not alarmed enough

Posted on June 10, 2014 by greg

I don’t have time today to write about this properly, but here’s something to think about. Y’all already know about Jerad and Amanda Miller — the young married couple who shot and killed two Las Vegas police officers as they were having lunch, then proceeded across the street to kill another person in a Wal-Mart before killing themselves. But did you know this?

Police believe the couple walked the four miles to CiCi’s Pizza, where Officers Alyn Beck, 42, and Igor Soldo, 32, were having lunch in a booth.

Let me repeat that. They walked four miles before they started shooting. And further, did you know this?

[A] neighbor who saw them set off on foot Sunday morning with a red shopping cart carrying weapons and ammunition was not alarmed enough to call police.

So think about this: these two people walked for four miles to a busy shopping area on a Sunday, while carrying a shotgun and several handguns, and pushing a shopping cart holding “hundreds of rounds of ammunition” — and nobody they passed by felt any need to notify the police. Why?

The murdered Las Vegas police officers

Because Nevada is an ‘open carry’ state. Because it’s perfectly legal in Nevada to go wandering around with firearms and a shopping cart full of ammunition. Because until they walked into the pizza restaurant and opened fire, they were presumed to be responsible gun owners. Didn’t matter that Jerad Miller was a felon who wasn’t allowed to own a firearm, didn’t matter that these two had espoused hateful ideologies and talked about killing police officers, didn’t matter at all.

Wayne LaPierre, NRA spokesman

I’ve written about these ‘open carry’ fuckwits before. You cannot tell the difference between an armed Second Amendment fuckwit and a mass murderer by looking at them. You can’t tell them apart until the bullets start flying. We can thank the National Rifle Association for that. The NRA and the cowardly greedhead legislators they’ve paid off through campaign contributions.

Two police officers dead. And pretty soon it’ll happen again. And then again, and again and on and on. Because that’s the world the NRA has given us. And unless we, the people, stand up on election day and frogmarch every last one of these conscienceless bastards out of Congress, nothing will ever change.

two related but separate things

Posted on December 23, 2013 by greg

First thing: I’ve gotten several comments over the past few days suggesting that the only way to stop school shootings is to put armed guards in every school (and/or arm the teachers and school administrators and support staff). This is not entirely stupid. It’s pretty damned stupid — especially the notion of arming teachers and janitors and other school employees — but it’s not entirely stupid.

The sad fact, however, is that there have been armed guards present in many of the mass murders in recent years — not just in schools but in other public venues. They just don’t prevent these events from happening. That’s true for several reasons.

First, for the most part the shooters in these events don’t expect to survive. These shootings are often elaborate suicides, intended to make as many people as possible as miserable as the shooter is. Knowing there’s an armed guard present doesn’t dissuade a shooter who doesn’t intend to come out alive. Second, the firearms most often used in these shootings are semi-automatic weapons. Combine the ability for rapid fire with large capacity magazines, and you have a situation in which a shooter can kill a lot of people in an alarmingly short time.

Robert Steinhauser — 13 teachers, 2 students, 1 police officer– 10 minutes

Adam Lanza killed 20 children and 6 adults in less than 10 minutes. Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and an adult in about 4 minutes. Robert Steinhauser killed 13 teachers, 2 students, and a police officer in 10 minutes. Seung-Hui Cho killed 30 Virginia Tech students in around 11 minutes. They weren’t able to kill that many people in that short a time because they were superior marksmen; they were able to do it by firing a LOT of rounds.

We’re no longer talking about the ‘classic’ Charles Whitman-style mass murderer. Whitman climbed the clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin and methodically, almost leisurely, picked off his victims. He killed 17 and wounded 32 others over the course of an hour and a half. In today’s mass murderers, the emphasis is on mass.

Thomas Hamilton – 16 children, 1 adult – 4 minutes

Guards with weapons won’t prevent these mass shootings, but they will almost certainly reduce the body count — and that’s a good thing. But why not take other steps that can help reduce the body count? Why not limit the capacity of ammunition magazines? Every time a shooter has to pause to reload, there’s a chance for victims to escape and for courageous bystanders to act (Jared Loughner — 6 dead and 13 wounded in around two minutes — was tackled by a wounded bystander when he was forced to reload his pistol).

