"Guns take pride of place in US family values."

[vortexring 0]

You're more than welcome.

'for it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "chuck 'im out, the brute!" But it's "saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.'

[Channman 2]

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Bleh. Didn`t make it through the whole article before my stomach started turning. On a side note, looky what followed me home yesterday!!!

Ahh...A defender of freedom, as this little one gets older, will it have IR targeting capability?

[Steeler 0]

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Bleh. Didn`t make it through the whole article before my stomach started turning. On a side note, looky what followed me home yesterday!!!

Ahh...A defender of freedom, as this little one gets older, will it have IR targeting capability?

This little one will have all kinds of goodies soon!! I should buy a good cage for it though, ya know, so it can`t get loose and take over trhe world or anything.

[DZJ 0]

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One point I would make however is overall "school" shooting are down. The ones that do occur however are blown out of proportion by the media circus created.

Could you give an example of a school shooting you thought was 'blown out of proportion'? How should such incidents be reported?

[Channman 2]

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Bleh. Didn`t make it through the whole article before my stomach started turning. On a side note, looky what followed me home yesterday!!!

Ahh...A defender of freedom, as this little one gets older, will it have IR targeting capability?

This little one will have all kinds of goodies soon!! I should buy a good cage for it though, ya know, so it can`t get loose and take over trhe world or anything.

Have a Colt AR myself, little bastards truely are hard to tame...had to lock mine in a steel safe just to insure it knows who's boss. But I let it out once and awhile to chew on a few things to keep its teeth clean.

[Royd 0]

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Whilst most people are aware the media will dramatise anything it thinks will sell it's papers, it's still a massively unacceptable situation. And of course, the majority of them are happening in America. So that raises a question of why.

Except for the media coverage, I believe you are describing binge drinking on college campuses. I'd like to see the stats on those deaths.

[kallend 2,106]

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Except for the media coverage, I believe you are describing binge drinking on college campuses. I'd like to see the stats on those deaths.

1,400 deaths a year is the current estimate, mostly due to accidents following the drinking. There are no actual data available.

There is a big effort underway in colleges and fraternities right now to cut down on alcohol abuse on campuses. Incidents of alcohol abuse among students do seem to be declining.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[1969912 0]

Of course it's unacceptable, but so is the fact that 1,500 kids drown each year. Drownings kill perhaps 500 times as many kids yearly than do school shootings. Why is there no big outcry about all the kids who die that way evry year? 200 die on their bicycles. Are the live of the shooting victims more valuable than the others? Of course not. So why are the deaths of 1,500 kids/year ignored, while the deaths of 5, maybe 10 kids/year are considered a national crisis? What about the children murdered by their parents? Car wreck victims?

What the news headlines are really saying is that thousands of dead children don't mean FA, but 5 or 10 or 20 kids that die in a special way are of huge national importance. Politicians scramble to enact laws, school shooting experts pop up like mushrooms, and so on. So let's say the deaths of 20 kids/year are prevented through new laws, special grants to universities to study the issue, a cop in every school, etc. How many drowning deaths might have been prevented if those resources were applied to drowning prevention? I'd bet significantly more kids deaths would be prevented, but even if it's only 5, 10 or 20, who cares?

I haven't read it yet, but this article might be interesting:

http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol8is3/killingbeck.html

"Once we got to the point where twenty/something's needed a place on the corner that changed the oil in their cars we were doomed . . ."
-NickDG

[Royd 0]

Except for the media coverage, I believe you are describing binge drinking on college campuses. I'd like to see the stats on those deaths.

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1,400 deaths a year is the current estimate, mostly due to accidents following the drinking. There are no actual data available.

There is a big effort underway in colleges and fraternities right now to cut down on alcohol abuse on campuses. Incidents of alcohol abuse among students do seem to be declining.

Another one that gets swept under the rug with a wink and a nod is deaths by fraternity or sorority hazing.

[vortexring 0]

There isn't an outcry over the drownings in comparison to the school shootings because they didn't die in, as you put it, a 'special' way.

So whilst a child drowning may raise questions, it doesn't quite raise the same questions that a school shooting may cause.

