Shooting at CT elementary school leaves at least 27 dead, 18 of them children

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if you made tragedies apolitical there is nothing left.  is war apolitical?  is war not a tragedy?

I just find scoring political points while our country has just started to mourn to be distasteful.

Don't kid yourself.  The country is not mourning.  You don't know any of the people affected.  You could, however, be supportive of efforts to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again, right now.  That might be the best way to mourn the murdered children for someone who has no personal stake in the tragedy.

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I just find scoring political points while our country has just started to mourn to be distasteful.

Like Huckabee blaming this on God not being in the schools?  Conservatives make plenty of political hay out of stuff like this.  It's only when people bring up points they don't like that we're "politicizing a tragedy."  I call BS on the hypocrisy.

As I stated earlier, I am equally upset about the politicization on my side of the aisle.  My twitter timeline at the moment is making me ill, because for some folks the only solution to a problem is to introduce even more guns into the equation.

if you made tragedies apolitical there is nothing left.  is war apolitical?  is war not a tragedy?

I just find scoring political points while our country has just started to mourn to be distasteful.

Don't kid yourself.  The country is not mourning.  You don't know any of the people affected.  You could, however, be supportive of efforts to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again, right now.  That might be the best way to mourn the murdered children for someone who has no personal stake in the tragedy.

That's absolutely insulting, but I'm not holding it against you because this is a very sensitive issue.  

Attacking Constitutional rights is never a responsible reaction to a tragedy, whether its internment camps, the PATRIOT Act, going to war without purpose, or unreasonable gun control.

Stop the melodramatic posturing.  It's insulting that you are using the devastation wrought by this tragedy among the families involved to try and steer the debate/conversation away from preventing such an act from happening again.

[Ban my account ffs!]

I just find scoring political points while our country has just started to mourn to be distasteful.

Like Huckabee blaming this on God not being in the schools?  Conservatives make plenty of political hay out of stuff like this.  It's only when people bring up points they don't like that we're "politicizing a tragedy."  I call BS on the hypocrisy.

As I stated earlier, I am equally upset about the politicization on my side of the aisle.  My twitter timeline at the moment is making me ill, because for some folks the only solution to a problem is to introduce even more guns into the equation.

if you made tragedies apolitical there is nothing left.  is war apolitical?  is war not a tragedy?

I just find scoring political points while our country has just started to mourn to be distasteful.

Don't kid yourself.  The country is not mourning.  You don't know any of the people affected.  You could, however, be supportive of efforts to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again, right now.  That might be the best way to mourn the murdered children for someone who has no personal stake in the tragedy.

That's absolutely insulting, but I'm not holding it against you because this is a very sensitive issue.  

Attacking Constitutional rights is never a responsible reaction to a tragedy, whether its internment camps, the PATRIOT Act, going to war without purpose, or unreasonable gun control.

Stop the melodramatic posturing.  It's insulting that you are using the devastation wrought by this tragedy among the families involved to try and steer the debate/conversation away from preventing such an act from happening again.

I have yet to see any solutions in this thread that would prevent this act from happening again.  Please, if there are any such solutions, bring them forward.

Require gun owners to keep their guns locked up.  Enact severe penalties for letting someone else without a permit handle/possess/use the gun, including confiscation of all guns and revocation of all permits and a lengthy period of being barred from gun ownership.

As such, if weapons are stolen and the robbery is not reported immediately to police (say, within 48 hours of finding that it is missing), the owner of the gun becomes partially criminally responsible for any crimes committed with the gun by the person who stole it.

Tie a mental health flag to background checks.  Just as a doctor can forcibly have you hospitalized for a psych evaluation if you are suicidal, they should also be able to put a red flag in your record that would come up on background checks that you are mentally unstable/unfit to own a weapon pending proper medical treatment of the mental issue.

Put conceal/carry under higher scrutiny.  Make handgun owners prove mental stability at regular intervals with their permit renewal, and make the owners of the guns keep them safely locked up when the gun is not on their person.  Require registration of all guns in a national database.

