The Housing Bubble

Kent State.

School shootings in the US have been remarkably consistent since the 1900’s, with about fifty students killed in schools every year and a dozen mass incidents a decade. The fifties and sixties were just as rife with psychopaths as the seventies and eighties onward.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shootings_in_the_United_States

‘School shootings in the US have been remarkably consistent since the 1900′

OK, but this isn’t all school shootings. Last week there was a shooting at a mall in Oregon. The guy who shot people at a Sikh temple, the movie theater shooting. There was the one in Tucson, and at Ft Hood. And the one last year in Afghanistan where the US soldier allegedly went house to house for three hours. I’m probably missing others.

Agreed, Ben. Rampaging is part of our genetic makeup; right up there with mob violence, warmaking, and in its more refined form, team sports competitions and popular entertainment media. The impulse is there in all of us. More disturbingly, we celebrate it.

Except when the individual does it….

This violence will stop when these cowards start getting mowed down by adequate security, armed citizens or close by police officers. Hell, I have no kids but I would volunteer one or two days a week of free security for any neighborhood school. Why not call on retired military, retired police or security professionals to donate time?

Gun free school zone signs won’t do the trick.

This violence will stop when these cowards start getting mowed down by adequate security, armed citizens or close by police officers.

I’m not so sure about. It seems that they want to die…they just want to take others with them. Even if we mow them down, the most that will do is maybe reduce the body count. I wonder if instead there’s a way of creating less people who hate life and humanity.

Some will see that it’s not as lucrative….in terms of deaths per incident. Less chance of making the news cycle. Or…we can continue to produce a culture of victims hiding in closets and begging for their lives.

I wonder if instead there’s a way of creating less people who hate life and humanity.
Sure, easy-peasy. Exterminate the human race. After that there definitely won’t be any human left who hates life & humanity, and no way to make any more either. Not a realistic wish when carried to extremes or a realistic solution.

If we did like the guys who jump on the field during baseball games(camera operators immediately point the cameras to the sky and the announcers talk about something else), it would put a stop to these acts.

These guys want to be famous and on the front page of every newspaper and on every news broadcast.

Civilians have owned semi auto rifles with large capacity magazines at least since the 20s, I think. Some of them were even full auto (think Tommy-gun) until those became highly regulated. So we’re getting close to 100 years.

“How many school shootings were there in the 1970s? 1960s? 1950s? etc.. It’s not the guns.”

“Were assault weapons available to civilians back then?”

Full auto weapons were available to civilians back then.

The restrictions on full-auto firearms are a result of the Hughes Amendment (99th Congress, H.AMDT.777). The amendment prohibited the general public from possessing fully-auto firearms manufactured after May 19, 1986. Rep. William Hughes (D-N.J.) proposed the amendment late in debate and at night when most of the members of the House were gone. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), a long proponent of gun control, was presiding over the House at that time and a voice vote was taken. Despite the fact that the bill appeared to fail, Rep. Rangel declared the amendment approved and it was incorporated into House Bill 4332. Once passing the House, H.R.4332 was incorporated in its entirety into S.49. The Senate passed the final S.49 on April 10, 1986 by voice vote and it was signed by the President on May 19, 1986.

Gun control was first instituted by individual rights hero, Governor Ronald Reagan, in the early 1970’s in response to Black Panthers who (legally) marched into the in-session first day of the California Assembly at the Capitol Building in Sacramento bearing AK47’s and Mini14s.

See: Mulford Act

Gun control was first instituted by individual rights hero, Governor Ronald Reagan,

Cognitive dissonance alert!

“Were assault weapons available to civilians back then?”

What exactly is an assault weapon? If you mean semi-automatic, yes.

Don’t forget, if I assault you with any weapon, ballistic or non ballistic, that weapon becomes an assault weapon.

Nick,

You are asking people who have likely never seen one let alone fired one. Good luck.

An assault weapon is a firearm designed to kill people, as apposed to a firearm designed to hunt animals or put holes in paper targets. High rates of fire, large magazines, bayonet mounts and the like are sure signs.

The general public doesn’t need assault weapons.

The general public doesn’t need assault weapons.

Nope. Not until right up to the moment when they them really badly.

This is such a misnomer.

Rates of fire: I can fire an AK full auto and be lucky to hit anything from 25 meters out on full auto. Switch to select fire and I am much more accurate.

