From the BBC: Police probing the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech University have criticised the decision of US network NBC to show footage of the killer.

My thoughts on this:

1) "If it bleeds, it leads"...that's journalism in today's society. Did the police really expect NBC to sit on it?

2) I think the public should see at least some of Cho's video. It gives us a glimpse into who this guy really was.

At the same time, I think we've officially hit the saturation point with coverage of this. I'm going to quit reading and watching the news for the rest of the day, I think.

I agree, but it is time to stop giving this idiot, who dead anyway, more air time. It could be fanning the flames of someone with similar delusions and stimulate them into acting in a similar manner. They need to quit already, stop the pictures, stop the video, stop the voice overs. Stop. Let's focus on his victims.

Can you imagine being the NBC staffer who opened the package?

I think there would be more focus on the victims had Cho's package not came up. I recall hearing a lot more about the victims at Columbine and OKC at a similar point in coverage.

So is April the official month of crazy? Look how much bad shit has happened in April in this country.

Apparently, someone at the USPS notified NBC of the package...could you imagine being them?

I suspect this would be a bigger deal too, if not for VT.

I thought it was Meunster

Yes.

...and happy birthday to me. :p

Merc is right on that they are giving Cho too much air time .

One, we should honor the victim instead of Cho.

Two, we are turning Cho into a fucking martyr. The media just told the entire United States that if you want to get a message out to the world, shoot up a school then kill yourself and people will read it.

yeah--one thing that disturbs me is they keep saying "the deadliest school shooting ever." That gives sickos incentive to beat the record.

Eh...maybe. I'm sure that there's some shithead out there thinking, "I can do 34!" But at the same time, Cho may have been a time bomb. The kids from Columbine may have given him some inspiration, but I suspect that his plan wasn't to go for any kind of record...just to hurt people.

Imagine this: I'll be 36 next week, and I have *never* seen a gun used aside from the rifle that my friends and I used in the country to shoot cans off of a wall. I've lived in 4 cities so far, two of them metropolitan cities, and I've never seen a gun used or known anyone who has been shot, and I know a LOT of people.

To address those who think that NO ONE having a gun is a good idea, consider this: when guns are totally banned, the only ones who will have them will be exactly the people you want to defend yourself against. People with ill intent *will* find a way to get a gun if they really want one, so relieve yourself of the utopian notion that banning guns will mean that there will be no more guns. The black market is ingenious and capitalistic, and as long as there is easy money to be made, it will be made, laws be damned.

:litebulb: :thumb2:

Take a look at the Wikipedia list of school killings, it's interesting reading.

Did you know that in 1927, a disgruntled school board member planted a bomb in a Michigan schoolhouse, killing 45 people? That is the deadliest school massacre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_massacres

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Usually all the violence happens in one neighborhood so if you don't live in that neighborhood then you won't see anything.

http://www.ichv.org/Statistics.htm

They do happen whether you see them or not.

They may be accurate, but I will question anything that comes from an anti-gun site before I see the original source of the statistic from the CDC. There is motive from these people to show you factoids that have been altered and doctored to show what they want you to see just to bolster their message.

.

To look at these figures, it seems like we need to balance US suicide figures against those of others where violence is "less rampant." Do you really think that suicides will cease to happen if guns aren't available, or (more likely) that people will just find another way?

It frustrates me that there isn't a further breakdown on how the guns were used: drug related crime, B&Es/robbery, crimes of passion, organized crime, etc. Really, that tells a lot more of a story to me than a black and white total number. I don't live in the hood but I don't live in a gated community either; I think I live the way most Americans do, and I think my chances are ridiculously small of ever seeing any kind of firearm violence. I'm not afraid!

Wow. if you look carefully at that list, you will see one of the "foiled" plots refers to an incident yesterday, in which a kid text-messaged his intention to beat Cho's record.

