At what point will it be appropriate to talk about gun control? About raising the rules? About making it an actually difficult thing for lunatics to acquire guns that destroy rooms full of children?
How many have to die, and how long do we have to wait after those deaths, before it’s addressed?
Just curious.
PAD
• 
It has been time for a very long time to talk about this.
I could never understand what the hëll ANYONE other than the military or law-enforcement needs with fully automatic weapons. Hunters cannot use them, so what’s the deal?
Those linds of weapons are made for one purpose only, and that is killing as many people as possible in as short a time as possible.
And this person used fully automatic weapons? No – he didn’t. Please, try again.
Yeah, with fully automatic weapons, the devastation would have been even worse…. the difference between semi and fully is a total bûllšhìŧ argument…
I was unaware that one enforced laws by “killing as many people as possible in as short a time as possible,” but perhaps Jim grew up in Nazi Germany.
Cops use automatic weapons too, in certain situations.
You don’t bring a snub-nose, .38 Police Special to an automatic weapons fight with drug lords.
Which “or law enforcement” would mean.
There’s never an appropriate time because they simply do not wish the discussion to be had.
After all, if you simply wait long enough, then another tragedy will occur and the ‘clock’ is reset. How convenient for them. Not so for the rest of us.
As far as I can tell, the only person here who does not want to have any discussion is Craig (if gentle reader will scroll down, you’ll find his post urging all to ignore me).
You’re probably right, we shouldn’t ignore the crazy such as you.
After all, mental illness is a serious problem in this country and what leads to incidents like the one that caused this thread.
Perhaps I’m simply missing something but I’ve heard the NRA blamed for the lack of effective controls on assault weapons but I’ve never seen them actually quoted after any of these horrors (and seldom ever) and I’ve never actually seen anybody who actually took paper and envelope and stamp and sent a mesage to their legislators that as votors they expecte lawmakers to ignore the gun lobby and do something statesmanlike to promote getting rid of or control over the gun.
Am I missing something?
Sadly, no. The NRA leadership sees what’s going on, but it’s all through the lens of profit for their companies and supporters. The NRA brainwashes people into believing that A) The Second Amendment says you can have any gun you want and B) The Government wants to take your guns away so they can come and GET you, as if they were some boogeyman who actually cares about them individually. And as of yesterday, the number of people commenting like this on FB, Yahoo and elsewhere was disappointing.
Whenever a radical muslim terrorist group attacks our media (most specifically, the right wing media) responds by decrying the non radical muslim groups for NOT doing something and for NOT denouncing the radicals. Then how come this same media is not requiring the NRA from denouncing these crazed gunmen? If the NRA is SOOOOO concerned with responsible gun ownership, then why are they not forefront in stopping the irresponsible gun owners? Hmmm… could it be because the NRA are nothing more than a bunch of power crazed, money grubbing lying hypocrites? Just sayin’.
Yes, viz., that “assault weapons” [Sturmgeschutzen] ALREADY are illegal to possess sans a Treasury license. So, what are you proposing? To ban a banned device?
Or, is it something else you want to ban?
I’ve got a great idea: Write all of us here a model statute that tells us precisely what it is you want to do! Also, how this plan will prevent crimes like the current one under discussion from happening in the future.
The NRA are idiots if they’re saying that it’s inappropriate to talk about gun control. By refusing to talk, they’re conceding the issue. They could say something like this:
“It is a fact that guns are extant in this country. The biggest effect of tightening gun control laws will be to ensure that guns will be easier to obtain by criminals on the black market than by law-abiding citizens through legal means. This would be dangerous for society.
“There are things which we can do to reduce the likelihood of tragedies of this magnitude occurring. Increased security in schools may be helpful. Having a hidden and secured gun in each classroom for a teacher to use in case of such an emergency may also be helpful. We are perfectly happy to be part of the solution.”
Now, I’m not particularly pro-gun or anti-gun. I’d prefer to live in a society with no guns, but it’s not really possible to get there from here. There’s a tough issue for the anti-gun crowd to counter: What happens when individuals can make their own guns with 3D printers? How on earth can you possibly do gun control then?
I believe the saying, Trent, is, “Don’t go off half-cocked. And, I’m not sure just how one makes a gun with a printer. But, you are correct insofar as you recognize that the M1 carbine was invented (by Carbine Williams) inside a prison.
It’s not like this technology is secret.
We can have their guns when we pry them from their cold dead hands.
I’m good with that. When can we start?
So your answer then to a few nuts committing murder here and there is organized murder against even the ones who aren’t nuts.
Nice.
Jerry,
That was really harsh of me. I don’t really want to kill anyone. I was responding to the normal rhetoric of the NRA in a manner that was as callous as their positions appear to me.
I’ve had to bury a child once. (Not due to firearms.) The sympathetic pain that I’ve been feeling over the past few days, after all those children were torn from their families, has been so extreme that I have been near-blind with grief.
I just can’t understand why anyone (outside of military and law enforcement) has access firearms anymore. We claim to be a civilized society, and yet we make these weapons, weapons designed solely for murdering, available to ANYONE.
Normally I’m a very cheerful and even funny person. But, there has not been a significant amount of time in the past 60 hours that my eyes have been dry.
Every time there’s a shooting, every time there is a death from firearms, we are ALL responsible for it because we have not dealt with this issue. Every one of us who has not spoken up about the out-of-control gun culture in this country is to blame. We are all mass murderers for staying quiet.
Before Friday, I had no real opinions on gun control. I refuse to sit on the sidelines anymore. I just can’t bear the thought of my inaction being responsible for the death of any more children.
Where do you live?
Sorry, Jerry: The reply was to Brian, not you (I know where you live).
Um, I’m hoping that was a joke, not a threat.
No, it was a question of where do you live where you feel it is safe for no-one to have firearms for defense? The notion being that you don’t live where I live, where there have been break ins every other day, and plenty of shootings of those trying to break in, and by those doing the break ins.
We are just wondering where utopia is…
A counterfactual: if the shooter’s name had been Adam el-Lanza, most of the people who are saying “now is not the time to talk about gun control” would be saying that this is the perfect time to talk about how Obama has left us open to terrorism. Just a guess.
Sadly, the NRA and its supporters will (already have) adopt the, “it’s not about guns, it’s about people/mental illness/etc” stance. Mercifully, being a a room full of children, they didn’t go into the extension of, “…in fact, if the victims had been armed, they could’ve taken the shooter out” like some did with the theater shooting over the summer.
Far too many just don’t get the notion that the Second Amendment is an amendment to allow for changes in society and technology that the founders couldn’t possibly imagine. They were smart guys, and built that into the structure. And, in holding to their position, some have just sounded ridiculous. When I’ve used an extreme example, I’ve actually had more than one person who opposes any and all gun control modification say in so many words that, yes, I should be able to purchase a nuke or an attack helicopter if I want one and have the money.
But they’re already in full on, “don’t blame the guns for the actions of the shooter” mode, and, with the victims being children, are finding allies among the, “this wouldn’t have happened if Christianity was prevalent in schools” crowd.
–Daryl
Sadly, the NRA and its supporters will (already have) adopt the, “it’s not about guns, it’s about people/mental illness/etc” stance.
Or, worse, that all the other “usual” suspects are to blame: violent video games (Faux News), the liberal media, entertainment industry, or just not having enough Jesus in one’s life (read all the latter on FB).
Just don’t blame our orgasm-inducing gun culture.
Heh.
Fox News’ Mike Huckabee Blames School Shooting on Absence of Religion in Schools
So, let’s put religion back into the schools, then let the kids, themselves, shoot it out over that!
In answer to the question about full-auto weapons:
Nobody aside from military (or potentially police) needs them. That’s why it’s been illegal to own them in the US without a Federal license since the 1930s. (Of course, criminals being criminals, they seem to find ways to smuggle them in anyway, but tightening laws isn’t going to help with that – only tightening enforcement will.)
On the other hand, on his blog, David Brin notes that most of these rampages have been stopped when the shooter was wrestled to the ground by unarmed bystanders while reloading. His suggestion: Since anything new to do with the firearms themselves is anathema, how about regulations on high-capacity magazines? Nobody needs a 30-round magazine for home defense, or to go hunting, and the 2nd Amendment doesn’t say anything about the number of rounds the arms get to carry…
You’ve never heard of double-taping the clip? If your limit is, e.g., 10 rounds, that gives you 20. And, a trained shooter can switch the clips in 2 seconds.
Ordinarily, I don’t reply to nitwits. You, however, have been such an exceptional nitwit as to have earned a reply. (But just this once – don’t count on getting a rise out of me regularly.)
1) It’s quite difficult to tape magazines together as you describe when they’re not high-capacity to begin with. A ten-round mag just isn’t that big.
2) Very few “trained shooters” are going to be running around shooting up schools, malls, etc. That’s part of the training, after all – knowing when not to open fire.
A ten-round clip is as big as it needs to be (it’s a box with a spring in it). You need no more than a spacer at the bottom, and that’s assuming you’re right about “regular” clips being too small.
Want of inventiveness on the part of the school board and police is what got everyone shot to pieces. Which makes the nitwit you!
You’re talking about a magazine, not a clip. Get your nomenclature right, dámņ it!
Let’s say there’s agreement on some gun controls – oh, like the Brady Bill that went through.
Now, that’s usually called a “compromise”.
That’s when the topic is settled, because both sides recognize they can’t get what they want, but they did get something.
Here’s the problem the pro-gun people keep having – the anti-gun people do *NOT* want to accept that a compromise was reached – they want *MORE* and *MORE*. They ask for a compromise between their position, and the *NEW* position represented by the formerly compromise position. Once a new compromise is reached, yet another debate starts, with a compromise desired between the new compromise, and the original position of the anti-gun side.
And of course, the pro-gun people got sick and tired of that. It wasn’t compromise the anti-gun people want, it’s appeasement. And history shows how well *THAT* worked out for Poland, France, Austria, and Britain.
Is this the closest we’ll get to invoking Godwin’s Law in this thread?
No, Craig, it’s called playing “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” The Soviet Union used to play that one all the time.
