President Obama, leading with maturity and understanding

By Mustang Bobby 

Andrew Sullivan marvels at President Obama's ability to handle a very tense situation with coolness and reflection.

No other president could have said what Obama said on Friday afternoon with similar authority. What was striking to me was the tone of acute sadness – a tone others could have used after what was, under any interpretation, a tragedy. And then there was the fact that this first black president, even after such a polarizing incident, spoke to all Americans, white and black. I cannot fathom how some on the knee-jerk right could have seen this as a divisive set of comments – just as I cannot quite fathom how this president is capable of controlling and channeling his own emotions.

What he tried to do was explain to white America how it must feel like to be perpetually deemed guilty before being proven innocent just because of your age, gender and the color of your skin. He didn’t deny the facts of the Martin case; he didn't dispute the jury's decision; he didn't dismiss legitimate issues like the toll of gun violence within the young black male population – but he did insist that we all understand the context, the history, and the reason, behind the anguish and anger of many African-American men and parents and boys. What he was asking for was some mutual empathy.

To answer his point about the knee-jerk right seeing this as divisive, it was a given; Sean Hannity and the rest of the people at Fox News and other such places would have had the same reaction if the president had come out and given his mother's recipe for beef stew.  Their response to anything he says is programmed far in advance. He speaks like Martin Luther King, they hear Malcolm X.

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The new gun-control movement, post-Newtown

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I wasn't terribly disappointed when the Manchin-Toomey gun bill was defeated in the Senate (even though it got well more than 50 votes, because of a Republican filibuster), because it was a bad bill. But it did include an expanded background checks provision, along with various pro-gun provisions, and so in the end it was probably better than nothing.

And yet in defeat that bill did more for the gun-control movement that it would have done had it ever become law, and in that sense a lot of good may come from what at the time seemed like a serious, embarrassing, and revealing setback.

Actually, though, it started not on April 17, 2013, but on December 14, 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. There had been many other mass shootings previously in America, including recently at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, but Newtown was different. It was a brutal attack on a school, where parents leave their children and expect them to be safe, and the fact that so many children were killed in cold blood was simply too shocking, too powerful, too overwhelming, to ignore. (And there was a cultural/racial element to it as well. This wasn't inner-city Detroit. This was a part of America with which more Americans, including the political and media elites who shape public opinion, could identify. It's easy, sadly so, for many to ignore the plight of a city like Detroit. But if it could happen in Newtown, it could happen anywhere.)

This is not to say that the country was suddenly ready for significant gun control. That will take time. No, if not that, it was at least ready for something meaningful to be done to curb gun violence, to put a stop if at all possible to a mostly unregulated gun market that has resulted in guns, including weapons of mass destruction for which there is no reasonable justification for private ownership, falling into the wrong hands way too many times.

President Obama himself took the lead. In an incredibly moving vigil in Newtown a few days after the shooting, he said:

We can't tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.

And this: 

Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, Dylan, Madeline, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, James, Grace, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica, Benjamin, Avielle, Allison, God has called them all home. 

For those of us who remain, let us find the strength to carry on and make our country worthy of their memory.

Yes, the country was finally ready, at least for expanded background checks, and perhaps for much more, and they overwhelmingly expressed that in poll after poll. 

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The song of the Furies

By Carl 

Witnesses to them that died,

The blood avengers at his side,

The Furies' troop forever stands.

Aeschylus was more right than he knew.

I'll leave it to Gabby Giffords to explain what this post is about:

SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

The former congresswoman is far more eloquent than I could be in reaction to the cowardly, blood-thirsty vote that took place in the Senate yesterday, as 45 traitors voted to block a yes or no vote on... and here Congresswoman Giffords and I differ in what she defines as "common-sense"... on a bill that amounted to the Democrats throwing up their hands and saying, "Fine! YOU write a gun control bill!"

President Obama was rightly angry at the 45 senators, saying, "unfortunately, this pattern of spreading untruths about this legislation served a purpose, because those lies upset an intense minority of gun owners, and that in turn intimidated a lot of senators."

There it is: he called them "cowards" to their faces.

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"A pretty shameful day for Washington": Republicans block highly popular gun control measure to expand background checks

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, it was a bad bill (Manchin-Toomey, a bipartisan "compromise" that only a few Republicans supported), but it was something (expanded background checks mixed with various gun-"rights" provisions approved by the gun lobby (not the NRA, though, which is opposed to any and all gun control), and I suppose it was better than nothing (or maybe not), but it failed yesterday because of the Republican filibuster and the ongoing Republican demand that anything Republicans don't like requires a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate (to hell with democracy):

It failed by a vote of 54 to 46, with five Democrats voting against it. Only four Republicans supported it.

