Virginia Tech had its own SWAT team. Columbine HS had an armed guard. (From Mother Jones)

[gollygee]

http://m.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/12/nra-chief-calls-more-guns-everywhere

At the National Rifle Association's first press conference since the Newtown massacre that killed 27 people, most of them elementary school children, the gun lobby's CEO Wayne LaPierre said the solution is more guns.

"There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people," said LaPierre. He was talking about the entertainment industry, not groups such as the NRA that lobby for laws that allow people to get away with murder. Rolling out a list of 1990s-era conservative cultural shibboleths, LaPierre blamed a coarsening culture, and violence in movies, video games, and music for mass shootings—that is, everything but the deadly weapons the killers have used to slaughter people.

LaPierre's "solution" is for Americans to arm themselves, and for the government to place armed guards at every public school in the country: "I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school—and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January." LaPierre did not note that Columbine High School had an armed guard when two students went on a murderous shooting rampage there in 1999, and that Virginia Tech had an armed police force with its own SWAT team equivalent when one of its students killed 33 people in 2007.

The head of the nation's most powerful gun rights organization laid out a vision of a paramilitary America, where citizens are protected by armed guards until they are old enough to walk around with their own firearms on the off-chance they might need to pump a few rounds into a fellow citizen. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," said LaPierre. "Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away ... or a minute away?" Yet outside of video games, civilians rarely stop mass shooters.

[Plaid Adder]

1. Here's what I don't get about the violent video game argument:

Why does nobody point out that there is an obvious connection between gun culture and video game content?

I mean seriously. Does Wayne not get it that in a country where the coolness and manliness of guns was not being promoted 24/7 by the entertainment industry, not as many people would be buying them? Or that in a country where private ownership of automatic weapons is promoted as right, good, and patriotic, people would be attracted to games that allow them to fantasize about shooting the crap out of dehumanized "bad guys?"

Surely he must. Of course he's not going to point it out...but I'm surprised nobody else is calling him on it.

The Plaid Adder

[Festivito]

2. I guess in Canada they play the same games but don't shoot each other the way we do.

i think it's our mentality of banning rather than earning. Banning makes drugs, cigarettes and alcohol more attractive to youth. In Switzerland they took away the ban and it made drugs boring to the kids because it too easy to get.

Well regulated militia should be well regulated guns. How one earns a gun leads to a well regulated militia. Give this a second: If we offered to help buy a gun for a civilian who goes to the classes, passes the physicals and keeps good control of the weapon, it would change the way we think of it, and it would possibly cost us much less in the long run. (And, I'm a little vindictive as it would piss off the hoards that just bought tons of guns.)

But, it's not the games or Japan would look like a Chicago slaughterhouse.

Hey, just having fun here tonight.