It Must Have Been the Guns ...
 

The following is attributed to Paul Harvey. Not sure if he really wrote it or spoke it. Doesn't matter to me but it's just a great piece.

For the life of me, I can�t understand what could have gone wrong in Littleton, Colorado. If only the parents had kept their children away from the guns, we wouldn�t have had such a great tragedy. Yeah, it must have been the guns...

1. It couldn�t have been that our children are being raised in broken homes.

2. It couldn�t have been because our children get to spend an average of 30 seconds per day in meaningful conversation with their parents. After all, we give our children quality time.

3. It couldn�t have been because we treat our children as pets and our pets as children.

4. It couldn�t have been because we place our children in day care centers where they learn their socialization skills among their peers, under the law of the jungle, while employees who have no vested interest in the children look on and make sure no blood is spilled.

5. It couldn�t have been because we allow our children to watch, on the average, seven hours a day of TV filled with glorification of sex and violence that isn�t fit for adult consumption.

6. It couldn�t have been because we allow our children to enter into virtual worlds in which, to win the game, one must kill as many opponents as possible in the most sadistic way possible.

7. It couldn�t have been because we have sterilized and contracepted our families down to sizes so small that the children we do have are so spoiled with material things, they have come to equate receiving material with receiving love.

8. It couldn�t have been because our children, who historically have been seen as blessings from God, are now being viewed either as mistakes created when contraception failed, or inconveniences that we try to raise in our spare time.

9. It couldn�t have been because our nation is the world leader in developing a "culture of death" in which 20 to 30 million babies have been killed by abortions.

10. It couldn�t have been because we give two-year prison sentences to teenagers who kill their newborns.

11. It couldn�t have been because our school systems, by teaching evolution as fact and by handing out condoms as if they were candy, teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.

12. It couldn�t have been because we teach our children that there are no laws of morality that transcend us, that everything is relative, and that actions don�t have consequences. What...the president gets away with it.

Nah, it must have been the guns.

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All valid points....
Just playing devil's advocate....but you gotta admit the body count would have been a lot less if Dylan and Eric were armed with...say.....machetes.:wink: (just making a statement - I am not anti-gun. In fact, I own eight.)

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Wyld,
You have a good point, but how about the flip-side of that record? I have "several" guns in my house. More than 10, less than 100. And none of them have ever been used to kill another human being.

A firearm is just a tool. It's not a weapon until you use it as such. JMO.

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I agree SB.

I argee with you 95%.

The 5% is the semantics part. A firearm is much more of a weapon than it is a tool.

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i wouldn't be too sure of that. i would be willing to bet that if someone went on a rampage through a crowded place like a school with a machette the body count would be pretty high.

the only difference would be the response of the other people being attacked. people tend to run away from gunfire, they would have probably attacked back if they had machettes. ...could do the same thing to a gunman too. a hord of 20 or so students could have overtook Dylan and Eric with no problem and saved alot of lives.

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So who exactly will be teaching the kids to attack any armed intruders they see?

Any takers???

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Kleebold and harris killed a couple of kids... the cowardly police killed the rest.

Every single oe of those cops should be in prision right now for deriliction of duty at the least.

How many killed were killed after the first coupel dozen cops arrived? How many bled out while the cowards waited around outside to ensure the bad guys would off themselves before they came in.

Blame the cops, not the guns.

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Does anyone else find it odd that the article doesn't want to blame guns, but it has no problem blaming TV, movies, music and video games?

It is also appearant that the author has never played "Doom" (the game blamed for Columbine), since there is no points given for killing an opponent in the most sadistic way possible. The game has no points at all -- the closest it comes to points is a screen at the end of each level giving statistics about the number of secrets found, monsters killed, and time used.

Doom didn't make the Columbine killers. The Columbine killers used Doom to live out their fantasies. If it wasn't a video game, it would be something else: perhaps they'd be discussing gruesome accidents, or idolizing news reports about murderers. Its the same with guns: Guns didn't turn them into killers, they used guns as a tool to achieve their sick, twisted goals.

Ironically, the video games blamed for causing so many problems probably reduce criminal acts. Playing video games requires a lot of time, and as everyone knows, a busy teenager is a teenage that is staying out of trouble.

Oh well, just my rambling $.02

/has a strange urge to play Doom again. It really is a good game.

