School kid guns down eight

[Avinash]

MINNESOTA (US): A disturbed US high school student went on a shooting rampage killing his grandparents at their home and then eight people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired, authorities and witnesses said.

 

The suspect apparently killed himself after exchanging gunfire with police.

 

It was the worst school shooting in the United States since the Columbine massacre in 1999.

 

One student said her classmates pleaded with the gunman to stop shooting.

 

"You could hear a girl saying, 'No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?"' student Sondra Hegstrom told The Pioneer of Bemidji, using the name of the suspected shooter.

 

Before the shootings Monday at Red Lake High School, the suspect's grandparents were shot in their home and died later. There was no immediate indication of the gunman's motive.

 

In addition to the shooter, the death toll at the school included five students, a teacher and a security guard, FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said in Minneapolis.

 

McCabe said the gunman first killed a school security officer near the school entrance. At some point, the shooter exchanged gunfire with Red Lake police in a hallway, then retreated to a classroom, where he was believed to have shot himself, Mc Cabe said.

 

Fourteen to 15 other students were injured, McCabe said. Authorities closed roads to the Indian reservation in far northern Minnesota while they investigated the shootings.

 

Hegstrom described the shooter, who had two handguns and a shotgun, grinning and waving at a student his gun was pointed at, then swiveling to shoot someone else.

 

McCabe declined to talk about a possible connection between the suspect and the couple killed at the home, but Red Lake Fire Director Roman Stately said they were the grandparents of the gunman.

 

He identified the shooter's grandfather as Daryl Lussier, a longtime officer with the Red Lake Police Department, and said Lussier's guns may have been used in the shootings.

 

"After he shot a security guard, he walked down the hallway shooting and went into a classroom where he shot a teacher and more students," Stately told Minneapolis television station KARE.

 

Students and a teacher, Diane Schwanz, said the gunman tried to break down a door to get into her classroom.

 

"I just got on the floor and called the cops," Schwanz told the Pioneer. "I was still just half-believing it."

 

The school was evacuated after the shootings and locked down for the investigation, McCabe said.

 

"It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together," he said.

 

It was the nation's worst school shooting since two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 before killing themselves on April 20, 1999.

 

The rampage in Red Lake was the second fatal school shooting in Minnesota in 18 months. Two students were killed at Rocori High School in Cold Spring in September 2003.

 

[Avinash]

This is not the first time such an incident has happened in US. In the past also, I have read news about school students shooting their classmates and teachers.

What could be the reason for such a mentality of these students?

[Guest guest]

Mental disturbance + Guns are a bad mix.

The answer my fren is blowin' in the wind

The answer is flowin from the lips of the sadhu.

Hare haraya

[Guest guest]

A neo-nazi 'angel of death'

Guardian Unlimited ^ | Tuesday March 22, 2005 | Sarah Left

 

Sarah Left uncovers a series of website posts apparently linking Jeff Weise to extreme rightwing politics

 

Jeff Weise, the 17-year-old named in newspaper reports as the gunman in the Red Lake school shooting, may have been investigated last year in connection with a shooting threat to the school, according to posts made on a Nazi website. Over a five-month period between March and August 2004, someone identifying himself as Weise posted numerous messages on a talkboard hosted by Nazi.org, the website of the Libertarian National Socialist Green party. The party promotes a Nazi philosophy of racial purity.

 

In March 2004, a chatroom participant tagged Todesengel ("angel of death") began a thread titled "Native American Nationalist?" and introduced himself as "Jeff Weise, a Native American from the Red Lake 'Indian' reservation in Minnesota". Todesengel expressed interest in joining the party and said he had done a great deal of research on Hitler, a man he much admired. Later in the thread, Todesengel changed his tag to NativeNazi. "When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazi's were (are) evil and that Hitler was a very evil man, ect," wrote Todesengel, in a quote not corrected for spelling and grammar. "Of course, not for a second did I believe this. Upon reading up on his actions, the ideals and issues the German Third Reich adressed, I began to see how much of a lie had been painted about them. They truly were doing it for the better."