The Slippery Slope argument need not apply.  These are common sense ways to help prevent these tragedies from happening.  By making hunting-rifle ownership relatively easy and red-tape free, you will satisfy a lot of gun owners.  

With owning a gun comes great responsibility.  If you cannot properly ensure that the gun stays in your possession, you should not be allowed to own them.  Period.

If you have a history of mental illness where owning a firearm would greatly increase the danger to others... you are then treading on the right of others to live peacefully without the fear of being shot by a maniac... and you should not own guns.

That said, I think non-violent felons should be able to own guns like anybody else.  Unless your crime involved a weapon... such a broad ban on owning guns is nothing but reactionary bullsh**t.

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Improving mental health treatment is certainly part of the solution, if not The Solution.  

100% agree.

That is the biggest part.  90% of preventing things like today's shooting from happening is proper mental healthcare.

Unfortunately Republicans not only want to give everyone a gun... they also want the crazies to own them too by default since without any appreciable healthcare, we'd never know they were crazy in the first place.]

The cognitive dissonance among conservatives is enough to drive a person crazy, in and of itself.

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Just to put a combo breaker to the political bitching, I finally got in touch with my friend Scott who I went to school with, who's daughter was in the school when it happened. Everyone is okay, but they havent found a way to tell her that a friend she had has passed in this event. So please, keep the insensitive fighting going on the tragic event that just happened. It's appreciated.

And I really am sorry for your friend's family and their daughter's friend.  This is something that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

But how does ignoring the elephant in the room while being melodramatic and pretending to "mourn and grieve" (which is really inappropriate since I don't know any of the people involved and can't relate to what they went through in any way) going to make things better?

Maybe it's insensitive.  But I'm pretty sure sensitivity didn't come into the equation as the guy was shooting small children in cold blood.  It was a disgusting act of violence that happens over and over again because people get all butthurt when gun control is brought up after these tragedies... but we barely have time to get over it before the next tragedy comes along.

I'm sorry, but the debate has to start right now.  Taking action to prevent this from happening again is the best thing that the non-personally involved public can do to honor to lives of those that were killed today.

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I don't know what would drive someone to do something this horrific- I don't want to know.

we're all but a day or two removed from doing it ourselves.

No.  I'm pretty sure that it takes more than a day or two to develop the mental illness required to carry out such a horrific act.

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Improving mental health treatment is certainly part of the solution, if not The Solution. 

100% agree.

you fools, do you know what mental health and addiction 'treatment' entails.  just like the liberals who spew their sh**t about diverting drug users into treatment when it is all just a windfall for the insurance companies and formerly-addicted 'counselors', at the expense of people who have nothing left to expend.  let the cure be worse than the symptom and you'll have your dystopia ready-made and microwaveable, and don't ask me for relief when the bombs drop.

Have you ever met a recovering alcoholic who put his life back together and got that started in a treatment program?

Or a former meth or heroin addict who kicked the habit in treatment and used the aftercare support groups to stay away from the drugs and live a more meaningful life?

Nobody is arguing for severe intervention because you blew a .09 one time.  Or because you had a pipe and a quarter ounce of weed in your pocket.

But it just sounds like you're railing against the man as either some kind of self-justification to keep a potential addiction going or because you have had very little experience with people who have benefited from interventionist mental healthcare and treatment.

I may be wrong... and I don't know you personally, so I'm sorry if I assumed where I shouldn't have... but my personal experience is contrary to your argument above.

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I am an addict myself and know plenty of other addicts, within and without the family, those who have gotten sober and those who haven't.

I have also been to 25 or so 12-step meetings, 5 or so non 12-step meetings, have a living grandfather who is 35 years off of booze and initially got sober through a 12-step inpatient rehab program, etc.

And I have a brother and sister who were drug addicts that successfully kicked the habit in an inpatient treatment program.  Alcoholism runs rampant in my dad's side of the family.  Both my grandparents were alcoholics til the day they died.  My uncle is a recovering alcoholic.  Somehow my dad bucked the trend, though there were signs early on that he might be one... but he successfully stopped and didn't have a drop for 10 years before he drank again.. and to this day he drinks only occasionally and in moderation.

