to notice that the killings in the USA

[butisthismyname]

Are HUGE NEWS, but the children who are being shot and killed every day in syria, the children who live on the streets and die every day in south america and the children who are dying in third world countries are 'part of the furniture'? I know what has just happened is horrific and sad and awful, but it's just so fucking unfair. It's like the twin towers - OMG the USA is in trouble, lets be outraged ( not negating that but just an example) When will we be as understanding and sympathetic and make what is happening everywhere else in the world as important and newsworthy as this?

Op - the vast majority of comments are not aimed at you.

Well mine certainly. It's no so much that you started the thread it's some of the comments thereafter.

I can't empathise so much with what is happening in Syria because I have never lived in a country ruled by a dictator where civil war has to happen to allow democracy to be the norm.

I send my 2 children to school everyday and am not an emotional person but have a heavy heart today and have cuddled my kids for longer than usual today, I have thought of the panic and horror of those parents before they knew whether their children were dead or alive, the guilt of those who still have their kids when they look at the parents of the dead children, the envy of the dead children's parents when they look at the parents of the kids who survived. I sit here and know I would end my own life, the grief and pain and emptiness would be too much. I can't feel like that about the kids in Syria because I believe that I will never live amongst war. That may be wrong but it us normal human nature and I actually think what you have brought up right now is course and disgusting and actually more denigrating to those poor children who have died in the horrific tragedy yesterday than people not having dying Syrian children at the forefront of their mind.

That sums it up nicely ever.

I'm still really sorry for starting it - as I said, it was a knee jerk ( and a bit too much gin maybe ) I've been really affected for some reason by the syria/lebanon issues and just worked myself up into a bit of a frenzy last night. Stupid woman!

Very crass thread OP.

Children have been murdered. Are you saying that by virtue of them being American it is in some way deserved because of American foreign policy?

That's really very unpleasant.

No child ever deserves to be murdered wherever they are from and whatever the politics of their country of birth is.

I would imagine that we hear more about American news simply by virtue of the fact it is a Western nation. If one were to google the particular issues in the Middle East then you would find hundreds of articles. Maybe consider broadening your horizons regardless the news programmes you watch as well. BBC,ITV and channel 5 don't exactly offer hard hitting analytical reports of world events.

Gah! Op whilst I was typing my fairly long comment you've come back.

I can understand why it is frustrating to get news on certain events,from certain places,about certain things when so much more is going on in the world. So I see where you're coming from there.

Don't worry but. And thanks for coming back.

Thanks - sticking to tonic water tonight . And it is horrific, i've just read the paper in tears. This world is just..shit sometimes :(

Abitwobblynow I think you are brilliant.

It is shit op. sometimes there is so much bad news and misery it can be overwhelming.

I haven't read the whole thread but I've always thought the news does concentrate a lot on things happening close to home, like how the news is always followed by the local news in your area. I'd be more interested in more analysis of important world events and issues such as you might get on Newsnight or similar. Just because it happened near me am I supposed to care that much more ? But then I've moved around the country quite a bit so perhaps I don't have that local loyalty as much as some.

I was shocked and saddened to hear of the death of these children at their school in US. I guess it's only human that I relate to that as a mother and as someone who's worked in schools. It naturally makes me concerned over whether such a thing could happen here - at worst in a school my children were at or where I was working. It's only human to think of how news could affect you and your loved ones. But if you only or mainly see things through that filter it does seem to me to be lacking some perspective. The death of a child anywhere under any circumstances is always a great sadness. I'd like to see more awareness of children suffering through both war and hunger, and then more action on these issues.

Other countries do get attention. Remember the Beslin (Breslan?) school siege in a former Soviet Republic? The children were kept hostage and people were shot. There was masses of coverage at the time, for days.

People just have short memories.

Pickled, I was trying to hold on to the strand of discussion about how these events shock America into querying its gun laws and - to a lesser extent - its approaches to mental health care. I'm not making this connection all by myself, the American people make it.

Yesterday's tragedy seems to have raised the debate to a higher level than previous ones. When I said that, for a long time, many have been asking "How many more lives must be wasted before America questions its right to carry lethal weapons?" I wasn't talking about myself, but the American people. When I said let's hope Connecticut marks that point, I wasn't scoring hits but reflecting American media coverage.

I'm finding this thread weird. It seems like people want to attack everybody who seeks to look at the issues Sandy Hook raises, and at the wider context. We all have our different ways of responding. When I hear of a child murdered, I think of all murdered children. Is that wrong? Why? Is there only one acceptable response?

When I was making the point last night garlic I was specifically referring to foreign policy, following several posts which in my opinion seemed to be insinuating the USA was in some way getting a taste if its own medicine.

I'm not just leaping at people who say anything remotely negative about the USA and I did mention specifically gun law and foreign policy in the post.

That's a very different discussion to the one you are referring to.

Although ill get accused of going "waaaaa waaaaa waaaaa" and telling people what they can & can't discuss in the wake of a gun massacre it seems a little more understandable to me to talk about gun laws & domestic issues than using it to complain about USA foreign policy.

