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Sends you thoughts and prayers, they are saying this may be the worst school shooting yet - don't read further if you are easily upset - If anyone complains I say some things are important, priorities and all that - just skip the thread if you don't like it - but it's going to be all over the news They say at least 27 shot - still breaking news - terrible http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/14/us/connecticut-school-shooting/index.html?hpt=hp_t1 Shooter reported dead at Connecticut elementary school By Michael Pearson, CNN December 14, 2012 -- Updated 1741 GMT (0141 HKT)

I have to say that I do not engage in posts or comments made by you Cyn .. but this one is important enough to put aside any issues of what went on in the past. The shooter is on FB ... his name is Ryan Lanza, and I just saw his page. He seemed like an ok, level headed boy. He came to CT today to kill his mother who worked at the school. All this death because of an issue between him and his mother. Tragic.

Thank you moonstorm, I think our petty differences should take a back seat to this horrific event - good for you Anderson Cooper says the death toll is up to 30 The President gave a heartfelt emotional speech in part saying "Today America is broken hearted"

The media just updated the name of the gunman. The name originally given was incorrect. They say it's Adam Lanza, not Ryan (who is the brother)

I don't really want to engage in any bickering too - and I've been posting as page since early June in complete peace and I want to keep it that way be who you are moonstorm - but if you do refer to me I prefer page just page I think we should keep these children in mind, and anytime someone wants to make snarkey comments - we should just stop and these of what is really important and real world (sorry pg) where real people get hurt and die. I'm not going to rise to the bait, as Pat says - and just post - so please before anyone here want to be rude - think of those kids and send prayers and good vibes to the families so we all can get our priorities straight

My heart aches for the families of the victims. Some only 5 years of age

As some of you already know...Newtown is my hometown. There are no words to describe the moods, emotions, grief that the people in this town are experiencing from this horrific, unthinkable, senseless act of violence. The healing process will be a very long road ahead for the poor families who have so tragically lost their loved ones, mostly innocent, very young children. On a positive note...the community is joining together and helping to hold each other up during this most difficult time. Please keep Newtown, Connecticut in your thoughts and prayers. Embrace those who you love each and every day...show them and let them know just how much you love them each and every day...life is such a fragile, precious gift. Peace.

MAK, hugs to you and your community. This is the epitome of senseless act. It's hard to imagine how anyone could ever get in the state of mind to commit such an act against innocence. So sad that so many young children have had to learn the harshest reality life has to offer at an age they should have visions of Christmas, not armed assailants running through their heads. Thoughts for the healing of your community. Yvette

Lots of good vibes to you MAK and your home town - so sorry about this, sad and sorry

There are no words to speak about my despair concerning human violence MAK - I feel so sad about what happened in your Home town, these kids, slaughtered in a horrific outburst of dark emotions - or whatever it was, that let this young man kill so many kids and some adults You all are in my prayers

...and his own mother - they say he wanted to hurt what his mother loved and she loved those kids

Living under the gun by Bill Moyers Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and 300,000 gun-related assaults in the U.S. Firearm violence may cost our country as much as $100 billion a year. Toys are regulated with greater care and safety concerns than guns. So why do we always act so surprised? Violence is alter ego, wired into our Stone Age brains, so intrinsic its toxic eruptions no longer shock, except momentarily when we hear of a mass shooting like this latest in Colorado. But this, too, will pass and the nation of the short attention span quickly finds the next thing to divert us from the hard realities of America in 2012. We are after all a country which began with the forced subjugation into slavery of millions of Africans and the reliance on arms against Native Americans for its Westward expansion. In truth, more settlers traveling the Oregon Trail died from accidental, self-inflicted gunshots wounds than from Indian attacks – we were not only bloodthirsty, we were also inept. Nonetheless, we have become so gun loving, so blasé about home-grown violence that in my lifetime alone, far more Americans have been casualties of domestic gunfire than have died in all our wars combined. In Arizona last year, just days after the Gabby Giffords shooting, sales of the weapon used in the slaughter – a 9-millimeter Glock semi-automatic pistol – doubled. We are fooling ourselves. That the law could allow even an inflamed lunatic to easily acquire murderous weapons and not expect murderous consequences. Fooling ourselves that the second amendment’s guarantee of a "well-regulated militia" be construed as a God-given right to purchase and own just about any weapon of destruction you like. That’s a license for murder and mayhem and it’s a great fraud that has entered our history. There’s a video of which I’d like to remind you. You can see it on YouTube. In it, Adam Gadahn, an American born member of al Qaeda, the first U.S. citizen charged with treason since 1952, urges terrorists to carry out attacks on the United States. Right before your eyes he says: "America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely, without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?" The killer in Colorado waited only for an opportunity, and there you have it -- the arsenal of democracy transformed into the arsenal of death and the NRA -- the NRA is the enabler of death -- paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion. With the weak-kneed acquiescence of our politicians, the National Rifle Association has turned the Second Amendment of the Constitution into a cruel hoax, a cruel and deadly hoax. I'm Bill Moyers. http://billmoyers.com/segment/bill-moyers-essay-living-under-the-gun/

