At least 17 dead in Florida School Shooting

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Yes, the Australian murder rated has declined, but not only firearm deaths.

Perspective for thought:
The United States has nearly 14 times as many people as Australia. So adjusting for poulation:
2002’s Monash killed two and wounded five = 28+70
2011 Hectorville killed two and wounded three =28+42
2014 Hunt killed four people = 56
2014 Wedderburn killed three people = 42
The per capita equivalent would be 154 Mass shooting deaths since confiscation.
Knife killings on the rise in Australia as gun murders fall...

I'm very worried about that as well, not only because of the potential backlash for so many innocents in the ASD community. But also because it's clear from some of the students' comments that this person was massively shunned and ostracized for years.

I don't want to go down the chicken-and-the-egg road (did the ostracism and isolation make him worse? Or was he already beyond hope before the ostracism and isolation even started?). Nothing, no pain on earth or in heaven, justifies what this young man did.

It's just that I've seen social isolation / ostracism / bullying as a recurring motif in too many instances of youth violence. That motif, its prevalence, keeps me awake nights almost as much as the violence itself. As does the fact of its being universally ignored...

I know I'm expressing this extremely poorly. But if these episodes of violence are a response to something, perhaps we should be taking a multifactorial approach to them: remove the tools of violence from easy access, and also do something about the situations (bullying? social isolation?) that ultimately result in this type of horrible, never justified, but dammit it keeps happening! something has to be causing this! acting out.

Edit in: Well, emerging details seem to indicate sociopathy. Harming small animals. Multiple issues with neighbors and their children. Many calls to local LE. So... removing the tools of violence yes, but a different type of social intervention was needed than I'd surmised might be.

@Mudboy: even with normalized ratios, you're talking 4 episodes in 16 years? If your count is comprehensive and my math (2002 - 2018) accurate. Over here in Gunville, we're looking at 18 episodes so far this year alone: that's 18 in eight weeks.

Last edited by Esmerelda Weatherwax on 15 Feb 2018, 8:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Woah there cowboy, Australia has nowhere near the number of mass shootings as the US. We had 13 mass shootings in the 18 year period from '79 to '96 but none in the succeeding 20 years. Why? Well in '96 the Government brought in really tough gun control laws. I can't just wander into a department store and buy an assault rifle and nor can any other Australian. Gun control does work. It's not something Americans want to believe but it's true.

So far this year there has been 18 school shooting in America. That's just school shootings, not mass shootings in general. There were over 350 mass shootings in America last year. You guys have a gun problem. Simples.

Of course gun control works. Just ask Syria, North Korea, and Nazi Germany!

If you had a giant field of grass that you wanted to cut, how much easier is it with a tractor, vs a push mower?

If you have a Chihuahua and a Pit Bull, which are you going to be more afraid of attacking someone?

If someone is determined to attack you, what would you rather defend against... a knife or an assault rifle?

I think everyone who wants to live would much rather face someone with a knife than an assault rifle...

An assault rifle ban would not stop all violence, no one is suggesting it. But it sure would help in limiting injuries and deaths, and the amount of damage a person is capable of if they do choose to do something terrible like this.

Its pure simple logic, and its why the Gun Advocates, the NRA and Republicans avoid addressing it directly as if it were the plague...

This is a quote from The Atlantic and it's interesting because it shows less guns doesn't just mean less mass shootings.
"The number of mass shootings in Australia—defined as incidents in which a gunman killed five or more people other than himself, which is notably a higher casualty count than is generally applied for tallying mass shootings in the U.S.—dropped from 13 in the 18-year period before 1996 to zero after the Port Arthur massacre. Between 1995 and 2006, gun-related homicides and suicides in the country dropped by 59 percent and 65 percent, respectively, though these declines appear to have since leveled off. Two academics who have studied the impact of the reform initiative estimate that the gun-buyback program saves at least 200 lives each year, according to The New York Times."

Yeah but he killed 17 white people?

IMO the media has blood on its hands for continually and reliably televising these events and making the perpetrators much more well known than even the victims, demonstrating to violent troubled youth that not only is there an easy way to seek revenge on your bullies, but you'll become world famous, too!

perhaps we should try changing the way we report tragedies like this, before or in addition to talking about the pandoras box of gun control.

ask them what?

how gun control is at all related to their problems? because i'd like to know that, too.

Regardless of his racism, I think he was more infuriated at being expelled from school.

how do we know all the victims were white?

the pictures seem to be young girls so maybe he wasn't getting any dates either...

my girlfriend texted me this morning saying that there was a sigificant police presence at her school an that it would be harder or me to visit her there.

recently a kid at another high school in our area was caught making threats online against female students, how to shoot them, 16 were named. i wonder how these two incidents may be linked?

https://www.independent.com/news/2018/j ... hreatened/

it looks like we may be experimenting with armed guards in schools soon.

This is true. But there is no question the number of mass shootings involving non family, non gang, non drug and those involving 10 or more killed have gone way up.

The worst school massacre in US history was not a school shooting but a school bombing 91 years ago.
Bath School disaster

I heard George Noory on the radio say "this is the cost of living in a free society." after screaming BULLSHITTTTT!! !! at that numbskull on the radio, I had to restrain the urge to scream. I never heard such a stupid public comment from anybody who is not The Dotard.

What a stupid thing to say.

Obviously the guy figures those kids are just collateral damage so that everyone can be armed to the teeth... which is nucking futs. I'll never understand that part of American culture.

The above statistic is highly misleading. In small European countries with low populations (ten to hundred times less than the US), of course that rare event of a mass shooting would affect a relatively larger proportion of the population.

If you look instead at "Violent deaths by firearm, rates per 100,000 population, 2016"*, the US is way above all European nations (bar Turkey) and other wealthy nations like Australia and Canada:

Germany, Australia = 0.1
Netherlands, Belgium = 0.3
Italy, Greece = 0.4
Canada = 0.5
France, Ireland = 0.6

United States = 3.1

There's no question that you're far more likely to face death by firearm in the US than in Europe - and to say otherwise is to push a dubious agenda, IMO.

* source:
http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/tools/in ... lence.html