Are you embarrassed by the Connecticut shootings?

I would be, if I was an American. How many times does the country want global headlines about another round of mass killings at the hand of a crazy gunman? I feel dreadfully sorry for the victims but I am shaking my head in contempt at a country that goes whole hog on the grief stricken news cycle yet does nothing to address the problem of rapid fire weapons so easily available. When does the romanticism of guns end in your country? So far it seems rather an abusive relationship.

• Name your nationality so we can tear it to bits, OP

• I wouldn't use the word 'embarrassed', OP. I'm frustrated and sad that there seems to be a large contigent of people who don't even want to look at potential options for improving the situation. Those 'they'll have to pry my guns out of my cold, dead hands' type are really annoying.

• OP, the global news media is going as apeshit as the American media is on this story. Also, most people are not "embarrassed" by the incident rather than fucking HORRIFIED by it.

• You sound like Piers Morgan, OP. Do sod off.

• [quote] if I was an American Oh, dear.

  WERE

• How droll, OP. No, Americans aren't embarrassed by the shootings. We're fucking outraged. A huge proportion of this country hate guns and the wreckage left in their wake. Every country has its crosses to bear. Ours happen to be fodder for the entire world to dissect and judge. I guess that comes with the territory.

• OP, nothing will be done about it. So expect future headlines. I just skip them nowadays. Not worth spending any time over as the problem will never be resolved.

• Were you outraged over Aurora? Over Virginia Tech? Outrage is cheap, and easy. Action is hard. And America is incapable of making hard decisions. When this happens, again, you'll all be outraged, again.

• One interesting aspect of Narcissism is no sense of shame, though it's projected onto others in the form of hatred - gays, African-Americans, Latinos, etc. Those of us on the Left have watched with the right wing with horror for decades. Lynchings, Blue Laws, poll taxes, this is a God awful country with a shameful past, founded on the murder of Native Americans. It's basically a "peasant" country with a peasant mentality. It never benefited much from the "working class" mentality of densely populated, mature Western Europe, and has much in common with China or Russia, but with ignorant arrogance stirred into the mix. How could those of us with brains and conscience be any more embarrassed than we already were? I'm completely mortified, and have been since I was a child. I don't think it could get any worse - well, I used to say that, then came Bush II - but after him I'm maxed out on shame for this disgusting moronic joke of a "modern" country. The only way to not go crazy is expect the worst and every blue moon you get a nice surprise, i.e. Obama. (don't expect many)

• Saddened once again. So easy for anyone to buy any kind of gun. $50 for an Uzi is old school thinking.

• Fuck you OP. The US isn't perfect, and neither is whatever fucking country you live in. But, I'd never live anywhere else.

• Yes, I am ashamed to live in a country where rapid-fire guns are easy to get, and mental health care isn't.

• I'm going to let Rachel Maddow handle R11. We have a major problem. Face facts.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXfX6dyBHUU

• OP is under the impression that we still care very deeply about what the rest of the world thinks of us. We used to. We don't anymore. Seriously, we don't care what you think.

• Which is why America's time has passed, R14.

• What [R12] said

• How long this outrage lasts? Not long I guess then back to their right to own guns until the next massacre. History keeps repeating no lesson learned. Are they this stupid?

• Again for R12.

• [quote]I would be, if I was an American. You need to be more embarrassed by your inadequate command of English.

  Oh%2C%20that%20subjunctive%20mood%21

• Grammar, such an effective shield.

• I would be EMBARRASSED if I WERE your Grammar teacher and saw you EMBARRASS yourself with the improper verb in your subjunctive construction.

• Trolling by spouting anti-American bigotry, such an ineffective substitute for sex.

• That's really what you've got to focus on? You're a loser, by any construct.

• Pot, thy name is kettle.

• I feel very sad but I don't feel embarrassed about Sandy Hook. What embarrasses me is how everyone here will talk about how it is time for something finally to be done to try to make sure the mass killings never happen again and then the uproar will all stop, as it always has done, after Columbine, after Virginia Tech, after Aurora. What embarrasses me is how we get so serious about an issue for ten minutes and then it inevitably gets forgotten.

• OP is an American troll. That is all.

• Where was it, Norway, where a 32 yo gunned down 92 fucking people? Now that's historic. America has yet to top that. Maybe if one of those poor bastards had had a gun, the death toll wouldn't be so high.

