some deaths more important than others

[ahinton]

It is sad indeed to see this of all threads polluted by this kind of shameful nonsense.

Indeed; I would like to see Simon substitute his arrogant dogma, complacency and the rest with serious thinking and Mr GongGong substitute his rudeness with the kind of serious withering dismissal of Simon's expressions that is warranted but which simply requires no such rudeness in order to generate the desired effect.

[MrGongGong]

Indeed; I would like to see Simon substitute his arrogant dogma, complacency and the rest with serious thinking and Mr GongGong substitute his rudeness with the kind of serious withering dismissal of Simon's expressions that is warranted but which simply requires no such rudeness in order to generate the desired effect.

Sometimes rudeness is what is honestly felt and necessary
nothing wrong with a good dose of Anglo Saxon language from time to time.................

[Petrushka]

Indeed; I would like to see Simon substitute his arrogant dogma, complacency and the rest with serious thinking and Mr GongGong substitute his rudeness with the kind of serious withering dismissal of Simon's expressions that is warranted but which simply requires no such rudeness in order to generate the desired effect.

If they want do that then perhaps they can take their handbags elsewhere and slug it out while the rest of us can discuss a serious subject.

[Resurrection Man]

Indeed; I would like to see Simon substitute his arrogant dogma, complacency and the rest with serious thinking and Mr GongGong substitute his rudeness with the kind of serious withering dismissal of Simon's expressions that is warranted but which simply requires no such rudeness in order to generate the desired effect.

Or perhaps you write sentences that are short?

[MrGongGong]

If they want do that then perhaps they can take their handbags elsewhere and slug it out while the rest of us can discuss a serious subject.

I was (if you can be bothered to look ) actually making a serious point about people seeing things in simple terms
Black vs white
good vs evil etc

but as usual professor "logic" decides to try to lay the law down ....... and to be honest i'm bored with his opinion masquerading as "fact"

[ahinton]

Or perhaps you write sentences that are short?

Or maybe you first define short?...

[ahinton]

I was (if you can be bothered to look ) actually making a serious point about people seeing things in simple terms
Black vs white
good vs evil etc

but as usual professor "logic" decides to try to lay the law down ....... and to be honest i'm bored with his opinion masquerading as "fact"

Don't be. It doesn't. Not that this fact excuses your rudeness towards him, though.

[teamsaint]

Behaviour at ALL levels can be quite dismal.

but its rather more of an issue when you hold power, isn't it?

[Pabmusic]

Of course every bereaved parent deserves compassion, but surely that's not the point here.

The reason events like Connecticut, Dunblane etc are particularly shocking is because of the deliberate, brutal nature of it all. Most transport deaths etc are accidentally caused. No consolation to the bereaved of course, but the added knowledge that your child was randomly gunned down must surely add utter bewilderment to the grief.

Many families are affected by tragic deaths of children caused by illness as well as accidental deaths. Few have to endure the realisation and horror that their little child was deliberately murdered in cold blood.

I'm with you. Nothing can diminish the pain and loss - certainly not saying to a typhoon victim's family that it was a natural act - but there is a difference for those not immediately affected. It is made worse for most of us because they were children, and young ones at that. We are the most empathetic of all species, and we have evolved to be protective of our children, and the thought that our protection can be so easily and so suddenly overcome in an unnatural way is deeply shocking. That it could happen in a primary school (as at Dunblane) makes it all the more tragic, because schools - especially primary schools - are in our collective psyche, places of fun, friends, and growing up together. No survivor will forget this, so that, for them at least, the magic of schooldays has already been lost.

You are right, too, that this was a wholly premeditated act. I suspect the doer was severely depressed (quite common in 20-year-olds) and he clearly had poor role-models (his mother kept automatic weapons?!), but this doesn't explain this act. Many people become depressed, or are 'loners', without killing children. I've not seen anything yet that suggests psychopathy (and in any case, 'loner' and 'depressed' don't go well with 'psychopath'). The circumstances seem on the face of it similar to those of Michael Ryan (odd coincidence of names) at Hungerford, who was older, but who had a fascination with guns, and was a 'loner' who suffered from depression, killed his mother first, and went on the rampage before killing himself.

