Northern Illinois shooting

Yeah, let's blame a horrible, tragic crime on inantimate objects that can't do anything until someone picks them up and uses them.
Why don't you save your anger for the psycho who did the crimes.

 

If the psycho didn't have access to a gun, he wouldn't have killed nearly as many people, dipshit.

 

They grow desensitized to violence and see no way out to their pain than inflicting it on others. Guess he thought others needed to feel a hole in their hearts where he figuratively felt one in his. It's a shame it happened.

 

You know this for a fact chick? Maybe he had a permit. Maybe he bought it legally, as did the Virginia Tech shooter. Maybe, if he couldn't get a gun, he would gone into the classroom with a knife.

And take your juvenile insults and stuff them. Try to be mature enough to have a discussion without resorting to name-calling, although that may be asking too much of a 12-year-old.

 

Six dead, including the shooter....four at the scene, two at the hospital. All students, including a grad student teaching the class where the shooting occurred.

What a nightmare.

 

No way he causes as much damage with a knife than he did with a gun.

Maybe he did buy it legally. Maybe the law should be changed.

 

I agree with you on your first point. I was only making a point myself that if someone is determined to kill, they'll find a way.
And maybe we ought to take the novel approach of putting personal responsibility on the criminals, rather than whatever instruments he or she uses.

 

You're all for intellectual honesty, so exercise some. How many fuckin people ya gonna kill with a knife? Seriously now.

Show me the campus knifing that killed ten. Please.

You want to defend gun rights, fine. But let's not travel this road. Knives, hemlock, gila monsters, harpoons, dirty looks...yeah, they tend to be a little less effective....

 

OK, it's his fault, he's a fucking bad fucking person. And...six people are still dead.

Novel.

At any rate (yeah, I'm going to be insulting) do you know how ridiculous your statement is? Do you have any earthly clue? At no time in American history has our government not held as many people "personally responsible" for their crimes as right fucking now. You know that right? Our incarceration rates are off the charts. New prisons are being built every month all over the place. We've locked up damn near 10 percent of the country, it hasn't done a damn thing.

There is nothing - nothing - profound about identifying bad people as bad people. It's the easiest damn thing in the world to do. It saves no one. It changes nothing.

 

We do. We punish criminals plenty.

We put them in jail -- to the point of overcrowding. We put them to death -- to the point of being the only Western country in the world outside Bolivia and Suriname still practicing capital punishment. We take away their abilities to vote, to work, to live around schools or small children. We take away their ability to purchase legal weapons.

And yet ...

All these crimes still happen, regardless of "personal responsibility." Dontcha think, even for a second, that less access to weapons -- especially automatic and assault weapons, designed for no other purpose than to kill -- might have a positive effect?

It's worth considering, IMO.

 

If the choice was as simple as gun vs. knife, that would work. But less access won't deter people who are determined to kill. Those deranged enough to take innocent human lives will find a way to kill. Terrorists kill tens, hundreds, thousands at a time without guns. Guns ain't the problem.