Tag Archives | Violence

Sales Of Assault Weapons Skyrocket Following Sandy Hook Shooting

By on December 19, 2012 in News 11

It turns out that a school massacre is better than any advertising that money can buy. The Hartford Courant reports:

Some gun retailers this week are reporting a spike in store traffic, in excess of the usual holiday rush, in the aftermath of the Newtown murders. Since Friday’s shooting, customers have crammed parking lots and thinned out inventories.

Doug Odishoo, owner of Delta Arsenal in Meriden, said, “As soon as this shooting happened on Friday, I almost sold out of everything. Saturday I couldn’t keep up with it.” He said people walked into his shop, looking at the AR-style guns and saying, “I better get one before I can’t.”

Resurrected talks of gun control, some shop owners said, are pumping up the market for rifles, especially AR, or assault rifles, like the Bushmaster’s civilian version of the military’s AR-15 that Adam Lanza used on Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

In Worcester, Mass., at Pullman Arms, co-owner Alicia Merritt called the jump in business “dramatic.” She said she did $30,000 in business on Monday — up from a usual Monday of about $2,000.

… Read the rest

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Semiautomatic Weapon Manufacturer Bushmaster’s ‘Man Card’ Campaign

By on December 18, 2012 in News 19

Via Buzzfeed, a fascinating just-deleted social media-based marketing campaign from Bushmaster, maker of Adam Lanza’s gun of choice. The Man Card campaign is centered around panic over potential loss of masculinity, with the ability to publicly revoke others’ “man cards,” and the promise that use of a Bushmaster assault rifle will provide the reinstatement of one’s man status:

The company that produces the semiautomatic rifle used in the Newtown, CT, shootings is currently running an online campaign based around virtual cards that “prove” the bearer’s manliness. One specifically talks about how unmanly it is to be afraid of elementary-school kids.

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Chinese Man Who Stabbed 23 Children Was Inspired By Mayan Doomsday Rumors, Authorities Claim

By on December 18, 2012 in News 5

Is the possibility of a looming apocalypse causing people to lose it in horrific fashion? Via the Christian Science Monitor:

Chinese police said that they suspect that the man who stabbed 23 children in a rural Chinese elementary school just hours before the Newtown, Conn., massacre “injured innocent people and children with a knife because he was influenced by doomsday rumors.” None of the wounded children died of their injuries.

The knifing spree is the darkest manifestation yet of how end-of-the-world rumors have taken hold in China. Chinese are susceptible to doomsday reports, suggests social psychologist Wei Zhizhong, because “scientific knowledge is still not widespread in China. People have abandoned their traditional mystical relationship with nature, but they are still exploring scientific ways of coexisting” with the natural world.

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On Fox News, Mike Huckabee Says The Sandy Hook Massacre Was Caused By Lack Of School Prayer

By on December 17, 2012 in News 85

For U.S. conservatives, it’s time for lawmakers to stop beating around the bush and finally put a halt to the epidemic of mass shootings — by mandating the Bible in public school. Via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a 2008 Republican presidential candidate who is now a pundit and host on Fox News did not mention guns, gun culture, or assault rifles in talking about the country’s latest mass killing, but said, “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be surprised that schools would become places of carnage?”

Huckabee seemed to see church-state separation as responsible for the horrors Friday at an elementary school, where 20 pupils died: “We’ve made it (school) a place where we don’t talk about eternity, life — that one day we stand before, you know holy God in judgment,” said Huckabee.

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The Mentally Ill Are More Likely to Be Victims Than Perpetrators of Violence

By on December 16, 2012 in News 10

Picture: Vitaly Efimenko (CC)

Graham Brown writing at Bipolar World, from 2005:

In this article there is summarised the results of just a few studies regarding mental illness and violence from a number of very respectable sources to allow a fair and unbiased assessment of the risk posed by those with a mental illness for you, the reader, to consider.

Firstly, from the Canadian Mental Health Association and it’s pamphlet – “Violence and Mental Illness”,

”In today’s media reports about mental illness, there is a tendency to emphasise a supposed risk between violence and mental illness.  News stories regularly suggest that there is a strong connection between mental illness and crime.  In fact, people with a mental illness are more likely to be the victims, rather than the perpetrators of violence.”