Large Magazine: I can take a weapon with a large magazine and stand across the room from you and miss you because I fire quickly, knowing I have a lot of rounds. I can sit across a field from you with a scoped, bolt-action rifle and end your day with a single pull of the trigger.

Bayonet mount: Whether I have a bayonet mount or not, why would I jab you with a bayonet if I still have ammo? If I wanted to stab you, why would I mount a knife on my gun to do it?

Why is this an assault weapon?

Another to consider:
Caliber of ammunition: The ‘assault weapon” you are thinking of in your mind fires a very small round. There are much larger rounds, which create much larger wound channels available to the public. Why is this your concern?

This whole discussion about “assault weapons” is arbitrary. People need to stop and realize that this world is not always necessarily a nice place, full of good people, where good things happen. Trying to create new rules isn’t always the answer. Sometime you just need to embrace the suck.

It’s hardly arbitrary. We’re talking weapons designed for soldiers to kill other soldiers. They don’t belong in the hands of anyone else. It’s easy enough to label certain fire arms as such.

If you put that AK with a large mag on auto and fire into a crowd, you’ll hit a lot. A hunting rifle won’t do as much damage. And many of the crazies will spend time learning to be accurate. Instead of taking time to aim and killing one at a time, they can spray a crowd. The bayonet mount is just a potential feature of an assault weapon.

Your mentioning calibre brings a up a good point. How would you feel about having 50 calibre machine guns floating around? Are they fair game?

As a business guy, I like to think in terms of cost-benefit. What possible benefit is it to have assault weapons in the hands of the general public? The costs, by contrast, can be significant.

What possible benefit is it to have assault weapons in the hands of the general public?

If we reach the point of being forced into another American revolution, we’ll need the populace to have all the firepower they can possibly get.

Does that count?
Not in my book. Charles Whitman just happened to use a building on the UT grounds as a vantage to shoot whoever he could.

I am still grateful I changed my mind about bicycling to the UT library that day.

Charles Whitman just happened to use a building on the UT grounds as a vantage

And in the current slaughter the gunman apparently just chose the elementary school for dramatic effect. He didn’t work there, had no ties to it.

What’s the diff?

The root is lurking in our DNA — all of ours. In earlier times, the violent psychopath would become chieftain. But through the civilizing mesh of socialization and regressive benefit to the whole they simply become heads of TBTF financial institutions.

Any estimates on the relative numbers of innocent people killed by small arms fire / hand weapons in 2 categories: (1) perps were bands of armed men commanded by dictators or warlords (from Genghis Khan to Saddam) and (2) perps were criminally insane like the most recent one in the news.
Don’t count battle deaths & forget about dronezaps. Just consider hand-held weapons.
I would guess the ratio is at least 99:1 in favor of warlord induced killing. Handwringing & grief expressed over the death toll is probably a billion to 1 the other way.

In earlier times, the violent psychopath would become chieftain.
You have omitted all the other violent psychopath would-be chieftains rubbed out & removed from history by the ultimately successful psychopath, the one whose strong arm defeated his competitors.

” In earlier times, the violent psychopath would become chieftain.”

Yes, and in those times Lanza would have bravely chased a bison off a cliff while hunting.

bravely chased a bison off a cliff
His tribe would most likely have either ostracized him or done him in. Or perhaps he would have gone on a vision quest & died of exposure or starvation while pushing himself a little farther than was compatible with life. I don’t think Lanza would have made a very good Genghiz Khan, got to have yourself together to do that.

Speed Kills
What’s the lesson of the Connecticut school massacre? The faster the weapon, the higher the body count.

This morning, a madman attacked more than 20 children at an elementary school in China. As of this writing, there are no reported fatalities.

A few hours later, a madman attacked an elementary school in Connecticut. As of this writing, 20 of those kids are dead.

The difference? The weapon. The madman in China had a knife. The madman in Connecticut had a semi-automatic rifle.

Look up the worst school massacres in history, and you’ll see the pattern. Madmen are everywhere. They strike without regard to gun laws, mental health care, or the national rate of churchgoing. They’ve slaughtered children in every country you’d think might have been spared: Scotland, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Finland, Japan. They’ve falsified every pet political theory about what kind of culture or medical system or firearms legislation prevents mass murder.

