Shooting at Sandy Hook. Many dead.

[Cheshire Cat]

A beautiful and gracious man speaks to the loss of his little girl.  I have yet to find the full video of this lovely man so that you can yourselves see and hear the truth of his words and the gentleness of his spirit and that of his beloved child.  I hope you will look for it and take the time to watch.  You will be moved and inspired.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/connecticut-school-shooting-dads-emotional-1492478

[Cheshire Cat]

The shooters family is deeply grieved by this tragedy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/15/peter-lanza-statement-adam-lanza_n_2308744.html

[Coolyfett]

Well well well would you look at this thread & all the know it alls in it lol. You guys act all hurt & sad about this, ttry to figure out who to blame, what to blame, how to blame. Change is to blame. This is not the first time & will NOT be the last people. Get used to it. Oh yes people get used to it. Some of you think your so called progressive views will help society, some of you people think your self rightous agenda to give progress to one set of people does not take away from another set of people. No one has acknowledge the fact to all these killing dudes, KILLING IS FUN, they get a rush or a high from it. Its a power driven ego driven feeling to have the last word. Something many of the idiots that post here have that same addiction to, having the last word. People have a need to have the last word and or able to do whatever it takes to have the last word. I'm not saddened by this news at all. Children were killed because it was a reaction to a reaction to an original action. So when do people stop? Keep getting that last word in people......

[ronchamblin]

Of course we are all saddened by this tragedy, but no matter what we all say about this thing, there will always be mentally unbalanced individuals (nuts) around who, by some mental aberration, are able to perform mass killings.   

That is why the only thing anyone can do is get the legislators and the gun nuts off their asses and free of their delusions, and produce good legislation so that the guns are not so easily obtained, so that buybacks become the norm, so the those owning guns, such as the mother who was killed by her own son, will lock up and control access to their guns, and so that the media does not promote the “killing” pastime. 

To have millions of guns around the environments, easily available to most anyone, is proving to be a major enabling factor to allow the mentally deranged to kill at will.  All guns cannot be eliminated.  But logic says that a gross reduction in guns, and greater control of existing guns, will go a long way in reducing the ability of mentally deficient individuals to mass kill. 

For example, if the recent killer’s mother had not made available her guns to this obviously mentally warped youngster, he probably would not have been able to kill with such efficiency.  And perhaps the absence of readily available guns to him would have provided more time for possible emergence to a normal mental state, and thus to a normal and productive life.

The Texas Republican, Gohmert, who recently suggested that more guns should be out in the wild so that everyone can carry a gun to protect themselves and others, is a suggestion that would only increase the problem.  It seems to me that the more guns in the environment, then there is greater ease to obtain them by anyone who desires to do so, either by theft, borrowing, or purchasing.  Total elimination cannot be achieved.  But to have so many guns in the population is foolish, and can be targeted as a major contributor to the increase in mass killings over recent decades.  Once again, our elected officials, as shown by this Texas Republican, show their capacity to think to levels approaching idiocy.  If things were left to idiots like this Texas type, they would recommend sprinkling guns all over the landscape so that anyone could grab one immediately, and at any time, to defend themselves.   

[JeffreyS]

I do not plan on getting used to it.

[Tacachale]

There was another shooting spree in Portland last week.

http://m.thenational.ae/news/world/americas/us-gun-debate-drags-on-as-resignation-sets-in

[ben says]

The shooters family is deeply grieved by this tragedy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/15/peter-lanza-statement-adam-lanza_n_2308744.html

Lanza was a victim, too.

[ronchamblin]

Yutawginboutadam orisma ben?

_...   .    _.  ?

