No offense, but not only does that article flat-out state that the "statistics" aren't fully documented, the two links it provides are to personal blog posts. One of them is a Wordpress site.
No it doesn't. That's taking an "if" statement and applying it broadly across the board. Having a gun on your person does not prevent you from being raped, and can lead to accidental shootings during to improper training, and careless storage.
@smeagolheart I can agree to stop giving tax cuts to rich political donors--that kind of money is distorting politics in ways it shouldn't be distorted.
You would have to define "assault weapon" in the law, of course. Once done, it won't take after-market gunsmiths long to figure out how to convert a weapon so that it either will--or will not, depending upon what they are trying to do--comply with the law.
Right now, I have no stake in this fight--there is no money in the budget for a gun, the safety procedures to go along with it, and a safe in which to keep it, much less the safety/training classes and the licensing to carry it concealed (or open, if I prefer).
Another write-up from Talking Points Memo about the central problems of why the gun debate can't be fixed in this country. Some profound stuff here, that goes into alot of what different people here are saying. Long, but I'm gonna post the whole thing, as it's an essential read:
We’ve discussed it many times. Most of us realize it: one of the great ironies, and perhaps tragedies of the “gun control” debate is that it has been backed into such limited and incremental policy prescriptions that those prescriptions can be reasonably derided by “gun rights” advocates as barely worth the trouble or hardly of any use. We know that no one restriction would prevent every needless tragedy. But together, a number of them, interweaving and compounding each other, would prevent or limit many massacres and bloodbaths. More importantly, this whole logic is not one we apply to any other problem of criminality or public health. Our entire counter-terrorism policy is based on no silver bullets but a series of traversable but still consequential obstacles, the aim of which is to disrupt, make more complicated or reveal conspiracies. We have collectively made it mainly too difficult to hatch plots to commandeer airliners or even effectively communicate to plan major operations at all. So radicals are reduced to largely ineffectual (but still often deadly) DIY kitchenware based bombs and trucks. That’s a good thing.
Yesterday was an unspeakable tragedy for a few dozens of families and an opportunity for the rest of us to revisit our collective disgrace – every single one of us – in sitting by and letting these things happen again and again. Yesterday I had what was for me at least a minor epiphany: A major driver of gun massacres is not simply our failure to act on any one of the various proposed incremental reforms. It is our failure to act on any of them or all of them, ever, which validates and encourages a culture of massacre.
I want to be clear precisely what I mean. Our inaction itself and the clear reasons for our collective inaction validate and inspire the culture of massacre. Directly. By doing nothing we validate a simple point: the total, maximal right to have any number of guns of any sort in any circumstance is not only more important but overwhelmingly more important than preventing school massacres. It is more important than anything. Nothing better captures the cultural supremacy of the gun than this. Nothing provides more fuel to the now hideously cliched ritual of the blaze of glory moment of total destruction.
We know that individual mass shooters are the product of damaged psyches, unbounded rage, mental illness of some sort in almost every case and the cult of public spectacle which informs our entire culture. But these events, these people, grow out of ourselves. They are not singular and unknowable. They are the products of countless injuries but also validations and mores and encouragements – sanctions and inhibitions. The public campaign against drunken driving is the operative case in point about the transvaluation of values, driven by and undergirded by changed laws but not equal to them, which is the only way forward for true change.
Numerous laws changed and that changed the equation for drunken driving. But the true change came from a radically different understanding of the social acceptability of the behavior itself. It is now seen as shameful, awful, selfish. Drunken driving still happens of course. But it happens much less and our society and the individual life lanes we all travel have numerous impediments, disincentives, and collective shamings on the way to getting drunk and getting behind the wheel of a car.
The gun problem requires laws, restrictions, reshaping the framework of legal and civil liability to bend the curve away from the current culture of massacre. But what makes all those things impossible, for now, is the political decision that nothing is more important than the completely untrammeled right to have any gun with any amount of ammunition anytime anywhere.
