Curious... seattle self-censorship, or worse?

I happened to be reading an article in the seattle community about the shootings last night at Chop Suey in Capitol Hill, and followed a link in the comments to the Slog's take on the incident. On returning from the link, quoth the Raven, "404" -- page not found. It appears the LJ article has been obliterated from the system.

Now I did notice that the original poster was a bit concerned about receiving responses in her mailbox, and had edited the original post to read, in part, "I don't want to discuss it anymore". So that could be a simple case of the original poster getting cold feet. But once a message is deleted, there is no way to find out who deleted it or why.

My take:

It is a tragedy when someone gets killed for no good reason, no matter who it is, and there are in the end no good reasons for killing someone, but only sadly necessary ones such as self-defense.

Absolute prevention of crime is impossible, just as perfect security is an unattainable goal. Thus talk of banning this or that genre of music, confiscating all guns, and the like is in the end futile. Blaming guns, hip-hop music, or anyone else but the shooter is useless, and fixing the blame is usually not helpful in fixing the problem.

Abusive relationships with our churches

In a comment to this post on Pam's House Blend, I discovered a new way to think about gay adherents to a religion that believes they are denied the salvation preached by that same religion [emphasis mine]:

A lot of what is mentioned in this article is commendable, though I think a case can be made that the greater service to gay LDS members would be to treat them as battered wives in abusive relationships they can't leave--and help them to get out.

For "LDS members" one can easily substitute "Catholics", or "Muslims", or members of any number of other religions.