Another major school shooting today ... Newtown, Conn

the "culture" of boys

I understand what you are saying here, David...but the commentary is logically faulty.

What might make more sense is to suggest that you would go to EVERY K - 4 school in the country and offer guns to ALL those kids...and see if things end up better or worse than they are right now.

Tell me...do you think if EVERY K - 4 group of kids were armed the way you suggest...that shooting events would decrease across the United States? Or would you guess that they might well increase?

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

...

On the intake form, under the question, “What are your expectations for treatment?” I wrote, “I need help.”

And I do. This problem is too big for me to handle on my own. Sometimes there are no good options. So you just pray for grace and trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense.

I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am Jason Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61 mass murders involving firearms have occurred throughout the country. (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map). Of these, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jones focused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign of mental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the U.S. live in fear, like I do.

You know I find it sad that the anti-gun nuts are using the deaths of 20 children to promote their programs so shamefully.

It not the death of 20 children that is the issue as if those children had die in a school bus accident or by a tornado hitting the school or a fire or by any other means it would be short story over in a day or so at most. If it was on a school bus there might had been a short discussion of how to improve school buses and the same for how to strenghten schools to better stand up to tornadoes.

Hell if the crazy SOB had used a can of gasoline and a road flare it would likely not be the never ending story either.

To sum up this event and deaths are being use to promote laws that likely will not stop one death by guns but will reduce the likelihood of anyone being in a position to defend themselves and others from such arm nuts.

Calling for gun control means we're happy to put a band aid on the problem without addressing the reasons that some young men are so angry that they do things like this

December 15, 2012
Children Were All Shot Multiple Times With a Semiautomatic, Officials Say
By JAMES BARRON

The gunman in the Connecticut shooting blasted his way into the elementary school and then sprayed the children with bullets, first from a distance and then at close range, hitting some of them as many as 11 times, as he fired a semiautomatic rifle loaded with ammunition designed for maximum damage, officials said Saturday.

The state’s chief medical examiner, H. Wayne Carver II, said all of the 20 children and 6 adults gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., had been struck more than once in the fusillade.

He said their wounds were “all over, all over.”

“This is a very devastating set of injuries,” he said at a briefing in Newtown. When he was asked if they had suffered after they were hit, he said, “Not for very long.”...

. Carver said it appeared that all of the children had been killed by a “long rifle” that Mr. Lanza was carrying; a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle was one of the several weapons police found in the school. The other guns were semiautomatic pistols, including a .10 mm Glock and a .9 mm Sig Sauer.

The bullets Mr. Lanza used were “designed in such a fashion the energy is deposited in the tissue so the bullet stays in,” resulting in deep damage, Dr. Carver said. As to how many bullets Mr. Lanza had fired, Dr. Carver said he did not have an exact count. “There were lots of them,” he said.

He said that parents had identified their children from photographs to spare them from seeing the gruesome results of the rampage. He said that 4 doctors and 10 technicians had done the autopsies and that he had personally performed seven, all on first-graders.

“This is probably the worst I have seen or the worst that I know of any of my colleagues having seen,” said Dr. Carver, who is 60 and has been Connecticut’s chief medical examiner since 1989...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/nyregion/gunman-kills-20-children-at-school-in-connecticut-28-dead-in-all.html?hp

The discussion also turns to better gun regulation . . .

Read between this post and yours, tell me this is how gun owners care about people,
children more than guns?

It's impossible to separate the type of gun used from the type of devastating, and lethal, damage inflicted, quite rapidly, on a large number of victims.

Because we care about them,
we want them well armed in their own defense...

The gunman in the Connecticut shooting blasted his way into the elementary school and then sprayed the children with bullets, first from a distance and then at close range, hitting some of them as many as 11 times, as he fired a semiautomatic rifle loaded with ammunition designed for maximum damage, officials said Saturday.

This mother has no recourse other than jail for her young son.