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- The real Fourth Estate in this country is apparently going to be a bunch of brilliant high school kids. The actual press, meanwhile, will continue to focus on story instead of policy, just like the NRA and this White House wants it.
For example, the contrast between the high school kids’ skillful questioning of various politicians on an assault weapons ban in the wake of the Parkland Massacre on the one hand, and Jake Tapper’s focus on the “horrific” (his word) FBI errors regarding the killer, aptly demonstrates how even talented journalists join the herd and follow.
The Parkland students, by contrast, have a laser focus on the real issue: guns.
Please share widely!
Yes and no. Absolutely the focus should be on these courageous students. My own students are getting inspired to think about ways to act against gun violence in their own communities and the Parkland victims are a real inspiration to the nation.
That said, I think was we should ask ourselves what caused a 19 year old to slaughter 17 of his peers. My priest this Sunday did a good job tying Parkland with the start of Lent and urged us to pray for courage from our lawmakers and the students hounding them to do the right thing. He also reminded us that as Christians we should also pray for the killer and pray for potential future killers that their hearts can be turned away from committing violent acts and that they get the help they need. Even if this is difficult to do.
“Mental health” when uttered by the loathsome likes of Trump and LaPierre is a smokescreen to cover inaction on gun violence. Disarming the killer is the most effective way of preventing future slaughter. That said, we ought to do ore to invest in mental health.
As BTU President Jessica Tang put it on Radio Boston yesterday, if we can afford to hypothetically arm teachers we can afford to arm every school with more social workers and mental health counselors. We have two at my school who are an awesome resource for our students, many of whom have witnessed gun violence firsthand and have processed severe traumas from growing up in their environment.
Arming teachers violates the basic bond between an educator and a student. Arming schools with an army of mental health professionals is a worthy policy goal and one we absolutely should support. Disarming the killer starts with limiting access to military grade firepower. It ends with changing hearts and minds and helping all students make healthy choices.
Plus didn’t Trump agree to rescind regulations making it harder for someone with a mental health issue to get a gun?
He sure did. Thanks. We can’t be reminded of this often enough.
Some companies are cutting ties with the NRA.
http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/a-major-bank-and-3-car-rental-companies-cut-ties-with-the-nra/
Interesting. Really interesting.
Symantec/Norton hasn’t cut ties yet. Just emailed them saying that I’m ready to switch anti-virus protection providers if they continue to support the NRA.
That was fast. Symantec is out. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/omaha-private-bank-enterprise-rental-company-cut-ties-nra-article-1.3837432
Rick Scott just bucked the NRA on raising the purchasing age to 21 and passing a three day waiting period. He is also bucking Trump on arming teachers. The Speaker and Senate President are also backing these changes. Very small potatoes, but significant for a fairly pro gun state entirely controlled by Republican lawmakers. The Parkland survivors are already having a real impact in changing the conversation.
Rick Scott did no such thing. Specifically, he did not “buck the NRA”. With all due respect, this is a very familiar playbook on the part of the NRA after these shootings.
The NRA is brilliant at allowing their puppet politicians to say just enough to try to take some of the energy out of the gun control movement to diffuse the situation politically.
This is exactly what is happening here. And it is not only Rick Scott. It is also Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and all the rest of them. They are all reading from the same playbook.
When one of them breaks with the NRA and declares support for reinstating an assault weapons ban, I will start believing that any one of these Republican politicians who is essentially owned by the NRA is “bucking the NRA”.
Happily, in this case, we have brilliant high school students who are smarter than all of the politicians and all of the political pundits accumulated throughout the country combined. They are smart enough to see through the NRA ruse. Are we?
Fair enough. Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) did endorse an assault ban in an Op-Ed in today’s Times.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/opinion/brian-mast-assault-weapons-ban.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
A bunch of people who hate me and want to tell me what to do and what to believe want my guns. I wonder why? — a gun owner
If you want them to want guns less, maybe you should try wanting their guns less.
Reinstate the ban on military style assault weapons because : ” Government is instituted for the common good : for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor or private interest of any one man, family or class of men.” JOHN ADAMS
Australia instituted gun control measures back in 1996 with the National Firearms Agreement (NFA) that included two nationwide gun buybacks, voluntary surrenders, state gun amnesties, a ban on the importation of new automatic and semiautomatic weapons, the tightening of gun owner licensing, and the creation of uniform national standards for gun registration. Australia collected and destroyed an estimated 650,000 firearms (a reduction equivalent to the removal of about forty million guns from the United States), which reduced Australia’s firearms stock by around one-fifth.
Since that time, there have been NO mass shootings in Australia
You can believe whatever you want. I think that your right to play war games ends at our children’s lives.