No, Robert, Austria and France was mentioned instead of the Baltic Republics or Germany. Still, why let the facts stop good ol’ Red Scaremongering?
And when people die as a result of stronger gun legislation, then those fighting for weaker legislation might have an argument that things have gone far enough.
“Austria and France were mentioned.” Serves me right for adding another example after the proofreading.
Sadly, the NRA will *never* think it’s an appropriate time to talk about gun control. At most, the members give general lip service to the possibility of maybe someday doing something (never specific) about things like automatic rifles and armor-piercing bullets — and then wait for the fervor to die down without trying for any sort of change. At least/usual, they blame everything but guns, ignoring everything from the massive amount of shooting deaths in the U.S. compared to other countries, to the fact that when someone in the U.S. wants to kill lots of people, the weapon of choice is almost invariably a firearm. And then there’s author John Lott — a frequent pro-NRA speaker on news shows after a shooting — whose book MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME argues that the solution to gun violence is to have more guns out there; because the one thing that would make shootings “safer” would be crossfire.
Is that why “automatic rifles” have been illegal to possess without a Treasury license for three-quarters of a century?
It’s shocking and disgusting to me that the first thing many of the pro-gun crowd think to say after a tragedy like this is “the government is going to come for our guns!” That they’re so paranoid that some of them claim, as they did after the theatre shooting this past summer, that the whole thing was orchestrated by the left so that they could pass stricter gun laws. This is the sort of thinking that prevents any kind of productive discussion from being had. They think the other side is out to get them, and I don’t know how to responsibly combat that mindset other than to ignore it and press for what I hope are reasonable precautions. One cannot satisfy the ignorant, fearful reactionaries among us (which could be applied to people on both sides of the argument, I suppose).
I actually am of the opinion that if guns were completely outlawed then only outlaws would have guns (well connected outlaws, anyway). I think people should be able to take responsibilty for their own defense,but I don’t think the solution to problems of gun violence is a gun in every hand. I think you should have to get a license before you can buy a gun, and that getting that license should be VERY difficult; at least significantly more difficult than it is to get a drivers’ license.
It’s the most appropriate time to discuss gun control. When a tragedy happens, two things must happen in response. Support for the victims and an accounting of how to prevent it from happening again.
I’m still feeling out how I should feel on gun control, I worry that gun laws don’t stop illegal guns and that will leave people vulnerable to illegal gun crimes. There is a lot of information I still require. But for progress to move forward, we as a society must have this conversation and we must have it openly and honestly.
Society also needs a discussion about mental illness treatment in this country.
A lot of conversations are appropriate now.
Here is the problem with tougher gun control laws:
As stated in The Declaration of Independence;
“But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is the Right, it is the Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.”
The Second Amendment safeguards our right of the people to keep and bear Arms. If we abolish or amend this amendment, we effectively neuter ourselves and make it that much easier for a corrupt Congress, House, President or a combination of all three to rule us with no chance of our successful revolting against them.
If the only ones allowed to own modern weapons are LEO or Military, then we really cannot defend ourselves should the government (local, state and federal) become corrupt more so than what they are now or if we are invaded by a foreign state.
The problem with what happened in Connecticut stems from this fact: that a man who was mentally unbalanced did not receive the mental aid he so sorely needed.
Just like the man who shot up the movie theater in Colorado or the man who killed those innocents in Arizona. If people who were close to them had been paying attention, or if our medical system wasn’t so broken, then these atrocities might not have happened.
Gun control is not the answer, but magazine control could be. I agree that there should be a law that regulates the magazine capacity. 10 rounds is more than enough for a civilian owned assault rifle. It is also more than enough should we ever rebel again against our government.
Will magazine control happen? Maybe, if enough of us write our Congress or Representatives and voice our complaints.
But no matter how we debate this issue, no matter what is finally decided, it will not bring back those who have died. We can only remember them with fondness, honor them with our tears and try to insure that this does not happen again.
Yeah, about that 2nd Amendment thing, I seem to recall a little part–at the very beginning of the Amendment–that mentions something about a “well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.”
Now, I’m done with the yahoos who insist the “militia” means all able-bodied men because that’s NOT it. The amendment states “well-regulated” and not all “able-bodied men” fit into that.
I’m also done with a recent declaration that, when the Founders were drawing up the Constitution, the word “regulated” meant “trained.” I’ve never seen any dictionary that even defines “regulated” as “trained” as an obsolte usage. You show me (direct me to) a dictionary that includes this obviously obsolete usage and I’ll consider it. (Hey, I’ll even accept the usage in some period-contemporary work of fiction–and, if this odd definition was in use in 1787, then it should’ve still been in use for a few decades after that, so up to 1900 as an extreme.)
The SIMPLE fact is this: EVERY SINGLE ONE of your First Amendment rights is subject to restrictions and limitations yet there’s rarely any massive public outcry over these limits (and, in many cases, you’ll actually hear arguments that there should be MORE restrictions). So, if the FIRST Amendment’s rights are subject to many varied restrictions, why should the SECOND Amendment be viewed as more sacrosanct?
Well, you’re certainly welcome to start a movement to repeal or modify the Second Amendment, but the fact is that the Supreme Court took on each of the points you brought up, and ruled against you. Evidently they didn’t think to ask whether you accepted their interpretation.
As to your straw man argument that Second Amendment rights are more sacrosanct than any others, here’s Justice Scalia:
“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
The problems is that the gun control proponents tend not to be gun people themselves, so the gun lobby can correctly point out that the proposed controls are worthless. How many times have we heard about an assault rifle ban? How much of the discussion in this thread has focused on assault rifles, whether automatic or semi-automatic? Unfortunately the assault rifle ban is a red herring; in the 1994 version, one of the characteristics that could identify something as an assault rifle was a bayonet lug, which doesn’t seem to be a particularly helpful approach to the issue, and we’re focusing on this and missing the minor detail that of the 12,664 firearms homicides in the US last year, 323 of them involved rifles. Magically transform all rifles in the US into turnips, and you’re left with 12,341 murders to deal with.
If they’re really serious about it, the gun control people should actually be more aggressive. Ban semi-automatic firearms outright. You can hunt a deer with a bolt action rifle, and you can defend your house with a revolver. Sens. Manchin and Warner could be genuinely useful with this, in an “only Nixon could go to China” way. Nobody can accuse them of being effete leftist gun-haters, and unlike the Senator from California, they might actually understand what they’re doing.
That should be “the problem is,” not “the problems is,” obviously.
In addition to what David so expertly said, you’re flatly wrong on the face of it, both by what the Founders expressly intended, and based on the rules of English grammar, both then and now.
The word “Militia” does mean all able bodied adult (then-male) citizens. This is not opinion. It’s demonstrable fact, based on the writings of the time including three consecutive drafts of the Second Amendment itself:
The boldfaced part was removed from the final version for one reason and one reason only: because it was considered to be redundant! Everyone knew what the word “militia” meant!
Even discounting that, as for grammar, the operative part of any compound or complex or compound-complex sentence is the independent clause. Any dependent clauses or phrases are merely modifiers to the independent clause.
How do you know which is which? By which can stand alone on its own without the other parts and still be a grammatically complete and correct sentence in its own right.
Let’s apply that test to the two parts of the Second Amendment:
• “A well regulated Militia, necessary to the security of a free State,” — can that stand alone as a grammatically correct and complete sentence in its own right? No, no it cannot. Therefore, it would be at best a dependent clause (actually not even that, since it lacks a verb or even a verb substitute).
• “The Right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” — can that stand alone on its own as a grammatically complete and correct sentence? Why, yes, yes it can! Therefore it’s the independent clause and is thus the operative portion of the whole sentence.
The Militia part merely states a reason for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, not a limitation upon that Right.
You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts, your own history, your own dictionary, nor your own grammar rules.
You can rationally and honestly debate whether the Second Amendment has become dangerously outdated, has outlived its usefulness, and thus should be repealed or at least amended by another Amendment. But you can not rationally and honestly assert that it says and means anything other than what it very clearly says and means in the grammar and idiom of the day, and even in modern grammar.
For the record, one thing the NRA gets wrong: the Second Amendment is not about defending the citizens against their own government (some of the Founders did indeed feel that way, but that’s not the actual reason it’s in there). It is not “the Right that guarantees all the others” or “the Amendment that puts teeth in the others,” or any such thing.
The Second Amendment was meant to empower the civilian Militia (such as what Switzerland has now), which was meant to be the nation’s ultimate defense against foreign invasion. The nation was not intended to maintain a standing army nor any other form of military in peacetime! In case of a surprise invasion, the citizenry armed with their own Arms (hand-wieldable weaponry, as opposed to Ordnance which would include artillery, canon, or these days, tanks, nukes, jet fighters and bombers, etc.) that they had both the Right and responsibility to keep, maintain, and be trained in at their own expense, to buy time until the Government could mobilize a true military response using both Arms and Ordnance which was the government’s responsibility and expense.
Since we do not have a standing army and military in “peacetime,” perhaps the Second Amendment really has outlived its usefulness.
But let’s not here any more about it saying or meaning anything other than what it very clearly says and means.
To quote William Burroughs: “After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.”
At the Clackamas Mall shooting, an armed citizen stopped the shooter. Two dead.
At the New Life Church shooting, an armed citizen stopped the shooter. Four dead.
At the Appalachian Law School shooting, two armed citizens (students who happened to be off-duty police) stopped the shooter. Three dead.
In Connecticut, the shooter was the only one armed. 26 dead.
At Virginia Tech, the shooter was the only one armed. 32 dead.
At Luby’s in Killeen, Texas, the shooter was the only one armed. 23 dead.
Can anyone cite an example of a mass shooting where it was a bad thing that others besides the gunman were armed?
Can you name an example of a mass shooting where an automatic or semi-automatic was necessary to stop the shooter? *Those* as simply, flat-out unnecessary for any purpose other than making war.
Black Panthers in Los Angeles? Symbionese Liberation Army? North Hollywood bank robbery?
There probably are dozens. And, if I’m going up against someone with a couple of Glocks, I want more sound effects on my side than one gets from a muzzle-loading musket!
Two points:
1) “To quote William Burroughs: “After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.””
