitely not in the first tier of those affected - I was only his stepmother. There is no doubt but that the highest price was paid by my stepdaughter, and then by her maternal grandmother. That old woman's hands were so cold, all the day of the joint funeral, and she just kept shaking. I just held her hands and tried to give her some warmth. And then my ex, and my stepdaughter's maternal aunt and uncle.... Talking my stepdaughter out of her desire to look at the crime scene photos when we met with the police, cleaning up the rooms in which they died....packing up their possessions...my sister helped with that, and we were both so conscious of what an invasion of their privacy that was, and how much both of them would have hated anyone going through their things....

Other than those days, I have almost no memory of that year, other than of the police coming to the house to inform us, and then the subsequent days; everything else about that year is like a faded dream, all the details missing.

So, I can imagine some of what these families are facing, but I know it's much, much worse than what I have experienced.
 
das_nut said:
I think a lot of them are. Most parents don't kill their children. Most people don't kill their partners. Most people don't snap during a road rage incident and kill someone.

It's not a healthy action to kill someone because you are mad at them.
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I think that people tend to forget how thin the veneer of civilization actually is - it's why atrocities are committed in war, why there are bloodbaths such as in Rwanda. It happens on the individual level, on the mob level, on the national level. It's part of humans - we're not nearly as civilized as the sheltered among us tend to believe.
 
mlp said:
I think that people tend to forget how thin the veneer of civilization actually is - it's why atrocities are committed in war, why there are bloodbaths such as in Rwanda. It happens on the individual level, on the mob level, on the national level. It's part of humans - we're not nearly as civilized as the sheltered among us tend to believe.
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I do honestly believe that it depends on the person and the culture.

It's hard to explain such a wide disparity in historical and contemporary murder rates otherwise.

Of course, if you're right and I'm wrong, that's one hell of an argument for the 2nd amendment.
 
If U.S. society were to collapse, I imagine it would be in much the same manner as the USSR. States separating and declaring independence, not 300 million individuals hiding in their houses trying to protect their potatoes from their neighbors across the street. Considering that, I also sometimes feel the need to remind people that the federally controlled U.S. Army, all jokes aside, is composed of individuals who are just as diverse as the country itself, not mindless robots who would be willing to go to war with their home states. If the country fractured, the military would likely fracture right along with it. And then there's the National Guard, which is already state controlled to begin with. A military of this nature would, thus, probably be more of a threat to the central government than to the people in such a catastrophic collapse.

That's not to say I see it happening in the near future, I'm just theorizing.
 
das_nut said:
Of course, if you're right and I'm wrong, that's one hell of an argument for the 2nd amendment.
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No, because my argument is that, in those instances when the veneer cracks, it's best to not have an easy mechanism of killing at hand. Assuming that everyone is armed, the people who are around the person whose veneer cracks are always going to be at a disadvantage, whether it's by a split second or by minutes. The only way Bonnie would have lived if she had been armed is if she had the gun in her hand when her son walked through the door, and then only if her first shots had been better than his. The same thing for the young vet, and for the road rage victim. The element of surprise always works in favor of the attacker.

There are much worse things than dying, IMO, and one of them is living in fear.
 
yakherder said:
If U.S. society were to collapse, I imagine it would be in much the same manner as the USSR. States separating and declaring independence, not 300 million individuals hiding in their houses trying to protect their potatoes from their neighbors across the street. Considering that, I also sometimes feel the need to remind people that the federally controlled U.S. Army, all jokes aside, is composed of individuals who are just as diverse as the country itself, not mindless robots who would be willing to go to war with their home states. If the country fractured, the military would likely fracture right along with it. And then there's the National Guard, which is already state controlled to begin with. A military of this nature would, thus, probably be more of a threat to the central government than to the people in such a catastrophic collapse.

That's not to say I see it happening in the near future, I'm just theorizing.
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Agreed.
 
