William Jefferson Clinton - 04/20/1999 Approximate quote " We need to teach our children how to resolve differences with words and not guns."

He sure is setting the example in Yugoslavia !???

[rant mode on] The gun control people are already on TV. Without acknowledging that guns can't be bought by kids legally... or that these kids didn't get their guns from their parents... or pipe bombs can be built with plumbing accessories and matchheads... or that children witout hope of a better future can't cope.

We, as a nation just can't admit to ourselves that WE ARE THE PROBLEM !! We have developed a society that is upside down. We think that things can be fixed from the top down. There is no reason to lay a solid foundation of principles and an appreciation for the sanctity of life, or guard our children from the mind numbing media of our day, or supervise our childs associations, because our government run schools will handle it.
[rant mode off]

Guns are not the problem... we need to figure out the frustration and delusion of the person who picks up that gun and uses it to kill another human being in cold blood. We need to treat the disease and not the symptom.
The disease is an arrogant civilization in hopeless decline.

The sad part is this... I find myself hoping that Y2K will speed up this decline and get it over with. Why drag out the agony? Let's just start over.

Excuse my ranting please... today's events have surfaced my emotions, my concerns... my fear...

-- WebRNot (webrnot@ncap13k.com), April 20, 1999

Answers

WebR.,

AMEN! Just sent a note to Diane Squire basically expressing the same sentiments.

I can't believe what dolts we are anymore. The anti-gun crowd and the race-baiting crowd is in overdrive tonight.

Why can't Americans see the inevitable?

We're doomed.

-- INVAR (gundark@sw.net), April 20, 1999.

The disease in this terrible situation just might be HOMOSEXUALITY. It seems that these boys were bragging to their fellow homosexuals on AOL about making all those straight kids in Colombine HS very sorry today, April 20, 1999 (Hitlers birthday) Check it out on the Drudge Report. Perhaps the "gun grabbers" will be hoisted on their own petard this time. Guns in the hands of people who choose an alternate life style. Aren't gay people supposed to be so nice and clever and soooo artistic. Maybe they will call this one a hate crime.

Bill in South Carolina

-- Bill Solorzano (notaclue@webtv.net), April 20, 1999.

I read about the 25 killings at the school. It almost made me cry. (Maybe should have, if I hadn't been seeing this kind of insane junk all my life. Insanity inures you to insanity.) Mostly I grieve for parents. My god. Before my baby was even born, I was having nightmares about "not being able to find her" and her being gone, or stolen or something. Still, once in a great while, it is the worst nightmare I could have. I think about sending her to school and being told she is dead now. How can the feds MANDATE children being sent to school, especially in cities like Los Angeles, if they can't guarantee their safety? A friend of mine with two degrees, who speaks God knows how many languages, who was a Schoolteacher previously, fought battles literally for two years to get to home school his kid. It's ridiculous.

And then I grieved because I knew that even though pipe bombs were the culprit, even though we know those kids did not exactly buy those guns legally, no matter all that, I knew that IMMEDIATELY the gun control jerks would be in the media saying see, if only we took every hunting and defense gun away from every citizen in this country, those crazy kids wouldn't have shot their schoolmates.

For some reason I was reminded of a news story from about a year ago. A nice man had run an animal shelter and clinic for over a decade. Many of the cats there he'd had for 10 years. A couple of 18-19 year old guys broke in and took baseball bats to the cats. Killed many, maimed more for sure. It was like a holocaust on a small scale inside the place when it was over. And this was the sickest part: The media and the judge actually DEBATED over these guys. The judge sentenced them to 30 days, "One for each cat they killed." TV interviewed their friends and family who said, "They're just cats." I just watched with my jaw hanging open. These guys are sociopaths and nobody SEES that from this behavior? What is wrong with this picture that instead of targeting the obvious PROBLEM, we discuss the symptoms? I thought these guys should have been committed to a psych ward.

I agree with webrnot.... and I think our culture is disintegrating from the inside out. We are Rome, like lead poisoning and inbreeding and capitalism gone mad, and we can't even see it coming. Like a tall tree, we've already been chopped, it's just taking a long time to hit the ground. Right now we're just starting to feel the trembling of the beginning of the topple.