Democratic Sens. Mark Pryor (Ark.), Max Baucus (Mont.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Mark Begich (Alaska) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) voted against it. Reid supported the measure but voted against it to preserve his ability to bring the measure up again.

GOP Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Susan Collins (Maine), Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Mark Kirk (Ill.) voted "yes."

Some are saying it's a major blow for President Obama, who of course, post-Sandy Hook, has made gun control a central policy commitment of his second term. I'm not so sure. Expanded background checks have overwhelming public support (even most Republicans support them), even if the country remains divided on more comprehensive reform.

Even this limited measure only failed because the extremist, NRA-indebted Republican Party used the filibuster and benefitted from the disproportionate representation of small, rural states in the Senate to block it. And, really, that's the story here -- so much so that the president can continue to take his case directly to the people while further isolating the Republican Party way out on the far right.

Obama called yesterday "a pretty shameful day for Washington," and that, too, is part of the story. The president's approval ratings aren't great, but they're way higher than Congress's, and he can now make the case that a Congress no one likes won't even pass a hugely popular measure that is pretty much the least that ought to be done in the wake of the Newtown massacre (not to mention every other instance, day after day, of the appalling gun violence that plagues the country).

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Freedom is free. Fascism, however...

By Carl 

So it turns out that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has yet another black eye in his third term – Occupy Wall Street:

After eleven months of talking in the courts, New York City has agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street almost a quarter of a million dollars.

The lawsuit, filed on May 24, 2012, by lawyers representing OWS, claimed that 3,600 of 5,000 books in the free People's Library were destroyed during the violent raid and eviction of the protest camp in Zuccotti Park.

In addition to books, also destroyed were computers, live streaming equipment and bicycles which were owned and operated by an environmental nonprofit, Time's Up.

It's barely a victory... after all, people were harassed and arrested and injured for the crime of protesting and assembling peacefully, and $186,000 of that is eaten up by attorneys' fees... and yet, it's a start.

The greater victory is this: the city actually acknowledged responsibility for the actions of its police officers. This is diametrically opposed to the usual, "Who? Him? Don't know him. Rogue cop."

I can sympathize with the city, but to a limited extent. The administration of a city the size of New York demands some corner-cutting somewhere, and the fact that rights were trumped is indicative of that. Safety and health have importance, too, as well as the rights of other people.

With OWS, however, we see a situation where – some sanitation issues aside – peaceful protestors were using a public space, admittedly provided by a private corporation but in exchange for zoning variances, effectively making it a public space. It was this company that demanded OWS be removed, which started the whole mess back in 2011.

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Ted Cruz accuses Obama of trying to "take advantage" of Sandy Hook massacre

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Teabagger Ted Cruz, first-term Republican senator from Texas, has emerged as one of the most loathsomely extremist members of what is overwhelmingly a loathsomely extremist party. And like any "good" Republican extremist, he's taking it upon himself to block any and all gun control efforts, and of course to use any and every occasion to attack the president:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) responded to President Barack Obama's latest call for action on gun control Thursday, launching criticism at the White House and promising to do everything in his power to stop the administration's push for stricter legislation.

"It is saddening to see the president today, once again, try to take advantage of this tragic murder to promote an agenda that will do nothing to stop violent crime, but will undermine the constitutional rights of all law-abiding Americans," Cruz said in a statement. "I am committed to working with Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and Jim Inhofe -- and I hope many other colleagues -- to use any procedural means necessary to protect those fundamental rights."

Cruz also blamed the Obama administration for contributing to the gun violence it is now attempting to address.

Yes, you know, your "fundamental" right to own weapons of mass destruction that can do things like this, and to be able to acquire them without background checks, and to be able to do so within a gun-obsessed culture that glorifies gun violence, without effective law enforcement to go after criminals (Cruz blames the Obama administration, but it is Republicans, backed by the NRA, who have stripped the ATF of what it needs to do its job to enforce gun laws).

And of course it isn't just Newtown. It's Aurora, it's Oak Creek, and it's Tucson. It's Columbine. It's the mass murders that become media sensations and historical events, even if nothing is ever done about them, and it's the murders that don't because there are just so many of them, day after day after day. And it's so much else, including all the gun violence since Newtown.

Ted Cruz is a despicable right-wing ideologue with an agenda of extremism. But on this as on so many other issues he's solidly in the mainstream of the Republican Party, and he and his wretched party will continue to do all they can, no doubt successfully given the dysfunctionalism of American government, to block even the most mild (and even the most popular) gun control initiatives.