'Tragedy' is certainly the right word.

[scottycelt]

I very much concur that all deaths are tragic, particularly among children.

I believe that our Press, and the BBC in particular, are obsessed with America. Anything that happens in America is reported here in great detail - it must be a reflection of the 'Special Relationship' that we have dreamed up over the years. In return for behaving like a poodle obsessed the Americans have very generously deployed nuclear weapons all over the UK - so they may 'defend' themselves, if required.

It is hard to believe that we are part of the EC and still have a Commonwealth; our media are usually hostile to the EC and virtually ignore the Commonwealth.

'Vinteuil' quite rightly highlights the fact that over a thousand died in the Philippines last week with barely a mention in our media; and that's before we look at the deaths in Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere (not to mention Haiti).

It is right to be horrified by any tragedy, we need to ensure that we remain equally horrified - irrespective of circumstance, race or creed. If these children had been Chinese the coverage would have been minimal.

I think we might all be in agreement with the thrust of that. In fact I (and others) made that very point recently regarding Hurricane Sandy.

We have been a virtual colony of the US since WWII and have aped much of its culture ever since. We continue to refuse to accept our natural role as a leading and influential player in the New United Europe which will surely ultimately emerge with or without us.

This genuinely bewilders some, including our current friends and allies including maybe some in the US administration itself!

However, there is no sign of anything changing any time soon and, indeed, some of our leading politicians and the bulk of our media seem to think if we return to 19th Century political fragmentation the rest of Europe and the world will follow suit.

I digress ...

[ahinton]

I think we might all be in agreement with the thrust of that. In fact I (and others) made that very point recently regarding Hurricane Sandy.

I think that it's all too easy to exaggerate this so-called "obsession with America"; it is, after all, a land colonised by many Europeans over the centuries and one in which the principal languages are for the time being English and Spanish and, at around 315m, it is the third most populous nation on earth - it is also quite wealthy. This being the case, it is little wonder that it attracts considerable attention from many parts of the world, not just UK.

We have been a virtual colony of the US since WWII and have aped much of its culture ever since. We continue to refuse to accept our natural role as a leading and influential player in the New United Europe which will surely ultimately emerge with or without us.

I do not believe that we are any kind of US colony, although there have certainly been times when it might look rather too much like that - and we don't have a "natural role as a leading and influential player in the New United Europe", for our part is a small one (especially being outside the Eurozone) and the "New United Europe" is far from united; one has only to remember that the EU state tally is 20 short of the Council of Europe one and even the latter is not representative of the whole of Europe.

However, there is no sign of anything changing any time soon

Really? I assume that you've not recently visited Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Scotland, Catalunya?...

and, indeed, some of our leading politicians and the bulk of our media seem to think if we return to 19th Century political fragmentation the rest of Europe and the world will follow suit.

They can talk - that's what we pay them for - but talking is no more going to achieve an end such as that which you posit above than anything other than the most innocuous tweaking if American gun laws is going to happen following last week's tragic event in CT (said he, trying to end that digression!). There are reckoned to be almost as many firearms in US as there are people and gun culture has long been endemic there; a Texan friend tells me that there's a joke there that gun laws are already very tough in Texas in that, if the cops come round to search your home and find no guns, you could be in serious trouble. How and to what extent can one realistically draw parallels between the fact of this gun culture as a way of life and the massacres that occur in US from time to time? I think that this and the remainder of the problem can perhaps best be summarised as it was a couple of days ago by a friend and colleague who lives in the part of CT where the latest one happened.

