31 Students killed at Virginia Tech

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Video games don't breed violence. I shoot guns and play Doom a lot, I listen to music thta scares people and watch underground horror which is as violent as it gets and most are banned in a lot of countries.

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There was an experiment about this actually.. and ud be surprised about the result. They had kids, never been exposed to violent video games before.. they separate them into groups... one set playing kiddish games, and others playing violent games. then after hours of letting them play the games, they let them play on the playground.. guess who turned out to be agressive towards other kids... its the group that played kiddish games.

the fact that the violent games gave out-put to the kids' agression.. essentially after playing the game, they were mentally exhausted to be agressive to other kids, comapred to the ones that played those kiddish games...


another fact. guns are just tools. if u want to kill someone, u will find a way, gun or no gun. where i grew up, guns were never used. all they used were ice-picks, knives, any sharp and pointy object. if they wanna mass murder, a machette is always available. just go to the nearest crowded place and start swinging like crazy.

given that guns makes the job easier, banning guns will not solve the problem.

what u society needs is to care. care about the ppl next to u, if u know something is seriously bothering them, help them. u never know, just talking to one person, u may have saved many lives on that very day. if u happened to be on the right place and the right time, and managed to talk this guy into changing his mid, this event wouldnt have happened.

I have been teaching hunter and firearm safety for 5 years now. IMHO there are no firearm accidents. Let me explain.

Rule 1: do not point a gun at anything you do not intend to shoot or kill.

Rule 2: treat every firearm as if it were loaded.

Rule 3: do not rely on a "safety", they are mechanical and can fail

Secure your firearms when not in use, preferrably not loaded. Even better secure the ammo in a second location.

Follow those rules and there are no firearm "accidents". If you own firearms teach those that live with you the rules as well.

I know, you're not cool unless you've got a loaded Glock stuck down the waistband of your pants.

Hmmmm,

What strikes me as strange is that the Second Amendment is Constitutional, yet gun control isn't Federal? Different rules in different states doesn't really help.

I came across this:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3052278&page=1

If you have a detention order for mental illness you should be on a register of people not fit to have guns.

This does not criminalise mental illness, it is plain common sense for the good of the individual and the community.

Hey, if you have epilepsy you won't get to be an airline pilot?

Another improvement would be to adopt a system like we use in Europe. You get the licence FIRST which means you can be checked more thoroughly. This would also get round the problem of there being no background check for private (legal) sales?

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Originally Posted by dalek

Most of everything we buy today comes with warning lables or cautions, yet we don't see any of these on firearms, such as "this is the safety catch" or "pulling trigger may be hazardous to your health or others", or "please put in a secure cabinet and keep away from children"...:rolleyes:

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If I had the paperwork that came with my newest rifle on hand I could photocopy for you the pages where all of the above and more are covered. The guide goes over basic safety concepts, safe handling, unloading, loading, and all the safety mechanisms built into the weapon. It also came with a lock that allows me to renter the weapon completely useless to anybody other than the person with the key, when its locked up you can't even put a magazine into the gun or load a single round into the chamber.

As for your idea that most everything but acts of god are preventable that would require for the world and everybody into it to be perfect and that just a realistic expectation at all. Land owners cant spend every single day inspecting all the trees on the border of their land to ensure they aren't a danger to the road next to it. I cannot just say I wont drive because its windy, raining outside, or snowing; life dictates that things have to get done and most employers don't like to hear whine stories from their employees that it was too windy to drive to work and will be quick to inform you that you need to find a new job.

Try this for an idea of an unavoidable accident: I'm driving down the highway in the left hand lane (observing the posted speed limit). Its a split highway with two lanes on either side of a grass median. As I pass a slower car in the right hand lane their front drivers side tire blows out as they run over a tiny but sharp piece of road debris and their car moves over towards me in fractions of a second. I can slam on the brakes at the speed of 65mph and send the car behind me plowing into my rear end and still likely be hit by the car with the blown out tire due to the fact that their speed starts dropping immediately as the rim contacts pavement, I can swerve into the median to avoid them and quite likely loose control as my tires leave the asphalt and likely wind up going into oncoming traffic, hitting a tree, sign or parked state police cruise shooting radar, or I can slam on the gas to try to get out of the way and risk loosing control of the vehicle at higher speeds. Mind you I have to calculate the probabilities of all of these outcomes in less than a second and make commit to my choice in the remaining time and even then my vehicle unless it is a finely tuned performance vehicle may not be physically capable of avoiding the situation.

In the above situation the variable that makes this a hard to avoid situation is that the other driver has to make a choice as well and their choice has to be the right one to fight the wheel and try to bring the vehicle safely off the road, thus in such a situation my options are very bad, all of them carry a very high risk of causing damage to my vehicle, my person and possibly others as well. At that point my fate lies in the hands of the other person to react in the perfect way with exacting precision. Since I can't control them and their decision or reaction speed I have to do the best I can which still will likely end badly.

As for the diseases which you passed off as self-imposed I have only one word: heredity.

31 dead in a school?

