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Mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut
- KenCochrane 14y agoLooks like it is even more now.. This link reports 27 people dead, including 18 children: http://www.pressherald.com/news/Gunman-killed-in-Conn-school-shooting-.html?cmpid=breaking-news-box http://www.pressherald.com/news/Gunman-killed-in-Conn-school... so sad
- washedup 14y agoA father of one of the children's... how does our society produce individuals like this? I know there are probably dozens of answers... edit: just to be clear, I am not a father of one of the children. I was told the shooter was a father of one of the children at the school. Not sure if that is correct.
- debacle 14y agoVery many people suffer from undiagnosed mental illness. An even larger amount just go way off the deep end.
- gnu8 14y agoMany who suffer diagnosed mental illnesses roam the streets because we don't care for them. Our mental healthcare system is that of a third world country.
- msutherl 14y agoIn addition to the problem of wide-spread untreated mental illness, many public schools are much like prisons for kids who have trouble adapting to social norms, both in that they do not grant basic human rights and that inter-student relations are barbaric. I don't know whether the shooter was a student or not, but based on my experience, it is not difficult for me to imagine somebody with less self control acting out in a violent manner. Sorry for your loss.
- washedup 14y agoSorry, my comment was poorly worded. I have no relation to the children. However, I was told that the shooter was a father of one of the children of the school, but that has not been confirmed.
- untog 14y agoI can't wait until the part where we all don't talk about gun control and carry on as usual. Sigh. EDIT: I see my post is being downvoted. I know that it may come across as insensitive to immediately leap to the gun control debate, but frankly I'm more angry than upset by this news. How many times does it have to happen? We have a good 48 hours of emotional outpouring and then everyone forgets it ever happened.
- trentlott 14y agoIf we gave our children and teachers handguns the problem would solve itself!
- dmm 14y agoWhat do you mean? That's usually the first thing people talk about when they hear about a shooting. There is always lots of talk. However, it's a divisive issue that many people feel strongly about and it's a constitutional issue.
- untog 14y agoWell, I mean talk seriously. Even in the presidential debates, both candidates ran away from a serious discussion on the topic. I know it's divisive, I know people feel strongly about it, but it appears that no politician is interested in starting a real debate.
- bcoates 14y agoPoliticians talking about a topic is not the cause of political change, it's the result of one. There is currently a public consensus against your preferred policy position to the extent that it's disadvantageous for politicians to promote themselves with it. Changing that consensus won't lead to victory on its own, but it's a necessary precondition.
- untog 14y agoI think you have too much faith in the political process. The gun lobby ensures that there is no debate on gun control.
- xauronx 14y agoThis isn't hacker news. I'm going to see this depressing, heart wrenching news in a hundred other places... let me have my one safe technology news site :(
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- marknutter 14y agoTrue, but it's a community whose opinion I trust more than most others, so it's often enlightening to read comments about non-hacker news posts once and a while.
- driverdan 14y agoI agree completely. Everyone should flag this and it should be removed.
- ColinWright 14y agoFrom http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Yes, this is important, yes, it's newsworthy. No, it's not "Hacker News". It's all over the news, and there's nothing specific about hacking, or start-ups. It's not even of "deep interest" in any real sense. It's tragedy, pure and simple, and then it becomes politics.
- sixQuarks 14y agoyour quote just negated your argument. Read it carefully, it says: "MOST stories about..." Most is the important word here. This shooting is unprecedented in the US as far as the number of children killed, and will mark a point in history. Considering I don't even watch the news or go to any news web sites, if I hadn't heard about it on HN, I probably wouldn't have even known about it to be honest.
- btilly 14y agoThis shooting is unprecedented in the US as far as the number of children killed... For a shooting, yes. But the 1995 Oklahoma bombing included 19 young children among the 168 killed, including all 17 children in a daycare in the building. This level of death is, sadly, not unprecedented. And I guarantee you that in 20 years it will be even less remembered by the general public than Timothy McVeigh is.
