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More Sickening News

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Post by greg »

Oh no. This is just after the news of that Portland shopping mall shooting, which was nothing in comparison to this. Topics like this usually degenerate into debates over gun control laws and gun bans, but that is oversimplistic and really completely misses the point. Crystal meth, illegal immigration, and prostitution are also banned, yet America still has a problem with those. American society has just rotten to the core. The United States can't even prevent people from walking across the border from Mexico, let alone stuff that they carry with them.

It just makes me glad to be raising my child in Japan. However, sick things can happen here too. I was living in Himeji when about 11 years ago, some man walked onto the campus of an elementary school in Osaka with a knife and started poking holes in lots of the children, and several died. The problem is that guns makes killing more efficient and effortless. So, occasionally there are school murders in Japan too. A few years ago, there was one girl who had posted some gossip about another girl online, and that girl took her to an empty classroom and slit her throat from behind with a box cutter. Still, mass murders like this seems to be one of America's specialties, unfortunately.

I'm interested in learning the psychological profile of the 20 year old murderer. I'm sure he fit the profile of a kid disenfranchised with society, distanced from his divorced parents, no friends, obsessed with murder and violence, etc.
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I've spent most of my life sticking up for gun rights, but not any more. America needs to realize it has a serious problem with guns and gun violence and the way it's being dealt with. As in, it is not.

Of course, the paid shills of the NRA are already crying that it's not the right time to talk about guns. It wasn't a good time after that football player shot his wife and himself, it wasn't a good time after the mall shooting, it wasn't a good time after the guy shot up the movie theater. It's NEVER a good time for these people, because there's ALWAYS some kind of nonsensical gun massacre going on in the United States.

I'm sick of the debate being controlled by the right-wing lunatics in the gun lobby, I'm sick of these haters and waterheads hiding behind a Constitution they can barely read (hint, it involves a 'well regulated militia') and whipping up fear just to sell more guns and ammo, which merely sets the stage for yet another gun massacre, that they can claim means it's "not the right time" to talk about Americans dying.

I'm from the South, I've owned firearms, I've shot at a competitive level, I've had many a heated debate with well-meaning leftys who don't think any private citizens should own any guns at any time for any reason. I think guns are awesome and I think America has a real problem with them. Something has to be done.
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Yeah, I look at it from both sides of the issue myself as well. According to this AP article, he had a "personality disorder" and was "remote." Apparently he was a thin little gothic shitbird too. Two big warning signs right there. Being remote isn't a bad thing, I guess, and personality disorders seem to have proliferated quite a lot over the years. I don't care for Michael Moore because he's a lying hack and I disagreed with a lot of what he did in the movie, but his basic message in Bowling for Columbine is correct: America has given itself over to a pervasive culture of violence. Americans mutilate their bodies like crazy, listen to violent music, play violent video games, watch disgustingly violent movies, etc. Not one single factor really can be proved to cause this sort of thing, but I think it's just the prevalent culture of cynicism and emotional detachment from each other. One of America's greatest ideals is the sense of personal freedom and liberty, but Americans have allowed that ideal to become distorted and perverted to the point where their own pursuit of happiness takes precedence over anyone else's. We've stopped realizing that my liberty ends where yours begins. A few years ago, I had unwillingly initiated a feud between me and my neighbors when I asked my neighbor to keep their six constantly barking dogs quiet. "You can't tell me to keep my dogs quiet! I'll sue you, derp-a-derp derp." Americans just don't give a shit about each other anymore. Our comedy mostly revolves around cynicism and belittling others, and we just do not know how to get along with each other anymore. Add to that the type of stuff I listed above, add in constant divorce and broken homes, tons of drugs and the violence and burglary that stems from that, the dehumanization and objectification of women, and tons of other crap I'm too tired to think of right now... it's a wonder that this sort of thing doesn't happen more.