It can be done on your own in a few cases.  But most people benefit immensely from a support group of people in various stages of the recovery process with the guidance of trained professionals who devote their lives to helping people recover.

I can only think that your original post on the matter wasn't serious...

Because all the post told me was "minimize/justify".

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Does anyone have the numbers for the number of children killed by guns every year?  I realize I could Google it, but I want actual, unbiased numbers...

So nobody knows?

I did find a good story with actual cited facts in it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/nine-facts-about-guns-and-mass-shootings-in-the-united-states/

That was a most informative article.

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I don't think it makes it any more disturbing.  It's not like I'm going "Oh thank God.. he only shot 20 children and 6 adults because he was aiming for his mom, who worked there."

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Why is it most liberals seem to focus on gun control, and gloss over better mental health treatment, as the most effective solution to this problem?   They seem to hardly even mention it. 

Because nobody - literally nobody - knows what that would even mean.

Making sure people have access to affordable, efficient psychiatric care is part of the puzzle, but it's a small part. I don't know why it's suddenly been christened the silver bullet in massacre prevention, and as you said, nobody can seem to outline specifics beyond "make mental health services better!"

We're doing ourselves a disservice by thinking these killings are only perpetrated by generically and predictably insane people.

Perhaps because 100% of the people who massacre schools/public places have major mental illness that obviously hasn't been treated.

It is no small part.  It is the biggest piece to the puzzle.  The best way to prevent such massacres is to prevent the desire to carry them out.  Beyond that, removing the vehicle to carry out such a massacre must be removed.

I think the reason it has become a "silver bullet", is because it is hardly ever discussed in the context of these shootings.  Maybe because we chalk it up to teen angst when one teen goes and shoots a bunch of his classmates.  But who kills 20 small children?  Somebody who had major mental health problems that were untreated. 

Perhaps I am naive, but I'd venture to guess that if this Lanza fellow had been properly diagnosed and was receiving medical as well as psychiatric care, those 27 people would still be alive, and he'd be living a more productive life.

If you simply took the guns away.. he'd be stewing in his own misery/anger/sociopathic tendencies just waiting to get his hands on someone else's guns.

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You don't think it's a little too easy to label all spree killers undiagnosed head cases? I agree that proper health care would've impacted the outcome of Newtown and V-Tech more heavily than gun control, but what about Aurora, the Amish school shooting, Columbine, and even the OKC bombings? Those were all carried out by people of varying mental states, but none severe enough to suggest a potential problem down the road without heaping doses of hindsight.

I didn't mean to suggest that gun control was the catch-all solution either, or that psychiatric services were insignificant. It's a multi-faceted problem, perhaps largely cultural, and trivializing it by clinging to one aspect or the other as the Eureka moment isn't going to stop the next guy.

A lot of mental illness goes undetected.  People are good at masking it.  The Columbine shooters obviously had problems.  The problem with a lot of mental illness is that the people in question are aware of it by the fact that others begin noticing it.  And as a defense mechanism, they mask it because mental illness has a big social stigma.

Another problem is that the mentally ill will go to great lengths to deny they are mentally ill at all and resent the help that is offered.  Instead, they just stew in their own mental illness until they finally have a breakdown.

How many people kill themselves...  and everybody close to them is saying "I never suspected a thing... if only I had...."  There is no question that the person who committed suicide had major mental issues that needed sorting out... but they suffered in silence.

These shootings were planned affairs.  The only type of a situation I can see where mental illness might not be a big issue is if the person did not intend to kill anybody, but the situation got out of their "control" (like a hostage situation).... or someone is in a rage, like those who get laid off and then shoot up their workplace in a fit of resentment and rage.

These massacres aren't like that.

So my point is that psychiatric/mental healthcare is a big part of it, and it will likely be the most difficult to really do something about.  But it has to be a big part of any debate we have.

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The Colorado shooter was receiving psychiatric care and it didn't stop him.

Which is why my previous argument that gun control measures that keep guns away from the mentally ill are a good idea.