Do you really need an AR-15? For some people, it’s just fun to fire off an AR-15. I begrudge no one that fun. You’re at the range. It’s just cool. I get it. But maybe, because it’s also the weapon of choice for virtually every school massacre, to have that fun you need to do a background check not just for institutionalization or felony records but something a bit more thorough, to know you’re not someone with all the markers of a mass shooter. Or maybe you can have it and fire it as often as you want but you need to leave it in a locker at the range. These changes would be a bit of a pain for enthusiasts. But changing mores about drunken driving also made social drinking a bit more difficult. You have to think through how you’re getting home if you’re going to go out and have more than a couple drinks. Does your spouse or partner not drink? Do you have a designated driver? Public transportation? It’s a bit of a pain. We’ve decided this pain is more than worth it. The ability to drink in any way or to any extent at any time is not an absolute value.
The specific reforms are beside the point for these purposes. The point is the need for and public agreement to some balancing, some inconveniences and impediments to total freedom to do anything with guns up to the doorstep of a felony or a massacre. Until we do this, not only do we not have any of even the most basic reforms which could begin to make it a little harder to commit massacres, we also collectively send a signal as a society. Guns are not only potentially fatal as tools. They are all powerful totems. They are untouchable. They reduce adults who promise to spare no exertion to protect the country from various public or domestic threats to be reduced to the gibberish and nonsense of “thoughts and prayers.” Nothing is a deeper testament to the cultural power and invincibility of the gun in our society. And it is that power which is at the heart of the massacre spectacle – the desire and all-consuming need and drive to destroy lives including your own indiscriminately in a final burst of total power. Our collective impotence not only sharpens that weapon, that symbol for the perpetrators of the actual massacres. It also gives sanction for all the precursor behavior (the gun nut who is stockpiling AR-15s and ammo but never actually kills anyone).
The reforms are critical. And more of them than are even close to the current debate will be required. But the core of the culture of massacre is equally driven by the social sickness of inaction itself. It is the ultimate validation of the power of the gun that is at the heart of the sick social disease. Until we recognize that the collective message of the power and singular importance of guns is at the heart of the gun massacre scourge, we’ll never be rid of it.
I'm in favor of gun control and rifles are among the least of my concerns. Handguns have always been more important in my eyes, and the data on the FBI's website bears it out: handguns are the top murder weapons in the United States by far.
Easy and convenient. Tuck one into your pocket. Someone pisses you off and in a moment of rage shoot em. Rinse and repeat happens every day. At least with a knife you have to really mean it. It's harder than squeezing one finger from 10 feet away.
By far the most important point. It is INFINITELY easier, from both a physical and mental standpoint, to shoot someone rather than to stab or beat them to death.
This is actually SPECIFICALLY invoked in Fallout 2 at the end of Temple of Trials in the very, very beginning. Ask the guy you have to fight "Why do we have to fight?", and he'll say that at some point, eventually there will be fighting, and that using weapons desensitize us from the effects of our weapons and distance ourselves from our actions, from looking in their eyes and feeling the pain in your hand when you hit them (it's a hand-to-hand fight).
There is something very interesting happening after this shooting. These survivors are high school kids. And right now, they are really pissed off and naming names. They are telling people in no uncertain terms that, yes, this IS about guns, because we experienced it. And they are demanding something be done about it.
There is a reason the GOP has thrown all their chips in on voter suppression, gerrymandering, and cultural resentment. Because they are going to be dead party to most kids growing up under Trump.
Not that anything's going to happen. As I believe YOU pointed out much earlier in this thread, if a school full of shot first-graders (Sandy Hook Elementary) wasn't enough to mobilize the country to action, nothing is.
1. That is a ridiculous argument. How many bank robberies a year are prevented because people think there's armed security guards, or there COULD be armed security guards? Millions. And yet, they still happen. I COULD rob a bank. I COULD rape a woman. I COULD kill the president. I COULD blow up Congress. Does that mean that I now am one of those 3600 (+1 now!) rapes prevented per day? But, at least yet I hope, we don't arrest people for what they are thinking in their own minds, and only base criminal actions on what has actually happened, or at least what they are in the beginning stages of planning to carry out, when laying the foundation for whatever criminal action. 2. That link, had a link cited, which had no links to their "surveys". So....what...?
As i've showed, the criminalty in Australia become bigger after the more strict gun control.
As I mentioned before any suggestion there is a link between guns and rape would need proper evidence. Far more relevant is whether there is a link between guns and gun violence. This article reviews the impact in Australia of gun control. Since the change in the law in 1996 it is indisputable that gun homicides and gun suicides have decreased by a considerable amount. There is an argument about the causes of this - as I mentioned recently, there has been a sharp decline in violence across much of the world in the last few decades so it's possible that the reduction in Australia would have happened even without gun control.