[spuwho]

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/december-web-only/media-and-massacre.html?paging=off

The voices followed me through the airport yesterday afternoon, their insistent tones blaring as loudly as the glaring screens that have colonized nearly every public place in American life. They chased after me offering insider knowledge: "The autopsy reports on Adam Lanza and his mother are providing some gruesome new details … "
I scurried out of sight and hearing of whatever gruesomeness was about to be unveiled. They quoted press releases from lobbying groups: "… prepared to make meaningful contributions to make sure this never happens again.…" I pondered how many PR professionals had polished that artfully vague phraseâ€""meaningful contributions"â€"and whether they truly believed that such a travesty would never happen again, no matter how meaningful their client's contributions.
No, it will happen again.
I did not actually curse in the televisions' direction until I heard them serve up the most heinous possible version of disaster theologyâ€"this, offered in all strident sincerity to best explain the fates of the victims to one's own children: "God needed some wonderful new angels. He asked for them, and he got them."
Not a single person in that airport was assisted in any way by these ghastly disclosures, pat press releases, and offensive atheologies. But this is the ironclad logic of continuous broadcasting: Broadcasting must be continuous. Someone must always be saying something even when there is nothing new to say. The most basic lesson for those who would comfort the victims of tragedy is that the first, best response to tragedy is presence, and often the best form of presence is silence. The grieving, the sick, and the dying sometimes need our words, sometimes need our touch, but almost always they need our presence. And there is no contradiction between presence and silence in the embodied life for which we were all created, to which we are all called, into which God himself entered. Bodies can be present without a word. That is the beauty of bodies.
Mediated communication, on the other handâ€"any form of communication that places something "in the middle," between personsâ€"cannot abide silence. Radio hates dead air. Television hates sound without movement. As Garrison Keillor discovered when his perfect radio show became a mediocre television show, the camera cannot sit still. An audience of a thousand can sit utterly quiet as a single person plays an acoustic guitar, Keillor said ruefully, but the camera cannotâ€"it must swoop and pan and zoom. Media cannot rest.
And while there was a time when you could count the number of broadcasters on one hand, we are all broadcasters now. A tragedy like the Newtown massacre becomes not just a media event, but also a social media event. As the journalist Alex Massie pointed out in his trenchant essay this week, silence is not an option in social media. Not to tweet or post or blog is not to be silently presentâ€"it is to be mutely absent. He suggested, fully aware of the futility of his suggestion, that perhaps we all could have simply posted one-word tweets on Friday, using the hashtag #silent, and left it at that. But we didn't, nor are we likely to during the next tragedy. #silent will never be a trending topic on Twitter.
All that any of us who do not live in Newtown, Connecticut, truly needed to knowâ€"possibly more than we needed to knowâ€"appeared in a 12-word news alert on my phone Friday afternoon. Almost everything else, I believe, was a distraction from the only thing that we who are not first responders, pastors, or parents in that community needed to do at that moment: to pray, which is to say, to put ourselves at the mercy of God and hold those who harmed and those who were harmed before the mercy of God.
Instead, we tweeted, we compulsively reloaded the live feed on The New York Times, we opened multiple browser windows, we turned on NPR. (At least that is what I did for a while that grim afternoon, in spite of myself.) All this accomplished, for the great majority of us, was to substitute information for contemplation, the illusion of engagement for prayer. I did not really need to know more about what happened behind those 12 awful words in order to pray. I needed to contemplate just those words, just those most brutal facts.
The quest for more talk, more images, more footage (none of which would ever satisfy our lust for understanding, no matter how graphic police and producers allowed them to become) is rarely about the quest to more deeply contemplate the brokenness of the worldâ€"it is the quest to not contemplate it. Because if we were simply to contemplate those 12 words, we would be brought all too soon to the terrifying precipice of our own inadequacy, our own vulnerability and dependence, and even (so the saints testify) our own culpability, our nearness in spirit to even the most deranged and destructive.
Mind you, silence is not the only kind of presence Christians have to offer a world gone wrong and gone mad. We also bear witness to the presence of the Word made flesh, the Word who entered into this story, who did not send a message but became a baby. And that Word does indeed prompt our wordsâ€"words not of endless rehearsal of "details" or promises we cannot keep, but words of truth, hope, and life. This is the only way I know how to participate in our mediated, self-medicated world of too much information and too little contemplation: to keep silent until we have something true to say.
Terrible things happen every day. One day, one will probably happen to you, if it has not already happened. Surely it is our suppressed awareness that tragedy is coming our way, too, our unwillingness to be silent and contemplate our own need for mercy, that turns compassion into compulsion, turns our God-breathed impulse to stop for the wounded traveler into the gawking slowdown on the other side of the highway.
So for those of us who are spared their direct blows, this terrible thing, and the next terrible thing to come, are opportunities to learn what it will be almost too late to learn when death is at our own door. How to be silent, how to be truly present, and then how to speak. How to hear what the true mediators always say when they bring real news to a broken world: "Be not afraid."

