At Least 26 Dead in Shooting at Connecticut Elementary School

[rearnakedchoke]

Originally Posted by NateR

Yeah, that's what everyone told the Revolutionaries in colonial times. They were completely outgunned and outclassed by the British military; but America won its independence just the same.



Oh, I thought you were actually going to provide a link to a news story, so that we could all read it and share this information. But instead it seems that you're only here to start a fight and insult anyone who disagrees with you.

Maybe you should allow us time to mourn and time to process this tragedy, before getting on here and pushing all of your anti-gun opinions. Your attitude is very disrespectful so I think you need a few days to cool off.

LOL .. you mean the first thing you did was come into this thread and offer condolences? no .. mike started talking about teachers being armed and you piped in about how you agree ... so i find it funny you are talking about mourning when the first thing you did was come in and start talking about your pro-gun views ... i said in another thread, people on here can only agree with nate or they get sent to the corner ... careful people nates on the war path

[Bonnie]

Originally Posted by adamt

gun control= effective as drug control

I agree. Situations like this one, and the Colorado theater shooting, and the Gabby Giffords' shooting, all these shooters appear to have some mental/psychological/neurological problems that people around them obviously didn't recognize as potentially dangerous to others. I don't know how effective new gun control laws would be against people like these who have no record and who fly under the radar until they do something like this. From news reports, Adam Lanza used his mom's legally registered guns, I believe the Colorado theater shooter bought his weapons legally, and I'm not sure about where the guy in the Giffords shooting got his(?).

Originally Posted by adamt

His expression couldn't be more perfect for that!

[Bonnie]

Originally Posted by Neezar

I can't believe how many people are blaming the mom.

I think it's wrong for us to blame the Mom; we don't know the truth of things, and they are printing and putting out all these stories on the internet...we don't know if they are true or not. I heard it reported that his brother and dad had nothing to do with him for several years now, if that's true, why? Was the dad just leaving it up to the mom to handle and deal with their son and his problems?

They're reporting that she did take him to the shooting range. A friend said it was one way she found of trying to bond with him, he seemed to enjoy it. He wouldn't allow her to touch him or hug him so she was trying to find ways to bond with him. If he did have some form of autism, it might explain some of these things about him. I just listened to several people, some of them doctors, but all of them have autistic children. They explained that autism is a neurological problem, and that children with autism may be affected in different ways within the autism spectrum. Some of them may have little or no empathy or feeling for others. We don't know what this young man's diagnoses was and what kind of support, if any, they were able to get for him throughout his young life that might have helped him with impulses he might have had due to his condition.

People are quick to judge and point fingers when they don't know squat about these people.

[adamt]

apparently he shot out a window to gain access and the two principals charged him and got shot

even paul blart, mall cop would have been an assett in this scenario, somebody, anybody with security as a goal would have been better than nothing here

what if the principals had each had a can of mace or pepper spray? that would have been something!!! paul blart could have at least been carrying a taser


this is an extreme thought i know, but what if they had a panic button that fogged the whole school with pepper spray?? i think pepper spraying all the kids would have been better than 20 kids dead,

bottom line, any kind of security would have made this situation a little less tragic, cops are wonderful, but even they need at least a little bit of time to get to the scene

[Bonnie]

Originally Posted by adamt

apparently he shot out a window to gain access and the two principals charged him and got shot

even paul blart, mall cop would have been an assett in this scenario, somebody, anybody with security as a goal would have been better than nothing here

what if the principals had each had a can of mace or pepper spray? that would have been something!!! paul blart could have at least been carrying a taser


this is an extreme thought i know, but what if they had a panic button that fogged the whole school with pepper spray?? i think pepper spraying all the kids would have been better than 20 kids dead,

bottom line, any kind of security would have made this situation a little less tragic, cops are wonderful, but even they need at least a little bit of time to get to the scene

We are so on the same wavelength....it's scary! Seriously though, I was thinking about a panic button that would alert local authorities and maybe automatically lock down the rooms and/or trigger some type of bullet proof wall/door shields that would come down and block anyone entering or shooting into the rooms. And I also thought about the teachers and staff having tasers, but I'm not sure how close you have to be to someone to taser them? And I'm all for having armed security there on site (several, not just one person). I think any/all of these are great ideas that should be considered before ever considering having loaded guns locked in cabinets.