However, there are some clear pointers that gun control has indeed been at least partially responsible - for instance the points made in the article include the following: “While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the NFA, resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.” “In the seven years before the NFA (1989-1995), the average annual firearm suicide death rate per 100,000 was 2.6 (with a yearly range of 2.2 to 2.9); in the seven years after the buyback was fully implemented (1998-2004), the average annual firearm suicide rate was 1.1 (yearly range 0.8 to 1.4).” “In the seven years before the NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 was .43 (range .27 to .60) while for the seven years post NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate was .25 (range .16 to .33).” “The drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback.”
@smeagolheart I can agree to stop giving tax cuts to rich political donors--that kind of money is distorting politics in ways it shouldn't be distorted.
You would have to define "assault weapon" in the law, of course. Once done, it won't take after-market gunsmiths long to figure out how to convert a weapon so that it either will--or will not, depending upon what they are trying to do--comply with the law.
Right now, I have no stake in this fight--there is no money in the budget for a gun, the safety procedures to go along with it, and a safe in which to keep it, much less the safety/training classes and the licensing to carry it concealed (or open, if I prefer).
Yes assault weapons would be defined and banned. And if you alter a regular weapon to be an assault weapon, then you have a banned weapon and there are charges that can be used against you to extend your sentence.
Still, gun ownership in Poland is really low (we are one of the most disarmed countries in Europe) and crime involving guns is basically non-existent or close to. In 2016 we had 15 murders AND attempted murders with use of guns. In 2015 - 19, in 2014 - 32, 2013 - 25, 2012- 30, 2011- 20, 2010 - 30. Here are statistics from Polish Police Force website: http://statystyka.policja.pl/st/wybrane-statystyki/bron/bron-przestepstwa/50844,Przestepstwa-przy-uzyciu-broni.html
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
Don't forget--Congress is expressly *forbidden* from enacting legislation which restricts our right to own guns. States, on the other hand, may enact whatever legislation they wish. Anyone wishing for gun control legislation needs to look to their State Legislature, not Washington, D. C.
@Mathsorcerer This is not true, the Second Amendment applies to the states (the SCOTUS case in question is McDonald v. Chicago).
However, Scalia's opinion for the majority in DC v. Heller made it clear that ownership of certain types of weapons beyond handguns and those most necessary for self defense can be restricted. This means that an AR-15 ban would most likely pass Constitutional muster.
I mean, that's completely untrue. They might reduce violence in some situations (Australia, UK) but not others (almost everywhere in South America). The real question is whether or not they can work in the United States, which already has a large number of weapons in circulation.
The one thing that can probably be done is to restrict the media (either voluntarily or by law) from reporting these incidents. Now that may seem counterproductive, but regardless of how many times its reported, nothing changes. What can change, is taking away these individuals way of m aking a name for themselves. Everyone knows the name Dylann Roof, but can anyone name one of his victims without looking it up?
I never use the actual names of high-profile shooters, referring to them only in generic terms such as "the shooter" or "this person", etc. In this particular case the shooter was not also killed, so he is going to have a public trial--he gets publicity for months.
Yep.
Now pass a law like Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act where the minor can not be named after they commit a crime so everyone else (including the media) follows suit.
I'm not a fan of that kind of law. Restricting speech and knowledge can't be a good thing.
I'm in favor of gun control and rifles are among the least of my concerns. Handguns have always been more important in my eyes, and the data on the FBI's website bears it out: handguns are the top murder weapons in the United States by far.
@semiticgod That is completely true, but its also true that handguns are also (in addition to shotguns) the most common gun used in self-defense. Luckily, a lot of handgun violence is gang-related, and can (hopefully) be reduced by laxer drug laws that could shrink the black market and decrease the financial incentives for crime.
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now. The fake part seems to be the insistence of Trump supporters that it was a post-shooting hit job. All archiving of the Instagram page and interviews with students who knew about him AND his Instagram page seem to confirm that it was indeed his:
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now:
The story he gave was based off of 4chan. Also, its kind of hard to imagine that a hispanic man is a white supremacist, but then again he was clearly very unstable so anything is possible.
