6

(million ways to die, choose one)

4/18/2007 4:59:12 PM

4/18/2007 5:28:55 PM

I think there is no doubt it was a horrible tradgedy, but a bigger tradgedy is that we continue to let this happen. Anyone can still buy guns freely and kill whoever he wants. Constitution was written 100 years ago and it is stupid to let so many people die in the name of constitution. How many more poeple have to die before we intitiate gun control. I like shooting guns myself but there are plenty of idiots out there who do not understand the tremendous responsibility that comes with owning a weapon. I think so many lives is too heavy a price to pay for this.

4/18/2007 6:19:46 PM

Quote :

"Constitution was written 100 years ago"

4/18/2007 6:21:16 PM

Once again,

Quote :

"I think nearly all of you haveabhinavgoldy has missed the boat on this. What happened yesterday doesn't make a case for either more or less gun control. Yesterday's crime was committed by a troubled individual and the fact that he used a gun is ancillary to the fact that he was a determined person bent on death and destruction. Neither more CCP's nor stricter hand gun laws would have prevented this."

The victims did not pay a price for lack of gun control. They paid a price for Cho being psychopathic. I'm not big on ascribing blame for what is ultimately a senseless act, but if I were to place blame with someone/something other than Cho, it would be with a system that allowed Cho to stay at the university, despite him stalking two girls and despite his teachers expressing serious concerns about his mental health. One teacher was concerned enough to pursue having Cho compelled to attend therapy.

Even that is a bullshit excuse, though. Ultimate blame and responsibility lies with Cho himself. He pulled the trigger and he knew it was wrong.

4/18/2007 6:38:59 PM

Quote :

"I think there is no doubt it was a horrible tradgedy, but a bigger tradgedy is that we continue to let this happen. Constitution was written 100 years ago"

okay i get it..

you're one of those ESL guys from india.

pls to study up on american history before attempting to critique it.

spell check would be nice too.



[Edited on April 18, 2007 at 7:31 PM. Reason : ]

4/18/2007 7:27:39 PM

Quote :

"I think there is no doubt it was a horrible tradgedy, but a bigger tradgedy is that we continue to let this happen. Anyone can still buy guns freely and kill whoever he wants. Constitution was written 100 years ago and it is stupid to let so many people die in the name of constitution. How many more poeple have to die before we intitiate gun control. I like shooting guns myself but there are plenty of idiots out there who do not understand the tremendous responsibility that comes with owning a weapon. I think so many lives is too heavy a price to pay for this."

I don't get this mentality. Guns exist, whether you like it or not. Millions are sold, legally and illegally. What do you plan to do? gather all the guns in the country and melt them down to make a few hybrid cars? Have at it. Fact is, if you want a gun, you can get one. Doesn't matter if you are 18, 21, or mentally unstable, someone will sell you a gun. Do you think criminals - or those determined to become one - care if they get their gun through legal means? Gun control only makes it harder for law abiding citizens to own firearms.

Why don't we outlaw marijuana so all the kids will quit smokin it? oh wait...

4/18/2007 7:39:41 PM

I know it weird but I guess due to my wife's current problem with bio-polar disorder (she's been hospitalized for 3 weeks now, because we her family noticed something was wrong and acted on it) but I really feel sorry for the shooter, he like my wife I'm guessing thinks they have to do whatever (wife wants to move to disney) but she too thinks as herself as "godlike" and "all knowing" and it just troubles me that there was unfortunately no one there who took the appropriate steps to have this poor person hospitalized. it just really sucks, and I feel for his parents too, my wife's mom doesn't speak much english and she kept telling me she was stressed, just stressed. they don't understand our "western" just really sucks all around

4/18/2007 8:04:15 PM

Quote, "The victims did not pay a price for lack of gun control".

Victims did pay a price for lack of gun control. No matter how troubled one is, a single person cannot and I repeat cannot kill more than 30 people without the help of fire arms or explosives.

