Maj wrote:@vitm: I heart you!!!!! Do you think giving him a gun would save him from poachers?
Someone on another message board I read went off about gun control as a result of Aurora, and I argued that given the guy's knowledge and preplanning, without guns more people would have died because Holmes probably would have gone the bomb route.
There's also the fact that this is a guy who clearly does not care about receiving the death penalty or spending life in prison. Fuck, he think's he's the Joker, maybe he's hoping to make a Harley and be a super villain. Crazy or not, he is not deterred by the consequences of his actions, so if guns were illegal, he may well have built a zipgun.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
His actual knowledge of weaponry was pretty minimal. His rifle was refitted with an extended magazine, but it jammed. Someone who wasn't a schizophrenic with minimal weapons knowledge would not have had that problem. So it's very likely that if he had gone the bomb route, it simply would not have worked. People set bombs that fail to go off all the time.
Also: the guy obviously doesn't think he's the Joker. He just said that to get into the movie theater with things that looked like weapons (because they were in fact weapons). His hair was dyed red, and everyone knows that the Joker's hair is green.
He allegedly told police he was the Joker. Maybe he knows as much about the Bat-mythos as he does about weapons.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
The Vigilante wrote:Or he thinks this might land him in mental hospital through insanity defense rather than supermax prison.
It doesn't really matter. Both options involve being incarcerated for the rest of your life in a maximum-security facility.
The mental hospital option might even be considered more terrible since there is a good chance they'll turn you into a living zombie from the drugs they'll give you.
Maj wrote:@vitm: I heart you!!!!! Do you think giving him a gun would save him from poachers?
Someone on another message board I read went off about gun control as a result of Aurora, and I argued that given the guy's knowledge and preplanning, without guns more people would have died because Holmes probably would have gone the bomb route.
Ah, I didn't hear that he warned anyone about that fact (seems a bit weird that he did that). I thought it was just a matter of the cops running to his place and the traps being obvious enough for them to notice before kicking in the door. Same goes for the time frame, I only heard "it was trapped", but the connotation was that they got in the same night they searched.
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How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
This guy apparently knew explosives pretty well. Thankfully, he decided to go with a gun for his murder spree. Imagine if he'd put the stuff in his apartment in a van and crashed it into the theater instead.
virgil wrote:Ah, I didn't hear that he warned anyone about that fact (seems a bit weird that he did that). I thought it was just a matter of the cops running to his place and the traps being obvious enough for them to notice before kicking in the door. Same goes for the time frame, I only heard "it was trapped", but the connotation was that they got in the same night they searched.
Yeah, he told them it was trapped. They pretty much taped a camera to the end of a stick, peeked in his apartment window with it, and said "Great googly-a-mighty" from what they saw. Shit was set up to kill whoever came through the door.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Last edited by Maxus on Wed Aug 01, 2012 2:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
I think i have to point out again that the very week that the guy decided to become an hero and shoot up a theater showing, a "sophisticated network of terrorists" bombed a bus at an airport in Bulgaria. They killed six people and the bomb was delivered by a suicide attacker who also died.
The lone nut with a gun was literally twice as effective as the suicide bomber who was backed up by a sophisticated international terror network. Oklahoma City was an impressive act of terror, but the vast majority of bomb strikes are nowhere near that effective.
Any idea why and what would have to change for that not to be the case? O.o
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
Well, the lone nut with a gun was somewhat shooting fish in a barrel. They were crowded, unaware, and dealing with a dark, smoke (tear gas?)-filled theater.
The six-for-one suicide bomber sounds like they just had a bad plan or something went wrong.
I think it mostly has to do with the fact that bullets fly pretty far, while as explosions lose 3/4 of their force every time you double the distance. A single explosion has to be pretty damn big to hurt people even a few meters away. Hand grenades are way larger than bullets, and they aren't going to kill anyone past about 6m, cover or no. Wherever you set off the explosion, people are actually going to be pretty far from it in any crowd (at least, on the scale that explosions care about). If you aren't bringing down the entire building, you're pretty much just bringing down whoever happens to be standing next to it when it goes off.
Really successful bombings like the Bali Bombings of 2002 require really huge bombs and intricate planning. Recall that we remember the nightclub bombings that killed 202 people, there was also a bombing attack on the American Embassy that failed to breach the outer wall and accomplished absolutely nothing. Even the nightclub bombing was actually two bombs, one of which was a suicide bomb that filled an entire backpack and was used to flush the crowd into the exit, and the other of which filled an entire van and was used to blow up that exit when it was filled with a mass of screaming people.
For the foreseeable future, Mujaheddin-style lone wolf attacks are simply going to be much more effective on average than bombing attacks. An automatic weapon can target a lot more people than a bomb of any man-portable size can, and it's a lot easier to target it against real people.
FrankTrollman wrote:I think i have to point out again that the very week that the guy decided to become an hero and shoot up a theater showing, a "sophisticated network of terrorists" bombed a bus at an airport in Bulgaria. They killed six people and the bomb was delivered by a suicide attacker who also died.
The lone nut with a gun was literally twice as effective as the suicide bomber who was backed up by a sophisticated international terror network. Oklahoma City was an impressive act of terror, but the vast majority of bomb strikes are nowhere near that effective.
-Username17
"America! We do everything better! Especially if it should fill us with shame!"
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Yeah. I'm not really worried about terrorist bombs, I'm worried about them randomly shooting up crowded city centres around the country over the course of several days or weeks at random, while at the same time dumping large amounts of concrete with possible bombs at truck/postal depots, airport runways, train tracks and motorways, while using bombs to damage bridges, as well as setting fire to crops up and down the country. If they can also find internet hubs and destroy several of those simultaneously it would be even worse.
Because that sort of thing would drastically affect everyone, scare the hell out of people, and be able to be done by lots of individuals with no communication or real planning. Just get a group of people to agree to start causing havoc at a certain time and leave them to it. There's also little to no way to fight it if they can brainstorm enough different ways to attack different places with 1-2 people.
Last edited by Parthenon on Tue Jul 31, 2012 11:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.