- scarmig 14y agoFlag it, don't post in comments complaining about it. Then again, your comment reminded me to flag it...
- ColinWright 14y agoI have flagged it, and I'm not so much complaining, as reminding people that this isn't a generic social site, it's intended to be specific to hackers. As such, anything that's not specifically of interest to hackers as opposed to general members of the public, does not belong here. Yes, this is of relevance to the vast majority of people in the USA, and it should be of major concern, and that's exactly why it doesn't belong here. Sometimes people need to be reminded of that. Well, that's my point of view.
- sidcool 14y agoAnd there should be no gun control....Bollocks.
- bstewartny 14y agoGun control cant and wont solve these problems. These are societal problems. Anyone insane and evil enough to kill children would get guns on the black market or use some other weapon such as a bomb. Schools need to able to have armed guards and better locked/secured entries IMO.
- lostlogin 14y agoThen why is this problem more prevalent in America? I know this sounds like baiting, it isn't. Surely gun laws come into it, even if they aren't the root cause (they aren't IMHO).
- bstewartny 14y agoI don't know. Is it in fact more prevalent in America? I don't know just asking. It is a societal and cultural problem IMO.
- short_circut 14y agoI can't say for sure but I suspect the problem in the US stems from a number of factors not at all related to gun laws. Just a short list (for overall gun violence): 1) The way our prison system works. It makes people worse. It makes them better criminals. It removes much of their opportunity to get better (try getting a decent job as a felon). It creates desperation. 2) the way we treat mental illness. By that I mean it is demonized and ignored. Does health insurance even cover mental health exams or treatments? Probably not basic coverage 3) Disparity of wealth. In the town I live in there are people living in absolute poverty and people driving around in lamborghinis and million dollar churches. The cost of that car could feed 50 people for a year. In thiscase there is no telling what the root cause was yet. I suspect a case of someone just losing it.
- josephlord 14y ago
- malkia 14y agoHorrible news. Also in China someone this morning stabbed 22 children at elementary school - wtf... http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2012/12/14/man-stabs-22-children-at-chinese-elementary-school/ http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2012/12/14/man-stabs-...
- sixQuarks 14y agoWhat did he stab the kids with, a spoon? None of them had life-threatening injuries.
- ipince 14y agoUnless you get stabbed on the neck or get your stomach punctured, I think the chances of surviving a stabbing are high.
- bigdubs 14y agoThis is an incredibly touchy subject, but something that I always come back to when tragedies like this happen is that if a disturbed person wants to hurt people, guns only make it easier. What does this mean in practice? It can both be an argument for gun control and an argument against. I have no idea where this really comes down. I just know that there are disturbed people in the world, and we need to take a step back and figure out how to prevent them from causing damage in the first place.
- marknutter 14y agoWhen are we going to start talking about knife control in a serious way?
- mattvanhorn 14y agoWhen the mass stabbing has more fatalities than the mass shooting. That no one died in the stabbing attack, makes a pretty good argument for some form of gun control. (Actually, I prefer Chris Rock's idea for bullet control. Make it too expensive to buy enough for mass shootings.)
- 14y ago
- sidcool 14y agoAnd there should be no gun control....Bollocks.
- alexbell 14y agoIt's depressing how we are becoming numb to mass shootings due to their frequency. It seems like a week can't go by without a tragedy like this occurring.
- marknutter 14y agoWe're numb to them like we are all other kinds of deaths. Hurricanes, winter, car accidents, tornadoes, etc. There are ways to die are far more preventable than mass shootings that we should be focusing on.
- dmm 14y ago20,000 children starve to death _every day_.
- samspot 14y agoI'm not numb to this... it is seriously getting to me. I'm pretty appalled at how may people have jumped at the opportunity to get on their soapboxes in this thread.