But one pattern holds true: The faster the weapon, the higher the body count. It’s not politics. It’s logistics. If you stick a knife in your first victim, it takes time to move on to your second. You might need two stabs or more to finish off the first kid. By then, the other kids have begun to flee. Soon, the cops will be here. How much time do you have? At some point, it’s time to off yourself. And all you managed to kill were two lousy kids because the only weapon you had was a kitchen knife.

Google “knife control” and you’ll find legions of gun-control skeptics comparing U.S. firearm attacks to Chinese knife attacks. In the past two years, there’s been an epidemic of knife attacks on Chinese schools. Some of them show up on Wikipedia’s list of school massacres. But none crack the top 10 because the body counts never rise above single digits. It’s just too hard to kill that many people, even little kids, with a knife.

Guns do more damage. Look down the list and you’ll see gun after gun after gun. But not all guns are equal. I’ve gone through the 25 worst massacres on the chart, and nearly every shooter had a semi-automatic weapon. The one exception was a guy who had speedloaders and a bandolier so he could keep firing…

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/human_nature/2012/12/connecticut_school_shooting_semi_automatic_weapons_and_other_high_speed.html

Timothy McVeigh, without firing a single shot, killed 168 people. All he needed was diesel and fertilizer.

once a soldier “goes there” and “does that” there is, for him, no going back.

What about those hundreds of thousands of soldiers who came back from WW2 to live mostly normal lives?

‘who came back from WW2′

‘Once-Censored WWII Documentary Shatters Cliches’

‘Their conditions manifested in such maladies as stuttering, nervous tics, paralysis, amnesia, and social phobias, leading them to an 8-week stint in one of these huge Army hospitals. Huston and his crew had done such a wonderful job of drilling down 75 hours of interviews between the Army psychiatrists and their patients — exposing at a rare level (at least at that time) the pain, the sense of isolation, guilt, and melancholy these men brought home from them the war — that the Army simply banned “Let There Be Light” and kept it from public view for the next 30 years.

The Army was so frightened that the film would hurt recruitment that when Huston tried to screen it for his friends at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a couple of military police came and seized it, supposedly on the pretense that the film would violate the privacy of the vets involved. The War Department claimed the releases signed by the men had been lost, but the Army never attempted to get new ones. In Huston’s words:

” We then pointed out that, though the film indeed represented a deeply personal investigation into the innermost lives of these men, nothing was disclosed which might cause them to be ashamed. We proposed asking them individually to write letters of clearance, but the War Department said no. The authorities had made up their minds.”

So the documentary was locked up in a vault, along with some of the most truthful reflections of the war and the human psyche captured on film up to that time.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/once-censored-wwii-documentary-shatters-cliches/

I don’t doubt for a second that many people were warped by their combat experiences in WW2. But many more came back to lead very normal lives.

I was disputing combo’s “once you see combat, you’re forever freaked” dictum. Seeing combat in your youth/early manhood has probably been the norm for most of human history.

“Once you see combat, you’re forever freaked”

Yours words, not mine.

Yours words, not mine.

What does ‘no going back’ mean, then?

many people were warped by their combat experiences in WW2. But many more came back to lead very normal lives.
A huge number of people warped by combat go on to lead what appear to be normal lives. Those lives just LOOK normal. You haven’t interviewed enough combat vets, or even vets who saw combat for a distance that was a bit safer.
Screaming nightmares that regularly wake up the spouse, recurrent over many months, seem to be common sequelae. Just my observation.

‘Seeing combat in your youth/early manhood has probably been the norm’

Yes, war is normal, say worshipers of the state.

‘In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic holiday.’

‘Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State.’

‘With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war.’

‘The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men.’

‘The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government.’

‘The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of justice…Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized.’

‘For war is essentially the health of the State.’

‘The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal.’

http://www.antiwar.com/bourne.php

‘For war is essentially the health of the State.’

Perhaps. But prior to the state was ‘war of all against all’. And since the invention of the state, there has been no shortage of war. Some form of war seems to be our natural state. If anything, the invention of the state was probably mainly due to our mutual desire for protection and advantage in this eternal war.

I’m not saying this warlike tendency is a good thing, but perhaps it is. It may be one of the driving forces that helps us evolve. We’re debating on the internet, which probably wouldn’t exist if not for the competition of the Cold War. Penicillin has saved many more people than were lost in the war that led to its invention. Evolution moves in mysterious ways.

