Yes Newtown is a crime that calls out to Heaven, God have mercy on the sick soul that did the deed, however before we go all gun grabbing nuts, we must be rational and look at the facts. You can read the articles at the links provided
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#1 gun free zones are a joke, Connecticut has some of the tightest gun control laws in the USA, neighboring Vermont has some of the most liberal, the school was a registered “gun free zone” yippee skippee
The Facts about Mass Shootings
“In fact, the high point for mass killings in the U.S. was 1929, according to criminologist Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections.
Incidents of mass murder in the U.S. declined from 42 in the 1990s to 26 in the first decade of this century.
The chances of being killed in a mass shooting are about what they are for being struck by lightning.
Until the Newtown horror, the three worst K–12 school shootings ever had taken place in either Britain or Germany.
New York Times columnist David Brooks and Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson have both suggested that the ACLU-inspired laws that make it so difficult to intervene and identify potentially dangerous people should be loosened. “Will we address mental-health and educational-privacy laws, which instill fear of legal liability for reporting potentially violent mentally ill people to law enforcement?” asks Professor Jacobson. “I doubt it.”
Gun-free zones have been the most popular response to previous mass killings. But many law-enforcement officials say they are actually counterproductive. “Guns are already banned in schools. That is why the shootings happen in schools. A school is a ‘helpless-victim zone,’” says Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff. “Preventing any adult at a school from having access to a firearm eliminates any chance the killer can be stopped in time to prevent a rampage,”
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#2 where were the parents and neighbors, which brings me to this excellent quote from
Second mass shooting prevented on Friday
“BARTLESVILLE, Okla. – A Bartlesville High School student is in custody on charges he plotted to bomb and shoot students at the campus auditorium on the same day that 28 people were shot and killed at an elementary school in Connecticut.
Police arrested 18-year-old Sammie Eaglebear Chavez at about 4:30 a.m. Friday after learning of the alleged plot Thursday.
An arrest affidavit says Chavez tried to convince other students to help him lure students into the auditorium, chain the doors shut and start shooting. The Tulsa World reports that authorities say Chavez threatened to kill students who didn’t help.
The last point this brings up, though, has to do with community. If there is any remedy to be found to these events, it’s not through legislation or restricting the tools (read: guns in these cases) used by madmen. It’s the rebuilding of a sense of community and responsibility to each other.. a shared sense of decency being passed down to each generation. When that collapses, the entire system is weakened. The government is, in reality, very limited in their ability to protect us if responsible citizens are not engaged in the duty to protect and defend ourselves. And that includes speaking up when we learn that somebody is even considering doing something like this. That worked in Oklahoma by all accounts. It somehow failed to work in Connecticut. This is a time for all of us to pull together and hopefully remember that we are stronger and safer when we stand up together and look out for one another.
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#3 and that brings up another point from “The Art of Manliness” often quoted at New Advent, what the article says to me is “where are our churches and civic groups”, for years the Church was the community, we have failed and miserably so
The decline of traditional honor in the West
“Traditional honor can only exist among a group of equal peers who enjoy intimate, face-to-face relationships. It is entirely external, and completely predicated on one’s reputation as judged by fellow members of the honor group. Without close ties, there is no one to evaluate your claims to honor, and thus the possibility of a traditional honor culture vanishes.
In 1790, 95% of Americans lived in small, rural communities. By the 1990s, 3 out of 4 citizens made their home in urbanized areas. While in small towns everyone can keep track of the doings of their neighbors, (Catholic and Protestant parishes maybe?) in cities and suburbs relationships tend to be more impersonal and anonymous; any city dweller has experienced the sensation of being in a large group of people and yet feeling entirely alone. In large populations you can live out your whole life without anyone checking up on what you’re doing, much less judging your reputation as honorable or dishonorable.”
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And #4 for those who scream about gun control, including the Nuns on the Bus who now are calling gun control the “true pro-life cause” all you have to so is look to England to see the results, laws do not keep guns out of the wrong hands just out of the right ones
Gun crime goes up 89% in ten years in Britain
The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offenses in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year - a rise of 89 per cent.