Fact: More people are killed in US because of gun violence then any other place in the World (May be excluding Iraq now)

This fact does not mean that there are more psychotic people in the US then other places, it plainly means there are more psychotic people with access to Guns in the US. I don't know what we are going to do with all the guns in the United States. YES, collecting them and melting them will be a good start.

4/18/2007 10:28:19 PM

Quote :

"Fact: More people are killed in US because of gun violence then any other place in the World (May be excluding Iraq now)"

SOURCE?

[Edited on April 18, 2007 at 10:49 PM. Reason : .]

4/18/2007 10:46:22 PM

Quote :

"YES, collecting them and melting them will be a good start."

I can see it now, all the gangstas waiting patiently in line to turn in their weapons at the local police station.

you are truly dense.

4/18/2007 10:49:28 PM

Quote :

"I don't get this mentality. Guns exist, whether you like it or not. Millions are sold, legally and illegally. What do you plan to do? gather all the guns in the country and melt them down to make a few hybrid cars? Have at it. Fact is, if you want a gun, you can get one. Doesn't matter if you are 18, 21, or mentally unstable, someone will sell you a gun. Do you think criminals - or those determined to become one - care if they get their gun through legal means? Gun control only makes it harder for law abiding citizens to own firearms. Why don't we outlaw marijuana so all the kids will quit smokin it? oh wait... "

I agree sir.

and abhinavgoldy,
I'm sure you have good intentions but I think you're being a bit naive.
As much as everyone would like, this is not and never WILL be a complete save haven for every single person that lives here. It's just NOT possible unless we were to give up all freedom and probably not even then. I don't own a gun, but I don't think we should have restrictions on them just because a couple of people fuck up the privilege. I mean do you think we should stop driving cars because there are so many drunk drivers on the roads causing accidents? no. It's just not feasible.

4/18/2007 10:49:36 PM

^^^^ Even melting down all the guns and forever banning them wouldn't stop psychos from killing innocent people. Case in point, china 2005:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4337056.stm

Quote :

"A man armed with homemade guns has shot and wounded 16 children at a primary school in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, according to state media."

The technology behind guns is very simple. If someone wanted to kill a bunch of people with a gun, they will do it. The problem is, you're trying to imagine criminals and psychos as rational people who will turn in their guns if you ban them, and never seek to build them or get them from another source. The unibomber didn't need to buy his bombs at K-Mart to kill his victims, and someone looking to kill a bunch of people with a gun won't need wal-mart to get a gun.


[Edited on April 18, 2007 at 10:59 PM. Reason : and -> as gives new meaning to the sentence]

4/18/2007 10:54:28 PM

Quote :

" No matter how troubled one is, a single person cannot and I repeat cannot kill more than 30 people without the help of fire arms or explosives."

Well, I'm eagerly awaiting your idea that will effectively prevent such pyschopaths from possessing a gun.

And simply passing a law isn't it.

[Edited on April 18, 2007 at 11:05 PM. Reason : ]

4/18/2007 11:02:08 PM

Believe me, I know we cannot completely ban guns. I am realistic. We cannot completely stop drugs, smuggling, rape, murder anything but that does not mean we don't make laws or try our best to restrict these things to minimum possible level. If we cannot compltely eliminate something that does not mean we do not try at all. It is wrong to assume that people who want to kill someone will go to any extent to get weapons. May be it is the ease of getting weapons that instigates to commit mass murder in the first place.

4/18/2007 11:04:59 PM

Quote :

"May be it is the ease of getting weapons that instigates to commit mass murder in the first place."

This is the most ignorant statement I've read today.

and on tww, that's saying something.


you sir, do not get it.

4/18/2007 11:08:37 PM

Quote :

"May be it is the ease of getting weapons that instigates to commit mass murder in the first place."

Simply having a weapon doesn't make a person a killer. That comes from within. Otherwise, this would probably happen a lot more often than it does.

Quote :

"It is wrong to assume that people who want to kill someone will go to any extent to get weapons."

Ummmm...no. Like many things, human ingenuity is one our greatest and one of our worst traits as a species.