Adam Lanza – 20 children, 6 adults – 10 minutes (plus 1 earlier)

Why not require stricter background checks before letting a person purchase a firearm? Why not require background checks at gun shows? The weapons bought at gun shows are just as lethal as those bought through a licensed gun dealer.Why not require states to report and share mental health records with the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System? Currently only 27 states have laws that allow (or require) them to report mental health records — and many of those states fail to do so because of state budgetary reasons.

Seung-Hui Cho — 30 students – 9 minutes (plus 2 earlier)

None of those things — armed guards, universal background checks, limits on large capacity magazines, mental health information — will stop mass murders and mass shootings from taking place, but each of them will have some effect on the body count. By combining several (or better yet, all) of those measures, we can reduce the body count even further.

Second Thought: Claire Davis died. She was the young woman Karl Pierson shot in the head ten days ago. I took a moderate amount of crap for suggesting that “nobody other than her friends and family will remember her in a couple of weeks.” That’s a horrible thing to say. It’s all the more horrible because it’s true. It won’t be very long before there’s another school shooting — or some other mass casualty event — with a new set of innocent victims. And for a few days, the names of the victims will be in the public eye, and then they’ll be forgotten in turn.

There have been 22 school shootings so far this year, resulting in 19 fatalities and 34 wounded. Do we remember any of their names? There have been 351 mass shootings so far this year — 351 incidents in which at least four people were wounded or killed. Most of them don’t result in multiple deaths, but they easily could. Do we remember any of their names?

Claire Davis — not a statistic

Their friends and family members remember them. For the rest of us, they’re numbers. It doesn’t lessen the pain felt by the family and friends of the victims. Nothing can. That pain can only be exacerbated by the ugly fact that their loved ones are reduced to mere statistics.

We can reduce those numbers. Maybe not by much, but we can reduce them. We can reduce them without damaging the Sacred Second Amendment. We really can reduce the body count.

But we don’t.

Update: I incorrectly located the Seung-Hui Cho mass murder at the University of Virginia; in fact, it was at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (more commonly called Virginia Tech).

Circumstantially newsworthy

Posted on December 16, 2013 by greg

174

So. Another school shooting. Kid named — well, it doesn’t really matter what his name was, does it. ‘School shooter’, that’s the only way Karl Pierson will ever be referred to from now on. Far as that goes, Karl wasn’t really a kid; he’d turned eighteen. Not old enough to buy beer yet, but old enough to go out and buy the pump-action shotgun and ammunition he used.

This shooting took place around the anniversary of the Sandy Hook slaughter. Which, let’s face it, is why the shooting has been so widely reported. If it had happened, say, three weeks ago, it would have been a local story. The national news media probably wouldn’t bother to report it. It’s a circumstantially newsworthy story.

Name doesn’t matter; you’d forget it soon anyway.

Nobody famous was involved, the body count was low (just ~~the school shooter~~ Karl), and the entire incident took place in less than two minutes. Yes, a 17-year old girl got shot, but if it weren’t for the Sandy Hook anniversary thing, the national news media would probably have ignored it. Still, they did what they could with what they had. They emphasized the Cute White Girl Who Loved Horses angle, making her a classic innocent victim. They found some really nice high school photos of her. What was her name? Kaylee? Claire? Callie? Something like that — pretty sure it starts with a ‘k’ sound. She got shot in the head. With a shotgun. Nobody wants to hear about that. And nobody other than her friends and family will remember her in a couple of weeks. Same with what’s-his-name, the school shooter. Karl.

Poor Kaitlin/Carly/Courtney wasn’t even the target. She just happened to be sitting there. The guy — you know, Karl — fired five rounds from his shotgun. Three were apparently just random shots down hallways. One took Kirsten/Cameron/Kendall in the head. The last round went into his own. Ninety seconds or so from the first shot to the last, and it was all over. Well, except for the girl — Kassidy/Kimberly/Caryn — who’ll be fucked up for the rest of her life. However long that’ll be.

The local sheriff said he believed what’s-his-name…uh, Karl…shot himself because he heard the approach of the deputy assigned to the school (think about that for a moment; we live in a society that has to assign armed personnel to patrol schools to shoot school shooters — how incredibly fucked up is that?). I don’t know. It seems unlikely to me that in the chaos of those ninety seconds ~~the school shooter~~ Karl would hear — and able to identify the footsteps — of an approaching school cop.

