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I hope all of you will join me in prayers for our children who were shot yesterday. It is the most tragic event of our state, and painful for not every Virginian, but every parent.
I can't imagine the fear in every parent's heart who has a child going to college at VATech. I have friends who are professors there, and my heart is so broken that they, along with the families of every student, must go through what they have gone through, then the media sensationalizing it, everyone speculating what went wrong. How about the NRA saying this is exactly why the gun laws need to be lightened up? So everyone will be armed to protect themselves. Now, you know, you WANT to send your children to a school where everyone carries a gun, don't you? Forgive me, but the NRA carries far too much power here in the US. I think I will vote against whomever they support, no matter what the platform.
To everyone who has lost a child, my heart breaks for you, and I pray your hearts pain is eased in good time.


Live so that when you arise in the A.M, Satan shudders & says..
'Oh sh t..she's awake!'
Joined: Jun 2001
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And only a teacher (or their spouse) understands how many hours are spent unpaid on your own time. My wife would spend almost 2 hours of off time for each hour of class time. And how much money we spent out of our own pockets as the school did not find so many things "necessary" and this was in the US. Belize is so much worse on teacher pay and supplies. We have a neighbor who teaches at a government school, and when they give tests they have to make copies for the students out of their own funds. Anyone who teaches in Belize has my respect as they sure do not do it for the money!!

Joined: Apr 2007
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hi s&s--tragic event--what will be learned from this??--a lot of finger pointing and someone (or more)will go down for neglect, not reading that crazies mind when he wrote his stories--everything. Who is to blame!!NRA does not have the answer in arming everyone. It is a shame that we will have to run our schools and Universities like a jail in lock down mode while classes are on. As a retired teacher I know that I and some of my colleagues have felt a danger to our safety in the class rooms, but how to get anyone to believe that?? I grieve for the families and friends of those murdered and injured. Take care.

Joined: Mar 2006
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first, S&S, my deepest sympathies and condolences. the sensationalization of a tragedy is very difficult for those involved. i chose to watch only as much as i need to in order to get the facts, then i change the channel. there are very real people involved in this whose lives are shattered, their wounds will never heal...only get less obvious in time.

as for teachers, i am the daughter of a Philadelphia School teacher. When i was young, my father would come home after having gone through metal detectors etc. phila currently has one of the highest murder rates in the country. teaching there is a combat sport, where, in the school my uncle teaches in, the principle was BEATEN by a student...and all they could do was suspend the FIFTH GRADER!

now, as for the hours they work, anyone who has lived with a teacher knows, all those papers, tests, projects need to be created, graded and recorded. so, while they might only appear to work 9 months out of the year, they are also working about 14 hours a day in order to do that.

without teachers we have no doctors, lawyers or anything else. our values are a bit screwed up here...and the greatest minds, the ones that could be inspiring and enlightening our kids, are going elsewhere as it is nearly impossible to support oneself and ones family on a teachers salary...especially in certain demographic areas.

peace

Joined: Nov 2002
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This side of the Atlantic, it is all too easy to sit and watch the tragic events unfolding in Virginia in the US and think it is a million miles away from the society we live in. The massacre at Virginia Tech was the 19th shooting on an educational premises in the last 10 years in America - an alarming fact but one that Britons seem to believe highlights the enormous gulf between the two societies in relation to guns. People need to stop burying their heads in the sand. What has just happened in the US is not confirmation of how much safer our society is but a stark warning of what could happen in the UK if the growing gun culture is allowed to develop unchecked.
To date, there have been two major killing sprees in the UK and neither of them was carried out by a youngster. In March 1996, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and a primary school teacher at a school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and in 1987, unemployed labourer Michael Ryan, 27, went on the rampage in Hungerford, Berkshire, killing 16 before turning the gun on himself. Two truly shocking disasters, but not a track record to match that of the US. We should be grateful that we have witnessed such atrocities so rarely, but we should not be lulled into thinking that a relatively trouble-free past (in relation to gun crime) automatically translates into a safe future.
Violent start to the year

The signs are there that the UK has already begun a downward spiral. In February this year, five young men were shot dead in south London. They weren't all killed in one incident, but whether that makes the statistic more or less terrifying is difficult to determine. Also in February, three men were shot dead in Manchester in just one weekend. It's been a violent start to the year and it isn't showing any signs of slowing down. At the start of this month, a pregnant woman was shot dead at her home in south London. It was in a well-to-do area and didn't seem to be gang-related. All of a sudden, the gun problem appeared to be spreading through all parts of society.