Yes, war is normal, say worshipers of the state.

ZINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!

Dudgeon, never have seen it, but thanks for the tip on a good flick! I declare, I get more tips here on this blog about good things to read, watch and lissen to! I don’t exactly have time to go out and suss ‘em out on my own.

Thanks to all of you, respected members of the HBB community.

Yes, war is normal, say worshipers of the state.

ZINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
No credit for truisms. Nothing profound or ‘zingy’ here. War is normal, and not just to ‘worshipers of the state.’

nor·mal
/ˈnôrməl/
Adjective
Conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.
Noun
The usual, average, or typical state or condition.
Synonyms
adjective. regular - standard - ordinary - common - usual
noun. normality - normalcy - perpendicular
Well, leave out the ‘perpendicular’ part

Nonsense.

Organized violence, i.e., war is no more “normal” than violence between two individuals.

Learn what war is before you claim it “normal”.

Organized violence, i.e., war is no more “normal” than violence between two individuals.

If peace is normal, then why is it such a rarity?

Are these films a reflection of society, or the other way around? Do they make these things because we want them? Why are they so popular? I don’t have the answers.

Is this all a reaction to feelings of decline, or helplessness? It’s interesting that today the US govt sees the use of force or control as a first reaction to almost any event. Is that a reflection of what most people want?

Is this all a reaction to feelings of decline, or helplessness?

helplessness in the face of perceived injustices. anger about the helplessness. hatred towards everyone they think is involved. what better way to get revenge in a society that one hates, than to kill innocents, especially innocent children.

Dudgeon,

Yes, I saw it as well and found it profoundly disturbing for the dissonance it forces us to confront in our conflicting emotions. Too Honest For Television. Similarly, “Five Fingers” appears on cable every now and then, inducing much of the same squirm factor. Each highly recommended, not so much for the production values (although FF has an extraordinary soundtrack) as for the self-induced sermon.

Luckily all we have semi-automatic guns.

at least guns can be used for self-dense. we have much more terrifying technology that there’s no defense against. people with BS degree in bio-science can make bugs that there’s no defense against and will spread silently before one even knows they’ve infected or spread it. new bugs that could be spread through the air, like the common cold would be impossible to stop.

there are people that would willingly use those things because they falsely believe that there are too many people on the planet. in truth, all our pollution and food problems can be solved with science and technology. and the more people we have working, the more we will be able to build space based defenses against comet or asteroid impacts. we can’t do those things without a growing population.

“Self-dense”. Excellent!

Here’s another self-dense individual who thought his extensive home arsenal would protect him from the ravaging hoardes:

“… The police called out through a bullhorn that they were there looking for illegal firearms and narcotics, then stormed in, breaking open doors with sledgehammers, handcuffing four security guards, and shooting a guard dog dead.

Inside, the cops found $20,000 in cash, a lab stocked with chemistry equipment, and a small armory’s worth of firearms: seven pump-action shotguns, one single-action shotgun, two 9-mm. pistols, 270 shotgun cartridges, 30 9-mm. pistol rounds, and twenty .38 rounds. Vexingly for the police, all of this was actually legal….”

http://gizmodo.com/5958877/secrets-schemes-and-lots-of-guns-inside-john-mcafees-heart-of-darkness

Tj, you must have read Clancy’s “rainbow Six.” scary premise. But yes I think there are people who think the world has too many humans and they actually want extermination. Maybe that is what was in the killer’s twisted mind at that school. Also in China. Since 2010, 20 Chinese school children were killed by similar mass attacks, not by guns, but by knifes. An additional 50 Chinese school children were I juried in those attacks. The perps were not other kids, but adults. Just as sick as that killer in Connecticutt.

you must have read Clancy’s “rainbow Six.”

no, i haven’t.

But yes I think there are people who think the world has too many humans and they actually want extermination.

i fear there are many.

Since 2010, 20 Chinese school children were killed by similar mass attacks, not by guns, but by knifes. An additional 50 Chinese school children were I juried in those attacks.

i think Ben is correct that we’re not looking in the right places for the cause.

I’m betting the shooter thought he was doing the little kids a favor by saving them from a life like he’d experienced. Or perhaps it was to punish the legacy of the teacher-parent who had hurt him.

