The Boomtwon Rats wrote a song about this event.

'Tell me Why(I Don't Like Mondays)'

Which was the reason Martha Moxley gave when asked why she did this.

There was uncorroborated evidence she was sexually abused by her father.

To say that the Bush regime has a "lax stance on gun control" is an understatement. The regime vigorously opposes gun control.

I am fortunate to live in a school district that would never consider allowing Laura Bush to read to students...for fear that the voters would never approve another school district bond issue if they allowed her on campus.

JPFO, Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership, and the founding fathers of this nation strongly disagree with this far-fetched NWO article.

The Boomtown Rats song came out in 1979, way before the Winnetka shooting referenced in the article.

However, Bob Geldof's song was inspired by an actual event: the San Diego playground shootings/killings by 16yo Brenda Spencer - and her nonchalant reply for why she did so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Don't_Like_Mondays_(song)

http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/mondays.asp

School shootings are bad. But I wonder what political leanings we can expect in say 20 years after several generations of students growing up in schools obsessed with perfecting their "lockdown" techniques above all else.

I've got friends who are gun-lovers and friends who are gun-haters, so my stance on guns has always been a little more nuanced than the "ban 'em all" and "guns should be compulsory" perspectives hawked in the media.

That said, I was really shocked after the NIU shootings to hear professors that I really respected talking about how we need to be on the lookout for dangerous signs like black t-shirts, trenchcoats, and an interest in industrial music. All the time, I couldn't help thinking that it wasn't trenchcoats or CDs that killed the victims at NIU but GUNS, and I wondered why otherwise intelligent people would follow such obvious diversions from the actual weapons used to commit the crimes.

It was as if guns were, by unspoken fiat, off the table for discussion. And I thought of all the other ways in which we as a nation seem brainwashed to avoid the obvious and to pursue the spurious instead.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. A simple and undeniable truth.

Excuse Me!!!
She made this quote: "If Jews had guns in Nazi Germany, no one would have survived. It would have been an excuse for Nazis to kill with even greater abandon,"
Killed with "Greater Abandon" . . . .
Are you serious???
How many millions were marched into gas chambers and killed?
Millions . . . Yes Millions . . . .
If Millions is not "Greater Abandon" than someone please explain to me what is.
This article is so full of holes I have to laugh out loud while I read it.

Charles Whitman killed 14 people with a high powered rifle in 1966 at the University of Texas.

He also ushered in a new paradigm of mass murder in the United States.

People kill people a lot more often and easily when it is easier to buy a gun than get a driver's license.

Dann wasn't the first school murderer: it was the Ohio National Guard at Kent State.

To be technically correct, Dann was the first elementary school shooter.
Also the Ohio National Guard were judged sane at least prior to the shootings.

And for Tobias, if we were to use gun ownership the way the founding fathers meant it to be used, all those gun owners would be members of the militia, and maybe we could send the craziest off to Iraq.

Here's my compromise. Ban all concealable weapons, i.e. handguns.

Let the sportsmen, the minutemen, and the home defenders keep their rifles and shotguns.

You want to carry protection? Then sling it over your shoulder where the rest of us can see it.

It wouldn't have stopped Charles Whitman, but it might have stopped Laurie Dann. "Excuse me, miss... but why are you taking THAT into the school?"

Second Amendment Safe, Citizens safer.

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people. A simple and undeniable truth."

Yes, but as pointed out in the article, people would kill a lot less people with a knife or by any other means that with a readily available firearm. It might be truth, but it's simplistic and ridiculous to use that as a defense for allowing anybody and their insane mother have a gun where and whenever they want.

I grew up in Idaho where gun ownership is important, primarily for hunting and I don't think guns should be banned. However, I am constantly flummoxed by the logic that putting safeguards into who can purchase guns and what kinds of guns are available for sale is somehow an infringement of anybody's constitutional rights. The constitution does not say I have a right to buy a handgun right here right now. It says I have a right to bear arms, and possibly only in a militia, depending on your interpretation. And it was written at a time when the country was very small and the guns were primarily muskets, not rapid-fire semiautomatic weapons. The gun nuts in this country need to get a freakin' grip and realize that the rest of us aren't hellbent on depriving you of your rights, but would simply like to seek some compromises to keep us all safe. Why is this so hard to understand?

