Another Mass Shooting

[Stephen Maturin]

Thank goodness for our well-regulated militia.

[slimshady2357]

Boise mall shooting leaves 2 dead and 4 injured - live updates

For the peeps on this side of the world.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Some summary in thrad:

NEW: NPR has obtained hours of recordings of the NRA’s private meetings after the Columbine shooting in 1999. In addition to panicked discussions over how to deny culpability, NRA leaders are heard deriding their members as "hillbillies" and "fruitcakes.” https://t.co/6zWj8hoG3F

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) November 9, 2021

[Limoncello]

The kid's Father bought the 9mm Sig Sauer - at a Black Friday Sale.

4 Dead, 7 wounded - 15 year old gunman at High School

[viscousmemories]

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — An 18-year-old gunman opened fire Tuesday at a Texas elementary school, killing 14 children, one teacher and injuring others, Gov. Greg Abbott said, and the gunman was dead.

It was the deadliest shooting at a U.S. grade school since the shocking attack in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, almost a decade ago. source

I can't believe Texas doesn't issue weapons to grade schoolers. Obviously only good kids with guns can stop bad men with guns.

[Ari]

Abbott is supposed to speak at an NRA convention, in Texas, this Friday, so I expect it won’t be long before a shinny new 6-shooter is in the hands of every elementary school child by the friday after! At least some fast tracked ‘give every teacher a concealed carry weapon’ version of it.

I’ve really come to the conclusion that not only do they not care, but they actively enjoy and promote a world where they see traumatized children growing up into easy to con marks, and the boost to gun stocks this will bring as a win win, at the loss of only a handful of customers.

[viscousmemories]

The terror-filled psychological climate created by mass death only encourages the embrace of fundamentalist and cult ideologies that promise to bring order to chaos by providing an explanation for everything that happens. A healthy democracy requires a strong civic culture and a public sphere conducive to social trust and altruism. Instead, we have generations raised with fear, suspicion of others and uncertainty — states of being perfect for authoritarian politics, which play on conspiracy theories and seek to rob populations of optimism and hope.

From America’s gun culture is priming us for authoritarianism - The Washington Post

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Ari

I’ve really come to the conclusion that not only do they not care, but they actively enjoy and promote a world where they see traumatized children growing up into easy to con marks, and the boost to gun stocks this will bring as a win win, at the loss of only a handful of customers.

"Women and children first"

Death of women in back-alley abortions, death of children in classrooms, it's all death cult.

[JoeP]

[JoeP]

and ...

[Ari]

Indeed. In America men have the right to pay a corporation for the chance to hurt as many as possible while they emotionally self destruct. It’s in the constitution.

Which is one of the many many reasons nothing will happen again. We’re asking men who feel weak and out of control to give up their last grasp at the feeling, while others profit off them for it.

[Sock Puppet]

Now, now, don't exaggerate, Ari. In America white men have the right to pay a corporation for the chance to hurt as many as possible while they emotionally self destruct. I suppose men of Latin descent can do it on a conditional basis, provided they don't target white kids.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

The Onion today:

[mickthinks]

I've quoted Heather Cox Richardson before, and no doubt I'll do it again: Here she is mapping out how the NRA switched from supporting gun control measures to lobbying for white supremacy and maximum profits for the gun trade.

Originally blogged by Heather Cox Richardson
But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”


This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors. Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government.


In 1972, the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan—for the first time.
When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew.


In 1981 a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, then-representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it.


After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.
In 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.


Now a player in national politics, the NRA was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election. In that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

"The only cure for school shootings is simple: no more education." --Wayne LaPierre #NRA

— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) May 25, 2022

[Ari]

That ‘ghost guns’ are getting talked about by politicians tells me nothing will be done, because it is a scary sounding term for ‘a gun a corporation didn’t make money on’.

While we have a serious problem with toxic men having murder suicide tantrums, it’s really helped by all the damn guns, and that Heather Cox Richardson quote should include this graph.

Despite the fact many many old weapons remain perfectly usable, they don’t make money, so the market is flooded with more and more new weapons, so that they are overflowing. It’s so easy to find one because people don’t just have spares, they have spares of spares, shops are full, and gun buyers buy like the latest carbon fiber barrel shroud will fill that hole in their soul. (At least pre-pandemic stats showed fewer american's buying guns, but those who did, bought way more, with large collections of poorly tracked weapons).

