Virginia Tech killing: more than 30 dead - Page 13

I think ROTC members should be able to have guns on campus.

While on duty, I was called to several incidents at colleges, some with guns involved. It was not much fun.

why??

Because they have been properly trained, have demonstrated personal responsibility, and have a full understanding of the consequences of gun usage. Important traits to have. The same things that are required of a CHL holder.

How have they demonstrated personal responsibility?

Are they subject deep psychological profiling?

Scary!

I was in a dart league once, one of my "hot tempered" teammates (and a close friend ), lost some games. went home. got his pistol, came back, and while outside, decided to shoot a few rounds into the air!

Anyway, he was banned from league play for ~ one year.

Do you know much about the ROTC? They don't put up with screw-ups.

Is ANYONE subject to deep psych profiling?... and in terms of this discussion, CHO WAS PROFILED and NO ONE DID ANYTHING to keep him from getting a gun.

Before you give blanket exception to this common rule, you better have damned good reasons. Claiming that ROTC members (I was in JROTC in high school) are any less likely to be head cases than the general public is laughable -- they want to be in the armed services for a reason (and it doesn't have anything to do with the benefits package).

As for Cho, clearly under federal law he shouldn't have been able to buy a weapon, and there needs to be an investigation as to where this breakdown occurred...

Here are some interesting opinions (both ways):

http://www.isthatlegal.org/archives/...ntrol_cam.html

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opi...,6997724.story

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...50C0A9649C8B63

http://www.thetartan.org/2005/4/4/forum/guncontrol

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770

http://www.stateline.org/live/detail...ntentId=199281

Excuse me? JROTC is completely different from a college ROTC program. And your swipe at the reason for desiring a career in the military is insulting and bullshit.

A military career through an ROTC program is a very wise decision for many people. Leaving college with zero debt, money in the bank, a job, competitive salary, a degree, and good experience is a pretty damn attractive decision for many people.

I hate people who make blanket dumbass statements.

ROTC just landed a blackhawk next to a GIGANTIC parking lot here and cracked my windshield.

Blackhawk. Parking lot.

Blackhawk. Lots of wind.

You'd think they'd be more properly trained than to land a friggin' ENORMOUS helicopter next to a lot full of parked cars.

Sounds familiar.

Not sure that is the answer. Even dysfunctional people have a right to self-protection, but no one has the right to senselessly take lives. If Cho had purchased weapons and simply continued to live his twisted fantasies out in his mind, no one would be any wiser.

ahhhh HA! BLACK helicopters. I KNEW IT!

Dude. Joke all you want. It was a big-assed Blackhawk. How do I know? My ROTC students corrected me when I called it a HUEY.

But these well-trained people landed it next to a lot full of cars. FULL. 9:30 am.

Why?

BECAUSE THE ROTC PEOPLE THOUGHT IT WOULD BE COOL. So far as I could tell, the ROTC folks ran an endless parade of kids into the field to gawk at the utter coolness that is a Blackhawk helicopter sitting in a soccer field.

I can hear the planning sessions now:

Dude 1: "DUDE, WE SHOULD TOTALLY LAND IT ON TOP OF THE PRESIDENT'S OFFICE."

Dude 2: "DUDE, NO, DUDE, WE SHOULD LIKE, DUDE, LIKE, TOTALLY LAND IT IN FRONT OF THAT BIG, LIKE, PARKING LOT WHERE, LIKE, ALL THE FACULTY PARK!"

I'd have been much, much happier if they'd just driven a tank up to campus.

That sucks. Sorry about your windshield. I hope the gubbment will pay for it with that check I just sent in earlier this week. Did you call to complain about the incident?

Yes. I did.

Here's a nice quiz:

1) How do you know that our GIGANTIC HELICOPTER did it?

2) How do you know that a suicidal seagull didn't crash into your truck?

3) How do you know that your windshield didn't just crack on its own?

Hmm, noone picked that one up. But I have some additional thoughts upon the topic, so, gasp, I quote myself.

