Posted on 04/06/2012 10:28:50 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
It has been 46 years -- nearly a half-century -- since Charles Whitman, a troubled ex-Marine, climbed atop the iconic University of Texas Tower to use it as a staging zone for a shooting spree. He killed 16 people on and around the campus, including his wife and mother.
The nation, while sobered by a second World War and stunned by escalating political turmoil, was still naive in many ways back then -- halfway through a violent decade that would rend the political and social fabric. The youthful president, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated just three years before. It's no surprise that Whitman's massacre horrified Americans from coast to coast.
But in the years since, we've adjusted too well to the armed madmen in our midst. A massacre on a college campus barely garners notice outside its immediate locale. Last week, when disgruntled ex-student One Goh allegedly opened fire in a classroom of Oakland's tiny Oikos University, killing seven and wounding three others, the news drew low-key coverage outside California. After all, it was just the latest of several campus shootings so far this year.
And Whitman seems an amateur by current standards of senseless carnage. In 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 25 at Virginia Tech. By then, of course, the 1999 Colombine High School massacre, during which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 before committing suicide, had long since faded from the news.
Cho came from an immigrant family, but his massacre suggests how thoroughly American he was. (The same is true of Goh, if he is, as suspected, the perpetrator.) Other countries have generated a few homicidal lunatics, but murderous frenzies by gun-toting maniacs are a particularly American form of madness.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
If pResent alge gets re-elected the guns sales this time will make the numbers sold after his first election look small
FU CT!
Hey Cynthia, how many home break-ins were prevented today? How many people defended their family and property? How many people didn’t realize just how safe they were because the person that was considering robbing them thought twice that they might be armed?
Charles Whitman had a large brain tumor, and in those days before CT scans and MRI’s, no one believed him.
But if they officially admitted it, there would have been lawsuits galore, so it was said that the tumor was “asymptomatic”.
That aside, there are good arguments against semi trained civilians carrying guns: They will either freeze and not shoot (or have an assailent grab the gun and kill them) or else they will end up shooting too quickly when a lesser action would be less lethal.
yes, I know you guys are all experts, but I’m not (so I let my husband keep the gun on his side of the bed).
;-)
Cynthia was the Affirmative Action editorial page editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper for a number of years, sort of like how Obama was chosen to be editor of the Law Review at Harvard. She is reliably knee-jerk Leftist in all the logic-free ways you would expect. The AJC eventually had to move her aside in their attempt to move to the center and retain some semblance of a readership, so they made her the DC beat reporter. It appears from the byline in this article she is now playing the academic game.
Neal Boortz used to call her “Atlanta’s cutest little Commie”.
Just so everyone has an idea of who we are dealing with here.
A little more history on CT above.
Let’s compare numbers...
Hitler murdered 6 million UNARMED jews and another 6 million UNARMED christians, poles, gypsies etc.
Joseph Stalin killed 20 million UNARMED Ukrainians and fellow Russians;
Mao ZeDong killed 40 million UNARMED Chinese dissidents;
Pol Pot killed 2 million UNARMED civilians in Cambodia killing fields trying to create his utopian society;
Fidel Castro killed well over 100,000 UNARMED civilians and over 70,000 migrants were drown trying to flee his communist government.
Obama (TBD - est. 25 Million):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_5MY59ENrc
Although victims of madmen are a tragedy brought on by deranged psychopaths, the murder of unarmed civilians by their own governments, typically SOCIALISTS trying to create their version of utopia on earth, far outnumbers the few scant shooting victims of the likes of Charles Witman and others...
The Founders didn't think so.
They will either freeze and not shoot (or have an assailent grab the gun and kill them) or else they will end up shooting too quickly when a lesser action would be less lethal.
They "WILL freeze"? Really? I would think that some people, sometimes, MIGHT freeze.
"Shooting too quickly"? Uh... there already laws stating when it is justified to use deadly force.
"Less lethal"? Let me just state for the record that if I am in a fight for my (or my family's) life, I want MORE lethal... I want a freaking low yield neutron bomb if I can get my hands on one.
This is almost as mindless a post as the guy last week who said Zimmerman should have shot to wound Travon Martin.
<--------------- DU is that way.
I’m 78 and in my younger days most all the American’s I knew had a “Love Affair with Liberty and Freedom.”
I never owned any guns, but always had access to guns to hunt with [and in the service we had weapons], no one I knew ever thought of using a gun on another person.
We must never forget, just during WW2 those millions that were killed had no weapons, nor the millions that Stalin had put to death had no weapons.[They had a love affair with killing the un-armed].
To me if all news media really were responsible, they would underscore the fact; That the most cowardly thing happening in America is armed thugs get and have arms, and they kill un-armed victims.
Think about it; “It is a most cowardly thing to kill an un-armed man, woman or child.”
Until January 2011 I never owned a weapon; but that my wife of 54+ years is in a care home and I live alone. And in several cities I have lived in, and were I’m now living; cars, have been car-jacked, housing are broken into, friends, neighbors, cousins have been beaten, robbed, raped, and killed. I will stop their crime careers if I have to.
Thanks! Just what I wanted to say!
UNARMED!uNARMED!UNARMED!
Ever since the first hot babe said, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you glad to see me?”, the love affair with guns has been in full stride.
Call me crazy... ONE more time. Molan Labe.
I’m not gun crazy but I absolutely love having massive quantities of ammunition.
Cindy needs a new hoodie.
Interesting how none of Tucker’s examples mention the Black on Black jihad in America’s inner-cities using illegal weapons.
Mellow Yellow?
I’m headed to the insanity show shortly to buy some more insanity.
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