BreeMass - well said!

I live in West Virginia, where even 6 year olds are taught to hunt by their fathers and the absence rate during the first week of hunting season is off the charts. (For awhile, some counties actually closed school that week since it's also Thanksgiving week, but for some reason at least some apparently decided to keep school open and just tolerate the lack of students.) When you visit rural families, they often welcome you into their homes by showing you their gun collection.

Misunderstandings about gun control here abound. I've heard it expressed that any Democrat who is elected will take away "our guns and our Bibles"! And many West Virginians seem to believe that their hunting rifles and handguns will prevail if the gummint decides to "take over" the country. Whatever that means.

One of my poker buddies actually fervently believes that if students in universities were permitted to carry guns, the shootings would either not have taken place or that the shooters would have been stopped before the real damage occurred. He's even said, with a perfectly straight face, that "an armed populace is a friendly populace."

For many people, ideology is a much more potent force than facts, rationality, or even historical evidence. Just as they do with the Bible, they pick and choose their interpretations of the constitution to fit their view of the world. The fact that the word "militia" is in the second ammendment has no bearing on their understanding (or lack thereof) of their rights. Anyway, I started thinking about the real consequences of people being consistently armed.

I play home games of poker at several different friends homes, and generally speaking, most of the players are acquaintances rather than friends. This means that I see them at poker games but know very little about them personally. Sometimes there are as many as 20 or more players. Recently, I thought about how I'd feel about going to a game if I knew that some - or most - of them were carrying concealed weapons. It was a rather terrifying thought, since sometimes someone gets pretty angry about a bad beat or even another person's playing style. They also drink pretty heavily as the night goes on.

In light of this scenario, I then tried to imagine how I'd feel if lots and lots of people decided that they needed to carry weapons "just to be safe" in the streets, in stores, and in restaurants as some of my more extreme acquaintances believe they should. Somehow I just can't see that the world would be a safer place.

I've read that there are places in the US where laws have been passed allowing people to carry weapons on a regular basis. I can't remember where this is or if it was just an attempt to get these laws passed. In any case, it doesn't seem like a very good idea. Sometimes something that sounds good in the abstract becomes kind of scary when put in the context of a real life situation.

The gun-rights advocates seem pretty obsessed with the "last line of defense" - prevailing in a violent encounter with another gun owner.

If they all put as much effort into the "first line of defense" - preventing violence and its causes - then regulation of gun ownership would be a non-issue in this country.

Guys, don't know what to make of it. I grew up in 1960s St. Rose, Louisiana, 15 miles upriver from the French Quarter, but wild & rural. All boys learned to shoot by 8 years old. I was a farm kid & didn't enjoy killing things for fun, so I never hunted. But I did shoot all the time. My parents, like most in the area, were NRA members, and we had handguns of all kinds, shotguns, even an M-1 carbine. To the horror of most folks I talk to today, we didn't even lock them up--we were trained by our parents what they were & how to behave with them.

There was never a school shooting. Incidently there were no stabbings either, and all of us boys carried a pocket knife. (I'm amazed these days at the scene in the old Boys Town movie when Father Flanagan comments on how nice it is that the school's bad boy, played by Mickey Rooney, gave the littlest kid in Boy's Town a knife--we've come a long way--what happened? Something did).

Most of the men in St. Rose wore a pistol at their side. There were never any crazy shootings, and criminals never held up grocery stores frequented by these townsmen.

Gun control is barking up the wrong tree. We've apparently
got some much deeper problems.

And far from a right-winger, I'm a card carrying Green for Cynthia McKinney.

"And far from a right-winger, I'm a card carrying Green for Cynthia McKinney."