I actually find the following quote to be sorta funny:
"“It may seem odd that Jereb would bring attention to his group by claiming a connection to Cruz, but Jereb has always been somewhat of a publicity seeker,” wrote SPLC. “In 2014, in fact, he wrote to us to complaint that we had not already listed ROF as a hate group.”"
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now. The fake part seems to be the insistence of Trump supporters that it was a post-shooting hit job. All archiving of the Instagram page and interviews with students who knew about him AND his Instagram page seem to confirm that it was indeed his:
Who cares though? He wasn't even old enough to vote in 2016. He may have picked that hat to deliberately piss people off for all we know. He's an unhinged 19 year old teenager...
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now:
The story he gave was based off of 4chan. Also, its kind of hard to imagine that a hispanic man is a white supremacist, but then again he was clearly very unstable so anything is possible.
Well who's fault is that?? The guy came out and gave an in-depth interview to media outlets and then changed his story. If the guy was straight-up LYING then I would guess that would be the main crux of the problem. As for him being Hispanic, I don't even know if he is. While the name "Cruz" would imply that, it isn't a certainty. Plus we do know for sure that he and his brother were adopted.
As for the Instagram page and the MAGA worship, that all seems to be entirely confirmed. The Snopes article mentions that students at the school were aware of the photos he posted of dead lizards long before this happened.
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now. The fake part seems to be the insistence of Trump supporters that it was a post-shooting hit job. All archiving of the Instagram page and interviews with students who knew about him AND his Instagram page seem to confirm that it was indeed his:
Who cares though? He wasn't even old enough to vote in 2016. He may have picked that hat to deliberately piss people off for all we know. He's an unhinged 19 year old teenager...
I'm willing to bet that if a shooter in the Obama years had been wearing a "Hope and Change" hat on social media, we'd have heard quite a bit about it. Just a hunch.....
It would also be the second time in less than a year that a killer with a very clearly definable Alt-right ideology could be viewed as someone who looked to Donald Trump as a leader to be revered. Charlottesville being the first.
There is a reason the slogan "Make America Great Again" (usually shortened to MAGA) has become a clarion call for all sorts of hideous viewpoints.
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now:
The story he gave was based off of 4chan. Also, its kind of hard to imagine that a hispanic man is a white supremacist, but then again he was clearly very unstable so anything is possible.
Well who's fault is that?? The guy came out and gave an in-depth interview to media outlets and then changed his story. If the guy was straight-up LYING then I would guess that would be the main crux of the problem. As for him being Hispanic, I don't even know if he is. While the name "Cruz" would imply that, it isn't a certainty. Plus we do know for sure that he and his brother were adopted.
As for the Instagram page and the MAGA worship, that all seems to be entirely confirmed. The Snopes article mentions that students at the school were aware of the photos he posted of dead lizards long before this happened.
Multiple media reports said he was Hispanic. Also, having a MAGA hat and being a white supremacist are definitely not the same thing. Alt-right, sure, but the twitter post and the reports that he was a white nationalist appear to be incorrect.
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now. The fake part seems to be the insistence of Trump supporters that it was a post-shooting hit job. All archiving of the Instagram page and interviews with students who knew about him AND his Instagram page seem to confirm that it was indeed his:
Who cares though? He wasn't even old enough to vote in 2016. He may have picked that hat to deliberately piss people off for all we know. He's an unhinged 19 year old teenager...
I'm willing to bet that if a shooter in the Obama years had been wearing a "Hope and Change" hat on social media, we'd have heard quite a bit about it. Just a hunch.....
We did hear about this quite a bit though. However, I don't see how it was relevant to his actions. Perhaps his support for gun ownership? If you're implying that him being a MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter is the reason he shot kids then I think you're reaching. Are we going to look at the voting history of every shooter now so that their actions can be exploited for political purposes? People of all shapes, colors, and political persuasions can be unhinged.
I find it classless how often Drudge Report and MSNBC try to speculate/share stories about the political beliefs of rampage killers. Having policy debates about guns in the wake of tragedies is not at all exploitative in my opinion, but that stuff is.
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now:
The story he gave was based off of 4chan. Also, its kind of hard to imagine that a hispanic man is a white supremacist, but then again he was clearly very unstable so anything is possible.
