Posted on 4/18/2007, 1:07:44 PM by RKV
About these gun mass murders being an American problem. From BBC, April 26, 2002:
Eighteen people died when an expelled former pupil went on a shooting spree at his school in the eastern German city of Erfurt. Masked and dressed in black, the gunman walked through classrooms killing 14 teachers, two schoolgirls and one of the first policemen on the scene before taking his own life. He was clothed completely in black and you could only see his eyes. Pupils of the Gutenberg School spent four hours trapped inside before police could declare the building safe. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder described the massacre in the quiet provincial city as "beyond the powers of the imagination".
And this account from the New York Times in 1995:
After murdering three relatives at home, a teen-ager walked to the next village today and calmly opened fire on a quiet town square, killing nine more people before turning the gun on himself. The incident was the country's worst multiple killing since 1989. "It was like he was hunting birds," said Guy Sintes, the owner of a cafe on the square in Cuers, a village near the Mediterranean port of Toulon. Television footage from the scene showed sidewalks and a car spattered with blood and a bullet hole through a shop window. "The people are devastated, totally traumatized," said the Mayor of Cuers, Guy Gigou. "The village is in shock." The boy was identified as Eric Borel, 16. The impetus for the killings was unclear. His father died recently of cancer. Neighbors, interviewed on French television, described him as taciturn and said his room was plastered with posters of Hitler and neo-Nazi themes.
From the Moscow Times:
GALI, Abkhazia -- One night in June at a lonely Russian post in the small village of Sida, Sergeant Artur Vaganov, 22, of the Russian peacekeeping force here, woke up to commit mass murder. Very deliberately, he cut the post's communications, gathered together all the weapons and opened fire on his fellow soldiers as they slept in their bunks. He shot dead 10 men and wounded three more before killing himself. The building was still awash with blood the next day, eyewitnesses said.
And this 2002 Time article:
Last week's mass murder of eight city councilors in a Paris suburb left not only a traumatized community and bereft survivors. Coming in the thick of a presidential campaign, alsoit, set France searching for political meaning in a fundamentally senseless act. Both major candidates, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and President Jacques Chirac, were on the scene before sun-up, condemning the attack in the same words, as "a murderous folly." Yet by the end of the day the two sides were enmeshed in a furious debate over the propriety of drawing any connection between the desperate act of a deranged man and "insecurity," a central theme of the campaign. Then that deranged man, Richard Durn, managed to commit suicide while in police custody, and the focus shifted again. How could government be so dysfunctional as to allow the avowedly homicidal and suicidal Durn to own and use guns and then make his dramatic exit?
You want more examples to show that this is not peculiarly or even especially American? See here.
FYI
ping for later read.
Interesting link on criminal mass murderers from Clayton’s site. http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/murder1.html
Good point.
N.H. and Switzerland are overwhelmingly White; N.O. is not. Ethnicity is a far better predictor of gun violence than rates of gun ownership.
New Orleans’ problem is that it is a lawless h*llhole and has been so for a long time.
Not so sure about ethnicity per se. What we do have (imo) is a drug prohibition which results in rampant crime in our inner cities, as drug selling gangs (of various races) fight over turf. We either legalize it or get the police to operate in ways we are very uncomfortable with to suppress the trade.
European hypocrits.
Hutu’s and the Tutsis.
I was in a coffee shop one time, and there was an older gentleman with a thick German accent at another table. He was reading in the paper about the Elian Gonzalez matter, which was current at the time. He was proclaiming loudly to anyone within earshot that this proved how “arrogant” Americans are. Imagine, a German calling Americans arrogant.
And I suppose Hitler proves all Germans psychopathic killers?
Managed and populated almost exclusively by bedwetting Liberals.....
Plus, the "uropean" knife laws don't work either. There's been a few mass murders there by knife recently...not to mention soccer hooligans...
5.56mm
Prohibition is counter productive, agreed, and exacerbates the problem.
And there’s always the number of World Wars fought on their territory. Europe-2, USA-0.
Bump!
Many of said politicians have ties to, shall we say, “families” (e.g. those of the organised crime variety) and much of the police force is on the take.
It was even more galling coming from a Pepsi vice president who happened to be a female Indian immigrant. Is there anything more annoying than being lectured by an Indian immigrant about not using a "u" when spelling "color" or how to pronounce "bananna"? How long are the lines outside the Indian embassy of 'Mericans applying for Green Cards to work in India?
“almost every male in the Granite State has a firearm.”
I know one who doesn’t, but that is only because he is at college, where he is safe.
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