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School shooting: but don't mention guns!

gumboot said:
Most victims of violent crime in the US don't require medical treatment either.
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89% though? And bare in mind 'free NHS' you can see a doctor over a hangnail if you want. Do you have any figures on this?

Aside from that, it is pretty roundly rejected in psychology and criminology circles that violence must be physical, and indeed psychological violence (such as the threat of injury) can be just as damaging to society.
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Any crime is damaging to society so I don't disagree in principal (although I'd take issue with 'just as' in many cases) but the near 9 out of 10 incidents in which no-one was significantly injured aren't all terrified victims being terrorised by hulking hardened criminals, a proportion and going to be two guys who never got past the shoving (or even possibly verbal insult) stage of an argument and wouldn't stop talking trash when the police arrived, or a drunk trying to push past a bouncer. A lot of stuff ends up with the police over here that frankly needn't if people weren't such dicks and the way our system works means they get reported and end up in stats like this whether any charges were eventually brought or not. My suspicion is that there is a more 'deal with it' attitude among a lot of Americans (and more discretion avaliable to your police than ours get now) that would lead to minor incidents where no-one is actually hurt being dealt with more informally (not to mention the differences in the legal system, the concept of the victim pressing charges is different here) and while these kinds of figures aren't going to quantify this they may give an indication and could certainly disprove it.

Besides which, psychologically harmful or not, when people are talking about violence and taking potentially lethal precautions against the threat of it they are thinking of physical harm, noone would genuinely argue that a party where there were four push and shove arguments but no real injuries was more violent than one where someone was stabbed would they?
 
varwoche said:
What I see is an argument that is utterly devoid of intellectual integrity, and so idiotic, that it's pathetic.
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Those are some pretty unsubstantiated labels you're throwing around there.

Would you care to try to demonstrate WHY you think it's proper to be so concerned about two dozen high-profile deaths, and unconcerned about two hundred unknown deaths?

The people who grieve in Newtown (and their family and friends around the world) can come together for mutual support. The hundreds of families who lost a child to drowning had to grieve alone. There was no national public outpouring of sympathy for them.

What, precisely, provides "intellectual integrity" to the position that it's proper to be incensed over THESE deaths, and indifferent to THOSE? I really want to hear it. All I've heard so far is the observation that these deaths were deliberate, and those were not. I don't regard that as an important difference. The sorrow a family feels at the loss of a child is no less because the death was not deliberate, and the guilt they feel may well be greater.

What, exactly, makes my argument ridiculous and pathetic? Spell it out, Enrico; don't just indulge in empty name calling. Let's see some intellectual beef behind these slurs.
 
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DavidJames said:
Ok, that does it for me. This has taken a surreal turn.
Continued comparing accidental swimming deaths with mass murder [...] You are welcome to carry on, I would just feel guilty continuing.
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Of course you would. When your attempt to guilt-trip responsible gun owners into "we gotta DO something" because twenty children died is examined in light of "what are you doing about ten times the preventable deaths every year?" it's natural to feel some guilt.

I guess we'll just have to carry on without you.
 
orpheus said:
And you know what? If your kid drowns in a neighbor's pool, you can sue the owner of the pool for negligence resulting in a child's death.

How about that for a start? Any gun used in a crime - the owner is legally liable.
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Is that not the case already? I know it is for that other mass killer, automobiles. Unless your car is stolen, as the owner you are liable if it kills or injures someone.

I'd be willing to go one step further with guns -- if your gun was stolen because it wasn't properly secured, you're STILL liable.
 
Kestrel said:
It's just a gun lobby talking point, and not really relavent to the discussion here. We were talking about school shooting, not drownings of kids who are not even old enough for school.
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It is relevant to the discussion here. People are howling that we have to DO something, we can't allow children to continue to die like this. Yet, they are willing to continue to let ten times the number of children die every year in swimming pools.

I guess it all depends on whose ox is being gored, or whose kid is being killed.
 
