Idriz Ajeti wrote:I think professors should be armed just like airline pilots. Campus security is doing good job and the law enforcement is doing its part but that doesn't seem to be enough. You fight fire with fire not with velvet gloves. There is no need for Campus Marshalls,... yet. However, issuing hand guns to university professors, in my opinion,  I don't think is such a bad idea. When professors are armed, the loonatics out there will think twice - if they are capable to think - before they storm into a classroom and start shooting indiscriminately.

Idriz Ajeti

I am stunned by your proposal.  Most, the vast majority of, professors are left-wing fanatics.  Frankly, many of them are probably mentally less stable than the young men who committed the last two mass murders on campus.  I doubt any of them would be willing to carry a gun as they almost certainly all believe in eliminating private gun ownership.  

I also don't see how your claim that campus security and law enforcement are doing their job but seem to be enough.  The two shootings weren't thwarted by campus security or local law enforcement.  In fact, in Virginia Tech, the campus security did nothing in the time between the shootings in the dorm and the shootings in the classrooms.  Frankly, they seem to have done virtually nothing to protect the students on campus.  

Part of the problem is that these are seriously mentally ill people.  It is very difficult to predict the actions of seriously mentally ill people.  So, unless you reinforce campus security on a massive scale, like a cop in every room, they won't be able to be everywhere to deter crime.  

The other option is to actually allow private citizens to practice their 2nd amendment rights and carry weapons.  So many governments have declared "gun free zones" assuming that it will protect people.  But this tactic obviously doesn't protect the law abiding citizens who don't carry guns.  It just appears to make them targets and victims in waiting.

But, even then, allowing people to carry weapons might not be a sufficient deterrent to someone interested in killing as many as they can before they kill themselves.  Their motive seems to be to kill and die.  I am not sure it will matter to them whether they kill themselves or die by a bullet fired by law enforcement or a private citizen. Again, assuming seriously mentally ill people think rationally is not a safe bet.

But, it would be ironic to see a headline something like this:

John Smith, Liberal University Professor of World Peace and Social Justice, Engages Deranged Student in Gun Battle!  Saves Hundreds of Lives!

Followed by the inevitable headlines a few days later:  

University Senate Votes to Condemn and Expel Smith.

Followed by the other inevitable headline a few days later:

Family of Mentally Ill Student Sues Liberal University and Professor Smith for 198 Quintillion Dollars for Wrongful Death.

Paleo, LMAO reading that last one.

Idriz, I was being sarcastic when I wrote that it was the gun's fault.  Sarcasm doesn't always come through in typed words.

I think a clue needs to be taken from the Va Tech shooter last year.  He made it clear that he was looking for "infamy".  That is, he wanted to make news -- he wanted to be talked about -- he wanted to be popular (even in the most negative way) -- he wanted publicity.

The first of these crimes was Columbine, and I believe it had the same source and motive.

Essentially, a mentally aberrant person - rather than slaughtering their family, as they might have in previous generations - is also brainwashed by the media to desire the "cult of personality" afforded to the greatest morons that society has to offer.

It's not a matter of the coarsening of society, or the degradation of morals thru the media (though these are real problems with other negative effects).  It's more specific than that.  It is tied to the relatively recent spate of "reality" t.v. shows, shows given to the likes of Flava Flav, and the enormous popularity of certain people (specifically, Paris Hilton) who have absolutely no business being famous.

For someone who feels like an invisible, unapreciated, outcast among even a small community -- how demoralizing must it further be to know that it takes nothing of substance to achieve fame & stardom.

As for these mentally deranged shooters: They're crazy.  They were bound to shoot or stab somebody, somewhere, at some time.  But because their entire lives are defined as being scorned "outsiders" (usually for good reason), all the really want is attention - to be noticed - to be remembered - to mean something (even if it's an evil something that they're remembered for).

It makes no logical sense, because they're crazy.  But, these days, they're not only just crazy, they want/demand notice.  Just like Paris Hilton gets noticed.  Just like the crappy tone-deaf clowns who WIN American Idol get noticed.  Just like desperate idiouts lacking dignity get noticed for eating cockroaches or pig testicles.

