The only way they are going to resolve this ongoing tragedy is real and effective gun control, not more window dressing. That means restricting or even banning certain classes of weapons and effective programs to get millions of guns out of the hands of civilians. There is simply no reason for there to be almost 1 gun for every American except the batshit crazy ideology of the lunatics who took over the NRA and the republican party decades ago.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s the NRA supported and help right gun control law to address the crisis posed by organized crime outgunning the police.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the NRA’s leaders helped write and lobby for the first federal gun control laws—the very kinds of laws that the modern NRA labels as the height of tryanny. The 17th Amendment outlawing alchohol became law in 1920 and was soon followed by the emergence of big city gangsters who outgunned the police by killing rivals with sawed-off shotguns and machine guns—today called automatic weapons.
In the early 1920s, the National Revolver Association—the NRA’s handgun training counterpart—proposed model legislation for states that included requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon, adding five years to a prison sentence if a gun was used in a crime, and banning non-citizens from buying a handgun. They also proposed that gun dealers turn over sales records to police and created a one-day waiting period between buying a gun and getting it—two provisions that the NRA opposes today.
Now their "solution" is to put even more guns in the hands of civilians like teachers totally compromising their main task which it to teach students not engage in urban warfare.
Following what the NRA used to stand for before lunatics hijacked it, there should be a ban on assault rifles, there should be restrictions on handguns and there needs to be a national database and background check system THE ACTUALLY WORKS.
Same for high capacity magazines, the products the gun makers keep making sure that some Americans have an almost unlimited access to are basically designed for urban warfare to do the maximum amount of damage in the shortest time possible.
One more time for the terminally stupid.... the Las Vegas shooter used legally obtained weapons to kill 59 and wound 850 PEOPLE in less than 10 minutes.
Anyone who claims there is any gun control in America or that selling even more guns is either nuts or paid to say that.
Or possibly both like Wayne Lapierre...
The second amendment purists are so damn insane. A right to bear arms should be reasonable and moderated, not the damn wild west. They treat the second amendment like holy scripture it’s bizarre. More guns will not stop gun violence. It will only cause a larger body count not only though shootings but just accidents, unintentional shootings are surprisingly common. As I said this is a social issue as much as a legal issue. Currently its almost impossible to stop the “lone wolf” mass shooter, a person that may or may not have a criminal record he might as well be a ghost, background check comes out clean, just another gun enthusiast adding to the collection. Until he takes his shiny new rifle and commits mass murder.
However this Florida shooting should never have happened. Firearms should not be so easy for minors to obtain. But many people in the States value gun rights more then things like affordable healthcare… I think there is something fundamentally deranged about that. But what do I know? I’m just a dumb urban liberal.
........................
The US Constitution is not written in stone, right now the republican party is in near total denial of the provisions contained in the US Constitution to guarantee voters rights for millions of Americans creating requirements that will in fact disenfranchise many based on bogus claims of voter "fraud".
But they will not budge on an Amendment that is all but useless and is deadly to tens of thousands of Americans every year.
There is nothing patriotic in adamantly supporting the 2nd. Amendment no matter how much death it is causing the way it is now being applied, just as there is no patriotism in denying more and more Americans the right to vote.
I hope these young people get their act together, help vote out the totally corrupt politicians who take money from groups like the gun lobby then refuse to make changes to law that will actually protect Americans even if does hurt their donor masters.
The 2nd. Amendment needs to be amended or it will keep enabling the murder for money of thousands of Americans a year.
Indeed, the US Constitution is not perfect, nor were the founding fathers. In fact, the Constitution has been amended quite a few times since its first writing and initial amendments. The most notable of the changes is the 13th amendment, abolishing slavery. The talks of what the founding fathers intended and of not going against the intents of the founding fathers are lame excuses for not doing what would be right, for not making the needed progress.