Likewise as well here Craig. Somewhere we on the left really lost the thread with this gun control thing. When I am in a conspiracy oriented mindset I wonder if gun control was promulgated by the CFR and other elite organizations to assure a docile population when the corporate globalist war mongering elite* impose a clampdown in a world of scarce resources that they will want to hoard to themselves. Provable? Obviously not but it sure is a different left then the one in the 20s where box cars full of people with gasp eek scary guns would come to the defense of strikers being shot by Pinkerton goons. Something happened between 1920 and 1980 to turn the left against the idea of ever considering armed self defense. Cue bono who benefits from a disarmed and cowardly population?

*And no this is not intended to be anti Semitic, most of the members of this elite are blond blue eyed wasps. Dick Cheney, and the Bush family ring a bell? These blond blue eyed wasps are our true enemy not people who want to preserve our right to own weapons to fight back. And no we aren't fear mongering anymore than the gun control advocates are with their spectre of crazy people with guns. A problem with crazy people, deal with the crazy people, problem solved.

It is in the basic psychology, or mind programming of the gun owning citizens of the US that they have the right to murder people. Since the stresses of modern life are going to be increasing, with unemployment, lack of health care and particularly mental health care, impending food riots, racial tensions and anti immigrant unease, the number of people in the US who hate any other number of groups, and will crack up crazy on drugs , alcholol or plain delusions, is on the increase. Of course, others will decide that they need the guns for defense against the crazies and dispossessed. There are already more gun owners than possessors of sense. Expect more shooting sprees.

I am amazed that people can't see another obvious solution to this problem, and that is humane institutional treatment for the mentally ill:

"She had been investigated by authorities in three states for repeated threats to kill people and even stabbed her ex-husband with an ice pick.

She had a "thing" for raw meat, putting it under her mattress at college while she slept and stealing it from the refrigerators of families for whom she babysat.

She rode elevators for hours wearing rubber gloves to avoid touching the metal.

Two days before the shootings, Dann mailed arsenic laced snacks to former acquaintances and her psychiatrist and hand delivered others, leaking and appearing foul, to fraternities at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

And the day of the shootings she started fires at a Winnetka home and a different school from the one she shot up.

P.S. She was on psychiatric drugs."

Why was she walking around outside a mental instition again? Oh yeah that's right because Reagan defunded mental health provisioning in the U.S.

" More than a third of this country's homeless population have severe mental health issues, including schizophrenia and manic depression. At least one in every six inmates in America have been diagnosed with serious mental health conditions.

The gutting of public mental health services began with Reagan, first in California where he closed state-funded mental health facilities. As president he cut aid for federally-funded community-run mental health programs. The result: thousands of more homeless people in California and nationwide and a spike in the prison population."

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=255943

And Reagan had help from the Thomas Cszaz relativist all kinds of thoughts are OK there is no true reality crowd.

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

And the result now our streets are filled with dangerous paranoid schizophrenics who hear voices and who are suffering terribly sleeping on the street and a few of whom may be be ticking time bombs like Laurie Dann. If we got these people off the street it would not only be the humane thing to do to prevent needless suffering but it would reduce the number of obnoxious spangers, and head future Laue Danns off at the pass. Further it would mean law abiding sane people would be able to keep their firearms as a first line of defense against future fascism. I know both the left and right won't like this idea for the so called left it undermines a rationale for 2nd amendment eviscerating gun control and for the right it would entail more government spending. Yet looked at clearly it seems like a more rational, sane and Constitution respecting position than we see from either NRA supporters or Volvo drivers. Anyone willing to think outside the box and give me some support here?

Learned Helplessness.