Well who's fault is that?? The guy came out and gave an in-depth interview to media outlets and then changed his story. If the guy was straight-up LYING then I would guess that would be the main crux of the problem. As for him being Hispanic, I don't even know if he is. While the name "Cruz" would imply that, it isn't a certainty. Plus we do know for sure that he and his brother were adopted.
As for the Instagram page and the MAGA worship, that all seems to be entirely confirmed. The Snopes article mentions that students at the school were aware of the photos he posted of dead lizards long before this happened.
Multiple media reports said he was Hispanic. Also, having a MAGA hat and being a white supremacist are definitely not the same thing. Alt-right, sure, but the twitter post and the reports that he was a white nationalist appear to be incorrect.
Right, but if they ARE incorrect, they are incorrect because a White Supremacist leader gave a detailed interview about his involvement with the group (to the point of describing guns they bought for him and training) which he later recanted. The story wasn't made up out of thin air. They talked to him, he gave the quotes. Much later in the day, he started walking away from it.
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now. The fake part seems to be the insistence of Trump supporters that it was a post-shooting hit job. All archiving of the Instagram page and interviews with students who knew about him AND his Instagram page seem to confirm that it was indeed his:
Who cares though? He wasn't even old enough to vote in 2016. He may have picked that hat to deliberately piss people off for all we know. He's an unhinged 19 year old teenager...
I'm willing to bet that if a shooter in the Obama years had been wearing a "Hope and Change" hat on social media, we'd have heard quite a bit about it. Just a hunch.....
We did hear about this quite a bit though. However, I don't see how it was relevant to his actions. Perhaps his support for gun ownership? If you're implying that him being a MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter is the reason he shot kids then I think you're reaching. Are we going to look at the voting history of every shooter now so that their actions can be exploited for political purposes? People of all shapes, colors, and political persuasions can be unhinged.
I find it classless how often Drudge Report and MSNBC try to speculate/share stories about the political beliefs of rampage killers. Having policy debates about guns in the wake of tragedies is not at all exploitative in my opinion, but that stuff is.
I'm saying that there is an ever-increasing trend of killings associated to Alt-right ideology in this country, and that that nexus of political belief in this country views Donald Trump as an almost god-king like figure:
Say what you will about Antifa or radical environmental activists. The worst I've seen from them is property damage and hitting someone with a bike lock. They haven't KILLED anyone as far as I'm aware. The body count is mounting. Alot of these I didn't even know about til this report by the SPLC came out, since they got almost NO media coverage.
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now:
The story he gave was based off of 4chan. Also, its kind of hard to imagine that a hispanic man is a white supremacist, but then again he was clearly very unstable so anything is possible.
Well who's fault is that?? The guy came out and gave an in-depth interview to media outlets and then changed his story. If the guy was straight-up LYING then I would guess that would be the main crux of the problem. As for him being Hispanic, I don't even know if he is. While the name "Cruz" would imply that, it isn't a certainty. Plus we do know for sure that he and his brother were adopted.
As for the Instagram page and the MAGA worship, that all seems to be entirely confirmed. The Snopes article mentions that students at the school were aware of the photos he posted of dead lizards long before this happened.
Multiple media reports said he was Hispanic. Also, having a MAGA hat and being a white supremacist are definitely not the same thing. Alt-right, sure, but the twitter post and the reports that he was a white nationalist appear to be incorrect.
Right, but if they ARE incorrect, they are incorrect because a White Supremacist leader gave a detailed interview about his involvement with the group (to the point of describing guns they bought for him and training) which he later recanted. The story wasn't made up out of thin air. They talked to him, he gave the quotes. Much later in the day, he started walking away from it.
I'm not saying whose fault it was, I was just trying to correct the facts in this post to make sure we are on the same page. I wasn't blaming Time magazine.
The gun laws in Florida are almost non-existent. Almost ANYONE can get their hands on one of these weapons. Also, that Alt-Right body count has apparently gone up again:
The only thing I've seen is that the white supremacist leader who GAVE AN INTERVIEW claiming he did train with them has now apparently changed his story. As for the photos, they were from his Instagram account, which Snopes is rating as "true" as far as we are able to establish right now:
The story he gave was based off of 4chan. Also, its kind of hard to imagine that a hispanic man is a white supremacist, but then again he was clearly very unstable so anything is possible.
