And here we go again.



Ok, so once again the goths are going to get blamed rather than the parents (I am assuming - we'll have to wait and see).

When are we going to decide that enough is enough and sit down for a serious discussion about gun control? How many kids have to die in school, the one place where they are supposed to feel safe, for this to be a real issue rather than a political poo-throwing and pandering contest?

And no offense to any members here, but the NRA can eat a bag of dicks. They should not have the clout in Washington that they currently enjoy. It's all fine and well to say the parents need to make sure their kids don't have access to guns, but they fail to realize that there are a lot of dumb shits with guns out there and they need to be screened better.

At the very least I would support an amendment that says if you have kids in your house, you are either a: Not allowed to own a gun at all, or b: have to purchase a gun safe along with your gun and sign an affidavit that implicitly states that any and all crimes or accidents involving the gun you have just purchased are your sole responsibility and you MUST bring all people who live in your household to a gun safety training session before you ever get your hands on said weapon.

I mean, FFS you have to take a test to drive a car but any asshole without a criminal record can buy a gun. How does that make sense?

~spidey, who's obviously fuming...

and...AND we have this tidbit from Sunday.

A friend of mine is a trauma nurse who attended the victim and many of the wounded. It's like a scene from M.A.S.H. only it's in our country!

Just to co-fume with you, Spidey, this is ridiculous. Gun advocates would rather have some "weirdo" to blame crime on rather than submitting to tighter gun control.

I (and maybe some others on this board) have lost people from my life due to gun-related deaths; I can never seem to make the point with an NRA type (who basically shoots unarmed deer) that this is an issue. They would much rather fault the victim-the depressed are "going to kill themselves anyhow", "he was probably mixed up with drug dealers" or "that was a people-hating goth, not a responsible gun owner." Those statements may or may not be true to varying degrees, but are certainly not reasons to let everyone who wants a gun have one.

Gah!!

I wandered over to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032525/ns/us_news/ to take a peek at the article (and the discussion board at the bottom of the page.) The ignorance that spews from the mouths of people is sickening, to say the least. There are way too many people who remain severely uneducated when it comes to the Goth subculture and continue to blame it for all of the world's wrongdoings. It is a shame.

I am against gun control but I am a firm believer in holding parents accountable for their children to such a point that it would include potential criminal liability in the event that their child engages in violent crime.

Our violence problem is a cultural problem, and we'll never be able to fix it if we keep focusing on the manner in which these crimes occur without taking a serious look at the various sociological aspects that are making violence so prevalent.

I know of an inner city school district near here where a year or two ago a kid somehow managed to acquire a machete as school was letting out [not exactly a concealable weapon choice] and slashed up a classmate he didn't like on the sidewalk outside of the school in front of everybody. Inexcusable! From what I recall hearing about when it was still in the news regularly it was somehow gang related. It's just one "statistic" among many and we seem willing to react to it with policy changes whenever those policy changes involve tinkering with sentencing, increasing the big brother treatment to teens, or implementing various weapon restrictions. But do any mainstream politicians stop to question the way things like our drug policies create the environment where these violent gangs thrive? We need bigger solutions and we're just not getting them.

In Philly, which is not too far from here; a few years ago two students beat a teacher into a coma during class. Apparently one of the two students was using their cell phone in class. The teacher instructed him several times to put it away, and finally confiscated the phone when the student continued using it anyway. The student then started arguing with the teacher and the confrontation moved into the hallway where another student who wasn't even in the class and had nothing to do with the original incident [didn't even see it!] joined in and the pair beat the teacher nearly to death. In explaining their actions the two youths gave the usual sob story about how bad their home lifes were, and how bad they had it growing up. There are two ways we can react to this directly: We can say "this is bullshit, they beat a teacher nearly to death and should be held accountable for their violent crimes" or we could buy the defense argument and say "If their home life was really THAT bad, perhaps we should take a look at what was going on there and hold the adults responsible for THAT accountable." Whatever we do we need to remember that stuff like this is a part of a larger violence problem. Philly's teachers have gone to board meetings pleading for the school policy makers to eliminate the policies that have teachers confiscating cell phones because so many of them had been violently attacked [albeit to lesser extremes] when trying to execute those policies. They've been pushed, hit, had desks & chairs thrown at them. Yet nothing is done to address why these kids are acting out this way. Related to that point: Philly's youths have in recent years been such a problem with violent flash mob robberies [where someone uses FB or twitter to organize a mass gathering at a location so that the kids who show up can rob/beat the people around them or rob a store clean en masse] that other youths as far off as London have been picking up the habit [Philly's flash mob problem was the inspiration for the London Riot!].

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying this case is another example of typical American "gangsta" teen violence here. What I am saying is that whenever we have a violence epidemic we don't actually try to get to the root of the problem. Remember how we reacted to Columbine? I do, I was in school when it happened. My school reacted to Columbine by targeting the types of kids singled out by bullies for extra scrutiny, as if any one of us would be the next one to committee a school shooting. That and suddenly we weren't allowed to have big scissors on school grounds, pocket knives, toe nail clippers, chains or bullet belts [all of which were perfectly ok previously]. The more bullied a student was, the more they'd be harassed by the school's administrators through big-brother type tactics. Did they actually take a look at the underlying problem [then-believed to be bullies]? No, not one bit. For bullies the months & years after Columbine were no different from the months & years that proceeded it.[1] They could beat up their victims in front of the faculty and rarely did anything ever come of it. But god forbid any one of these bully victims played first person shooters, wore black, or listened to any kind of music that's not played on the local radio stations. Given these types of reactions [and this hysteria is really just the tip of the iceberg: Remember all those kindergarteners who have fallen on the wrong end of zero-tolerance policies in this post-Columbine, post-9/11 world for drawing guns in school or bringing in "armed" gi joes?], is it really all that surprising that teen violence continues to be such a problem?