We have gun control here in the UK. You cannot just go and buy a firearm, you have to apply for a licence. We have very low incidences of gun crime, and what there is seems to be caused largely, by the illegal weapons brought in by Eastern European or Afro Carribean young men. In a population of 65 million, we only have half a dozen fatal shootings of people who are unknown to their assailant each year. There are more fatal shootings which are the result of gang warfare, relating to drugs, or prostitution.
The US has something in common with Iraq - the level of firearms in the hands of ordinary people. Look what has happened in Iraq, following the invasion and disbanding of the Army and Police force - utter chaos and violence.
If things get really bad in the US, as a result of recession or civil unrest, then I would not like to be an innocent citizen. How can you defend the use of private gun ownership, when so many young and innocent people have perished because of the lack of regulation?

The mass murder record in my state (New York) is held by a man named Julio Gonzalez. Julio didn't use gun at all to kill 87 people. He had a "Blackhawk Hydraulic Oil" plastic bottle filled with $1.00 worth of unleaded regular gasoline and a bic lighter. After being ejected from the "Happyland Social Club" in The Bronx NY he returned for revenge.

My point obviously is that those that wish to commit murder and mayhem don't need guns.

Martha,

I know you have a good heart about violence in our society, but blaming guns for violence in our society is like blaming gas for the high price of oil.

We should be looking for larger, more attainable solutions to both "problems."

Gas price can be reduced if our society commits to building an alternative transport system such as city trollys and trains, more bike paths, electric cars, etc. etc.

Gun violence can be controlled with a more humane society, i.e. more living wage jobs, more opportunity to higher education, universal access to quality medical care, humane prison and court system, a rational drug policy, etc. etc.

If we make the society atmosphere humane, people will feel less stress, less violent, and have more hope. Without hope we have what we have, now, fear and violence.

The fact that we even have to have this discussion in the 21st century definitely shows something about America today. This "every man for himself" USA mentality is clearly demonstrated in the gun issue. Security of every individual is primary responsibility of the state, you can have a tons of guns and still not be safe. Seems to me that freedom to not to give a dam about other people and to kill them if felt threatened together with the hostility to your own government is behind this "gun culture".
As a European, I do not feel the need to have gun to protect me from my fellow citizens or from my government, this whole idea seems to be so silly to me...

"Which was the reason Martha Moxley gave when asked why she did this.

There was uncorroborated evidence she was sexually abused by her father."

WHAT???

I find it disturbing that articles here that support gun restrictions are always attacked by large numbers of comments. It shows how organized the gun lobby is.

How did Martha Moxley get dragged into this? She was killed with a 9 iron.
And really, it's the bullets that kill people. A gun without bullets is a club. Bullets should be manufactured with a "DNA" so that each box of bullets is uniquely identifiable and anyone buying bullets signs for that batch. If the bullets show up in bad places, like inside of other people, the purchaser of the bullets has some 'splainin' to do.

Julio Gonzalez killed 87 people.
I think 9-11 broke that record.
And they didn't have guns either.

Is Martha Rosenburg the pen-name for Stella Goldschlag?

> And while you can't stop the actions of .. the mentally ill, they're not likely to
> commit drive by stabbings.

They could drive a car into a crowd while doing 110 mph. Or torch a church after pouring gasoline around all the exits. Might actually be better off having them shoot people.

The problem with citing Dann's case is that she not only should have been prevented from having a gun but access to an ice pick, lighter fluid, motor vehicle and basically anything more dangerous then a plastic spoon. Her case reminds me of a shooting in California that had roots in Washington State.

A racist held hospital staff with a 'sharp instrument'. Why? He heard voices, was afraid he was going to kill someone and wanted help. They told him he was too violent to help. The cops held him for a while then released him. He went to California and shot up a Jewish daycare. His wife's former husband died in a shootout with the Feds. She's 2 for 2 in picking husbands who make the front page by murdering people. I hate the idea of a police state but in her case, I think the cops should keep tabs on who she dates next.

The solution people propose is banning guns. Well fine. You do that. But that still leaves crazy murderous people wandering around free to buy as much gasoline, matches, arsenic, etc as they want. No we can't stop all crazy folk. But why can't we stop the ones with 'ample warning signs'?

I would rather that a few mentally ill have a small chance of obtaining a weapon, than a police state with a few mentally ill in charge be the only legal posessors of weapons. That's just my two cents.

