“A nationally recognized school security expert said those funds had been critical for years in helping schools continue to enhance protections against growing threats of violence. But they simply dried up with little notice as the Columbine and Virginia Tech school shooting tragedies faded from memory and many Americans and political leaders had their attentions diverted to elections, a weak economy and overseas dramas.

“I was baffled to see funds and programs cut in these areas,” said Kenneth Trump, the president of the National School Safety and Security Services firm that helps school districts and policymakers improve protections for teachers and students. “Our political and policy leaders need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk about being concerned about school safety.”

http://www.washingtonguardian.com/washingtons-school-security-failure

When it’s easier to get guns than mental health treatment, the call will be for more gun control after am incident like this, if conservatives insit on a totally individualist approach to society, than people will pursue individualist rather than systemic solutions. The systemic solution is universal healthcare with mental health provisions. But you fought that. So now low imfo America is gonna come for your guns.

libfreeordie on December 15, 2012 at 6:44 AM

America is not gonna come for any guns. Of course hard core progressives will try but a majority of Americans are against more restrictive gun control. What may happen is a push for more restrictions and institutionalization of the mentally ill, although I doubt that will succeed either.

The obvious and easiest path will be to require armed police at every public school in America. This makes sense considering the children’s safety at public school is the states responsibility, not private citizens who own guns or even the parents. This may gain support because it would also help prevent gangs from gaining access to schools in more urban areas, and it would help protect the schools from a possible organized terrorist or Jihadist attack. Schools are after all a prime soft target.

McCain Hater on December 15

So, can I assume you voted for the hot chick in ’08?

Lanceman on December 15, 2012 at 12:11 AM

You may assume what you want, but no I held my nose and bit my tongue and voted for for Mccain. I may never do that again but rather just not vote.

President Barack Obama’s call for “meaningful action”

If he were a decent man, alas, he’d have simply said “I express my deep regrets and condolences, for my family and the country. Our thoughts and prayers are with the greiving families”.

This is a charlatan of the first degree. The bodies were not even cold and many, him included, had politics on their minds. To Hades with you all, Bloomberg first. You are animals, hyenas.

lib’free’, you’re wanted in the Snyder threat thread. Show some decency.

When it’s easier to get guns than mental health treatment…

libfreeordie on December 15, 2012 at 6:44 AM

Luv, you really should study schizophrenia and also mental health/committment laws.

Loughner, Holmes, Cho, Lanza, etc, all had access to mental health treatment. Schizophrenics often REFUSE to take medication because they believe that doctors, family, spouses, etc, are trying to poison or “mind control” them and many courts will not order commitment or forced medication because of mentally ill person’s rights. BTW, Holmes WAS getting psych treatment up until the weeks before he broke.

Eric Harris, the mastermind behind Columbine, died with prescribed psychotropic drugs in his system.

Maybe, you idiots should stop it with the moral equivalence and “hey, no one behaviour or lifestyle choice is any better than another” bullshyte. When you defend the right of the nuts to refuse treatment and to live amongst us, then you reap what you sow.

Not many people want to take away your little toys and sense of power, only the far left dreams of a gun free America. Bob Costas and others are proposing sensible regulation on the types of weapons with easy reach of your suburban nut job.

bayam on December 15, 2012 at 10:06 AM

What do the Columbine shooters, Cho, Loughner, Holmes, Lanza, and almost all of these rampage killers have in common?

They are psychotic and exhibited signs of the serious and dangerous nature of their mental break long before they picked up a gun. When Bob Costas and others start proposing fundamental reforms to how we deal with the mentally ill, who are clear and present dangers to society, then I’ll pay attention to them. When Bob Costas and others put the rights of 20 innocent children to live over the “rights” of a “nut job,” then I’ll believe that they honestly want to prevent these types of shootings and aren’t seeking to collectively punish the law-abiding for the actions of those that they, themselves, have enabled.

Common sense is quite nearly illegal nowadays and it’s certainly unfashionable in the Obama Age. So the usual liberal dingbats — including the ACLU types who assured us it was “a fearless, independent life style” for a crazy woman to defecate in public on the streets of Manahattan — are telling us we need more gun control.

“Chris Rock was right: ‘Whatever happened to ‘crazy’? . . . What? You can’t be crazy no more? Did we eliminate ‘crazy’ from the dictionary?’”

So if we really want to solve the problem… we need to go back to the time when we didn’t have it! Sometimes going forward means going back to where you took the wrong turn and then take the right turn!

JellyToast on December 15, 2012 at 7:53 AM

Deinstitutionalization was based on the principle that severe mental illness should be treated in the least restrictive setting. As further defined by President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, this ideology rested on “the objective of maintaining the greatest degree of freedom, self-determination, autonomy, dignity, and integrity of body, mind, and spirit for the individual while he or she participates in treatment or receives services.”

Oh, Jimmy… another one of your legacies.

I remember when I was young, it was common to go to a friend’s house and see 5-6 rifles just leaning in the corner of someone’s living room. Everybody had a gun cabinet.. and it was always in the living room. Nobody had a gun safe. Wasn’t even thought of. Also… guns in back of pick-ups… in the window gun racks. I haven’t seen a pick-up truck with a gun rack in the window in years.

Our High School had a shooting range in the basement. I have a picture of the door and range. Got to tour my school with a few people this past year. They are in the process of tearing it down. But there it still was.. our school gun range. Also.. our school had hunter safety classes and I still remember people bringing their hunting rifles to school for the class.

