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New York, 9:55 AM
Fri Dec 4
53 posts in the last 24 hours
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05/10/09
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05/09/09
And I don't find the tone of this post to be blame-y or excessively snarky or even notably irreverent. Instead it just highlights how some of the fairly mundane details of this story managed to take on a sadly tragic importance.
Similarly, I'm pretty sure that some commenters' attempts to psychoanalyze the perpetrator are hopelessly premature...but I still find those interesting too, especially SarahHeartburn's comments about the very first impressions that students sometimes make.
In short, I see a lot of thought-provoking observations in this post and its attendant comments, and it seems unhelpful and obfuscatory to complain instead about what's not there. (Except maybe the failure to blur out the instructors' identifying info -- that seems worth considering.) I wonder if people aren't just taking their free-floating sadness and anger at this story and aiming it at the nearest target, which Owen happens to be here.
05/09/09
I grew up in a "nicer" suburb of Atlanta, where even the losers had the opportunity to go to college straight away, and it seemed like only the creepy, angry, ambiguously bigoted assholes that were working pretty hard to keep the violence just below the surface chose the military instead. There were a couple of exceptions, but this was pretty much the rule.
05/09/09
Further dehumanizing our fellow humans to the point that they are creepy and angry and because you are part of the cool kid contingent they can have no voice?
Any psych docs out there want to explain to THIS douchebag how dehumanizing and disgustingly degrading their fellow human beings may result in isolating normal people with such "loser" language and treatment that may result in such antisocial behavior.
Yes, I am calling you out psssshwhatever. You are the loser for thinking that any human being is a loser merely because you decided it to be so.
See, I like gawker because they call out losers for what they do. You just simply decided that the people who you didn't like in high school were losers because they didn't like you.
Sublimation is a bitch. I hope you do not ever hold a handgun, because you are steps away from being a shooter.
That is all.
05/09/09
I wasn't a cool kid. I was on the debate team and played the viola. I listened to angry music. I didn't go on an absurd number of dates. We're not all special and amazing and unique snowflakes. Admitting that isn't denigrating anyone.
And the kids I'm talking about? Were losers. As was this guy. Let go of high school, dude. Your life will be happier.
05/09/09
Your ignorance knows no bounds. You seem pretty creepy, angry, and ambiguously bigoted to me.
Next time you go to the polls, write a message to Gawker or watch MSNBC, you can thank the efforts of millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines over 200 years who made that possible.
Asshole.
05/09/09
Got a naked pic? You might still get to do it with a ROTC kid if you're cute.
05/09/09
I'm talking SPECIFICALLY about kids with a fair amount of privilege that, instead of going forward with that, found the military as a way to engage their violent tendencies. A lot of them were already violent, in fits and starts, in high school. Talk to anyone in the any branch of the military, and they know who these people are, a lot of them stick out there, too. I don't think it's going out on a limb to think that these people exist, or that this guy sounds like one of them.
Face facts: the higher you go on the socioeconomic ladder, the less likely a young person is to join the military in this day and age. This guy had a private school education in a city with lots of opportunities. He's not the average serviceman, and I wasn't talking about the average serviceman.
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Until they fuck up.
Guess you have low self-esteem.
When you go ballistic, please don't shoot me.
05/09/09
Your smart argument has turned into name-calling. I understand what you're doing with the, "I called it. Shooter. Everyone fucking run for your lives!!!!" But there are better ways to go about it. You wanted a reaction and you got it. Shut up High School.
05/09/09
"Well if everyone in the bookstore had been armed, like our Forefathers had intended, they could have shot him before he fired all seven shots."
douchebags.
05/09/09
See stalkers feel entitled to what they want. Entitled. Where have we heard this concept before?
05/09/09
Fuck all of your "personal responsibility" and "entitlement" bullshit. Gun owners need to take some responsibility themselves and realize that laughably easy access to weaponry helps to enable these types of incidents. Period. Want more "responsibility"? Enact stricter handgun restrictions and pay a little more attention to the actual amendment to the Constitution that you keep referencing. Yes, the amendment guarantees that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. But there's a whole other contextual statement there: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State....
The Constitution doesn't grant that any jackass has the right to own a semi-automatic assault weapon -- or a single handgun, for that matter -- just because they fucking feel like it.