[Play The Man]

Originally Posted by BradW

why do you think 6 and 7 year olds would jump him and take him down while he was reloading when in fact all they would have to do is run ?

yes maybe his mother had a plane in the garage...

if you really think you could blow up that school with 3 or 4 bags of fertilizer then i have some ocean front property in North Dakota id like to sell you.

in the end i see that you are right...assault weapons are in no way at all part of the problem in the USA when it comes to the slaughter of defenseless children in a situation like this...

it will be a comforting for people to know that even if there were absolutely no semi automatic weapons at all at his mothers place that all these children were going to die that day anyway,and many many more if he would have used a plane or a fertilizer bomb...at the end of the day we should just be thankful that his mothers guns were so easily accessible.

Brad, you do realize that scenarios similar to what Adam described have already occurred, don't you?

In 2002, a 15-year-old in Tampa, Florida stole a private plane and purposely flew it into a building as an attempt to commit terror similar to 9/11. Thankfully, it wasn't a school. Thankfully, he only killed himself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_plane_crash

The worst school massacre wasn't Columbine. It actually occurred 85 years ago and involved explosives at a school. 38 children were killed (not including adults). No children were shot.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

Brad, you do know that Adam is a farmer and probably is quite familiar with regulations concerning the use of fertilizer?

[rearnakedchoke]

Originally Posted by Bonnie

We are so on the same wavelength....it's scary! Seriously though, I was thinking about a panic button that would alert local authorities and maybe automatically lock down the rooms and/or trigger some type of bullet proof wall/door shields that would come down and block anyone entering or shooting into the rooms. And I also thought about the teachers and staff having tasers, but I'm not sure how close you have to be to someone to taser them? And I'm all for having armed security there on site (several, not just one person). I think any/all of these are great ideas that should be considered before ever considering having loaded guns locked in cabinets.

thats great and all .. but there are thousands of schools ... i am not saying the price is not worth paying .. but it ain't gonna happen .... and teachers trained in using guns and locked guns in cabinets is another unreasonable/far-fetched idea ... its probably best to tackle the issue from the root, which is why are these deranged people getting their hands on guns and going postal ... who knows if there is a solution .... when there is a abvious issue with gun violence in the US ... the US crime rate isn't that bad .. and ranks with most developed nations .. but when is comes to deaths via guns, the US is in the same boat as third world nations ... there is obviously an issue, its just figuring it out ..

[Play The Man]

Originally Posted by rearnakedchoke

its not the guns .. its the culture ...

I agree.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/03/05/e...-who-ran-away/

On the annual commemoration of the “Montreal Massacre,” the Quebec broadcaster Marie-France Bazzo remarked how strange it was that, after all these years, nobody had made a work of art about what happened that day at the École Polytechnique.

I wonder, in the two decades since Dec. 6, 1989, how many novelists, playwrights, film directors have tried, and found themselves stumped at the first question: what is this story about?


To those who succeeded in imposing the official narrative, Marc Lépine embodies the murderous misogynist rage that is inherent in all men, and which all must acknowledge.

For a smaller number of us, the story has quite the opposite meaning: M Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater. And, as I always say, no, I’m not suggesting he’s typical of Muslim men or North African men: my point is that he’s not typical of anything, least of all, his pure laine moniker notwithstanding, what we might call (if you’ll forgive the expression) Canadian manhood. As I wrote in this space three years ago:

“The defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate—an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The ‘men’ stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.”

That’s what my film would be about. But don’t worry, the grant from Cinedole Canada seems to have got lost in the mail.

I would imagine that, when the director Denis Villeneuve and the talented vedette Karine Vanasse set out to make Polytechnique, they were intending to film the official narrative. But, in this case, art cannot imitate life. There is no hero in the official version—other than, as is invariably the case in Trudeaupia, the Canadian state riding in like a belated cavalry to hold annual memorials with flags lowered to half-staff and to demand that every octogenarian farmer register his rusting shotgun. Alas, on celluloid, that doesn’t come over quite as heroic.

So M Villeneuve and his collaborators were obliged to make artistic choices. For starters, Polytechnique is not a film “about” Marc Lépine. Aside from the early voice-over narration of his ugly, banal manifesto, we hear or see very little from his perspective. He is not (if you’ll again forgive the expression) the leading man, and, indeed, barely functions as a supporting role in his own movie: there is no attempt to explore his pathologies or their roots.