Here in Japan, people like this just end up killing themselves. I live a short car trip away from the infamous "suicide forest" even where people go to kill themselves. It's sad, but it says something. Sure, there are incidents like the Akihabara stabbing a few years ago, but for the most part, people here internalize things more. They kill themselves rather than lashing out at others and committing mass murder.

Anyhow, I guess that's all the rant from me for the time being. I swear, I can't stand goths. I hate their stupid fake black hair, infected piercings, shitty music, their disgusting bloodletting fetishes, and their rotten attitudes. It's about time that is no longer tolerated as an alternative lifecycle and start treating it as a personality malfunction or something.
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Re: More Sickening News

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They can make as many laws as they want, but the problem is the people. What a different world this would be if people would just learn to love each other...
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I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here, but one of the reasons Japan doesn't have the kind of America-style gun massacres is because of Japan's restrictive gun laws. Japanese people are quite capable of committing all kinds of horrific crimes against themselves and others. Most people are, really; everywhere and throughout history. People kind of suck.

What sets America apart is its gun culture; and by that I mean a dedicated marketing campaign by the major gun manufacturers to sell firearms to people based on whatever mythology is currently in favor: the 'wild west' which was largely a creation of advertisers, fear of crime, racial tension, distrust of the government; they've all been used to sell firearms. The gun manufacturers have an expensive and powerful lobby that ensures Congress receives a blizzard of mail every time anybody even thinks about restricting firearms in any way. This lobby exists to protect the profits of the gun industry at the expense of the American public.

After a century of this propaganda, America has become a country with 270 million privately-owned firearms. That's 8.8 guns for every 10 people. America is ranked first among private gun ownership: Germany is 4th, Mexico is 7th, Canada is 12th, Brazil is 8th, England is 22nd, Japan is 64th.

America is also far and away number one in firearm deaths. Like most other violent crime, the numbers have been decreasing steadily since 1990, but there are still way more firearm deaths in America than in any other nation. I mean, I work with a guy from Somalia, and even he is asking me what the hell is going on in the United States. That's what we've come to, guys from SOMALIA are going 'what the hell, Dave?'

Of course, there are fifty states, most of them have their own gun laws, and municipalities can set their own gun laws. If you can't buy a gun in your home town you can drive a few hours and buy one. You can pick one up at a gun show. I've bought firearms at garage sales.

What America needs are comprehensive federal laws making it harder for people to purchase firearms. Ownership of handguns should require a training course and a license. We need to close the gun show loopholes, we need to make ammunition harder to purchase, and we need these steps to be federal, not state to state or city to city. We need to break the influence the NRA has on our public policy.

It would be great if American citizens were mature enough to handle unrestricted firearms, but that's just not the case.
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Well, I'm not sure I agree with that. What sets America apart from the country with the second most numerous in gun ownership is not the amount of guns, but the amount of social conflict. Those who have a fear of crime or a mistrust of the government are not the ones committing these murders. And those who are caught up in the "Wild West" mysticism (a period of America's history that only lasted a couple of decades, really), in other words, those who are a member of SASS, are definitely NOT the ones committing these crimes. I come from a family of gun nuts and SASS members (my father included, who has a big collection) and my uncle built an Israeli AK-47 just for the fun of it. I have had no part in any of this, but these SASS guys are really the same as cosplayers at a comic convention. Those who are likely to commit gun violence are young men who've grown up in broken homes, never receiving proper love from parents, parents with criminal records and/or run a meth lab in the kitchen, who will buy a $16 rap CD to listen to somebody shout "I'm gonna kill you, MF'er" and shoot him in the face... these are the kids who get caught up in drugs, gangs, and drug violence. Or socially malfunctioning kids with deep psychological issues like the kid last week who shot all those kids.

Making laws to closes gun show loopholes and forcing mandatory psychological profile tests for gun purchasers may help a bit, but that schoolteacher was apparently psychologically fit to be a kindergarten teacher as well as a gun owner. Her problem is that she gave guns to her pathetic goth son who can't even talk to people. There's no way to prevent that sort of thing from happening. Maybe if 100+ years ago each and every single gun had a registration number and you needed some sort of title document corresponding to each number, like you would have with a car or a boat, that would have done some good. There's just no way to ever enforce something like that today. Unfortunately, it's too late.