Assault weapons

By Mustang Bobby

In case you missed it, Wednesday was an emotional day at the Senate hearing on assault weapons. Via TPM:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sparred with Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn over prosecuting people who fail firearms background checks, a common line of attack from the gun rights side of things. The back-and-forth grew heated, requiring Feinstein to gavel in asking for order.

But it was from the gun control side where the strongest emotions came. Among the Democratic witnesses was Neil Heslin, a father of a boy killed in the Newtown shooting. He spoke about his recent testimony at a Connecticut hearing where gun rights advocates in the audience shouted out to him after he posed a question during his testimony, leading the chair to accuse them of heckling. Once again, Heslin asked why guns like the AR-15 that was used to kill his son should be in civilian hands.

"What purpose those serve in civilians' hands or on the street?" he asked.

Chances that the assault weapons ban will actually pass the Senate are slim, and when you get the to the House, virtually nil. The NRA have bought and paid for enough members of Congress to ensure that nothing will get through without their blessing. And they'll have no problem attacking Mr. Heslin or any other victim of gun violence as an enemy of freedom, America, and Smith & Wesson's bottom line.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Annals of gun nutsery

By Mustang Bobby

According to Rep. James Lankford, (R-OK), guns don't kill people. Welfare moms who medicate their kids with free drugs kill people:

CONSTITUENT: My question is regarding the guns and is Washington at all aware of the psychotropic drugs that these children are taking? I guarantee it 100 percent that's our big problem. [...]

LANKFORD: I agree with that. I think there's a bunch of issues that, quite frankly, most liberals are afraid to talk about. [...] Where are we on all those psychiatric drugs? We've overmedicated kids. Quite frankly some of the overmedication of kids are because welfare moms want to get additional benefits and if they can put them on SSI through maintenance drugs, they can also put them on Social Security disability and get a separate check. That is wrong on every single level. Not only is it fraudulent to the government, but it also tells a kid with great potential, "don't try because you're disabled."

This genius is the fifth-ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives. And they let him out without supervision. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't bring up the welfare Cadillac and the young bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. Why let perfectly good racially-tinged stereotypes go to waste?

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Defending the indefensible, the NRA blows its load

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The NRA's chief gun fetishist and bullshitter, Wayne LaPierre, was on Meet the Press yesterday and -- surprise, surprise -- objected to any and all gun control efforts. (Watch below.)

He also defended the NRA's "universally panned call for armed guards to be stationed at every school in the country." Because, you know, there's no problem that more guns can't solve.

For once, it does seem that the NRA and gun nuts generally are facing a fight they simply cannot win, a tide of public opinion that will ultimately prevail.

Oh, maybe they'll win in the short term because there are more than enough Republicans in Congress to block meaningful legislation, but it's just so obvious now that they're defending the indefensible and that their extremist absolutism is essentially murderous.

Maybe, sadly, it took the killing of 20 young children in Connecticut to wake everyone up, but maybe that's the silver lining of that horrific tragedy.

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America is a crazy place

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Question for you:

A guy goes into an elementary school and kills 26 people, including 20 children, with an assault weapon, yet another (if numerically and dramatically worse than usual) violent crime committed with firearms, there's national shock and outrage and along with the grief and mourning there's talk of what's wrong and how to prevent such a horrific thing from happening again, specifically talk of sensible gun control laws including a ban on such assault weapons, and how do people respond?

Why, by loading up on assault weapons, of course. This is America, for fuck's sake.

Even if its just a small minority of Americans who are responding in this way, it's certainly a large enough number to warrant concern, to put it mildly.

Personally, I favor broad gun control, but even if it's just assault weapons we're talking about, weapons of mass destruction as we saw in Connecticut, there's simply no reason for them to be in anyone's private possession, as their sole purpose is to kill large numbers of people rapidly.

And if you do own one, or want to own one, there are only two possible reasons why, other than wanting to kill large numbers of people rapidly: (anti-government) paranoia or fetishism (or both).

And in either case, you're fucking crazy.

NRA's absurd scapegoating of violent movies, video games doesn't hold up to scrutiny

By Marc McDonald 

For five days after the horrific bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the National Rifle Association went eerily silent. They slithered under a rock and nobody heard a peep from them until Friday. The cowards even temporarily took down their Facebook page. 

Finally, the NRA's head ghoul Wayne LaPierre spoke up. And in his idiotic, error-filled statement, LaPierre fell back on the one of the gun lobby's oldest scapegoating tactics. He blamed Hollywood for its violent movies, as well as video game makers. He called them "a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people." 