Coming in to work tonight, I tell the security guard at the gate reading the paper, "The news is just getting WORSE every day, isn't it?!" It sure is, he says. I shake my head. I can't believe humanity has survived this far.

This is in response to my ultra-polly mood last night. :-)

PJ in TX

-- PJ Gaenir (fire@firedocs.com), April 20, 1999.

Well, the right-wing fundamentalist nuts are out in full force tonight. I bet the parents of the killers of those students are good gun-bearing god-fearing Christians who hate minorities. Just like the posters on this thread.

Go to Serbia and do some ethnic cleansing. It suits you well.

As to Y2K. I can see how losers want the world to end, given that they haven't succeeded. Sorry. The world will continue. And you will stay where you belong, at the bottom, in your trailers, ranting and raving.

-- Noway (noway@noway.com), April 21, 1999.

Fascinating show partly addressing these gun massacre atrocities on tonights Jeff Rense show at www.sightings.com.

BTW Denver is just about to vote on a new concealed gun carry permit law...

related?

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), April 21, 1999.

Andy - imagine a place where the attackers KNOW that none of their victims can defend yourself. Like a school perhaps?

Bill - gee, seems to me that more crimes are against Homosexuals than committed by them.

INVAR - Watched Larry King tonight. He had (among others) Sarah Brady of Gun Control, Inc, and Gerry Spence - an attorney of note. Spence was masterful, even though he got *much* less time to speak. He said that the problem isn't with the guns, or the pipe-bombs, or even the children or the schools. The problem is HERE (thumping chest) in the HEART. Fix THAT and you'll fix that problem.

Not so Jolly tonight.

-- Jollyprez (jolly@prez.com), April 21, 1999.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/national/daily/april99/suspects21.htm

[for educational use only]

By Marc Fisher

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, April 21, 1999; Page A1

The shooters who turned Columbine High School into an unspeakable landscape of carnage yesterday were members of a small clique of outcasts who always wore black trench coats and spent their entire adolescence deep inside the morose subculture of Gothic fantasy, their fellow students said.

Students at the Colorado school said the gunmen, whom police say may have turned their weapons on themselves after killing as many as 25 of their schoolmates and teachers, were a constant target of derision for at least four years.

"They're basically outcasts, Gothic people," said Peter Maher, a junior who had a confrontation last July 4 with the shooters and several of their fellow members of the "Trench Coat Mafia," the black- clad teenagers' name for their clique. "They're into anarchy. They're white supremacists and they're into Nostradamus stuff and Doomsday."

Several students said the shooters  whose names were withheld by police but who are believed to have graduated from Columbine last year  were deeply into death  talking, reading and dreaming about it.

Black trench coats are a consistent theme in the Gothic subculture that has attracted many teenagers to the poetry, music and costumes of a scene that ranges from benign fantasy to violent reality.

Inspired by fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Gothic has become a fascination of many American high schoolers, some of whom simply dress and paint their fingernails black while others immerse themselves in a pseudo-medieval world of dark images.

On Web sites featuring poetry called "The Written Work of the Trenchcoat" and in political tracts and other elements of the conspiratorial imagination, trench coats serve as a symbol for things from Hitler and the Nazis to mass murder to suicidal fantasies. Yesterday was Hitler's birthday, an occasion for demonstrations, mock funerals and other macabre commemorations among both neo-Nazis and parts of the Gothic scene.

When the young men started shooting yesterday, tenth-grader Mindy Pollock was in the school parking lot. She saw two shooters firing their guns repeatedly, and she watched as her fellow students dropped to the pavement.

She said she couldn't believe it was real, especially since she had once before seen this same boy pull a gun on some of her friends. "The one with the handgun today pulled a shotgun on my friends once. He said he was sick of being made fun of," she said. "He said, 'I'll shoot you, I'll shoot you.'" Pollock said her friends tried to calm the boy and then ran from him.