 

On April 19 2004, he posted to the talkboard: "By the way, I'm being blamed for a threat on the school I attend because someone said they were going to shoot up the school on 4/20, Hitlers birthday, and just because I claim being a National Socialist, guess whom they've pinned?"

 

By May 26 the incident seemed to have blown over, with Todesengel posting: "But the school threat passed and I was cleared as a suspect, I'm glad for that. I don't much care for jail, I've never been there and I don't plan on it."

 

The gun rampage through the remote northern Minnesota reservation yesterday left 10 people dead. Reports suggested that Weise took a shotgun and at least one handgun belonging to his grandfather, a veteran local police officer. He shot his grandparents, who later died, before moving on to Red Lake high school and killing five students, a teacher, a security guard and ultimately himself.

 

Today the Libertarian National Socialist Green party said incidents such as yesterday's shooting were to be expected when "thinking people are crammed into an unthinking, irrational modern society".

 

"We knew [Weise] briefly through 34 posts he made on the forum. He expressed himself well and was clearly highly intelligent and contemplative, especially for one so young," the site's administrator said in statement posted today on Nazi.org.

 

"Weise participated in the forum in part because, unlike 'white nationalist' or 'white power' movements, the LNSG embraces all races as part of its vision of world nationalism. His statements on the site reflected a frustration with the populist politics and materialistic arrogance of modern society," the statement continued.

 

In a July 13 post, NativeNazi expressed his concern that Native Americans had turned their backs on racial purity and were being weakened by "interracial mixing". He was particularly annoyed that young Native Americans were copying the culture of African Americans.

 

"Where I live less than 1% of all the people on the Reservation can speak their own language, and among the youth wanting to be black has run ramped. We have kids my age killing each other over things as simple as a fight, and it's because of the rap influence. Wannabe-gangsters everywhere, I can't go 5 feet without hearing someone blasting some rap song over their speakers," he complained.

 

He went on: "It's hard though, being a Native American National Socialist, people are so misinformed, ignorant, and close minded it makes your life a living hell."

 

 

[rand0M aXiS]

Libertarian National Socialist Green party

 

Lets's see...

 

Green Party, right wing???

 

Socialist, right wing???

 

Libertarian, right wing??? A little bit I suppose.

 

Nationalist, right wing??? I'll claim patriotism rather than nationalism. /images/graemlins/cool.gif

 

"Libertarian National Socialist Green party"

 

Can't get much more LEFT WING than that!

 

The paper's bias is obvious.

 

It does show one thing......liberals have very oppressive visions.

 

The liberal who wrote the report just wanted to find someway to blast the right wing. Even if it means making the reporter look stupid. But deep down inside of the reporter and the reporter's liberal pals...........they quite possibly have the same eilitist/oppressing vision that the shooter had.

 

Would explain a lot of anti American/anti Liberty statements that a lot of democrats make. /images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

 

 

[Kulapavana]

there are kooks on both extremes of the political spectrum. I voted libertarian for the last 8 years or so and there are both right and left wing libertarians out there, but the real "ringe of the fringe" joins groups like the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party".

 

 

[rand0M aXiS]

prabhu. /images/graemlins/blush.gif

 

There are extremists on both ends of the spectrum (McVeigh on the right, Kazinsky on the left).

 

There are two types of libertarians, the small "l" and the capitol "L". I call the capitol "L" LOSERS, as they have never won a national election, tho they are electing a few city council members and state legislators. I think the capitol Ls are too hung up on the legalization of drugs. But that is for another thread.......

[rand0M aXiS]

[stonehearted]

Dasanudas_das:

"Libertarian National Socialist Green party" Can't get much more LEFT WING than that!

 

 

I wouldn't be so quick to make such a glib assertion. Here's the site for that party:

http://www.nazi.org/

[rand0M aXiS]

his posts. They are completely crazy.

 

The rundown:

 

-He's a Native American.

-He's a Nazi.

-He hates Capitalism.