Like all the NRA's claims, though, this one doesn't hold up to scrutiny. 

As film director Oliver Stone noted, Hollywood movies are viewed all over the world. And violent video games are played worldwide. 

If one takes a look at Japan's culture and society, one begins to realize how idiotic LaPierre's argument is.

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Thanks, NRA cowards, for the Connecticut bloodbath

By Marc McDonald

Thanks, NRA, for fighting any meaningful regulations that could help keep guns out of the hands of the violent and mentally ill. Thanks to you, guns can be bought in America as easily as a loaf of bread.

We also appreciate your work on ferociously opposing the Brady Act (which Ronald Reagan, by the way, supported). Rest assured, though, despite your crazy, paranoid fantasies, NO meaningful action will be taken on guns in the aftermath of this latest horrible bloodbath.

Thanks to you, dozens, if not hundreds of more children will be brutally slaughtered in the decades to come.

The NRA truly is a cowardly organization. For example, they cowered under a rock and waited nearly five days to offer any kind of response to the Connecticut bloodbath. How chickenshit is that? If they had the courage of their convictions, they would have spoken up sooner.

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How the truth could destroy the NRA

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

Michael Moore (@MMFlint) tweeted at 9:15 PM on Fri, Dec 21, 2012: 

If the public could see what a .223 bullet from a Bushmaster does to a 6 yr old face or body, the gun debate would b over & the NRA finished 

It's a horrible thing to think about, but he may well be right. These are horrific weapons of mass destruction, and they must be treated as such under the law.

Even the NRA, after all, is no match for the brutal truth of gun violence.

In the wake of Sandy Hook, it's time we took hold off this issue once and for all and forced the gun nuts to defend the truly indefensible.

No, this is the stupidest thing you’ll read

By Mustang Bobby 

(Ed. note: For more on this stupidity, see Dave Weigel, who did the research Allen didn't do and notes that there were in fact men at the school, not that it would have mattered. -- MJWS) 

Earlier this week I shared the wit and wisdom of Megan McArdle, who said the solution to school shootings was teaching the kids to gang-tackle the attacker, thus making it easier for the coroner to find the bodies. I called it "probably the stupidest thing you'll read today."

My apologies to Ms. McArdle. Or at least I should tell her to get out of the way; she's been overtaken by Charlotte Allen at National Review, who says that the reason all those kids died was that there weren't enough men and well-built 12-year-old boys at Sandy Hook Elementary:

In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the "reading specialist" — were female. There didn't even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza's knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school's public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

Seriously, where does she get this shit?


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Newt Gingrich is still an idiot

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Does this make my dick look bigger?

There's really nothing Newt isn't willing to blame on his usual target of all that is wrong with America: secularism. And he was at it again in trying to explain the Sandy Hook massacre:

When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum. And that something, you know, I don't know that going from communion to playing war games in which you practice killing people is necessarily an improvement.

Right, because it wasn't the easily-accessible assault weapons or the mental illness, and as we all know there's never any violence like this when public life is all about God, Christianity being such a peaceful religion that never resorts to bloodshed.

For more, check out my post from November of last year, "Newt Gingrich, hypocrite extraordinaire, blames secularism for 'all the problems we have.'" 

Fucking, fucking idiot.

Getting it

By Mustang Bobby

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has decided to veto a bill that would have allowed concealed weapons in such places as schools, day care centers, sports arenas, bars, places of worship, hospitals, dorms, and casinos. The bill had been passed by the legislature the night before the massacre in Connecticut.

That might have had something to do with his decision to back away from the bill.

So might this:

The approval rating of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) is in the gutter, according to a poll released Tuesday, the strongest evidence yet of the political perils associated with the right-to-work legislation he signed into law last week.

According to the latest automated survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, only 38 percent of Michigan voters approve of the job Snyder is doing, compared with 56 percent who disapprove. In PPP's previous survey of Michigan in November, Snyder's approval rating was 10 points above water: 47 percent of voters approved of his performance as governor, while 37 percent disapproved.

The right-to-work bill, signed by Snyder amid mass protests, appears to have changed the political climate in the Great Lake State. Fifty-one percent of Michigan voters oppose the bill, which made Michigan the country's 24th right-to-work state, while 41 percent support the legislation. Moreover, Snyder trails every Democrat in hypothetical matchups of the 2014 gubernatorial election.