Indeed, the US Constitution is not perfect, nor were the founding fathers. In fact, the Constitution has been amended quite a few times since its first writing and initial amendments. The most notable of the changes is the 13th amendment, abolishing slavery. The talks of what the founding fathers intended and of not going against the intents of the founding fathers are lame excuses for not doing what would be right, for not making the needed progress.
One of the most important things that the framers of the US Constitution understood is that society and technology change. They understood that the US Constitution is a living document that is designed in such a way as to allow for changes in society and technology.
In terms of the 2nd Amendment, the US stopped needing "well regulated militias" a long time ago. Also the firearms that the 2nd. Amendment was created to guarantee these citizens militias access to for the security of the state were very primitive compared to what is available now. How many people would the Las Vegas shooter have been able to hit let alone kill if he'd had a muzzle loading rifle for instance. It took soldiers of those days at least ten seconds to load a weapon, a more practical time would be about 20 seconds. So maybe the Las Vegas shooter it he'd had a rifle from the time the 2nd. Amendment was created could have got off 3 shots a minute times 10 minutes. So at most he could have got off 30 shots and if you've ever shot black powder you know how fast the barrel becomes fouled making loading each succeeding shot harder. And they are barely accurate at 100 yards, so let's be generous and say 3 shots in ten hit someone. That's 6 people wounded, and let's also be generous with the lethality and say half die.
That would be 3 wounded and 3 dead for ten minutes of a shot every 20 seconds or so.
As compared to 59 dead and 850 wounded.
It's crqazy how the NRA gun nuts want the 2nd. Amendment applied. They say it guarantees them access to virtually any weapon they want because the "founders" wanted it that way.
First off as you point out the founders were not creating a locked in stone religious document of how Americans must live, they were creating a flexible constitution under which Americans would have as much of liberty protected while allowing for basic security of the state.
But the NRA treats the 2nd. Amendment on the same level many would the Bible and make it such an emotional issue that it has been impossible to get past this deadly roadblock they have created.
And American society has changed dramatically since the days of the framing of the US Constitution, most people then lived in rural areas and needed to depend on their own resources for immediate survival. Most Americans now live packed into crowded cities where any vigilante gun "justice" is deadly.
And in the end that is what I think the NRA is fighting to preserve, their right to engage in vigilante killing like one of their most influential modern leaders did when he was young.
https://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/the_nra_once_supported_gun_control/
After Carter was re-elected to lead the NRA in 1981, The New York Times reported on Carter’s teenage vigilante killing—and how he changed his first name’s spelling to hide it. At first, he claimed the shooting was by someone else—and then recanted but refused to discuss it. Winkler writes, “the hard-liners in the NRA loved it. Who better to lead them than a man who really understood the value of a gun for self-protection?"
Which is complete nonsense, the framers of the US Constitution were not creating the means for people to engage in extra-judicial killing which is what the NRA is in de facto support of by making sure that so many weapons are constantly available to as many Americans as possible.
The 2nd. Amendment needs to be amended because it no longer reflects the rights of Americans and plays no role in the security of the state.
The way the NRA and other heavily armed far right wing groups treat the government is in fact a threat to the security of the US as are the huge number of people killed and wounded by firearms every year.
Until there is real gun control in the US I don't think it can be considered a modern civilized nation, anarchy breaks out far too often as heavily armed civilians act out in highly sociopathic ways that have nothing to do at all with what the original framers of the Constitution had in mind.
The Constitution is not a Bible and the NRA doesn't even represent the spirit of the Amendment anyway. If they want their right to firearms respected under the spirit of the 2nd.Amendment then they need to join a formal militia under government control and be equipped with muzzle loading black powder firearms.
The Washington Post did a comparison of the reactions of Barack Obama and trump to tragic mass shootings of children at school, the differences are stark.
I know that Obama wasn’t perfect, no one claimed he was… but trump isn’t even human. While in the very same situation Barack Obama spent hours with survivors and those who lost loved ones.
trumps at home and tweeting his usual idiocy. When he did show up it was for a brief photo op. Then went back to attacking everybody who doesn’t slavishly kiss his ass.