M Villeneuve then opts to shoot the movie in black and white, and to be very sparing in his dialogue. I saw the film with a capacity crowd at the Maison du Cinéma in Sherbrooke (lousy sound, by the way), and the dialogue-free stretches are so frequent that, by the time someone eventually delivered a line, I’d all but forgotten the movie was in French. In reality, it’s speaking in a kind of interior language. It’s a black-and-white film of a world of grey—the literal grey of dirty urban snow falling on drab apartment houses and the godawful bunkers of Quebec government architecture, but also a kind of moral grey. The physical landscape of the École Polytechnique is unsparingly rendered: claustrophobic windowless rooms of painted brick blocks that capture the particular grimness of a city full of modern buildings that all look out of date. We hear a couple of period pop hits, but the rest of the score is mournfully anemic violin generalities. It’s an airless world, and M Villeneuve seems determined to keep it that way, as if to let in too many superficial indicators of life—colour, music, banter—would draw attention to how un-animated his characters are. Consciously or not, the director has selected a visual style that’s most sympathetic to what some of us regard as the defining feature of this atrocity: the on-the-scene passivity.

And yet, despite his artfulness, he can’t quite pull it off. He focuses his efforts on two composite students, Valérie (Karine Vanasse) and Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau). They’re sitting next to each other at the back of the class when the killer walks in and barks the two most important words in the movie: “Séparez-vous!” This is the hinge moment in the story, the point that determines whether the killer’s scenario will play out as intended, or whether it will be disrupted: drama turns on choices because choice reveals character. But, when the man with the gun issues his instructions, every single male in the room meekly obeys him and troops out, and we are invited to identify with Jean-François because unlike the rest, who shuffle for the exit as if for a fire drill, he alone glances back and makes momentary eye contact with Valérie. Oh, the humanity!

And then, like everyone else, he leaves the room.

“I wanted to absolve the men,” Villeneuve said. “Society condemned them. People were really tough on them. But they were 20 years old . . . It was as if an alien had landed.”

Get 20 issues of Maclean's for $20 and a bonus gift! Click here to purchase.
But it’s always as if an alien had landed. When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It’s supposed to be “women and children first,” but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In reality, First Officer William Murdoch threw deck chairs down to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship—the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director subsequently apologized to the first officer’s hometown in Scotland and offered 5,000 pounds toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.) Pace Cameron, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. “An alien landed” on the deck of a luxury liner—and men had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats and sail off without them. The social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure.

At the École Polytechnique, there was no social norm. And in practical terms it’s easier for a Hollywood opportunist like Cameron to trash the memory of William Murdoch than for a Quebec filmmaker to impose redeeming qualities on a plot where none exist. In Polytechnique, all but one of the “men” walk out of that classroom and out of the story. Only Jean-François acts, after a fashion. He hears the shots . . . and rushes back to save the girl he’s sweet on? No, he does the responsible Canadian thing: he runs down nine miles of windowless corridor to the security man on duty and tells him all hell’s broken loose. So the security guard rushes back to tackle the nut? No, he too does the responsible Canadian thing: he calls the police. More passivity. Polytechnique’s aesthetic is strangely oppressive—not just the “male lead” who can’t lead, but a short film with huge amounts of gunfire yet no adrenalin.

Whenever I write about this issue, I get a lot of emails from guys scoffing, “Oh, right, Steyn. Like you’d be taking a bullet. You’d be pissing your little girlie panties,” etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it:

“When we say ‘we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances,’ we make cowardice the default position.”

I prefer the word passivity—a terrible, corrosive, enervating passivity. Even if I’m wetting my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it. M Villeneuve dedicates his film not just to the 14 women who died that day but also to Sarto Blais, a young man at the Polytechnique who hanged himself eight months later. Consciously or not, the director understands what the heart of this story is: not the choice of one man, deformed and freakish, but the choice of all the others, the nice and normal ones. He shows us the men walking out twice—first, in real time, as it were; later, Rashômon-style, from the point of view of the women, in the final moments of their lives.

If M Villeneuve can’t quite face the implications of what he shows us, we at least have an answer to Mme Bazzo’s question: you can’t make art out of such a world. Whether you can even make life out of it for long will be an interesting question for Quebec, Canada and beyond in the years ahead.

[Play The Man]

This is the issue: http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.c...kable.html?m=1

Thinking the Unthinkable


In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.

“I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.

“They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.”

“They told me I could wear these,” he insisted. “You’re a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!”

“You can’t wear whatever pants you want to,” I said, my tone affable, reasonable. “And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You’re grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I will take you to school.”