Well, duh! Everyone single one of the people who did one of these mass shootings was one of the “people who didn’t do it” a day earlier. Of course we want to take guns away from people *before* there is more killing.
2)”Can anyone cite an example of a mass shooting where it was a bad thing that others besides the gunman were armed?”
When someone shot Representative Gifford, a man in the crowd pulled his gun and almost shot an innocent person. He was just trying to help, but in this case it is *not* the thought that counts. I’m okay with trained police officers having guns, but this idea that random citizens carrying around guns are going to make things safer in a desperate situation is not reality.
And at the Empire State Building shooting, trained police officers accidentally shot civilians.
Re: the Tuscon shooting. I suspect you’re referring to one Joseph Zemudio. He ran up after the shooting started and helped tackle and subdue the gunman. Zemudio was legally carrying a concealed gun at the time, but exercised proper judgment and did NOT attempt to use or even draw his gun.
That’s right. A “gun nut” heard shots, ran TOWARDS the shooting, and helped subdue the shooter WITHOUT panicking, pulling his gun, and ventilating a whole bunch of innocent people. Simply having his gun on him did NOT send him into a shooting frenzy. In fact, I’d wager him having his gun made him more confident about running into danger — even though he didn’t use it.
Um…didn’t William Burroughs accidentally shoot his wife in the head? Not sure that’s the best person to quote….
Bull.
In Texas?
Someone in that crowd was armed. I’d offer hundred-to-one odds on that.
And they either wimped out or froze up.
Do a little homework on the Luby’s shooting, mike. One of the people in Luby’s was Suzanna Hupp, a licensed gun owner who — because of Texas law at the time — could NOT bring her gun into the restaurant with her. It was locked in her car while she watched the gunman murder both her parents. She led the campaign to change that law. Hupp testified across the country in support of “shall issue” laws after watching her parents be killed and being unable to shoot back.
Not what i was talking about. In a group that size in Texas, there was probably at leas one character who was ignoring the laws because he “needed a gun to protect himself”.
The number of people i know out of my acquaintance here in Georgia (which has less of a pseudo-cowboy mentality than Texas) who carry regardless of the law makes it almost a certainty.
So, mike, your stereotypes and prejudices and anecdotes outweigh every single account and investigation of the incident?
That’s not how to win arguments, sport…
That’s a great idea, Mike: We can pass a bunch of new laws, then ignore them!
Based on real-world experience and simple probability – yes.
What did those “investigations” show?
Did they search every single survivor to see if they were carrying a gun and were too embarrassed to say “I was strapped, but I didn’t do anything”?
Is there actual evidence that none of the dead had been carrying?
What i’m saying is that, as Damon Runyon said “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet”.
And i simply find it close to impossible to accept that nobody was carrying.
==========
As for you, Robert – i never said i approved of people violating the law (nor, for that matter, that i disapproved) -just that it’s a fact of life that, no matter what the laws say, a sizable percentage of people do what they wanna do.
That’s why we have metal detectors at the doors of public buildings.
===================
Which reminds me – unless they ran everybody who was present the say Gabbie Giffords was shot through a metal detector when they arrived, that’s another time i’d put money on the proposal that there were other guns in the crowd (certainly, if there were off-duty LEOs, i’d expect them to be carrying) and nobody did anything.
Of course, in either case, if there was a gun present, maybe the owner was smart enough to realise that in a crowd, initiating a cross-fire situation could very well be worse than doing nothing.
You’re not helping your argument at all, mike. If you want to allege that things didn’t happen as they were reported, then you ought to offer some kind of proof beyond your own prejudices.
But let’s say that half a dozen of the bystanders were armed, just for the sake of argument. Exactly what harm was caused by all those guns, and all those gun owners who didn’t totally lose their composure? It was a case where shooting back would have been a bad idea, and not one of them succumbed to the EEEEVIL power of their guns and started blazing away. Sounds like half a dozen responsible, smart, decent gun owners to me.
Mike, at the time Texas was not a Shall-Issue CCL State. It was that incident that, thanks to the testimony of Suzanna Hupp, persuaded Texas (and some other States) to implement Shall-Issue CCLs.
You’re judging Texas and Texans as they are now, and ignoring the fact that things change, and it wasn’t always that way.
The U.S. is a gun-obsessed culture. I’m not sure if anything will change that. I’ve read that the shooter’s mother was an avid gun collector who taught her son how to use them. She is not responsible for what he did and she certainly paid the ultimate price for anything she might have done indirectly, but it would be nice if this did make gun owners take a step back and ask why they own lethal weapons or why they teach their children how to use them. It’s not the Wild West. We are fortunate enough to not live in a nation that’s war-torn or under threat of invasion.
Newton, CT’s crime rate (http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ct/newtown/crime/) is relatively low. There was no immediate need for the shooter’s mother to be armed.
But, unfortunately, in America, the question is not “Do I need to be armed?” but “Why shouldn’t I be armed?”
Now, I’m about to go for a walk. There’s a Planned Parenthood down the street from me and without fail, there are protestors outside who are sickened by what goes on inside. I’ve never passed a gun shop where I’ve seen protestors outside with photos of dead children. Perhaps gun control advocates don’t want to sink to that level but the reality is that we are not as successful as the anti-abortion lobby. Ever since the attempted assassination of a U.S. congresswoman, there have been several mass shootings, and the only real political dialogue is about “transvaginal probes” and whether a woman should carry her rapist’s child to term.
Gun control was never discussed at any presidential debate.
Now, I’m about to go for a walk. There’s a Planned Parenthood down the street from me and without fail, there are protestors outside who are sickened by what goes on inside. I’ve never passed a gun shop where I’ve seen protestors outside with photos of dead children. Perhaps gun control advocates don’t want to sink to that level but the reality is that we are not as successful as the anti-abortion lobby. Ever since the attempted assassination of a U.S. congresswoman, there have been several mass shootings, and the only real political dialogue is about “transvaginal probes” and whether a woman should carry her rapist’s child to term.
Actually, I’d say that gun control has been more successful. There have been quite a few laws passed in the last 20 years alone that restrict gun ownership, while there hasn’t been a single successful attempt to legally restrict abortion.
“Visibility” does not equal “success.” Discussions are not laws. Words are not deeds.
Okay, Jay, I’m guessing you’re really just splitting hairs, but “there hasn’t been a single successful attempt to legally restrict abortion.” Really? What the eff are you smoking? Or, are you just hinting that, because the courts have overturned ALL the LAWS THAT WERE PASSED BY STATE LEGISLATURES, we can’t consider any of these attempts as “successful?” Because if that’s your intent, sorry, but that’s weaseling out.
Right now, there are more than 20 states which have imposed waiting periods of at least 24 hours, at least half the states have imposed mandatory counseling for women seeking abortions, and two states force women to view ultrasounds of the unwanted fetus. But, no, there hasn’t been a SINGLE “successful attempt” to restrict abortion. (Oh, and in 37 states, at least 3/4 of the counties have NO abortion providers. For instance, in Mississippi, there are effectively NO providers in the state, thanks to a recently-introduced law that requires an abortion provider to have credentials at a local hospital; of course, no hospital is required to provide credentials to any physician at all.)
The problem, Peter, is that you don’t really believe in gun control — you are not proposing that you (or your agent, Obama) take the nuclear bombs, aircraft carriers, combat aircraft, machine guns, tanks, rockets, machine guns, mortars, bazookas, assault rifles, &c., and throw them into the Marianas Trench (after which I will be obliged to follow suit with whatever weapons I own). And, that’s understandable because, at some point, when it comes time to collect that unconstitutional health-care mandate “tax,” your side definitely will need something stronger than a “pretty please.”
What, of course, you do want is to be able to control my gun with your gun (not quite the same thing) — the best reason I can think of to stay armed to the teeth!
The shooter in Connecticut had two auto-loading pistols (which he used) and a Bushmaster “assault” rifle (not really), which he left in the car. The pistols were the same kind the Supreme Court said people had a constitutional right to keep in their homes in the D.C. Heller case. Here all the perp did was take from NJ to CT on the interstate two legal handguns (a lot harder to get in New Jersey than in Connecticut, incidentally) and let everyone in the class have it. As one who teaches in the local schools here, I’m not sure what the defense is to that, but I am certain trashing the NRA in a comics blog isn’t it.
All Florida public schools have a deputy on duty, and he is armed (I’m not allowed to take my gun to school, the constitutional provision notwithstanding).
So, let me ask you, Peter, the question that counts: Given that Connecticut has a right-to-carry provision in its constitution STRONGER than in most other states, WHERE WAS THE DEPUTY IN THIS CASE?
Sounds like at most what we have here is a case of gross negligence by the Newtown school district.
The children and the teachers were killed by the Bushmaster .223. Each was shot multiple times. This was told by the medical examiner in front of the news media from the autopsies he conducted.
Henry, I’ve since seen several reports re what gun was used and where it came from. Now they are saying the guns were stolen from the perp’s mother in Connecticut (after she was killed) and were not transported from New Jersey.
But, the weapon employed really is irrelevant. I lived in Connecticut, and the constitutional provision there allows all “citizens” the right to “bear” arms in defense of self and the state. The state courts (whom I think are in error) keep substituting “or” for “and,” so the provision today is even broader than it need be. But, the bottom line is that every one of these weapons was legally possessed and could not have been banned by law. If a criminal breaks into your house, KILLS YOU, then takes your guns and uses them to commit horror, the failure (if any) lies in the security at the school.
There apparently was no deputy on duty nor any procedure in place obliging visitors to enter only via the front desk.
Such protections are fundamental.
Am I the only that thinks that just by Robert using the term, “Your agent, Obama”, it makes him look like an ášš?
As soon as I read that, all credibility went out the window, IMHO.
Just ignore Crazy Crim. He’s not worth the headache you’ll get.
Reverend:
Just how do you think Obama (or for that matter Romney had he won) enforces laws?
You don’t do it with a tulip.
I’m under no illusion that Peter personally is going to up from New York and travel 1500 miles just to shoot me (he’d have to ban himself from his own blog for threatening the guests).
I’m also under no illusion that the President represents Peter and (so far) doesn’t represent me; and, Peter and Obama want me to pay for the socialist program with an unconstitutional exaction I’m not going to honor.