Oh, and as someone in favor of gun ownership and against gun control: I want to say that throwing more guns out there is not going to be a magic bullet for these kinds of problems. I don't believe we could take the NRA-type argument that "gun violence is cured by more guns" and simply issue every k-12 student a glock each day while they recite the pledge. That's not anymore of a cure for murder, than removing all guns would be.




[1] We now know, of course, that Columbine had nothing to do with our bullying problem. If the media hadn't made that one up when they had nothing else to talk about, perhaps these post-Columbine copy cat losers like this kid wouldn't have decided to use a gun in this manner.

According to this news report, the teen shooter's father was an ex-con who had been indicted on charges of felonious assault, kidnapping, and attempted murder.

Say what you will about gun control, but I'm thinking that what this country needs is more birth control.

-- Nephele

I agree. Just because someone has the biological ability to pop out a child, doesn't mean they should.

To go a step further from that: I believe that it is possible for a guardian to be so bad at parenting that it should result in sterilizing & the permanent lose of their parenting rights. Any kids they already have, should in a bad enough situation be rehomed & they should not be able to respond to making more.

To use another example local to me: 12 year old boy ran away from home and spent two years living with the biggest gang in the area [the bloods] who used him to mug people at gunpoint on the city streets. Eventually he was arrested before anyone was hurt. Two years and the family never reported him missing, put missing posters on telephone poles, went to the media to try to find him. Their reaction was basically "We figured he ran away and was happy." If I were in charge of the world, if a parent lets a 12 year old run away & does nothing: they should be sterilized, any other children under their care should be taken away, and they should be banned for life from caring for dependents.

I have been involved in a school related shooting, and I had to have surgery to remove pieces from my head. If my head had been turned one way or the other slightly, I'd be dead or blind in my left eye.

And I DO NOT believe in limiting guns any more than they are.

I DO believe that parents should be held accountable.

I also believe that violent felons should have their right to have children taken from them.

limiting guns is not the answer, it just makes it harder for people like me -good people who need the food they can help me get, and the defense they offer- to get one.

Maybe, after we figure out how to have fewer and smarter people in the U.S., they can have their guns back.

After their test scores are in.

Here's the problem I have with that idea: Guns give the weak a fighting chance against the strong. If you have a bunch of violent youths from "bad homes" on the streets beating people up in flashmobs, they intentionally target the people who can't win against them in a fair fight: We're talking the disabled, and the elderly. Last year one of Philly's flashmobs beat an old man nearly to death and left him permanently brain damaged. An old man in this scenario simply has no chance in a fist fight between himself & a group of however-many young strong attackers.

sgath92 and I are of a similar mind on this matter. I'd be worried if I lived in a society wherein the license to breed was a privilege, as it's very totalitarian and reminiscent of Half-Life 2, however a casual observation of mankind's childish behavior validates its immediate instatement.

I just want to clarify my comment about how I think this country needs more birth control.

By no means am I advocating forced sterilization on women and men. It would be horrific if government officials ever had the authority to strap us down and perform surgery on us without our consent, regardless of whatever crimes we might have committed (or merely been accused of committing).

What I want to see are politicians (particularly the Republican Party) knocking off the religious rhetoric against contraception and abortion. They need to stop trying to obstruct Planned Parenthood at every turn.

-- Nephele

Here! Here! Nephele.

And before this thread turns into a gun/ birth control debate, let's not forget:

Somebody got murdered.
Somebody's dead forever.

(The Clash)


If perhaps the shooter could have gotten some emotional/ mental help...if that could have been recognized maybe this could have been avoided and there wouldn't have to be gun/ birth discussions because the real issue is his mental disposition.

My response too, Lachrymose. I'm groaning about possible negative consequences to a subculture, but people lost their kids and friends. Makes me feel selfish.

Absolutely. But (as Spidey mentioned in the OP), the media is pointing the finger at the goth subculture (yet again) as an indicator of this person's instability.

I'm afraid that well-meaning members of society might insist that we all (meaning us here at Goth.net and our brethren elsewhere) are in need of getting some emotional/mental help simply because of our music/fashion/life-style aesthetics. They're obsessing over the wrong things and that's not going to help anyone.

People need instead to focus on violence in the household as an indicator for intervention – not the way that kids choose to dress or (non-violently) express themselves.

Even well-meaning goths who protest certain depictions of our subculture in the media need to ask themselves: "Is there any actual violence being advocated here?"

Violence, abuse in the family, bullying in the schools, these are the red flags that should serve as an alert that help is needed. And (as sgath mentioned) it's not the targets of the bullies that need to be scrutinized – it's the bullies themselves.

-- Nephele

TL;DR answer: the Supreme Court realised that if they ruled that the words mean what they say the room would be stormed by the bunch of now-criminals sitting outside.

Every time this arguement comes up I point to where I live and cite our number of school shootings.

Zero.

Gun control is not a blanket ban, but even the equaliser argement kind of falls apart. A gun against a flash mob will do bugger all even with a high-capacity 33 round mag (assuming you're using a Glock 9mm and it's even legal....) and assuming 100% accuracy and maybe a bit of overpenetration.

Basically the equaliser arguement boils down the the standard response of beating violence with more violence, and as two pointless middle eastern wars should have taught it, it doesn't work.