Mass shooting

[Bonam]

Setting 21 as the legal age to consume alcohol results in less drunk driving fatalities

Got any data on that? The US has double the drunk driving fatalities per capita as Canada (6 per 100,000 in the US and 3 per 100,000 in Canada) despite the higher drinking age.

[guyser]

Interesting. When I turned 21 the drinking age in Canada was still 21. With all the emphasis that has been put on drunk driving, I think today's kids probably behave better than we did for the most part. Designated drivers were for sissies.

I happen to agree.

There is zero tolerance under the law for drivers aged 21 and under. Any alcohol consumption before driving (On) results in a loss of licence and vehicle. Even if your daughter were to drive to a party, drink and spend the night, she could easily get popped by the police the next day. I know for a fact on that one.

Also, any accompanying driver for a G1 must remain alcohol free. No calling Junior to drive drunk dad home.

[Guest Derek L]

Didn’t see this coming:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/12/19/nra-sees-surge-in-membership-after-connecticut-school-shooting/

The National Rifle Association, while staying mostly quiet in the immediate aftermath of the mass shooting in Connecticut, has registered an average of 8,000 new members a day since the tragedy, an NRA source told Fox News.

While this broadly aligns with trends seen after similar incidents in the past, the surge in membership this time is said to dwarf past trends.

And this:

Sources close to the issue had earlier alerted Fox News that the National Rifle Association would soon start to "push back" against gun-control proponents.

Following the shooting at the Connecticut elementary school, gun-control advocates immediately launched a campaign to pressure Congress and the Obama administration into enacting stricter regulation of guns and rifles.

It’s telling that of both sides of the gun control debate, the NRA has been respectful and quite for the first week on the issue, well the anti-gun folks started trampling all over the victims graves right out of the gate for political expediency………….The whole thing reminds of this pic & caption I got in an email a few months ago:

[Guest American Woman]

Got any data on that? The US has double the drunk driving fatalities per capita as Canada (6 per 100,000 in the US and 3 per 100,000 in Canada) despite the higher drinking age.

Where are you getting your data? U.S. - "In 2010, the rate of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities per 100,000 population was 3.3" I'm having a difficult time finding stats for Canada.

Regarding Canada's statistics: "Of all the young drinking drivers who are killed or seriously injured, the smallest proportion is 16 years of age. The largest proportion is 19 years of age."

Also regarding Canada's statistics: "Drinking drivers aged 20-24 years contribute significantly to the impaired driving problem. During 2003-2005, this age group accounted for more than 20% of drinking drivers who got into a fatal crash, yet they made up only 8% of licensed drivers." So apparently experience that comes with earlier drinking hasn't made Canada's statistics different from from the U.S.'s in that age group.

http://www.centuryco...ving-statistics

http://www.madd.ca/m...statistics.html

[Black Dog]

It’s telling that of both sides of the gun control debate, the NRA has been respectful and quite for the first week on the issue, well the anti-gun folks started trampling all over the victims graves right out of the gate for political expediency………….

Yeah because staying silent when the status quo is on your side is not a political move at all.

[WIP]

Maybe it's just my imagination, but this thread seems to have devolved into a collective circle jerk by the gun lobby!

If we're going to discuss mass shootings and school shootings in particular, there seems to be two diverging opinions from left and right as to the underlying contributing factors besides easy access to guns. First, from the right:

Religious Right Reacts to Sandy Hook Shooting by Blaming Lack of Government-Dictated School Prayer

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Monday, 12/17/2012 12:00 pm

Bryan Fischer

,

Mike Huckabee

and

James Dobson

’s claims that the school shooting in Connecticut represents God’s judgment on the U.S. are no anomalies. Indeed, many other Religious Right commentators have also claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting is part of divine punishment.