So, Reverend, what are you going to do now? Unless you’re armed with a gun?
Wow. You’re rapidly going from ridiculous to full-zoot bull-goose loonie, Robert.
What the Hëll are you talking about?
“What the Hëll are you talking about?”
We worked out some time ago that Robert is just a version of the random complaint letter generator.
http://www.pakin.org/complaint/
Don’t try to figure it out. Just enjoy the comedy of it.
Wow!
Obama is Peter’s “agent”?
I never knew PAD was that powerful.
I dunno – he wasn’t a good enough agent to keep PAD on “Hulk”… 🙂
The legal term for acting through a proxy is employing an “agent.” I gather that what Peter is proposing is “commissioning” an agent with a piece of paper bearing words to the effect that my militia rifle now is contraband and may be seized by the agent, since Peter hasn’t the inclination (nor the balls) to do it himself. He may call his piece of paper a “law” if he wants to, but I call it a piece of paper.
So, Mike, stop playing the standard demodonkey dodge of ignoring the issue by calling the opposition crazy. You still don’t have a plan of action re what to do when all the “crazies” (like me) look at your piece of paper and, with a flip of the hand, say, “Eh!”
After reading your past replies on this site, You’re a special kind of crazy aren’t you?
Well, I’m not a demodonkey jáçkášš, if that’s what you seek to know.
Neither am I, but crazy takes on many different forms & you’re at least three so far. Let me know when you’re going to the Marco Town Center mall so I can avoid going there, just in case.
How about this – If it’s “too soon” to discuss gun control then how about we also make it “too soon” to discuss supposed religous causes.
If we can’t talk about gun control then the righties can’t talk about the lack of school prayer causing these things or “God didn’t protect the children because he’s a gentleman who doesn’t go where he’s not wanted.”.
Maybe if people like you spoke up about this more during the time in between these tragedies instead of just during them, you might have a chance of getting it made into law. These things don’t just change overnight.
Instead of talking about gun control, how about if we explore solutions that might solve the problem? Do you know how incredibly illogical it is to expect cold blooded killers who would point guns at the heads of children and squeeze the trigger to listen to and obey gun control laws? That’s insanity. Gun laws only affect law abiding citizens. Period.
Frankly, the only reason why gun control laws are bandied about after a tragedy like this is because well-meaning people want to pretend that they are doing something to solve the problem. They are trying to make themselves feel better. That tripe has about worn itself out. It’s time to start looking at our society and figuring out why we are producing homicidal monsters that think nothing of killing children. That’s the core issue. Not the availability of guns.
Instead of talking about gun control, how about if we explore solutions that might solve the problem? Do you know how incredibly illogical it is to expect cold blooded killers who would point guns at the heads of children and squeeze the trigger to listen to and obey gun control laws? That’s insanity. Gun laws only affect law abiding citizens. Period.
THis is empirically not true for non-American cultures. See, for example, Australia, where gun control laws have apparently resulted in zero gun-related mass killings.
Of course, since we’re talking about American culture, that empirical fact may have limited usefulness.
Drug laws only effect law abiding citizens.
Sodomy laws only effect law abiding citizens.
Speed limits only effect law abiding citizens.
EPA bans only effect law abiding citizens.
(Corproations are citizens too!)
“Thou Shalt NOT Kill” only effects Law abiding citizens.
No law is written to stop anything. It can’t. But ignoring the Rule of Law just because someone else can too is to deny Civilization itself. And it is as much a dodge as thinking “Hey, we passed a law, everything will be fine now”.
Peeping toms and pornographers and sex offenders use cameras in the commission of their crimes. Let’s ban cameras, so no one will use them illegally.
I just real;ized that I am being as much a part of the problem as the “No, don’t do that” crowd.
Mr. Butler, I would like to ask, in all sincerity and with no intent of pulling a “gotcha!”(*) and dismissing your efforts as unworkable, what would you have us do?
(* – To aid in this, I do have two caveats: First, it has to be something we can do, and action we can take, and not just a lack of inappropriate action. Second, it must be a specific action, and not just “Stop being a degenerate society and everything will work out”.)
Jay, this may have escaped your attention, but pornography is not a crime. You betray your bias here.
Neither is owning a militia rifle (that’s what the Constitution specifically protects).
All Florida public schools have a deputy on duty, and he is armed (I’m not allowed to take my gun to school, the constitutional provision notwithstanding).
*******
SER: I am constantly amazed at how easily Americans will imprison themselves WILLINGLY in order to hold on to their guns. It’s like the parable about the monkey.
****
Instead of talking about gun control, how about if we explore solutions that might solve the problem? Do you know how incredibly illogical it is to expect cold blooded killers who would point guns at the heads of children and squeeze the trigger to listen to and obey gun control laws? That’s insanity. Gun laws only affect law abiding citizens. Period.
****
SER: There are “law-abiding” citizens whose guns are stolen and used against them. There are “law-abiding” citizens whose children find their guns and kill themselves with them (one such case happened a couple weeks ago). Banning guns would have prevented those deaths.
“Law-abiding” citizens not having guns in the home would also prevent murders committed in the heat of the moment. A knife is potentially lethal but a gun can kill quickly and from a distance.
The CT shooter and the Colorado shooter both got their weapons legally (the former from his mother). Even if we accept that a deranged person, hellbent on destruction, would attempt to illegally arm themselves if guns were banned, that scenario creates multiple opportunities for the potential shooter to be stopped. He either risks being killed by the shady person who is selling him the weapon (rather than the law-abiding owner of a gun shop) or arrested during a sting. If he’s lucky and neither of those things happen, he is now in possession of an illegal weapon. If he’s stopped for speeding, he could be caught with it and arrested. If a neighbor sees him entering his home with assault weapons, she would call the police rather than presume he has a legal right to own them.
Multiple opportunities for the prevention of a potential tragedy. Instead, someone can legally possess weapons and then decide to kill dozens of people. The crime only occurs once the person has pulled the trigger.
I don’t necessarily dismiss the idea that lunatics would get their hands on guns illegally and successfully kill people. I don’t even dismiss the idea that lunatics would try to kill people with a knife or run a car through the school.
However, before I will engage in that debate, let’s start with known facts: The killers behind the trigger of TWO mass shootings this year both got their guns legally. We know for a FACT that a gun ban would have at the very least made it harder for them to gain access to guns. All else is speculation.
I often hear complaints about a gun ban or gun laws “punishing” law-abiding citizens. What is the “punishment” here? If a law-abiding citizen’s primary reason for owning a gun is protection and self-defense, what percentage of gun deaths related to a gun ban would be sufficient? 10% 20% Or do we really cling to the belief that a gun ban would not prevent any of these gun deaths even when the weapons used in the massacres were legally obtained?
I sometimes fear that the U.S. is a country that cares little about its own national security unless it means invading or bombing other countries.
Lest anyone misconstrue what I said:
I can’t teach a class anything while I’m packing heat (and I’m in the high schools). The idea of having an elementary-school teacher carry a pistol in class is revolting (not to mention invitation to unbelievable disaster).
You need a uniformed, armed deputy on duty at the school during all hours when school is in session. We’ve had such in Collier County for at least a dozen years (I don’t go back any further). Failure to have that is negligence on the part of the school district.
As for myself, I continue to leave my guns behind, irrespective of the requirement.
There are something like 350 million guns in the United States.
There are billions and billions of rounds of ammo.
How in the world does one even begin to ban them?
We can’t un-invent them.
We’ll never be able to round them all up without the army going door to door, and even then, there will be blood in the streets.
You’ll never get two-thirds of the states for a constitutional admendmant to repeal the second.
The genie is out of the bottle.
There’s no putting it back in.
Gun laws are great, for people that will follow the laws.
Schools are way too exposed. Every school in the nation needs to have armed security, be it public or private.
Every school in the nation needs to have metal detectors. There are thousands of unemployed vets, with security clearances. Put them to work.
I’m fiscally conservative, but I’m fine with raising taxes for something like this.
We need to protect our kids better. Period.
Collier County, Florida, long has had an armed deputy at all of its schools. It’s looking like Newtown was negligent here, though it now is being reported that the locals, rather than bash the NRA (which to date has said nothing), have pinpointed the breech and are saying they won’t let their children go back until this is fixed.
As for the metal detectors, it now is being reported that the school did have some kind of barrier to entry other than past the front desk but that the perp simply shot his way through it.
I’m not sure how one fixes that. Bin Laden didn’t have a solution either.
Every school in the nation needs to have armed security, be it public or private.
Ahh, yes, the solution to our gun problem is… more guns!
This country has already lost the war to the gun culture.
And of course a kid in Utah brought a gun to school today, in order to help protect the school from any spree killers.
Peter, we talk about it all the time, you just don’t like the answers.
There is NOT ONE SINGLE LAW that would have prevented this tragedy. LAWS DO NOT PREVENT HUMAN ACTION. They only provide for appropriate punishment AFTER the deed has been done.
This was planned. If he didn’t have the weapons already on hand at his mother’s, he would have obtained them somewhere else.
Please answer the following question: If someone is going to obtain a gun illegally, how will MORE laws telling you you can’t have that weapon stop you from getting that weapon? No one has come up with an answer to that question other than “they won’t”
This was planned. If he didn’t have the weapons already on hand at his mother’s, he would have obtained them somewhere else.
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SER: I stated this upthread but I’ll keep repeating it. If the shooter had tried to obtain guns illegally, he would run the risk of either being killed for his money by the criminal selling him the weapon or arrested as part of an undercover police sting. Also: Geeky white males like the shooters in CT and Colo might also scream UNDERCOVER COP and they would need to have someone “vouch” for them to make the illegal sale. Acquiring the weapon is very difficult. Loners with no friends, as these shooters have been described, usually do not have tons of contacts in the criminal world.
******
Please answer the following question: If someone is going to obtain a gun illegally, how will MORE laws telling you you can’t have that weapon stop you from getting that weapon? No one has come up with an answer to that question other than “they won’t”
SER: I’ve also already stated this: If possession of a gun is illegal, there are multiple opportunities for someone to be arrested with the weapon.