Obama tried to get real gun control bills through Congress that we all know will save lives. The republican controlled Congress killed them.
If you hate America and Americans just keep voting republican, they are well on the way to killing off the nation.
Why the hell do you think the Russians picked the party to place their traitor in the White House…
This is such an insane situation, it’s not even known how many assault rifles there are in the US now.
Lawmakers convene next week under pressure to consider limits on the purchase of assault rifles. But as congressional aides on both sides of the debate scramble to draw up background reports and statistics on the issue for their bosses, they’ll run into a basic informational roadblock: No one has any idea how many assault rifles are in circulation.
That’s intentional. By law, the government isn’t allowed to gather that metric and put it in a modern, searchable electronic database.
“Those numbers don’t exist because there’s no national registry," said Jan Kemp, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “Because by law, we are not allowed to have a national registry."
The gun industry’s argument against a registry that tracks the sale of guns goes like this, according to former ATF agent Mark Jones: If the government kept a database on firearms sold, it would have a de facto registry of gun owners, and if that existed, then the government would be just a step away from being able to confiscate people’s guns.
Because the gun industry wants to keep selling millions more of these weapons it has used its lobbyists to make sure there isn't even a way to know how many combat level weapons there are in civilian hands in the US and who has them. We don't have to wonder if these weapons are being used in acts of domestic terror, we see it over and over.
Of what use are these weapons but to kill large numbers of people as quickly as possible. Rifles should be limited to hunter models with at most a five round integral clip that can't be loaded quickly. Handguns should be limited to ten round clips at most and strictly limited in access. The NRA shouldn't be able to decide if cities want to control guns in their limits, even back in the 1800s town could empower the sheriff to take the guns of people visiting and there were no guns allowed in many cases.
It's a no brainer that no guns means no gun violence. And id the police aren't spending all their time on crisis management with the constant and high level of violence that can do much more baseline policing that prevents crime in the first place.
It's time to stop letting the gun industry decide what gun policy is going to be in the US.
I worry that gun violence will never stop. But to be honest people having guns does not really concern me too much. I'm more worried that the fabric of our society is breaking down and all manner of inequalities are becoming worse. The Christians blame a lack of christian values; as they do with everything else including their packages being late, but I think its a very complicated problem.
Mainstream liberals are missing the point. Its not because of firearms, its due to a breakdown in the stability of our society. More and more people are falling though the cracks and even if you decide to repeal the second amendment this situation will only get worse. Although less people would likely get shot up on a daily basis.
Guns are certainly not helping anything. Society breaks down when mass murder is frequent and unstoppable. Civilized countries don’t have the mass murders we have. Why is that? Do they have magic wands?
Lois
The second amendment purists are so damn insane. A right to bear arms should be reasonable and moderated, not the damn wild west. They treat the second amendment like holy scripture it's bizarre. More guns will not stop gun violence. It will only cause a larger body count not only though shootings but just accidents, unintentional shootings are surprisingly common. As I said this is a social issue as much as a legal issue. Currently its almost impossible to stop the "lone wolf" mass shooter, a person that may or may not have a criminal record he might as well be a ghost, background check comes out clean, just another gun enthusiast adding to the collection. Until he takes his shiny new rifle and commits mass murder.
However this Florida shooting should never have happened. Firearms should not be so easy for minors to obtain. But many people in the States value gun rights more then things like affordable healthcare... I think there is something fundamentally deranged about that. But what do I know? I'm just a dumb urban liberal.
The second amendment “purists" are not purists, they are frauds. The 2nd Amendment says the people’s rights to guns will not be infringed for one reason and one reason only, “a well-regulated Militia is necessary to the safety and security of the people." There have been no citizen militias called up—well-regulated or not—for at more than a hundred years. And I’m curious about that phrase “well-regulated". Was that supposed to mean anything like the regulation of guns and people with guns? Just wondering.
