If you feel strongly about this tragedy, you might want to read Roger Ebert's article in today's New York Opinion pages. www.NYT.com

ROCKMAN

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ROCKMAN



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-07-21 06:09 by Rockman.

Haven't had the stomach to read much about it yet, I have heard that Ebert's column is terrific.

no offense, but how about we change the subject.? i read trajedy when i open up the newspaper daily. i'd rather not see this stuff on this messageboard. IMO.

A gun is used to hunt and kill. In what ways do guns help or hurt our society?

Why do this here?







You're moving demons into a coffeeshop

It's simply getting old hearing news of folks dying for no damn reason at all. Most likely guns are involved. I'm sick of this shit and this my last post. I do not want to be associated with anyone that thinks there is a reason to own a gun.

Good Bye!

ROGER EBERT'S JOURNAL
The body count
By Roger Ebert on July 20, 2012 8:06 PM

I've never held a handgun in my life. I did some rifle target shooting with the ROTC in college. That's it with me and firearms. Does this make me less of an American? I think handguns are dangerous, and the more people who walk around carrying them the more dangerous they are. I also don't understand why civilians need to possess AR-15 assault rifles, such as the one used by James Holmes in Colorado. They fire 10 shots at a time, and are intended for combat use. In civilian hands, they are by definition weapons of slaughter. Do you need one in your home?
About 47% of the American population has a gun in their home. About 49% support the right to own guns, and 46% support restricting gun ownership. We all know the arguments on both sides. Debate gets us nowhere. After James Holmes opened fire in Aurora, the discussion started all over again. I couldn't even bring myself to tune in cable news. It would be the usual assortment of talking heads, repeating the usual arguments. Blah, blah, blah.

The theory is that gun ownership makes us safer. That doesn't seem to be working out for us. The body count rises. In Chicago we have a murder wave going on. Gun ownership doesn't bring safety when both sides are shooting at each other. Nationally, most guns fired in homes kill people who live there, including children, and do not kill home invaders. The death toll in Aurora only represented half the daily U.S. average in deaths by gunfire. In a year, guns murdered 468 people in Australia, England, Germany and in Canada put together, and 9,484 in the United States.

Here is a record of mass shootings in the United States since 2005.

[www.bradycampaign.org]

It is 62 pages long. It was compiled by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. I went to university with Jim Brady, and we were friends. He's spent the years since 1981 in a wheelchair. He was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., the flywheel who thought assassinating President Reagan would impress Jodie Foster. Of course he was crazy. I'll go out on a limb here and say James Holmes must have been crazy, too. When you think it is necessary for you to open fire and murder innocent people in a movie theater, what else does that make you?

True, there is no way we can defend ourselves against insane shooters. But I suspect Australia, England, Germany and Canada have about the same percentage of crazy people that we do. It's just that they can't get their hands on firearms so easily. Nor do they sell assault rifles over the counter in those nations.

You know what? The hell with it. I'm tired of repeating the obvious. I know with a dread certainty that I will change nobody's mind. I will hear conspiracy theories from those who fear the government, I will hear about the need to raise a militia, and I will hear nothing about how 9,484 corpses in a year has helped anything. That is a high price to pay. What depresses me is that half of my fellow countrymen are prepared to pay it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-07-21 14:28 by tatters.

I've been watching CNN yesterday afternoon .
I felt hurted by what I saw and I am very sad things like that happen again & again .

And was the movie good? Because frankly, the previous "Dark Knight" was a bloated expensive turd.

Getting shot while watching a bad movie is imho terminally tacky...

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dcba
And was the movie good? Because frankly, the previous "Dark Knight" was a bloated expensive turd.

Getting shot while watching a bad movie is imho terminally tacky...

?

Well said Roger Ebert. I agree with him completely.

The sad thing is: it is, or was, never the film's fault.

Psychologically, human beings have a blank slate 'tabula rasa", which is written on in their formative years, and not by films, or music, or art. The violent impulses, which were manifested by the gunman, were there, subliminally, for years.

In Britain, many years' ago, we had the notorious Jamie Bulger case, where two 10 year olds murdered a toddler: there was an outcry, because the two older children, apparently, watched a Child's Play horror film. However, the two murderers came from dysfunctional families, and not from overt saturation of horror films.

Would it mean, if people decided to blame films/music/art/literature, that women would re-enact Judith beheading Holofernes, men would cannibalise women based on Too Much Blood, people would shoot other people "Just to watch them die" to quote Johnny Cash ? No, countless people watch violent films, listen to gangsta rap, violent songs, appreciate violent art, but never act on what they see.

People kill, not guns.

Guns make it a whole lot more convenient for people though...

People don't hear, their ears do

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MingSubu
People kill, not guns.

Thank you for saying this!

People, if they want to do harm to others are going to it regardless of guns being legal or illegal or whatever. If they are determined nothing is going to stop them, and people acting like making gun ownership illegal across the board is a solution to stop crazy people from doing horrible things are being ignorant and incredibly naive.

Not sure anybody wants to make guns illegal do they?

Then just the criminals would have 'em

Ebert's on the money.

I'll explain things in a nutshell: Guns are in American's DNA.
Somehow, some of us still live in a fantasy America that was 1870.
We had enemies. "The Indian". The "freed slave". Some Americans
still live life in a rear view mirror, a frontier mindset, if you
will. Someone is always mucking up the ideal white life here. Fix
that, buy a gun, the great equalizer. Flee the city to the 'burbs,
protect your stuff by buying a gun. The Gov't's too big, someone's
after our freedom, buy a gun, form a militia. Americans need an
enemy, so we need to manufacture 'em. It's us. That's why we justify
the NRA buying itself protection so it can make more guns that nobody
should use.