You said you haven't seen any guns used or heard of any making it seem like you are implying that gun violence doesn't happen and I gave you stats providing how many people have died from firearms in 2004. I have never said anything about banning guns on any thread in the past few days so I don't know where that question about suicide came from.

and I hate to say 'it's not guns that kill people, it's people who kill people' there is a basic flaw in society. I own guns, however I have never shot anyone (although I must admit there are a couple I would have liked to.. but I'm not going to, besides that..and another thing I hate to agree with.. once you outlaw guns only the outlaws (criminals) will have guns. and personally, if someone comes guning for someone I love.. I want to be able to remedy the situation as quickly as possible. (and for the record, I think handguns are for cowards.. if you're going to take someones life, I think one ought to do it face to face, with a knife/sword/big stick it's personal.. and that ought to stick with you for the rest of your life.. that's a life you are taking! taking!... not press a button/pull a trigger and it's done... that is another human being!..however society being what it is.. my views are outmoded if not archaic, so.. I must adapt and survive.)

More people died from poisoning than from firearms in 2004.

During 1979--2004, the three leading causes of injury death in the United States were motor-vehicle traffic, firearm, and poisoning (including drug overdose). In 2004, for the first time since 1968, when such data first became available, the number of reported poisoning deaths (30,308) and the age-adjusted poisoning death rate (10.3 per 1000,000 population) exceeded the number of firearm deaths (29,569) and the firearm death rate (10.0), respectively. During 1999--2004, the poisoning death rate increased 45%, whereas the firearm death rate declined 3%; during the same period, no change occurred in the rate (14.7) for motor-vehicle traffic deaths.

SOURCE: Mortality data from the National Vital Statistics Systems. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/deaths.htm.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5550a6.htm

What the hell is that suppose to prove? Whether or not 100,000 or 2 people have died from poisoning, it doesn’t change the fact that 12,000 people have died from homicide in 2004. I have never compared firearm deaths to any other death statistics because I don't think it is a contest, they are all horrible and we should be working to prevent deaths in every field. If you are honestly using this to back up a pro-gun view, I highly suggest looking at yourself and what you stand for.

Oh God these stats are cracking me up. I'm so amazed I might shoot someone.

You know what? In 2002 less people died being beat with a beverage straw than were killed by being held under water for 2 hours.

Fascinating stuff. :headshake

What is everyone arguing about I can't tell anymore.

I knew it.

This guy was made fun of throughout high school for his korean accent. He would answer a question, then would be made fun of, then he would hang his head in silence (just heard it on the news, it should pop up later). This is caused by some fucking tools that think they are better than everyone else and will not accept other people.

Gun deaths and rights.

That's weird. One of my close friends came to the USA from S. Korea 10 years ago at the age of 10 and it is very hard to detect an accent at all if you're not a close friend and listening for it. This guy shouldn't even have an accent after he's been in the states for 15 years at age 8.

If everyone made fun of through high school took up arms the roads would be red with blood.

NOBODY gets out scot-free. And not everyone goes postal about it either. Blame the sick, broken mind of the kid, not his fellow students. School bullying is bad, but not the cause of mass murder.

Don't be a frigging tool... the point is that the statistics are not all that alarming when taken in the context of all deaths. 46,000 people died from MVA's and I don't hear you quoting some anti-auto site to make sensational claims. Death is a fact of life, here, over there, everywhere. I don't think this is a contest either. This is a discussion, keep it that way. Given that there were 2,400,000 deaths in the US in 2004 the figure of 12,000 deaths is a whopping 0.005% of all deaths in the US for that year.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_19.pdf

That is an unrealistic comparison because guns are designed weapons and cars are not.

I guess my comments are about things we can do to avoid deaths in general. Regardless of what causes them.

We should work to prevent deaths in all fronts, including cars and poison.

Ibram, I am not putting all the blame on the kids that made fun of him and I don’t have any sympathy for this guy, I can just relate to him in some ways. He had no right to do this or even come close to doing this but I am just making the point that if you make some kids life a living hell and make him feel excluded from society and you let him buy a gun, what do you think would have happened?

I have NOT red ANY of this thread , ALL you gun haters F off and die !!!

Look at this and wounder WHY kids Kill !!!

I just watched some video of Cho on ebaumsworld. (He has no accent at all, by the way)

That man was so out of touch with everything that I felt painfully awkward when I viewed it. I support the moment of silence tomorrow at 11 AM in the United States. I will also wear orange and maroon to support Virginia Tech. Man, some things in this life are just unneccessary and irrelevant and the consequences are devastating and disgusting.

Most of the current research indicates that schizophrenia is a brain disorder, either chemical or structural. Stressors can exacerbate symptoms, but they don't cause the disease.