DavidJames said:
If that's true, it would clear a lot up for me. I thought it was interesting that a bunch of people coming up with the same ludicrous analogies was a bit odd. So you're saying they're just mindlessly parroting the NRA?
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Are you still here? I thought...

Well, since you're back, maybe you can show why the analogy is ludicrous. I'm not mindlessly parroting anything -- I don't get the NRA newsletter, so I don't know what they have to say. I'm genuinely puzzled by the people who have been ignoring hundreds of preventable child deaths for decades, but who are now suddenly up in arms because of a one-time event, even one as horrible as this one. What gives?
 
zeggman said:
Are you still here? I thought...

Well, since you're back, maybe you can show why the analogy is ludicrous. I'm not mindlessly parroting anything -- I don't get the NRA newsletter, so I don't know what they have to say. I'm genuinely puzzled by the people who have been ignoring hundreds of preventable child deaths for decades, but who are now suddenly up in arms because of a one-time event, even one as horrible as this one. What gives?
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Possibly becasue it was an horrific event in its own right.

And yes the preventable child deaths are horrifying but this was doubly so.
 
zeggman said:
Are you still here? I thought...

Well, since you're back, maybe you can show why the analogy is ludicrous. I'm not mindlessly parroting anything -- I don't get the NRA newsletter, so I don't know what they have to say. I'm genuinely puzzled by the people who have been ignoring hundreds of preventable child deaths for decades, but who are now suddenly up in arms because of a one-time event, even one as horrible as this one. What gives?
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I think your premise is wrong. No one has been ignoring preventable child deaths by drowning. Some pretty strict laws on pool owner responsibility have been written and enforced. Drownings due to lack of attentiveness of the caregiver are investigated and tried (when there is enough evidence) as criminal offenses.
 
Dcdrac said:
Possibly becasue it was an horrific event in its own right.

And yes the preventable child deaths are horrifying but this was doubly so.
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I still don't get it. Even granting your "doubly horrifying" is an accurate measurement, we still have ten times the number of children dying every year from another preventable cause. When we take number of deaths times the horror multiplier, swimming pools are still the cause of much more suffering. Why is pointing that out "ludicrous"?
 
sgtbaker said:
I think your premise is wrong. No one has been ignoring preventable child deaths by drowning. Some pretty strict laws on pool owner responsibility have been written and enforced. Drownings due to lack of attentiveness of the caregiver are investigated and tried (when there is enough evidence) as criminal offenses.
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I wouldn't oppose additional requirements for responsible gun owners, including harsher (criminal) penalties if a gun owner's negligence contributed to a crime or an accident.
 
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swiimig ppol deaths utterly irrelevent to this discussion, somene dying due to that is a horriying tragedy but is no way on a par with what happened and any attempt to create an equivalence between that and what happend in Conneticut are just plain wrong.
 
Dcdrac said:
swiimig ppol deaths utterly irrelevent to this discussion, somene dying due to that is a horriying tragedy but is no way on a par with what happened and any attempt to create an equivalence between that and what happend in Conneticut are just plain wrong.
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Yeah, people keep repeating this assertion, but no one can give me a good supporting reason for the belief. The closest anyone's come is that one is "deliberate" and the other is not. I don't think that makes a lot of difference to a grieving parent, and I think "preventable" is more relevant than "deliberate".

Care to try again?
 
You are being totally disngenous the greif is the same but thethe shooting was on a totally different level to an accidental death whatever the cause, they are not the same.

One was a deliberate act a mass murder

The other whatever the cause accidental uniteneded unplanned.

You cannot honestly say they are the same.
 
zeggman said:
It is relevant to the discussion here. People are howling that we have to DO something, we can't allow children to continue to die like this. Yet, they are willing to continue to let ten times the number of children die every year in swimming pools.
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A query of the CDC Wonder database shows that 4,818 children ages 0 to 14 died as a result of firearms from 1999 to 2010. Swimming pool deaths for this same period and age groups totaled 3,885.

This isn't to say that swimming pools do not pose a risk to children. It just isn't the topic of this thread.
 
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