If someone wants to kill people, they will.

4/18/2007 11:10:47 PM

Quote :

"May be it is the ease of getting weapons that instigates to commit mass murder in the first place."

Weapons were widely available (even automatics) prior to 1934 (NFA). Did the ease of obtaining those result in any mass shootings that weren't gangs vs. gangs?

4/18/2007 11:11:34 PM

http://brentroad.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=473056

4/18/2007 11:12:36 PM

i just read that crazy shit on cnn. If he hated the rich so much why did he not go to like DUKE or a country club to shoot the rich people, not a bunch of half-broke engineering students in VT, in hillbilly country

4/18/2007 11:15:33 PM

^I AM taking it you have never been to VA TECH?? and if you have obviously it wasn't for very long...

4/18/2007 11:23:08 PM

haha dude . . bburg has nothing there except for VT

4/18/2007 11:24:16 PM

What I think is so messed up is that the news is showing his tape and pictures he sent them. He looks kinda scary with his guns and all. And he's saying stuff about his children and brothers and sisters. I guess he means other people going through the same torments that he went through. Anyway, it seems like his tapes are meant to be an explanation as well as an inspiration to other people like him. By having it on the news like this, he is getting exactly what he wanted. I just hope that other troubled kids don't get inspired by his video and act on their feelings of revenge as well. Well, that's my 2 cents. Someone may have already said this...I didn't really feel like going through all the pages to see.

4/18/2007 11:31:23 PM

The ease of getting guns has nothing to do with this. If he couldn't have obtained the guns legally he still would have gotten them somehow. I don't see why everytime something liek this happens that everybody goes on this anti-gun crap. No matter how difficult you make it to get a gun people will always find a way around it.
Not saying that I agree with this woman but she was one of the survivors of that grocery store that got shot up awhile back and the gunman killed 22(someone will be able to name this place for me because I can't think of it at the moment)...she lost both her parents that day and she is not anti-gun...she is pro-gun because she said if one person would have had a gun they would have been able to at least fight back instead of being helpless. The store was a gun free zone and so if every school. She asked her opponent to name one place where a mass shooting had taken place like this that wasn't a gun free zone and he couldn't name one. People target places like this because they know they aren't going to come up against someone with the fire power to take shots at them. In one case at a school the principal had his gun but it was in his car...he went out to his car and came back in the school and unarmed the gunman...I don't think this one was as public as Columbine, etc...because I think he had just taken a classroom hostage at this point(someone can also prolly fill this name in for me as well because it to has slipped my mind.) *Both places that I can't name at the moment have been in the news over the past couple of days when speaking of the VT massacre. As I said I don't think we should change all the gun free zones so that everyone can be packing but I don't think that some extra security would be a bad thing.
Side note: I really don't think that a person that is here on a visa or whatever the hell he was here on should be able to get them legally. I would think that the right to bare arms would only be for US citizens not people that are here for a couple years or whatnot.

[Edited on April 18, 2007 at 11:42 PM. Reason : and the baby at the top of this page is cracking me up!]

4/18/2007 11:42:08 PM

He had a green card, he was here for good.

4/18/2007 11:47:17 PM

Even if we lived in a magical world where guns didn't exist, this kid would have still found a way to kill people. He might not have taken out quite as many people with, say, a machete or a katana, but he could and would have found a way. Shit, he could have made a bomb out of house-hold chemicals.

It doesn't matter how many things you ban or restrict, people have been killing other people even before there were homo sapiens. Perhaps guns can make killing a little too easy by reducing the act to a mere "point and click," but if somebody is depraved enough or pissed enough, they will find a way to end other people's lives.

It's a fact of life that people will always kill other people. No amount of wishy-washy, feel-good, "let's all hold hands and get along and respect diversity" mentality will ever change that. But making more gun laws or taking away all the guns, which would only affect LAW-ABIDING citizens, is only going to ensure that people like this Cho character will be able to carry out their sick revenge fantasies with little to no opposition. Allowing CCW people on campuses won't realistically end these sorts of scenarios, but they can help to cut down on the body count.