With gun-related incidents on the up, it is fair to assume that the number of weapons in circulation is also on the up. Youngsters seem to be able to lay their hands on firearms and they are happy to use them. Up to this point, incidents have largely been gang-related, which is a massive problem in its own right, but not the size of the one in the US. The most concerning aspect of this rise in shootings in the UK is that it is only a matter of time before a disgruntled teenager, rather than a gang member, acquires a gun. If that happens, we will not be talking about the horrors of isolated fatal shootings, instead we could well have a massacre on our hands. It may sound like the sort of thing that only happens in the US, but if the guns are there, it is an almost inevitable consequence.
It's not rocket science

So what can be done? A ban on guns is already in place and rightly so, but the ban on its own is not enough to erase the problem entirely. It needs to be properly enforced. A ban without ruthless enforcement is nothing more than a token gesture. Severe punishments for possessing a firearm, not just using one, are needed. Thankfully steps are being taken to put this into practice and this month the government did introduce measures that should help clamp down on gun use, under the Violent Crime Reduction Act. It is a start, but the government must throw all the resources it can into stopping guns getting into circulation. That way the problem can be stopped at its root. If there are no guns, there can be no gun crime. It's not rocket science. It may not be quite as black and white as that and no system can prevent all guns getting into the UK, but the more effort that is put in, the less guns there will be and the lower the risk becomes of a Virginia Tech-like mass shooting.

An opinion piece by Tom Reed - MSN News Editor


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Imagine those who drafted the Constitution, I bet they would have changed it knowing what is happening today.

NRA fa' life [%^$#]!


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It's a sad fact that many kids begin to show symptoms of mental disturbances after puberty. Many are very bright intellectually. How many unbalanced students are on a campus of 25,000? Most of those "weird" types are tossed off as a nuisance and are shut out either by their own choice or by others who might be able to get close enough to them to make some kind of difference but don't. It's too simplistic to say that guns alone are the danger in those cases.

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As said by Malcolm X quoting Stephen Biko (google it), "Violence begets violence". The chickens have come home to roost. Live by the gun........


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A friend of a friend of mine was killed in the massacre. I don't like refering to it as a tragedy, because of the poetic implications of the word. Massacre more accuratley describes what took place.

Massacres occur when there are unarmed victims. Unfortunatley, while concealed carry is allowed in Virginia, it was not allowed on the Virginia Tech campus. A lot of people are wishing that they had allowed properly licensed people to carry.

Quite frankly, when a psycho gets his hands on a gun (which no law can prevent...think about the "drug war") you want guys like me around, i.e. guys with guns who know how to use them. If there had been other people armed, far fewer individuals would have lost their lives. Crazy psychopaths are a fact of life, but allowing them to do whatever they want doesn't have to be.


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the constitutional right to bare arms stems from one thing, and one thing only.... No citizen of the US should ever be out armed by their government. that is the purpose of the right to bare arms. if the govt can have an AK47, so can a citizen, thereby creating a balance of weaponry so as to avoid dictatorship and ensure democracy.

i'm not smart enough to begin to hypothesize how to solve the problems of guns and violence in america. but i do believe that the right to bare arms is a constitutional necessity. clearly something can be done to help prevent senseless violence, but i also have to point out that senseless violence occurs, and has occurred since man began walking the earth. it might have been for land, for water, for a buffalo, but by todays standards, those were senseless deaths. think wild wild west.

anyway...

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