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I heard that the cops actually shot a few of the kids when they went in. Not sure how much truth there is to that, will have to do more research.

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You have got to be kidding me.

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Why not place the blame on all those anti-gun gun laws? Weren't the gun laws designed to prevent such things from happening in the first place? Kind of makes all the anti-gun laws we have look real stupid if you ask me.

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I agree, the cops killed a bunch of kids as well. How was it that one kid was shot with a .223 round while the drugged punks had 9mms?

Either way, blaming the guns only serves an agenda, plain and simple. My cousin was in that shool on that day and lost a friend to those bastards. She was pretty messed up for a while but none of my family blames the guns - that's short sighted. Blame poor parenting, prescription drugs, or the killers themselves, but to blame inanimate objects is rediculous.

Why not blame the bullets, since they actually killed the kids? How about the gunpowder used to propel the lead? How about the bullet manufacturer? How about the books that these kids had access to, maybe that contributed.

A free society is a dangerous one by nature, but it's the society that our forefathers fought for and died trying to construct, it's what makes this and any country great.

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If guns cause crime, all of mine are defective.

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Does that actually say that the "zionists" were to blame for columbine???:musicus:

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You like to stir things up there don't you? My question on school shootings to anti-gun people has been what if teachers (the quiet ones, not the loud mouths) had been allow concealed carry? Or instead of dumping millions into metal detectors, police/security protection we instead invest in training willing teachers self-defense and lethal force?

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Has anyone ever thought of what the damage could have been if either were skilled gunmen?

A former Marine, Charles Whitman, climbed a clock tower in Texas many years ago and killed 15 people and wounded 31.

That's more than both Columbine killers are credited for.

Re: It Must Have Been the Guns ...
 

WHITMAN, CHARLES JOSEPH (1941-1966).

Charles Joseph Whitman, tower sniper, was born in Lake Worth, Florida, on June 24, 1941, the oldest of three sons of Margaret and Charles A. Whitman, Jr. He attended Sacred Heart grade and junior high schools, was an Eagle Scout at twelve, and graduated from St. Ann's High School in West Palm Beach in 1959.
He enlisted in the Marine Corps on July 6, 1959, and was stationed for a year and a half at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
He passed a test to enter officer training, was sent to a preparatory school in Bainbridge, Maryland, and then to the University of Texas at Austin in September 1961 to major in engineering.
There he met Kathleen F. Leissner, and they were married on August 17, 1962, at Needville, Texas, her home town.

Because of low grades he was ordered back to duty as an enlisted man in the Marine Corps on February 12, 1963. While still in the service he attended East Carolina State College in the summer of 1964. He was discharged on December 4, 1964, and returned to Austin, where he reentered the University of Texas in the spring of 1965 to study architectural engineering. In the summer of 1965 he attended Alvin Junior College and then continued at the University of Texas in the 1965-66 school year. He also worked part time and was a scoutmaster.

In the spring of 1966 his mother left his father and moved to Austin to be near her eldest son. On March 29 Whitman sought medical and psychiatric advice at the university health center, but he failed to return as directed for further assistance. On July 22 he visited the University of Texas tower observation deck with his brother John.
During the pre-dawn hours of August 1, 1966, Whitman killed his mother in her apartment and his wife at their residence. Later in the morning he bought a variety of ammunition and a shotgun; about 11:30 A.M. he went to the university tower, taking with him a footlocker, six guns, knives, food, and water.
After clubbing the receptionist (who later died) on the twenty-eighth floor about 11:45 A.M., he killed two persons and wounded two others who were coming up the stairs from the twenty-seventh floor.

On the observation deck of the tower, at an elevation of 231 feet, Whitman then opened fire on persons crossing the campus and on nearby streets, killing ten more people and wounding thirty-one more (one of whom died a week later). Police arrived and returned his fire, while other policemen worked their way into the tower. Several of the dead and wounded were moved to cover by students and other citizens while the firing continued. At 1:24 P.M. police and a deputized private citizen reached the observation deck, where police officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy shot and killed Whitman.

Altogether, seventeen persons were killed, including Whitman,

and thirty-one were wounded in one of the worst mass murders in modern United States history.