I've had to very quickly read your link, and whilst there may be a belief of the press causing a 'moral panic' and people using the incidents to fuel their own anti-gun agenda's, what I did see from the article was an attempt to put the situation into a realistic context. Especially once statistics came to the fore:

"In the academic school year 1997-1998, there were 44,351 public and private secondary schools and 91,661 public and private elementary schools for a total of 136,012 schools (Moody 1998). There are on average 180 days of school per year when schools are in session for a total of 24.5 million school sessions. The nine school shootings in this year represent .00003 percent of the approximately 24.5 million times school was in session for the day somewhere in America. As horrific and tragic as each of these events was, given the number of days individual schools in America are in session, on most days and in most places it is safe for a child to go to school."

Now, most people don't pay too much attention to stats. But they'll certainly pay attention to the 9 school shootings that year.

That, without shadow of doubt, is newsworthy information. In very basic terms you could ask, where shootings are being carried out by young teenagers; is it because they're becoming more twisted or evil than another nations children? Or is it through having easier access to weapons? But then, what about the many other nations where weapons are easily accessible, who don't they have such a high frequency of shootings? And does that then bring us back to the statistics to find an answer?

Either way, you can't completely blame the media for any 'moral panic', or for the attention these incidents attract.

'for it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "chuck 'im out, the brute!" But it's "saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.'

[kallend 2,106]

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Another one that gets swept under the rug with a wink and a nod is deaths by fraternity or sorority hazing.

[JohnRich 4]

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Despite the spiralling rise in the daily number of shootings in the US...

I didn't even get past the very first sentence, above, before I spotted a lie.

The latest annual FBI crime report shows violence is down. And over the last 15 years, it has spiraled down to a 30-year low.

The story is so full of lies it's ridiculous. But no lie is too great for the gun-o-phobes.

You really should arm yourself with the facts, rather than the anti-gun hype, in order to make the proper judgements.

[kallend 2,106]

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The story is so full of lies it's ridiculous. But no lie is too great for the gun-o-phobes.

I've yet to hear of any male "gun-0-phobe" masquerading as a woman in order to write favorable reviews of his own work.

Or when asked for proof of a published claim, responding that a bookcase fell on his computer and the documentation of the study was lost.

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[mnealtx 0]

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School (or any) mass shootings are very rare, but there have been a few big ones in the last 8-10 years here.

And virtually every one of them guaranteed 'copycat' crime status by the sheer AMOUNT of press coverage over it.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[mnealtx 0]

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The story is so full of lies it's ridiculous. But no lie is too great for the gun-o-phobes.

I've yet to hear of any male "gun-0-phobe" masquerading as a woman in order to write favorable reviews of his own work.

Or when asked for proof of a published claim, responding that a bookcase fell on his computer and the documentation of the study was lost.

No, they just say that the records must have been lost... (Belleisles, I believe it was?)

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[kallend 2,106]

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The story is so full of lies it's ridiculous. But no lie is too great for the gun-o-phobes.

I've yet to hear of any male "gun-0-phobe" masquerading as a woman in order to write favorable reviews of his own work.

Or when asked for proof of a published claim, responding that a bookcase fell on his computer and the documentation of the study was lost.

No, they just say that the records must have been lost... (Belleisles, I believe it was?)

No one ever believes that dogs eat homewok!

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[mnealtx 0]

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The story is so full of lies it's ridiculous. But no lie is too great for the gun-o-phobes.

I've yet to hear of any male "gun-0-phobe" masquerading as a woman in order to write favorable reviews of his own work.

Or when asked for proof of a published claim, responding that a bookcase fell on his computer and the documentation of the study was lost.

No, they just say that the records must have been lost... (Belleisles, I believe it was?)

No one ever believes that dogs eat homewok!

I suppose nowadays it's more "The dog ate my thumb drive!"

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[lawrocket 3]

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Last week the schoolteacher, 44, went to court in her home town of Medford, Oregon, to protest at her working conditions. Specifically she is outraged she cannot carry a handgun into class. 'I know it is my right to carry that gun,' she said.
Katz was in court in the week that someone else took a gun to school in America. This time it was a pupil in Cleveland, Ohio. Asa Coon, 14, walked the corridors of his school, a gun in each hand, shooting two teachers and two students.

Um, yeah. No shit she's worried. She would rather not be one of the shooting victims.

