BF2S Forums Bush's speech...my god.

usmarine2005 wrote:

sergeriver wrote:

usmarine2005 wrote:

"Depends what your definition of is, is." - Bill Clinton

Find another quote, this one is getting old.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Depends what your definition of sexual relations, is.

Hunter/Jumper wrote:

tictack's posts allways suk

Ah, irony.

GorillaTicTacs wrote:

WTF?!?!  This is their FIRST FREAKING RESPONSE?!?

The first response from some of my liberal friends was "ban the guns and this won't happen." Both sides are guilty of jumping to conclusions, pal. Hell, just today I heard one con talk show host and another lib host guess that "gunmen like these probably play too much Doom."

Hunter/Jumper wrote:

tictack's posts allways suk

The Authoritarians

What is it with the US and lone gun men going "postal"?, I mean it happens so often in the US you guys even coined a term to describe it.

It's not gun ownership, other first world countries have higher gun ownership, sure they have more checks and balences for gun ownership but it ain't that alone.

Why do Americans think it would be a great idea not just to blow your own brains out but to take as many people with you????

Because in the US you need to work too hard and too long to make your lifestyle the way you want it to be.  The result of this is families that don't really know each other.  Mental illnesses that go untreated (cost is a factor), parents that are more concerned about outward appearances to the neighbors ("My boy would NEVER do that...") than actually figuring out what their kids are up to.

Other Westernized countries can and do have these incidents, but at nowhere near the rate or frequency they happen in the US.  Violent crime in general (NOT just gun crime) is astronomical in the US compared to any other civilized country, yet we have the harshest penalties for it to no effect.  So, you want my list of things to blame for why this happens:

• Emphasis on punishment instead of prevention of crime, useless against a suicidal killer or someone that places no value on their personal rights and freedom.
• Lack of training in schools to identify at-risk kids (Cho never should have made it to college).
• Psychiatric treatment is lazy and usually pill-based, full accurate diagnosis is prohibitively expensive in the US
• The US health care system makes long-term voluntary treatment for these people devastatingly expensive.
• Long parental working hours means less time knowing anything about junior.
• Stigmatization of the mentally ill - if you were to check in to a mental hospital for a few days to prevent a panic attack, for example, you would be marked for life in the US among your friends and family.
• Bullying in school.  Yes its a problem, but I don't know the solution.  Lets just say I was amazed during my stay in Germany how the whole "clique" concept didn't really exist.

My little brother blew his brains out at the age of 14 with a shotgun. (http://www.jewishworldreview.com/bob/greene031901.asp http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m … i_17382263)
Though he became a poster child for anti-bullying campaigns, I know from hours upon hours of listening to his revenge theories what his mental state was and bullying was just a part of the total picture.  If he hadn't killed himself at an early age, he would have done a lot more damage later.  He was also a blind "follower", which I guess always disgusted me, though I didn't know why at the time.  It was just another fraction of his mental illness, but one that made him easily manipulated and therefore an easy target at his school.  The fact that he was also in a mental hospital for two months (at a cost of $9000 to my dad when the insurance from his work denied to cover it), where he was juiced up and basically untreated, didn't help much.  The nail in his coffin though came from our narcissistic mother, who basically "disowned" her imperfect son and said as much to him.  Having a son with minor "mental difficulties" was an embarrassment in her little yuppie social circle, and hence why he was sent away to live with my real dad.  Yes, his final death came through the barrel of a gun, but if it wasnt a gun it would have been a rope, or a pile of pills, or drano.

As you can see, these kinds of incidents are born of a diverse cocktail of little parts that add up.  Warning signs, factors, circumstances.  Most of the time they don't make a big media splash.  A suicide rarely even makes the local news.  A single homicide usually doesn't either in a larger city.  But in the end its the result of a minor mental illness from any number of factors, provoked and ignored over a (sometimes short) lifetime, and then culminating in tragedy.

As a PS, this also explains why today I'm always trying to show blindly-obedient followers how to think for themselves and hate the leaders that take advantage of them, especially leaders that make them harm themselves or others on their behalf.

Last edited by GorillaTicTacs (2007-04-20 01:29:54)

Kmarion wrote:

san4 wrote:

Bubbalo wrote:

Be fair, their first response to 9/11 was "let's go shoot some people", what do you expect?

QFT and LOL

Umm no, we mourned, looked at our security risk, and changed our policies. Then with the support of most the world we went into Afghanistan who were openly supporting terrorism.

I've read the speech GWB made after 9/11, and half of it talks about mercilessly hunting down those responsible.  Not that you shouldn't hunt them down, but as a first response at a Presidential level, somewhat inappropriate IMHO.

iamangry wrote:

You're talking to the wrong forum.  By the time I got back to my dorm from the academic side of campus on Monday, a thread had already been made and there had already been two pages of people talking about gun control instead of the tragedy.  At least Bush waited a day.

But the difference is position.  If I were the President of a country where this had just happened, my first response would be sympathy for those involved.  I'm not, it isn't.

In which case the response could easily have been that it was too early to comment on an appropriate response.

Bubbalo wrote:

In which case the response could easily have been that it was too early to comment on an appropriate response.

What you need to ask yourself is is it the fault of the reporter for asking the question too early or the fault of the PR person for answering the question when asked?   I submit that it is the fault of the reporter.  I met a lot of reporters last week, and let me tell you they tried so hard to find conspiracy and drama and bullshit because that's what sells.  It's the duty of the PR person to answer the reporter's questions, not dictate what questions are ok to ask.  It is however, the duty of the reporter to practice responsible journalism... something only very few of them actually did last week.

I think you're confused.  We're talking not about the President's response, but about the way he chose to first respond.  Since the reporters thought gun control was the important issue here, they asked PR about it first, which is why Tictacs is able to say its the President's first response.

Allow me to elaborate...
Bush's first response: gun control, which was prompted by the reporter saying, "what about gun control?"
Bush's response:  some junk about gun control.  This is the substance of the response as opposed to the "first response" which I take to be the subject of the response.  In not so many words, this thread is about the subject and not the substance.  You may now refer back to post #42.

iamangry wrote:

Allow me to elaborate...
Bush's first response: gun control, which was prompted by the reporter saying, "what about gun control?"
Bush's response:  some junk about gun control.  This is the substance of the response as opposed to the "first response" which I take to be the subject of the response.  In not so many words, this thread is about the subject and not the substance.  You may now refer back to post #42.

Apart from the fact that you still seem to fail to understand the fact that a first response is a response, even by your definition he was talking about gun control in both cases when he could have told the reporter to ask the question at a more appropriate time.

So, you're saying that iamangry is as dumb as an inanimate object?  That isn't very nice.