Pump action shotgun; brand doesn’t matter — they all do the same thing

I think it’s more likely he saw what his shotgun had done to Carmen/Kasey/Kelsey and couldn’t live with it. I’ve had the misfortune to see what a shotgun blast can do to the human head. It’s not like it is in the video games young Karl played. It ain’t pretty.

So what happens now? You know the answer to that. Nothing. Oh, politicians will look earnest and say something like “We must do something to keep our children safe,” but nothing will actually happen. Or maybe it will. Maybe they’ll try to find the money to make the doors to classrooms bulletproof, so children will have a secure location to ‘shelter in place’ when the next gunman goes roaming through the hallways. But that would mean raising taxes, so probably not. For certain, we won’t do anything about guns. Because, you know, it would be wrong to punish all responsible law-abiding gun owners because of the actions of some disturbed kid.

Of course, what’s-his-name…young Karl…was assumed to be a responsible law-abiding gun owner when he bought his shotgun. In fact, he was a responsible law-abiding gun owner until he carried his shotgun into the school. And that guy (I don’t remember his name) who killed all those people at the Navy Yard recently? A responsible law-abiding gun owner until he took his weapon out of the car. And the mother of the kid who murdered all those 2nd graders and their teachers in Sandy Hook? Adam Something? She was a responsible law-abiding owner of over a dozen firearms when her boy shot her four times in the head while she was asleep.

That guy at the Navy Yard, no longer a responsible law-abiding gun owner.

That’s the thing, isn’t it. Most mass murderers are responsible law-abiding gun owners up until the moment they start their mass murdering.

Oh well, freedom isn’t free as the gun rights advocates tell us. The occasional school shooting is just the price we have to pay for living in a free society. Well, it’s the price Kaylee has to pay. Chloe? Claire? Whatever.

another angry anti-government white guy with a gun

Posted on November 3, 2013 by greg

Another angry anti-government white guy with a gun. We’ve been through it all before, and we’ll undoubtedly have to go through it again and again because this is what the United States has become. It’s sad, pathetic, and completely fucking stupid — but there it is.

Another angry anti-government white guy with a gun. And yeah, race is a factor. Sure there are angry minorities, and anti-government minorities, and minorities with guns, and even angry anti-govenrment women with guns. And yeah, some of them go to a mall or a school or a fast food restaurant and open fire — but not very often, and when that happens people express shock.

Paul Anthony Ciancia

Was anybody terribly shocked that Paul Anthony Ciancia — another angry anti-government white guy with a gun — went to LAX and opened fire? No, not really. I suspect most folks just thought ‘Here we go again.’ I suspect most folks could even make a reasonable guess as to how Ciancia was dressed and armed. Let’s see…angry anti-government white guy with a gun…I’m gonna go with black clothes or camo, a bulletproof vest, some variation on an AR-15, and a buttload of ammunition. And they’d be right.

We all know how this sad, stupid story will play out. There’ll be talk of tightening airport security, conservatives will blame a flawed mental system (while voting to cut funds for mental health systems), some folks might even suggest this is a ‘learning moment’ (but if we learned anything at all from the Sandy Hook massacre, it’s that we never really learn anything at all), and the lunatics at the NRA will raise funds by claiming the president will use this shooting as an excuse to ‘grab our guns’ and violate the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

Smith & Wesson .223-caliber M&P-15

They’ll ignore the fact that Paul Anthony Ciancia was a law-abiding gun owner until he carried his Smith & Wesson .223-caliber M&P-15 into LAX and started shooting TSA workers. Almost all mass murderers are law-abiding gun owners until they start killing people. By the way, I’ve got a shiny new quarter that says gun dealers are going to be selling a LOT more Smith & Wesson .223-caliber M&P-15s over the next couple of weeks.

The LAX shooting will disappear from the news in a couple of days. Most of us will go on with our lives and not give it another serious thought. But you know who will give it thought? Angry anti-government white guys with guns. We see this as a tragedy — no, not even that, really. We see it as just another in a seemingly interminable cascade of mass shootings. But angry anti-government white guys with guns see it as evidence of a conspiracy directed at angry anti-government white guys with guns — and they’ll get angrier and buy more guns.

Think I’m being pessimistic? Read this story on one of the most popular conservative ‘news’ sources, WND.com: Did TSA Know LAX Attack Coming? It’s conspiracy theory nonsense, but compared to the conspiracy theories posited in the comments, it sounds almost rational. If you have the stomach, read the comments. If you read the comments, the odds are you’ll feel a sense of despair. You’ll feel a sense of despair and you’ll turn away and probably try not to think about it.