David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network

defended

Fischer and Huckabee’s statements that the prohibition on state-mandated school prayer was responsible for the shootings:........

and that's as far as we need to go. Anyone who needs more can follow the link to Rightwing Watch. Personally, I favour the hypothesis advanced by sociologist/OpEd News blogger - Dennis Loo, which is also a call to the left to start pushing back against the radical right/ libertarian agenda. A few excerpts from a lengthy blog post:

Extreme Individualism, Shredding the Social Fabric, and the Sandy Hook Massacre

Nancy Lanza appears to have embodied at least some of the attributes so highly touted by those who have the greatest fear of crime and who seek the comfort of very white, very rich communities, away from the big cities with all of their frightening heterogeneity, in big houses, on big lots, with lots of guns. The very things that she thought would protect her were her and her son's undoing. Her stockpiling of weapons of protection and her enthusiastic training of her son Adam to use those weapons were not used against threatening strangers but instead turned on her and they made Adam's psychotic break so very deadly, not just to her but to twenty-six others, including twenty children, in a school just two miles away, filled with the very people that Nancy Lanza regarded as her own. This is what makes Columbine and the Aurora Massacre resonate so much with the Sandy Hook Massacre.

Why is a parent who knows that her son is profoundly impaired socially, lacking in the most rudimentary skills of social interaction and empathy, who as a child had to be monitored constantly because he might do something harmful, teaching him how to use semi-automatic weapns?.............................

As I wrote in the Preface to my book,

Globalization and the Demolition of Society

:

"Using market forces and individualism as the organizers for economic and political affairs is a recipe for ever-expanding inequities and the shredding of the social fabric, leading inevitably to myriad disasters on the individual, regional, and global level. It will not do to attempt to mildly modify this [neoliberal/free market fundamentalist] invasion, gesturing and gesticulating at the margins. The response to this assault that is occurring on every conceivable level requires an equally comprehensive retort, an alternative vision for our society." ............................................

There are far too many people with life stories like Holmes (

referring to the Aurora Massacre

) to realistically envision even stricter gun laws pertaining to them. Such signs of social disconnectedness might trigger the need for counseling at the very best (which would have, even if implemented, questionable usefulness). Preventive measures could only work reasonably in a society that was startlingly different than the one that we now have. That is to say, it would have to be a society in which the collective interest and welfare were paramount over the current principle that individual freedom -- particularly to exploit others and to ignore others if it's not in one's own personal material (i.e., selfish) interest -- are touted as the be all and end all of existence.

Second, the proximity of this mass killing spree to the Columbine massacre, within twenty miles, is not coincidental. Colorado (along with places like Arizona) are the destination and residence of choice for many who are part of white flight from urban areas. Columbine itself concentrates whites seeking "refuge" from minorities and urban areas, thinking that they were or are finding safe haven, when in fact the level of alienation, anti-intellectualism, and a Wild West vigilantism is palpable. One commenter "JQ" on

The New York Times'

online edition describes the situation in Colorado as

"There is a subculture in America that seems closer to the surface, seems to involve more of the population, in some places than in others. No place is immune, of course, but having lived for a long time in New England and now in Colorado, I have a vague sense of unease here, especially when I venture forth outside my enclave of highly educated affluence.

Third, and most importantly, these incidents of people "going postal" are intimately and directly related to the example being set by those in authority and by the forces of enmity, solitariness, and scapegoating that are at full volume over the last several decades in the U.S. and the world. This is in certain respects a distinctly U.S. problem in that these kinds of mass killing sprees are concentrated here, with ready access to and the celebration of the military and paramilitary gear that Holmes sported. But it is not exclusively American because it is larger than that. While the NRA is a major culprit in this they are not the exclusive perpetrator. In China, for example, there has been a spate of incidents involving middle-aged men who are so profoundly disaffected and abused that they have expressed their alienation by killing sprees of young Chinese children.[1]

The most important parallel here is not between the depiction of violence and battles between good and evil present in contemporary mass entertainment such as the film "Dark Knight Rising." There is a connection in a broad and diffuse sense and of course, Mr. Holmes did not choose his get-up and target venue coincidentally. But one can readily imagine a mass murderer choosing Disneyland instead. Playgrounds and day-care centers are where the incidents in China have been. The connection between filmic and video game presentations of violence are connected to these murderous rampages only in the sense that entertainment and individual and group behaviors are both reactions to and reflective of larger social, economic, political, and ideological forces............................................

Aggressive war. Unjust and immoral occupation in which U.S. soldiers are routinely instructed by their superiors to "shoot first and ask questions later." Free fire zones. Torture of innocents. Indefinite detention. Drone attacks. Breaking down Afghan civilians' homes' doors in the dead of the night and then one by one, gunning down the families inside - men, women, and children - then covering their bodies with blankets and setting them afire.

These are not the actions of lone, mad, pathological individuals; this is U.S. policy. This is how empires behave and think.

Here is U.S. style liberation. Here is yet another fine example of the exceptional character of the U.S. military and U.S. government.

Obama, after the Aurora Massacre, issued a statement saying, "Such violence, such evil is senseless; it's beyond reason." Mitt Romney called it "a few moments of evil."

It's not senseless. It's not a "few moments" of evil....................................

When countries' leaders tell everyone in their nation that "our" nation's lives are more precious than the lives of non-citizens, justifying killing others in the name of protecting (e.g., American) lives, then what's the difference morally when an individual such as James Holmes decides that his life is more important than the lives of others in a theatre? How is our leaders' ultranationalism different in kind from Holmes' narcissism?

When individuals lose their connection to others, those isolated individuals are liable to lash out at others to establish their own lost presence, to affirm their "importance," and to prove their existence by anti-social, belligerent, and even violent means.

When nations are led by those who falsely claim that the nation is separate, apart, and superior, with no necessary inter-connection between nations, that this great nation may rape and plunder because that proves its Darwinian fitness, and when these authorities further ignorantly assert that those even within their nation-states are not all of a common fabric, where all rise and fall together, but instead winners and losers, with the winners entitled to treat the losers as objects to be exploited and discarded, and that this callousness even proves the virtue of this greatest of all nations, this freedom to be free of the inextricably intertwined, then the levees are breached and the floodwaters will follow.

[WWWTT]

[/size][/sup]

So I'll just stick to the most important aspect the 'freedom to drink alcohol' and 'freedom to own guns' - and that's that both "freedoms" result in the same danger to innocent people in society - yet we have some who are appalled by gun deaths as they minimize the other. I'm sure parents who have lost children to drunk drivers wouldn't be impressed.

Ah yes,but you are sidestepping a big point!

And that is the roles of cars,alcohol and firearms.

Cars and transportation are not going away anytime soon,and if they did our economy would tank!

If alcohol became illegal,then everyone (except me) would become criminals in their persute for a drink.

But would reform of gun control have the same effect on our economy and our society?

WWWTT

[Guest]

But would reform of gun control have the same effect on our economy and our society?

WWWTT

Gun control would have no effect on anything. As someone already pointed out, there are close to 300000000 guns in the US. What kind of gun control do you advocate in order to make a difference?

Making it harder to get AK47s and M16s? That'll do the trick.

[Wilber]

Gun control would have no effect on anything. As someone already pointed out, there are close to 300000000 guns in the US. What kind of gun control do you advocate in order to make a difference?

Making it harder to get AK47s and M16s? That'll do the trick.

Guess they're screwed.

[Guest]

I think so. It's like climate change. What will be done won't help, and there's no will to do what will help.

Sorry for all the wills.

[Wilber]

I think so. It's like climate change. What will be done won't help, and there's no will to do what will help.

Sorry for all the wills.

Too bad there are no wills where they are really needed.

[eyeball]

Gun control would have no effect on anything. As someone already pointed out, there are close to 300000000 guns in the US. What kind of gun control do you advocate in order to make a difference?

Making it harder to get AK47s and M16s? That'll do the trick.

Controlling the manufacture of ammo including the movement and trade in precursor materials, moulds and presses etc would have an impact. We'll never get all the guns but I bet we could render so many guns useless by controlling the ammo they use that it would make a lot of the difference you're looking for.

Bullets are for guns as gas is for cars. There'd be a few who might be able to make their own gas but like homegrown bullet makers they'd also stand out like sore thumbs.

We can worry about seizing the chairs and ladders that mass murderers use later.

[bush_cheney2004]

....Bullets are for guns as gas is for cars. There'd be a few who might be able to make their own gas but like homegrown bullet makers they'd also stand out like sore thumbs.

Stick to nets and treble hooks...you obviously have no idea how easy it is to manufacture ammunition at home, re-using "precursor" materials. You should like that...homemade ammo is "green".

[Guest]

Controlling the manufacture of ammo including the movement and trade in precursor materials, moulds and presses etc would have an impact. We'll never get all the guns but I bet we could render so many guns useless by controlling the ammo they use that it would make a lot of the difference you're looking for.

Bullets are for guns as gas is for cars. There'd be a few who might be able to make their own gas but like homegrown bullet makers they'd also stand out like sore thumbs.

We can worry about seizing the chairs and ladders that mass murderers use later.

That's what I meant when I said "no will" in my reply to Wilber. It's possible, but it won't happen.

[bush_cheney2004]

That's what I meant when I said "no will" in my reply to Wilber. It's possible, but it won't happen.

People making this suggestion are the same ones that say controlling illegal drugs is impossible.

[Wilber]

People making this suggestion are the same ones that say controlling illegal drugs is impossible.

Perhaps it is impossible to control guns in the US but other countries have found it quite possible. Nothing is 100% effective but they have done it and it works.

[Guest]

People making this suggestion are the same ones that say controlling illegal drugs is impossible.

Controlling illegal drugs is impossible. Unless you legalize them.

Edit> Just reread your post with the right emphasis. Get it now.

Edited December 21, 2012 by bcsapper

[eyeball]

Stick to nets and treble hooks...you obviously have no idea how easy it is to manufacture ammunition at home, re-using "precursor" materials. You should like that...homemade ammo is "green".

People making this suggestion are the same ones that say controlling illegal drugs is impossible.

People who point this out are loath to stop trying.

I have no doubt making your own ammo is as easy as making your own fishing hooks but I also know those who do are as few and far between as the ammo makers. Controlling the manufacture of ammo would have an impact on the vast majority of gun owners almost immediately.

[bush_cheney2004]

I have no doubt making your own ammo is as easy as making your own fishing hooks but I also know those who do are as few and far between as the ammo makers. Controlling the manufacture of ammo would have an impact on the vast majority of gun owners almost immediately.

Sure....look at how many pot/crack heads can't find any dope to buy. Scarce as hens teeth.

[eyeball]

Yes but look at how law-abiding gun owners are compared to crack addicts.

If gun/ammo control as many would seemingly have us believe is best defined as a right vs left issue, I'm betting that when the state finally and forever says no to guns that the vast majority of you will default to your usual position towards it's authority - which is buns-up kneeling usually.

[bush_cheney2004]

I'm betting that when the state finally and forever says no to guns....

Guns...unlike fish...are a constitutional right in the U.S.

[eyeball]

What about the right to ammunition? I understand there is a fair bit of pedantry involved in interpreting exactly what the constitution says or means - is the word ammunition even in the constitution?

Fish mostly fall under state control and if the right of a state to govern things are dealt with through the constitution then fish, one way or another do fall within the constitution's reach.

[bush_cheney2004]

What about the right to ammunition? I understand there is a fair bit of pedantry involved in interpreting exactly what the constitution says or means - is the word ammunition even in the constitution?

Ammunition is not so enumerated...neither is gun powder, cotton wadding, or lead slugs.

Fish mostly fall under state control and if the right of a state to govern things are dealt with through the constitution then fish, one way or another do fall within the constitution's reach.

Not for First Nations.

[eyeball]

That's right, it is your constitution after all.

[WWWTT]

What will be done won't help, and there's no will to do what will help.

Yes I pretty much agree here with you on this one.

I even think it's kind of pathetic when the news broadcasts start listing the names of the victims and people start saying things like "we have to start focusing on the victims and not the perpertrators".Like as if not mentioning the murderers name will somehow prevent any future slaughters from happening or it was the media that was a catylist for these crimes?!?!?

It's obvious that the US has some serious issues with health care,crime/justice,military spending,education and infrastructure.

I believe that they have come to the point where they do not even know where to start.

WWWTT