In any case, the murdered children were simply pawns in a larger game, not the point of it.

It’s wash,rinse,repeat time folks! Just as with Columbine,VTech,Aurora,Tucson,etc,etc. There will be: Shock,Horror,Anger,Debate,More Debate,Tear Jerking Memorial,Teddy Bears and Candles,Razing of the School with Some park and “We will never forget” plaque. And then we will all go back to our “regularly scheduled programming” until the next boot stomps on the anthill. We are basically ants when it comes to this as we just rebuild the hill each time a boot stomps on it. It’s never improved, reinforced, or relocated. Mental Health is a long avoided issue in this country and it’s all coming home to roost. Somehow I recall a certain political party doing away with funding for dealing with mental health many years ago. Blowback is a terrible thing. This all blows over in a few months until another individual storms into another facility and blows away more people. Somewhere in the far future, archaeologists will unearth all of these monuments to massacre and ponder why there were so many and what they really did to solve anything.

I’m not sure how gun control is going to solve this. If you ban semi-autos and limit the psycho to a 6-round revolver, then what? He’s still psycho. He’ll succeed in killing 6 people instead of 22. And if he carries 3-4 loaded revolvers, he’ll get his 22 anyway.

No, prevention needs to happen earlier on in the process.

“Here’s another self-dense individual who thought his extensive home arsenal would protect him from the ravaging hoardes:”

Your example sites a meth lab. Good Job on the progressive spin.

I’m betting the shooter thought
My educated guess is the shooter wasn’t ‘thinking’ the way most readers of the HBB think of ‘thinking.’ He was acting out a shooter game protrayed countless times in his head, triggered by stage, screen & media including news items. Monkey see, monkey do, combined with whatever internal distress s/he had. Combined with going bats*t crazy.

I have never been for gun control, but there is something to be said for limiting magazine size, and perhaps having a serious discussion about semiautomatic rifles and pistols. If this guy had a bolt action rifle with a 5 shot magazine which he had to reload, there is no way he’d be pumping 11 rounds into each defenseless child. It would have given people time to get away from him, and the damages would have been far less.

When you’ve got an AR-15 with a 30 round clip backed by two semiautomatic pistols sporting similar capacities, you can lay waste to incredible numbers of unarmed humans in a short period of time. With a single-shot bolt action rifle, not so much. Let’s be honest here. These guns are good for one thing- killing humans. The biggest fear I have insofar as losing my guns has nothing to do with defending myself against bad people, but rather losing my defense against a rogue government.

The biggest fear I have insofar as losing my guns has nothing to do with defending myself against bad people, but rather losing my defense against a rogue government.

Therefore what?

What about 8-shot shotguns? What about compound bows with 12-arrow quivers? What about throwing knives?

Whether the “debate” to follow is constructive or not is up to the HBB posters

I don’t think there can be much of a debate on guns in this issue. I offer no debate but just an observation. It’s reported that the guns were registered to his mother. Assuming she was sane and not a criminal, that is her Constitutional right. That’s the way it is.

There are many positives coming from the right to bear arms and I would not make an effort to change it. But rights are not free, and we see that sometimes the price of our rights comes very dear. God please help those families.

So the phantom part of the income is determined from what I spend it on and not from where it came?

“So the phantom part of the income is determined from what I spend it on and not from where it came?”

Yes. The part of your home equity which is spent on luxury consumption henceforth becomes dead equity, aka ‘phantom income.’

I like it. Where do I go to sign up?

“So the phantom part of the income is determined from what I spend it on and not from where it came?”

Darrell — hopefully still in — Phoenix would argue the opposite. The phantom is where the income came from. What you spent it on was real.

I think the “phantom” part of the income is the future labor which you promised to do, to earn your wages, which you would eventually use pay off the debt. But now you don’t need to labor to pay the debt. Instead, the bank is giving you $$, which you use to pay off debt right now. No different than a Grandma writing you a very big check for Christmas. That’s why it’s taxable.

Oxy, an apt analogy, makes it very easy to explain to others (like kids). Thanks.

And yer empty skull is vast enough for a few of us here.

Kick yer feet up Jethro!

This altering of prices by the Very Clever is not only easy, it is cheap.

The Very Clever - because it is their game - do not have to bear the expenses that the Less-Than-Clever have to bear.