I don't need a gun. I live in a redneck town with a few token black
families. The clan protested here on the town green a few years back.
A kid was badly hurt up the road when he found Grandpa's gun in a
closet sometime around that time. A country as schizophrenic in
operation and thought as ours really has no business going around
the world telling others how to conduct its business, 'cuz it's
clear we can't even get OUR act together. Freedom is earned.
Respect is earned. You can't buy a gun to necessarily get either.

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Midnight Toker
no offense, but how about we change the subject.? i read trajedy when i open up the newspaper daily. i'd rather not see this stuff on this messageboard. IMO.

nobody forced you to open this thread.

I have nothing against sane people owning guns and I realize that many love to hunt and target shoot as a sport, I just dont see the why ANY civilian needs a fully automatic assault rifle to meet these needs....say what you will but the types of guns, capacity of clips and type of ammunition have something to do with the ability to cause this type of carnage. A nut with a bolt action rifle with a 3 shot clip is not gonna be able to get away with as much killing..I know, I know ..you could bring up the 60s UT Tower killings but that is apples and oranges...

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msw2525

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MingSubu
People kill, not guns.

Thank you for saying this!

People, if they want to do harm to others are going to it regardless of guns being legal or illegal or whatever. If they are determined nothing is going to stop them, and people acting like making gun ownership illegal across the board is a solution to stop crazy people from doing horrible things are being ignorant and incredibly naive.

So true.

It's not the guns fault, it's the people's fault. The only thing that guns do is allow the person to kill huge numbers of people.

That is also not the gun's fault. Poor gun gets all the blame.

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NICOS

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dcba
And was the movie good? Because frankly, the previous "Dark Knight" was a bloated expensive turd.

Getting shot while watching a bad movie is imho terminally tacky...

?

Don't worry NICOS ,dcba post is just an other anti American /hate"ful and please ,no one can say it's irony or sarcasm .



I am a Frenchie ,as Mick affectionately called them in the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 .

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treaclefingers

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msw2525

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MingSubu
People kill, not guns.

Thank you for saying this!

People, if they want to do harm to others are going to it regardless of guns being legal or illegal or whatever. If they are determined nothing is going to stop them, and people acting like making gun ownership illegal across the board is a solution to stop crazy people from doing horrible things are being ignorant and incredibly naive.

So true.

It's not the guns fault, it's the people's fault. The only thing that guns do is allow the person to kill huge numbers of people.

That is also not the gun's fault. Poor gun gets all the blame.

Common sense indicates methods of harm are minninzed by compromising opportunities. I almost puked when Zimmermann said on the hannity show"It was God's Plan" treac it's your business if you want to carry guns and all that nonsense...word to the wise it's bad business.

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dcba
And was the movie good? Because frankly, the previous "Dark Knight" was a bloated expensive turd.

Getting shot while watching a bad movie is imho terminally tacky...

Hey jackass, why don't you take your attempt at "comedy" to the garbage dump at the comments section on TMZ? You'd fit right in there.

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msw2525

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MingSubu
People kill, not guns.

Thank you for saying this!

People, if they want to do harm to others are going to it regardless of guns being legal or illegal or whatever. If they are determined nothing is going to stop them, and people acting like making gun ownership illegal across the board is a solution to stop crazy people from doing horrible things are being ignorant and incredibly naive.

I think in the 236 years this country's been around, it's pretty clear we've FAILED the "gun makes us safer" experiment. Guns are readily available for anyone to have which leads to the gun, as a weapon, to be the most commonly used weapon for murders. It's simple logic...you allow guns to be available...they WILL be used. People kill, not guns. That says it all, doesn't it? If people kill...why give them access to a weapon that can allow them to do so?

You say people will kill regardless...so there's no point to take away guns. You seriously expect murder rates to stay the same even with guns taken away? What, you expect criminals will walk around and start strangling everybody? There's a better chance of surviving a strangling, stabbing or beating than a gunshot to the head from a shooter, 50 feet away. I just don't get it. If guns are a means to keep us safe, why then didn't anyone at the theatre (as Ebert points out) actually shoot BACK? Where are these guns keeping us safe then? It seems to be that the WRONG people have the guns. And everyone's cool with that.

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scottkeef
I have nothing against sane people owning guns and I realize that many love to hunt and target shoot as a sport, I just dont see the why ANY civilian needs a fully automatic assault rifle to meet these needs....say what you will but the types of guns, capacity of clips and type of ammunition have something to do with the ability to cause this type of carnage. A nut with a bolt action rifle with a 3 shot clip is not gonna be able to get away with as much killing..I know, I know ..you could bring up the 60s UT Tower killings but that is apples and oranges...

Exactly. How any sane person can say that automatic assult rifles should be widely available is beyond comprehension.

No guns, much less death.

To: treaclefingers, msw2525 and MingSubu


US:

Population: 314 million
Murders by guns: 9484


Australia, England, Germany and Canada together:

Population: 192 million
Murders by guns: 468


murders per million:
US: 9484 / 314 = 30.2
Australia, England, Germany and Canada together 468 / 192 = 2.4

treaclefingers, msw2525 and MingSubu please explain why the annual average of murders by guns is thirteen times higher in the US compared to this other states if the availability of guns is not the reason.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2012-07-21 21:56 by firebird.

Personally, I feel that one of the most important issues is WHY the murderer spent much time and money and thought to carry out this hideous plan?

What created this terrible need for attention?