We never had a single shooting. Why is that? What has changed?

Well.. I can tell you… we had school prayer. We had moments of silence. We had Christmas concerts not “Winter Solstice” concerts. We did have school fights.. and if there was a fist fight between two kids.. the teachers grabbed the one who started it and the other guy went on his merry way. Nobody got a felony conviction for defending themselves. Students had pocket knives. We had prayer at graduations.

So what didn’t we have that they have now? We didn’t have classes on self esteem. We didn’t watch porn for health class. We didn’t have “no bully zones.” We didn’t have “gun free zones.” We didn’t have teen pregnancies and we didn’t have teen moms giving birth in the school toilets and trying to flush their baby down the drain! And most of all we didn’t have school shootings!

So if we really want to solve the problem… we need to go back to the time when we didn’t have it! Sometimes going forward means going back to where you took the wrong turn and then take the right turn!

JellyToast on December 15, 2012 at 7:53 AM

Same here guy – not the in school shooting range but everything else. We built guns in metal shop and stocks in wood shop. Most kids old enough to drive carried guns every day because we worked the ranch b4 and after school before going home.

Only shooings I remember from middle school through college were either city folks shooting each other because they looked like deer or lovers/extra lovers fights

“Feelings of rejection, failure, and loss of autonomy create frustrations that inevitably overwhelm them [mass murderers], and they experience a need to strike back. And for many of these killers the best way to lash out against a cold, forbidding society is to destroy its children. Gunning down children on a schoolyard not only provides the needed sense of power and control but is also a way of wreaking vengeance where it hurts the community most.”

-p.11, “Serial Murderers and Their Victims”, Eric W. Hickey.

but if lanza as an adult wasn’t receiving treatment- he sounds social dysfunctional with sociopathic tendencies like most mass murderers – or was refusing treatment as was his right as an adult, no one would have paid attention to him living with his mother’s legal guns. his brother knew instantly that his sibling was the cause of all this evil so one assumes his brother regarded him as disturbed. anti-social and extremely and unnaturally dysfunctional young men in particular- those alienated from their peers and the rest of society- should be seen as being at great risk with any access to fire arms in their homes. were his parents shielding him from professional help since childhood? sounds like all the signals were their for him to go off. having guns near him was monumentally and tragically ill considered.

the problem here is not guns-it never was. he could have built bombs from household items and killed as many if not more people. or serial arson- should be ban matches? the problem is how our society does not deal with indicators of sociopathy. our attitudes toward mental health and its treatment need a re-alignment. but as our society becomes more narcissistic at the core, those with disorders that involve serious NPD which is often coupled with sociopathy are ignored and left untreated, they blend in although sometimes jarringly with the rest of the malignant narcissists until they break out in unimaginable violence against others. it’s his sociopathic tendencies not autism or guns that should be the focus.

obamacare of course insufficiently covers serious psychiatric problems.

When it’s easier to get guns than mental health treatment…

libfreeordie on December 15, 2012 at 6:44 AM

Yeah.. and when it’s easier for the administration to create crime than it is to stop crime then we have a serious problem in this country.. and it’s not our gun laws. It’s with our government.

I’m talking about Fast and Furious.. lest we forget.

JellyToast on December 15, 2012 at 9:50 AM

Went it’s easier to kill some Pakistanis with a drone……

When it’s easier to get guns than mental health treatment…

libfreeordie on December 15, 2012 at 6:44 AM

Yeah.. and when it’s easier for the administration to create crime than it is to stop crime then we have a serious problem in this country.. and it’s not our gun laws. It’s with our government.

I’m talking about Fast and Furious.. lest we forget.

One useful parallel is on-board airline security and the air marshal program.

Banning gun sales is an unserious response. Already murder is against the law, and you see what good that does.

When it’s easier to get guns than mental health treatment, the call will be for more gun control after am incident like this, if conservatives insit on a totally individualist approach to society, than people will pursue individualist rather than systemic solutions. The systemic solution is universal healthcare with mental health provisions. But you fought that. So now low imfo America is gonna come for your guns.

libfreeordie on December 15, 2012 at 6:44 AM

LOL . . . I was wondering how long it was going to take before we started hearing this from the left. “Oh if only we had universal healthcare, there wouldn’t be any more crazy people on the loose.”

You’re making an awful lot of assumptions here, leftie. One is that this guy lacked access to mental health care. How do you know? You don’t know his personal financial situation, or the situation of his parents. You don’t know whether he had access and just didn’t avail himself of it. He was over the legal age of majority. How are you to MAKE someone seek treatment who doesn’t want it? It’s quite a legal burden to go to court and prove an adult should be placed into guardianship for their own protection and protection of others. What will happen under Obamacare? Will we just skip that step and let IPAB decide who gets committed to the booby hatch and who doesn’t? I think we saw what the results of that were about 80 years or so ago in Europe. Is that what you advocate returning to?

libfreeordie on December 15, 2012 at 6:44 AM

You are a problem. I have your cure.

JellyToast on December 15, 2012 at 7:26 AM

Your feelings are not all that uncommon, at least in my experience. Over the years, I have watched several friends become so disenchanted with government mental and social service programs that they quit their profession out of good conscience.

People expect things now…right now. I think one of the casualties of the dot.com boom is the sense of proportionality.