It’s important to note that none of the shooters this year acquired their guns illegally. We as a society don’t even make it that difficult for them. If they were getting the weapons illegally, we could actually argue that the gun laws we have are not being adequately enforced but we are currently willfully arming lunatics.
“multiple opportunities for someone to be arrested with the weapon”
But that still doesn’t mean it will be PREVENTED. Only that it is POSSIBLY prevented. I didn’t ask possibly. I asked – is there ANY LAW that WILL PREVENT this from happening? Not POSSIBLY PREVENT. WILL PREVENT.
But such is reality. If there were a sure fire way to prevent tragedies like that, it would already been done.
It’s not logical to mantain that, if a proposed law will not be effective in stopping 100% of the cases, then it shouldn’t be implemented.
OK, let’s actually get semi-serious here. Let’s hear some proposals for “reasonable” gun control measures. And intelligent ones.
Let me start off by bringing up some stupid ones.
Ban automatic weapons. Not only have those been effectively banned for almost a century, I can’t find the last time a fully automatic weapon was used in a crime.
Revive the assault weapons ban. That was an incredibly stupid law that almost entirely concerned itself with purely cosmetic features of guns, not their effectiveness. The only really substantive one was the banning of making large-capacity magazines, and there thousands and thousands of those already on the market.
So… what measures do people want to see?
Mandatory safety and testing for all permits. If you can’t hit what you are aiming at, you are a danger, period. No different than if you are unable to merge into traffic on a freeway. It should be just as hard to get – and maintain, this is equally important – a gun license as a driver’s license. And barring extraordinary circumstances, no harder either.
You sell to someone without a license, you lose the right to sell. No different than a bartender selling alcohol to someone obviously intoxicated. Again, it should be no easier – and no harder – to run a bar than a gun shop. (Or head shop, tattoo parlor, or hairdresser.)
No concealed carry, under any circumstances. If guns prevent crime, they should be front and center doing so. Not hiding in a back pocket waiting for “the right moment”. If you believe that guns save lives, but you refuse to carry one because of social stigma, than you are a coward. By not showing that guns can be used responsibly, you simply perpetuate the sterotype.
Interesting points. Let me take them on.
1) The NRA offers superb training programs, often free or cheap. But there are a few problems. For one, a lot of cities restrict suitable training facilities. I seem to recall that Chicago, at one point, had put such restrictions on gun shops and shooting ranges that there was literally nowhere in the city you could have either. That qualifies as a back door ban.
Others have run into situations where local law enforcement has total discretion over issuing licenses. Which means that if the local chief of police wants no gun permits, there aren’t any. That was the case in Texas, until they passed a “shall issue” law and took the discretion away from the chiefs — if you meet the requirements, they have to give you a permit.
2) Already covered by existing laws. That was brought up in Fast & Furious — gun sellers knew that the buyers were straws and wanted to refuse to sell to them, but the BATFE basically ordered them to make the sales. And considering how much the dealers depend on the good will of the BATFE, they went along with the instructions.
3) There are a lot of times when concealed carry is appropriate besides the stigma. Some people are freaked out by the sight of a gun. An exposed gun is vulnerable to being grabbed. And in inclement weather, you might want to keep that gun out of the rain/snow/whatever. Also, it gives police an excuse to hassle someone who accidentally lets their gun get “concealed.”
The problem isn’t gun laws. The majority of these shooters start off breaking laws before they start shooting. The Connecticut shooter took his mother’s gun (presumably without permission) and shot her first — he didn’t own the guns he used. And I don’t think an NRA member has EVER gone on a shooting spree.
People who are inclined to obey gun laws — old and new — are more likely to obey other laws (don’t go shooting up schools). People who are inclined to break other laws (breaking into a school, shooting people) are also inclined to break gun laws — old and new.
An additional thoughts on a concealed carry ban.
1. Taking away a concealed carry option in favor of open carry reduces the effectiveness of carrying when it come to deterrent. Part of what makes it effective is that potential bad guys don’t know who is and isn’t carrying. If they knew, they’d make sure to neutralize the good guys with guns first.
2. IIRC, the percentage of people with ccw licenses who commit crimes with guns is about .09 of one percent. The percentage for the general populace is about 1/2 of a percent. Sure there are bad actors in any given statistical group, but people those who carry concealed have a very low number of them. In other words, at least as far as character is concerned, the people with ccw licenses are the people you’d want to carry a gun.
Predictably, this has become about guns.
Had a look at a UN facts site.
http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=UNODC&f=tableCode%3A1
According to the graph I brought up, the murder rate in the US per 100,000 was approx 4.2 in 2010 (Source: “National Police”).
Same site gives Brazil a rate of 21 (“Ministry of Justice”) which is odd because the government banned private ownership of guns years ago. (Fiancee is a Brazilian national living in Sao Paulo, so we talk about this sort of thing a lot.)
On the other side, we have Switzerland, whose Constitution mandates every adult male (without a major criminal record) spend some time in the militia/armed forces and have a working, military grade weapon in their home. A weapon they are then allowed to purchase and keep beyond their years of service. Murder rate there? 0.7. By the way, a proposal was put forth to change that part of the Constitution a year or two ago. It was voted down by the population.
Not saying NRA fanatics aren’t raving nutters, but maybe they are right about one thing: maybe it ISN’T the guns.
Not in any way, shape or form trying to diminish the tragedy which just occurred, but unless we wrap our minds around the REAL problem(s), no amount of band aid legislation will help in the long run. See Brazil above. And, for those who say it’s easier to kill lots this way, remember Columbine and how we got lucky because if their home made bomb had gone off and exploded the propane tanks, the death toll could have been much higher – without guns.
As a Brazilian, I have to say that that is not quite right. The government hasn’t banned private ownership of guns. Usually you can have a gun, but has to keep it inside your residence. Getting a carry permit is next to impossible, except if you work as private security or something like that.
There was a referendum in 2005 to prohibit the sale of guns and ammunition, but it failed to pass. I voted against it myself.
And while we do have a lot of gang violence here, we don’t have the kind of psycho mass killing that goes on in the US. We have professional criminals and drug lords doing a lot of damage, but not nutsos like Adam Lanza.
I’m not sure what is the solution for the US. I used to be very pro-gun myself, but I suppose it’s getting harder all the time to be pro-gun with a clean conscience. I do agree that draconian anti-gun laws don’t work with professional criminals: those guys have a network of contacts, they will always be able to get guns.
But unstable loners like Lanza? I dunno, perhaps they would have trouble getting weapons with more anti-gun laws. From what I read, his Mom was a nut, and he was a nut. But it seems like in the US it’s so easy to get a gun, even nuts can do it.
I think I’m slowly becoming more of a traditional Liberal. Lately I’ve found very difficult to continue defending Israel against all charges. And now I found very difficulty to keep saying that the very permissive pro-gun legislation in the US has nothing to do with fruitcakes like Lanza having such a easy time getting high-grade weaponry.
There was ONE case I remember of a schizo guy killing one or two people with a gun here in Brazil. He killed comparatively few people before being aprehended, because he only could get a crappy revolver. I don’t want Brazil to be like the US where nuts can buy Bushmasters and Glocks easily. Something is very wrong with the US.
She replies that those are older, collector pieces which are not allowed out of the house. No carry permits as in the U.S. No auto or semi auto guns are allowed. Yet, though individual incidents which see more people killed at once don’t tend to occur there, the overall death rate is still higher, which is the whole point. Honestly, whether I (or a loved one) am killed as part of a group shooting, or solo in some dark back alley, the end result is the same.
Dead is dead, yes.
But Brazil’s problems are typical of a country struggling with poverty, lack of education, drug problems, and incompetent police departments. I don’t think Brazilian gun laws make that much of a difference in the big picture, since the other conditions are so very different from the USA.
We don’t have lots of killings done by ordinary citizens going crazy. My point is that in the US keeping guns away from ordinary citizens could be far more effective than in Brazil.
Another point: while being killed by drug cartels fighting other drug cartels also sucks, those drug cartel musclemen aren’t in the business of deliberately killing scores of schoolchildren.
Regarding Switzerland, I believe I read elsewhere on the web that those Swiss guys no longer keep their ammunition AT HOME. That’s kept in a central depot.
Of course, the Swiss don’t have the same irrational fascination for guns that so many Americans have. They seem to understand what guns can do and what their purpose is.
But here’s an intriguing article that shows just how different the Swiss perspective on guns is (csgv2.blogspot.com/2011/03/truth-about-guns-in-switzerland.html).
I believe that may have been part of that referendum which was voted down. Not much point being in a state of readiness if your weapons are unloaded, after all.
Your comment hits part of the point I’m making. It isn’t the guns, its the attitude towards them. I’m guessing – and I admit I could be wrong here – the often prevalent “me first” attitude in parts of the U.S. society doesn’t help. Switzerland isn’t a Communist country, but I’d bet that, on average, people there are more cognizant and understanding of others. I’m going out on a limb, but I’d say that would probably make someone less likely to indulge in mass killings for the hëll of it. But I don’t have a PhD in Sociology, so what do I know?
“Every country has a sizable contingent of mentally ill citizens. We’re the one that gives them the technological power to play god.”
Gail Collins, NYTimes
Different countries take care of them in different ways, though. Dare I speak those terrible words: “health care”? I’m not a big fan of forcing individuals into institutions when they show no signs of being a danger to others, but at least having those institutions available if they opt in is a Good Thing. I do know that the number of homeless and street folks increased noticeably in Canadian cities when some short sighted government cut funding to mental health hospitals. That’s something which can come back to bite one in a rather nasty way.
Nutso’s Mom was a survivalist that fits several right-wing stereotypes. Just imagine if she were an atheist or muslim or lesbian. The right would go ape-šhìŧ crazy.
Shouldn’t we also be talking about mental healthcare?
I suppose we can, Grey, but I’m not seeing any bona fide mental-health issue here. The guy drove to Connecticut, apparently from New Jersey, broke into his mother’s home to get the guns, killed her in the process, then took the weapons to the school, shot his way through the door, killed the principal when she tried to warn the others, THEN went on the killing spree against the kids.
