Gunman kills 32 on campus!

    Quote from Rick_D

    you'll find that people who legally own guns and passed all the tests to get them are not the people going around shooting people all the time. It's not very often that a criminal legally buys a gun. The country is already flooded with weapons, and by taking away the guns from responsible gun owners who legally acquired their weapons all you're doing is disarming people who aren't doing anything wrong.

    I thought about this for a while. Isn´t it so that most murder happens in the home?

    Quote from Rick_D

    I used to believe that the right to bear arms was a questionable one at best, but when you actually look at the facts, you'll find that people who legally own guns and passed all the tests to get them are not the people going around shooting people all the time. It's not very often that a criminal legally buys a gun. The country is already flooded with weapons, and by taking away the guns from responsible gun owners who legally acquired their weapons all you're doing is disarming people who aren't doing anything wrong. States that have concealed carry laws are far less attractive to criminal activity because when every other person might just be carrying a gun you're hardly going to try anything because you'll get shot for your trouble. If you know that nobody is allowed to carry a gun about their person or in their homes then it gives you and your illegal weapon a license to do whatever the hell you want without fear of getting shot by civilians.

    What the authorities should really do is try and reduce the amount of illegal guns, and introduce better laws and means of upholding laws that enforce people to secure their weapons safely in their homes, so people cannot steal them and sell them on, or kids can't get hold of them simply by opening a cupboard or looking in a shoebox.

    If half the students had guns in their dorms then that punk-ass kid wouldn't have got very far after his first shot.

    I'm not encouraging the arming of schoolchildren but the usual knee-jerk reaction is not always the best one, and there's always people behind the emotion who will attempt to exploit their own agenda - people far more dangerous and persuasive than JT.

    When people question the right to wear arms, its not that they want to see them banned, whats imposible anyway, but subject to better rules (as you mention)

    In Virginia a 12 year old is able to buy a gun.

    Weapons are indeed spread widely over the US, there is a ratio of 93-96 weapons per 100 people in the US, in Holland thats 2:100 Belgium 16:100 Norway 38:100 as far as I can remember the numbers from teh newspaper.

    just wanted to make a point that the people that go on these crazy killing sprees pick places where people are easy targets, if you knew that everywhere you went people would be armed you wouldn't have such an easy time getting past one victim.

    I'm not saying that weapons should be widespread in any society - that's a dangerous thing, but if your sole reason to remove all legal weapons (which is what all these gun control people want) is the actions of someone like this then it's a flawed argument. Someone made a comment on another site that this person is going to be crazy with or without videogames, and I think the same applies to guns, they would have done something stupid like this if they didn't have guns, the death toll would just be lower.

    But having laws in place that control how your weapons are stored etc will do much more for safety than just taking away legal weapons.

    But to sum up, I didn't mean to suggest that students should be armed, just making a point that no guns doesn't always mean a safer place, it just means you are defenseless against a person who does have a gun.

    People who want guns can get guns, I think thats the point Rick was making. And its true, I could get a gun any day of the week illegally. Doesn't mean I'm going to.

    Quote from killertomato

    Read it yesterday. This is really making me worry about our western society, we appear to be getting sick and selfdestructive.. If these things will continue then we might have allready reached the top-hight of our advanced culture.Sad news..

    The good thing is, that we on the east side of the west (aka. Europe) don't have the overflow of weapons.What I find strange, is that a building which contains close to 1000 students doesn't have armed guards at each entrance. School shootings have happened in USA before and probably won't stop just yet. As for the entire campus, there is like 24k students? And how many guards? 15?

    Klein, yeah allowing guns on campus, imagine the chaos if someone pulls a "prank" on someone, and someone else sees it and then shoots at the guy making the "joke" with his gun, students shooting students in all directions and no one even know what happened.