- grkballer44 14y agoWithin a couple years this exact scenario will play out. A gunmen will talk in a crowded place loaded to the gills. Assault rifles, bullet proof vest, explosives hid around the building. He will pull out his gun and kill the poor unsuspecting first soul. After that initial shot someone with a concealed weapons permit is going to blow his brains out cutting his rampage short ( I truly hope the person who plays the hero is a little old lady packing heat in her purse).
- jacquesm 14y agoNote that these things are pre-meditated and that the people doing this are clever enough to hit soft targets. Little old ladies with guns are typically not present in grade schools, nor would you want them to be because their weapons could be taken away from them and used against others.
- owenjones 14y agoYou sound excited by the prospect. Personally I feel nauseous at your callous description: 'He will pull out his gun and kill the poor unsuspecting first soul. After that initial shot someone with a concealed weapons permit is going to blow his brains out...' I truly hope that maybe we work towards a society where mass shootings aren't a monthly occurrence...
- nollidge 14y agoRight, because everybody with a concealed weapons permit is James Bond with perfect aim and cool nerves. Reality is a little bit messier than your fantasies.
- sukuriant 14y agoThe point was that "he with the gun holds the power" in those situations. And I'm sure the person with the gun feels like that. Make the odds of him having his tables turned on him by respectable law abiding citizens, and suddenly he'll be more afraid to do harm. Ideally. As a side note, she shouldn't shoot for the head anyway, especially if the bullet is going to go propelling out of the man. That's a great way to have unintended collateral damage.
- jacquesm 14y agoThe psychology behind the kind of people that could do a thing like this baffles me completely. Insanity doesn't begin to describe it. Parents should not have to worry about whether or not their children are safe in school. At the same time armed guards at school are not a solution either, then you might as well turn it into a mini prison. What a sad sad day. Even countries with gun control have instances like this (but they're arguably less frequent), and some countries with lots of guns have almost no problems like this at all (Switzerland for instance). Just trying to imagine dropping a grade school kid off at school to find them dead in the afternoon from an insane thing like this I find that I can't do it, it is just too far from what I can still imagine. And I have a pretty rich imagination... This world could be so nice, why does it have to be such a crappy place?
- chimeracoder 14y ago> This world could be so nice, why does it have to be such a crappy place? Nice stuff happens. It just doesn't make (or sell) the news. But that doesn't mean the world isn't nice.
- jacquesm 14y agoNice stuff happens but I find it hard to come up with a single instance that offsets grade schoolers being murdered in cold blood. Stuff like this just makes me want to cry.
- cheeseprocedure 14y agoHow about the millions of children who have been educated for 13+ years in the public school systems and go on to lead fulfilling adult lives?
- pdeuchler 14y agoIn my ever so humble opinion, it's a population issue. When you have a population size of 300 million you're going to get a lot more outliers (crazy people) than if you have a population of 7 million. Statistically, you will also have crazier people.
- jweir 14y agoSomething to be aware of Ruger's 1 Million Gun Challenge http://www.ruger.com/micros/million/about.html http://www.ruger.com/micros/million/about.html
- goostavos 14y agoI fail to understand the point of your comment. Why do we need to be aware of a gun manufacturer wanting to sell guns?
- jweir 14y agoWanting to sell guns is a given. I was surprised(not shocked) to learn of the contest for one manufacturer to sell over a million guns in one year with the goal of increasing funding for lobbyists. 1.2 million guns is a lot of weapons to sell in a year.
- paulhauggis 14y agoA news anchor on CNN had a theory about how as a society, we are becoming less empathetic because of our tendency to have more and more online relationships. Just look at the people on Twitter and even here on HN. You act very differently than you would in real life. I almost wonder if there is something to this and has an effect on some people, which leads to less empathy in real life.
- paulhauggis 14y agoI guess HN really is going down hill. I wasn't trolling at all and genuinely had some thoughts on the topic, and I am downvoted with no comment.