“Recent studies have showed that alcohol and substance abuse far outweigh mental illness in contributing to violence.  A 1996 Health Canada review of scientific articles found that the strongest predictor of violence and criminal behaviour is not major mental illness, but past history and criminality.”

On the question of does mental illness cause violence?  The CMHA does go on to say:

“Mental illness plays no part in the majority of violent crimes committed in our society.  The assumption that any and every mental illness carries with it an almost certain potential for violence has been proven wrong in many studies.

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Texas Man Arrested For Carving Pentagram Into His Son On 12/12/12 ‘Holy Day’

By on December 14, 2012 in News 12

CNN reports a case with all the telltale signs of demonic possession, or the impending end of the world:

A Texas man appears to have interpreted the date of 12/12/12 as a reason to carry out a grotesque and sinister act. “I shed some innocent blood,” Brent Troy Bartel told a police dispatcher from the Fort Worth suburb of Richland Hills in a phone call just after midnight.

When the dispatcher asked him to clarify, Bartel responded in a matter-of-fact tone, “I inscribed a pentagram on my son…’Cause it’s a holy day.”

When police officers arrived at the home, they say they found the traumatized boy standing shirtless with a large red pentagram carved into the skin on his back. His blood was smeared on the front door of the house. They arrested Bartel, whose manner was flat and emotionless. What exactly may have motivated Bartel, who is being held in local jail on a $500,000 bond, remains unclear.

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Unheard Audio Tapes From 1969 Could Reveal A Dozen Additional Manson Murders

By on October 22, 2012 in News 0

Charles Manson’s Family may have committed more than twice as many killings as previously believed, the Los Angeles Times reports:

Los Angeles police officials said they hope to bring closure to the families of victims in a dozen unsolved homicides that occurred near places where the Manson family operated during its slew of murders four decades ago. Officials revealed Thursday that they hope audiotapes recorded in 1969 between Charles Manson follower Charles “Tex” Watson and his attorney could provide some answers.

Watson is serving a life sentence for his role in some Manson killings. He has been fighting to limit the Los Angeles Police Department’s access to the tapes.

This spring, a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge in Texas granted the LAPD’s request to review eight cassette tapes containing hours of conversations between Watson and his late attorney. Watson’s new attorney appealed, and the case was stalled.

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Chimps Attacking Humans In Revenge For Habitat Destruction?

By on October 16, 2012 in News 42

Does this portend a future war between apes and humanity? Local media in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are interpreting a spate of chimp violence perpetrated against people as motivated by revenge. Via New Scientist:

Habitat loss may be to blame for an apparent spate of violent attacks by chimpanzees on humans in the war-torn eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Mistrust of chimpanzees has been heightened by local media reports, which suggest that as many as 10 people have been killed and 17 injured by chimps, in acts that were reported as “revenge attacks” for people encroaching on their territory.

Klaus Zuberbuhler, a psychologist at the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK, and scientific director of the Budongo Conservation Field Station in Uganda, says restricting the chimps’ habitat can certainly affect their behaviour, though it is debatable whether the chimps’ aggression towards humans is a form of revenge.

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A Dozen LAPD Officers Beat And Taze College Student Over Beer In Brown Paper Bag

By on October 9, 2012 in News 36

Video surreptitiously filmed by a nearby security guard shows approximately a dozen men participating in a mass beating resembling a brutal gang initiation — except that the participants are Los Angeles police officers who went to town on 23-year-old Aibuidefe Oghogho, after he made the mistake of raising his arm in defense when an officer initially shoved him:

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Americans Love Torture and the Idea of Nuclear War Because the TV Tells Them To

By on October 6, 2012 in News 14

Picture: wizardryo (PD)

James writes at My Bloggity Blog:

In a shocking new poll it was revealed that American’s are more like 24’s Jack Bauer than ever before in their mindset about torture and ways to eliminate terrorists. This poll which was conducted for Foreign Policy revealed that American’s are much more in favor of torture and specific torture methods than they were during the Bush administration which put nearly all of these measures into place and when these torture methods were legal. The kicker is that American’s are also increasingly more in favor of using nuclear weapons to eradicate terrorists regardless of the harmful effects to the environment. It should also be noted that most terrorists don’t even congregate in large enough numbers to justify even a 2,000lb bomb never mind a nuclear bomb.

A quarter of all Americans are willing to use nuclear weapons to kill terrorists.

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