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.)

A perfect place for bloodythirsty NRA members to move

By Carl 

South Africa:

To understand South Africa's gun culture, it's crucial to go back nearly two decades. In 1994, apartheid ended. The official system of racial segregation, in place since 1948, took rights away from black Africans and gave virtually all power in every aspect of life to whites.

For generations, violence born out of apartheid spawned a kind of arms race; blacks and whites fought against each other, and everyone else armed themselves, afraid to be caught in the cross fire.

Gun violence was at a record high as the country made its first effort to become what archbishop and peace crusader Desmond Tutu envisioned -- a rainbow nation.

Sort of sounds familiar, doesn't it? A waning white majority panicked over the rise of people of darker complexion purchases crates of guns to protect itself in an overheated paranoid delusion.

Not surprisingly, that forced South Africa to toughen its gun possession laws. Less surprisingly, the anti-apartheid and liberation movements also stockpiled weaponry in response to the perceived threat that white people would start shooting black people on sight.


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Justified

By Capt. Fogg

It isn't common for the U.S. media to make an issue of the level of violence in South Africa, but Oscar Pistorius is a celebrity and the woman he's accused of murdering was a celebrity. The lives of our secular pantheon are important to the public and particularly if the celebrity has to do with sports. Are the successful athletes we love to appoint as role models, whom we love to pretend to emulate, really paragons of virtue and discipline or does their drive, their ego, their motivation spill over into something sometimes less than wholesome? I'm not going to generalize about the famous, but like the U.S., South Africa is a violent nation and one with a long history of violent racism and violent crime, and a population with a large difference between haves and have-nots. The murder rate is high, about 50 per day, and while I read that only about 12% of South Africans own guns, the probability is that many more are not reported and are illegally owned.

White middle- and upper-class South Africans live in fear, and those who can afford to live in gated enclaves behind iron barred doors and windows, behind electrified fences with sophisticated alarm systems and armed security guards -- and they own guns. The standard of living is lower for non-whites, but the level of fear is high for all, and one can argue that it's justified. Guns are used in 77 per cent of house robberies and 87 per cent of business robberies, and they are the cause of death in more than half of all murders. Many burglars are seeking guns over other items.

South Africa is often described as a "gun-loving" country. Yes, of course, if one lives on a remote farm in the bush, there are leopards and lions and hippos and elephants that argue for heavy arms, but I think that for the most part owning a gun is all about crime and a sense of security in a violent nation.

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The government rescues boy from gun-loving anti-government nut in Alabama, ending hostage standoff

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Great news from Alabama:

A 5-year-old child abducted from a school bus six days ago is safe, and his kidnapper is dead, ending a nearly weeklong ordeal for the little boy, his family and a small Alabama town.

The child appeared to be OK when he was freed, law enforcement officials said.

It's not clear what happened, nor how exactly officials were able to figure out what was going on, but it appears that something serious prompted the rescue attempt:

FBI Special Agent in Charge Steve Richardson at the scene said negotiations had broken down with 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes, the child's abductor, and Dykes was "observed holding a gun."

Believing the child to be in imminent danger, an FBI team entered the bunker at 3:12 p.m. CT (4:12 p.m. ET) and rescued the boy, Richardson said, adding that the hostage-taker is dead.

Let me make a few points:

First, what a relief. I really don't like to see killing of any kind, and I wish this had ended peacefully, but the key is that the boy is safe after a long and horrible ordeal for him and his family.

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When guns are around, people get shot

By Michael J.W. Stickings

And people get killed, including famous ex-military people:

A former Navy SEAL known for claiming a record number of sniper killings in Iraq was one of two men shot dead at a Texas gun range, allegedly at the hands of a fellow military veteran, officials say. 

Chris Kyle, the author of the best-selling "American Sniper," and Chad Littlefield, also a veteran, were gunned down Saturday afternoon on the grounds of the expansive Rough Creek Lodge and Resort in Glen Rose, Texas, southwest of Fort Worth, law enforcement officials said. 

About four hours afterward, and 90 miles from where those two men's bodies were found by a hunting guide, authorities arrested suspect Eddie Ray Routh, 25, on a capital murder warrant.

Of course, there's a lot to this story that isn't yet known. But you know we'll continue to be told that guns aren't the problem (even if they make killing a whole lot easier/likely) and that America's troops (in uniform or vets) are the greatest people on the planet and deserving of our hero-worship (many of them are good, courageous people, but a lot of them aren't).

Because America has a crazy gun culture, because jingoism runs rampant while the empire collapses, and because people don't learn a fucking thing.

More gun violence takes the lives of two firefighters

By Michael J.W. Stickings

CNN:

A man convicted of killing his grandmother decades ago ambushed firefighters on Monday, fatally shooting two of them as they arrived to battle a blaze in upstate New York, police said.

