Elem. School shooting in Conn.

[BSink42]

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12 ... icial-says

18 children among the dead.

I'm shaking overhere right now.

[Duncan Edwards]

I guess the lesson is that there are crazy people everywhere -

Crazy man slashes 22 kids in Chinese elementary school -

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asi ... index.html

Picking out defenseless targets in the ultimate act of cowardice is nothing new. I sure am getting sick of it though.

[reisen55]

Horrible event and on FB my daughter commented that 30 people would not have killed with just a knife. No, just 22 in China today. Crazy. My father owned guns, was a good NRA member and I an nominally pro-gun but some firearms, by specific name, have no place in the public arena. That said, criminals and crazy people, read this sick pieces of scum, break laws . ... so we can pass the best gun control laws in the world and they will still find a way to get them. BTW the nation with the toughest gun control law is Northern Ireland.

Hearts and hugs still, overwhelmed.

[Duncan Edwards]

Let's not go there. This isn't about that. It's just bad. Period.

[PM2K]

Words fail me... first time I broke down in tears over news coverage since the scope of 9/11 really hit me.

[BSink42]

Not it's been upped to twenty children, six adults and the shooter.

One of the ones dead was the shooter's mom, the children where the kids she was teaching.

I... I can't. There's no words for this.

[Mynock]

Homy A and Homy B shooting it up in the ghetto, and catching a kid in the crossfire, that I can understand. Bullied kids getting revenge at Columbine I can understand. Shooting up a Sikha Temple because of religious hatred I can understand. Mind you I don't condone these things but I can at least grasp the "why" of them.
This guy walked into a classroom, leveled a rifle at a class of 5 year olds who never did anything to anybody, and shot them one by one.....why? Seriously that's all I want to know. Fuck the gun control arguement, fuck the school security arguement, we need to take what's left of this....thing.....and put its body in a lab and dissect it in the name of humanity. Either that or stop the planet and let me off because I don't want to live here anymore.

[bbjohn]

I watched this story unfold today and I was in a state of shock. Now, I am appalled and horrified. I can't understand how anyone could shoot up a classroom full of small children. It doesn't make any sense at all.

On the one hand, I'm glad the shooter is dead so we don't have to have the expense of a trial. At the same time, I wonder if we will ever know what was going through his head. I can't help but feel that, if we knew that, there might be a chance, even a small one, we might be able to prevent this sort of thing in the future.

Even among criminals, those who go after children are seen as the lowest form of life on Earth.

I've seen criticism of the media in how they've handled all this. They've put out some information that turned out not to be true, which certainly added to the confusion.

As someone who works in the media, let me say I know of no reporters who want to cover a story like this. Reporters are human, too, and I'll bet 99 percent of them are as shocked and horrified by this as everyone else. I suspect such feelings may have clouded their judgment on what information to put out.

Incidents such as this are almost always chaotic. Often, the police and other authorities are not sure themselves what's going on. They may have information that appears accurate at the time that later turns out to be false. If they pass that info on to the media before they learn it's not true, it can be spread all over the world before the truth comes out.

In the old days, reporters had a chance to hold off on putting some information out because deadlines were a lot longer than they are now. These days, with the "24-hour news cycle," the public expects, even demands, instant information on any event or incident. This puts reporters under a lot of pressure to get information out. I guarantee you no one is more chagrined when a news report turns out to be untrue than the reporter who wrote it.

The 24-hour news cycle has revealed some of the pitfalls of the process of gathering news. It's not always a pretty picture. Reporters and other media people are only human.

It's been said that people who like good news stories and sausages should probably not watch how they're made.

Big Bad John

[julie]

I'm not a mother but I DO have a little brother who goes to elem School, I'm not a violent person but my next door neighbor IS, he's a disabled ( mentally ) vet from the military who served in every single big or small conflict, gunfight or whatever from 1980 thru 1999, he said if the man hadn't died he would go to Conn with a saws all and disassemble him for killing children, and I have to say I probably would have drove him there. I go to school every day and we ere watching this unfold in the teachers lounge and hearing it on the radio in the office and our resource officer ( school cop) had backup waiting down the street at his high school, and I'm in Va not Conn.
I truly believe that even Satan himself hates child killers and has a special place in hell for those people

[Regisblb]

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