On Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:25:46 -0500, nemesis wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> That you've found.  Again, just because YOU didn't find it doesn't mean
>> it didn't happen. <sigh>
> 
> well, if you follow your logic, then there's a lot more school shootings
> happening right now that go unreported.

It's very possible there are.  I don't know - I don't visit every school 
in the country.  Do you?

What you're doing is applying a straw man argument to my logic.  Sorry, 
but that ain't gonna work.

>> Clearly not enough.  After all, I found a bunch of other incidents that
>> predated your statistics and it didn't take a lot of time to do so.
> 
> I found this:
> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/020712.html
> 
> Pretty interesting.  It just goes on the general statistics of murder
> crimes -- so there's no way to know if school shootings are in.  Murder
> crimes, thus, seem as high nowadays as in the inbetween war times of the
> 20's and 30's... only that then it was the result of war, gangsters and
> others while today it's insane people with access to guns shooting
> school teens.

Huh, now I wonder if that counts things like the guy who blew up a school 
in the 1920s in Wisconsin.

Or coming into the 1980s, the gang crime in California or in New York.  
Or Miami, for that matter.  Or in downtown Minneapolis.

>> > huge crowds, big news in TV.  If shootings happened in schools, it
>> > would be everywhere, politicals would show up in TV etc.
>>
>> And that would've happened in the 50s or the 60s as well?
> 
> probably not, as we brazilians were living under a military dictatorship
> who regularly would arrest and murder University professors and other
> rebels.  So, it's possible to imagine that some school shootings
> happened then, but it was politically motivated against a few targetted
> individuals, not some random nut with a weapon unloading his gun at
> random students.

Reports of some of these school shootings are that they're not random in 
nature - that the kids are shooting their tormentors.  Not always, of 
course, but much of the time.

> I'm not saying it's not as bad, just that this current shooting modality
> *is* a novelty.

I don't personally think any kind of shooting is a "novelty".  I think 
that trivializes the situation.

>> Times change.  News didn't used to be sensationalized the way it is
>> now.
> 
> I call that BS.  The press has always chronicled passionate crimes like
> these shootings.  This kind of news is the real revenue of newspapers...

It has not played it up the way it is now.  Today, you get a shooting 
like Columbine and it's in every major newspaper in the country and many 
around the world.  In the early 1900s, news traveled relatively slowly.  
In the 1800s, it traveled even slower.

News tended to be localized as a result.  I challenge you to prove any 
differently.

>> So, you haven't seen proof of some things and you believe them, and you
>> haven't seen proof of other things and don't believe them.
> 
> I don't believe such violent act as random students being shot at will
> by maniacs in a school would go unnoticed by the press or by school
> staff and the community they live in.  

I would agree with that, both now and in the past.  It's the *spreading* 
of news that has changed, and made us more aware of the things that go on 
in neighboring cities, states, and countries.  When something happens 
today, it's known about on the other side of the planet before the 
story's even complete.  Go up on news.google.com and have a look at the 3 
stories (as of this moment) on a major explosion at a pipe factory in 
Provo/Springville, UT.  News like that would never have made it out of 
the state in the early 20th century.  And that's a story that's still 
developing.  Right now, there are people in India and China who know 
about that because news travels nearly *instantly* thanks to our 
technology.

It wasn't always that way, and it's IMO foolish to think that that's the 
case.

> Someone, somewhere, would make a
> big noise out of it, make such horrid news spread.  Unless there are no
> survivors to tell the tale...

The reach was not as great in the past as it is now.

Jim

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