• He killed 69 people r27. On an island. With extensive preparation.

• Wikipedia is reporting 69 R28 but everywhere else is reporting at least 85.

  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/norway/8657475/Norway-killings-The-laughing-gunman-who-shot-85-young-victims-one-by-one.html

• Werent their deaths from the bombs he planted away from the island?

• "What embarrasses me is how we get so serious about an issue for ten minutes and then it inevitably gets forgotten." Who is "we"? You need to stop classifying American society as a whole. There have been plenty of people who have been fighting for gun control for a long time now. Rosie tried sounding the alarm on her talk show and was ridiculed for it. I linked Rachel Maddow doing a devastating a real analysis of the major cases up until last year. Maybe if more people would take up the fight instead of just shrugging and saying "it does no good, people will forget" WE would get further.

• OP how did you feel after the murder spree in Norway?

• Mass shootings in other countries are the exception. In the US, it's normal. Last week there were two random killing sprees, in Oregon and Newtown. The day other countries follow suit, yes, the US shouldn't feel ashamed but unfortunately it's not the case.

  http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/14/1337221/a-timeline-of-mass-shootings-in-the-us-since-columbine/

• All of the mass murderers in the last few years in the U.S. and Sweden, could have been prevented, if their families and the health care providers who treated them, informed the police that their family members' were crazy as hell. When will families stop protecting their crazy kids??????

• Thanks R33. Someone gets it.

• R27, read R33!

• I've come to view the 47% of the nation that voted for Romney as the embarrassing relatives in the family that one would begrudgingly have to associate with during certain times.

• R37 yaaaaas, indeed.

• Yes. Of course OP. And thank you so much for your compassion to those of us who were born here, don't support this aspect of our country and culture and speak out to change it. Thank you for your prejudicial ways, and your sensitivity in painting us all with a broad brush because that will help us all.

• To those who agree with R33, who is comparing the US only to the tiniest Western European countries. Is it really a shock that America has more crime that Luxembourg? That we have more gun deaths than Monte Carlo? That we have more fat people than Monaco? Have we really lost all sense of proportion? If you feel the need to compare us, juxtapose our crime rates to South America's--the entire continent, not to countries that are small than most of our states. When you can say, "It's exceptional for there to be shootings in Brazil and Argentina on the same day," then you will have a comparison worth thinking about.

• I'm not embarrassed

  Pol%20Pot

• Hear Hear R9!, minus the Obama part... That's not much to be proud of.

• You and other Republican goons may not care what the rest of the world thinks, R14, but I sure as hell care. Because the US is still the world's best hope for leadership for Western liberal democracy. Where is that leadership going to come from? The EU? Does the phrase "herding feral cats" mean anything to you? Germany? They can't organize an economic union. The UK? Much as I love this place, they don't have the clout. France? No one cares what they have to say, because they only speak to be contrary and pompous. Remember the Balkan genocides? Europe couldn't solve a geopolitical crisis in their own home and had to have the US fix it. Back in the day when we had a president with brains. The US damn well better care, because the world needs us at our best. And after 12 years of Bush and Obama, we are now at our worst.

• This happens all over the world. The problem is we don't help parents enough withfucked up kids.

• I'm American, and I'm terribly embarrassed. When I travel to Europe, I lie and tell people I'm from Canada. That's how bad this place has become.

  Shameful

• OP = the height of irony.

• I'm not embarrassed, just horrified. And if it can happen in Connecticut, it can happen anywhere.

• School_shootings_in_the_United_States

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

• Hey OP, are YOU embarrassed to be such a tacky, classless, exploitative bastard that you use this tragedy as an excuse to look down your snobby nose at Americans, you elitist pig. You don't give a flying fuck about the tragedy - hell you Eurotrash insects get a hard-on every time American blood spills. And I know you are European because I've unfortunately dealt with HUNDREDS of European subhuman backpacker vermin over the years and I know your condescending, hypocritical, snotty, smug, arrogance all too well - I could literally set it music. Jesus, you are disgusting, OP. Flat-out disgusting. Get off your little pedestal because you have no justification to be on one.

• No, OP, I'm not. Were the Norwegians embarrassed when that nut shot up all those kids at the camp? As someone pointed out it can happen anywhere. Anyone can obtain a gun if they want to.

