JCC school shooting in Conn.

The media bring this news because it gets lapped up. You wanna take away the media voyeurism, take away people's appetite for sensation. I think it's kind of primal, and its splattering out comes with an open, free society. Don't think that this is exclusive to the U.S.

People, I'm sad to say, want to be better than other people. The reason people click a news story about a robbery is so they can denounce the robber. Same with murderers. Same with mass murderers. People want to denounce. They want to know the names of the mass murderers - and they want to know their exact names, and be sure it's not the name of the brother that they are remembering - to denounce him. This is not just the media. It´s happened in this thread, too. The ravenous hunger for details is all over the first few pages.

So if that's why your country sucks Jabba, humanity sucks with it.

 

I think you're onto something, but not necessarily that denouncing wrongdoing is a key component. I think it's completely true that tragedy elsewhere provides affirmation of normalcy for the people who didn't experience it. Or that would be true if people didn't also use such occasions to reassess their own sense of risk and danger, usually inappropriately.

 

I would agree, but then there's also such a thing as celebrity gossip.
Sure, people want to assess their safety, but they mostly just want to denounce.

 

Sorry, but just about the last thing anyone could accuse Jim Kunstler of is being "highly conservative".

 

Apparently the KKK is going to counter - protest the WBC if/when the Westboro idiots show up in Newtown.

My brain is still buffering trying to process that.

 

I don't like agreeing with the KKK but I guess they are the lesser of two evils in this instance.

 

Maybe it helps the viewers at home feel better about themselves to be able to denounce others. After all, if you're in a position to denounce someone's bad behavior, you're probably doing ok... right?

 

I didn't mean conservative in the sense of American political party identification. Ok, so he thinks the Republicans are stupid and dangerous, that Fox News is dumb, religion is supernatural malarky, and that current fiscal policy is unsound. So do a lot of conservatives. I don't see too much actually spoken in there about his actual political leanings, but I look at his gender politics, and I look at his stance vis a vis contemporary American culture and its "ugliness" (and particularly that its heading for a reckoning that it cannot avoid) and I see a conservative position.

True, maybe I need to read more of his stuff, but based on what I've sampled, I'm not sure he's for me. Too much doomsaying, not enough reasonable discussion of solutions. Also, I have no idea what he means when he talks about the economic ascendancy of the South and its "comfortable suburban lifestyle." The southern states all generally fall in the more impoverished half of the country, so I don't know what he's on about with that.

I take it you have no objection to my other points in that post?

 

Plenty are already planning a silent wall against Westboro. I personally hope they just stay away. Two of the services were today. Once more it was surreal seeing Green's Funeral Home on CNN. Even more depressing to see a line of children going in to pay their respects.

Another note from our University President. One student's mother was killed.

And I now find myself wracking my brain wondering if I ever met the shooter. He very well may have been in classes at the same time I was at college.

 

I caught an interview with the principal's husband on CNN. Twenty years her senior and he always thought she would outlive him. And then there are seeing the photographs of all those children who were killed.

Like I said earlier, I hope the shooter's rotting in hell.

 

NRA's facebook page goes dark.

 

Been seeing various reports of Anonymous hacking the Westboro fools. Normally I don't agree with Anonymous' actions but I think I can make an exception in this case. (Kinda like Lando agreeing with the KKK above.)

 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/photos...alflow&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=buzzfeed

 

Merk, after some rumination, I disagree. It's entirely too facile to just blame the media, and it's a pipe dream to wish everybody would just turn off their TV.

If one station were to decide not to broadcast any human interest details about shootings, nobody would watch, advertisers would pull back and the station would go broke. Showing tragedy is their livelihood.
And the audience isn't a singular entity that could just stop watching at any time.

It would only work if the government outlaws the publishing of names and mugs of mass murderers.

 

The bogus Freeman statement is one of those things that seems sensible at first, but falls apart once you start thinking about it. Should the media not report the mass murder of 20 children in a school? Should educators and parents ignore the story, rather than informing themselves so they can tray to prevent the same thing happening to their children?

I assume most have seen the "I am Lanza's Mother" article. Really heartbreaking article that does a very good job of highlighting the problems faced by parents of mentally ill children, though i think the author should give herself more credit, and Lanza's mother considerably less. For all the talk about the need for radically improved mental health care in the US (and pretty much everywhere else, too), I still come back to one point -- given that Adam Lanza's condition was well known, what WTF was the mother thinking keeping a small arsenal of weapons in the house and not locking them away? To be blunt, I'm having a very difficult time finding any sympathy, or even empathy for Ms. Lanza.

 

Perhaps they were locked away. We simply do not know.

Anyone who has worked in the Security Industry should tell you, though, that any system is only as secure as it's weakest link; and compromising the system at any point along the chain, compromises all of it.

 

Yeah, we don't know if she had weapons laying around the house, but my sense tells me that she didn't. Kids have a way of getting into their parent's **** when they really want to.

 

What would have helped, I think, would have been for the Police to assess how quickly their SWAT team(s) could get to the school in case of incident; and then ensuring that the points of access could resist the heaviest feasible assault for at least that length of time. The killer reportedly shot his way in, and was then in a victim-rich environment for the 8 minutes the outrage apparently took (according to the BBC's timeline).

 

Regardless of whether the guns were "lying around" or safely secured in a gun cabinet, she still kept an assault rifle in the same house with her severely troubled son. That alone shows a major lapse in judgment IMO.

 

Apparently she actually taught her sons how to handle the guns, and would take them target shooting.

 

Darth-Lando, see my #492.

Platelet, So do thousands of other parents. Can hardly fault her for wanting her children to know how to be responsible and safe around weapons.

 

Yeah, we should fortify school entrances; German defenses at Normandy would be a good model. Barbed wire, pill boxes complete with heavy machine guns ... And, of course. Arm the principal and teachers. And the kids, while we're at it.

Seriously, though, I find the response time to have been pretty phenomenal. 8 minutes and the first responders were already entering the school, which apparently led him to turn the gun on himself almost immediately.

As D-L said, having guns around the house when you have mentally ill child, regardless of how well locked away they may be, is really not a particularly sound idea.

Oh yippee. All that accomplished was making him even more deadly.

Sorry, I know I'm getting rather snippy, but I'm just incredibly frustrated.

 

Do you think the author of the "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" article is going to teach her son to shoot? Or do you think she realizes, "Hey, this probably isn't the best activity for someone like him?" When you are a parent your child should come first. If that means giving up your gun hobby because you have a dangerous child, so be it.