UK shooting has me freaked out..can UK orgers please check in

yea plz check in, haven't even heard about it yet.

Thanks hun. Are you talking bout the one with 12 dead or was there another one?

[Edited 6/2/10 20:12pm]

Crazy stuff huh?

Luckily, we live far away from there.

Here's a map.

We live in Surrey and the shootings happened in Cumbria.

I have been watching the news the past two days about it. How sad!

[img:$uid]http://www.itraveluk.co.uk/maps/england/england-county-map.gif[/img:$uid]

Police were trying to work out Thursday why a quiet taxi-driver gunned down 12 people around the serene Lake District, as Britain debated how to prevent a repeat of its worst rampage for years.

Derrick Bird's shooting spree Wednesday through sleepy towns, villages and beautiful countryside in one of Britain's top tourist spots stunned the entire country, and left authorities struggling to find answers.

The 52-year-old, later found dead in the remote Eskdale valley after apparently turning one of his guns on himself, seemed to know some of his victims while others appeared to have been strangers, shot dead at random during a three-hour spree.

Eleven others were injured and seven remain in hospital. Cumbrian police said more than 100 detectives were now piecing together Bird's trail with evidence scattered across 30 different crime scenes.

"We must do absolutely everything to complete this investigation, to make sure that everything is done to make sure that events like this cannot happen again in our country," Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters.

WHAT SPARKED RAMPAGE?

Officers are trying to work out what turned the driver, described by friends and colleagues as a nice, quiet, normal man, into a mass killer.

Fellow taxi drivers in the coastal town of Whitehaven, where Bird worked, told Reuters he had been involved in a dispute with other cabbies the previous night.

Newspapers reported that after the row he had left saying: "There's going to be a rampage tomorrow." At least one of those killed was a taxi driver.

There have also been unconfirmed reports that a dispute over a family will might have pushed him over the edge. Lawyer Kevin Commons was one of the victims and media reports said Bird's twin brother was also among the dead.

"We've had lots of speculation, rumour and innuendo about what occurred the night before," Stuart Hyde, deputy chief constable of Cumbrian Police, told BBC television.

The rampage was Britain's deadliest multiple shooting since Thomas Hamilton walked into a school in Dunblane, Scotland, 14 years ago and shot dead 15 children and their teacher.

That killing led to new laws which banned civilian ownership of handguns and meant other weapons required a certificate from the police.

Cumbrian Police said Bird, who used a shotgun and a .22 calibre rifle with a telescopic sight, had been licensed to own both firearms. The government said it would hold a review of existing gun laws when the full facts of the case were known.

"We should be clear that in this country we have some of the toughest gun control legislation anywhere in the world," said Cameron, who will travel to Cumbria Friday.

"Of course we should look at this issue but I don't think we should leap to knee-jerk conclusions about what can be done on a regulatory front."

Cumbria is one of the safest places in Britain, and the latest official figures show there were just four homicides in 2008/9. In 2006/7 there was none.

But opposition politicians raised the issue about whether its small police force had the resources to cope with such an incident, while some locals posted messages on a local newspaper's website asking why Bird was not stopped sooner.

"You can't blame the police," said Darren Williamson, 32, an electrician who was working at a shop a few doors down from the taxi rank in Whitehaven where Bird opened fire. "The police round here have got no experience at all of shootings like that. London, New York maybe -- we don't have shootings in Whitehaven.

"If the police had stopped him getting out of Whitehaven, he would have just run rampage in Whitehaven and killed as many people as he could round here."

[Edited 6/3/10 8:23am]

Checking in from Suffolk

This stuff is bonkers.

florescent said:

checking in!!

glad you all r ok