NBC only posted the excerpts they did because they were given permission. Frankly, I'd love to see the entire manifesto, including all the video clips.

I collect crazy guy manifestos whenever possible.

I have some good suicide notes, too.

I go to a conference every other year on Critical Incident Stress Management. Three times, half of the conference speakers (mostly the FBI guys and other sorts of feds) have had to leave because "something happened." "Something" being things like Branch Davidian, Oklahoma City, and Columbine ... all occured during the conference.

We actually experience a lull in April at the nuthouse. When I left work tonight we were at 64% capacity. We usually are closer to 95%, and gone as high as 116%, but usually manage to cap things at around 105%. Yes, we end up with more patients than we have beds.

Although they get a lot more attention, I deal with relatively few suicides by firearm. Based on my own experience, I'd put #1 at overdose, #2 cutting, #3 jumping from high places. #4 kind of sorts out to CO poisoning, hanging, and other (I had a suicide attempt by toothpaste ingestion once). It stands to reason that a higher number of completed suicides are by firearm, but I don't think it would #1 for attempts. Stats on completed suicides are pretty easy to find, I've searched around a bit and can't find any for attempt without completion. There are 16 attempted suicides for every completed suicide according to the CDC.

Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than ALL of my firearms (and knives and swords).

That is irrelevant. Whomever ted kennedy is, his car was not designed as a weapon nor is it something that can be banned because a great deal of ameicans depend on cars to work, go to the market etc.
Guns on the other hand are specifically designed to kill. It is not wise to allow a population that glorifies violence to have access to firearms.

Duck duck, I'm sorry but you are very much mistaken, and following that particular mistake leads to genocides, as has been demonstrated seven or eight times in the last century. Armed populations do not suffer genocides because they can kill off the Einsatzkommandos before they can have sufficient effect -- it took the available might of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS plus the Romanian Iron Guard and Gestapo an entire month to reduce the Warsaw Ghetto. Now imagine the likely outcome of the Final Solution if every Jew in Europe had had a Mauser Kar-98 and two hundred rounds of ready ammunition -- I mean, would anyone disapprove of an empty Auschwitz and a heap of dead Nazis?

It is wise to prevent genocides, and there is only one known way: stay armed. Genocides happen when three factors come together: hatred, government/state power, and gun control laws.

Funnily enough, automobile accidents are by the numbers thirty-five times as lethal as firearms accidents, and even deliberate homicides only increase the numbers to approximate parity -- and a third of the homicides are ruled justifiable: lawful, that is. Killing bad guys. What's more, two-thirds of the unjustifiables are bad guys on bad guys. This is a net social plus no matter what your point of view is.

We may sum up the Virginia Tech massacre in very simple terms: in places where strong gun control is in place (college campuses generally are such), what you have created is hunting preserves for crazies.

And there is a solution to this kind of problem. It's not exactly nice, but then, getting murdered isn't very nice either, is it? I'll tell you what it is later.

The other thing that really strikes me is how much general resemblance there is between Cho Seung-Hui's diatribe and Ted Kascinski's manifesto: there are lengthy listings of grievances that are in the authors' eyes monstrous, enormous wrongs; there's a fury of resentment -- and then there's a complete inability to come up with any solution or resolution of any of it. They will make some approach to figuring out how to resolve it but will stop short of doing so; there is an incompleteness to their thinking. It stops at the sound and fury and at the revenge fantasy.

There was also genocide in america by the government towards an armed native american population and most of them died anyway. If you want to prevent genocide then the civilized nations of the world should be proactive in preventing monsters like hitler, stalin, saddam etc. from coming to power or staying in power.

As for automobile deaths, what does that have to do with guns? It is not a numbers game and it isn't realistic to compare the two. You cannot ban cars and they are not made as weapons. Just because one has a greater number of deaths per year does not mean the lesser is ok.
Also pointing out college campuses have gun control doesn't mean anything since anybody can walk off said campus, go buy a gun and then walk back on the campus and kill at will.
I understand the pro-gun argument and believe most american gun owners are good people but making guns so available in a nation makes it that much easier for the bad guys to get them.
America should not only ban it's guns but make sure anybody who is ever convicted of a violent crime, never see the light of day ever again.