Two other volunteer firefighters were wounded in the attack in the Rochester-area town of Webster. A police officer from the nearby town of Greece suffered minor shrapnel wounds when his vehicle was hit by gunfire.

Investigators believe the suspect, William Spengler, 62, set the original fire, then likely set himself up on a berm with a clear view of the scene and started shooting.

As Pam Spaulding writes in response: "When will we have the broader discussion about why so many Americans are so damned violent and have hair-trigger tempers lit over irrelevant bullsh*t. The fact that lethal weapons are the first resort in minor disputes or even just uncertain situations (like this one — in what context should you shoot at a firefighter?!) is extremely troubling.

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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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Do the math

By Mustang Bobby 

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said on Friday that there should be an armed police officer at every school in the country. Aside from the fact that there have been incidents where there were already people with guns protecting a facility and still a shooter got in and did his carnage — Fort Hood, for example — let's indulge Mr. LaPierre in his masturbatory Rambo fantasy and put one well-trained armed guard at every school in the country. How will he pay for it? The cost would be out of the reach of most school districts, and even if Congress decided to pay for every one of them via a federal grant, it would be a budget buster.

Let's just take a look at one school district. How about one I know pretty well, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools? It is the fourth-largest district in the country, with over 347,000 students. It has 354 schools or facilities with students, so we'll need one guard per school. Let's say that the base average salary of a guard is $75,000. I know that seems a little high for a cop, but we're talking average salary, not starting.

But you just don't pay for the base salary and you're done. There are other costs, such as paying into their retirement account, Social Security and Medicare contributions which the district has to pick up a portion of, contribution to health insurance, and the required payment of workers compensation, liability, and unemployment insurance, all required under contract or state or federal law.


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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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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.

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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America's gun lunacy

By Frank Moraes

There is something very much wrong with us. You've probably seen the graph above. The green line at the top is the murder rate in the United States over the last 50 years. The red lines at the bottom are the murder rates in the other OECD countries. It really makes you wonder. I don't have any answers except that there is something fundamentally wrong with us -- and we have a lot of guns.

Dylan Matthews, who normally writes about economics issues (we are all of us a little distracted), wrote an article at Wonk Blog today that is half comedy and half tragedy, "The 6 Craziest State Gun Laws." There are a few surprises in it.

One thing that surprised me is that four states allow concealed carry without any licensing at all. One of the states, Vermont, allows people as young as 16 to do so without their parents' permission. But before you start dumping on Vermont, it would appear that they just have a strong libertarian streak in them. They also allow young women to get abortions without parental consent. (And yes, I do think that they're not at all the same, but I was expecting some major hypocrisy.)

There is one bit of gun-rights wackiness that I'd heard about before: employees bringing guns to work. The workplace is the employer's property. In most cases, that settles the issue. But not when it comes to guns. Let's suppose that you park on your boss' property and you want to keep a gun in the car. You know, you might need it. Some one may dis you one time too many! Anyway, thankfully in 17 liberty loving states, you can just go to your car, get your gun, and put an end to that.

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President Obama at Newtown vigil: "We can't tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This was exactly what was needed, a great leader providing comfort and projecting determination at a time of crisis:


You can read the transcript here. Here are the parts that I found most moving, and that, reading them again now, bring me again to tears:

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Conservative answers for shootings

By Frank Moraes 

On Friday, I reported on the obsession of Wall Street Journal reporters Tamer El-Ghobashy and Devlin Barrett regarding how the shooter got through the security system at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It was otherwise a good and informative article, but really: how did he get in? As I wrote, "This is a typically American approach to a problem: look everywhere but not at what is right in front of you."

Now we have the answer: he forced his way into the school. Before I heard that, I was pretty sure that was going to be the answer and I thought that would settle the issue. What an idiot I am! Of course it doesn't settle the issue. It puts the issue into sharp focus for conservatives: the answer is to put armed cops in every school. Check out the Fox News clip at the end of this segment on Up with Chris Hayes:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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What guns can do

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I really don't want to get into the horrific details of the Connecticut school shooting, just like I don't want to post gratuitous photos of the suffering, terrified children and weeping adults who ought to be allowed some privacy, but there's a point to this:

The gunman in the Connecticut shooting blasted his way into the elementary school and then sprayed the children with bullets, first from a distance and then at close range, hitting some of them as many as 11 times, as he fired a semiautomatic rifle loaded with ammunition designed for maximum damage, officials said Saturday. 

The state's chief medical examiner, H. Wayne Carver II, said all of the 20 children and 6 adults gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., had been struck more than once in the fusillade.

He said their wounds were "all over, all over."

This is what guns do. Or, put another way, it's what guns allow people to do. 

We have laws against weapons of mass destruction. Guns can cause mass destruction and incredible suffering.