05/09/09
You rush to mental illness, so you can live a happy life thinking that bad parenting doesn't exist or can be cured by drugging people into a stupor.
He had a legal gun. He would have passed a background check. So stop deluding yourself.
No, you need to take responsibility for your ostrich in the sand approach to life as if Governor Blagoyovic(whatevs) acted out his insane corruption fantasies in a land controlled by the Democratic Party where there were no laws against it.
Yes I want more personal responsibility. Where we ALL take responsibility not to shoot people because of mistakes we made. What is so bad about that?
I knew a guy who was arrested for trying to buy 3,000 handguns off an ATF undercover agent. I worked with him for a bit. His father was friends with my father. He was a Local 282 Teamster official in New York City. He went to jail, and later his Dad did too. They were Democrats who believed in gun control. Why? Pushed the prices higher on the illegal guns he was trying to procure.
Don't get all high and mighty with me.
He was no jackass. He was smart. He was a party loving Democrat.
I don't speak from an ill-informed history my friend. Run Rahm Emanuel's party line with someone else my friend.
I speak from experience.
And I'm more insidery and meta than you could ever understand.
05/09/09
Yes, he would have passed a background check. That was the whole fucking point of my comment. If this man, or the VA Tech shooter, or the guy who took an Amish school hostage can pass a background check, then maybe the background checks we have aren't particularly effective, are they?
It's all about personal responsibility until you have to actually take some, huh? The NRA's approach on gun control has, without exception, been "Guns don't kill people, people kill people", which is partially correct. However, guns make it a hell of a lot easier for people to kill people. In context, it would have been much more difficult for this particular individual to murder a completely innocent person without a handgun.
"I knew a guy who was arrested for trying to buy 3,000 handguns off an ATF undercover agent."
What does this mean? I don't care that you "knew a guy" who did anything. As is all of your blather about Rahm Emmanuel, Rod Blagojevich (tip: Google is fucking great for learning how to spell something you're unsure of), or how "insidery" or "meta" you are. That's all irrelevant to the point, and doesn't really have any bearing on this particular discussion (except that, in my mind, discrediting you further since you can't stay on fucking topic).
05/09/09
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05/09/09
Good luck with that whole gun control thing, because the millions of Americans who own guns certainly are not going to turn them in for any reason, and anyone who tries to force them is likely to end up very dead shortly thereafter.
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Your argument reminds me of all the people who suggest we castrate rapists. That wouldn't have done much for my friend who was raped with a beer bottle. I'm no fan of guns, but I don't understand the knee-jerk "gun control" cry that gets uttered every time this happens. No matter how hard you try to control this thing you fear, you're not going to stop such things.
05/09/09
[caselaw.lp.findlaw.com]
But far from it bolstering your case, it illustrates how idiotically easy it is for people to purchase a multitude of guns through "legitimate" means and then turn around, file off the serial #'s and then illegally reselling them. If anything this proves how loopholes should be closed all across the country to crack down on "straw purchase" practices and make the process of purchasing a firearm more stringent so that only legitimate users are the ultimate recipient of the guns they purchase and they're not reselling them on the black market, which is where most guns used in street crimes originate from. After all, if there's a criminal background check to stop crooks from purchasing guns, then how in the hell are they all getting their hand on them?
05/09/09
[edition.cnn.com]
05/09/09
Thanks!
05/09/09
05/09/09
And... do what, exactly? Ban being a "loser"? Discriminate people who are socially awkward? The outward signs of the kinds of dysfunction that you're talking about are shared by an awful lot of people who are not violent, are not misogynists, are not racist or anti-semitic. Whenever something like this happens, people begin to agitate towards "doing something" about the problem. The effect of that something is merely to further stigmatize people who already face marginalization, almost without exception. And it never actually prevents anything at all. It just makes it a little shittier for the people who have to live as permanent outcasts.
There are people in every human society who are simply predatory and murderous, there's no reliable way to divide them from the hordes of men who are just lonely and unpopular and sad until after the fact, and there is no preventing the tragic but statistically tiny threat of the lone crazed murderer. As much as I wish it wasn't the case, there is no preventing this kind of violence, without being able to make wholesale changes in human nature.
05/09/09
And among the people who need guns to get by, hunt, protect themselves because they live in isolated tiny towns with no constabulary: almost all of these people are for gun control. How does a creep like that get a gun?
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