And that’s one of the reasons we continue to suffer through these mass shootings. We’ve allowed a handful of angry anti-government white guys with guns to determine our future. They get angry and act, we despair and turn away. Until we get angry and stay angry and act on that anger, they’re always going to win.

this shit has to stop

Posted on December 24, 2012 by greg

Set fire to a building, wait for the police and the fire department to show up, fire a few rounds at them, run away.

This used to be a tactic used in inner cities during the infamous Long Hot Summer of 1967. A hundred and sixty urban riots during a four month period. A lot of anger and rage against government — national, state, municipal, it didn’t matter. Tension about the war in Southeast Asia, tension about racism, tension about drug laws, tension exacerbated by the summer heat. Start a fire, wait for the response, fire a few rounds, run away. The motives in 1967 were personal and political. Not like this — not like what happened this morning in Webster, NY.

Scene of the shooting, Webster, NY

This morning, in a middle-class, lakeside suburb near Rochester, firefighters — and let me stress this: volunteer firefighters — arrived at the scene of a home fire and were shot at. Four firefighters were shot; two are dead. The gunman is also dead. The house that was on fire — it burned to the ground since the firefighters couldn’t extinguish the blaze while being shot at. Three other houses were also destroyed when the fire spread; four others were damaged by fire.

I don’t know if the shooter started the fire. I don’t know if this was planned or spontaneous. I don’t know how the shooter was armed or what sort of ammunition he used. But I know this: this shit has to stop.

Last week, it was children and their teachers. This morning, volunteer firefighters. Regular people who give up some of their free time to train and practice putting out fires. Regular men and women who, when called, willingly stop whatever they’re doing and respond to help the people of their communities. They don’t care if the house belongs to a friend or a stranger, they don’t care if the house is owned by Democrats or Republicans, they don’t care if the inhabitants are black or white, they don’t care if it’s the home of illegal immigrants. They get the call and they deliberately put themselves in real danger, because it needs to be done.

And some asshole with a gun shoots them.

My guess is Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association will suggest that all firefighters should be armed so they can return fire.

Let me be clear about this. It’s NOT the individual firearms that’s the problem. The problem is ALL the firearms. It’s the easy availability of firearms and the availability of high capacity magazines. Making firearms more difficult to obtain IS NOT going to stop mass shootings; our culture is much too fucked up at this point for that to stop. But we can, over time, at least try to reduce the body count.

This shit has to stop.

it’s the guns

Posted on December 14, 2012 by greg

Sandy Hook Elementary School — children from kindergarten through fourth grade. We’re talking kids who are roughly 5 to 10 years old. Right now they’re saying 26 dead, maybe 18 of them children. We don’t really know. We don’t know how many were injured but survived. We’re hearing reports that when the shooting was over the children were told to keep their eyes closed as they were led from the school.

[These shootings] happen in clusters, and given the persistence of them happening in Democrat/Liberal enclaves, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s deliberate.

What we do know right now is the shooter is dead. We’re told he had two handguns — a Glock and a Sig Sauer — and possibly a .223 caliber rifle. The .223 is a common caliber for rifles, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the shooter used an AR-15, the civilian equivalent of an M-16. Nobody has said yet, but will anybody be surprised if/when we discover those guns were bought legally?

9mm Glock

These are all very common firearms, very easy to obtain at gun store or sporting goods shop after a simple background check — or at gun show without a background check. But we can’t blame the firearms, can we. Because guns don’t kill people.

This sounds like a potential jihad attack.

Already the right wing gun nuts are pushing back. Of course, they are. Kids have been murdered and their first thought is to blame anybody or anything but the tools that make these mass murders so easy and so commonplace. It can’t be the guns.

If this is Islamic terror related, I wonder if Ubama will claim the video made them do it?

People want to blame somebody. Somebody else. Not one of us. Not somebody who is white, not somebody who is Christian. People want to believe this was an act of twisted religion or politics. People want to believe this is an act of madness.

Alleged shooter, Adam Lanza

But this is the alleged shooter when he was younger. An ordinary-looking white kid. Since he’s not a Muslim, he must be crazy — because only a Muslim or a crazy person would do something this horrific. And maybe the shooter did have a psychiatric problem. But he also had guns. Crazy and heavily armed — not a healthy combination.