Seascraper wonders why people like me want to strip the AR-15 owner of his or her weapons of mass destruction. I’m speaking just for me, I don’t know about anyone else.
I view the owners of assault weapons and their ammunition the way I view those who collect and enjoy child pornography and “snuff” porn. I know they exist, I know they believe they have a right to do what they do. I think they are dead wrong, and I think society and the law agrees with me. I think that those who create and sell that child pornography are even worse than those who consume it.
So far as I’m concerned, these assault weapons and ammunition are an obscenity. So far as I’m concerned, those who manufacture and peddle them are worse than those who buy and possess them.
We have long ago determined that child pornography and snuff porn are not “protected” expressions under the First Amendment. At one time, until corrupt and extremist forces bought our government and judiciary, our courts had applied similarly reasonable restrictions to the Second Amendment.
To Seascraper’s assault gun owner: I don’t want your gun. I want you to NOT have your AR-15. I want you to not have the ammunition for it. I want you to be ashamed that you have one, if you have one. I want you to fear that you will lose your livelihood and your family if your filthy and obscene secret is discovered an exposed. I want the pervert who sold you that weapon to live in constant fear of being similarly exposed. I don’t want you to live anywhere near me. I don’t want your children to be anywhere near mine (we should not forget that the Sandy Hook shooter got his weapons from his parents).
From sources like this we learn that Sandy Hook terrorist Adam Lanza came from a home with the following arsenal:
The notion that our Second Amendment should protect this is utterly and completely insane.
This inventory is far more obscene than any collection of pornography. The sellers and manufacturers of these items should be shamed, jailed, and destitute.
This needs to stop R I G H T N O W.
Just to make myself perfectly clear to Seascraper’s AR-15 owner: You make me sick to my stomach. I’ve just told you why. The blood of our brothers, sisters, children, and grandchildren is on your disgusting hands. Your desire for these weapons is sick and disturbed.
Have I made myself clear?
More important for you to expel hot air about gun owners than to reduce number of guns.
I don’t think you want to actually accomplish what you say. If you did, you would see how counterproductive your behavior and attitude is. You’d rather use this as another way to express your hate.
It seems to be more important for you to kill children than actually engage the issue.
Is it “counterproductive” to make child and snuff porn illegal? Was the imposition of such laws an expression of hate?
I invite you to explain how assault weapons are different from child and snuff porn.
Never touched a gun in my life. But because you’re against them, and you’re a power-grasping half-bot, I feel sympathy for gun owners. See how that works?
I did not suggest that you’ve ever owned or touched a gun.
You’ve made it crystal clear that you “feel sympathy for gun owners”.
What you have not done is explained how assault weapons are different from child and snuff porn. Perhaps that’s because you know full well that such an explanation is futile.
In fact, there is no difference. Your insults and posturing don’t change that reality even a little bit.
The analogy is weak
I think “the analogy is weak” is your way of saying “I don’t like the analogy”. In particular, I think you don’t like how it makes you feel.
I think you know as well as the rest of us that the availability of these weapons and their accessories is an abomination.
I think you don’t want to talk about it, so you troll us with distracting sideshows.
I think there is a good point to be made about separating those who own conventional hunting rifles and handguns from those who covet assault weapons. Getting the reasonable gun owners to burn their NRA cards, join an apolitical gun club, and start contributing to reasonable regulation is a smart and worthy goal.
I noticed this division first hand when the friends of mine in Texas, who had concealed carry, were terrified of the open carry folks. Exploiting those divisions and making it harder socially for the reasonable gun owners to affiliate with the NRA has to happen.
Assault weapons just look scary. The rules you create for them could be applied to hunting weapons too. Many of your allies would like to confiscate all of them, admit it!
“Assault weapons just look scary”.
That’s simply a lie.
An AR-15 with a bump stock fires at a rate of 400 to 800 rounds per minute. No legitimate hunter does that.
Our fishing regulations are chock full of things I’m not allowed to do. There is no nationwide outcry claiming that my constitutional rights violated because I’m not allowed to use a net to catch Smelt in Massachusetts.
If you have a weapon that, with accessories like a bump stock, can fire 400 to 800 rounds per minute, I want the government to confiscate it. If it excites you to own such a weapon, I want society to treat that excitement as a symptom of a serious disorder.
I think that men and women turned on by child porn and snuff porn are sick. I think that men and women who are turned on by rapid-fire weapons are sick.
I think the latter are far more dangerous, in fact, than the former.