Imagine if in todays military (militia) each member could own, carry, stockpile and use his guns with no supervision, any time of the day or night, anywhere. That’s what we have with the deliberate misreading of the second amendment that is the law of the land now. Anarchy and mass murder.
L
If teachers are armed or ar just reputed to be armed, who is the first person a gunman is going to shoot in a school? A teacher is not hard to identify. So the guman picks off the person(s) he suspects may be armed, rhen shoots the kids, it would take only a split second to do the deed. I hope teachers resign en masse if they are odered to be armed or even reputed to be armed. Any teacher who would teach under those circumstances needs his or her head examined. Any teacher who agrees is as stupid as Trump and his sycophants who would suggest it. I’d like to see those right-wing gun nuts engage in a fire fight with each other. Now that would be a gun fight worth watching. Watch the cowards run like scared rabbits, with Trump at the head of the pack, bone spurs or not.
L
He Almost Shot Up a School. Here's What Stopped Him
An assault weapons ban and ... love
http://www.newser.com/story/255646/he-almost-shot-up-a-school-heres-what-stopped-him.html
By Arden Dier, Newser Staff
Posted Feb 21, 2018
(NEWSER) – After the Parkland school shooting, Colorado father of four Aaron Stark listened as his wife and daughter discussed the massacre of 17 people. "They could not understand what could make someone do this. Sadly, I can," Stark writes in a letter to KUSA. "I was almost a school shooter." It's a confession perhaps as hard to hear as it is for Stark to air publicly. But it's a conversation that must be had, Stark says. He tells KUSA a violent childhood and years of bullying led him to consider murder and suicide in 1996. "I was going to try to kill a lot of people and then kill myself," he says, per NBC News. It had nothing to do with "the media, or video games, or music." Rather, "I felt like I had nothing at all in life to look forward to and ... nothing to lose."
But though he tried to find a gun, he wasn't able to, in part because of an assault weapons ban in place from 1994 to 2004. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people. But people with guns kill lots of people," Stark writes. "Do we really need to have assault weapons?" he adds in an interview with MSNBC. But this issue is bigger than guns alone, says Stark, noting one kind act—a friend baking him a pie—kept him from committing suicide. Acknowledging "a severe lack of love" took a toll on his mental health, Stark now says "compassion is the only real way we can stop this." Something as simple as "a kind word, a hug, saying 'Hey how are you' … could literally save someone's life," Stark tells MSNBC. "When you're in the worst state and you think that no one cares, having someone actually care can make an entire world of difference."
Arming teachers is such a great idea from a “stable genius”.
A north Georgia high school teacher was arrested on Wednesday after he barricaded himself in a classroom and fired a shot from his handgun out of a window, police said.
No one was injured in the incident at Dalton High School, except for a female student who injured an ankle running through the school, police spokesman Bruce Frazier said.
The shooting about 85 miles north of Atlanta heightened the already tense debate around guns in schools in the wake of the deadly mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, two weeks ago.
The only thing that is going to reduce gun violence is the removal of guns from as many places in America as possible.
So, let the people of good sense try to fly Delta Airlines to defeat the gun fools!
Delta Airlines to lose Georgia state tax break for being on the side of gun control in the USA. Shame on the Georgia House of Representatives!
So, let the people of good sense try to fly Delta Airlines to defeat the gun fools!
Delta Airlines to lose Georgia state tax break for being on the side of gun control in the USA. Shame on the Georgia House of Representatives!
http://www.bbc.com/news/43250091
By first getting people to believe that the Clintons, California Democrats, Bernie Bros and others are capable of murder and are stealing our tax dollars, they are now able to do just about anything and continue to get elected. People believe that this is how the game is actually played, so seeing an actual quote or tweet doesn't really matter any more. We might see the actual receipts and get actual testimony that Jared threatened Qatar with war so he could get a loan, but people believe Hillary sold Uranium to the Russians and somehow profited despite all the documentation showing how that deal was made.
So, let the people of good sense try to fly Delta Airlines to defeat the gun fools!