So has Laura Bush's. Your point?

So, in order for you to put money in your own pocket, you're willing to sacrifice more people to this kind of mental-illness-spawned killing spree? It WILL happen again, and at a new record level.

Let me get this right: you want to speak authoritatively on the US based on your short time here, but you don't know who Ted Kennedy is?

I think you can STFU now.

I'm going to hell for laughing so loudly at that. :lol2:

The US is NOT the most violent nation in the world for gun violence. There's a chart here: http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvintl.html that lists firearm deaths per 100,000. The US comes in at 3.72/100,000 and interestingly enough Northern Ireland comes in at 5.24, Brazil at 10.58, Estonia at 8.07, Mexico at 9.88, and Italy, even at 1.88! Italy comes in at more than half what the US does, but I don't ever hear of anyone cancelling honeymoons to Italy or Ireland or trips to Carnivale because they are afraid of being shot.

It's your choice to live in fear. Duck duck, I've read enough of your drivel here that I sincerely hope that you never come back to my country. We have our problems, but your country has its own. With your head that firmly stuck in the sand, my only wish is that the internet didn't have subterranean reach.

I don't think her failure to know the name of the washed up drunk who represents the fine citizens of Massachussets has any real bearing on her point. Not that I agree with her point but your point really isn't material to the debate not to mention kind of asinine.

That is 100% wrong. Why would the market sell guns to kill? Who preacehs killing? What society holds killing close to their heart? Every culture kills, but no culture THRIVES off killing (except maybe the Yanomami?).

Handguns are NOT DESIGNED to kill. They and every other firearm have other uses, like say, protection. You can shoot someone in the knee and you do NOT have the motive to kill them.

No one can win this arguement. Duck duck is from a gun banning culture. Her beliefs are 10000x different than the average Americans'. As much stuff as we can tell her she will never believe guns are used for good. Let's stop arguing a futile cause, because we all know guns have very positive effects and that America is NOT a "rampant" society. Someone just stated the stats above.

That, unfortunately, will get to 10 to 20 most of the time. Wouding someone with a lethal weapon puts you in a very difficult and awkward legal situation. The prosecutor will simply use the boilerplate cross examination to make the point that if you really were in fear of your life then you could not possibly deliver a restrained response (making the point that you really weren't in fear of you life) and will prosecute you on that basis.

If you have a gun and someone is trying to kill you then dont' stop shooting until they are dead. Vital areas only.

:bs:

Nice stretch, fresh. I almost had coffee shoot out my nose. Thanks for the laugh.

What the hell is so funny? I'm sure the gun owners here did not buy them because they aim to kill anyone. They probably bought it for PROTECTION.

Dammit, quit making coffee come out my nose. You are SO funny!:lol2:

Whatever. I'm gonna stick with my original post like 4 posts earlier.

I know! let's ban guns and go to the cutting tools, that way we can prevent violent death by lethal means! Our government will protect us. They know best.

Ok, ok, I know that they killed 800,000 people in 100 days in Rawanda in 1994... but that was a loooonnnggg time ago. Ignore that. At least they didn't have evil guns because who knows how many they could have killed in that 100 days.

You seriously don't know what's so funny? Funny as irony or funny as utter ignorance, works either way.

How did those people die? Were they all "self-defensed" to death? They were "protected" to death? Maybe the handguns were designed to ... intimidate, to frighten potential threats. Were the victims "scared" to death?

Tell you what, I'll give you a pass on this one, we're all upset, you and me both, and I'll just let slide your clearly false statement. A slip of the fingers in the heat of an argument. You come back to this post in a week and revisit your position on the designed intent of handguns, and we'll talk.

Oh god, more stats. I don't know what's worse, all the stats being thrown about or the ignorance.

Guns kill like the penis is the cause of HIV/AIDS. It is what is behind the tool, not the tool itself. Given the right tool, people are going to do what they want to do regardless of the original intent of the purpose of the tool.

I guess in your experience your ignorance trumps someone elses ignorance, right?

NOW we get to the root of it all: gun as penis...penis as power.

This has become the most satirical thread ever. It's so going into my book.

Yea, most women fear it.

Everything about me trumps everything about everyone else. Didn't you know that? Start listening.