To add to STom’s list of reasons why the AR-15 is different — and doesn’t merely “look” scary:
“The injury along the path of the bullet from an AR-15 is vastly different from a low-velocity handgun injury. The bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body like a cigarette boat travelling at maximum speed through a tiny canal. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic—moving away from the bullet like waves of water displaced by the boat—and then
returns and settles back. This process is called cavitation; it leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/
Most NRA “members” are just people added to the mailing list automatically because they bought a gun. They don;t have a “member” relationship to the organization, which is a lobby for gun manufacturers. They are the fake grass in the astroturf.
Why do regular gun owners need a lobbying arm? Is there a national association of people who own lawn mowers?
Assault weapons ARE scary and the ONLY people in a sane democracy that should have them are public safety officers and our military.
As a former youth NRA member who learned gun safety and marksmanship, I can assure you NONE of my current responsible, sane, NRA friends use human killing machine AR-15’s for hunting, target shooting or collecting.
Would you feel better if the look of guns is regulated? Because there are nicer-looking weapons that are as deadly as the AR-15 used in the Florida killings. Do you really believe that you would reduce mass shootings by changing the exterior design of guns? Would capacity and firing rate regulations of the AR-15 also apply to many more guns? Yes. And that is why they don’t pass.
We banned them before and with the exception of Columbine, there were no
major mass shootings on campuses between 1994-2005 when the Brady Bill was in effect. That seemed to work. Expanding the bans to include semi automatic weapons would also make sense.
I have no problem with individuals owning shotguns or rifles. I do want mandatory training, mandatory mental health screening, mandatory criminal background checks before people are allowed to use them. Make the age of purchase 21 across the board and expand wait times. Yes there will still be bad actors who slip through those cracks too, but this is better than the status quo and substantially reduce gun violence. Actually funding mental health, suicide prevention, and community violence prevention will dent it even more. Even halving the annual gun deaths would still be worth it.
Why are you so badly trolling this discussion? I for one want to regulate based on capability, not looks. In fact we should get away from naming weapons to be banned in legislation and focus solely on what they can do so that we don’t end up exploiting loopholes on irrelevant things like length of the barrel. No civilian needs to own any weapon that can fire multiple rounds with a single squeeze of the trigger – that’s virtually a WMD. I can live with some semi-automatics being available, but they need to be regulated and the operators licensed at least as much as we do for cars (which BTW, nobody thinks we are confiscating). Anyone who claims to support the second amendment should be asked if they support the whole second amendment.
When I get speeched at that’s where it goes. I know what you believe, I live here, I get pounded with it every day. I don’t need a longer post. I didn’t say it was wrong I just pointed out where what you want has foundered on the rocks every time. If I wanted more gun control I would fire everybody who has advocated for it on my own side, because they are obvious failures.
If this issue was easy to resolve it would have been done. Allowing freedom for guns is going to allow crazies to get guns. Gun owners think these mass shootings are the price you pay for them to have guns. Just as the rules that make it virtually impossible to involuntarily commit somebody will allow crazies to get guns.
Mass killings by crazy people are evil events. But perhaps the things you or I would do to restrict them would be more evil.
That’s what so many gun lovers get wrong. We are not a nation divided between “good guys” and “bad guys” and we are not a nation divided between normal people and “crazies”.
Every American is a “good guy” until that moment when they make the decision to be a “bad guy”. None of us is incapable of doing something wrong, something illegal, even something horrific under unique circumstances. All of us are mentally sound, until we are not, just as all of us are healthy until we catch the flu or fall and break our leg.
Every one of the perpetrators of the numerous mass shootings was a “good guy” of “sound mind” until something happened, a switch was flicked somewhere in their being, and they were no longer good, nor of sound mind.
This is not a “Us versus Them” problem. This is an Us problem.
1. This is a gun problem. Even your view of people suddenly “snapping” were correct (which it is not), if it were difficult or impossible for your recently-switched “bad guy” to get a weapon of mass destruction and all the equipment that comes with it, then there would be far less carnage. A “bad guy” with a 10″ hunting knife in a library in Winchester still commits a horrific crime. Only one person is dead, though, not dozens.
2. The picture you paint of good guys suddenly going wrong is wildly inconsistent with what actually happens in the real world. Have you not seen the reports of the many symptoms the most recent Florida shooter demonstrated in the months before his horrific acts? Saying that “all of us are mentally sound until we are not” is content-free truism.
3. A passion for weapons like this is itself a symptom of something badly damaged. That’s one reason these weapons should be illegal.
Sophistry like your last paragraph is useless, and provides no insight into what needs to change. Of course it’s an “Us” problem. Only some of us acquire these arsenals and then go out and kill dozens of people. The act of acquiring those arsenals itself identifies the persons who are very much more likely to commit those crimes.