Jerry, you’re the cop, so correct me if I’m wrong, but all the above sounds pretty deliberate to me.
Wait… you don’t think the mentally ill can… make a plan?
Bobby, this, despite all your attempts to hide it using big words and doing a Google search for legal rulings to copy and paste chunks of text from, is why you give yourself away as an idiot time and time again.
Someone can be extremely mentally ill and absolutely certifiable and still be capable of planning and executing something more complicated that just shooting someone because they lost it in the heat of the moment. You’re confusing the the argument of premeditation VS crime of passion/heat of the moment for what we have here. What we have here is a subject with a history that indicates that he may have indeed been mentally ill. That in no way means he could not come up with a plan and follow it.
That doesn’t sound like something somebody who was mentally stable would do. But I forgot… Robert Crim always takes the opposite stance of what anyone writes. I get it. It’s your Schtick. It would, however, be nice once in a while to have a conversation where you don’t rudely spout jargon after EVERYONE’s comments.
Grey
You’re making the assumption that “bona-fide mental health issue” = “full-blown insanity, incapable of forming a rational thought.”
There are a lot of mental conditions. One in particular seems to be behind many if not most of the premeditated multiple-random-victim rampages such as this one (including most of the notorious school shootings of recent years), namely, hypermania.
Hypermania is not full-fledged insanity. You could carry on a rational conversation with a hypermaniac and not have an inkling of a hint that s/he was suffering from such a mental condition.
One of the key symptoms of hypermania is “overproduction of ideas” (the actual terminology in the medical literature). This includes the ability to plan in advance and carry out very detailed and intricate schemes.
Far from being a counter-indication, the fact that what Adam Lanza did was, in your words, “pretty deliberate,” is part and parcel of hypermania!
Hypermania also includes complete loss of conscience, guilt, remorse, feelings of connectedness to others (these can even be reversed, so that the people whom the hypermaniac most loved before the hypermania set in become the people s/he most wants dead), extreme inflation of self-importance so that any real or imagined injury, insult, or slight against the hypermaniac is blown all out of proportion and demands the ultimate penalty, etc. Surely you can see what an enormously dangerous combination this is?
Hypermania is, as its name implies, a mania. It is not in and of itself schizophrenia, an autism spectrum disorder, etc., though people suffering from those can indeed get hypermania as well, especially considering what has become far and away the most common cause of it.
Prior to the 1980s, while there were about as many multiple-victim rampages (regardless of weapon type or location type), it was rare for the victims to be random. Sometimes other people died as a result of the perpetrator wanting to murder the one or few people s/he had some sort of actual or imagined reason to kill, but that was usually collateral casualties, though even in such cases hypermania can be suspected because the willingness to kill innocents to get at the one(s) one hates pretty much requires a loss or absence of conscience, and hypermania is a (not the only) cause of that.
Prior to the latter ½ of the 1990s, this sort of random victim premeditated massacres in schools happened about once per decade on average. One that was nearly forgotten but has become more famous lately is the Bath School Massacre of May 18, 1927. That one was largely forgotten partly because the people of Bath, MI didn’t want reminders of their horrific loss, but also because it didn’t make good political fodder for any side. What violent video games did Andrew Kehoe play, or violent movies or TV shows did he watch, as a child in the 1870s–80s (he was 55 at the time — 1927, remember)? God hadn’t been “taken out” of public schools yet then, either. And, he didn’t shoot his victims — he blew them up. Yet his body count of 45 equals that of Columbine and Virginia Tech combined!
The first one of the modern rash happened on February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, WA. The next one happened about a year later. A little over a year after that, there was one month (May of 1998) in which there were two nearly consecutive days (just one intervening day between the two) where each day had multiple such incidents!
That is a very sudden, sharp, and steep statistical spike or cliff. It is not some smooth gentle Gaussian normal distribution bell curve. Nothing gradual can explain that! None of the usual scapegoats offered by the Left or Right. Not violence in the media or immersive violent video games, not decline of religion or the traditional nuclear family, etc. etc. etc.
Kids of my generation played “Cops & Robbers” in which we would actually hold an actual physical toy weapon in our hands, aim it at a real live human child, sight along it and get the child in our sights, then pull the trigger, and if it was a cap gun or had some sort of audio and/or tactile feedback mechanism, we’d even get semi-realistic audio and/or tactile feedback! Our playmate would then enact a somewhat realistic death scene right before our eyeballs. That’s far more immersive than any video game, yet very few of us went on to shoot up our schools!
We also watched TV and movie Westerns, and those could be pretty darn violent. Not to mention the pre-censored versions of Loony Toons cartoons with Elmer Fudd blowing Daffy Duck’s beak off with a rifle, or Yosemite Sam shooting pistols willy-nilly, or Bugs Bunny feeding sticks of dynamite to Taz, not to mention Wyle E. Coyote’s various schemes and their results.
No, something else has happened. Something sudden, with a very definitive start point.
Prior to the latter ½ of the Twentieth Century, hypermania wa much rarer than it is today. Then as now, it could be caused by a blow to the head (the aforementioned Andrew Kehoe), a brain tumor (Charles Whitman, the Texas University Tower Sniper of 1967), etc.
Those causes still exist, but in more recent decades they’ve been overshadowed by another cause: as a known side-effect of certain psychotropic drugs, in partricular (but not limited to) Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and SNRIs. Older tricyclics, MAOIs, etc. have also been implicated, but not to the extent of SSRIs.
The timing is very powerful correlation in and of itself. Psychotropics in general came into existence in the Twentieth Century, which is also when such incidents began to increase somewhat. SSRIs came out in the 1980s, and was followed by a rash of “unexplained” rampages among a group of people previously believed to be harmless and even major fixtures of society, and this so shocked the nation that it added a whole new two-word idiom to our language: “Going Postal.” The US Postal Service was still a fully government orgnization back then, and postal workers were federal employees, entitled to federal employee health care including mental health care, which would include availability of such medical treatments that otherwise few could afford. Interesting coincidence, that.
SSRIs were initially not prescribed to young people, but later were starting in the mid-1990s. Remember when the modern rash of such incidents in schools by students began? Early in 1996!
For several years thereafter, 100% of the perpetrators were upper middle-class or upper-class white boys. 100% of the incidents happened in upper middle-class or better neighborhoods and communities, not in inner-city ghettos or “da ’Hood” as would be expected with many other criminal statistics. Pearl, MS, not Jackson. Littleton, CO, not Denver. No. Exceptions. Not for many years after the rash started.
(Notice how, after most such incidents, the news media would show some local Pillar of the Community type who’d be standing there, wringing his hands and moaning, “B-b-but, this is such a nice, peaceful community! These things don’t happen here!” Well, excuse me, Mr. Pillar, but such places were the only places where “those things” did happen! In the immortal words of PAD’s CBG column title, though, But I digress…)
In more recent years, there have been a few exceptions, but even that is predicted by the hypothesis, and it has been observed just as predicted. Jeffrey Weiss was a quite poor Native American youth on living on the Red Lake, WA Reservation, and he shot up his school. That was also a poor community. Cho of Virginia Tech was also non-white, but still of higher socioeconomic class, and Virginia Tech itself isn’t exactly a charity state college.
To the best of my knowledge, there still haven’t been any black perpetrators, nor any taking place in an inner city “da ’Hood” ghetto.
Why would such demographics be important? Well, who can afford child psychiatrists and the expensive psychotropic pharmaceuticals that they prescribe? During the 1990s in the Soccer Mom era, it was even considered something of a status symbol to have a child or teen going to “therapy,” almost as much as it was to wear a Rolex® or drive a Beemer!
Some try to excuse this by saying that these people were mentally ill which is why they needed the drugs, and it was the illness, not the drugs, that triggered the incidents. But were that the case, we would be seeing the rampages more or at least the same amount among those who did not have access to such medications, either because they lived before the medications existed, or they were of a socioeconomic class that could not afford them and did not yet have some government-funded means of getting them (e.g. being a postal worker, living on a Native American reservation, etc.).
For Weiss and Cho, there is no doubt: both are known to have been on psychotropics at or shortly before the time of the incidents. Ditto Eric Harris of Columbine (Luvox). Dylan Klebold is said to have been according to a student who says that he asked her for help getting off of Paxil. At least one of the Jonesboro killers also was being treated by a psychiatrist, which usually involves prescription medication (otherwise they could go to a much less expensive psychologist).
Going by just the ones we know for a fact were using pychotropics, the percentage of perpetrators is waaay out of proportion to the general public who use such drugs!
We don’t know of a single known counter-example, of someone who, since 1996, committed such an act but whom we know for a fact was not using psychotropics at or before the time of the incidents (this is mainly because medical records are sealed).
I’ve been posting on this hypothesis since well over a decade, dating back to before the Internet was popular. I posted under this same handle on the GEnie dial-up ASCII-based online service (PAD himself was an active participant on it), and posted on this very subject shortly after Columbine. Since then, all subeequent observations have fit the predictions, including timing, demographics of both perpetrators and locations, etc. And, this hypothesis even has an actual causative mechanism (hypermania), unlike the usual scapegoats.
Dear Left,
I wasn’t going to say anything about the shooting in Connecticut until you chose to politicize it. The school where this shooting took place is a microcosm of the society that you are trying to create in America when it comes to gun control: nobody there except perhaps security/police officers on duty. It was, when it comes to guns, the very utopia that you have been striving for. It is not only a microcosm of what you want, it’s a microcosm of what will happen if you get your way on a national scale. Start blaming the evil in some people’s hearts and stop assigning that blame to the objects they use to carry out their evil deeds. I know it’s easier to do what you do, but you need to suck it up. I know it makes you feel better about yourself to blame guns and to use incidents like this to affect social change, but perhaps, just this once, you could set your own self-interests aside.
I doubt it, but who knows. You may surprise me.
Dear Darin,
What, you propose that school teachers and students all carry guns to make schools less of a microcosm liberal “utopia”?
Are you completely insane?
Are you completely insane?
He’s certainly trying to compete with Bobby in his own special way, isn’t he?
