Another GodAwful Massacre In A School

[glasseye]

Concealed heat.

[Amskeptic]

Concealed heat.

Sure, that too.

Turns out that Adam and his mother, Nancy Lanza, lived just three thousand yards up the road from where I used to ride my bicycle past fields that are now subdivisions.

There has been some suggestion that psychotropic medications (Prozac, for example) have been discovered in the bloodstreams of others who snapped horrendously.

http://www.ssristories.com/index.php

Prozac is one of the few antidepressants approved for the treatment of depression in youths. Unfortunately, however, studies on children have linked the drug to increased suicidal thoughts and behavior. As a result, the FDA issued a public warning in October 2004, and two years later extended the advisory to include young adults as old as 24.

In 2007, the FDA took an even stronger stance. The agency required antidepressant manufacturers to update existing black-box warnings about the increased risks of suicidal thoughts and behavior during initial treatment, which the FDA defined as the first one to two months.

An FDA black-box warning is the most stringent precaution a drug can carry before it is pulled from the shelves.

Colin

[jimbear]

This happened only a few hours from us in RI and what makes it even closer is that our friend's son was there... he lost his best friend and another close playmate on Friday. She finally told him last night the full details about happened at school on Friday and that his buddy is gone. She says he is doing OK, "moving between sadness and intermittently angry."

He was barricaded in a bathroom with his teacher telling him and his fellow students that she loved them and that they were going to be OK. There is a link below to his teacher being interviewed. This is the only TV footage I have seen regarding this horrific and terrifying event. My knowledge is gleaned from NPR and friends.

Hug your kids or let those close to you know how special they are. Write your congressmen and tell them that it is their duty and responsibility to fight for stricter gun laws and tighter security in our schools...

http://abcuni.abcnews.com/now/stitched/ ... ontent.mp4

[Amskeptic]

Write your congressmen

The War of Words is beginning. There appear to be many who cannot grasp that banning 60 round ammo clips is not taking away their 2nd Amendment rights.

[Bleyseng]

I am in favor of banning ALL handguns other than a six shot revolver. All these semi-auto handguns for "protection" are a joke. You want protection get a six shot shotgun. No auto or semi auto rifles as they are only for the military. Rifles are for hunting, bolt action only.

[glasseye]

You want protection get a six shot shotgun.

Absolutely. If somebody's coming after me at close range, that's what I'd want. Two barrels and a pattern a mile wide. No skill required.
Handguns have two assets: portability and concealability. Both are irrelevant for personal protection of home and family.

The time has come, neighbours. If not now, when?

[sped372]

I already wrote to my representatives. Enough is enough.

[JLT]

There are those who think that the Second Amendment is so sacrosanct that these massacres are part of the price we pay for the ability of the citizenry to take arms against their government.

If we were really serious about this argument, then there should be a monument in every town square listing their names and the dates of their death, just as there are for war casualties. It would have to be a bigger monument, of course, since there are many more people killed by handguns and rifles due to crime and mania and misguided passion than have been killed by handguns and rifles in all the wars in our country's history. People are dying every day, mostly one at a time rather than in the mass slayings that make the news and horrify us. It's easy to overlook the ones who don't make the front page of the paper, but they count, too. Any innocent person who dies by gunfire should go on the monument.

In an ideal world, we could preserve our rights to bear arms and still find ways to identify and cure those mental and social ills that make people kill other people. But this is not that world, and we must choose. Every day we avoid that choice is another day that good people die.

[denjohn]

Finally the USA has an act that perfectly expresses its true spirit as the horror show nation among nations: the random mass slaughter of little children by a maniac. Is it not so that the failure to protect little children from harm is the most shameful weakness an adult human can present?
Next, of course, comes the empty ritual of pretending that we must make sure something like this never happens again. How? By some forensic inquiry into the psychology of the shooter, Mr. Lanza... his comings, goings, email musings, Netflix rentals, chemical composition of his fingernail clippings? We flatter ourselves with the technocratic conceit that if we can measure something enough, we can control it. Ban assault weapons or tighten up the background checks? The horse is out of the barn on that one. There are enough weapons loose in the USA to conduct a full-scale Civil War right now. And probably enough ill feeling. Just pick the flavor of the conflict you want: ideological? Religious? Racial? Regional?
For what it's worth, the Newtown Massacre to me is largely about the failure of men in America, and in particular the failure of men to raise up male children into men.......................

http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/americ ... -show.html

[Amskeptic]

There are those who think that the Second Amendment is so sacrosanct that these massacres are part of the price we pay for the ability of the citizenry to take arms against their government.
many more people killed by handguns and rifles due to crime and mania and misguided passion than have been killed by handguns and rifles in all the wars in our country's history.

