A terrible, terrible tragedy.

[Occhidiangela]

Having attended this dance a few times before, I had intended to sit this one out. ;)

But like most of us, you just could not resist. :lol: You are in good company, Shadow.

"Hi, I am Occhi, and I'm a postaholic." :P

And, FWIW, eppie - this is a topic that goes nowhere. It is a deeply embedded American cultural imperative to feel that they must retain the right to own guns. And those Americans that might agree that gun control is a worthy objective will get drowned out in this forum by certain frequent posters. ;)

We already have gun control, Shadow. There are volumes of laws regulating firearms, and we have a sector of the DOJ called the ATF who enforce those laws at the federal level (with mixed success) as well as local laws and law enforcement.

What is being pursued is gun confiscation. (Or more accurately, certain kind of gun confiscation.) My sister agrees with a hand gun ban. I don't, but I understand where she is coming from.

As to the penchant for some to leap on a particular rhetorical bandwagon over firearms and citizens, I'll ask when the last time was that I posted demanding that Dutch people stop wearing wooden shoes, or keeping windmills turning, or building dikes? When's the last time I criticized Dutchmen for doing something fundamentally Dutch? Is it fundamentally Dutch to piss and moan about Americans? Not among the Dutch I worked with, so it appears that only a rarified strain of Dutchman succumbs to this disease.

Oddly enough, a quid pro quo seems not to hold, so it is an assumed "weapons free" for Eurotrash to wax poetic on perceptions of imperfections in American ____________ (Fill in the blank with whinge du jour. ) You'll excuse me if I don't put up with that crap. Or you won't, your call.

Check the murder stats, month by month, in the Greater Los Angeles Area. By the way, this is only the known and reported murders, from the LAPD.

Year to date, in 2007, there are 102 homicides. In the three week period 3/18 to 4/14 (four weeks) there were 35 homicides.

Let's look in Rampart Division, where a friend of mine works as a cop. 7 in 2005 and 10 in 2006.

Blacksburg/Virginia Tech, is, by and large, not that kind of place. This is a spike, which any statistician will be able to point out to you as an outlier. Let's look at Blacksburg's homicide rate for the past 10 years or so.

Notice anything? Two homicides in the last ten years. So, if one is to analyze this event, one must confine one's self to the influences on the young man at hand, not on some systemic flaw. The fallacious presumption of a systemic flaw based on tools seems to me not just misguided, but negligently so. What is at hand is a behavioral matter. This young man was in a toxic environment, emotionally and mentally, and in his case, he was unprepared or unable to deal with the toxin. More on that as more detail about this sick bastidge comes to light. It may be almost normal behavior to kill one or two people with whom one is angry, but it is a whole different matter to act out on an impulse to "kill them all." (No, Jack Thompson is not right.)

This event is a spike, not a trend. As W. Edwards Deming suggested, chasing spikes is no way to establish a viable error band in a process control. Chasing spikes is a form of tampering that tends to destabalizes and hurt a system, or create new errors and flaws.

Do you, or any other thinker, care to present a way to a priori detect and prevent a murder, let alone a shooting spree? The FBI would love to hear it, and so would INTERPOL, I suspect, and Scotland Yard. The RCMP might just pay you handsomely for it.

Is the way ahead to install a Minority Report style protocol? The first psychic who can actually perform that role needs to do two things.

1. Show up for work.

2. Get to work.

Until then, I am unwilling to curtail an essential freedom for the payoff of the illusion of security.

There is no security.

Occhi