Thu, April 09, 2009
LOS ANGELES, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Last week seemed to be the bloodiest week in the United States with 14 people being killed in a shooting rampage Friday in Binghamton, New York, followed by two more shootings Saturday in Washington and Pennsylvania which cost a total of nine lives including five children.
Increasing fatal shootings have aroused debate on what and whom to blame and whether the United States should tighten its gun control laws.
Violence prevention expert Ronald Stephens, who currently serves as the school safety chair for Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology in California, told Xinhua in an interview that the social problem can not be solved by gun control alone.
Stephens said the federal government banned any guns on school campus in all 50 states in 1994, and since then gun violence has dropped significantly, but can not be totally rooted out on campus.
The professor on violence prevention said each state has its own laws on gun control. Some states have loose control while the others have tight control. Generally gun shops will check the background of gun buyers, but most gun shops allow people to buy guns without going through background check. Even in states with tight gun control laws, criminals always have their ways to get guns, he said.
Stephens said studies found that almost all those who committed shootings had some kind of problems either with drugs, alcohol, gangs or had psychological problems.
Therefore while continued to stress the importance of gun control, people have turned to other ways to solve the problem such as to join efforts of educators and mental health workers to find out the most dangerous people.
While 99.9 percent of people behave well with guns, there are people who will use their guns to harm others, Stephens said, adding that educators are looking for ways to reduce the rate of gun violence by the small amount of irrational people.
Sheldon Zhang, professor and chair at San Diego State University's Department of Sociology, told Xinhua that gun ownership is a long treasured American tradition. It is also a highly charged issue among various groups of people.
"Switzerland is often used as an example by the National Rifle Association to debunk the relationship between gun ownership and violence. Switzerland has higher private gun ownership but far lower gun related violence than the average of industrialized countries," Sheldon Zhang said.
In his opinion, not only the availability of guns makes any confrontation more volatile and lethal than similar incidents in countries without widespread gun ownership.
He echoed Professor Stephens that there are many factors that contribute to the use of guns in the United States. The presence of alcohol and drugs are tied to gun violence.
He concluded that by and large, one must admit that the widely availability of guns makes America one of the most violent and lethal countries in the world. It is also a reality that all who choose to live in this country must face because there are no viable options to remove all the guns from private owners.
Asked whether the bad economy is to blame, Zhang said: "I personally think the economy is just an excuse for people to blame something. No one can really explain these irrational behaviors unless you have enough numbers for scientists to explore."
"Not being able to find a job, such as the case of Jiverly Wong in New York, happens to millions of people these days. So it is not unique in any way. Taking it out with a gun is unique," he added.
A recent survey conducted by BuzzDash.com web site showed that on the question "do you blame current gun laws for Binghamton shooting", 14 percent said yes to a large degree, 5 percent said yes to some degree, while 81 percent said no, other factors are to blame.
NEW YORK, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Jiverly Wong, the Vietnamese immigrant who killed 13 people before taking his own life in Binghamton, upstate New York, on Friday, mailed a letter to a TV station the day of the massacre, local media reported Monday.
Wong wrote in rambling English that the police had harassed him for 18 years, even spreading rumors about him and touching him in his sleep. Full story
BINGHAMTON, the United States, April 5 (Xinhua) -- A total of 14 people of eight different countries of origin, among them 4 Chinese nationals, were killed in Friday's deadly shooting rampage in downtown Binghamton, the U.S. state of New York, local authorities said on Sunday.
According to a victims' namelist released here, the 14 came from Pakistan, the Philippines, Haiti, China, Vietnam, the United States, Brazil and Iraq, respectively. Full story
BEIJING, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi made a phone conversation with his U.S. counterpart Hillary Clinton on Sunday, expressing concerns over Chinese nationals killed and injured in Friday's Binghamton shooting rampage.
According to preliminary investigation results, four Chinese women were among the people killed in the shooting and another Chinese national was injured. Full story
BINGHAMTON, the United States, April 4 (Xinhua) -- The shooter who killed 13 people before taking his own life in an immigrant services Centre in New York's Binghamton has been identified as a naturalized U.S. citizen of a Vietnamese descent, the authorities said Saturday.
Jiverly Wong, who was believed to be in his early 40s and lived just outside the nearby Johnson city, was recently frustrated over a job loss and disrespect from people who laughed at his poor English skills, providing clues to the motive of the killings, they said. Full story
NEW YORK, April 3 (Xinhua) -- A lone gunman armed with two handguns on Friday killed 14 people and critically wounded four more in a rampage through an immigration services center in the upstate town of Binghamton, in the U.S. state of New York, police said.
Police chief Joseph Zikuski told reporters at a late afternoon news conference 37 other people in the single story building escaped harm, many of them hiding in a barricaded boiler room of the American Civic Association on Front Street and "most of them could not speak English." Full story
WASHINGTON, April 4 (Xinhua) -- Three Pittsburgh police officers were shot dead on Saturday morning and two more were wounded after they responded to a domestic dispute in a residence home, police said.
The western Pennsylvania city's police chief Nathan Harper told reporters at a press conference in the afternoon that the suspect, Richard Poplawski, opened fire on two officers when they approached his home in Stanton Heights district.