Just waiting for sightings of Sarah Brady or her kind dancing on the bodies and calling for more gun control now.

The news folks are saying this is ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘beyond belief’ and ‘completely unthinkable.’ They said the same thing after every other mass shooting this year, and every mass shooting last year and the year before and the sad and ugly truth is that is is absolutely NOT beyond belief. It’s not only not beyond belief, it’s completely fucking predictable. Because of the proliferation of guns in the United States.

AR-15

We don’t want to recognize the fact that mass murders happen in the U.S. on a regular basis. They happen so often they don’t make the national news. They’re considered local stories — until the bodies hit newsworthy numbers.

Bank on it, “O” will make a power play to shut down gun ownership.

It’s being reported that this is the deadliest mass grade school shooting in U.S. history. We have so many mass murders at schools that we have to distinguish them by grade. Virginia Tech University holds the record body count for school shootings, but Sandy Hook is a close second. The victims in the former case were college students; the victims at Sandy Hook were mostly children. The thing they have in common is the guns.

9mm Sig Sauer

Each time a reporter talks about “the deadliest school shooting in history” there’s an implied “…to date.” It’s the deadliest school shooting of 4th Graders and below…to date.

It is sickening that the left will blame the gun, but not support the gun that would prevent this Satanic act.

It’s not the gun. Don’t blame the gun. The gun didn’t shoot itself. We’re going to hear that a lot. And you know what? It’s true. Individual firearms aren’t responsible for all these deaths. But the collective easy availability of firearms is most definitely a major part of the problem. The easy availability of high capacity magazines, that’s part of the problem. The lethality of firearms, that’s a serious part of the problem.

This is an act of provocation allowing for new legislation to outlaw handguns. I have no evidence yet, but this is a play straight out of Rules for Radicals. Watch out, Zero’s about to make his big move to disarm the law abiding public

When the local hospital was notified of the mass shooting, they brought in extra staff to assist with the casualties. Only three people were brought to the hospital. Three. More than two dozen dead, only three injured. Why? Because of the guns.

I am afraid the Gun Control Fascists will use this to push for Gun Control.

I’m also afraid. I’m afraid and angry. I’m fucking furious. I’m furious because we don’t have any meaningful gun control. I’m furious because despite all the dead children in Connecticut today, despite all the grieving families, nothing is going to change. Next month there’ll be another mass shooting, and there’ll be another the month after that, and nothing is going change.

It’s not the gun? Fuck you, it IS the gun. It’s all the goddamn guns.

Editorial note: The quotes above were taken verbatim from FreeRepublic.com.

sad and stupid

Posted on August 5, 2012 by greg

“Right now, it’s just a mass shooting.”

Those are the words of ‘a federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity,’ quoted in The Washington Post. Just a mass shooting. Jeebus on a fucking cracker. Just another mass shooting.

Some jamoke strolls into a Sikh temple and opens fire. Six people dead. Seven, counting the shooter himself. And we’ve become so inured to this routine madness that federal officials can say “it’s just a mass shooting.” In other words, it’s nothing out of the ordinary; it’s not an extraordinary massacre — just your usual, normal, everyday sort of massacre.

And how is the right wing responding to this latest ‘just a mass shooting’? Some of them are assuming it’s a ploy by President Obama to create conditions that will help him get re-elected and take away their guns. Here are a few choice comments from freerepublic.com:

[T]he timing seems suspicious as well, given the upcoming elections and Democrats’ attempst to scale back conceal carry?

After Aurora is this the next asset being ‘activated’ by his handlers. The more BHO fears November the more of these events are going to occur and they will escalate in level of violence and number of casualties.

Sounds like Liberal black ops operation to influence the election

Adolph Hitler: socialist. Obama: socialist. And the parallels don’t stop there by any means. The parallels are eerily similar, except instead of Jews, it’s Christians that are now ok to persecute. I know in this case it wasn’t but that’s where the trend is going. I’m still wondering when 0bama’s Reichstag Fire moment will happen.

Wow the lefties are really shooting up the country right before the election. No doubt to prop up their Obama God as only he can save us from those evil right wingers.

So it’s either just another ordinary mass killing or it’s a liberal plot to disarm conservatives. Both viewpoints are sad and stupid. Stupid, stupid, and so terribly sad.

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