Maher and two of his friends were at a fireworks stand in Littleton July 4 when the Trench Coat Mafia boys approached them and said they had a shotgun. Maher and his friends saw no gun, but the trench coat boys did pull knives and tried to fight with the others. Maher said he and his friends had had no previous contact with the boys in black.

"We didn't want to fight, so we talked to them for a while and then we just got out of there," Maher said.

Several students described the Trench Coat Mafia members in similar terms: They wore their trench coats every day, no matter the weather, even in class. Under the coats, they dressed in black from head to toe  military berets, T-shirts, jeans, combat boots. Red shoelaces and the occasional Confederate flag patch were the only departure from the dark theme.

"They were kind of the freaks of the school," said Kendra Curry, a senior.

Pollock and other students described the Trench Coat Mafia as a group of perhaps six to ten students who were constantly being ribbed by the school's athletes and other, more popular cliques.

"The athletes and stuff are really popular," Pollock said. "They make fun of me all the time because I wear bell-bottoms and I'm a little hippy girl. And they'd make fun of the Trench Coat Mafia. They'd say, 'White trash,' and 'Why don't you comb your hair?' and 'Are you Gothic, man?' and 'You need some new clothes.' Just stupid teenage stuff."

Maher, too, said athletes at Columbine routinely teased the trench- coated students, muttering "Goth" every time they passed one another in the hallways.

Students said the Gothic look appeals only to a tiny minority of young people in the Denver suburb. "They kind of stay by themselves," said junior Evan Vitale. "They always have the neo-Nazi look, so we were talking about them and Hitler's birthday even before the shooting started. Everybody knew it was Hitler's birthday."

On one such Web site, a skeleton dances over a raging inferno and the words "The Trenchcoat." Below, a poem called "Death of a Jester" includes these lines:

"There will be no performance today/There will be no curtain call/He can no longer perform for you/So witness the grandest spectacle of all/It's a one night engagement/So make your way to the front row/It's the death of a jester/It's one dead man's show.

"There are no mourners today/Only spectators at the scene/Relishing in this bizarre event . . . /He died from no acclaim/I heard his dying words/As his final breath he gave/He wanted to be taken seriously/Now he's taken to the grave."

) Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), April 21, 1999.

Bold off.

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), April 21, 1999.

Why is my post bold???

-- R. Wright (blaklodg@aol.com), April 21, 1999.

R. Wright is ON the ball.

Sad when we can see the erosions happen daily can't we?

Question everything. We live in a world of Spin Behind the Looking Glass.

-- INVAR (gundark@sw.net), April 21, 1999.

People kill, not guns. Had a few of those teachers in that school had a gun, there may be less dead today!

-- SCOTTY (BLehman202@aol.com), April 21, 1999.

I don't usually respond to idiots and trolls, but NOWAY, I'm not right wing, I'm not a Christian, and I don't hate minorities, and I'm not a failure. In fact I'm officially "undeclared" politically, I have no official religion, I'm 14 different races, and I make a pretty good living at this point in my life. Name calling and baiting usually indicates that people have absolutely no intelligent arguments to provide. Apparently.

PJ in TX

-- PJ Gaenir (fire@firedocs.com), April 21, 1999.

Whenever you want to solve a problem it helps to find somebody else who had the same problem and solved it. In this case, Israel. They used to have a big problem with Palestinians shooting up their schools. They don't anymore. Why? They authorized their teachers to carry concealed, and encouraged parents to patrol the school grounds with rifles. You don't have to be a right-winger to follow their example, just a pragmatist.

On the other hand, Britain has very strict gun-control laws, and a couple years ago they had a school massacre anyway.

-- Shimrod (shimrod@lycosmail.com), April 21, 1999.

Scotty said "Had a few of those teachers in that school had a gun there may be less dead today". BUT there were scores and scores of police around the school almost immediately and they all had guns. I understand it was a hour from when the shooting started to when it ended. One hour. Didn't we have one hero, one "dirty Harry". One hour. And no one tried to take these shooters out. What are we missing here?