When fame is meaningless, meaningless people demand fame.

[quote="paleocon

"I am stunned by your proposal.  Most, the vast majority of, professors are left-wing fanatics.  Frankly, many of them are probably mentally less stable than the young men who committed the last two mass murders on campus.  I doubt any of them would be willing to carry a gun as they almost certainly all believe in eliminating private gun ownership."
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I didn't mean all professors should be armed. Maybe, about  35% of the Academic staff. Professors can choose voluntarely. I mean, you can't have a cop a.k.a.  'University Marshall' sit in every classroom; you can't have metal detectors install in every auditorium; campus security seems ineffective and law enforcement are too busy dealing with crimes outside the campus. Well, something has to be done but we're not quite sure what can be done. Should we just sit and wait tweedling our thumbs till it happens again?

Idriz Ajeti wrote:
I didn't mean all professors should be armed. Maybe, about  35% of the Academic staff. Professors can choose voluntarely. I mean, you can't have a cop a.k.a.  'University Marshall' sit in every classroom; you can't have metal detectors install in every auditorium; campus security seems ineffective and law enforcement are too busy dealing with crimes outside the campus. Well, something has to be done but we're not quite sure what can be done. Should we just sit and wait tweedling our thumbs till it happens again?

Well, if it is voluntary, you might find 1/2 of one percent of college professors willing to carry a gun.  Then, of course, many college campuses would have to repeal their "gun free zone" legislation as well.  

You want something done and that is understandable.  These kinds of tragedies are terrible.  But I think Eyas hit on the larger truth that some people are seeking "infamy" and even arming everyone won't deter the insane from their insanity.  Arming lots of people might minimize the death toll but if the shooter wants to kill and be killed the threat of armed professors, students, security or police is not going to deter them.

There are some people who are just really stupid and want to harm others. Period. Some countries have suicide bombers. Some countries have bullies who run around with machetis. American crazies have a penchant for shooting classmates. The weapon is hardly the issue - it's the fact that someone decides to be a murderer.

I don't understand the left's position on this...they're okay with potential killers walking in our midst, getting high off killing people in games, watching murder for sport in our theaters, calling for political leaders to be assassinated, rotting their brains with harmful drugs, and idolizing serial killers in the media....that stuff is all cool as long as there aren't any guns around.

When we stop promoting and glorifying bloodthirsty behavior, stop mass murdering the unborn for convenience, and stop giving TV coverage to nutjobs who do these things, the frequency of school shootings would start to slow. But if we keep numbing our children to violence, we will reap what we sow, regardless of the weapon.

candance wrote:When we stop promoting and glorifying bloodthirsty behavior, stop mass murdering the unborn for convenience, and stop giving TV coverage to nutjobs who do these things, the frequency of school shootings would start to slow. But if we keep numbing our children to violence, we will reap what we sow, regardless of the weapon.

Frankly, that would be a great place to start.

Idriz said, " ...Something should be done..."

Here what DONSKI had to say:

" I don't know, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I believe there are two scenarios. Either way, it's an imbalance in perspective. One is culture shock and the other is acceptance of your surroundings.

1 way: culture shock

Children can be really cruel, even more so when they become teenagers, and some people never grow up. I've met a lot of adults that are real assholes that simply love to tease the shit out of people. It seems the more it bothers you, the more they want to tease you. They live by the idea that if you can't raise the bridge then lower the river. They feel if they can't improve themselves then they should degrade others. I've learned long ago not to let these assholes bother me, but there are others that are far more sensitive to that kind of criticism. Maybe it was just my upbringing, I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth. My father was an alcoholic and my mother was lazy and hated house work, but I still grew up in a loving family even though my brothers and sisters teased each other all the time.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the people most likely to snap were the ones that were over protected by their parents or had too many rules. Mothers in America today are being trained to do everything in their power to protect their children from harm. We never wore helmets, knee pads and elbow pads when we learned to ride bikes. We weren't escorted around the neighborhood by our parents on Halloween. And if you didn't make the football team, too bad. Some parents also expect far more out of their children and set standards impossible to obtain. When these children are so intensely groomed for success and then grow up and enter the real world, they don't know what to do when they fail. Their whole world comes crashing down around them and they just snap.

