Another School Shooting.

NEWTOWN, Conn. - December 14, 2012 (WPVI) -- ABC News, citing federal and state sources, report that more than a dozen people are dead, including children, in a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

The shooter was killed and apparently had two guns, a person with knowledge of the shooting said. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still under way.

Nearby Danbury Hospital said three patients have arrived from the scene, but their conditions were not known.

The superintendent's office said the district had locked down schools in Newtown, in western Connecticut about 60 miles northeast of New York City.

State police said Newtown police called them around 9:40 a.m.

A photo posted by The Newtown Bee newspaper showed a group of young students - some crying, others looking visibly frightened - being escorted by adults through a parking lot in a line, hands on each other's shoulders

This makes me feel ill. I can't believe the rate at which this shit is happening.

I read about this a little while ago. It is enough to make you sick to your stomach.

Oh, Al, it really is.

It's tragic and horrible. We've just lost all respect for human life in this world.

Good grief.

I can't even watch the news. Who the fuck would go and shoot up little kids? In cases like this, I would be all for the death penalty. I'm familiar with the Danbury/Newtown area....been up there a few time to visit friends of the family. Fucking despicable......

I am so glad to be Canadian! I am so sorry for he children and the parents who have suffered such a huge loss.

Suzi wrote:I am so glad to be Canadian! I am so sorry for he children and the parents who have suffered such a huge loss.

What does being Canadian or even American have to do with anything? A tragedy of this magnitude can happen anywhere.

Another nutcase with legally sanctioned handguns (and a military weapon in his trunk he didn't get a chance to use) manages to kill multiple ppl - this time 20 children and 6 adults.

This will reinvigorate the debate about gun control in our country and the Second Amendment, which should perhaps be better clarified as to "arms." Of course the NRA will call in its paid politicians in Washington to scuttle such talk. Part of the argument "guns don't kill ppl, ppl kill ppl" will undoubtedly talk about if guns are not available other weapons will take their place.

Meanwhile, on this very day in China 22 schoolchildren were attacked by a nutcase there. So far no reports of death, because ... well they were stabbed and their wounds are being treated with most expected to live.
http://www.ryot.org/22-children-stabbed-at-chinese-elementary-school/35114

I shudder to think what he had in mind for that rifle. We're going to have to address these issues in this country at some point. Obviously an outright ban won't work. The toothpaste is out of the tube there. But we need to make alterations to the law. The Second Amendment was in regard to a militia, not to automatic weapons & hi capacity clips. It's gotten out of hand. We also need access to better mental health care. What we have is not good enough. Mental health is not taken seriously. Insurance wants to limit visits. Medicaid is far from adequate. And if a person has neither they're shit out of luck. These two things do not go together. If something doesn't get figured out soon it's going to get a lot worse.

Last week two people were killed and one seriously wounded at a mall outside of Portland. Today this tragedy at the Newtown school. The nation has to stop being held hostage by liberal gun laws and start tightening up on the availabilty of these weapons being used against innocent people by any Crazy who can get his hands on them.

Nystyle709 wrote:



What does being Canadian or even American have to do with anything? A tragedy of this magnitude can happen anywhere.

We have real gun control and laws. Our last mass shooting was in 1989. We don't have constitutional right to own any weapons we wish. Thank goodness!

Nystyle709 wrote:

So does Norway and Brazil. And look what happened there. Gun laws in the US are definitely too lax and need to be addressed....but don't think that just because you live in Canada that somehow guarantees you protection from something like this happening there. For you to declare that you are "proud" to be a Canadian FIRST and then want to offer your condolences about those innocent children as an afterthought in your statement was VERY insensitive IMO and prob. THE most retarded thing I've read in my two years on this forum. And I've had to live through FM's posts.

I completely understand your point, NY. That said, I do not think Suzi meant her post to be dismissive of what happened in America today. I think because the Chamber is a small, intimate online community, it is easy to express blunt honesty when it comes to anything happening of any magnitude.

All I know is we can't keep doing what we're doing. I don't give a damn how much control the NRA has or thinks it has. We better make some changes.

CeCe wrote:All I know is we can't keep doing what we're doing. I don't give a damn how much control the NRA has or thinks it has. We better make some changes.

From what I've read, a large majority of NRA members support things like background checks and closing gun show loop holes. Time to give them what they want.

A little perspective from the AP today. The US does lead the world in mass shootings.

Some of the deadliest mass shootings around world
By The Associated Press
December 14, 2012

A gunman at a Connecticut elementary school killed more than two dozen people, including children, on Friday. It is among the world's worst mass shootings. Here is a look at some others:

UNITED STATES

— Aug. 5, 2012: Army veteran Wade Michael Page kills five men and one woman and wounds three other people, including a police officer, before taking his own life at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin outside Milwaukee.