There are some differences between them. Crim is more of a libertarian pseudo-intellectual that has a facile ability to collect a huge number of “facts” to “prove” his worldview, while ignoring anything that doesn’t fit. He will carefully pick and choose obscure and disproved biological theories to “support” that homosexuality is basicaly a choice, and it’s kind of fascinating to see, how he can build rationalizations.
Crim is an ideological machine and all “facts” are either weapons for him or obstacles. And using a Karl Marx quote to defend the poor, persecuted, 1% that will have to be subjected to pay a little more taxes? Priceless.
Now Darin is just your garden-variety regurgitator of right-wing talking points, not as fun, but perhaps not as crazy as Crim. Unlike Crim, I don’t think Darin believes that he is some sort of patriot super-warrior with guns ready to face the evil agent Obama and the power of the entire US government.
The thing they both have in common is that they’re totally shameless in their cynicism.
Craig, you don’t compete with anyone because you never offer anything rooted in any appreciation of reality. There are 350 million weapons outstanding in the United States, and those only are the ones we know about. They are private property, and the government could not seize them without paying for them, which it cannot do because it has no money. I agree that arming teachers is the worst idea (an elementary school teacher would have to be negligent for about 20 seconds to have a genuine catastrophe on her hands), but the alternative we have in Collier County of having an armed deputy in the office of each school summarily was pooh-poohed by you for being a “more guns” solution.
Which is to say you have no solution other than to sit in your ivory tower and be a permacritic.
As for Rene: Disproved by whom, Rene? I was, after all, unaware that you had any training in biology, but maybe now you’ll correct us?
As for Karl Marx, I’m unaware that I relied on him ever, but I do say a lot. Maybe I just forgot, and you can refresh my memory.
JMS had quite a productive discussion end up happening on his Facebook fan page. Take a look.
PAD,
I agree there gun control needs to be addressed and that something needs to be done.
The question is what?
Years ago, a friend of mine, a Republican, gun owner and NRA member, said he’d rather see stricter enforcement of existing gun control laws than passage of new ones. I think there’s some logic to that.
There are also probably some gun sale “loopholes” that could and should be closed.
Also, I never understood why some people had a problem with the initial several day waiting period proposed when the Brady law was being considered by congress. You want to buy a rifle to go hunting? Put in your application well in advance of hunting season.
There could also have been a special exception for people who’d been threatened in some way, and had reported said threats to the police. But for everyone else, there’s no pressing need to apply for a license and get your gun the same day.
I think the “gun culture” in our society has gotten well out of hand, but A) there are doubtless thousands of hunters and sportsmen and women who wouldn’t dream of harming another human being; and B) even if guns had never existed, someone as disturbed as the killer in Connecticut (there’s absolutely no need to mention his name) would have committed his crime in some other fashion. Back in the 1920s, a madman in Bath, Michigan blew up a schoolhouse, killing 38 children, among others (as mentioned by someone else on this thread).
No need to mention his name, either.
If I recall correctly, the two Columbine killers stated in letters or E-Mails they left behind that they’d be famous. And their predictions came true, because their names and faces where all over the newspapers and television news shows. I don’t know to what degree, if any, subsequent mass killers were prompted by the thought of being famous, but they shouldn’t get that wish. After the initial news story, there’s no need to mention their names. As Kathleen indicated in her own blog, it’s the victims’ names that should be remembered.
If anything, in situations like this the killer’s name should be mentioned in news stories subsequent to the initial reports only if the story is about how it’s been proven by psychiatric/medical experts that the crime would never have happened if the killer had been able to receive this, that or the other mental health care and/or medicine. In other words, give coverage to those with a genuine mental illness that could have been treated vs. those with a callous disregard for the lives of others.
Back to the gun issue. I don’t see why any private citizen needs to own high-powered military style weapons. You certainly don’t need them for hunting. Maybe private ownership of guns should be restricted to handguns and/or hunting rifles. They’re both a lot more powerful and deadly than anything the Founding Fathers had available.
My closest friend is a teacher, and she told me that her school has reviewed their “code red” procedures. Other than fire drills, schools shouldn’t have “code red” procedures.
Rick
Well, if this report is accurate:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/12/18/nra-to-push-back-soon-sources-say/
then the NRA’s answer will be that you’re to blame, PAD, not them.
I agree that no one other than cops or the military have a need to own automatic weapons, but banning guns to solve the problem is like putting a band-aid on a head wound. Making guns illegal isn’t going to make gun crime go away ..how many decades have drugs been illegal in the US, yet anyone who wants illegal drugs knows where, when, & how to get them.
Sadly no guns doesn’t equal no evil. There are many ways to kill large groups of people without using a gun (ie- 9/11, Oklahoma City bombing, the acid attacks back in the mid 90’s, the church burnings & bombings back in the early 2000’s, and lest we not forget McDonald’s super size meals). There were killers long before guns were invented. If someone wants to kill, they are going to do it by whatever means necessary ..heck, Stephen King showed us that you can kill someone just by using a corn cob.
When my Grandpa got dementia they took his car away so that he couldn’t get to town. But due to his determination, he would find a way to sneak out of the house and still get to town every day (whether by borrowing a friend’s car, riding a bike, or walking, etc.). His car was just a catalyst for him to get to town, but take it away and.. well, he still got to town. The only difference taking away his car made was that he didn’t use it to get to town. Taking away a catalyst isn’t going to stop mass killings. The real problem lies within the heart of the killer ..how do you convince a killer that is not okay to kill?
Honestly, I don’t believe draconian gun laws mean less crime. That is more of a feel-good liberal fantasy. Hardened criminals in urban areas will get the weapons they need, one way or another.
But I do think draconian gun laws can work to stop or diminish *specific* kinds of crime, specifically the lonely-young-suburban-white-male-crazy-snaps-and-kills-lots-of-people. Those alienated freakos don’t have a lot of street smarts. In an environment with less automatic guns lying around for the taking, they’d have to do with less efficient means to carry out their breakdowns.
Or perhaps more efficient. Propane bottles are cheap and easy to get. Other things are not much harder.
Possibly. But blowing people up from a distance isn’t as sexual and personal as shooting them. Terrorists and revolutionaries blow people up. Disturbed young males with broken masculinities like to shoot them up, or stab them.
WTF is a “broken masculinity”? You think they get a sexual high from doing this? Personally, I’m thinking population density is playing a role. Then again, I have trouble understanding the insanity that leads to charging customers to park at your location.
Shooting people at point blank range ..blowing people up from a distance ..it is all the same thing. It doesn’t make a difference in what way a mass killing is performed (or the person behind the action or their reasons for committing the killings), they all equal out to the same kind of wrong (there is no greater than or less than). Jim Jones killed over 900 people (including over 200 children) w/ cyanide laced Kool-Aid. The death scene wasn’t as violent/bloody as a mass shooting or terrorist bombing, but it was still the same wrong ..same evil. When someone has a desire to kill, they will kill regardless of what tools are available to them.
Interesting side note: there is at least one connecting factor that psychologists & criminal justice experts have discovered about all serial/mass killers.. they all, either during their childhood or teen years, would torture & kill animals before moving on to killing people in their later years.
Broken masculinity, yeah. Haven’t you noticed that these guys almost always share some characteristics? Middle class, male, white, lonely, frustrated, authoritarian and/or absent parents.
There are slight variations, there was that Korean guy. But in any case, the spree killer is never the studly, devil-may-care guy.
“they all, either during their childhood or teen years, would torture & kill animals before moving on to killing people in their later years.”
That is a fixture of psychopaths.
I’m no expert, but I’ve read that psychopaths are glib and superficially charming.
If these loners that shoot up schools are psychopaths, they surely didn’t get the whole package.
“I’m no expert, but I’ve read that psychopaths are glib and superficially charming.”
–and in the US the same is said about car salesmen.
Actually you raise an interesting point about psychopaths ..not all psychopaths are killers and not all killers are psychopaths.
If the serial/mass killers all share that connection of torturing/killing animals when they were younger, that almost sounds like a “power trip” or trying to find an outlet where they are the ones in control (where life and death hang in the balance and only they are the ones who make the call). Or they just get a high out of watching another living thing suffer. Or both.
Here are some questions I’m throwing out there for everyone:
Even if you ban specific weapons how will you collect them (not only from criminals but formerly law-abiding citizen)?
It’s been said that the current shooter had an undiagnosed mental illness (begs the question of if it was undiagnosed how do we know it was a mental illness?) and again brings up what “mental illness” would mean you are prohibited from possessing a fire arm and who makes that decision?
Also doesn’t it go without saying that the easier it is for a law-abiding citizen to obtain a firearm it increases the access for criminals (whether through theft of legal weapons or from less savory gun sellers).
The ideal solution vis-a-vis mental illness would be to get them the treatment they needed before they decided it was a good idea to shoot up a school.
But apparently the only thing more dangerous to freedom than gun control is health care.
One thing that will make banning weapons almost impossible is money. If you grandfather in the guns that currently exist, then the ban is worthless because there’s 300 million guns in circulation. If you don’t include a grandfather clause and simply, say, ban the possession of semi automatic weapons, then the Federal government would essentially have to buy back all of the guns at fair market values. It’s a taking, and while you can condemn private property for public purposes (Kelo, anyone?), the Constitution guarantees compensation to the property owner. That would be tens of billions of dollars. Try getting that budget passed.
Well, that was predictable and embarrassing. Thanks, NRA.
I think Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police has topped the “predictable and embarrassing” list for this discussion. That or there’s so little crime in the District these days that they have time to investigate someone for using a prop during a national news broadcast.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/us/washington-police-investigating-nbc-over-gun-device.html?_r=0
I can’t wait to see the DOJ investigation of Kevin Smith for appearing on the cover of High Times.
I say we take the NRA up on their offer of armed police officers in schools. And like the additional charges on cigarettes to help pay for increased health care, taxes on guns and ammo should reflect these costs, as well the the added load on healthcare.
As we approach the Chris Rock threshold of $5000 per bullet, I’m sure the NRA will start their typical cry of “Obama is coming for your guns, send us more money to fight him!”. At least the NRA has answered one question: The appropriate time to talk about this is one week later.
No word on when the appropriate time to talk seriously and responsibly will be.
Not from them, at least.
Just a point about fanaticism.