    If possible, the US should start a heavy background check of EVERYONE who wants a gun, checking for anything from family problems, school problems, addictions etc. etc. anything that might be an factor. And these should also be checked like once a year or so. Selling weapons over the counter is insane.

    blue, as for the weapon ratio in Norway, hunting is the answer. And there are almost no handguns (you need to be a member in a shooting club for like 2 years and 21 years old to get a .22 pistol, and the more years the heavier gun). The rest is shotguns and hunting rifles.

    Of course there is a background check to get a gun. Its not like you just walk into walmart, grab a gun off the shelf and pay for it and walk out.

    Like everyone else has said, the real problem with reducing or removing a legal way to obtain a gun is that there are SO many guns here already, that'll just take guns out of the hands of people who aren't the problem.

    I'm sure that school has more than 15 security guards, it probably has its own police force. The Uni that I used to go to was about that size, ~25k students, and like ~12k lived on campus. There was a police force of about 50 officers, and they were State police, not locals.. meaning they had more power than a 'normal' cop. They had a small SWAT team and one of those SWAT vans.

    To have security guards outside of every entrance of every building on campus would be absurd. That is hundreds of guards... Chances are once the police were called someone was there within a minute or two. I know at my old Uni you could easily get across campus in a car in under a minute.

    Its a tragedy but I don't think there is any logical way to prevent this kinda thing from happening.

    You can get a gun almost anywhere in any country if you really want one. Purchasing it legally will require a background check already. Scary thing is that this gentleman bought it legally.

    Okay, I want a gun. How do I get one? Srsly it’s not that easy to be hooked up to a shady market. But I do agree this is a fruitless tangent, even if it’s almost obligatory on a forum; strict regulations on guns in America will be about as taboo as opening up the display case and spunking on the constitution, and we can all agree having a gun does not directly relate to being a psycho nutcase.

    I’m annoyed by the speed in which Twat Thompson has latched onto this case, like the little tick he is, to blame games before the first shred of evidence he even played them. Debase a school shooting and entire entertainment industry just to he can stand on his soap box in front of the cameras and recite the same bullshit rhetorics again. Two things worry me in particular: 1) The creative writing class in which he wrote depraved stuff that worried his tutor and got him seeing a psychotherapist is completely glossed over, whereas blaming video games went straight into full swing without any foundation. 2) People are more happy to accept something is forcefully brainwashing millions of kids to turn them into murderers than, perhaps, that he was a heavily depressed psychopath with a gun.

    Quote from Thrik

    Yeah, Kotaku has absolutely become an embarrassment of a site. If a post isn't taking things completely out of context to create controversy or blatantly attempting to provoke a comment backlash by insulting someone or something, then it's probably the profanity-filled report of some ranting, outrageous dick who thinks he sounds really intelligent (case in point: link in this thread).

    My mouth, you took words out of!

    Yeah what scares me is the roommates who realized that nothing was wrong. They knew something was up when he talked and wrote about murder. Its the same case of everyone seeing the signs, no one doing anything about it.

    Quote from Bluestrike

    That's totally not true.

    it's 21 for a handgun, 18 for long guns.

    In addition you can only purchase one firearm every 30 days and are subject to a background check on the spot and are required to show 3 forms of ID.

    There's tons of other rules and regs, but those are the basics.

    Many states have tighter regulations.

    As an aside though, this guy was a psycho and was going to take as many people with him as he could no matter what. If it wasn't guns it would be a car, or a knife, or anything. Not really the point of the issue IMO.

    You reckon a guy with a knife running through a campus would be able to take out 33 people without being stopped? I doubt it. Whilst I agree that having a gun was in no way the motivation for the murders, it most certainly facilitated it more easily than had they not been available, and increased the final bodycount.

    Guns don't kill, people do, for sure, but guns make it a darn sight easier, faster and more effective for them when they choose to do so.

    I agree with you James, but it's a real catch22 - you can't just take away guns - I think we all can agree that that is not a reasonable or sensible option; but what can you do?