That all sounds so awful, MLP. I wish that some others who promote guns knew more about how people and their families are affected by shootings. Perhaps then they might reconsider their position.
 
mlp said:
The third story:
A middle aged friend was driving home in the early evening. The highway was congested enough that traffic was stop and go. Another driver got angry because he thought my friend had cut him off. He got out of his vehicle, walked up to my friend’s car, and shot him dead.
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My friend's husband had an argument with another driver recently and the man went back to his van and pulled out a machete and waved it around but basically calmed down and walked away, if guns were more widely owned in the UK and the man went back to his van to pull out a gun I think the story would have had a different ending.:( I definitely agree with Mlp that most killers do not have a mental illness, people kill for all types of reasons.
 
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mlp said:
No, because my argument is that, in those instances when the veneer cracks, it's best to not have an easy mechanism of killing at hand.
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Yet there's plenty of easy mechanisms for killing at hand. A knife. A blunt object. A gun. An automobile. Seems hard to get rid of them all.

You mention the Rwandan Genocide. Done mostly with machetes, IIRC.

Remember, the death toll of government is in the millions.
 
mlp said:
I think that people tend to forget how thin the veneer of civilization actually is - it's why atrocities are committed in war, why there are bloodbaths such as in Rwanda. It happens on the individual level, on the mob level, on the national level. It's part of humans - we're not nearly as civilized as the sheltered among us tend to believe.
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Having seen the LA riots back in '92 first hand, I totally agree. The fabric of civilization that we take so much for granted can and does unravel at an alarmingly fast rate under certain circumstances. Rule of law becomes suspended and it's every person for him or herself. Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do to survive.

My first experience with death was when a high school friend was shot dead, execution style. Wrong place, wrong time. Not sure what part mental illness played; it was simply a business transaction to the perpetrators (none of whom were ever convicted). Well, I've been stridently anti gun ever since, but admittedly I am biased.
 
MLP I, too am sorry about your experiences with gun violence.

mlp said:
Guns just make it so ****ing easy to kill out of a momentary rage. And I think it's a small percentage of people who aren't capable of such killing rages, given just the *right* confluence of events.
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I don't buy that. I don't even like most people and it's never crossed my mind to kill someone. If my life or a someone else's was being threatened I could, but not because they cut me off in traffic or drove 35 on the highway (which infuriates me to no end! :p)

As for psychiatrists being able to pick them out, just so you know, I don't get all my info from SVU. :p I was going off of what I've read in various real-life stories of various psychos. Though you are correct, the smart ones can fool people.

Maybe we should just ban men isntead of guns, because it seems nearly all of these violent attacks are committed by males. ;)
 
Wolfie said:
Maybe we should just ban men isntead of guns, because it seems nearly all of these violent attacks are committed by males. ;)
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We mustnt forget though that his mother was the gun enthusiast in this situation and played a big factor in what happened. And it was her guns that were used. And her encouragement for him to experiment with the guns even though he was a troubled person.
 
Thanks everyone. I didn't relate those stories because I want or need sympathy; those four deaths occurred almost twenty years ago, and I wasn't even at the center of those most intensely affected. They are not the only people I've known who have been murdered with a gun, and who would be alive but for the ease with which people can kill using a gun. There was the colleague who was shot and killed in a courtroom on the day of a final divorce hearing, together with his client and the court deputy, by the client's husband. (That's when the county put metal detectors in the court house.) The uncle and grandmother of a close friend, in another murder/suicide. And others.

IMO, almost everyone is capable of murder; it's just the triggering events that vary from person to person, and it's hardly ever one thing. The guy in the road rage incident, for example - on any other day in his life, he might not have done that. Perhaps his boss had been riding his *** for months, he found out his wife was cheating on him and that someone he loved was dying, and all that compressed into one moment of fury when he perceived my friend had cut him off, and at that moment, there was a gun at hand. And more than just the one life was destroyed.
 
Of course, I'd say that it's gonna take more than that for your average person to kill someone.
 

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