-He hates government.

-He loves trees.

 

 

Everybody got that? Are these things at all compatible? The only thing they seem to have in common is that they are ideologies that appeal to angry people.

 

Hitler was not right wing. He was a left wing socialist. Got that? /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[rand0M aXiS]

Here are the posts he made to the nazi site:

Google Cache. He worshipped a man that would have stuck him in an oven in a heartbeat.

[Guest guest]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quote from one of the forum contributions.

 

"The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which all living beings must be sacrificed. Without end, without regret, without remorse, Until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, and the death of death. "

[rand0M aXiS]

quote, but truthful. I prefer "The material world is no place for a gentleman" /images/graemlins/frown.gif

[theist]

how the left views Hitler and trys to shovce him off on the right.

 

The Nazi's started off euthanizing (murdering) the mentally ill and handicapped from what I heard. Today the left is all for killing people, like the fetus', who may have a lowered "quality of life" and even adults like Terry Schiavo currently.

 

Makes me wonder if Barbra Boxer was a member of the Third Reich last time around.

 

But Avinash raises an interestng question. Why? What the hell is going on? This phenomenon is only two decades old but now we just say "another one" and go back to eating our toast.

[rand0M aXiS]

left has been to convince folks that Hitler and facism is a right wing philosophy. How they do it is beyond my limited intelligence.

 

 

 

Victor David Hanson, a professor from Fresno has an excellent analysis: (html number codes translate thru incorrectly, sorry about that)

 

 

 

 

 

<font color="#800000">.....Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.</font>

 

<font color="#800000">...Entire continents can play this game. If Europe is awash in anti-Semitism, then one mechanism to either ignore or excuse it is to allege that the United States &#151; the one country that is the most hospitable to Jews &#151; is governed by a Hitler-like killer. Americans, who freed Europe from the Nazis, are supposed to recoil from such slander rather than cry shame on its promulgators, whose grandfathers either capitulated to the Nazis or collaborated &#151; or were Nazis themselves.</font>

 

<font color="#800000">If the sick analogy to Hitler is intended to conjure up a mass murderer, then the 20th century&#146;s two greatest killers, Mao and Stalin, who slaughtered or starved somewhere around 80 million between them, are less regularly evoked. Perhaps that omission is because so many of the mass demonstrators, who bore placards of Bush&#146;s portrait defaced with Hitler&#146;s moustache, are overtly leftist and so often excuse extremist violence &#151; whether in present-day Cuba or Zimbabwe &#151; if it is decorated with the rhetoric of radical enforced equality.</font>

 

<font color="#800000">....But something has gone terribly wrong with a mainstream Left that tolerates a climate where the next logical slur easily devolves into Hitlerian invective. The problem is not just the usual excesses of pundits and celebrities ......, but also supposedly responsible officials of the opposition such as former Sen. John Glenn, who said of the Bush agenda: &#147;It&#146;s the old Hitler business.&#148;</font>

 

<font color="#800000">....Is there a danger to all this? Plenty. The slander not only brings a president down to the level of an evil murderer, but &#151; as worried Jewish leaders have pointed out &#151; elevates the architect of genocide to the level of an American president. Do the ghosts of six million that were incinerated &#151; or, for that matter, the tens of millions who were killed to promote or stop Hitler&#146;s madness &#151; count for so little that they can be so promiscuously induced when one wishes to object to stopping the filibuster of senatorial nominations or to ignore the objection of Europeans in removing the fascistic Saddam Hussein? </font>

 

<font color="#800000">There is something profoundly immoral for a latte-sipping, upscale Westerner of the postmodern age flippantly evoking Hitler when we think of the countless souls lost to the historical record who were systematically starved and gassed in the factories of death of the Third Reich.</font>

 

<font color="#800000">.....The final irony? The president who is most slandered as Hitler will probably prove to be the most zealous advocate of democratic government abroad, the staunchest friend of beleaguered Israel, and the greatest promoter of global individual freedom in our recent memory. In turn, too many of the Left who used to talk about idealism and morality have so often shown themselves mean-spirited, cynical, and without faith in the spiritual power of democracy.</font>

 

<font color="#800000">What an eerie &#151; and depressing &#151; age we live in.</font></blockquote>

[Guest guest]

"The material world is no place for a gentleman"

 

This is too true.