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, nothing focuses the mind like impending political oblivion. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Maybe now

By Capt. Fogg

Maybe now's the time. The NRA has taken a serious body blow and in general, the American public is losing faith in the extremists of the GOP and its ability to solve our problems. A CNN poll shows that a majority, albeit a small one, thinks the GOP is too extreme and I don't think we need a poll to show that the National Rifle Association, its frequent unindicted conspirator, is aware that it has blood on its hands. The nation's largest and loudest gun lobby all but turned out the lights and pulled down the shades for 4 days after the Newtown incident and had nothing to say as 300 protesters arrived at their headquarters on Monday.

They have scheduled a news conference for tomorrow and have announced that:

The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.

Wouldn't that be nice, but while that remains to be seen, I'm given to wonder if the changes they propose and proposed by others will be meaningful as well, or as is often the case, haphazard, oblivious to facts and doomed to be ineffective at best.

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A place to start

By Mustang Bobby 

Charlie Pierce has a suggestion on how to institute gun control: go after the companies that make and sell them.

This could be the start of something real — a disinvestment campaign, modeled on the one aimed at companies doing business in South Africa and, later, at the tobacco industry, on the part of police, and fire, and school teachers' unions to remove their money from the marketing end of mass killing. A campaign that would redefine gun violence as a public-health crisis, as David Satcher tried to do years ago, and to redefine it on the balance sheet, where that would really count. This could be the start of holding the people who really make the money accountable for how they make it. You could close the NRA tomorrow, and there'd be another lobbying arm started up by armaments money within the hour. You could shoot Wayne LaPierre to the moon, and there'd be 100 other lobbyists lining up to take his place. Both LaPierre and the NRA serve not their members, but weapons manufacturers. (That's why all those polls about "rank and file" NRA members who support, say, background checks, are worthless. At its top, the organization no more answers to them than it does to the Brady Campaign.) The paranoia stoked by NRA fundraising — which, alas, seems to have worked its dark magic on Adam Lanza's mother — is not directed merely against sensible gun legislation. It's to sell more guns to the people who marinate themselves in that paranoia, so the people who make the guns can make even more money. That's the place you want to paint the bullseye.

This is America, after all: the place where everyone wants to make a buck... and then go out and shoot one.

Guns: providing freedom and taking it away since 1791

By tmcbpatriot 

Friday's atrocity is starting to sink in with each new day, and it just gets worse and worse. I have not been reading a thing about the killer or the children or that crazed woman who birthed this maniac. I can't. I think I hit my limit with this one. I honestly have to look away. Even reading the news is hard because every story is interspersed with a photo of a dead child who was my son's age. I stare at him while he is eating dinner and try not to imagine, but it just creeps in there and I have to push it away. 

Now, I expected the nuts to come out swinging after this insanity and say their usual line about how it's not guns that kill people, it's people. Guns, they say, have nothing to do with it. It is an incredible feat of the brain to come up with such a theory. To say it without even the slightest sense of awareness or irony is simply chilling and maddening to say the least. These people go on to make comparisons saying things like pencils don't make typos, writers do, or cars don't crash into trees, drivers do. One nut on my blog said this in the comments of my previous post:

Those guns killed no one, the mental missfit tool holding them did, the black trench coat, black brief case carrying tard killed those people and your liberal stench enables whackos like this to roam freely all amongst the general population. You dont like guns, MOVE.

I dare not ask this insane person what happens to me if I don't move. My guess is that he would shoot me.

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Connecticut school massacre: More blood on the NRA's hands

By Marc McDonald

In the aftermath of the deadly shooting that killed 27, including 20 children, at a Connecticut elementary school, there's one theme the mainstream media have been repeating over and over again. 

That is: How could this tragedy possibly happen? 

Actually, there's no mystery at all. 

The problem is that America has practically zero meaningful regulations on guns, thanks to the assholes at the National Rifle Association, an organization that has had great success in pushing its extremist agenda on America over the past 30 years. 

The NRA's vast power is the main reason that America today has far weaker gun restrictions than it did a century ago. For example, in my state of Texas, in the 1890s, it was illegal to carry a concealed gun, unlike today. Which raises a question: how, exactly, did Texans manage to get by back in the 1890s with gun laws that were more restrictive than what we have now? 

One issue that I never hear discussed when there is a tragedy like this is (ironically enough) the Second Amendment's actual text. Oh, sure, the gun nuts regularly talk about the Second Amendment in a general sense. But nobody ever actually cites the actual wording of the amendment. 

There's a good reason for this. Despite what the gun nuts would have us believe, the wording of the Second Amendment is very convoluted and vague.

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