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and lastly from my favorite political cartoon Day By Day by Chris Muir
I keep thinking of my recently departed great aunt Maria, a survivor of Nazi Germany as a teenager, and an immigrant to the US after the war, we were watching TV and Bill Clintoon was on, and he kept repeating the phrase “for the children”. Maria looked at me and said ” be careful of that man, Hitler said that a lot”
Pray for them all
Egyptian
17 December 2012 at 2:37 pm
By Devin Dwyer
@devindwyer
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Dec 17, 2012 1:38pm
FLASHBACK: Obama: I Have Expanded Rights of Gun Owners
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Two months after the January 2011 Tucson shooting, President Obama put into writing the same pledge he made last night in Newtown, Conn. “We have a responsibility to do everything we can to put a stop to” tragedies from gun violence, he said in an op-ed in the Arizona Star.
But in the next sentence, Obama adds this caveat, shedding light on his approach to guns:
“Like the majority of Americans, I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms,” he wrote. “And, in fact, my administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners — it has expanded them.”
In his first month in office, Obama overturned a 20-year ban on loaded guns in national parks and wildlife refuges. Licensed gun owners from any state can now carry concealed, loaded weapons on federal land.
Ten months later, as part of an omnibus spending bill, Obama reversed a decade-long ban on transporting firearms by train. Amtrak travelers can now carry unloaded, locked weapons in their checked baggage.
These actions, and others, are what earned Obama an “F” from the Brady Center for Gun Violence in 2010 for “extraordinary silence and passivity” on gun control. But Obama saw the moves differently.
“The fact is, almost all gun owners in America are highly responsible,” Obama wrote in the Star. “They’re our friends and neighbors. They buy their guns legally and use them safely, whether for hunting or target shooting, collection or protection. And that’s something that gun-safety advocates need to accept.”
This outlook offers insight into how the administration will approach what Obama described as the need for “meaningful action” in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre last week.
As president, Obama has always emphasized the need to keep guns out of the wrong hands, rather than restrict the availability of guns or gun parts themselves. In his few public comments on the issue as president, Obama has called for enforcement of existing laws and improvements to the national background check system.
The background check system “hasn’t been properly implemented. It relies on data supplied by states – but that data is often incomplete and inadequate,” Obama wrote in his March 2011 op-ed. “We should in fact reward the states that provide the best data – and therefore do the most to protect our citizens… we should make the system faster and nimbler.
“We should provide an instant, accurate, comprehensive and consistent system for background checks to sellers who want to do the right thing, and make sure that criminals can’t escape it,” he wrote.
Experts say that beefing up the system — and improving its ability to catch mental illness among potential gun buyers — is something that Obama could do right away via executive order. One proposal includes directing more state or federal agencies with knowledge of a person’s mental competency or drug use to funnel that information into one, central background check system.
Other gun control proposals that Obama has endorsed, such as requiring background checks for gun sales at trade shows or banning the sale of assault weapons, would require Congressional approval. In spite of six major shootings on his watch, Obama has not publicly pushed for a renewal of an assault weapons ban or new restrictions on high-capacity magazines.
18 December 2012 at 11:32 am
Foofoo
Obama is not what I was getting at, it is the failing of community, the loss of religion, of moral grounding, the failure of religions and religious communities to teach and care for people, the misuse of our laws and courts to help the mentally ill, case in point, with the ACLU’s help
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/recently-defeated-connecticut-mental-health-bill-may-have-stopped-fridays-shooter/question-3395115/
the debate has little to do with guns and much to do with society, ask the ACLU what to do now, of course they have nothing to do with it.
I am more concerned about congress critters using it for demigogry, you know, “don’t let a good crisis go to waste”
18 December 2012 at 3:04 am
A knife-wielding man slashed 22 children and an adult at an elementary school in central China, state media reported, the latest in a series of attacks on schoolchildren in the country. There have been a series of attacks on schools and schoolchildren around China in recent years, some by people who have lost their jobs or felt left out of the country’s economic boom.
And what was that blade used with great impact in Rwanda, the machete? and what did McViegh use? Wasn’t that fertilizer? What did Cain use to kill Abel? Most of what you need to learn to kill people can be found with a simple Google search.
And of course there are those 54 million plus children slaughter with the use of abortionist tools. Seems like that would be a place to start if you are banning instruments that might be used to kill children.
18 December 2012 at 4:15 am
…Take a look for more Information on that topic…
[...]I am now not sure where you are getting your info, however good topic.[...]…