You're a saint for bothering. When I hear statements like the one you quoted, I think of the people who say things like "Remember how great things were in the 50's? When TV wasn't vulgar and kids were decent to their teachers in school?"

And you just wonder if they even knew that the South was still segregated and the whole country didn't have highways.

Yep, violence has definitely gone down a lot since past times.
Strangely, America's perception of violence has countered the actual statistics.
Well, not strangely... look at this media we have.

It's no wonder that a lot of Americans feel less safe now than they did not 20 years ago, and crime statistics have actually fallen since then. We don't even need to hint at the probability that most people's perception of the safety status of the outside world is largely dictated by mainstream media. Nor do we need to really debate the tendency of people to not actually factor in the population at large and compare the occurrences to come up with a set of odds relevant to their life.
Instead, we end up with people that experience a constant sensationalist media sputum of almost glorified violence because it gets ratings. The crime drops, yet their fear of crime rises.
Unfortunately, we won't ever hear the mainstream media telling us we're safer than we were a decade or two ago. That might cause people to feel like their lives are ok, and maybe they can stop trawling the news daily so they can figure out how they're likely to die the next time they walk out of their house...

Actually I don't even remember where the discussion left off or what link your reffering to now. I've been kind of vaguely keeping up with the discusson since the gun control issue. Several different things got brought up, and I kind of just said to heck with it because footballs been on most all afternoon, and thats kept most of my attention to be honest.

This will happen again. And again and again until the utterly mad legislation that allows joe public to walk into a store and walk out with a f*cking gun in their hands.

It's insane and I will never, ever understand it.

However here is an example of how someone with the help of a gun actually did save lives at a school. Of course the media doesn't want you to know that.

Pearl High School shooting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is really sad, I don't understand how somebody could do this. I wonder what could possibly be the reason for killing so many people, including children and even your own mother. Just disgusting. I would never be able to feel good about myself if I'd killed anyone.

Has the police released any information regarding the reason he did it?

Watch this video via the link. The NRA are blaming schools and music videos for it and saying there needs to be a database of people who are mentally ill and security in schools! WTF! That's not going to stop massacres. Gun control might but people can still get passed by using the black market. The NRA are so stupid and want blame everyone else.

http://edition.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp...e-presser.pool

Anybody brought up how the NRA's solution is to have more guns in schools, and post armed guards? :laughing:

NPR said the cost of such a policy would be around 8 billion dollars :laughing:

this was Freebase Dali's suggestion though, so maybe he can shed some light on how this would be productive