The Gaming Den

Stahlseele wrote:Another who has problems with reading-comprehension?

Game On,
fbmf

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.

As it is, though, he's up for 24 counts of murder along with 117 additional felony charges.

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.

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.

-Username17

He allegedly told police he was the Joker. Maybe he knows as much about the Bat-mythos as he does about weapons.

Or he thinks this might land him in mental hospital through insanity defense rather than supermax prison.

The Vigilante wrote:Or he thinks this might land him in mental hospital through insanity defense rather than supermax prison.

That would be my guess.

He was a Doctorate candidate in Neuroscience (perhaps only masters)
I'm pretty sure he knows enough to fake being batshit crazy.

And if he had built a zip-gun.. he would have killed a fuckload less people.
The fact that he only killed 12, is a testament to how bad a shot he was.

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.

sabs wrote:The fact that he only killed 12, is a testament to how bad a shot he was.

Yeah. The guy didn't actually seem to know a lot about guns. But wasn't his apartment booby-trapped to hell and back?

violence in the media wrote:

You're welcome.

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.

As it is, though, he's up for 24 counts of murder along with 117 additional felony charges.

Maj wrote:

sabs wrote:The fact that he only killed 12, is a testament to how bad a shot he was.

Yeah. The guy didn't actually seem to know a lot about guns. But wasn't his apartment booby-trapped to hell and back?

Obviously not that well, since they were overcome.

virgil wrote:

Maj wrote:

sabs wrote:The fact that he only killed 12, is a testament to how bad a shot he was.

Yeah. The guy didn't actually seem to know a lot about guns. But wasn't his apartment booby-trapped to hell and back?

Obviously not that well, since they were overcome.

He warned the cops that his apartment was booby-trapped and it still took them three days to disarm or detonate all the bombs.

Based on that, I'm willing to bet that his bombs were pretty good.

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.

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.

edit: double post

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

Any idea why and what would have to change for that not to be the case? O.o

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.

-Username17

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!"

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.

K wrote:This is what really happens when you play hero with a gun.

This is a terrible thing to say, but I wonder whether that would have happened if it was his genetic offspring.