183 children dead by guns in 2010 . . . spread out so as not to draw attention, I guess.
Colin

[Hippie]

My school. My elementary alma-mater. There's my fourth grade classroom windows visible from the helicopter footage. The playground where I used to swing is now a barnacle of a permanent "temporary" classroom. There's the bus curb where I used to hurtle after classes.
But no, we are dealing with 20 dead young children, seven dead adults. I am so god-damned sick and tired of guns guns guns guns. I cannot imagine the anguish of these parents. Again and again and again, we will have these stupid earnest discussions about gun control, and the defenders of assault rifles and of no background checks and easy guns show purchases will reliably spring out of the woodwork to again tell us that it is the shooter not the gun, that is the problem.
There are first responders in the Sandy Hook Elementary School halls, whose blue and yellow plastic trays and half-pint cartons of milk I used to swill on my way to the playground, who have been reported as vomiting from the carnage, the children were commanded to hold hands and walk out with their eyes shut, and it is a sad sad day for America because we don't seem to get it. I want to throttle the dumb stupid breathless babble emanating from the TV as they describe my home town as some "rural" "peaceful" "pastoral" "perfect" suburban town where nobody imagines such horrific crimes could occur. Cameras stuffed into the faces of traumatized children "how did you feel?" STFU and let that kid be with his or parents. I can imagine it. I remember classmates in that very school who I deeply wondered about. I was friends with one tormented eight year-old soul whose home life could easily have turned him into a bullet-spraying maniac. He died young.
Did I say take away anybody's guns yet? Read again. Mental illness, rage, and incredibly efficient killing appliances are part of this recipe of devastation. We have *got* to tighten up. The NRA needs to be utterly run over by us, we are better than this.

I'm a little disappointed that you took the opportunity of this tragedy to politicize this within, what a few minutes?
Shame on you.

I'm off this forum for good.

[RussellK]

I'm off this forum for good.

Perhaps I'm out of line here but it strikes me as sad that today when isolation is so prevalent for some we can say I'm off this forum for good so easily. I regret the people in my life I've turned away from when they challenged me. We had so much more in common.

[JLT]

I'm off this forum for good.

Perhaps I'm out of line here but it strikes me as sad that today when isolation is so prevalent for some we can say I'm off this forum for good so easily. I regret the people in my life I've turned away from when they challenged me. We had so much more in common.

No, Russell, I don't think you're out of line at all.

Colin's post wasn't an attempt to sensationalize an issue for sensation's sake. It was, I thought, a heartfelt response to an incident that touched him on a personal level... his town, his school. His outrage wasn't at all like those of the talking heads on Fox or at NRA headquarters or the usual sources of bloviation. He had a dog in that hunt.

In a way, I did, too. I don't like to talk about it very much, but my first wife was killed by a lunatic with a handgun. (It's a long story; suffice it to say that it was a hostage situation gone sideways.) Every time I hear about a massacre like this, I grieve anew. That's something else the media doesn't dwell on. The grieving goes on a long, long time after the event fades from the headlines. I sometimes wonder if it will ever end. That is why I posted my own response -- it came from my personal experience, and from my heart, just as Colin's post did.

That is the difference between this forum and all the other screaming you've been hearing, Hippie. What's the alternative? To wait a reasonable amount of time to let passions cool off, and then post something weeks later when everybody is back to their normal state of inertia? When I'm hurt, I don't wait a week to say "ouch."

[airkooledchris]

I'm off this forum for good.

[Amskeptic]

Sometimes I feel so bone-tired.

Yes, JLT, I lived through a gun hostage situation as well, at the age of four,
and I participated in the NRA's Marksmanship program . . . up to Bar 2.
Colin