• It's just so many of those anyones seem to be in America. As pointed out, in virtually every other western country these mass shootings are the exception, not the rule. There's an image floating around Facebook today from Handgun Control Inc., which I think is an anti-gun lobby group. It reads: Last year handguns killed 48 people in Japan. 8 people in Great Britain. 34 in Switzerland. 52 in Canada. 58 in Israel. 21 in Sweden. 42 in West Germany. 10,728 in the United States.

• Op, I can tell by your grammer and sentence structure that you're an American yourself.

• You mean grammer as in grammar?

  OP

• Yeah, that.

• # 53, you don't get the joke??

• Last night I watched a CBS special and they went through the list of mass shootings in the US for the year 2012. I don't remeber the actual numbers but there was barely a month when one was not at least attempted. Some months had more than one. That does not happen anywhere else.

• We are a country of 240 million people. The fact that this doesn't happen more often is a miracle unto itself. If it's true that the shooter's Mother had a problem with the school and removed him from the school and home schooled him for a time then this tells me that somone in that school identified her son as having severe mental problems and she didn't like it or was in denial. The father needs to do more than issue a statement that his heart goes out to the victims. He needs to explain why he didn't make sure his son got the help he needed. Why didn't his brother have any contact with him for two years? This guy was acting out and the family did nothing but deny or evade. Pitiful.

• I don't think that's fair about the father. There's nothing at this point to suggest anybody knew he was so disturbed that what happened Friday was going to happen. If we know anything it's that the guy was more than generous in settling the financial terms of the divorce. The emotional upheaval, for once, wasn't accompanied by financial upheaval too. Besides, how many people here and around us don't have divisions and estrangements in their families?

• Of course its embarrasing--we seem to have cornered the market on violent, misfit nutjobs who love to kill people. We have the worst of the worst. At all levels of society. If they are not upper or middle class white men terrorising schools than they are gang members destroying whole neighborhoods. It's all races and class levels of men who havve given up on contributing to this society in a good way. They want to destroy this country from within. We have many good men in America but the bad are starting to outnumber them.

• True R59. Very rarely do you hear of a black man doing this type of thing. The DC Sniper was a shock to many people who expected an angry white man.

• This "ugly American" will tell you another EMBARRASSING thing about so many snotty, snobby, lazy, welfare-parasite, soccer-rioting Eurotrash pig-filth I've met over the years just like that condescending cocksucker of an OP: every time they realize I'm a native Anglophone the first thing they do is constantly BRAG that English is the easiest language in the world and they became fluent in days, hours, microseconds, whatever. So when Euro-trilobytes brag about their English, the first thing this yank does is to talk as fast as I can, using the most didactic words in the English language. And sure enough, these Zeropean phonies become confused and ask me to define several of the English words I used.......so much for their English-fluency bragging. My point is, mainland European filth simply don't have a single honest, down-to-earth bone in their drunken, chainsmoking, anorexic bodies.

• It's not a race thing, it's a male problem, specifically a young male problem. Of course it would follow that most offenders are white, because most people in this country are white. Look at the VA tech killer (Asian) or that guy who killed his fellow employees in that supermarket in Old Bridge, NJ (black). The one thing they have in common is that they are disgruntled young males.

• with G U N S !

• Not nearly as embarrassed as I was when I stepped on the ping pong ball!

  Gloria

• Explain why I should take ownership of a random psycho's actions.

• [quote] No, OP, I'm not. Were the Norwegians embarrassed when that nut shot up all those kids at the camp? Mass shooting has happened once in Norway's history. It happens about once a month here. I don't feel any ownership over a random psycho's actions, r65, nor do I think anyone is asking your to take ownership, but I do feel embarrassed to live in a country that does very little to attend to the medical needs of random psychos and even less to keep guns away from random psychos. It's also pretty embarrassing to have to claim big-mouthed, pea-brained assholes such as r49/r61 as countrymen. I can only hope that piece of shit is among the victims of the next great American spree killer.

• The NRA is an embarrassment. The NRA is a disgrace. The NRA is an enabler of criminals and psychopaths and seeks to pervert the political process. Ban the NRA.

• "Embarrassed" is such an odd way to put it. It's a little more significant than having a spot on your tie all day or spinach getting stuck between your teeth.

• 500 people die in Chicago in 2012 from gangland shootings (19 in one night), and no one even perks up. 20 kids die in a school shooting, and suddenly the world cares. Hypocrisy at its finest.