It's like a girl raised to read the bible and go to church every day, then when you turn her loose on the world she becomes a prostitute. Or a boy with a policeman for a father, and then grows up and becomes a drug dealer. They don't know where to draw the line between right and wrong without a reference point. A person can have it drilled into his head every day that drinking alcohol is wrong, then he enters college and not only finds out that alcohol is legal but all his friends drink. Without a frame of reference it's very likely that he'll drink too much.

Now you take a sheltered child that learns that he can purchase a weapon, coupled with watching TV shows that portray heroes with guns where they shoot and kill evil people without consequences, he now believes that he too can shoot the bad guy and be a hero in some people's eyes. Although he knows it's against the law, he still feels that it's the right thing to do and that the police just don't understand.

2nd way: acceptance of your surroundings

Some children grow up in bad neighborhoods where people are killing each other all the time. After a while this becomes a natural thing to do, if you don't like them then kill 'em. It's a shame that it happens far too often in our inner cities, but it's a cycle that's hard to stop. It's said that you can take the boy out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the boy.

For this same reason you're not going to stop the killing in Iraq because they've been killing for thousands of years. When you've grown up with killing all your life, it becomes an accepted way to live. It reaches a point where walking into school and killing your teacher, or walking into work and killing your boss, is just as normal as putting a dog to sleep when he bites someone.

It really has to do with raising your children to know right from wrong, but not coloring everything simply black and white. When you realize that everything has shades of gray and the world is far from perfect, it makes it easier to cope with everyday ups and downs. Your son totals your brand new car drunk driving, don't cry over spilled milk, learn to deal with it. People should be taught to take everything in moderation. It's OK to drink alcohol, just don't drink too much. It's the extremes that ultimately create the problems."

Idriz said,"...When professors are armed, the loonatics out there will think twice..."

SunLion responded: "It's a compelling argument, but professors aren't immune to mental and moral illness.

One of the most famous serial killers of the last century (the Unabomber) was extremely educated- he was a fulltime Harvard student by age 16, solved "unsolvable" mathematics problems, was a National Science Foudation "Fellow," and by age 25 had his Masters, Ph.D, and worked as an Asst. Professor teaching math at Berkeley. He wrote papers that only the leading experts in his field could even understand, and won some huge recognitions for it. Along the way he excelled in everything from chess to music composition to drama to philosophy to foreign language. Had he not changed occupations to become a killer, he really might have been the next Einstein or Newton.

The guy who did this most recent shooting was probably qualified enough to be teaching some classes, if that was his interest.

I don't have any good ideas to share on this. When someone decides to die, and take people with them, there's almost no chance of successfully intervening no matter what is tried.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would argue that the government is just testing their latest batch of psychological warfare drugs. While I've not heard whether or not this latest killer ever participated in any such government tests, it's now known that the Unabomber was a volunteer in a government study of interrogation methods. I don't remember whether that program was part of MK-Ultra or not, but I think I remember that it was some of the same people doing the experiments. But I remain skeptical on it."