[Edited on April 18, 2007 at 11:55 PM. Reason : blah]

4/18/2007 11:54:42 PM

ease of guns, think of how many school massacres involved guns stolen or illegally obtained in another way. more gun laws wont stop this, they will always find a way

4/19/2007 12:04:26 AM

A shooting spree with 30 people dead is an acceptable cost for millions to own guns.

4/19/2007 12:15:29 AM

Quote :

"By having it on the news like this, he is getting exactly what he wanted."

Yeah, I agree. They should have kept all of that stuff under lock and key, have some criminal profilers take notes, and burned that crap before the general public had a chance to see.

[Edited on April 19, 2007 at 7:20 AM. Reason : -]

4/19/2007 7:17:50 AM

it was going to get out, these things always do, why not do it now instead of reopening old wounds three weeks from now?

4/19/2007 7:23:23 AM

they could, at least, not have his picture blasted everywhere...

i don't particularly like going to msnbc.com and seeing him in some pose from the matrix trying to look like a badass...

4/19/2007 7:25:21 AM

Quote :

"Fact: More people are killed in US because of gun violence then any other place in the World (May be excluding Iraq now)"

That's not a fact at all, and you destroy your own credibility in intelligent discourse by trying to peddle opinion as fact.

Quote :

"that does not mean we don't make laws or try our best to restrict these things to minimum possible level. If we cannot compltely eliminate something that does not mean we do not try at all. It is wrong to assume that people who want to kill someone will go to any extent to get weapons. May be it is the ease of getting weapons that instigates to commit mass murder in the first place."

A wise man once said "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

That is not any less true over 200 years later.

4/19/2007 8:42:36 AM

Quote :

"they could, at least, not have his picture blasted everywhere..."

good call. somehow i doubt the families and friends of the victims like seeing this little turd's face everytime they turn on a tv. the kid didn't deserve to have his message played relentlessly. it was his whole point and the media is helping him out. then everybody just points to gun control. in North Carolina you should know that this isn't the real problem. probably half the people or better that i went to high school with had a gun. nobody got shot. what happened at VT was the result of a self-righteous psychopath.

they need to take his videos and all that crap off the air. they've got their ratings already, it's enough. it's time to give the people that this event has hurt a little break, and it's time to stop giving encouragement to other people like Cho to think that these actions are rewarded with so much attention to what they have to say.

4/19/2007 8:58:34 AM

Fact: You quoting something as fact and then saying "except maybe blah blah" and using no sources shows you are talking out of your ass.

Oh wait thats my opinion but probably true in this case unlike your opinion.

[Edited on April 19, 2007 at 10:26 AM. Reason : yarr]

4/19/2007 10:25:16 AM

I agree that more gun controls aren't going to help prevent situations like this. Look at Columbine, those kids had someone buy most of the guns for them b/c they couldn't. They wanted them bad enough and found a way to get them. Also look at the OK City Bombing. No guns used (although McVeigh did have one, he didn't use it) and one of the worst terror attacks ever in the US... 5x as many people killed than at VT.

All of these situations could have been prevented. Part of the problem is that there are too many roadblocks that tie the hands of people who suspect a person is planning something like this. For better or worse this is the way it is. I think that some of these incidents could have been stopped but at the cost of everyone giving up certain legal freedoms.

None of these major incidents happened because someone "snapped" the day of the killing. They were all planned, some for many months. Look at Columbine, one of those kids had a web site basically saying they were planning to kill a bunch of people. Their friends said that after the fact that they remember them saying the killers were planning such an event, and it was shrugged off as a joke.

The key to stopping stuff like this from happening is figuring out why people get to the point that they feel killing a bunch of people is necessary, not banning guns. It is very obvious that each of them has mental problems. The Columbine kids were later diagnosed as psychopathic and depressive. This VT kid was obviously disturbed as well. We need a better method to recognize these kind of people before they get to the point of shooting up a school and then a way to offer them real help to get beyond that.