Sounds like Baghdad on any given day. That same day,
over a hundred people were killed by car bombs there.
Tragic, indeed.

We're lucky we live in a place where things like this are
an exception, rather than the rule.

Ok, so some more counter points.

Gun safety.

Storing the gun and ammo in seperate lock boxes is a great idea. Its very safe. I agree with that. However, for those that buy guns to defend their homes that is not an option. Opening two lock boxes in the dark while someone is creeping round the house? not very practical. Obviously this can be taken to mean I think guns should be stored loaded and ready, but I take it to mean a gun is pretty useless for home defense.

As for violent video games - I was being sarcastic :P. Violent TV/Games doesn't make people violent. These people who go to copy the video games have something wrong with them in the first place. The video game gave them the idea but not the intent.

Finally statistics. Quote me as many accident reports as you like. Tell me more people are injured each year by paper clips than guns if you want (I think its true, I don't remember the numbers). But here are two counter points to that: Paperclips are a common item. I'd bet everyone has at least 10 they can think of. I have about 50,000 of the things on the shelf behind me. Therefore, per paperclip the accident rate is quite low. Per gun however I expect it is a lot higher. Same with cars. I'd imagine everyone drives once a day. Therefore its a daily gamble that you might crash. I doubt that you can say on average people use guns daily.

lies, damn lies and statistics. Statistics can prove anything taken out of context.

"In a test 7 out of 10 people said they prefered coke" (The other choice was water)

or one of my favourites was on breastcancercare.org.

"Where do you get most of your breast cancer information?
* Library
* Health Official
* Online"

Unsurprisingly the online pole revealed most people get information online. Gee.

finally..."they should have helped/seen it coming"

WTF? do you study your friends for signs that they are about to murder 30 people? even if they do write violent plays. I mean, someone has to write all these violent movies and games we all love so much. (doom used to scare the **** out of me btw, even in pseudo 3d. Doom 3 was really brown trousers time)

Point being, I don't think ANYONE could have seen this coming. Maybe he was odd and a bit twisted, but so are a LOT of people.

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I can slam on the brakes at the speed of 65mph and send the car behind me plowing into my rear end

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Person behind you is tailgating...(preventable).

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their front drivers side tire blows out as they run over a tiny but sharp piece of road debris

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In most cases it will be the rear tires that blow out due to the front tire lifting up the sharp object so that the rear tire runs over the upright object, otherwise glass is flat, nails lay flat.

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At that point my fate lies in the hands of the other person to react in the perfect way with exacting precision. Since I can't control them and their decision or reaction speed I have to do the best I can which still will likely end badly.

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Yep, but still all preventable if safe driving habits or practises are taken.

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Land owners cant spend every single day inspecting all the trees on the border of their land to ensure they aren't a danger to the road next to it.

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They can if they are involved in a woodlot and or clearcutting their land, and AFAIK most municipalities or rural areas will have zoning bylaws which will ensure all private property that abuts onto public roads are cleared of debris and are made safe.

If you practise defensive driving you will avoid mishaps, even if the other drivers are at fault, because you will be driving under the premise that all other drivers are idiots and that you need to be alert.

Blaming things on "accidents" is another way of saying I am not responsible or I am not accountable, which is it for you...:rolleyes:

As for my remarks about labels on guns, maybe I should have marked it [facetous]...[/facetous]. also as an adult I am sure you can understand all the written material that comes with the weapon, probably more so then say a 6 yr old...

As for heredity being your answer to my "self imposed", try telling that to a person who has been exposed to second hand smoke for a few years and develops lung cancer and there is no recorded history of it in the family, or that the person who had a massive heart attack because their lifestyle contributed to it smoking/unhealthy diets, lack of exercise etc. and there is no family history of heart failures.I could go on, but I think you get the point.

dalek in your world there are no chance encounters. Everything is preventable. Thats fine, my signature both accepts and denys that ... in a very round about way. Doesn't change the core meaning of my post. In terms of safety and chance of dying by gun or the unkown. Even if it seems like an unfair comparisson to you. To you it is unfair to say you are much more likely to die standing on a street corner than get shot by a gun. Regardless of the intentional or non-intention motivation of that event. I am not emotionally tied to this issue. I have no desire to spin one way or another, except that to me it's as much a right as the right to have an abortion under our consitutional law. And like abortion I can go either way but I have a preference for the constitution.

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Originally Posted by dalek

Easy...Lol...okay calculate the odds and find me facts to back that one up...:D

A few things...

1. Did the wind blow it down (big wind,what were you doing driving) if so then it is considered an act of God which is an accident

2. Was the tree cut and left to stand until a gust of wind blew it down...(preventable)

3. Was the tree dead and fell as a result of infestation (again Nature so it is an accident).


4. Was the tree part of an ecosystem that had been damaged or changed by man (preventable)

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You said nothing about frequency or likelihood of occurrence. You just said give me a situation that is unavoidable.

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Originally Posted by JPnyc

You said nothing about frequency or likelihood of occurrence. You just said give me a situation that is unavoidable.

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Touch'e....:cool: