Mass shootings have become so commonplace that it raises serious questions. Are these people doing it for the fame? The media after each of these shootings immediately starts to speculate on the motive almost given it a legitimacy. Their faces are splattered on everyone's TV. It's like being the star of a reality show. The media has stop romanticizing these people. And show for what cowards they are. Focus on the victims, not the perpetrators. There is also the question of easy availability of guns. Something the politicians have no courage in addressing. Why do these people have guns:
A coroner says the suspect in a shooting rampage that killed at least 10 people in south Alabama began his day of bloodshed by burning down his mother's house where officials found her body.
Coffee County Coroner Robert Preachers says officials have not been able to enter the house outside of Kinston to determine if she was shot. Preachers says the suspect then went to nearby Samson and killed his grandparents, aunt and uncle.
Preachers said the grandfather, Alfred White, had raised the suspect and that officials did not have a motive.
The Alabama Department of Safety says the gunman killed nine people before fatally shooting himself at a metal products plant in neighboring Geneva.
Police are investigating at least four separate shootings, all believed to be done by one gunman. His name was not released.
You can bet the shooter saw the stories about that church killer recently:
The suspect accused of killing a minister at an Illinois church had marked the day of the attack as a "day of death" or "death day" in a planning book, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
There were "words to those effect," written in a day planner belonging to Terry J. Sedlacek, the man accused in Sunday's attack at the First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois, said William Mudge, the Madison County state's attorney.
Mudge said he hadn't seen the planner and could not recall the exact wording that police described to him. He said police found the book in Sedlacek's home.
Lt. Scott Compton of the Illinois State Police said he hadn't seen the planner and could not confirm Mudge's account.
Authorities have charged Sedlacek, 27, with first-degree murder in the killing of the Rev. Fred Winters. He also was charged with two counts of aggravated battery related to the stabbing of church members Terry Bullard and Keith Melton.
Sedlacek was seriously wounded in the melee, authorities said.
Time to debate the role of guns and violence in our society:
A gunman's rampage that took at least 32 lives yesterday at Virginia Tech University was not an aberration. Mass shootings at schools in the United States have become frighteningly common. The U.S. Secret Service even collaborated on a detailed study with the federal Department of Education on how to prevent them. Too bad that changing lax gun laws was beyond the study's purview.- Update:
How common are school-based shootings in the United States? Between 1994 and 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta documented 220 separate incidents, accounting for 253 deaths. Leaving aside summer and holidays, that's nearly one homicidal incident a week over six years at schools. Yet the CDC called the incidents rare -- perhaps because 15 young people between the ages of 10 and 24 are killed each day, on average, in the United States. The mass school shootings are but a small percentage of this frightening total.
If the frequency of the mass shootings is uniquely American, it is also uniquely American to have a respected public-health authority label 220 school shootings in six years as rare. That lack of perspective goes some distance toward explaining why so deadly a massacre as the one at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 did not bring about a nationwide crackdown on guns. (Twelve students, one teacher and two teenage gunmen died at Columbine.) "What have we done as a nation in the eight years since Columbine about this problem?" Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, asked yesterday. Guns are still proliferating. No new gun controls have been legislated. A federal ban on assault weapons was left to expire in September, 2004.
Canada has had school shootings, but they have been much less common, and the outpouring of rage and disbelief has prompted the country's legislators to react. After Marc Lépine killed 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, the federal government passed gun-control legislation that may have helped limit the carnage last September when Kimveer Gill took semi-automatic weapons into Dawson College, also in Montreal, and killed one student. Mr. Lépine used a gun that could fire 30 bullets, but the 1991 law that followed his attack limited most rifles to five rounds of ammunition, and handguns to 10 rounds.
Incredibly I wake up to another mass murder. This time in Germany. Is there any doubt this was a copycat shooting? This demonstrates that the glorification of murderers is also impacting Europeans:
A 17-year-old gunman dressed in black opened fire at his former high school in southwestern Germany on Wednesday, killing at least 15 people before police shot him to death, state officials said.
Nine students and three teachers were among the dead, State Interior Minister Heribert Rech said.
It was Germany's worst shooting since another teenage gunman killed 16 people and himself in another high school in 2002.
Police said the former student at the school in Winnenden, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) northeast of Stuttgart, entered it at 9:30 a.m. and opened fire, shooting at random.
Witnesses said students jumped from the windows of the building after the gunman opened fire.
"He went into the school with a weapon and carried out a bloodbath," regional police chief Erwin Hetger said earlier. "I've never seen anything like this in my life."
Concerned parents quickly swarmed around the school, which was evacuated during the incident. About 1,000 children attend the school
After the attack, the suspect fled the Albertville high school toward the center of the town of 28,000, police said.
In 2002, 19-year-old Robert Steinhaeuser shot and killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two students and a police officer before turning his gun on himself in the Gutenberg high school in Erfurt.
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