-- thinkIcan (thinkIcan@make.it), April 21, 1999.

thinkican -

One "dirty Harry"? To quote another movie: "You too much TV." You may want to talk with someone from your local police or even better, SWAT. The objective is to take out the shooter(s) with minimal loss of life, including your own. Move in, move fast, follow the plan, but no movie heroics. The reality is far more heroic, since they can (and sometimes do) really die and leave behind widows, widowers, and orphans, rather than closing credits.

An armed and trained person in that scene would have had a far better chance of taking down one or both of the shooters, who reportedly were just running through the site, killing rather casually as they went. Had some of the teachers or other personnel been armed and trained, I suspect those two young men would have been dead far sooner and with far less loss of other lives. As has been pointed out, one of the other school shootings was ended when one of the teachers retrieved their own weapon from their car and confronted the gunman, who surrendered with no problem at all.

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), April 21, 1999.

Excuse me, Noway, but God-fearing, Bible-believing Christians *do not* believe in killing people as you describe-but you knew that already-and so does every other person that blames Christian fundamentalists for the world's problems. It's the *lack* of truly God-fearing people that is to blame. It's ironic; there were only 10 Commmandments. Then people decided to take the Bible out of schools and out of government. Now, soceity has to make thousands of new laws to control a group of people who didn't want to be controlled in the first place.

-- madeline (runner@bpcl.net), April 21, 1999.

Mac--- thanks for the answer, your reply makes sense to me. From watch TV last night I was under the impression that Col. does have a policeman posted a each high school. Where was he? One hour is a long time. You have students to ask during that time who had gotten out of the school. They had to know there was only two shooters {hate that term}. Where was the police work. One hour. How could have an armed teacher finished it sooner. Something is missing here. here should be some hard questions asked. One hour. That's a long time when we know there is a deadly force inside a high school killing students. One hour, and scores of police outside. Something seems to be missing here.

-- thinkIcan (thinkIcan@make.it), April 21, 1999.

1) SWAT does NOT Rambo into a situation and shoot at whatever seems to have a weapon. Call your local PD. Ask them if they do civilian ride-alongs, I know Cleveland does. If you get a ride-along, somewhere in the shift you are riding, ask about the fun-house, they use to train for interior scenarios. Some are using a true funhouse and some are using a new video. TRY to get a chance to go through it. YOU WILL, NO DOUBT kill a LOT of civilians the first 2 or 3 times through. And the bad guys will kill you several times. The 5th or so time through you will freeze. SHoot-no-shoot drill is NOT for beginers, nor is it done in an unsecured environment where you have to worry about your back.

2) As the SWAT team was clearing the school, in an orderly fashion, they had to worry about keeping the cleared areas clear still (covering their backs), trying to be SURE they had sorted teh good guys from the bad guys (I suspect a LOT of kids are going to have to wash their hands under black light for the officers before Thursday ends) and trying NOT to shoot at everything that moved.

3) To understand better, considre that I am a bad guy and I am in your house, somewhere. Or not anymore. How do you search for me? If you are inteligent you alone do NOT!! Can I hide somewhere until you get past me and then come around your back?? Anywhere? How do you clear ALL of your basement and be SURE I didn't get behind you??

4) Hollywood Rambo attitudes get real life police officers KILLED much more than anyone admits. Drink with 'em, ride with 'em listen to choir practices, listen to CISD sessions, walk through some of the training, buy a clue then come on back and bithch about the "hour" it took to "do something".

RETCH EEAARRL RRRALLLFF

-- reverse peristalsis (regurge@vomit.com), April 21, 1999.

OH YEAH

"How does an armed teacher finish it sooner?"

An armed and TRAINED teacher, with the piece in it's proper location (jackass rig, std shoulder rig or in the pants), removes the piece, orders the germ to drop his weapon, and if after a suitable time elapses without the thud of the weapon hitting the floor, he drops the germ right as he stands. Suitable time may be subjectively judged. We'll counsel the teacher later, and NOT zip quite so many body bags.

-- reverse peristalsis (regurge@vomit .com), April 21, 1999.