    The first thing that jumps to mind would be stricter laws in place for letting people get hold of guns - nothing unreasonable and overly intrusive (like: submit blood, semen and urine and allow us to monitor you with this camera 24/7/365), but something that checks into family history and the requirement to go under psychological evaluation before being cleared; you're given a government grant to purchase a safe gun cabinet that possibly utilizes fingerprint ID - sure it adds on a lot of time to the purchasing of a weapon and there's a lot of psychos who can disguise their illness and fool others but you're bound to "catch" at least 50% or more of the people that currently slip right through, that'll be 50% more than now so anything is better than nothing.

    I don't think it should swing the other way where you're required to give your life story and allow yourself to be electronically tagged just because you did something legal and through the proper channels.

    There's a problem in this country (the UK) with social workers, these people fail thousands of people every year but no reforms are being put into place, just a shock horror news story now and then about how they failed, the heads of office diverting attention to something like "oh we couldn't have known, they did the best they were allowed to do" - now if it were up to me I'd look at the cases and see where the social workers failed, why they failed and the practical solutions to those problems, no matter how much money it;s going to cost because if it's going to improve people's lives then maybe they won't go out and kill all these people or abuse their children who then grow up to do fucked up shit like abuse children.

    But instead what happens is there's some knee-jerk reactions and calls to ban kitchen knives.

    The same is true in the states, but it's a little more dangerous there, with all the little pieces of lead flying around, but I still think the solution is not a simple matter of "banning" something, but looking objectively at the problems, and their potential solutions, instead of offering some simple quick-fix solution like banning video games or confiscating guns.

    [edit] Oh and I found this funny but sad:

    At Oregon's Lewis & Clark College, another student was detained by campus police Wednesday shortly before a vigil for the Virginia Tech victims when he was spotted wearing an ammunition belt. Portland police later determined that it was "a fashion accessory" made of spent ammunition, and said the man did not have a weapon. The belt was confiscated.

    Glad to see there's no knee-jerk reactions taking place already. :roll:

    but what can you do?

    I think you could start by stricter laws, make it harder for all ppl to get hold of a weapon. Maybe like in Sweden, you have to use it in your profession or hunting to own a gun. And not only hunting btw, i think they have to be part in some hunter club or sum. This wouldnt get direct effects but after 1 generation or two it would look very different. We in Sweden have our share of murders and shoot outs, luckely we haven´t had any massacre yet though. I think and hope that in this country we are rather good to read signs from our children so we can adress problem a lot faster. Of course some ppl allways fall through. But less ppl falling through means less risk that something really bad happens. In US it seems like everybody just think of them self first. Like who cares if ppl live on the streets or dont afford medical help or drink them self to death or have problems in school. Sure it happens here too BUT the sociaty does everything to get ppl out of that situation.

    Why does everyone think america is some cess pool of death and murder and rape and robbery? Sure there are some bad parts of the cities, but all cities have some 'bad' areas. The vast majority of the country is a very safe place to live. Sure we could use some work in social services and education, but we are spending billions of dollars on a war

    There are hundreds of thousands of students in this country, there is bound to be someone to goes whacko. This kid's English teacher did see signs of mental illness, and did refer him to a psychiatrist, but they can't force anyone to do anything.

    And about his roommates... I saw an interview with one of them. He said he never really talked to them, stayed in his room or went to class. He said he never read any of the kid's writings. Not that it really matters, go on Deviant art, you'll find hundreds of potential mass murders there. Just because someone acts morbid doesn't mean they're gonna go slaughtering people. Seriously, just think to yourself.. how f**ked up would someone have to be for you to honestly think they're going to seriously hurt someone, let alone go on a killing rampage. Sure if he had anger issues, was obsessed with guns/knives, made threats, yeah I'd probably say something to someone. If he sits in his room with no weapons, saying nothing to nobody, I'm not going to suspect anything.

    I mean, d3 is morbid and angry(and lonely ), is he going to go on a rampage?

    Sorry d3 i <3 you

    Sometimes I feel like it

    Seriously though.. 12 years old to buy a gun? Which fucking planet are you from Bluestrike?!

    Btw 170 people were killed in Iraq yesterday.. but it's ok, it's just Iraq.

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