Newly manufactured weapons,

[JoeP]

Not crossed out: NRA convention.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by Ari

Newly manufactured weapons,

Interesting pattern with who was president when.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Steve Kerr Comments on the Tragic Shooting in...

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Gonna have to change up the active shooter drills since the drills have been going on long enough for the shooters to know all the drills from school.

[viscousmemories]

I've spent too many of the past 48 hours doomscrolling on Twitter, with about 90% of my feed consisting of details, armchair analysis, emoting, and opining about this latest massacre of children, and I'm deeply depressed about it. We live in a country that loves guns and hates social welfare, with a government that is concerned first and foremost with enriching, protecting, and perpetuating itself, and a President whose response to this crisis is to get in front of a camera and lament at that nothing can be done. It's just all a bit too much.

[mickthinks]

The first thing I'd say in response to that is that there is such a thing as too much commentary. Yes, we need to hear the news (seeing pictures is no where near as necessary) but then we need to turn off the endless pundits and go out and get active. "The optimism of the action is better that the pessimism of the thought".

My practice has become this:

1. Listen to a reliable and independent source to get as many of the facts as are available and then turn it off.
2. Seek out a trustworthy analyst's take.
3. Repeat at intervals.

And campaign for and vote for representatives in parties that are on the side of the least wealthy and least powerful.

... a President whose response to this crisis is to get in front of a camera and lament at that nothing can be done.

That is an example of an analysis that isn't trustworthy or helpful. Biden wasn't doing that. He was pointing out that something can be done. It is a simple fact that he can't do it on his own. He needs Senate and Congress to be turned around first and only the American people can do that.

Will the people take a stand against the gun lobby? Maybe, if they are reminded often enough that they can, and that now would be a good time. That's what Biden is doing. That's cause for optimism, I think. It's also a call to us to go out and campaign.

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by mickthinks

That is an example of an analysis that isn't trustworthy or helpful. Biden wasn't doing that. He was pointing out that something can be done. It is a simple fact that he can't do it on his own. He needs Senate and Congress to be turned around first and only the American people can do that.

My comment was less of an analysis and more just my general sense of his comments/demeanor. I found this comment to be particularly uninspiring coming from the "leader of the free world":

"As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?"

Or more pithily:

Biden is always tweeting shit like “who the hell is the president I’d like to have a word with him”

— pj (@pjayevans) May 25, 2022

And there's a lot he could do on his own if he was willing to use his executive authority more aggressively and spend less time begging his dear friends and colleagues on the other side of the aisle to please remember they have souls and play nicer. (And no, that wasn't meant to be trustworthy or helpful analysis either, just good old fashioned venting.)

[mickthinks]

And there's a lot he could do on his own if he was willing to use his executive authority more aggressively ...

Okay, but that would be a nasty Pyrrhic victory if it helped the Republicans to win seats in the midterms. "OMG Overreach!" has proved a pretty powerful card for the right to play, ihasn't it?

It would help if you were to provide an example of the kind of executive order you had in mind, and said why you think it couldn't backfire.

[erimir]

More and more stuff is coming out about these chickenshit police officers who like to LARP like badass action movie heroes but when a gunman is actively blowing a classroom full of children's brains out they're waiting outside and doing more to stop the parents than the shooter.

Look at these badasses:

Just an incredible story from @wsj. pic.twitter.com/TXT3KVelbe

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) May 26, 2022

Here’s a Texas DPS Lieutenant telling a local station that some officers breached the school to get their own children BEFORE the shooter was taken down. pic.twitter.com/BrvS4sCqp6

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) May 26, 2022

wtf is this shit

You can can be heroes who deserve our adulation, put "TO PROTECT AND SERVE" in big letters all over your swag, and get the benefit of the doubt that when you shoot an unarmed man, that you had a good faith belief that he was a threat, but then you have to also be willing to jump in front of a bullet to save kids. IT CANNOT BE that you get to be chickenshits unwilling to rush into the crossfire AND you get to shoot people with impunity because they looked at you funny AND you get heralded as brave warriors.

I would not run into an active shooter situation to save kids, but I'm also not a big guy, have never fired a gun and I am not trained and I did not sign up to be a police officer nor would I ever demand that people not only respect me but give me deference for "putting my life on the line".