Odessa Police Chief Will Not Publicly Name Gunman, Denying the Dead Shooter Notoriety

I agree with Red Neck, guns are not the issue. Guns have been around for a couple of hundred years, not just since the turn of the century. People say but, what about assault rifles. News flash - the Thompson Machine Gun (a true assault weapon) was invented in 1918 (100 years ago). People of legal age could buy them at places like hardware stores and even mail order. Laws were eventually put in place regulating ownership of machine guns. My point is AR style weapons aren't causing mass murder. I believe changes in society are the major factor. There is a very popular, terrible video game (Grand Theft Auto) that has been around for years. The main theme is to kill people and steal vehicles, sound familiar? When children play games where you shoot someone in the face and their brains splatter against a wall which raises your score, don't you think this will have an affect on a young mind. This is an old game, I'm sure there are newer, worse games available. The problem is people will claim these games fall under the first amendment which shouldn't be touched but, will gladly attack the 2nd amendment.

I suspect that most, if not all of these shooters are sociopaths to some degree. Only a person who is unable to empathize with others could kill innocents in large numbers. These folks may seem normal in there everyday lives, hold steady jobs, relationships and appear to be upstanding citizens. Background checks won't detect these people unless they have been previously diagnosed as such, allowing the easy access to firearms.
I applaud the execution by cops of this disturbed idiot and am glad that the public will not have to fund his defense, appeals and incarceration.

What about the quintessential young American boy's game of "cops 'n' robbers" or ''cowboys 'n' indians'', which was very popular among the generation before mine? In these role playing games, kids walked around with very realistic looking weapons, even carrying them with their mothers on a trip to the market, or coming to dinner dressed as a bona fide "INJUN killer". Using the video games scapegoat logic, this type of role play should've resulted in quite the body count, not to mention, champion a very healthy interest in genocide.

Not many ever claimed too many John Wayne or Charles Bronson movies were giving kids bad ideas, but around the late 80's, Rap music became the new intangible "threat to children", second only to the debunked "Satanic panic". Most rappers were surely not doing drive-bys or pulling off strong arm robberies, just as The Duke and Bronson had more than likely never so much as aimed a gun at anyone in their lives, but once suburban white children were sagging their pants and speaking ebonics, politicians who turned a blind eye to the real life plight of people in crime infested inner cities, soon began to sweat over the cassette tapes and records their own impressionable little brats began bringing home.

None of the aforementioned forms of entertainment or games have any direct, demonstrable correlation with gun violence , though many tend to subjectively rail against them, for either a personal disdain towards their authors or participants, or for a lack of understanding of where the root of the problem lies.

Mentally defective people, bent on murder, are going to commit these acts, irrespective of which laws are enacted or whether or not their weapons were obtained legally. The alleged gumman spent his free time picking off neighborhood pets from his rooftop. Animal abuse is a proven precursor to crimes against people, much more so than all the shoot-em-up video games and ''gangsta rap'' cd's combined.

The answer to curbing these incidents isn't removing certain guns from Walmart or banning video games with violent themes. Most people who legally own firearms and play video games don't become mass murderers, however, almost every known murderer has an extensive history in incidents of animal abuse.

People with histories of committing acts of unprovoked violence should be permanently barred from owning or using a firearm and placed under mandatory lifetime probationary supervision. When and if these people manage to escalate their little night excursions of cat killing to randomly picking off people, the public should also have the right to know how many times the local authorities dropped the ball in their failure to take these worthless assholes off of the streets.

A first violent offense should be one's last violent offense. A society which cringes at the prospect of swift, severe penalties for those who threaten it's well being, probably deserves to experience the hardship it's apathy enables.

“I’m not naming the subject. I refuse to give him any notoriety,” Gerke said.
He said his department would release the name to the media, but not publicly at the press conference at the University of Texas at Permian Basin that started at 12:30 p.m. Sunday.