__________________

Five Questions about Shootings at Universities
by Dennis Prager



Question 1: Why are murderers always counted in the victims tally? The day after the mass murder of students at Northern Illinois University (NIU), the headline in the closest major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, was: "6 Dead in NIU Shooting."
"6 dead" included the murderer. Why wasn't the headline "5 killed at NIU"? It is nothing less than moronic that the media routinely lump murderers and their victims in the same tally.
This is something entirely new. Until the morally confused took over the universities and the news media, murderers were never counted along with their victims. To give a military analogy, can one imagine a headline like this in an American newspaper after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: "2,464 Dead in Pearl Harbor Attack"? After all, 55 Japanese airmen and nine Japanese crewmen also died in the attack.
One can only assume that this mode of reporting murders is part of the larger movement toward non-judgmentalism and egalitarianism. To many Americans in academia, the media, and elsewhere, all the dead constitute a tragedy. Suggesting that some dead are more important than other dead is forbidden.
At the San Francisco Zoo, after a young man was mauled to death by a tiger that had escaped its confines, the administrators of the zoo even lumped a killed animal with its human victim: the Zoo set up a memorial to both the man and the tiger. And, unsurprisingly, given the egalitarianism that now also lumps human beings with animals, the tiger received more condolence messages than the human it killed.
Question 2: Which of these three options is more likely to prevent further murderous rampages: a) making universities closed campuses and increasing the police presence on campus (as the president of NIU has promised to do); b) making guns much harder to obtain; or c) enabling specially trained students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on campus?
Because political correctness has replaced wisdom at nearly all universities, colleges are considering options a and b. But the only thing the first option will accomplish is to reduce the quality of university life and render the campus a larger version of the contemporary airport. And the second option will have no effect whatsoever since whoever wishes to commit murder will be able to obtain guns illegally.
But if would-be murderers know that anywhere they go to kill students, there is a real likelihood that one or two students will shoot them first, and if in fact some would-be murderer is killed before he can murder any, or at least many, students, we will see far fewer such attempts made. Even though many of these murderers end up killing themselves, they don't want to die until they have first murdered as many students and teachers as possible.
Of course, there is virtually no chance that the uniformly left-thinking individuals who run our universities will ever consider this option. To do so would mean abandoning what is essentially a religious-like conviction that guns are immoral rather than the people who use them immorally.
Question 3: Why are "shooter" and "gunman" used instead of "killer" or "murderer"?

If a murderer used a knife to murder five students, no news headlines would read, "Knifeman Kills Five." So why always "shooter" and "gunman"? The most obvious explanation is that by focusing on the weapon used by the murderer, the media can further their anti-gun agenda.
Question 4: Why is "murder" never used to describe homicides involved in these university massacres? And why is "murderer" never used to describe these murderers? Why has "kill" become the only word allowed for deliberate homicide?
Some will say that this is because "murder" is a legal term, and until one is convicted of murder in a court of law, the word should not be used.
I find this unpersuasive. If these murderers can be described as having killed students, then they have in fact committed murder. I believe the major reason for the death of the words "murder" and "murderer" has to do, again, with an unwillingness to make moral judgments, and "murderer" is far more judgmental than "shooter."
Question 5: Would the press note killers' religiosity if they were all Christian?
Imagine for a moment that all the mass murderers at our universities were active Christians. Do you think that the press would at the very least note this? Of course it would, and it would be right to do so.
Yet, to the best of my knowledge, all the recent university mass murderers were secular. Is this worth noting? And if not, why not? Of course, the answer is that few, if any, in the mainstream media would find such a thing worth noting and would likely bristle at its mention. To nearly everyone in the media, the secularism of all the murderers is a non-sequitur. But if they were all active Christians, the same media people would hardly view that fact as insignificant and unrelated.
The fact is that nearly everyone in the mainstream media is secular and therefore cannot imagine associating secularism with anything negative. Secularism is presumed to be all good. But in truth, secularism, a blessing in government, is not a blessing in the lives of most individuals. Now, one can no more blame these college murders on secularism than one could blame Christianity if all the murderers were Christian. But in neither case would it be insignificant.
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Idriz Ajeti wrote:Idriz said, " ...Something should be done..."

Well, you did say that something should be done.  You just haven't proposed anything logical.  In fact,  you have proposed something terribly illogical.  

Idriz Ajeti wrote:Idriz said,"...When professors are armed, the loonatics out there will think twice..."

Well, again, your illogical proposal assumes that insane people will behave rationally when confronted with a given set of facts.  Which is again logically inconsistent.  If the lunatics were behaving rationally they wouldn't be out there plotting mass murder.