An autopsy on Whitman's body revealed a brain tumor, but medical authorities disagreed over its effect on Whitman's actions. His body was returned to Lake Worth, Florida, for burial. An autopsy on Whitman's body revealed a brain tumor, but medical authorities disagreed over its effect on Whitman's actions. His body was returned to Lake Worth, Florida, for burial.

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Don't you all remember there were certain kids in school that were physically and verbally picked on relentlesstly, day after day, for years. Tortured, and alienated. This is just payback.

Adults are to be blamed of course and not just those kids parents.
All parents.

First of all if any adult was physically abused by another adult, what happens. The police are called and the aggressor is charged. With kids in school, they are practically living in the jungle.

I don't know if any others have had this experience with their kids but this is what I have seen. There seems to be a major problem with especially little boys. It starts very early.

I have a 3 year old boy. I work a 3:00 in the afternoon to midnite shift which has given me much more opportunity to spend alot of time with my son than most fathers are able to spend with their child. I have spent literally hundreds of hours with my son at the park. I see it every damn day. It's always the same thing. Boys acting aggressive for no reason at all. My son didn't know what it was to treat another person badly, intentionally. Of course he knows now.

It was just very sad to experience this. These kids obviously are learning this somewhere.

Almost without exception though a boy will start up with some aggression out of the blue for no reason.

It has toughened him up, and he protects himself but why, that is what I want to know.

What surprises me about Columbine is not that it happened but that it doesn't happen all the time.

Everybody wants to talk about how they were on antidepressants. I wouldn't doubt that these kids had expressed deep depression and had been put on drugs. They were probably some of the relentlessly tortured kids on school campuses that society has failed. Schools need to do something about bullying. I think it is a big problem.

I don't see how we can live in a hyperviolent, hypersexualized culture and not expect to get these results as some of these kids just bite back.

These kids were just tortured and were saying F you to the world.

Yes their parents could have been better parents but so could the parents of the other kids that never taught their kids to respect all people and respect their personal boundaries.

My son is very athletic and as soon as he turns 5 years old he will be put into some type of martial arts so he'll do fine but I'll tell you though, I am dreading the day he has to start school. Dropping him into the "real world". It's sad.

The total blame sits on all of us. I'm disgusted with the culture and society that we have. I don't know if it is better in other countries but the usa is sick.

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TV yes, not to mention video game violence. I've been a gamer since PONG, lol, and it's been getting worse every year, since about when Doom first came out. That game seemed to spawn the whole violence game genre we see today. (a very fitting game title too, now that I think of it) They also all have warning labels (adult, NC17, etc) that most parents don't even bother to read anymore.

or...

"Oh, Johnnys mom bought it for him, Oh OK then......."

or...

"But my 13 year old children are more mature than most....."

Just some of the lame parenting excuses used these days.....


PS, I must be gettin' old. lol


.

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I cited 15 dead, since I did not include Whitman's death, nor the miscarriage of an unborn child, or the death of one of the injured many years later when the victim declined kidney dialysis. If all three are counted, 18 were killed. 15 is the conservative estimate.

All due to a marine with a rifle.

Whitman wasn't the worst spree killer in history. Mutsuo Toi managed to kill 29 people and himself with a rifle and Japanese swords in 1938. Martin Bryant killed 35 people (and later was captured alive) in 1996. Woo Bum-Kom killed over fifty people, and himself in 1982, but he had the advantage of being a police officer and living in a country where gun ownership is banned.

Oddly, the deadlyist school massacre in the US happened in 1927: Andrew Kehoe, angry about a local property tax passed to fund the new school, ended up killing over 40 people (and himself), most via a suicide bomb.

Kehoe grew up before dirty movies, television, rap music, and video games existed. He grew up in a time where women tended to have traditional roles, and when Christianity played a greater role in American life.

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Why do you assume that your son "HAS" to go to a public school. One of the reasons that I posted this thread was to point out the fact that the very cause in this cause/effect article is the fact that parents have abrogated their age-old duty to raise and teach their children. For 5000 years of human history, there was no day care center, public school, or MTV to raise our children for us. Nobody is making you send your child off to public school. The biblical instruction below was written to parents. Not to babysitters, public school teachers, day care center workers, or tv producers.

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (proverbs 22:6)

"And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." (ephesians 6:4)

"And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates." (deuteronomy 6)