Delta Airlines to lose Georgia state tax break for being on the side of gun control in the USA. Shame on the Georgia House of Representatives!
http://www.bbc.com/news/43250091
By first getting people to believe that the Clintons, California Democrats, Bernie Bros and others are capable of murder and are stealing our tax dollars, they are now able to do just about anything and continue to get elected. People believe that this is how the game is actually played, so seeing an actual quote or tweet doesn't really matter any more. We might see the actual receipts and get actual testimony that Jared threatened Qatar with war so he could get a loan, but people believe Hillary sold Uranium to the Russians and somehow profited despite all the documentation showing how that deal was made.
Sure some people do, but I seriously doubt it is the majority.
The attack from the right is two pronged, first convince its supporters that the left is evil which is where Fox "news", Limbaugh, Jones and a bunch of other quislings come in.
The second is fragment the center left so they don't support candidates who will threaten the far right agenda at all.
And it's pretty hard to deny that the far right has gone full fascist when you have someone like trump in office, I think this year is going to be a complete game changer. Either their will be a democratic rollback of all the power that has been stolen by the far right over the last 40 years... or there will be a complete fascist takeover of America at which point there will be no point to talk about it any longer.
It will actually be dangerous to do so.
So, let the people of good sense try to fly Delta Airlines to defeat the gun fools!
Delta Airlines to lose Georgia state tax break for being on the side of gun control in the USA. Shame on the Georgia House of Representatives!
http://www.bbc.com/news/43250091
By first getting people to believe that the Clintons, California Democrats, Bernie Bros and others are capable of murder and are stealing our tax dollars, they are now able to do just about anything and continue to get elected. People believe that this is how the game is actually played, so seeing an actual quote or tweet doesn't really matter any more. We might see the actual receipts and get actual testimony that Jared threatened Qatar with war so he could get a loan, but people believe Hillary sold Uranium to the Russians and somehow profited despite all the documentation showing how that deal was made.
Sure some people do, but I seriously doubt it is the majority.
The attack from the right is two pronged, first convince its supporters that the left is evil which is where Fox "news", Limbaugh, Jones and a bunch of other quislings come in.
The second is fragment the center left so they don't support candidates who will threaten the far right agenda at all.
And it's pretty hard to deny that the far right has gone full fascist when you have someone like trump in office, I think this year is going to be a complete game changer. Either their will be a democratic rollback of all the power that has been stolen by the far right over the last 40 years... or there will be a complete fascist takeover of America at which point there will be no point to talk about it any longer.
It will actually be dangerous to do so.
I think you pretty much got the picture for election 2018.
As for the majority not thinking that way, I think the current oligarchs figured out they don't need a majority. The majority really has no idea what's going on. They just keep voting the way they have been and don't know what it means when the Dow drops or when someone is indicted and certainly have no idea what it means that we have a person running HUD who knows nothing about the housing or urban development. You only need to change a few million votes, less if you do it surgically in pivotal states. You don't actually need to do anything on the issues you run on, like abortion or gay rights, just get people talking about those and then when you get in, get your tax breaks and destroy the industries you don't own, things most people don't understand or care about.
So, let the people of good sense try to fly Delta Airlines to defeat the gun fools!
Delta Airlines to lose Georgia state tax break for being on the side of gun control in the USA. Shame on the Georgia House of Representatives!
http://www.bbc.com/news/43250091
By first getting people to believe that the Clintons, California Democrats, Bernie Bros and others are capable of murder and are stealing our tax dollars, they are now able to do just about anything and continue to get elected. People believe that this is how the game is actually played, so seeing an actual quote or tweet doesn't really matter any more. We might see the actual receipts and get actual testimony that Jared threatened Qatar with war so he could get a loan, but people believe Hillary sold Uranium to the Russians and somehow profited despite all the documentation showing how that deal was made.
Sure some people do, but I seriously doubt it is the majority.
The attack from the right is two pronged, first convince its supporters that the left is evil which is where Fox "news", Limbaugh, Jones and a bunch of other quislings come in.