Blaming guns for violence is like blaming a car's tailpipe for global warming warming. It is merely the last link in a complicated chain. The real question we need to ask ourselves is why do we have so many cold, unfeeling, mentally unstable people in our country. In our society we give people such a narrow line in which to live and if persons can't fit into that line, we marginalize and ignore them, we make it impossible for them to live a productive, fulfilling life resulting in frustration and violence. We live in a judgmental Puritanical, overly regulated and legislated country which results in the highest incarceration percentage in the world (Confucius: More laws, more lawbreakers). Also, in our country, we are told that our greatest glories as a nation have come from violence - Revolutionary War, "Greatest Generation" in WWII - so we view violence and aggression as virtues.
We will never solve the problem of school shootings because we always find scapegoats - Marilyn Manson, goth subculture, "where were the parents?", gun control (not enough/too much), blaming some people as crazy, etc. What we need to do is look at our society and see where we ALL HAVE FAILED and accept responsibility for the world we have created. A system that sets itself up to have only winners and losers will always have its violent malcontents. Unless we move toward a more compassionate and accepting society, we will always have violence with or without gun control. School shootings (and terrorist acts) are perpetrated not by crazies but by people who have become so marginalized and deprived of the benefits of society that their only option lies in destroying the system that perpetuates their subjugation.

"I find it disturbing that articles here that support gun restrictions are always attacked by large numbers of comments. It shows how organized the gun lobby is."

What, like people who think for themselves must be part of some organized lobby? I'm liberal and not part of any gun lobby but I know it is a mistake to take firearms away from law-abiding citizens because when you do, crime goes up, not down.

The UK took away peopole's guns in 1997 and crime soared. Gun crime, property crime, robbery and assault. Why? Because the criminal class knows that when a whole society is unarmed, then their job as criminal gets much much easier.

Someday, maybe we will have progressed and evolved into a really decent sane society where people have no need of guns because there is no more crime. I pray for that day to come, but while I'm waiting, I reserve my right to protect myself and my family from armed criminals.

Just to be clear: I'm not part of any gun lobby, nor do I belong to the NRA (never have). I am liberal, progressive even, but I do not delude myself into thinking that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens makes anyone safer -- quite the opposite.

Don't believe me? Do some research and see what has happened in jurisdictions that have banned guns and others that have loosened up. What are the crime stats? Which jurisdictions have more crime in general and more gun crime in particular?

Although gun control laws for individuals are important, what I'd really like to see are gun control laws for our government. As far as I can tell, our government is completely crazy and has no business owning something as dangerous as a steak knife, much less heat-seeking missiles, cluster bombs, fighter planes and nuclear weapons.

Here here Ticonderoga!

The article puts the first school shooting as 1988 - it isn't even the second. After Charles Whitman, there was Michael Slobodian at Brampton Centennial High school on May 28 1975! The school boasts a couple of famous students, including a Premier's daughter and Scott Thompson of Kids in the Hall fame (who sat in the same row as the shooter). The post video comments are mainly former students:

http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/2007/04/042207_2.html

How come school shootings don't result in increased gun control in the US as it does here!

People with handguns kill people.

David Miller, the Mayor of Toronto, talking about banning handguns completely - in Canada (and restricting their sale in the US).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc06nT2gvjw

tgrantt said:

"I find it disturbing that articles here that support gun restrictions are always attacked by large numbers of comments. It shows how organized the gun lobby is."

That's extraordinarily presumptuous, I am anti gun control and I also think the NRA and their flaks suck because they are right wing. Does it even occur to you that we could have an authentic debate in the left community about whether we have right to armed self defense or not such as was proposed by Malcom X in the 60s? The Zapitistas had that debate and answered in the affirmative for armed resistance and thus won themselves a non racist, non sexist, autonomous enclave where they could organize their communities in a non hierarchical fashion. Imagine if we did the same in the U.S. but we never will if a small faction of the left tars anyone pro armed self defense with the label of being a tool of the NRA. Chavez, Castro, and the spirit of Geronimo (you know armed resisters) look upon tea party gun controllers in disgust. I cry for the weak pale shadow of the left that is left in this country for I see we will be easy pickings for goons with machine guns if the shit hits the fan which is not a remote possibility if the oil runs out.

l_vacek said:

"Security of every individual is primary responsibility of the state..."