Yes, guns require a person to pull the trigger, but guns allow a person who wants to commit an act of violence to do so with the sort of lethal force that brutally took down 26 people, including 20 children, in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday.

That's the fucking point.

There will still be days like yesterday

By Mustang Bobby 

We're all familiar with the tiny little fundamentalist Christian group known as Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. They consist mainly of the Phelps family, led by their patriarch, Fred Phelps, and they are most famous for demonstrating at the funerals of dead soldiers killed in the war as well as prominent people, including victims of terrorism, and carrying signs that proclaim GOD HATES FAGS and such gentle comfort. Their belief is that God so hates gays that he is inflicting his wrath on this nation for tolerating their existence that he does such things as kills soldiers for defending America. I don't know if they plan to show up at the funerals for the victims of the shooting in Connecticut, but I wouldn't put it past them.

Several states have written laws to prevent this pathetic little band of misfits from picketing at funerals, and they have also been sued for causing emotional distress. However, the courts have been circumspect about infringing on their right to express their opinions, and they were successful in defending themselves against the lawsuit. The rights of the people to express themselves, no matter how execrable their opinions are, cannot lightly be infringed.

Many if not all other Christian denominations have been swift to condemn the Westboro Baptist interpretation of the Bible, and they are equally horrified to see the name of their God libeled in such a way. Of course, not all Christians believe what they do and it would be unfair to tar them with the broad brush of bigotry and homophobia. And even as there are milder versions of the Phelps theology out there edging into the mainstream, they are still not representative of the vast number of Christians who are loving, kind, gay-friendly, or LGBT themselves.

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Crazy everywhere, well-armed here

By Frank Moraes

Everyone wants to know why it is we have so many mass shootings -- one every five days on average. Most of all, I want to know. Brad Plumer wrote what turned out to be a disappointing story over at Wonkblog, "Why Are Mass Shootings Becoming More Common?" It was disappointing because it turns out that we don't know. 

One of the more compelling theories is that mass shootings are contagious. I'm serious. Plumer doesn't say, but I think I know how it works. A mentally unstable person sees the news coverage of a mass shooting. He thinks, "Maybe that's what I need! Maybe that will fix me!" I know that line may sound cavalier, but I don't mean it that way at all. I know what it's like to feel that you have no control on your emotions, and the desperation that goes along with it. Luckily, my mental dysfunctions do not go along with a confused sense of reality. But I can see how these people would follow others who have gone before. 

It is much too convenient to hang all of this carnage on the media, however. For one thing, according to Richard Florida's work, there really is no correlation (within the United States) between gun deaths and mental illness. But he did find a correlation between gun deaths and loose gun regulation. To be clear: the more restrictive the gun laws, the lower the rate of gun deaths. So gun availability -- and this surprises no one, right? -- is a critical issue. 

Brad Plumer provided an amazing comparison. Yesterday, another mentally ill man attacked a group of children. Twenty-two of them were injured -- some of them badly. But none were killed. This is because it happened in China and the man only had a knife. 

People are crazy all over the world. We need to do something about that: for them as well as us. But the biggest social problem with the mentally ill here in America is that they are too well armed. 

(photo: "History of gun violence in America grows" at NBC News)

 (Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Guns are part of the problem

By Frank Moraes

Here is a map from The Rachel Maddow Show based upon data put together by Ezra Klein. There is no doubt that this has something to do with gun availability:

Horror in Connecticut; a violent, gun-obsessed America gone mad

By Michael J.W. Stickings

After what happened in Connecticut on Friday, I have little desire to write. About anything. It's not because I don't have anything to say, it's because I'm so saddened and so sickened that part of me doesn't want to care anymore about the United States. And I wonder why the hell I bother.

There isn't much I can say about the horrific mass shooting that left so many people, including so many children, dead. No words seems adequate to capture it. It's not that horrific things don't happen all the time, it's that a horrific thing like this touches us deeply because it was so close to us, to all of us with children, to all of us who know people who have children, to all of us who are capable of human feeling.

But I will say this...

This was not an isolated incident. This was not some one-off committed by a lone psychopath with no connection to anything else going on in society. No, this was yet another horrifically violent act, mass murder committed with guns, in a violent and gun-obsessed culture that refuses that deal with its own violent obsessions and tendencies.

This was worse than anything I can remember, including Columbine, yet it was also more of the same.

You won't hear this from conservatives, of course. Theocratic assholes like Mike Huckabee say that this happened because God was removed from schools. Others will say -- and you'll hear this all over Fox News especially, if you haven't already -- that now is not the time to talk politics, and so let's not talk about guns and gun control, shame on you liberals for politicizing a tragedy. Still others will say it wasn't the guns it was the madman with the guns. And, yes, there have already been calls for guns in schools, as if having more guns in society will somehow make society safer.

These people can all go fuck themselves.

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