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But a more bloody rampage, the murder of six young partygoers by Tyler Peterson, a policeman in Crandon, Wisconsin

I seem to recall hearing quite a bit about that one. Yeah, the guy was a cop. And apparently nobody there was armed, eh?

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Studies show that having a gun at home makes it six times more likely that an abused woman will be murdered.

I hate stats like this. I cna spin them this way, too:

"In an average year, 16,000 people would have chosen other means to kill themselves had a handgun not been present in the home."

re: the 16,000 suicides v. 650 negligent discharge deaths: "On average, handgun owners are almost 25 times more likely to commit suicide with a handgun than to kill themselves or others with an accidental discharge."

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Gun-owning groups have been so successful in their cause that it no longer even seems strange to many Americans that Katz should want to go into an English class armed.

That wasn't something strange until fairly recently in US History.

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The vast majority of settlers were farmers, not fighters.

Actually, they were both. They farmed, and would massacre any motherfucker that threatened them.

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Guns in colonial times were much rarer than often thought, not least because they were so expensive that few settlers could afford them.

Yeah, no shit. Colonial times. Guess what? he can't make that claim after about, oh, 1791. That's when the 2d Amendment was passed - AFTER the Colonial Era. Nice bit of working in "colonial era."

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Indeed one study of early gun homicides showed that a musket was as likely to be used as club to beat someone to death as actually fired.

Yeah. These were probably because the user figured out that it too too long to load it, so the guy swung it.

There really are some simple explanations...

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[mnealtx 0]

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Guns in colonial times were much rarer than often thought, not least because they were so expensive that few settlers could afford them.

Ah, more of Belleisle's bullshit. That's been debunked.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[kelpdiver 2]

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The story is so full of lies it's ridiculous. But no lie is too great for the gun-o-phobes.

I've yet to hear of any male "gun-0-phobe" masquerading as a woman in order to write favorable reviews of his own work.

But they will masquarade as scientists all the time.

Bellessies claimed to have lost records that were in fact destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco. Neat trick.

Even for social scientists, pretty weak.

[DZJ 0]

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School (or any) mass shootings are very rare, but there have been a few big ones in the last 8-10 years here.

And virtually every one of them guaranteed 'copycat' crime status by the sheer AMOUNT of press coverage over it.

Just to re-ask an earlier question (to a different poster) that got a bit lost in the course of the thread, how would you like to see such incidents reported?

[1969912 0]

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You really should arm yourself with the facts, rather than the anti-gun hype, in order to make the proper judgements.

I understand your point, but vortexring seems to really be interested in looking at this objectively, and has been posting rational and thoughtful responses to comments about the article. We may never agree (that's not my goal), but at least there's thoughtful and polite dialog going on.

"Once we got to the point where twenty/something's needed a place on the corner that changed the oil in their cars we were doomed . . ."
-NickDG

[kallend 2,106]

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The story is so full of lies it's ridiculous. But no lie is too great for the gun-o-phobes.

I've yet to hear of any male "gun-0-phobe" masquerading as a woman in order to write favorable reviews of his own work.

But they will masquarade as scientists all the time.

Bellessies claimed to have lost records that were in fact destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco. Neat trick.

Even for social scientists, pretty weak.

Earthquake - maybe that's why Lott's bookcase fell on his computer.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[mnealtx 0]

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School (or any) mass shootings are very rare, but there have been a few big ones in the last 8-10 years here.

And virtually every one of them guaranteed 'copycat' crime status by the sheer AMOUNT of press coverage over it.

Just to re-ask an earlier question (to a different poster) that got a bit lost in the course of the thread, how would you like to see such incidents reported?

Like I'd like to see most all news reported: Less grandstanding, more fact. Tell me what you know - don't tell me what to think, I can do that for myself, tyvm.

I don't know that there's any way to quantify what level of reduction would result in less copycat crimes.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[kelpdiver 2]

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Bellessies claimed to have lost records that were in fact destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco. Neat trick.
it i
Even for social scientists, pretty weak.

Earthquake - maybe that's why Lott's bookcase fell on his computer.

Could be...but the difference is that we know the SF records were destroyed a century ago. Computers have issues all the time, we can only suspect he did something to his records. It should be possible to recreate any records he had though, since they were based on current events. But when you're dealing with records from the frontier era, it's hard to find counter evidence. Much easier to gain by making shit up without being called on it.