Do We Have the Courage to Stop This? By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: December 15, 2012 IN the harrowing aftermath of the school shooting in Connecticut, one thought wells in my mind: Why can’t we regulate guns as seriously as we do cars? The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns. Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence. So let’s treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis that claims one life every 20 minutes. The United States realistically isn’t going to ban guns, but we can take steps to reduce the carnage. American schoolchildren are protected by building codes that govern stairways and windows. School buses must meet safety standards, and the bus drivers have to pass tests. Cafeteria food is regulated for safety. The only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has five pages of regulations about ladders, while federal authorities shrug at serious curbs on firearms. Ladders kill around 300 Americans a year, and guns 30,000. We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don’t have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys. What do we make of the contrast between heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and craven, feckless politicians who won’t stand up to the N.R.A.? As one of my Facebook followers wrote after I posted about the shooting, “It is more difficult to adopt a pet than it is to buy a gun.” Look, I grew up on an Oregon farm where guns were a part of life; and my dad gave me a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday. I understand: shooting is fun! But so is driving, and we accept that we must wear seat belts, use headlights at night, and fill out forms to buy a car. Why can’t we be equally adult about regulating guns? And don’t say that it won’t make a difference because crazies will always be able to get a gun. We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths, any more than we have eliminated auto accidents. But if we could reduce gun deaths by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved annually. Likewise, don’t bother with the argument that if more people carried guns, they would deter shooters or interrupt them. Mass shooters typically kill themselves or are promptly caught, so it’s hard to see what deterrence would be added by having more people pack heat. There have been few if any cases in the United States in which an ordinary citizen with a gun stopped a mass shooting. The tragedy isn’t one school shooting, it’s the unceasing toll across our country. More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. So what can we do? A starting point would be to limit gun purchases to one a month, to curb gun traffickers. Likewise, we should restrict the sale of high-capacity magazines so that a shooter can’t kill as many people without reloading. We should impose a universal background check for gun buyers, even with private sales. Let’s make serial numbers more difficult to erase, and back California in its effort to require that new handguns imprint a microstamp on each shell so that it can be traced back to a particular gun. “We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” President Obama noted in a tearful statement on television. He’s right, but the solution isn’t just to mourn the victims — it’s to change our policies. Let’s see leadership on this issue, not just moving speeches. Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands. The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings. In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half. Or we can look north to Canada. It now requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them. For that matter, we can look for inspiration at our own history on auto safety. As with guns, some auto deaths are caused by people who break laws or behave irresponsibly. But we don’t shrug and say, “Cars don’t kill people, drunks do.” Instead, we have required seat belts, air bags, child seats and crash safety standards. We have introduced limited licenses for young drivers and tried to curb the use of mobile phones while driving. All this has reduced America’s traffic fatality rate per mile driven by nearly 90 percent since the 1950s. Some of you are alive today because of those auto safety regulations. And if we don’t treat guns in the same serious way, some of you and some of your children will die because of our failure. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-do-we-have-the-courage-to-stop-this.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

There's no way to grasp this kind of tragedy, no words to explain the why of it. MAK, my heart goes out to everyone in your community. To parents everywhere. To everyone that's lost a loved one to senseless violence.

It seems like it is on every channel. I have only been able to watch a couple of minutes of the coverage since it happened. It is too horrifying to process. I pray deeply for every single person touched by this.