As someone with strong anarchist sympathies I find that statement dangerous and ludicrous at the same time, if you add together then number of people killed by British imperialism, the Nazi holocaust, Mao's murdering thugs, Stalin's purges, U.S. war crimes since WWII, and Pol Pot you easily get over 100 million people. Perhaps you want to trust your safety to an institution responsible for 100 million deaths, I for one do not. Safety is an inherent human right that we are all as individuals responsible for, IMO the blue gang of the cops is far more likely to show up to brutalize demonstrators than to help the innocent and weak. I'm sure many of my African American brothers and sisters feel the same way. Note that does not mean I am against all functions of the state like a Libertarian, I believe the government ought to be providing far more food aid and housing aid to the poor, job training, environmental and safety regulation, larger National Parks with real biological corridors as was proposed by old school Earth First!, a living wage guarantee, rights for Union organizers, and building more trains and sustainable infrastructure, all those are all positive things. More cops providing for our "safety" however I think spells a police state.

AndyUK paraphrasing expressed concern about domestic gun violence. Fair enough, however I would add that I do not think the U.K. with it's tens of thousands of surveillance cameras, increasing DNA sampling from wide swaths of the population and support for U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan is any panacea. If the UK government which is collecting tremendous amounts of information on all it's citizens turns on you and you are unarmed what will you do? In many ways the UK already resembles 1984 with microphones in the Bushes like Winston Smith faced, if it got worst you'd frankly be f*cked because you have no way to fight back. Maybe that's your idea of paradise me I'll keep the option of armed citizen resistance to the state open thanks.

Ashu excellent point rather than blaming the symptoms lets raise everyone up so we have a more just sustainable society that takes care of all it's members black, white, Asian, Native American, gay orstraight mentally ill or sane, EVERYONE. I suspect if we had that gun violence wouldn't be a problem regardless of how many guns were available.

Switzerland intentionally arms all it's houses with assault riffles and they don't seem to have the murder or shooting spree problems we have here in the U.S. Here in the U.S. we don't have a gun problem, we have a compassion deficit and glorification of competition promoted by the capitalist ruling class that makes people bitter, hateful, and self destructively violent. The solution to that problem is taking care of that actual problem not taking away the guns that are our first line of defense against tyranny. The old union guys from the 30s understood all these things, where did we lose the thread on the left I am genuinely puzzled? And no I am not an old union guy I am just a 42 year old landscaper and web designer who has read some labor history and talked to the sons of those old union guys and laments everything we have lost with a weak cowardly and defeatist left that has been fear mongered into a corner by the yuppies who believe everything they see on Oprah.

ticonderoga if the cops and military were to disarm first worldwide then I think gun control would be a viable and realistic proposition. However with heavily armed cops and military it seems unwise to face them naked of the ability to fight back if they decide to opress you say based on religious beliefs, political affiliation, sexual orientation, race, gender, etc. If you don't think the Christian fascist nutcases aren't capable of genocide against Muslims and gays you haven't been paying attention. Under those conditions disarming is sheer madness. I for one hope our gay brothers and sisters fight back if they are attacked by thugs of any sort:

http://www.pinkpistols.org/index2.html

Please take a minute to read this web site and think about it...

hoot owl,

You are absolutely right! There would be less crime if the mentally ill were institutionalized and given the treatment they need.

They are a danger to each other in the streets as well as a danger to the general population.

When they are caught committing crimes, they end up in prison, which is very different from a mental hospital.

It is inhumane to force mentally ill people into our communities without any assistance. They need custodial care.