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North Illinois University Shooting

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calenlass:
I believe he meant he didn't want to turn this into a debate over whether or not it should be this easy to obtain a gun in the US. This is the general debate that gets everyone in the states so fired up about it, not whether it is easy or is not. Some argue that it is their right as stated in the Second Amendment, and some argue that they are dangerous and pretty much only designed for killing and shouldn't be available to just any old Joe Citizen.

If you want to argue that it is easy, that is fine. If it gets into shoulds, that is where it crosses political debate lines and Jeph gets angry.

RedLion:
NIU is only about 45 minutes from where I live, and I have a close friend who used to go there..they transferred to a different college last year, thankfully. Nonetheless, this hits pretty close to home for me.

Also--why would you even bring up the issue of a gun debate if you didn't want one to develop? If you didn't want it to happen, why did you make an issue of it?

Nodaisho:
You see all those done during 1994-2004? All those were done during the strictest gun control times I know of, under the Assault Weapon Ban.

It really pisses me off that people do this, and it makes me feel a hell of a lot less safe at school than I would otherwise, they have a paper up on the billboard saying how they expect the students not to have weapons on campus, I can't help but think that all the people at most of those schools expected that as well. Not counting the Appalachian school of law shooting, that one I know for sure the gunman was held at gunpoint by two students until the police got there.

Some people are just fucked up in the head I suppose. I am very glad that at least in this one, nobody died but the shooter, knock on wood. I suppose it sounds cold of me, like I don't care about the shooter, but lets face it, this was a big way to commit suicide, a lot of people that go on shooting sprees end up suiciding, much more than escape or get killed by someone else, that I know of, at least. The one time I can think of in the past few years that the gunman got away was the two church shootings in Colorado last year, he suicided on the scene of the second one, after he had been shot by a woman with a concealed carry license who had asked the pastor to be allowed to carry a gun there.

Now, I know there will be people that disagree with me completely on this, but knowing that the college I plan on going to allows people to carry concealed weapons on campus makes me feel a lot better.

Interestingly, overall crime has gone down since the mid-eighties (I believe, somewhere around there), in the US at least, but we have had a lot more shootings since then.

I am trying to keep this within Troll's requirements, but it is a very thin line to trod.

IronOxide:
While you are right that overall violent crime has decreased since I believe 1991, but there's conflicting reports on school violence.

The problem with the gun control legislation is that without teeth, the law does hardly anything. Unless there is some kind of program to get the guns that are already on the streets off the streets, but more importantly, it is a Catch 22 in the order of media coverage.

One of the problems is that people think that these actions will give them their fifteen minutes, and it does. Where it becomes an issue, is how do we pay reverence to those injured in these atrocities without making people think that they will become famous for carrying out the acts. Like how TV networks generally agree not to publicize suicide on air (there are exceptions, of course, but it's generally avoided), the fact of the matter is that as long as people hurt others, their actions will be publicized. The way to stop this is to make it not appear as even the faintest option to a desperate person, but we can't allow ourselves to be uninformed. Honestly, there is probably not an answer to this issue that pushes our society in a desirable direction.

I am constantly astonished by the evil that some people seem capable of carrying out, but that's not what we should make this about; we should should use this as a moment for us to reflect on how we can be better to people around us. Don't let this tragedy turn into a negative force.

ALoveSupreme:
The whole thing is pretty insane.  More intimidating than anything else is all these damned newscaster helicopters overhead.  It makes it feel like a goddamn warzone, even though I know nothing is wrong.

It didn't even feel all that scary at the time to me, but I was working in a daycare on campus and we weren't told a thing.  We were bringing the kids outside and warned to get them back in.  Ridiculous.

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