Honestly after thinking about this whole issue, I think going forward schools need to incorporate a rule that if a gun is fired on campus for any reason, everything goes on lock down. Put locks on all of the classroom doors that can be easily operated from the inside so when the word goes out, people can at least have a place to hole up.

4/19/2007 10:57:21 AM

Quote :

"We need a better method to recognize these kind of people before they get to the point of shooting up a school and then a way to offer them real help to get beyond that."

the VT shooter was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital but he told the doctors he was fine so they had to let him out. Think how terrible it would be if people could be imprisoned indefinitely just because some nonprofessional says they are dangerous.

there is no way to prevent these things from happening again sadly.

4/19/2007 11:06:16 AM

I agree, which is why I said:

Quote :

"I think that some of these incidents could have been stopped but at the cost of everyone giving up certain legal freedoms."

Ideally a better way to recognize someone as a person who would commit an act like this would be good. However it's not very feasible because like you said, we'd be putting a lot of people in mental hospitals just because they looked at someone funny.

I think what happened was that the magistrate originally said he was a threat to harm himself and others, then after further evaluation determined that he was only a threat to himself and not others, so he was set free.

4/19/2007 11:13:03 AM

^^ Maybe not imprison, but I'm not sure how much a mentally unstable stalker creep deserves to be at a University of higher learning in the first place......I think sometimes in this PC world people are far too tolerant of fucked up people just to 'respect their feelings' and whatnot. Maybe a University should have higher standards or consider suspending or expelling people who clearly do not deserve to be there...

I mean this guy has been fucked up for a long time, I read an article about how an english teacher kicked him out of her class about a year or two ago because he kept saying weird things to the girls and openly taking pictures of their legs or under their desks with his cell phone, a lot of the girls stopped coming to that class because they were afraid of him, and that's when the prof kicked him out.....maybe if the University had followed suit or told him if it happened even one more time he was gone, because he did go on to continue stalking after that...

[Edited on April 19, 2007 at 11:18 AM. Reason : ]

4/19/2007 11:17:58 AM

Quote :

"maybe if the University had followed suit or told him if it happened even one more time he was gone"

that may have given him a stronger reason to commit the shooting in his mind. you cant use sane logic on an insane person.

4/19/2007 11:27:34 AM

hey, since all you guys are bashing him for opinion, can you please show me your source that says we are not #1...fucking tards with your do as i say, not as i do logic

OMG NO SOURCE

YOU LIE AND ARE WRONG

BUT I HAVE NO SOURCE EITHER

4/19/2007 1:22:00 PM

Listen chief, I'm not the one who made the claim.

But since you asked so nicely:

South Africa is #1 in firearm related homicide per the UN

http://www.unodc.org/unodc/crime_cicp_survey_seventh.html

of course this is 2000 data, the most current global data I could find.

4/19/2007 1:37:03 PM

Quote :

"hey, since all you guys are bashing him for opinion, can you please show me your source that says we are not #1...fucking tards with your do as i say, not as i do logic"

That's not how it works. If you want to validate your point by giving facts you need to show you didn't just make those facts up.

4/19/2007 2:24:30 PM

is genocide a subset of homicide figures? if so, it might skew the numbers.

4/19/2007 2:51:13 PM

It doesn't look like it since the well known genocide ridden countries were not included.

#2 is Colombia. Juan Valdez takes no shit.

4/19/2007 3:05:13 PM

TOTAL NUMBER is a very bad way to use statistics...we have one of the largest populated countries in the world, of course we are going to have a LOT of categories of all kinds of things where we have more 'insert item x here' than any other country in the world.

However stats like rate of murders per a certain number of citizens etc. or percentage of the population killed because of gun violence are stats that DO mean something. And i feel pretty confident that we would NOT have the highest RATE (not number of people) per 1000 citizens of people killed by gun violence per year when including some places like colombia or something. that is only my opinion, but even if im not correct im sure there are countries in our ballpark range.



