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<p>There was a lot of homeschooling interest after Columbine but I don’t think that that led to a big increase in actual homeschooling. There are barriers to homeschooling for many parents that aren’t necessarily easy to solve.</p>
<p>Tears.</p>
<p>I haven’t read much of this thread yet, so I hope I am not too redundant. Just saw somemom’s post and I echo her concerns. </p>
<p>Almost every time a tragedy like this happens people come forward and report some worry about the perpetrator’s behavior pre-crime. Sometimes, family members have done all within their legal power to seek help and are at their wit’s end, finding they have no recourse. Our system values individual liberty and involuntary treatment of adults requires indication of likely immediate harm which is subjective to some degree prior to an “event”. There are many competing interests in managing the needs and rights of the mentally ill, as well as the safety of both the community and the ill person. Remember the professor who reported the violent nature of the VT shooter’s writing? 20/20 hindsight. Confidentiality is also strictly regulated, making these situations even more complex as they unfold. It is a systemic issue of huge consequence.</p>
<p>Did the shooter kill his father also? I heard reports of a victim not at the school. So with the mother, father and shooter dead, we may never know if the shooter made threats about killing at the school.</p>
<p>I don’t like Mayor Bloomberg very much at all, but I agree with this statement:</p>
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<p>How many more “isolated incidents” with “lone gunmen” have to happen? How many more children have to die before it becomes generally acceptable for public officials to admit the obvious?</p>
<p>According to this report, the gunman shot himself. The mother was found dead at home, not at the school. So why did he purposely go to the school to kill mostly young elementary school kids after he just shot and killed his own mother? Why?</p>
<p>[Police:</a> 20 children among 26 victims of Connecticut school shooting - CNN.com](<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/us/connecticut-school-shooting/index.html]Police:”>http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/us/connecticut-school-shooting/index.html)</p>
<p>Bravo to Mayor Bloomberg and to DonnaL. Enough is enough! A massacre in a kindergarten TWO days after the shooting of holiday shoppers in a mall? I highly doubt that this was the intention of the second amendment.</p>
<p>ttparent, The question you should be asking is why this guy had access to assault rifles.</p>
<p>This is bothering me so much more than any of the other mass shootings. I am saddened beyond belief. </p>
<p>I hope that when Mayor Bloomberg leaves his office, he devotes himself full-time to this issue. I think he could be very effective.</p>
<p>And EVERYONE should immediately send a message to their Representatives and Congressmen, and to President Obama as well. We can’t get the laws we want unless our elected officials know that we mean business even more strongly than the NRA does.</p>
<p>neurotic, that one is pretty simple. The more guns available in circulation, the easier access everyone has to them. Seriously, what deterrence is there for anyone with no criminal record to get their hands on these guns.</p>
<p>A sad connection - news reports here have speculated that Adam Lanza had Asperger’s Syndrome… Just two weeks ago, there was another killing by a young man from Connecticut with Asperger’s Syndrom - the November 30 killing in Wyoming, where the young man killed his father with a bow and arrow, in front of the father’s community college.</p>
<p>We now know the mother was killed - at home - first, and then he went to the school, in her car. She is not one of the victims at the school, though that’s what was originally thought. The body at the house is the mother, not the father.</p>
<p>I can only imagine what it must have been like for the brother to hear about his mother’s death, and the fact that he was assumed to be the perpetrator. Even if they had gotten the ID right, can you imagine hearing about his mother’s death via Facebook, of from friends?</p>
<p>This is an excellent editorial. (Scroll past the photos.)</p>
<p>[Mourn</a>, and take action on guns - CNN.com](<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/opinion/zuckerman-connecticut-shootings/index.html?hpt=hp_c4]Mourn”>http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/opinion/zuckerman-connecticut-shootings/index.html?hpt=hp_c4)</p>
<p>Has anyone heard if this shooter had priors? A juvenile record? I wonder how much time elapsed between shooting the mother at home and coming to the school? Wouldn’t the mother who was a teacher have been missed for not reporting to her class? Was a substitute teacher there instead? Lots of questions.</p>
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<p>D1 just reminded me of a shooting at a church of our denomination in recent years, so need to add that to the list of places to worry about shootings. And, of course, one has to worry when going to speak to a politician in a public location.</p>
<p>I’m not going to read the whole thread, but I see there are quite a few misunderstandings coming from people who are not very educated about guns. </p>
<p>A semi-automatic assault rifle is the exact same as a semi-automatic hunting rifle, except it has very efficient ways to reload, cokc, and it allows for areas to mount accessories more so than a hunting rifle.</p>
<p>The difference is very minimal. In the hands of someone trained very well you’re losing 1-2 seconds in reloading. Getting a gun is not easier than getting a drivers license, they do a background check on you to some federal database for approval. How many of you are aware that for a few thousand dollars anyone who goes through the proper steps can get a license to have a full automatic weapon(machine guns).</p>
<p>If you make guns illegal, all that will happen is that the drug cartels would drastically ramp up smuggling them into the country. Making guns illegal would go over in this country a lot less than making abortion illegal.</p>
<p>edited: because I couldn’t spell cokc the correct way.</p>
<p>Yes, or take airplane, subway, or commuter train. Or got to work where a co-worker was just fired.</p>
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<p>Because it is easier to get an asualt rifle in this country than it is to get affordable, high quality mental health care. </p>
<p>My thoughts and prayers to all the families. We had this happen here in 1987. Really awful for everyone involved. Just a few months ago those kids were being dropped off for their first day of school. What a nightmare.</p>
<p>There are some works about surviving families of mass murderers. Most I know of and have read are of the Nazi children. The short answer is the response varies immensely, with some in denial, some accepting and introspective and some refusing to think about it as much as possible. They have a genuinely difficult time reconciling the person they knew with what that person did. I expect that is always true. Many have had difficulty being happy, which makes sense. </p>
<p>I never know what to make of this kind of thing. Part of me thinks we should start a movement for greater acceptance of suicide: if you’re angry enough at the world that you want, that you need to kill others, then kill yourself instead. Be a martyr to your hatred. But we can barely talk about suicide in the context of the terminally ill wanting to die a few weeks or months before the inevitable. My state, MA, just defeated a “death with dignity” initiative mostly because of the moral, religious prohibitions that mean we believe a suicide is cast into something bad after death. We don’t want to believe a person can want to die. And we don’t want to believe someone can be so filled with hatred that he - it’s almost always a he - would kill a bunch of children. But it happens so we should accept the reality and deal with that.</p>
<p>It was just reported that the mom purchased the guns.</p>
<p>Teachers usually have excellent insurance. The 20 year old could have been covered. I will bet he was seeing mental health people.</p>
<p>He was 20… if he did not want treatment, he did not have to have it unless he had threatened someone else or himself. So regardless of the insurance situation, we are leaving the decision on whether to treat mental illness in the hands of the mentally ill themselves. That is a recipe for… exactly what is happening so often.</p>
<p>And I hear the start of the gobbledy-gook on “semi-automatic”, “mounting accessories”, etc. that always pours out after these tragedies. We couldn’t POSSIBLY write a law that limits the ability to feed in many rounds at once and reload at lightning speed, could we? Yes, we could.</p>
<p>So what will it take… an actual AK-47 in a kindergarten class to convince you? No… then it would be the excuse of “it is the PERSON, not the GUN.” I am revolted by the continued flimsy excuses for inaction. And if today is not the day… then next week it might be my community or yours while we twiddle our thumbs some more.</p>
<p>Amen, intparent.</p>