Well who's fault is that?? The guy came out and gave an in-depth interview to media outlets and then changed his story. If the guy was straight-up LYING then I would guess that would be the main crux of the problem. As for him being Hispanic, I don't even know if he is. While the name "Cruz" would imply that, it isn't a certainty. Plus we do know for sure that he and his brother were adopted.
As for the Instagram page and the MAGA worship, that all seems to be entirely confirmed. The Snopes article mentions that students at the school were aware of the photos he posted of dead lizards long before this happened.
Multiple media reports said he was Hispanic. Also, having a MAGA hat and being a white supremacist are definitely not the same thing. Alt-right, sure, but the twitter post and the reports that he was a white nationalist appear to be incorrect.
Right, but if they ARE incorrect, they are incorrect because a White Supremacist leader gave a detailed interview about his involvement with the group (to the point of describing guns they bought for him and training) which he later recanted. The story wasn't made up out of thin air. They talked to him, he gave the quotes. Much later in the day, he started walking away from it.
I'm not saying whose fault it was, I was just trying to correct the facts in this post to make sure we are on the same page. I wasn't blaming Time magazine.
I'm glad for the correction, I did see the White Supremacist recant his story yesterday, but it didn't cross my mind to go back and edit the post from the previous when that information crossed my news feed. I have made such edits in the past, depending on how many pages back they go.
Why not ban lethal forms of ammunition and restrict bullets to rubber bullets? Most of the normal uses for bullets would work just fine if you used rubber bullets instead of metal.
If you want to stop a criminal in his tracks, a single rubber bullet is going to knock him down long enough for anyone to escape. They work just as well for target practice. Even criminals wouldn't necessarily go to the trouble of finding illegal lethal ammunition if a rubber bullet works just as well for a mugging.
You could make exceptions for lethal ammunition if the person had a hunting license or was a police officer.
Why not ban lethal forms of ammunition and restrict bullets to rubber bullets? Most of the normal uses for bullets would work just fine if you used rubber bullets instead of metal.
If you want to stop a criminal in his tracks, a single rubber bullet is going to knock him down long enough for anyone to escape. They work just as well for target practice. Even criminals wouldn't necessarily go to the trouble of finding illegal lethal ammunition if a rubber bullet works just as well for a mugging.
You could make exceptions for lethal ammunition if the person had a hunting license or was a police officer.
Right now we have the infinite power of the gun lobby preventing any changes. The moment this gained traction, we would see the NRA instantly become the ammunition lobby. I doubt the people who matter in Congress can be moved by this argument.
The facts are this. 100% of the Republican Party is bought and paid for by the NRA. To a person. About 20% of Democrats (trying to survive in rural districts/States) are as well. The 3/4 of Democrats who favor gun regulation proposals are never going to be enough to do anything.
We had an assault weapons ban in this country. Bill Clinton signed it into law. George W. Bush let it expire. The gun lobby has become WAY more entrenched on this issue since even that event took place. There is no movement to be had here. Any legislation on this issue would not only require a Democratic President to sign it, but likely 65 seats in the Senate and a 30-40 seat majority in the House. Never going to happen. We aren't going to do anything. Ever. Which is why I think it's beyond absurd that after every one of these shootings gun nuts walk out and start stockpiling even more guns and ammo, in anticipation of a "gun grab". Gun confiscation in THIS country is about as likely as us colonizing Mars by the end of the decade.
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You would have to define "assault weapon" in the law, of course. Once done, it won't take after-market gunsmiths long to figure out how to convert a weapon so that it either will--or will not, depending upon what they are trying to do--comply with the law.
Right now, I have no stake in this fight--there is no money in the budget for a gun, the safety procedures to go along with it, and a safe in which to keep it, much less the safety/training classes and the licensing to carry it concealed (or open, if I prefer).
We’ve discussed it many times. Most of us realize it: one of the great ironies, and perhaps tragedies of the “gun control” debate is that it has been backed into such limited and incremental policy prescriptions that those prescriptions can be reasonably derided by “gun rights” advocates as barely worth the trouble or hardly of any use. We know that no one restriction would prevent every needless tragedy. But together, a number of them, interweaving and compounding each other, would prevent or limit many massacres and bloodbaths. More importantly, this whole logic is not one we apply to any other problem of criminality or public health. Our entire counter-terrorism policy is based on no silver bullets but a series of traversable but still consequential obstacles, the aim of which is to disrupt, make more complicated or reveal conspiracies. We have collectively made it mainly too difficult to hatch plots to commandeer airliners or even effectively communicate to plan major operations at all. So radicals are reduced to largely ineffectual (but still often deadly) DIY kitchenware based bombs and trucks. That’s a good thing.