- jwwest 14y agoFirst off, the school shooting is a complete tragedy, there's no two ways about it. It's sickening and frustrating and depressing. I can't imagine what something like this does to a person or how a person is drawn to do something like this. However, our world isn't any different than it was. There's hope in everything. Crazy, murderous people have always existed and will always exist. Life has always had tragedies, even ones bigger than this. As humans, we're designed to look at the most recent thing and go "oh my god, this is the worst thing ever" in order to deal with problems - it's just how we're designed. What I'm getting at is that the world will be here tomorrow, and it's not ending any time soon. There's plenty of hope in this world, we just lack the proper context sometimes: 1) Your children are more at risk dying in a car accident or eating crappy food than a school shooting. 2) You're more likely to die of a lightning strike than a terrorist attack. 3) If we couldn't have guns, he would have used a knife. Be hopeful for the world.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mvleming 14y agoI think we have to be careful when things like this happen. It's god-awful. I can't imagine if I was in third grade and a guy barged in and started shooting up the place. But this makes me think of "You can always find evidence for your beliefs." I could take this story as evidence that the world is such a crappy place, but I don't believe that so I won't. Everything will be okay.
- jwco 14y agohere is a way to combine technology and transparency to make it more difficult for someone to do this: guns owned in America have mandatory geolocation installed. guns lock if geolocation is disabled or hacked, an alert is autosent to local people and authorities with the last known location, and law enforces speedy investigation of the guns whereabouts and reinstallation of the geolocator. i'd like an app that tells me where the nearest guns are to me and some info about who they belong to, i.e. police, citizen, military etc. if a gun is brought near public spaces, schools, theaters, etc., it should tweet, sms, or otherwise alert local police and anyone who would like to know. i'd like to also set my own alerts, such as alert me if a non-police gun is within a few hundred feet of my location, or my kid's location, etc. the constitution says there is a "right of the people to keep and bear arms," but does not use the word "right" to defend privacy.
- JoeCortopassi 14y agoListen, there are two parts to this: 1. The horrible tragedy, and 2. The hopes to prevent this from happening again. If we are going to talk about this, we need to all fall under the assumption that we agree that this is both a very tragic act perpetrated by someone who is obviously disturbed/mentally ill, and that it is all of our desires to do what we can to make sure senseless acts of violence like this never happen again. So where do we go from here? How do we prevent this from happening again? It seems that there are two schools of thought (generalizing obviously): 1. Disarm everyone, and 2. Allow everyone to carry weapons. Regardless of which side you fall in, neither work perfectly unless they are complete (i.e. all weapons are gone thus criminals don't even have access, or everyone is armed and no one has the upper hand). The problem with both absolutes, is a deranged person will always find a means to carry out their ill will, whether that's a gun/knife/driving a car into a crowd. The safest computer is encased in concrete, and buried 6 feet underground. Much in the same way, the safest society would have each of us locked in a room, with no interaction. What we have to figure out is this: How much liberty do we all give up, to limit the devastation of the senseless acts of a few?
- r00fus 14y ago> 1. Disarm everyone, and 2. Allow everyone to carry weapons. Nice strawmen. There are obviously options in the middle, namely, increasing traceability of weapons and ammo and shutting down channels that where weapons are allowed to change hands anonymously. The proliferation of weapons is one thing, but the fact that these tragedies occur and we don't have a way to follow the chain back to the disreputable dealer who sold these armaments - and shut them down - is just non-sensical. The 2nd amendment fundamentalists who don't even want question how these weapons can get in the wrong hands - often use that same strawman you pose above - which is rediculous - many folks support the 2nd amendment yet find the need for further action to prevent these events from happening.
- dmm 14y ago> increasing traceability of weapons and ammo The guns used in shootings are usually legally bought. There are no disreputable dealers here.
- ryusage 14y agoAm I the only one who finds it strange (or even slightly disturbing) that this is essentially an after the fact live-blog of the event? For those connected to this school, I can understand wanting information and not wanting to wait. For anyone else, it just seems like obsessive rubbernecking taken to the extreme.