Since the US is basically a sort of worldwide-empire, though not in the literal way, one can interpret Iraq to be something like a member-state of the US, that got invaded by the federal government of the US unlawfully, only because the federal government thought that the state wanted or has developed WMD's that could rival the federal government's ones.

It was not true, though Iraq cretainly worked on acquiring, developing WMD's for decades before the UN- or IAEA put a stop to it, so in that symbolic analysis, Iraq strived for gaining weapons that could rival the federal government's ones, and so it merely tried to fulfill the consitution of the US, in order to gain the power to discourage and repel an invasion.

Obviously it didn't work, the IAEA and the UN disarmed Iraq in the WMD-side, and also in rocket-technology that could fly longer than a certain number of miles... and the no-flying-zones with the daily air-raids on radar-installations also severely decimated Iraq's capabilities to spot and shoot down military airplanes...

and then the invasion by the federal government happened.

Iraq's dictatorship-government knew that it wouldn't have much of a chance to repel the invasion in a conventional war and opted therefore to open up the arms-caches for Iraq's civilians and laid the groundwork for the establishment of militias...

Isn't it eery how it all reflects the US-contitution's second amendment?

Nightcrawler

U.S. Law Made Killer Ineligible to Buy Gun




Go figure, VA rules differ from Federal government rules!

Geez guys, at least use the same rulebook uniformly in all states.

But in the end, we'll never know the chain of events that would have played out with this nutjob mass murderer!

It also suggests, depending solely on the state to protect you is, how shall I say it, a BOGUS argument!

Meanwhile, as the wiseacring continues at full pelt, almost unnoticed amidst the babble another deranged gun-obsessed loon goes efficiently about his work.......

Huh, see posts #472 and #477 on page 12.

And before you get too worked up over misuse of firearms, consider this list;

List of terrorist incidents

which includes;

Oklahoma City bombing

and

September 11, 2001 attacks

For a total body count of 3,165 since April 19, 1995, that's two incidents in the last ~12 years, or annualized ~ 264 deaths/year, almost 10 times the VA massacre.

So ~ 99 years will have to elapse before these two US incidents will have an annualized body count lower than the VA massacre!

Do you really believe that other incidents of this type WON'T happen over the next 87 years?

Perspective?

I'd rather take my chances with firearm carrying nutjobs, than with bomb carrying nutjobs or airplane darts!

I don't want to.

I'm trying to give this thread up - weaning off bit by bit......

Frank: you forgot Columbine's 13. That makes 46 and brings your total down to 5.7 times, using your equation.

However, if you consider in the 10,000 or so yearly homicides commited with firearms, your multiplier drops dramatically, to 0.0264 times, which means it is far less, thus meaning your chance of getting killed by a gun in the US is far higher than your chance of dying in a terrorist act. In fact, if we use the 264 figure, 37.8 times more people are killed by gunfire than by terrorist attack each year. Terrorists kill 0.723 people per day, whereas we kill 27.4 of ourselves every day using guns.

27.4 comes out to just over 1 person per hour that is killed by a gun.

How many people have to die in a firearms attack, in order to classify it as a act of terrorism? 100?A million?

Or is it a case that in the US, no amount of firearms deaths could ever be classified as "terrorism" because ...

(1) we have a dysfunctional 230 year addiction, and love affair with guns.. and
(2) we are fighting a war against terrorism. (oops)

Does anyone honestly think that we won't see a repeat of this kind of violence, all because we wrung our hands for a couple of weeks, shed some crocodile tears and said "oh how sad, oh how tragic", before the collective amnesia sets in and the story disappears from the headlines?

"The definition of insanity is the repetition of the same action expecting a different result." John Laroquette. In cases involving terrorism by the gun, just substitute "action" for "inaction".

Idiotsville, anyone?

First off, let me state that our situation here in the US is by no means idilic WRT firearms and their atypical usage!

However, firearms are not the only means of causing unwarranted deaths. WMD's (low frequency of occurrences) can easily undermine high frequency events (such as firearm deaths) simply because of their rare occurrence and potential for high body counts, as I have illustrated in my previous post (911, Oklahoma City, etceteras).

