20+ murdered in US school shooting. Many primary school children among the dead.

[seafoid]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4&feature=youtu.be#t=1m40s

[theskull1]

Have always believed this. Instead the media are blaming video games

[give her dixie]

Good article that sums up a lot of what I have been feeling over the past month or so and the murder of young school children

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/us-killings-tragedies-pakistan-bug-splats

[seafoid]

Good article that sums up a lot of what I have been feeling over the past month or so and the murder of young school children

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/us-killings-tragedies-pakistan-bug-splats

Obama crying over dead children, as long as they are not Pakistani

[Declan]

Ya. The "Christian right" in the US for want of a better term are among the most un-Christian people I have ever seen or heard anywhere

As an old teacher I've mine used say - some people are full of religion but have no Christianity.


I see the NRA have gone to ground as well.

Last Thursday, the National Rifle Association (NRA) boasted on their Twitter feed: "Did you hear? Our #facebook page reached 1.7 million "likes" today! Thanks for being a friend!".
On Saturday, one day after the massacre at the Newtown, Conn. elementary school, the NRA deactivated its Facebook page. And the NRA's main Twitter account has gone silent since Friday.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the NRA and its well-funded political operation is "vastly overrated" and was unable to prevent President Obama's re-election. "If Congress wasn't so afraid of the NRA — and I can show you that they have no reason to be — but if they were to stand up and do what was right for the American public, we'd all be a lot better off," the Mayor said.
Meanwhile, a just released Washington Post-ABC News poll done over the weekend shows that Americans favor stricter gun controls by a 54-43% with 3% having no opinion.
But last spring he wrote, "all of our freedoms, all of our rights, all of our values... All of them will be lost if Barack Obama is reelected." In an October column in the NRA's newsletter "First Freedom," LaPierre wrote: "With four more years of Obama, your firearms freedoms are gone. And we'll spend the rest of our lives mourning the freedoms we've lost... Every freedom we cherish as Americans is endangered by Obama. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

[bridgegael]

Gun sales surge since this travesty. Crazy!!  i hsve an american cousin and he is very much "pro gun& he reckons a change in the 2nd ammendment will infringe on their human rights. Also he says all teachers should be trained and armed.  Its hard to make sense of these peoples views.

[93-DY-SAM]

We only think we have protesting problems in the North.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/westboro-baptist-church-picket-connecticut-school-shooting_n_2312186.html

Just proves there is no low these sickos won't stoop to.

[seafoid]

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/dec/15/our-moloch/
Our Moloch

Garry Wills



Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan's war on humankind:


First Moloch, horrid king, besmear'd with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents' tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children's cries unheard, that pass'd through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)


Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—"besmeared with blood" and "parents' tears." They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children's lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).


The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god's bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol's teeth. The White House spokesman invokes the silence of traditional in religious ceremony. "It is not the time" to question Moloch. No time is right for showing disrespect for Moloch.

The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. How do we worship it? Let us count the ways:


1. It has the power to destroy the reasoning process. It forbids making logical connections. We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism. Thus do we deny global warming, or evolution, or biblical errancy. Reason is helpless before such abject faith.



2. It has the power to turn all our politicians as a class into invertebrate and mute attendants at the shrine. None dare suggest that Moloch can in any way be reined in without being denounced by the pope of this religion, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, as trying to destroy Moloch, to take away all guns. They whimper and say they never entertained such heresy. Many flourish their guns while campaigning, or boast that they have themselves hunted "vermin." Better that the children die or their lives be blasted than that a politician should risk an election against the dread sentence of NRA excommunication.



3. It has the power to distort our constitutional thinking. It says that the right to "bear arms," a military term, gives anyone, anywhere in our country, the power to mow down civilians with military weapons. Even the Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any every madman can indulge his "religion" of slaughter. Moloch brooks no dissent, even from the highest court in the land.


Though LaPierre is the pope of this religion, its most successful Peter the Hermit, preaching the crusade for Moloch, was Charlton Heston, a symbol of the Americanism of loving guns. I have often thought that we should raise a statue of Heston at each of the many sites of multiple murders around our land. We would soon have armies of statues, whole droves of Heston acolytes standing sentry at the shrines of Moloch dotting the landscape. Molochism is the one religion that can never be separated from the state. The state itself bows down to Moloch, and protects the sacrifices made to him. So let us celebrate the falling bodies and rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.

December 15, 2012, 5:25 p.m.

[Milltown Row2]

Automatic machine guns legal in America, but Kinder surprise is illegal because it poses a threat to children!!

[Orior]

NRA statement coming on Friday

http://home.nra.org/pdf/StatementAdvisory.pdf

[theticklemister]

NRA is made up of four million moms and dads, sons and daughters...........very touching


Is mom a real word??

[ballinaman]

Just watched Bowling of Columbine again there for the 2nd time ever after seeing it when it came out. Crazy stuff.

[Gabriel_Hurl]

Is mom a real word??

Yes, it's as real as mum or mam

[Hardy]

It's not as real as Mammy, though.

[Declan]

If you can stand it, Veronique Pozner's eulogy for her six-year-old son Noah at one of the first two funerals held for the Newtown victims.

"The sky is crying, and the flags are at half-mast. It is a sad, sad day. But it is also your day, Noah, my little man. I will miss your forceful and purposeful little steps stomping through our house. I will miss your perpetual smile, the twinkle in your dark blue eyes, framed by eyelashes that would be the envy of any lady in this room.

Most of all, I will miss your visions of your future. You wanted to be a doctor, a soldier, a taco factory manager. It was your favorite food, and no doubt you wanted to ensure that the world kept producing tacos.

You were a little boy whose life force had all the gravitational pull of a celestial body. You were light and love, mischief and pranks. You adored your family with every fiber of your 6-year-old being. We are all of us elevated in our humanity by having known you. A little maverick, who didn't always want to do his schoolwork or clean up his toys, when practicing his ninja moves or Super Mario on the Wii seemed far more important.

Noah, you will not pass through this way again. I can only believe that you were planted on Earth to bloom in heaven. Take flight, my boy. Soar. You now have the wings you always wanted. Go to that peaceful valley that we will all one day come to know. I will join you someday. Not today. I still have lots of mommy love to give to Danielle, Michael, Sophia and Arielle.

Until then, your melody will linger in our hearts forever. Momma loves you, little man."