Yesterday was an unspeakable tragedy for a few dozens of families and an opportunity for the rest of us to revisit our collective disgrace – every single one of us – in sitting by and letting these things happen again and again. Yesterday I had what was for me at least a minor epiphany: A major driver of gun massacres is not simply our failure to act on any one of the various proposed incremental reforms. It is our failure to act on any of them or all of them, ever, which validates and encourages a culture of massacre.
I want to be clear precisely what I mean. Our inaction itself and the clear reasons for our collective inaction validate and inspire the culture of massacre. Directly. By doing nothing we validate a simple point: the total, maximal right to have any number of guns of any sort in any circumstance is not only more important but overwhelmingly more important than preventing school massacres. It is more important than anything. Nothing better captures the cultural supremacy of the gun than this. Nothing provides more fuel to the now hideously cliched ritual of the blaze of glory moment of total destruction.
We know that individual mass shooters are the product of damaged psyches, unbounded rage, mental illness of some sort in almost every case and the cult of public spectacle which informs our entire culture. But these events, these people, grow out of ourselves. They are not singular and unknowable. They are the products of countless injuries but also validations and mores and encouragements – sanctions and inhibitions. The public campaign against drunken driving is the operative case in point about the transvaluation of values, driven by and undergirded by changed laws but not equal to them, which is the only way forward for true change.
Numerous laws changed and that changed the equation for drunken driving. But the true change came from a radically different understanding of the social acceptability of the behavior itself. It is now seen as shameful, awful, selfish. Drunken driving still happens of course. But it happens much less and our society and the individual life lanes we all travel have numerous impediments, disincentives, and collective shamings on the way to getting drunk and getting behind the wheel of a car.
The gun problem requires laws, restrictions, reshaping the framework of legal and civil liability to bend the curve away from the current culture of massacre. But what makes all those things impossible, for now, is the political decision that nothing is more important than the completely untrammeled right to have any gun with any amount of ammunition anytime anywhere.
Do you really need an AR-15? For some people, it’s just fun to fire off an AR-15. I begrudge no one that fun. You’re at the range. It’s just cool. I get it. But maybe, because it’s also the weapon of choice for virtually every school massacre, to have that fun you need to do a background check not just for institutionalization or felony records but something a bit more thorough, to know you’re not someone with all the markers of a mass shooter. Or maybe you can have it and fire it as often as you want but you need to leave it in a locker at the range. These changes would be a bit of a pain for enthusiasts. But changing mores about drunken driving also made social drinking a bit more difficult. You have to think through how you’re getting home if you’re going to go out and have more than a couple drinks. Does your spouse or partner not drink? Do you have a designated driver? Public transportation? It’s a bit of a pain. We’ve decided this pain is more than worth it. The ability to drink in any way or to any extent at any time is not an absolute value.
The specific reforms are beside the point for these purposes. The point is the need for and public agreement to some balancing, some inconveniences and impediments to total freedom to do anything with guns up to the doorstep of a felony or a massacre. Until we do this, not only do we not have any of even the most basic reforms which could begin to make it a little harder to commit massacres, we also collectively send a signal as a society. Guns are not only potentially fatal as tools. They are all powerful totems. They are untouchable. They reduce adults who promise to spare no exertion to protect the country from various public or domestic threats to be reduced to the gibberish and nonsense of “thoughts and prayers.” Nothing is a deeper testament to the cultural power and invincibility of the gun in our society. And it is that power which is at the heart of the massacre spectacle – the desire and all-consuming need and drive to destroy lives including your own indiscriminately in a final burst of total power. Our collective impotence not only sharpens that weapon, that symbol for the perpetrators of the actual massacres. It also gives sanction for all the precursor behavior (the gun nut who is stockpiling AR-15s and ammo but never actually kills anyone).