I'd rather mitigate high fatality low frequency events, than low fatality high frequency events, given finite financial resources, if I was forced into an either/or decision. Of course, we could attempt some sort of CB analysis based on lives saved versus lives lost based on the historical data. For example the historical low homicide rate (in my lifetime (53+ years) was ~4.8 DPY/100,000 people (mid-50's) versus 5.6 DPY/100,000 population currently. That's a delta of 0.8 DPY/100,000, or 2,400 DPY for the entire current 300M US population, which is less than the 911 death toll.

As to my statistics, I was mainly looking at extremes (either annualized or on an event based frequency of occurrence). However, this list of school massacres would be a better starting point, for a more meaningful assessment of atypical acts of killing. I think I've been reasonably honest in my presentation of the numbers, as I understand them.

Please see my previous post #465. But to briefly recap that post;

US total annual death rate = 8.26 deaths/1,000 population (or 2.478M deaths/year for 300M US population)
US total annual homicide rate = 5.6 deaths/100,000 population (or 16,800 for 300M US population)
VT massacre (annualized) ~ 10.7 deaths/100,000,000 (32 deaths/300M US population)

So these numbers (in percentages WRT 300M US population) are, 0.826%, 0.0056%, and 0.000011%, respectively. Or WRT average annual deaths the percentages are 0.68% (homicides) and 0.0013% (VT massacre), respectively. Or WRT 2005 homicides the VT massacre was 0.19 percent.

Now you can take these numbers with a grain of salt, however in no way have I misrepresented these data by only presenting the resulting percentages, which is all too common in the MSM and more specifically op-ed/blog hyperbole. You have all the numbers to generate your own multipliers (or whatever) to present/skew your POV. OTOH, I'm very comfortable with statistics, and I know almost immediately that presenting only half the underlying information, is bias with intent.

So now what should we do? Well a good start would be to increase the baseline of the record set (or years of record), and based on this figure;



I'd start with a 40 year baseline record, since it was ~mid-60's when the homicide rates were previously below the current rate. From my experience it is usually not good to go below 20-25 years of record to detect meaningful trends or long term averages.

Now we can look at these numbers on a per event basis (timeline plot with say a 5-year moving average (or 5-year bins) to determine relative frequency of occurrence or on an annualized per capita basis.

To do justice to this analysis, we would breakdown the baseline period of record into subsets of, 1) all homicides, 2) all homicides caused against law abiders, 3) all firearm related homicides caused against law abiders, 4) all bomb/aircraft (plus other acts of terror) related homicides caused against law abiders, 5) all firearm related homicides caused against law abiders in various levels of schooling, and 6) all bomb (plus other acts of terror) related homicides caused against law abiders in various levels of schooling.

Anyway, the basic rational is; Do we try to stop potential large (say, for example > 50 fatalities/event) mass murder events, or do we stop potential small (less than 51 fatalities/event) mass murder events, assuming that each grouping of events occurs with equal frequency (as it appears to me that they do)?

Of course both are important, but both are also extremely rare events (to date), with a current return period of ~1 every 10 years (or so).

Penn and Teller get it right... (Google video)

The governor did something about it:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/30/gun....ap/index.html


Good for him. Now let's get the rest.

I can see the bumper stickers now:

When the mentally ill having guns is outloawed, only mentally ill outlaws will have guns.

This is good if it is done right.

Yes - but it still leaves loopholes for private sales big enough to drive a Sherman Tank through:

That would be a pretty large hole!

What's a high caliber knife?

It's a Texas thing.

Not necessarily. I used to hear about high caliber knife and gun shows when I lived in Oklahoma for 8 years.

Yep, it's a traveling show. I was suggesting that the "high caliber knife" was a Texas thing. It was not to be taken seriously.

I think your bad joke (which I got) and my bad joke (which you didn't get) cancel each other out.

As opposed to a "assault knife" or "sniper knife" or "Saturday NIght Special knife."
The anti-gun language is such bullshit.