Forum Activity for @gaynor-madoc-leonard

Gosh, I didn't realise he couldn't feel pain. That is very weird. All the more reason to keep him away from those video games and weapons.

I haven't watched the example to which you've given the link yet but I ask this question: WHY WAS THE LAD ALLOWED TO WATCH THESE THINGS? Why are any kids, come that? Secondly, had the guns not been available to him, it's unlikely that he would have gone out and looked for a gun; it was simply that the guns were there and easily available.

There are always going to be people (thankfully, very few) who are going to be susceptible to suggestion from films/video games/theatre/TV but the vast majority of us can watch Tarantino movies without going and cutting someone's ear off to the accompaniment of Stealer's Wheel, just as we can go and see Julius Caesar without wanting to stab someone.

The little that I've seen of video games (trailers for them on TV for example) does make them seem to be extreme but surely someone should have been monitoring the boy and what he was watching, given his known mental state.

I would have printed and scanned it but it was a bit long for that. We can't retain everything in our minds - we'd probably go mad if we did! What impressed me was the fact that Australia could get itself together so quickly to pass a law like that; I realise that the US has more states but it gives one hope that something could be done.

Today, in The Times, Sir Peter Lampl (philanthropist) writes about his campaign against hand guns in Britain.

In the 1970s, he went to live in Boston and was horrified that the city had more murders in a year than the whole of Britain. In the 1990s, he moved back to Britain and feared that this country was moving in the same direction. After the shootings in Dunblane in 1996 (Thomas Hamilton shot 16 five and six-year olds and their teacher), he joined a campaign to ban handguns and, having met two of the dead children's parents, he funded the campaign. It resulted in a complete ban on the private ownership of handguns in Britain.

Six weeks after the Dunblane shootings, there was a massacre in Tasmania, claiming 35 lives and wounding 18 other people. That led to a change right across Australia - a ban on semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns. The Prime Minister, John Howard, won agreement from both state and federal governments in the space of 2 weeks. A study by Sydney University found that in the 18 years prior to the ban, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia; in the following 10 years, there were none.

Lampl states that there are some 5,000 gun shows across the USA each year, selling everything from Samurai swords and tiny handguns to semi-automatics like the one used in Newtown. US federal law requires gun-dealers to be licensed and to perform background checks but that does not apply to "occasional sales" at gun shows.

Apparently UN statistics show that there are 3.2 killings involving firearms per 100,000 people in the US, compared with 0.1 in the UK and Australia.

If you have a subscription to The Times, you can see this article:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article3635340.ece

I'd like to think that reporter at Columbine was fired from his job or even prosecuted (for idiocy, if nothing else) but I don't suppose that was the case.

I'm very glad I'm not in school in Chicago! In fact I'm very glad I'm not of school age now; what with the violence and the "sexting" I was reading about in the weekend paper. Is there any innocence left these days?

Today's Daily Telegraph reports that Mrs Lanza is a "prepper" and "survivalist" who has been hoarding supplies and weapons in advance of global meltdown.

Apparently a Republican Congressman very helpfully suggested that the school staff should have been armed for protection.....the mind absolutely boggles.

I'll be able to tell you what The Daily Telegraph says when I read the article properly tomorrow but, apparently, the perpetrator's mother possessed machine guns and an enormous amount of ammunition. I doubt that she was thinking about wildlife when she bought those!

Thanks for that. Morgan Freeman's very articulate and he's right, of course.

Sorry, Harold, I left an "s" out of the blasted link!

www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/dec/14/learning-speak-american/

You might be interested in reading this blog by a British writer editing his own book for the American market:

www.nybooks.com/blog/nyrblog/2012/dec/14/learning-speak-american/