The reforms are critical. And more of them than are even close to the current debate will be required. But the core of the culture of massacre is equally driven by the social sickness of inaction itself. It is the ultimate validation of the power of the gun that is at the heart of the sick social disease. Until we recognize that the collective message of the power and singular importance of guns is at the heart of the gun massacre scourge, we’ll never be rid of it.
2. That link, had a link cited, which had no links to their "surveys". So....what...?
However, there are some clear pointers that gun control has indeed been at least partially responsible - for instance the points made in the article include the following:
“While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the NFA, resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.”
“In the seven years before the NFA (1989-1995), the average annual firearm suicide death rate per 100,000 was 2.6 (with a yearly range of 2.2 to 2.9); in the seven years after the buyback was fully implemented (1998-2004), the average annual firearm suicide rate was 1.1 (yearly range 0.8 to 1.4).”
“In the seven years before the NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 was .43 (range .27 to .60) while for the seven years post NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate was .25 (range .16 to .33).”
“The drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback.”
However, Scalia's opinion for the majority in DC v. Heller made it clear that ownership of certain types of weapons beyond handguns and those most necessary for self defense can be restricted. This means that an AR-15 ban would most likely pass Constitutional muster.
Luckily, a lot of handgun violence is gang-related, and can (hopefully) be reduced by laxer drug laws that could shrink the black market and decrease the financial incentives for crime.
https://www.snopes.com/did-shooters-instagram-picture-maga-hat/
Edit: Even the Southern Poverty Law Center says they can't find any link between the white supremacist group (Republic of Florida... what a weird name) and Cruz. https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbp37y/white-supremacist-tries-to-walk-back-made-up-story-about-nikolas-cruz-blames-media
"“It may seem odd that Jereb would bring attention to his group by claiming a connection to Cruz, but Jereb has always been somewhat of a publicity seeker,” wrote SPLC. “In 2014, in fact, he wrote to us to complaint that we had not already listed ROF as a hate group.”"
This guy sounds like the scum of the Earth.
As for the Instagram page and the MAGA worship, that all seems to be entirely confirmed. The Snopes article mentions that students at the school were aware of the photos he posted of dead lizards long before this happened.
It would also be the second time in less than a year that a killer with a very clearly definable Alt-right ideology could be viewed as someone who looked to Donald Trump as a leader to be revered. Charlottesville being the first.
There is a reason the slogan "Make America Great Again" (usually shortened to MAGA) has become a clarion call for all sorts of hideous viewpoints.
Also, having a MAGA hat and being a white supremacist are definitely not the same thing. Alt-right, sure, but the twitter post and the reports that he was a white nationalist appear to be incorrect.
I find it classless how often Drudge Report and MSNBC try to speculate/share stories about the political beliefs of rampage killers. Having policy debates about guns in the wake of tragedies is not at all exploitative in my opinion, but that stuff is.
https://www.splcenter.org/20180205/alt-right-killing-people\
Say what you will about Antifa or radical environmental activists. The worst I've seen from them is property damage and hitting someone with a bike lock. They haven't KILLED anyone as far as I'm aware. The body count is mounting. Alot of these I didn't even know about til this report by the SPLC came out, since they got almost NO media coverage.
If you want to stop a criminal in his tracks, a single rubber bullet is going to knock him down long enough for anyone to escape. They work just as well for target practice. Even criminals wouldn't necessarily go to the trouble of finding illegal lethal ammunition if a rubber bullet works just as well for a mugging.
You could make exceptions for lethal ammunition if the person had a hunting license or was a police officer.
The facts are this. 100% of the Republican Party is bought and paid for by the NRA. To a person. About 20% of Democrats (trying to survive in rural districts/States) are as well. The 3/4 of Democrats who favor gun regulation proposals are never going to be enough to do anything.
We had an assault weapons ban in this country. Bill Clinton signed it into law. George W. Bush let it expire. The gun lobby has become WAY more entrenched on this issue since even that event took place. There is no movement to be had here. Any legislation on this issue would not only require a Democratic President to sign it, but likely 65 seats in the Senate and a 30-40 seat majority in the House. Never going to happen. We aren't going to do anything. Ever. Which is why I think it's beyond absurd that after every one of these shootings gun nuts walk out and start stockpiling even more guns and ammo, in anticipation of a "gun grab". Gun confiscation in THIS country is about as likely as us colonizing Mars by the end of the decade.