- mkr-hn 14y agoI recommend against reading the principal's last tweets.
- AlexMuir 14y agoAwful, tragic things happen every day. Some can be prevented and some can't. It's highly unlikely that this is saddest thing to have happened in the world today. There are a certain percentage of people in the world who will kill people for no reason, molest children, order executions and market crystal meth to young mums. This has always been the way, and will always continue to be. Now I'm not belittling it as a tragedy, but we have to accept that some terrible things just happen and cannot be prevented or deterred. They always have, and they will continue to do so. Sometimes there is no lesson to be learned, and we have to accept that what we've seen is a manifestation of human nature, in the same way that lightning is a manifestation of nature itself. Neither are predictable, preventable and both will happen forever.
- btilly 14y agoThis is a tragedy, but why is it on HN? From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html we have: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. That fits this story.
- ColinWright 14y agoI said the same thing here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922380 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922380 PG himself has chimed in to point out the words "most" and "probably". I'm with you, but we seem notto be in accord with the site owner.
- btilly 14y agoIt seemed to me that PG took a neutral stance.
- ColinWright 14y agoFelt a lot more to me that he was saying that the "most" and "probably" made this case an exception.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 14y agoThis may seem tangential, but I swear it's not. We live in a country (US) where growth and progress is measured primarily in GDP. Poverty is measured economically. People's happiness is blithely assumed to be some kind of function of their economic well-being, especially because that can be measured. There are alternative ideas like "Gross National Happiness" that attempt to measure what could arguably be called the end, as opposed the means (economic). This is generally presented as an alternative goal, to raise the "GNH" of a country. And it's certainly a valid one. But what if, even more importantly, it's not the gross "national happiness", but rather its distribution? The perpetrator in this horrible tragedy was clearly horribly unhappy, and almost certainly with severe mental problems. But this isn't a private concern, because in cases like this it becomes a national problem. When are we going to stop concentrating so much on economic progress and GDP, and start considering how our society and institutions provide for people at the bottom rung of the "happiness" ladder? When are we going to move mental health from a "side issue" about "sick people" that "doesn't concern me", to a central national priority? There's so much work to be done, and it's barely even a blip in the conversation.
- marknutter 14y agoYou may be incorrectly assuming that wealth makes people happier.
- the_economist 14y agoI don't think it's a matter of focusing on happiness. Mental illness a medical issue, like cancer and heart disease. We need to develop a cure, and when we do, days like this will be far less common.
- Kilimanjaro 14y agoPlease, if you want to go postal, don't aim at our kids, aim at the politicians. Drain your frustrations with those who destroy our future, not those who will build it.
- pchivers 14y agoHere is an interesting infographic from the National Post: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/28/guns-ownership-around-the-world-graphic/ http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/28/guns-ownership-aroun... "In 2007, the U.S. had the highest gun ownership rate in the world - an average of 88 per 100 people. But the U.S. does not have the worst firearm murder rate - that prize belongs to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. In fact, the U.S. is well down the list with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people. Below is a list of countries with available firearm data from 2007 starting with countries where firearms are most common."
- loup-vaillant 14y agoWhile I don't want to diminish the magnitude of the tragedy described here, I'd like to remind everyone that there are many other causes of untimely death that, while mundane, are much more lethal. Take for instance car crashes, or most diseases. If the goal is to fight untimely death, we should take a hard look at the cold numbers. One will find for instance that smoking scenes in films kill far more people than those shootings. [1] No, it should not happen ever again. However, we should not forget about the other priorities. [1]: Regular exposure to smoking scenes makes children and teenagers far more likely to smoke later on. Smoking makes you far more likely to have cancer and such. And having cancer most likely shorten your lifespan. Despite the 3 layers of indirection, the numbers are so massive that a single smoking scene in a blockbuster is probably more lethal than a fully loaded gun.