The second is fragment the center left so they don't support candidates who will threaten the far right agenda at all.
And it's pretty hard to deny that the far right has gone full fascist when you have someone like trump in office, I think this year is going to be a complete game changer. Either their will be a democratic rollback of all the power that has been stolen by the far right over the last 40 years... or there will be a complete fascist takeover of America at which point there will be no point to talk about it any longer.
It will actually be dangerous to do so.
I think you pretty much got the picture for election 2018.
As for the majority not thinking that way, I think the current oligarchs figured out they don't need a majority. The majority really has no idea what's going on. They just keep voting the way they have been and don't know what it means when the Dow drops or when someone is indicted and certainly have no idea what it means that we have a person running HUD who knows nothing about the housing or urban development. You only need to change a few million votes, less if you do it surgically in pivotal states. You don't actually need to do anything on the issues you run on, like abortion or gay rights, just get people talking about those and then when you get in, get your tax breaks and destroy the industries you don't own, things most people don't understand or care about.
The fact that Ivanka trump was involved in the North Korea vs. America potential disaster alone should scare the hell out of most US voters.
She went over to South Korea to watch a little Olympic figure skating and deal with that Kim Jong-un fellow.
This is someone who's not qualified to do anything responsible in government, she's the president's daughter, not some geopolitical savant. The same with her husband Kushner, the fact that the guy running the Executive Branch is placing people in positions of great power who don't have clue what they're doing is frightening. It's nepotism of the worst kind that the US was supposed to be created to prevent.
If enough Americans don't get the threat that the trump family and the republican party itself present to a majority of Americans, they you really have to ask if they even deserve to have their own country. And if they keep electing such utter frauds to office then the country is toast.
have continued to vilify the Parkland survivors who’ve spoken up after the mass-shooting at their school.
But the kids are fighting back, very effectively: . . .
NRA favorability plummets as millennials' interest in 2018 midterms soars.
By subir
2018/03/02
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/3/2/1746009/-NRA-favorability-plummets-as-millennials-interest-in-2018-midterms-soars
And it's pretty hard to deny that the far right has gone full fascist when you have someone like trump in office, I think this year is going to be a complete game changer. Either their will be a democratic rollback of all the power that has been stolen by the far right over the last 40 years... or there will be a complete fascist takeover of America at which point there will be no point to talk about it any longer.
It will actually be dangerous to do so.
So sad, so true.
But are lefties getting their act together???
Too many sounds of one hand clapping out there.
¶
And to think used to be we only had to worry about Melancholy Accidents - not kids with murder in their hearts and souls.
Here’s an interesting article on the history of Melancholy Accidents, that would be death by gun accidents.
We even know who the first victim was.
Melancholy Accidents
By Peter Manseau
As a window into human misfortune, #gunfail is hard to beat. The Twitter hashtag, used most persistently and effectively by the
Daily Kos’s David Waldman (@KagroX), provides a depressingly clear view of the many ways Americans find to
accidentally shoot themselves: cleaning guns, dropping guns, “overhandling" guns, allowing guns anywhere near children or dogs.
...
The first American gunfail on record seems to have occurred not long after Governor John Winthrop dreamed of establishing a
“city upon a hill" in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By the end of the colony’s first decade, with the population of Boston growing quickly,
it was a fairly common occurrence for a number of ships full of new settlers to arrive from England on any given day. ...
Gunpowder is an unpredictable substance, however. “The powder in the touchhole being wet," Winthrop noted in his journal,
“and the ship having fresh way with wind and tide, the shot took place in the shrouds and killed a passenger."
The gunner had fired through the rigging and hit one of the hopeful new colonists—“an honest man,"
Winthrop said, who had survived the ocean passage only to be shot dead upon arrival.
The next day, the governor and magistrates rowed out to view the body and determine how this tragedy had occurred.
“Hearing all the evidence," Winthrop wrote, they “found that he came to his death by the providence of God." ...
