12 dead in England shootings.

[bigbroon]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/10219655.stm

Apparently (news is still a bit sketchy) this guy went on a rampage in Cumbria, England, and shot dead 12 people, injuring a further 25. The targets were seemingly random, after the first shooting, who was a colleague of the man. He shot himself dead in the countryside almost 3 hours after the shootings started. It's still all over the TV news channels right now - the worst mass-shooting in England since 1987 (Hungerford).

 

[Wagewar47]

I just read this, very unfortunate. Thoughts & prayers with the affected families.

 

[Dancingweapon]

Yeh this is everywhere right now. Really messed up, should of just took himself and not poor innocents with him.

 

[Reeve]

England has some strict gun laws... looks like that helped.

 

[Tomasello]

All gun laws do is make it very difficult for law abiding citizens to protect themselves.

If a maniac wants a gun, there's always a blackmarket somewhere to sell it to him.

It's no different for drugs, prostitution, etc.

 

[Dancingweapon]

England has some strict gun laws... looks like that helped.

All gun laws do is make it very difficult for law abiding citizens to protect themselves.

If a maniac wants a gun, there's always a blackmarket somewhere to sell it to him.

It's no different for drugs, prostitution, etc.

He had a licensed gun, we have a hell of a lot less gun break outs than most other places (thank god) our laws are only just a little less strict than Japan's. No one could of predicted this is what he was going to use the gun for.

 

[bigbroon]

He had a licensed gun, we have a hell of a lot less gun break outs than most over places (thank god) our laws are only just a little less strict than Japan's. No one could of predicted this is what he was going to use the gun for.

Couldn't have put it better myself. The guy had a shotgun and a rifle - he had the license for the shotgun for 15 years, and the license for the rifle for 3 years. The last mass shooting this big was the Hungerford massacre in 1987 - 23 years is a long time, especially compared to places where gun laws are far more lax - America, for example.

The guy has 1 discrepancy on his criminal record - minor theft from a previous employer a long time ago. He was a quiet, friendly man who was known by everyone in the close-knit community. The motive is as yet unknown, but of course the theories are out there already. Unfortunately, he passed the background checks needed to obtain these guns, and when the day came that the switch flicked in his head, he had weapons capable of causing such a horrific turn of events.

I personally believe that, while he probably didn't plan this out for a long time, he woke up that day knowing he was going to kill himself and take people with him - the first person he killed was his twin brother. Everyone who saw him that day said he was completely different from his usual self. If he didn't have guns, chances are he would have caused an atrocity with a different weapon (albeit with far less harm.)

 

[Raesvelg]

The irony is that a knife wielding loony is frequently just as deadly as a gun slinging loony. Take examples from China and Japan if you need, but people armed with little more than meat cleavers racking up ~10 fatalities in their various rampages.

Statistically speaking, these sorts of random mass killings are anomalies, and in truth fade into the background of the actual murder statistics. Take Australia as an example there; after banning the private ownership of the vast majority of firearms, their murder rate actually went up.

There's an old saying: "An armed society is a polite society", and it largely holds true, but the caveat there is that pretty much everyone has to be packing, at all times, and you'll probably experience more of the random firearm-based massacres that happen from time to time.