 

"The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which all living beings must be sacrificed. Without end, without regret, without remorse, Until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, and the death of death. "

 

Oh father Abraham what hath thou started?

 

But the altar would have to vanish completely for evil to be eradicated.

 

 

 

For the material world by nature is a place of duality.

 

 

Death is nonexistent

for those who are

alive!

 

For I shall walk thru it's shadow and fear no evil.

 

Alas! If only I had two wings then I could fly in the spiritual sky.

Gauranga-Nityananda

Jaya Nitai Gauranga

Nitai Gauranga

Nitai Gauranga

Nitai Gauranga

[Guest guest]

"Makes me wonder if Barbra Boxer was a member of the Third Reich last time around."

 

We're all still here

no one has gone away

Waiting, acting much too

well and procrastinating

In different forms all changing clothes

Who is who?

Srila Bhaktisiddanta Saraswati asks

Anyone care to answer.

[krsna]

Shootings cause schools to take safety more seriously

By Craig Davison

Features Editor

 

The shootings in a northern Minnesota high school on Monday have brought safety and security of our nation’s schools to the forefront in the wake of the largest act of school violence since the Columbine massacre.

 

Jeff Weise, a student at Red Lake High School on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend before going to school, where he killed an unarmed security guard, a teacher, five students and later himself.

 

Weise had been in the school’s homebound program due to a policy violation and was remembered by classmates as strange and anti-social.

 

In the wake of the tragedy, a Purdue professor has spoken about how bullies affect children. In some of the previous shootings, the gunmen have had a history of being bothered, teased or bullied.

 

Jean Peterson, an associate professor of education studies and coordinator of the school counseling program, recently completed a study of 432 eighth grade students in 11 states on bullying and how it affects children.

 

The study showed there is more to bullying than physicality and identified 13 kinds of bullying. The form with the most significant effect was teasing about appearance.

 

Students from Red Lake High School said Weise dressed in "Goth" fashion and had a large black trench coat.

 

Comments from the students in Peterson’s study showed those who were bullied felt an array of emotions from worthlessness to vengeance. The study also found even one act of being bullied can set off a chain of self-doubt.

 

"They could talk about it as if it happened yesterday," said Peterson.

 

She said solutions to the problem lie in more supervision and providing support to resolve the bullying. In cases where this occurs, Peterson said she found students can "repair" themselves.

 

Sometimes, when the children become more connected to their peer, the child and bully even became friends.

 

Thomas Capozzoli, director of Purdue College of Technology in Kokomo and Lafayette, would like to see in an increase of communication in schools.

 

The author of the book "Kids Killing Kids: Violence and Gangs in Schools," in the past Capozzoli has suggested the creation of focus groups in schools to ask students what issues are going on that teachers or administrators may not be aware of.

 

"Sometimes you can be surprised what you can learn from (students)," he said.

 

Capozzoli said it's likely no one communicated with Weise.

 

"We just don’t pay attention to people, we’re too busy to listen to students," he said.

 

And while area high schools do not have such a formalized process as the one Capozzoli prescribes, some say they are trying.

 

"The biggest thing we do is get out and talk to our kids," said Shaad Buss, assistant principal and dean of students for Harrison High School. "If there is student conflict of any kind, we try to become involved to create solutions for that."

 

In addition to attention and communication, there is physical security present at local high schools. All have some form of security guards during the school day.

 

But more so than increasing security, Capozzoli said the most important thing is maintaining vigilance. As distance from the tragedy grows, so does complacency.

 

"As day-to-day operations go on, we’ll forget about it," he said. "We’ve got to be aware each and every day that this could happen.

 

"The longer it goes without something happening, you think you’re safer. It’ll happen again. It’s going to happen again."