— July 20, 2012: Twelve people are killed when a gunman enters an Aurora, Colo., movie theater, releases a canister of gas and then opens fire during opening night of the Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises." James Holmes, a 24-year-old former graduate student at the University of Colorado, has been charged in the deaths.

— Jan. 8, 2011: A gunman kills six people and wounds 13 others, including then-U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in a shooting spree outside a grocery store in Tucson, Ariz. Doctors say Jared Lee Loughner, who has been sentenced to life in prison, suffers from schizophrenia.

— Aug. 3, 2010: Omar Thornton shot 10 people, eight of them fatally, within three minutes at the Hartford Distributors warehouse in Manchester, Conn., before killing himself in what was the worst mass shooting in Connecticut before Friday's school shootings in Newtown.

— Nov. 5, 2009: Thirteen soldiers and civilians were killed and more than two dozen wounded when a gunman walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, and opened fire. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder.

— April 3, 2009: A 41-year-old man opened fire at an immigrant community center in Binghamton, N.Y., killing 11 immigrants and two workers. Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant and a former student at the center, killed himself as police rushed to the scene.

— March 10, 2009: Michael McLendon, 28, killed 10 people — including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff's deputy — across two rural Alabama counties. He then killed himself.

— Dec. 5, 2007: A 19-year-old man with a rifle opened fire at Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb., killing eight people before taking his own life. Five people were wounded, two critically.

— April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, kills 32 people and himself on Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va.

— April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school's library.

— Oct. 16, 1991: A deadly shooting rampage took place in Killeen, Texas, as George Hennard opened fire at a Luby's Cafeteria, killing 23 people before taking his own life. 20 others were wounded in the attack.

— June 18, 1990: James Edward Pough shoots people at random in a General Motors Acceptance Corp. office in Jacksonville, Fla., killing 10 and wounding four, before killing himself.

— July 12, 1976: Edward Charles Allaway, a custodian in the library of California State University, Fullerton, fatally shot seven fellow employees and wounded two others.

— Aug. 20, 1986: Pat Sherrill, 44, a postal worker who was about to be fired, shoots 14 people at a post office in Edmond, Okla. He then kills himself.

— July 18, 1984: James Oliver Huberty, an out-of-work security guard, kills 21 people in a McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif. A police sharpshooter kills Huberty.

— Aug. 1, 1966: Charles Whitman opened fire from the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin, killing 16 people and wounding 31.

OTHER NATIONS

— March 11, 2012: Sixteen Afghan villagers, including nine children, are killed during a predawn attack in which Army prosecutors have charged Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 39. (This one happened in another country, but was an American nutcase that did it)

— July 22, 2011: Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik kills 77 in Norway in twin attacks: a bombing in downtown Oslo and a shooting massacre at a youth camp outside the capital. The self-styled anti-Muslim militant admitted both attacks.

— April 9, 2011: Tristan van der Vlis, 24, fired more than 100 rounds from three guns in a suburban Dutch shopping mall, killing six people before turning one of the weapons on himself.

— April 30, 2009: Farda Gadyrov, 29, enters the prestigious Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in the capital, Baku, armed with an automatic pistol and clips. He kills 12 people before killing himself as police close in.

— Sept. 23, 2008: Matti Saari, 22, walks into a vocational college in Kauhajoki, Finland, and opens fire, killing 10 people and burning their bodies with firebombs before shooting himself fatally in the head.

— Nov. 7, 2007: After revealing plans for his attack in YouTube postings, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen fires kills eight people at his high school in Tuusula, Finland.

— April 26, 2002: Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, who had been expelled from school in Erfurt, Germany, kills 13 teachers, two former classmates and policeman, before committing suicide.

— April 28, 1996: Martin Bryant, 29, bursts into cafeteria in seaside resort of Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia, shooting 20 people to death. Driving away, he kills 15 others. He was captured and imprisoned.

— March 13, 1996: Thomas Hamilton, 43, kills 16 kindergarten children and their teacher in elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and then kills himself.

— Dec. 6, 1989: Marc Lepine, 25, bursts into Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique college, shooting at women he encounters, killing nine and then himself.

— Aug. 19, 1987: Michael Ryan, 27, kills 16 people in small market town of Hungerford, England, and then shoots himself dead after being cornered by police.

I watched the news for about an hour before I cut that shit off and just left the house. Completely sickening. The senseless loss of life is always sad, but the KIDS, though?? WTF did they do to deserve THIS?

I think Suzi is so damn tired of hearing about mass shootings in the US and the right wingers who defend the right to own any damn weapon the NRA lobby's to keep legal! 20 children, little kids, just seems to so easy for people to excuse or feel that the right to pack guns outweighed their right to life.