America's culture is just disintegrating. Everyone hates each other in America, and they do not care for the welfare of others. I know that is a very broad brush, but that is the direction it's going. I think it would be more efficient to target the psychological profile of people. As with Columbine, Virginia Tech, and now this recent massacre, these incidents tend to be perpetrated by socially malfunctioning, angst-ridden psychotic young men. Thinking that gun laws would change it is like saying, "Well, there's a sign saying that it's a weapon-free campus. He must not've seen the sign. We should make it bigger or something." Even without guns, the rotten souls of these people would find other ways to perpetrate mass murder, whether with bombs or knives or whatever. So I say it's not so much the fault of the "gun culture" as it is the fault of a "violence culture."
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Post by Heero »

greg wrote:America's culture is just disintegrating. Everyone hates each other in America, and they do not care for the welfare of others.
I think this is the main problem. I don't own a gun and never have. I have shot a gun before but don't TRULY care if they outlawed them tomorrow. But arguing about that ignores the deeper problem we have with our society. One of the things I TRULY respect and appreciate about Japanese culture is that people feel more RESPONSIBILITY to society. While I'm not saying the Japanese are perfect or their way is absolutely correct, I think American society places WAAAAAYYY too much emphasis on "the individual". We are TOO committed to the concept of non-conformity. I'm not saying everyone should be the same, but we should feel SOME obligation to the collective, but instead our society seems DEDICATED to denying the collective. This leads to problems in how we interact, how we do (or do NOT) raise our kids and generally how we live our lives. There are people right now saying people should die in debt because you can't take it with you and after you die it's not your problem anymore. That's the kind of self-centered "me first" nonsense we're building now.
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Re: More Sickening News

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It's way too early in the investigation to really be able to make any definite statements about the CT shooting, but when you say
greg wrote: that schoolteacher was apparently psychologically fit to be a kindergarten teacher as well as a gun owner. Her problem is that she gave guns to her pathetic goth son who can't even talk to people.
the problem is that part of being a responsible gun owner is NOT allowing your mentally unstable son access to your guns. Or ANYBODY access to your guns. There's always a lot of talk from the gun lobby about 'personal responsibility', but when a gun owner fails that test, when somebody personally is responsible for a gun massacre, suddenly the gun lobby starts blaming it on the media, starts blaming it on the culture, blaming it on rap music (really? is it still 1990?) starts blaming it on anything but a person with a gun.

I completely do not buy that there is anything special or distinctive about the American culture that makes Americans go out and commit gun crimes - other than the shit-ton of guns available for crimes, shovelled into American society by the various gun corporations. Nothing about European culture prevented the horrible massacres that led neighbor to kill neighbor in the Balkans in the 90s, nothing about Asian culture prevented the rape of Nanking or the Cultural Revolution, having lots of religion and going to church a lot didn't prevent the Mountain Meadows Massacre or the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre or the English Civil War or that business in Ireland that lasted two hundred years. People kill each other, it's what we're good at.

And yeah, we all know you can kill people with knives. That's why when you join the army they just give you a knife and say "hey, you can kill people with this, you don't need a gun, just figure it out." Right? Wrong. Guns make it a lot easier to kill a lot of people, and they frequently do, and it happens more in America than anywhere else because we have more guns.
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Re: More Sickening News

Post by davemerrill »

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-574 ... us-school/

Thank goodness this guy hadn't been able to get any knives, or TODAY'S gun massacre would have been a lot worse.

No fatalities in last night's breakup-inspired movie theater shooting in Texas:

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_ ... 123414.php

However, two police officers were shot and killed in Topeka KS last night.

http://www.ksn.com/mostpopular/story/Tw ... pp7Tw.cspx

Been a busy weekend for the guns.
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