When enormous numbers of 18-21 year old drivers were killing themselves and others while driving drunk, we acted to reduce the supply of alcohol available to them. Our roads immediately became markedly more safe.
This is not rocket science. We need to get these weapons off the street. A crazy person with an AR-15 is far more dangerous to those around him or her than the same crazy person with a knife.
Why is that so hard to admit?
And no civilian can legally own a weapon that fires multiple rounds with a single squeeze of the trigger, unless they have a highly regulated Federal Firearms License. An AR-15 operates the same way as any other semi-automatic weapon.
Bump stock simulate pulling the trigger multiple times. I have never used one, but I imagine any semi-auto firearm could have a bump stock adapted for it.
It does the job all too effectively without the bump stock..
Since when is talking about the other side of a issue trolling?
Exchanges like this are why I prefer the child-porn and snuff-porn analogy.
The world is full of people who buy, own, and enjoy erotica. Most of them are “normal” people are exercising their well-established First Amendment rights.
There are a small number of people who find videos that portray or simulate sex with children arousing. Similarly, there are a small number of people who find portrayals or simulations of people (usually women) being killed during sex arousing.
I hope we agree that these latter two groups are aberrations that our society correctly identifies as abnormal. I hope we agree that existing laws that severely restrict such pornography are not a significant First Amendment infringement.
North America (not the world, actually) has a great many people who buy, own, and enjoy firearms. Most of them are “normal” people exercising their well-established Second Amendment rights (though some argue that the right to own and use a weapon has nothing to do with the Second Amendment).
There are a small number of people who find weapons that fire very fast and that cause extreme damage to tissue appealing. In my view, this latter group represents a threat to society. A threat even more grave than those who seek child- and snuff-porn.
The fact that the government cannot even STUDY the effects of gun violence as a public health issue demonstrates how deeply our weapons disorder is rooted in our body politic.
I enjoyed shooting 22 rifles at targets in Boy Scouts while I acquired my “Marksmanship” merit badge. I enjoy the target shooting games at carnivals.
That has nothing at all to do with restrictions that we are discussing and that I enthusiastically endorse.
I could bring a carload of equipment to the shore of the Nashua River in Groton, I could use that equipment to electrocute all the fish in the vicinity of the shoreline and landing, and then wade through the water collecting the dozens of now-dead bass, trout, and other fish that I just electrocuted. I’m pretty sure that I would be breaking the law if I did that. I’m pretty sure that most of us would agree that whatever it was I was doing was not “fishing”.
Nobody who uses these guns cut down prey the way the Las Vegas shooter cut down victims in the crowd is “hunting”.
If nothing else, it is surely time to stop making excuses for these miscreants.
Seriously, what good is a car if you can’t drive it? Most people don’t buy these weapons just so they can sit on a shelf and not be used either.
Plus it’s trolling when you make a silly argument like accusing us of wanting to ban weapons on looks alone. As for capabilities, I don’t want guns available to the public that can mow down people that quickly.
I notice that you decline to answer my obvious response to your canard.
No individual should be able to manufacture, sell, possess, or use any firearm that shoots 400-800 rounds per minute. I hope that’s clear enough. That criteria has nothing to do with appearance.
I really do believe that if this criteria would be imposed, we would have significantly lower casualties. If this criteria means that guns other than the AR-15 will be restricted, so be it.
I don’t believe that any hunter needs to squeeze off 400-800 rounds per minute in order to bring down a goose, duck, or deer.
I would bet there is not a person out there that could put 400-800 rounds through an AR-15 in a minute. But, I guess you could say a revolver can shoot 100 rounds a minute if I could fire 6 shots in 3.5 seconds.
I’m glad that you therefore agree with me that this is an insignificant restriction.
Did you hear (and watch) the video tapes of the Las Vegas massacre? If it’s so hard to do, how did that shooter so easily accomplish it?
The Las Vegas shooting more than any other, gives the lie to the argument that all that is needed is a “good guy with a gun”.
There is no effective response from the NRA to the question of how a good guy with a gun could have addressed that situation, which obviously will happen again.
This is why they always slyly shift over to their endless talk about mental health and focusing on the killer. They’re skilled at what they do.
This thing about goofy liberals being obsessed that the gun LOOKS scary is a canard. Period. It is not about how it looks. Frankly, we don’t give the proverbial rodent’s gluteus maximus what the gun looks like. We care about the bloody carnage in our schools, malls, churches, concert halls, parks, and streets it facilitates.
I of course agree with you, but my +1 was also in part for your very high class “rodent’s gluteus maximus”:)