...it's the frequency of this sort of thing - by which I mean specifically, mass murders carried out with guns - that is a peculiarly American phenomenon. And it's hard to argue against the fact that the reason for this is the ubiquitous gun culture in this country; very approximately, there is one gun here for every man, woman and child in America. The fundamental problem with the inevitable shrill, vociferous argument now proceeding back and forth about gun control is that it misses the point that there are two incompatible strands to the matter. On the one hand, do countries with better gun control laws than the USA, and that have never permitted universal, well-nigh unregulated gun ownership - that would be most of them - have less of a problem with gun crime than we do here, as gets pointed out repeatedly by the gun control advocates? Obviously yes. Is this in any way relevant to the current or future state of affairs here? Not even slightly. The vast number of guns that are out there already aren't going away. Even if a benign dictatorship were to assert itself here and ban all gun sales to the public and demand that those in circulation be turned in (and for all sorts of reasons, that's an impossibility, whatever bollocks the gun lobby may talk about our European-style Socialist government intending to do exactly that), the bad guys and loonies would still have ample access to firearms for an indefinite period of time. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. A bit more common-sense regulation probably wouldn't hurt - no assault weapon sales to the public, no unregulated sales at gun shows, more stringent background checks - but at the end of the day, that will achieve a percentage reduction of the problem, but go nowhere near putting the US on an equal footing with, say, Japan. Frankly, there's probably nothing much to be done. This, and Aurora and Columbine and all the rest will happen again. The world is a shitty place, bad things happen, and this is just one of them. Statistically speaking, gun violence is far from the most likely way to be killed, here or anywhere else, obviously. So while the problem should certainly not be ignored by our elected officials, it's not going to be 'solved' and that's that.

There is no mention of the possibility of a firearms amnesty, but how could there be any sch thing other than in respect of illegally acquired firearms which are almost certainly a vanishingly small proportion of the total US gun tally? People are hardly going to be expected to hand in their licensed, legitimately acquired and paid-for guns, are they? As an admittedly somewhat cynical-sounding pro-gun American stated on this morning's edition of Today on R4 against the idea of introducing a firearms ban, it might help if there was a ban on mental health problems (presumably of the kind suffered by the perpetrator of this most recent piece of American carnage - and his mother, if it comes to that).

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

it is the frequency of deliberate mass murder with freely available guns that beggars the imagination ....

pace


i for one would be truly grateful if the usual suspects could give us all a break from their noisome chatter over the holiday period and especially on this thread .... thank you

[ahinton]

it is the frequency of deliberate mass murder with freely available guns that beggars the imagination ....

It does indeed. All that can possibly be hoped for, I think, is a turn in the tide of public attitude in US to the possession of firearms as a consequence of these tragic events; it's a long shot (sorry), of course, but it's not beyond all possibility one would hope, since owning and being able to use a firearm is not the "freedom" as which it is all too widely perceived in US.

i for one would be truly grateful if the usual suspects could give us all a break from their noisome chatter over the holiday period and especially on this thread .... thank you

For clarity's sake, you would need to identify them, which you could perhaps do by sending a round robin PM...

[Tony Halstead]

For clarity's sake, you would need to identify them, which you could perhaps do by sending a round robin PM...

[Pabmusic]

... All that can possibly be hoped for, I think, is a turn in the tide of public attitude in US to the possession of firearms as a consequence of these tragic events; it's a long shot (sorry), of course, but it's not beyond all possibility one would hope, since owning and being able to use a firearm is not the "freedom" as which it is all too widely perceived in US...

The second amendment to the US Constitution reads: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". I think that any objective observer would realise that the right to "keep and bear arms" is contingent upon the need for "a well regulated militia", something that the US has not needed for more than 150 years. But that is not generally recognised by Americans, who tend to see only that "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".

Changing this law would be so much more difficult than it would be in Britain, or almost anywhere else. First of all, it is notoriously difficult for central government to pass any laws (look at the difficulty Obama had over medical insurance). Even where a central (federal) law is passed, it is usually up to the individual states to implement it through their own laws; they can be experts at circumventing federal laws. But this would not be just a change in the law - it would be an amendment to the Constitution, which would have to be passed in Congress and then ratified by three quarters of the states (38 of the 50) before it could become law. That is a truly tall order, and there have been only 27 amendments to date, the first 10 (the Bill of Rights) dating from 1791.

So I'm afraid it's a bit much to believe that the Americans might change the law significantly in the light of this appalling tragedy.