18 dead in Texas school mass shooting...your thoughts ? 😔 💔

@Rhode57 That is what foreign and some domestic enemies want to see happen. That way they can easily take over the country.

@Diotrephes Absolute BOLLOCKS . The uk doesnt have public ownership of guns as do many other countries . Thats the sort of horse shit from someone who has little care for life and scared of not being able to own a gun .

@Diotrephes BS, the military would still have guns, c’mon read what he said.

@Rhode57 The UK is wimpy. Americans love to kick ass and take names.

@SW-User When you look at military forces around the world you see lots of them oppressing their fellow citizens. The founding idea of America is that the people have the right to overthrow their government by any means when it becomes oppressive. It's written in several State constitutions.

@Diotrephes and look what happens!

@SW-User For the most part, the bureaucrats behave themselves. That's because they know that the citizens have the power.

@Diotrephes ... ... for their funerals.

The courage is in not in being violent, or worshipping violence.

The courage is in opposing violence, in refusing to own private arsenals of automatic guns, in refusing to make these awful crimes party-political matters.

The courageous speak out against cold-blooded murder; and in the USA, question the need to keep an 18C constitutional amendment written for a fledgling nation that was not yet stable and had not yet developed proper national military and police services.

Of the various leading Americans people whose speeches we heard in part on the News this morning, the most courageous and meaningful was not that of a politician, Democrat or Republican. (We heard both.) The speaker was a leading sportsman, powerfully condemning these pointless killings, the ease of their perpetration and the difficulty in doing anything to stop them.

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You attack the UK, calling us "wimps". No, we are not wimps. We know, collectively, the realities of wars, of terrorist bombs, knives and vans on our city streets, of teenage gang-violence (the last, mainly by knives not guns), of domestic violence. We have suffered a few, fortunately very few, random mass killings for no clear motive - but those are near-habitual in the USA, and that baffles everyone else around the world. Perhaps this is why we don't worship guns, don't need or want gratuitous gun ownership, don't want our supermarkets to stock automatic rifles along with the cornflakes.*

It is legal to own certain classes of guns in the UK, for genuine sports, agricultural and antique-collection reasons, under strict, non-political, control; but owning guns is just not popular in Britain and in many, many other countries. Japan seems to be the nation with the least private ownership of guns.

For comparison, excluding those attacks defined as "terrorist" (i.e. for extreme political ends), there have been only four random mass-shootings in the UK in the last forty or fifty years, though one was in a primary-school (Dunblane). The latest school shootings in the USA must bring back awful memories for the residents of that Scottish village, with a similar death-toll in a similar age-range school, some 40 years ago now.

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*Guns and groceries...
For a strange insight into that, a friend told me of a visit to the USA to attend an outdoor-pursuits symposium; nothing at all to do with guns. One of the locals there, invited my friend and his companion to a meal at his farm-owing parents' home. There they were shown the father's sizeable arsenal and took up the invitation to try shooting, at static targets on their private range. Next day he tried to buy replacement ammunition and a few cans of beer in a local shop. The ammunition - no problem. The beer? No - the shop-assistant could not understand the visitor's UK driving-licence whose number includes the date-of-birth. So a foreigner in his 40s could not prove himself old enough to buy a tin of weak beer, but was considered old enough to buy potentially-fatal gun rounds....

@SW-User That is the worst case scenario. Government with all the arms will eventually end up in tyranny.

We wete created when we fought off a tyranny (your crown) and we will never let another take hold here.

The end

@SW-User So sad... teenagers randomly shooting school-children for no known motives (killing the murderer at the scene prevents anyone knowing for certain what drove him to do it), and then responses that neither understand other countries nor whatever is going wrong in your own. And you are not alone in that.

@ArishMell Knowing what drove him to do it is irrelevant. Bullying, and deep seeded anger are the most common reasons for this type of violence.
Regardless of the motive, the act is carried out anyway. That's not really an effective way of stopping mass shooters
from doing what they want do.

@Zonuss I see your point but given that many dismiss all such murderers as "mentally ill" - irrespective of individual fact though some are - surely understanding what drives people to such violent acts may help deflect others, if the signs are there?

Some are autistic but we have to be very careful indeed to see false cause from a statistically-weak correlation. Such conditions tend to make it easier to become ensnared and groomed by unscrupulous purveyors of violence inhabiting the nastier areas of "social"-media.

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The UK has a scheme - sorry I forget its name - designed originally to turn proto-radical young Islamicists from thoughts of terrorism, but I believe also picking up extreme right-wing characters who are just as potentially dangerous in this and some other European countries. I do not know how effective it is overall, but if it makes even a few see the error of their intended ways, it saves some lives.

Many of their actual or prevented acts have been found to have been by socially-weak individuals, vulnerable to being groomed by remote others into hard-line political extremist ideology and a contempt for human life; whilst also made to feel somehow "important" to some cause.

Though in Norway not the UK, Anders Brevik may have been one such. In 2011, Brevik killed 8 and injured others by a car-bomb in the centre of Oslo, then shot dead 69 attendees of a political-party's youth holiday-camp on a nearby island. He had made no secret of his hard-line ideology, and is currently serving a 21-year prison sentence for the murders.

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Those incidents though, have fairly readily identifiable, para-political and/or racist backgrounds.

Random shootings if strangers such as this latest, though, and the similar Dublane atrocity 40 years ago, seem to have no such, even deeply-twisted, reason.

Maybe they do, but if the killer is himself killed, or kills himself, at the scene instead of having to explain himself to a Court of Law and face up to what he has done, his act is even less comprehensible and even more the gratuitous savagery it already was.

@ArishMell If guns werent readily available you wouldnt have half the shootings the US has . The most recent was an 18 year old who a couple of days before , was able to walk in a shop buy a submachine gun or semi automatic and another rifle and no one questioned it . Where in a civilised world is that ok . Sorry ban the sale of guns unless someone can prove they have an absolute neccessity to own one . No one at 18 maybe not even 21 should be allowed to own a gun without proof that there is good reason for it and is accompanied by a licence holding adult to vouch for them .

@Rhode57 Yes, it so awful but also so puzzling, when we see it from afar so are not embroiled in their domestic political and social divisions.

Why for example would so many private citizens even want, let alone need, a submachine gun or large-magazine automatic rifle, that it's worth the shops stocking them openly? In some States anyway, maybe not all. I don't think even trophy-hunters or deer-stalkers shooting big animals use such guns.

One American, PM correspondent on here once said that shootings are so common in the USA that most rarely go un-reported except locally. Including in his own town - I don't know where he lives.

That incomprehension works both ways of course. It's pretty clear that a few Americans are so baffled by societies who do not wish to be full of private arms and have close gun laws, that they think those countries "wimps" or "tyrannies".

@Rhode57 somewhere between 1 and 3 million defensive use of a firearm yearly in the US buddy! Tell me how owning a gun is a bad thing?