[Edited on April 19, 2007 at 7:55 PM. Reason : colombia spelling]

4/19/2007 7:43:38 PM

For all those needing to know facts, here they are:

USA:
Guns: 200 million guns (100 times the Iraqi army) and 35,000 people killed every year (the equivalent of many years of civil war in Yugoslavia). Firearm deaths per 100,000 people (CDCP, Bureau Of Justice Statistics, 1998): 14.24 in the U.S., 4.31 in Canada, 0.7 in Holland, and only 0.41 in England (where not even police carry guns). Which means that if you live in the U.S., you are 40 times more likely to die of gunshots than if you live in Britain. Murders by handguns (1996): 15 in Japan, 30 in Britain, 211 in Germany, 9,390 in the United States. Which means if you live in the U.S., you are 300 times more likely to be murdered than in you live in Britain. In 1999 USA citizens were certainly reassured that "only" 6,000 workers were killed by colleagues in the workplace, a 10% drop from 1994's figure of 6,600... but still just about twice the number of people killed by the Serbs in the Kosovo war. The scariest data are about the other 25,000 deaths by handgun: they are suicides and accidents. In the U.S. a child a day is killed by a handgun.

4/19/2007 7:43:57 PM

i dont know where you are getting your facts but last i looked the US was VERY close to many of the european countries (only slightly ahead) in murders per 1000 or murders per 100,000 people. DEFINITELY not 300 times more likely to be murdered in the US than Britain...Latest thing i read was 2 times more likely. thats a pretty absurdly incorrect statement you made there

edit: in fact the only source i could find said the deaths by firearm in colombia is a rate of close to 50 per 1000. obviously all of these statistics must be taken with a grain of salt but i would assume your numbers are coming from comparing some of the 'richest' and most 'civilized' nations (ie a group of 25 nations or something)


[Edited on April 19, 2007 at 7:58 PM. Reason : ]

4/19/2007 7:52:19 PM

Quote :

"The scariest data are about the other 25,000 deaths by handgun: they are suicides and accidents. In the U.S. a child a day is killed by a handgun"

That's not other deaths. Only ~40% (depending on year of statistics) of all gun deaths are homicide. That is indeed a fact.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/publications/bulletins/gun_7_2001/gun2_2_01.html

[Edited on April 19, 2007 at 8:06 PM. Reason : .]

4/19/2007 8:03:27 PM

^^^copied and pasted directly from http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/problems.html

And SURPRISE, NO SOURCES LISTED.

It's a giant page of completely misinterpreted and or misinformed and or just plain wrong propaganda.


What bothers me about this whole thing is two-fold. One, this kid KNEW he would get national attention for doing this. If the fucking news media would STOP SHOWING THIS SHIT, I HIGHLY doubt he would have done it. It was his insane way to be heard.

Two, all of the mass killings in the past decade and more have been in "gun free" zones. Fuck that shit. If they had allowed concealed carry on the campus, I GUARANTEE you there would have been fewer casualties. Might not have prevented it entirely, but there wouldnt be 30+ people dead either.

I own several firearms, and I'll be the first to say that I don't think I have any constitutional right to own them. I think congress should ban ALL handguns, ALL semi-automatic rifles and ALL high caliber weapons to the public. Hunters and sportsmen can keep air pistols, shotguns and bolt action rifles. But as long as it's legal, you better believe I'm going to own them and know how to use them to protect myself and my loved ones.

---------------

And comparing the US to Britain in gun deaths is fucking stupid. That's like comparing the US to Ethiopia in terms of Playstation 3 sales. There's no right to bear arms in britain in the first place, nor were there tens of millions of firearms throughout the country. Few people owned them before they started all the meltdown programs.

[Edited on April 19, 2007 at 8:12 PM. Reason : .]

4/19/2007 8:09:02 PM

^10/10 would read again.

and i COMPLETELY agree about the media. its sad

4/19/2007 8:10:51 PM