Hi everyone,

Thanks to all those who have brought this thread to our attention.

We've just gone through and deleted some posts that were personal attacks.

Our hearts go out to any MNers across the pond, and to anyone suffering in a violent situation.

We completely understand the need to talk about this tragedy, and welcome all viewpoints, providing the do not contradict our talk guidelines.

Any posts that contradict our guidelines, or that are aggressive to anyone on Mumsnet, will be deleted..

Thanks again, and let's try to remember that the purpose of Mumsnet is to make parent's lives easier, and to offer moral support to one another.

OP it is not a competition.

Most of us are perfectly capable of feeling sad about more than one thing at a time.

Are you seriosuly saying we shouldbn't feel sad because in the scheme of things it's not so bad? Seriouslty?

I have apologised for the knee jerk reaction I had last night. Again, I didn't mean to cause such upset. Sincerely.

I found it startling that it got so much more attention than the stabbing of 22 children in China that had been on the news in the morning. Once the American one broke, the Chinese one got lost, wasn't on the red button or on any of the Euro news channels. I had to hunt through an Chinese-American friend's facebook page for the latest update on it. American media is a lot louder though.

I think recent posts from but have been amongst some of the most gracious back tracking and apology I've seen from a poster on MN. Again, I've not read the whole thread but surely she deserves some credit for being able to apologise (for starting this thread) with grace.

Thank you - I can be a complete idiot at times...

You are very, very gracious Op.
But there will be people coming on who haven't read the whole thread and have missed your apology.
IMO, for what it's worth, there were hideous things going on in the world during the Dunblane tragedy, but I still remember crying in the supermarket when looking at the papers and seeing the class photo on all the front pages.
I think, because war seems to be such a distant thing, and we thankfully don't have such horrors in our lives, a story about a senseless shooting of little children seems to us, as mothers, just a little too close to home.

YY, Lady Beagle, absolutely

Word, I understood the OP to be about the media and the amount of coverage given over to the American shootings compared to news coverage of other child suffering and death in other nations. Much of which is as a result of American Economic and political foreign policy.

Most people are concerned with all suffering. There is though the small matter of being distracted and by something so huge as this recent killing. Governments and the media combined are very good at distraction and we are being once again invited to not just empathise with ordinary American people (whom I think we all do) and being invited to sympathise with America (as in nation state) and it's policies. After the twin towers (which I was deeply shocked by) Bush and co' played on the fears of ordinary Americans and the sympathies of other nations/peoples to enact a whole raft of new laws which actively seek to strip American people of their freedoms. Through a sense of impending doom and state of emergency they set up Gauntanamo bay where they have subjected people to torture. Obama is no better.....yet more laws and changes that will allow the government to lock up it's own citizens without trial in massive detention centres dotted about in every state.

I am very concerned for ordinary American citizens but I will not be distracted and I will not be hog washed into sympathy for the American political elite and it's desire to spread economic misery upon all other nations whilst ignoring the plight of it's own impoverished citizens.

Look into the problems of Mexican workers, the rural poor, tented cities, people who are losing their homes (remember the party of wall street and Sub prime)

What concerns me is the power of the state combined with the media (who have common cause and interest) to shape peoples opinions and to distract people.

I don't want to sound judgemental but OP - your post is like something I'd have said when I was about 14 and, shall I say, trying to be controversial .

US media, crap as it is, is far more open than Chinese media. I've seen no added information regarding the Chinese school stabbings on the BBC website. The state does control this sort of thing as best they can. Whereas in the US, the news is there and people are airing their grief.

And it's natural that people feel a connection to people in the US. Most people I know here have either traveled to the US on holiday, or have family members living there, or both. That's not even starting on the amount of US media which is exported. In a global world, it feels like it's right next door, rather than thousands of miles away.

Children being shot in school plays upon the fears that every parent has when they have to start taking their children to school. They're out of our protection (not that we could stop bullets if we were there, but still). We've entrusted them to someone else's care.

Someone has said we (I am American, living overseas 10 years but still American) don't care when this happens elsewhere, that if this had happened in the UK it wouldn't be in our media. I can tell you, when I posted on FB yesterday "little kids :( " the very first responses from US friends were remembering the children in Dunblane. Americans aren't as self-absorbed as some seem to think.

I was in the US on business when the massacre in Norway happened. It was the top story in the news for days. Same when that school was held hostage in Russia. It's children, targeting children, which resonates with people around the world.

Yes, I think the media chooses how often to air other tragedies in war zones. If they only reported on how horrifically people are dying around the world right this moment, we would be even more desensitised to it than we already are. I can't even bear to think of the images I recently saw of a man holding his dead child's rucksack in Syria a few weeks ago. I knew a child had died, but when I saw the rucksack it just made it very real to me and brought tears to my eyes.

As word says, I'm capable of feeling sad about more than one thing at a time. At the moment, I am.. beyond sad over the Christmas these families are going to have. And on Monday, I'll send my son to preschool as usual, in very similar surroundings to those which those parents sent their children to school.

little babies :(