From what little I know about Political Science, extreme leftism is Communism, and extreme rightism is Fascism. They are polar opposites. Therefor a person can’t be both a Marxist and a Nazi. That’s why the Russians were against the Germans in WWII. I point this out to the people who are claiming that Obama is a communist and is “coming for your guns” in the same breath.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that being either is not great. We have a lot of well trained law abiding people with guns, and a lot of criminals and potential bad guys with guns in this country.
The problem I see with the NRA’s argument of the best defense against an armed bad guy is an armed good guy, is that everyone sees themselves as the good guy. Who gets to decide who is a good guy and who is a bad guy. More armed people didn’t work so well in what is called the Wild West for that exact reason. I don’t want to send my kids into a school in a country where the only defense against a crazed gunman is the hope that someone else is a “faster draw.” Guns are a tool that in the wrong hands can be devistating. So Crim, you can relax, because no is trying to take your guns away. We need to find a way to keep guns out of the hands of the “bad guys” and the “crazies.” I do think that there should be laws to control access to guns so they don’t get into the wrong hands just like we have laws for lots of other legal things. However that still only addresses the symptom not the problem. How do we address the disease? This is a uniquely American phenomenon I believe so the conversation should be about prevention, not just the stoping the shooters earlier to reduce the scope, but preventing these things in the first place. I don’t have the answer, but in know that there is no simple rule or law that will fix it. But please feel free to point fingers and continue fear-mongering. It has done as all so much good so far. ;(
The analysis is incorrect: Communism and fascism are different forms of socialism, so both belong on one side of a true political spectrum, though you are right that they are not particularly compatible —
Communism is the form of socialism under which the state owns all the means of production directly, and the market is abolished by force of arms. The Soviet Union perhaps was the best example of such a system in total form; however, prior to its reorganization as the United States Postal Service, the U.S. post office ran on identical principles (making the inventor of communism not Karl Marx but Benjamin Franklin). Under the old system, each post office was run by an aparatchik (the postmaster), who reported to his chief on the “politburo” (the postmaster general on the president’s cabinet) — and that’s exactly how communism works (or doesn’t work, as you prefer).
Under fascism, the market still is suppressed by violence, and entrepreneurs are stripped of their function but allowed to retain their independence as managers. The classic American example of this was the War Production Authority during the World War, although the Roosevelt Administration tried to implement fascism a decade earlier via the National Industrial Recovery Act (declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935). Under fascism, government-dominated corporations decide what to produce, how much, and where. Thus, for example, under the second WPA, it was illegal to produce, e.g., toy trains, because they were not considered “necessary” to the war effort by government bureaucrats. Instead, model railroaders were “conscripted” into the government’s work force and told to produce, e.g., Norton bomb sights (at the time, most model rails were amateur machinists).
This last, incidentally, is why the M1 carbine had so many manufacturers, including General Motors and (I recall) Remington Typewriters! The government simply took over the plant and ordered management to make guns!
It goes without saying that both of these systems are highly inefficient (I don’t know anyone who liked the post office in its previous incarnation, and everyone alive at the time saw WWII as a time of privation). In their place, modern “socialism” is not socialism at all, since the market is not suppressed, and what we have instead are gangs of pushy bureaucrats trying constantly to intervene. Such “interventionism” (the term coined by Ludwig von Mises) has some of the elements of fascism — transfer of legislative power to the executive, for example — but then counters that by allowing the market eventually to subvert the entire process (the primary reason our health-care system is a mess). The system also is subject to limited judicial review, which ameliorates some of the arbitrary decisions forced on the businessmen. (N.B.: There remain approximately 41,000 regulations created for the manufacture of hamburgers in the state of Missouri — interventionism has this terrible tendency to eat itself to death, and arbitrary decision making is inevitable.)
Although it shouldn’t be, the current gun-control debate has little to do with any of this. Hunters don’t need drum magazines to take down a deer (deer don’t shoot back). The actual issue goes to distribution of power in America — “socialists” like David want to concentrate power in the hands of the select (politicians in Washington) while other “socialists” want to centralize power in the hands of the select (fat cats and bankers on Wall Street). The libertarian alternative is to disperse power to the citizenry at large, which angers all socialists, whatever the format they prefer (witness all the nasty names the others here fling at me). Although the current gun-control debate does not focus precisely on this issue, that issue’s underlying influence can be seen in the Feinsteinianism that “only police and the military” need military or militia weapons.
Really? Why? Why do the police need drum magazines to enforce laws created supposedly by the rest of us? And, to what extent are the military going to be allowed to assume the role of “police”?
These are the ultimate questions, since standing armies ARE dangerous to liberty.
The assumption of the Feinsteinians is that all those hamburger regulations (and the army of pointy-eared bureaucrats needed to enforce them) are “good for us,” and that the costs are incidental. But, as we have seen in the current fiscal-cliff debate, this is not true. Fascists (and modern pseudo-fascists, interventionists, or whatever one wants to call them) never can have enough bureaucracy, never can have enough nanny state; and, since at the heart of their philosophy is a system of organized theft and predation, they require taxes to keep going up and up and up. Add to that the requirement that one must rob Peter to pay Paul (special to Peter: I’ve changed my name to Paul), and the final plank in the resulting corruption is cemented in place, for clearly the new taxes cannot be imposed on Paul. Hence, Obama’s call for imposing the taxes on those who primarily voted for the other guy (people making more than $250,000 per year, which eventually will be all of us if Ben Bernanke gets his way).
Corruption of such systems is well documented in history. We focus on Hitler’s hatred of Jews, but the truth is that, originally, his objective was merely to pick their pockets, not gas them to extinction. That came only later, when the war generated by the “international Jewish conspiracy” (in Hitler’s eyes) obliged him to steal their homes (to give them to German bombing victims) and find a place to relocate the dispossessed tenants. There WAS a logic to what he did, at least in the mind of a socialist, and if that horrifies us today, then perhaps we should reflect upon the fact that Roosevelt did the same thing to Japanese Americans, and that we had concentration camps too (look up Manzanar).
Obama is no different, except of course that he does not target Jews per se. The Constitution does not allow that, nor would it allow death camps like the Nazis had in Poland, but it should not have allowed Manzanar at all, and history tells us that the Constitution was no barrier to it. So, what is our ultimate security?
The Founding Fathers recognized that this kind of corruption could invade their system, and they placed an ultimate barrier against it: The double security which arises from both the federal government and the States having effective military power. Contrary to what the Supreme Court ruled in the D.C. Heller case, the Second Amendment is concerned primarily with this. Guns are not in the federal constitution so we can kill all the hedgehogs, and they’re certainly not in there so that we can wantonly murder each other. Guns are in the Constitution so that, in the event the central government becomes corrupt, islands of armed resistance will exist elsewhere, to which all free men may flee. This does not guarantee the preservation of liberty (nothing can do that), but it erects a strong barrier against perpetually increasing arbitrary government such as what we have now.
Gun owners are foolish to deny that such a system does not have its problems. In any society broaching a third of a billion citizens, given modern communications, the potential for some local fruit cake to create a national tragedy is uneludable. There have been similar elementary-school shootings in Norway and even England, where guns are very difficult to obtain. Why should we be shocked that such has not happened here until now?
But, it simply is not constitutional to answer this by disarming the public. Indeed, such an effort would not be a declaration of law but a declaration of war, irregardless of what the Supreme Court says. For, the very purpose of having so armed a population is to insure that sovereignty continues to reside where it ultimately belongs: In the people, themselves. Were any branch of the government to deny this, it would deny its own legitimacy.
America has used its divided system once to settle a constitutional issue, and that was the Civil War (in which about 600,000 people died). By modern standards, we would say that in that instance the States were the governments corrupted (by slavery); but, people forget that, with Dred Scott, the Supreme Court declared that the South was in the right.
Real history never is cut and dried.
Is it possible we will see this phenomenon again? Consider that the underlying principle of the Feinsteinians is to steal whatever they can by whatever means are available, in order to provide as much privileged dispensation as possible (with themselves as the dispensers). If they had to pay for what they are doing on some kind of balanced-budget arrangement, the taxpayers would rebel (like they have in the past) and vote them out of office. So, what they do instead is operate funny-money schemes or “tax” the unborn by continually borrowing money. And, when even that encounters opposition, the response from pigs like Geitner (and he really is a pig) is to demand that all Congressional control over the debt ceiling be turned over to them, “and the sooner, the better.”
Eventually, such a system will collapse on itself — it happened in Hitler’s Germany, it’s happening now in places like Greece, Italy, and Spain, and sooner or later it will happen here.
At that point in time (assuming we keep our weapons), some of the States controlled by the responsible simply will say, “No more!” They then will declare their independence and abrogate their “share” of the impossible debt (witness what’s happening in Catalonia now). That will be the third American revolution, and with 350 million firearms out there (that we know of), it probably will be especially bloody. Maybe not (maybe by then the debt will be so great that California will just fall into the ocean, and the rebels will win by default), but I’m predicting hail (the Chinese will want their money back). In that day, it won’t make a rats ášš’s worth of difference what the Supreme Court says (one way or the other), because it no longer will be supreme.
It’s an old English tradition that one can make the law by war, itself.
In the meantime, we do have the problem of wannabes shooting up schools, and it’s not wrong to say we should do something about it. Reasonable people will look around and ask, “What are other Americans doing to solve this problem?” And, they’ll realize that the answer is not to arm an elementary-school teacher (a study in negligence waiting to happen) nor to disarm the public at large (as sure a way as I know to actually precipitate the revolution). What we can do is what we’ve done in Collier County for years, which is to station a deputy sheriff at each school and make it difficult if not impossible for the fruit cakes to gain entrance during class hours by any place other than the front door.
The system works, everybody, not only in my local schools but at airports, courthouses, and other public buildings throughout the nation. Yes, it won’t work all the time (at Columbine, the first to run away was the — private — armed guard). But, it is the realistic thing we can do, so before we stir the country into some violent uproar, can we try it first?
This, after all, makes far more sense than to sit back, throw brickbacks at the NRA, risk Madison’s “tyranny of shifting majorities,” and ultimately for that do what we’ve done before, which was NOTHING.