MAK, i can`t express my words. I wasn`t at home this weekend, but this horrible news were everywhere - i think it was Friday evening in our news. I heard "Conneticut" and i heard "Newtown", it was back in my mind, but i wasn`t sure for 100% if it was YOUR town - or not. If so - i knew your kids are no longer in elementary school age - that was the next thing that came to my mind. Now this is quite hard - hard to express: from various pictures you showed me in the past, i always could imagine how Newtown is - the houses, buildings, public places, surroundings - a wonderful town in New England. It felt like i was there. It is now very hard to take - to combine this with the recent news. It is all horror.

Mak- having this happen to kids makes this seem aready like something happening to family. To know that you as part of the PG family are so closely connected to this town makes it even more personal. I'm so very sorry and my thoughts are with you and everyone in your community. I hope for the continued strength,positivity and support that is building as your town tries to heal. Peace and Light Anne

From: Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel" Dear President Obama, I was shocked and horrified by today's savage massacre of innocent children and adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.We in Israel have experienced such cruel acts of slaughter and we know the shock and agony they bring. I want to express my profound grief, and that of all the people in Israel, to the families that lost their loved ones. May you and the American people find the strength to overcome this unspeakable tragedy. With my deepest condolences, (Signed) Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel"

The Connecticut school massacre: How the world sees us Coverage of the school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, was splashed across newspaper front pages around the world, a testament to the universal horror of a tragedy in which 20 children, all of them ages 6 and 7, were killed in their classrooms by a lone gunman. There was an outpouring of sympathy from the international community, which was inevitably followed by utter bewilderment at America's continued obsession with lethal weapons. The U.S. is home to 270 million privately held guns, which equates to an average of nine guns per 10 people. (In second place, with roughly 1 gun for every two people, is Yemen, "a conflict-torn Arab nation still dealing with poverty, political unrest, a separatist Shia urgency, an al Qaeda branch, and the aftereffects of a 1994 civil war," notes Max Fisher at The Washington Post.) It is no coincidence that the U.S. also boasts the highest rate of gun-related deaths among developed countries — an American is 20 times more likely to die at the hands of a gun then another member of the developed world. Here, some reactions from around the world: Canada's The Globe and Mail: There is something inexorable about the phenomenon of mass shootings in the United States. We have been forced to write about it with tragic regularity for years. We have exhausted adjectives to describe our horror and revulsion. We have stated and restated the problem… The time for platitudes is past, Mr. President. It’s time the U.S. cured its gun sickness. Britain's The Guardian: The final difference is in many ways the most destructive of all. This is America's sheer difficulty in conducting any kind of rational collective conversation about gun control. In any other country, a shooting spree of the sort that took place in Newtown would set off a serious public debate. That's what happened after Dunblane in the U.K., after Port Arthur in Australia, and after [Anders] Breivik's killings in Norway. Nothing like this is now possible in the polarized gun culture of America, where law and politics have been unable to respond to such events for at least 20 years. That is why President Obama's very mild call this weekend for "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this," was regarded as so unusual... Mad men with guns will always be a danger, whatever the gun laws. But modern America still seems to lack the will to make even modest regulatory changes, let alone to confront a real and growing danger to the health and survival of significant numbers of its young people. The final difference is in many ways the most destructive of all. This is America's sheer difficulty in conducting any kind of rational collective conversation about gun control. In any other country, a shooting spree of the sort that took place in Newtown would set off a serious public debate. That's what happened after Dunblane in the U.K., after Port Arthur in Australia, and after [Anders] Breivik's killings in Norway. Nothing like this is now possible in the polarized gun culture of America, where law and politics have been unable to respond to such events for at least 20 years. That is why President Obama's very mild call this weekend for "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this," was regarded as so unusual... Mad men with guns will always be a danger, whatever the gun laws. But modern America still seems to lack the will to make even modest regulatory changes, let alone to confront a real and growing danger to the health and survival of significant numbers of its young people. Briain Masters at Britain's The Telegraph: In Arizona, where the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the slaughter of six others took place last year, almost anyone can have a permit to carry a concealed weapon and be allowed to take guns into a bar (where presumably they are going to drink something more potent than lemonade); that same state's legislators have talked about passing laws permitting teachers and students to carry their guns to school with them. Such is the contagion of madness. Germany's Die Tageszeitung: Beyond the individual state of the killer, the U.S. has a national pathology. The legality of gun ownership is a matter of course in the U.S., more so than anywhere else in the world. In 2012, some 270 million firearms were in private ownership. Every year, (thousands of) people are killed with them. In most states it's easier to get a firearm than a driver's license. This madness can only — if at all — be stopped in moments like this one. Against the tragic backdrop of 20 murdered children. And of a president like Barack Obama who has just won an election. The right wing has been pushed back a little, the public is appalled by the massacre. Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung: President Obama's "never again" are little more than plaintive words. He's trying to provide comfort, but he certainly isn't promising any improvement. During Obama's first term, more than 40,000 of his compatriots died in a hail of bullets. One out of 10 of these victims was under the age of 18. He never even had the courage to at least come up with stronger laws to take some of the deadliest weapons out of the hands of civilians. Viewed in political terms, that is at least equivalent to the crime of failing to assist a person in danger. Obama points to the constitutionally protected right for US citizens to possess weapons. In reality, however, he is wary of a battle with the Republicans and the gun lobby. Their opposition to almost any kind of gun control borders on political complicity in murder and manslaughter... [T]here is no place in Western Europe where violence from gun barrels rampages in the way it does in the United States. Germany's Stuttgarter Zeitung: Nowhere else in the world are so many weapons in circulation as in the US. In no other country are citizens as well armed. The U.S. Constitution guarantees every American the right to move about in public as though he or she is John Wayne in person. One can see it as a national tradition. But this martial approach to liberty is also a relic of the past and one that is out of step with the times. Every 20 minutes, a U.S. citizen is murdered by a firearm. American schoolchildren are killed by bullets 10 times more often than in comparable industrialized countries. Such numbers speak for themselves. Anne Davies at Australia's Sydney Morning Herald: To Australians it seems incredible that U.S. politicians will not move to control guns. It seems illogical in the face of global statistics and our own experience of the success of the gun amnesty. [T]he bigger task for American is to become a gentler, more trusting society, so that school children do not have to be drilled in cowering in store rooms. Chemi Shalev at Israel's Haaretz: "God takes pity on the kindergarten children" poet Yehuda Amichai wrote bitterly of a country in which it is the grownups," often Israeli soldiers, who are forced to pay the price. In America, God has no favorites: He allows even tiny angels to be massacred in a crazed and senselessly obsessed outburst of a lone gunman, armed to the teeth. Perhaps, when President Barack Obama was shedding a tear, he grieved not only as a parent who thinks of his own children but also as a president who cries for his beloved country. These unthinkable but nonetheless recurring bloodbaths by shooting are peculiarly, if not exclusively, American, a stain on its image that gets brutally bigger as time goes by. Tzipi Shmilovitz at Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth: America is not ready to talk about how it is easier to get a handgun than it is to see a doctor, not ready to speak about the video games that have extreme violence. It is just willing to sweep up everything under the carpet of tears. Peter Hellyer at the United Arab Emirates' The National: How fortunate we are that in the United Arab Emirates such an event would appear to be almost inconceivable. Long may that remain so… In the U.A.E., with about 8 million people, an equivalent rate would be 222 gun-related deaths annually. Yet so far this year, as far as I can see, there's been one — and that was either a suicide or an accident. India's The Times of India: For those griping about the American right to bear arms, wake up. This is the 21st century and America's a settled state, not the rough-edged, wide open spaces of the 1780s when the Constitution was framed and everything, from land to liberty, was based on violent contests. Bearing arms then might have made sense — doing so today is swallowing the nonsense posed as liberty by commercial lobbies. Some argue weapons empower victims against aggressors. If so, should second-graders pack pistols in their schoolbags? Such shaky logic simply intensifies dangerous situations. http://news.yahoo.com/connecticut-school-massacre-world-sees-us-105500647.html

Mak, I'm with you in thoughts and with all the people surrounding you in these dark hours. You know that I'm a teacher, and thus I'm deeply shocked. My pupils are a few month older than Newtown children. And even when I try to think in a "rational way" to what happened, I must admit that I properly fail to find the beginning of a reason to such an amount of senseless violence and suffering. Even if a deep cultural gap exists between Europe and the USA dealing with gun ownership, and even if we are much more reluctant towards the owning of guns there, the same situation occured this same year, not far from Ceridwen house in Toulouse. Gun ownership is thus one part, but only a part of the problem. I keep all your community in my thoughts, knowing that such a trauma will be overcome collectively. You're right to remind us how fragile life is, and how every day attention is precious.