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

At the start of seventh grade, Michael was accepted to an accelerated program for highly gifted math and science students. His IQ is off the charts. When he’s in a good mood, he will gladly bend your ear on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to the differences between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics to Doctor Who. He’s in a good mood most of the time. But when he’s not, watch out. And it’s impossible to predict what will set him off.

Several weeks into his new junior high school, Michael began exhibiting increasingly odd and threatening behaviors at school. We decided to transfer him to the district’s most restrictive behavioral program, a contained school environment where children who can’t function in normal classrooms can access their right to free public babysitting from 7:30-1:50 Monday through Friday until they turn 18.

The morning of the pants incident, Michael continued to argue with me on the drive. He would occasionally apologize and seem remorseful. Right before we turned into his school parking lot, he said, “Look, Mom, I’m really sorry. Can I have video games back today?”

“No way,” I told him. “You cannot act the way you acted this morning and think you can get your electronic privileges back that quickly.”

His face turned cold, and his eyes were full of calculated rage. “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said. “I’m going to jump out of this car right now and kill myself.”

That was it. After the knife incident, I told him that if he ever said those words again, I would take him straight to the mental hospital, no ifs, ands, or buts. I did not respond, except to pull the car into the opposite lane, turning left instead of right.

“Where are you taking me?” he said, suddenly worried. “Where are we going?”

“You know where we are going,” I replied.

“No! You can’t do that to me! You’re sending me to hell! You’re sending me straight to hell!”

I pulled up in front of the hospital, frantically waiving for one of the clinicians who happened to be standing outside. “Call the police,” I said. “Hurry.”

Michael was in a full-blown fit by then, screaming and hitting. I hugged him close so he couldn’t escape from the car. He bit me several times and repeatedly jabbed his elbows into my rib cage. I’m still stronger than he is, but I won’t be for much longer.

The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork—“Were there any difficulties with....at what age did your child....were there any problems with...has your child ever experienced...does your child have....”

At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

For days, my son insisted that I was lying—that I made the whole thing up so that I could get rid of him. The first day, when I called to check up on him, he said, “I hate you. And I’m going to get my revenge as soon as I get out of here.”

By day three, he was my calm, sweet boy again, all apologies and promises to get better. I’ve heard those promises for years. I don’t believe them anymore.

On the intake form, under the question, “What are your expectations for treatment?” I wrote, “I need help.”

And I do. This problem is too big for me to handle on my own. Sometimes there are no good options. So you just pray for grace and trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense.

I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61 mass murders involving firearms have occurred throughout the country. (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...-shootings-map). Of these, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jones focused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign of mental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the U.S. live in fear, like I do.

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the number of mentally ill inmates in U.S. prisons quadrupled from 2000 to 2006, and it continues to rise—in fact, the rate of inmate mental illness is five times greater (56 percent) than in the non-incarcerated population. (http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/09/05/u...ons-quadrupled)

With state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now the last resort for the mentally ill—Rikers Island, the LA County Jail, and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation’s largest treatment centers in 2011 (http://www.npr.org/2011/09/04/140167...-ill-prisoners)

No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, “Something must be done.”

I agree that something must be done. It’s time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That’s the only way our nation can ever truly heal.

God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.

[Play The Man]

Fifty years ago, the mortality rates for an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest were dismal. They still aren't great, but there has been improvement with a shift to a "first responder" emphasis on CPR and AED use amongst laymen. A non-medical bystander doesn't need to know anything about medicine or surgery; they just have to call 911 and start CPR. It isn't perfect. It doesn't always work, but it was an improvement on the past. The issue is time and distance. If the bystander on the scene can keep the patient alive for 5-10 minutes until an ambulance arrives, there is at least a chance. In these shootings, it takes the police at least 10 minutes or more to respond. Since Columbine, they no longer stay back and contain; they rush in to confront. The schools have to stop or slow down the shooter for at least 10 minutes. Why not at least try to arm a few school personnel in a few schools as a pilot program to test feasibility? Biometric safes keyed to fingerprints would secure the guns to a few trained volunteers. Alternatively, a few trustworthy community volunteers could walk the grounds during the day as armed guards. There are certain careers in this society in which we place a great deal of trust - police, pilots, firemen, career soldiers,etc. Many of these men (mostly men) retire in their 50's or early 60's. They are still in good health and could handle a firearm. In exchange for their service as school security, the legislature could make them exempt from all income and property tax. They would receive tax avoidance rather than a salary. Equipment could be provided by donations.