[BridgeTroll]

I seldom agree with Charles Schumer... but this time I am on the same page... I bet most of you are too.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-schumer-after-newtown-pursue-a-middle-ground-on-gun-limits/2012/12/19/69e36a98-4964-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html

A middle ground on gun limits

By Charles E. Schumer,

Published: December 19

Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat, represents New York in the Senate.

Since the massacre at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, many are wondering whether this tragedy might finally provoke action on guns.

The answer is, it could. The reason may surprise gun-control activists.

A post-Newtown examination of our gun laws would be the country’s first such effort since the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller, which struck down the District’s handgun ban and affirmed an individual’s constitutional right to bear arms. The case, decided by the court’s conservative bloc, was originally viewed as a setback for advocates of gun safety. But embracing the ruling could actually create a new paradigm for gun control.

The gun debate of the past two decades has devolved into a permanent tug-of-war between the National Rifle Association (NRA) and advocates of gun safety. One side has viewed the Second Amendment as absolute; the other has tried to pretend that it doesn’t exist. The result is a failure to find any consensus, even as one mass shooting after another underscores the need for sensible reform.

Heller told the two sides that they were each only half-right: The right to bear arms is constitutionally guaranteed, but reasonable limitations are allowed.

The first part is something many gun-control advocates did not wish to hear, but it was a needed dose of reality. Before Heller, the goal of some gun-control activists was an outright ban on handguns. Heller removes that possibility for good. Progressives should move on and work within the ruling. This means no longer harboring ideas of a future liberal majority on the court someday overturning Heller. It also means that states and localities should abide by the spirit of the ruling, not just its letter, and not seek to impose undue burdens upon law-abiding citizens seeking to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

The truth is, it was bad strategy to ever deny an individual right to bear arms and, similarly, the special place guns hold in our culture. That mentality alienated potential allies in the ideological middle of the gun debate â€" something I learned three years ago when my friend Ben Nelson invited me to Nebraska for my first hunting trip. I returned with true respect for how, in many parts of America, gun ownership is not just a constitutional right but a way of life. It has the same meaning in Nebraska that playground basketball did for me in my Brooklyn neighborhood. Heller understands that reality.

In the current state of play, moderate gun owners have become convinced by the NRA and other, even more radical gun organizations such as Gun Owners of America that the goal of all gun-safety advocates is to take away their guns. These owners view even the most reasonable gun-safety proposals with suspicion, fearing a slippery slope to a ban on firearms. This paranoia is what gives the gun lobby its power.

It wasn’t always this way. After the assassinations of leaders like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s, the nation enacted sweeping gun-safety laws â€" and the NRA did not stand in the way.

The NRA was less political in that era and more focused on providing practical assistance to its members, much like AAA does today for automobile owners. But in the 1980s, the group became more militant. Part of this was driven by new leadership, which sought to expand the group’s membership rolls and collect more dues.

But this radicalization was also abetted by those who really were seeking an outright ban on guns.

Now that Heller has ruled out the possibility of anyone ever taking away their weapons, gun owners should be more open to some reasonable limitations. No individual right is absolute, after all. While the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, no one has a right to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, nor to traffic in child pornography. Likewise, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms also comes with limits.

We need to refine those limits in the wake of what happened in Newtown.

The guns issue will remain thorny, but Heller points the way toward a possible compromise, under a new paradigm. All of us â€" especially progressives â€" should embrace it.

[If_I_Loved_you]

How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown? http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html?wpisrc=most_viral

[MusicMan]

Not having seen the quote from Bill above until now, all I can say is :

"Bill, you have shit for brains."