That I am happy that I can feel safe here is all I am trying t say. We don't carry guns everywhere, and frankly don't feel the need to.

Suzi wrote:I think Suzi is so damn tired of hearing about mass shootings in the US and the right wingers who defend the right to own any damn weapon the NRA lobby's to keep legal! 20 children, little kids, just seems to so easy for people to excuse or feel that the right to pack guns outweighed their right to life.

That I am happy that I can feel safe here is all I am trying t say. We don't carry guns everywhere, and frankly don't feel the need to.

Suzi, while you did not request defending, I did. I did while understanding where NY was coming from.

I see you do have a bit of animosity toward the way America deals with the right to bear arms. I can't stand a gun in my presence. That said, I think the problem does not lie in how arms are sold in America.

I think it has to do with the way all of these shootings are sensationalized. I won't pretend to know international media. What I do know is, American media makes a kinda-sorta hero out of these people shooting up in public places.

While I do not like guns, I really think the basis of the problem is the fact that any act of terror will be on a major network in ten minutes and if kids are involved..."even better" because there will be some bass ackwards parent letting her 6-year-old go on the news to report how afraid she was just 6 hours prior.

I lost a client tonight when I refused to summarize some of the disgusting interviews FOX obtained today. And I don't care. And I have never felt that way ever before when losing a client.

What can one say its sickening. My heart goes out to the parents of those children.

I do think it's sickening that the libs are ready to pounce with their usual "tighten the gun laws" crap, exploiting these kids for politics. It wasn't even an hour before they were taking to Twitter with their shameful comments. Maybe some of it is out of direct concern, but I think a lot of it is really just using a tragedy to shove an agenda. Instead of coming together to grieve, these people are just acting like vultures. (Their true colors, I guess) It's almost hard to take them seriously when their first response is to tout the same all-proven-ineffective chants that totally ignore the real reasons why things like this happen. (And almost essentially give the killer a free pass.) Gun control won't take guns away from crooks, just their victims. So let's stop the politicizing. A tragedy happened that is the result of a deranged individual who made a choice to do this. I'm sure both sides could easily politicize this to blame the other but if that's debate that comes from this, then we're really dishonoring those who died. We can't even put these petty things aside in times like this. Makes me sick.

And I'm done giving my attention to this political attention hogs exploiting this.

Minerva wrote:Last week two people were killed and one seriously wounded at a mall outside of Portland. Today this tragedy at the Newtown school. The nation has to stop being held hostage by liberal gun laws and start tightening up on the availabilty of these weapons being used against innocent people by any Crazy who can get his hands on them.

That makes sense and is also quantified by other countries where nutcases are just as plentiful as in the US but where guns are not.

More from China:

Schools and students are targets worldwide
By CHARLES HUTZLER
From Associated Press
December 15, 2012

... A half-day before a young gunman committed one of the deadliest school attacks in U.S. history, a Chinese farmer took a kitchen knife and hacked at more than 20 children as they entered their rural elementary school.

Though the outcomes are different — 28 dead in Connecticut, and 23 injured in China — the Friday attacks show how disturbingly frequent rampages against children and schools are. Attackers often seek out the vulnerable, hoping to amplify their outrage before they themselves often commit suicide. News of one mass killing often serves as inspiration and blueprint to other potential mass killers. ...

Attacks against schools are a bleak subset, offering easy targets for taking down large numbers of victims. Shootings at schools have periodically occurred in Finland and Germany as well as the U.S., though the American attacks have been more frequent.

China has seen more than a half-dozen school attacks in less than three years, though the death tolls have been mostly in single digits, largely because knives have been the most-used weapon. China largely prohibits private ownership of guns.

Every time a mass shooting like this occurs everyone who looks at the facts immediately knows that curbing the easy access to guns would make it more difficult for nutcases to get the firepower to commit these senseless killings. That is why the outrage moves from the victims to "how can we stop this?"

But, don't expect any changes. There is a whole industry involved in our gun culture.

"We can't postpone the discussion on a national level every time there's a shooting. They're too often,"
-Gov. John Hickenlooper

"This time our response must consist of more than regret, sorrow, and condolence...a meaningful discussion about our gun laws and how they can be reformed and better enforced to prevent gun violence and death in America."
- Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head during an attack that killed six people in Tucson, Ariz.

"Let's not say once again, `Oh, this is not the right time to talk about it.' It is the right time to talk about it. We are better than a nation that has people killing children and has people cowardly shooting people in shopping malls and schools and nursing homes. We're better than this."
-Tom Mauser, father of Daniel was killed at Columbine