Bummer! I'll start the thread but the facts are not in yet. http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2014/06/shooting-on-seattle-pacific-campus-2-victims-reported/ There was a plan in place that they had drilled on. It will be interesting to see if it mattered.
One dead. It's a shame too because the hospital they took the guy to is one of the best trauma hospitals in the country. http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2014/06/shooting-on-seattle-pacific-campus-2-victims-reported/ The good news, the planning for a shooter prevented deaths. A text went out for a school lockdown within minutes of the shooting and:
Why not, find out the problem and use it to add it to the repertoire of profiles so we can stop the next one before he shoots.
It's sad that stuff like this keeps happening. It's gotten to the point where I'm no longer as shocked as I should be. And that's never a good sign.
I just don't believe any sort of profiling is going to be able to predict the next shooter. You have a better chance of making the act more difficult.
^ I agree with Garball. It's really hard to predict when these things will happen. If the shooter is careful enough, there's really not much information you can use to stop him/her.
@Garball and @thirdwind, you should take a look at the FBI school shooter report I cited in the last shooter thread. The tools are there, people aren't using them.
Predicting human behavior is very hard. It doesn't matter how much data or tools you have; if someone with access to guns decides to go crazy, there's little you can do to prevent it from happening. In fact, here's the abstract from “Predicting the Risk of Future Dangerousness” (Phillipps, Robert T.M. Virtual Mentor. June 2012, Volume 14, Number 6: 472-476):
Hindsight is 20/20. Some of the most recent serial killers showed less than half of the quoted behaviors of being sociopaths and I can only assume (because we don't fingerprint normals) that many people have tested higher than Dahmer on that scale and never killed anybody. Isn't there a Tom Cruise movie about thought police and arresting people on possible intent?
OK, I have to state the obvious because I just can't let it go unstated: The saddest part about the story is that people. are. dead.
Question for those old enough to remember? Did this sort of shit happen as requently back in ths 60s, 70s and 80s? It seems like ever since Columbine there has been pretty regular outbursts of these shootings.
I perceive the increased frequency and the near-universal precautions as starting with Columbine, yes. When I went to high school in the 1980s, there was no apparent concern about that sort of incident, and I don't actually recall hearing about any such incidents. But "perceive" and "apparent" are of course not definitive answers. Thinking about this, I remembered the phrase "clock tower", which led me to the University of Texas incident in 1966, which led me to a "list of rampage killers" on Wikipedia. It does appear that they've been happening for a while.
Yup, The Minority Report. But they have some kind of clairvoyants in the movie, it's not about profiling criminals I think.
These cases seem to be piling up recently. First the gunman in Canada, now this. I wonder whether that guy from Santa Barbara has kicked off a wave of frustrated young guys going on shooting sprees. Mad world. I am certainly no fan of gun nuts and my gut reaction is to side with your position, but there is a fact we have to face: at the end of the day, banning guns will just keep law-abiding citizens from defending themselves when in need, whereas criminals and sickos will always find their ways to acquire them illegaly. You can't expect someone planning to shoot his classmates to care much for the law.
All of them, or at least a sufficient number that people who don't understand/appreciate the U.S. Constitution would form a majority of the electorate.
Dunno about that, for example if there is a guy merrily shooting away, and say five law-abiding citizens pointing their guns at him. These people are people like you and me, (presumably), they are as likely to injure other bystanders as the criminal. And here in India, where mobs routinely beat suspect thieves and blasphemers to death, I can only imagine how much worse the situation would be if everyone had free access to guns. Maybe not but if you are planning to go on a rampage in your school then your job is made that much more difficult if all you have is a knife or a mace, instead of you know, going to the friendly neighbourhood gun store and acquiring a weapon of defense..
It always saddens me to see this view so blithely accepted, when the availability of guns hasn't done anything to help the "law-abiding citizens" in any of these shootings. Yet the fact that there is always a spike in the purchase of firearms after one of these incidents shows that this myth is widely accepted. It's one of the reasons that definitive action will never be taken. I mean, if we couldn't get mandatory background checks after 20 schoolchildren got slaughtered, when 90% of the population favored them, you can forget anything more substantive. One guy tries to smuggle an explosive onto an airliner, and we all have to take off our shoes. Shooting after shooting after shooting, and we can't even get background checks. @GingerCoffee - I share your frustration. But the notion of prior restraint writ large, even if narrowly conceived, carries implications that drive to the very heart of any notion of personal freedom.
@pirate1802 @EdFromNY Excuse me if I haven't made my point clear. I'm not talking about making guns available, I say that every responsible person should be required by law to carry a gun. It's precisely people like you, people that would never think about owning firearms or even reject it, that should be armed. If the good guys are unable to fight back, the bad guys win. It's that simple. Background checks will be of little help, many shooters were absolutely inconspicous before they carried out their deeds.
I don't believe that more guns is the solution, but it cannot be denied that guns are part of our world culture whether you disagree with them or not. From the atlatl and Chinese rockets to prison made zip guns and the M134 7.62 mm minigun, man has found ways to reach out and kill his fellow man further and faster. Insert @Lewdog 's dead horse emoticon, outlawing guns does not affect outlaws; that is why their actions are considered illegal.
