It’s too soon again. No extra points if you guessed ‘military-style assault rifle’.
I believe the rules still allow you to call your Representative and ask them to do something useful about gun safety so, you know, do that.
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redshirt
The tree of liberty requires the blood of murdered family members, apparently. FREEDOM!
Comrade Jake
Caught a little of Rick Santorum on MTP yesterday, defending the availability of armor-piercing bullets, because WINGNUT, that’s why!
locoparentis
If I asked my representative about “gun safety” he would refer me to the NRA for a gun safety course. Surely there is a less confusing term, the NRA and hunter safety courses have used that term for decades to refer to the safe handling of firearms.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Comrade Jake: What if the bad guys have tanks? Or planes? Or drones (couldn’t resist)? I want my RPGs.
Omnes Omnibus
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Have you considered a Stinger?
WaterGirl
@locoparentis: When I make my calls (thanks, Tim!) I use the phrase “gun violence”.
It may be that whoever wins the naming wars wins half the battle before we do anything else. (see pro-life and pro abortion)
GregB
Another family kept safe from the oppressive government by firearms.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Omnes Omnibus: Isn’t that just for detecting when orcs are close?
22over7
This happened in my town. The paper was full of it this morning. Apparently it could have been worse. The teen shot his mother and the three sibs who were at home, then waited around for his dad to get home. Shot him too. Then loaded up the family van with guns (house was full of them) with the plan of going to the local Walmart and shooting people there until the cops gunned him down.
For some reason, he called a friend first, who convinced him to meet at their church. There he told a security guard, who took him home, looked inside, and called 911.
I don’t know what to think anymore.
Omnes Omnibus
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): it is useful for that, but you shouldn’t think of it only as some kind of early warning device. You can shoot down planes or chop onions or anything in between.
Face
From your link, more Texas hijinks.
But guns dont kill people.
Mark S.
I’m curious how this 15 year old got his hands on all these guns.
Svensker
@locoparentis:
There’s been a discussion on the intertubes about using “gun safety” laws rather than “gun control” laws in order to change the Overton Window a bit on the debate.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@22over7: Once again, a gun didn’t stop this.
JCT
Too bad the shooter didn’t encounter this!
Mommy, is this loaded? Sister pinched me!
The other side is hopeless. On one of the gun forums (after they finished “explaining” that a Sandy Hook shooting every day wouldn’t change their mind re any gun control) this latest shooting produced a long psychotic thread blaming all of these shootings on doctors prescribing SSIs. The irony of these disturbed people railing against medications used to combat depression is, well, words fail me.
Omnes Omnibus
@JCT: I have a college friend who is a balls to the wall libertarian and he has been ranting on FB about SSIs for a couple of weeks. I guess it is a Thing.
gypsy howell
The charges against him for the 3 children’s murders are “child abuse resulting in death”
Ugh. I hate to think what that might mean.
So, I’m assuming mommy and daddy thought having an arsenal stored in the house was a good idea. I can’t feel sorry for these adults who get killed by their own weapons, just like I refuse to call Nancy Lanza “one of the victims” in the Sandy Hook massacre. As far as I’m concerned, she’s an accessory to the crime.
Roger Moore
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Time to learn about making IEDs.
aimai
The analogy to cars is, again, very apt. We recognize that cars are owned by households, not so much individuals, and that individuals within a household are not necessarily equipped to own or operate vehicles until they, themselves, have passed certfication. People who are learning to drive often can’t drive people younger than themselves or drive alone until they have gotten fully certfied. Young drivers in a household often can’t get insurance coverage, or if they do drive the family vehicle the insurance coverage required is quite high to cover the liklihood that a younger driver will get into more accidents than an experienced driver.
But people are allowed to buy and hold guns at home with a lisence that takes zero account of the fact that guns in the home are accessible by children. Are there any laws that penalize parents for putting guns in the hands of children who are not old enough to have the judgment as to when and where to use the guns? Are there any laws that penalize parents/owners for putting guns into a household where they aren’t secured and crazy people can get to them?
If guns had to be insured you can bet that it would become prohibitively expensive to own them the more junior, mentally impaired, or immature persons had access to the guns.
Roger Moore
@Mark S.:
You can have three guesses, but the first two don’t count.
Machine-Gun Preacher (formerly Ben Franklin)
@aimai:
The car analogy is inept. There is no Right to Drive a Car.
It’s a privilege. That is all.
Nemo_N
Reading Talking Points Memo yesterday I learned that societal breakdown is more likely than the dirty fucking hippies want to acknowledge, therefore assault rifles are a necessity.
Where the heck does that fear come from?
JCT
@Omnes Omnibus: Yup, ANYTHING but the guns. The fun part was some poor fool who kept trying to explain to these hopeless losers that it’s a little unclear as to why it would make sense to ban SSIs because a few people (out of the millions) who used them were involved in a mass shooting. Not to mention the fact that there is no evidence that any of the recent shooters were on any sort of psychiatric med.
And then the thread went off the rails with an unintentionally hysterical diatribe about only women need these meds because they expect the whole world to be handed to them on a plate and when they discover that work is hard they need medication and somehow got around to how all they really need is a good vibrator and by that point I gave up.
There are some really interesting subjects for a PhD thesis within these gun nut worlds.
BruinKid
At some point, I think a good picture to go viral is a graphic of some of these mass murderers, or the parents of the mass murderers, with this text attached:
Roger Moore
@Nemo_N:
I think the fear is innate; it’s part of who they are. The direction of the fear comes from people they trust telling them who they have to be afraid of. What we really need to do is to figure out how to redirect their fear in a productive direction, e.g. against global warming and gun violence rather than UN conspiracies and blah people.
Origuy
I’m waiting for Rick Perry to explain how more prayer could have prevented this shooting in the home of a Calvary Church pastor.
El Cid
If that house had already been filled with a hail of gunfire, that misguided child would never have so easily killed the others.
The only thing that can stop an irresponsible child with a gun is an irresponsible storm of bullets from other guns.
Mnemosyne
@locoparentis:
I like to call it “gun regulation” since the phrase “well-regulated” is right in the amendment. Make the gun nuts go into their convoluted explanation of why they think “well-regulated” doesn’t really mean guns or gun owners should be regulated because argle bargle FREEDOM!!
johnny aquitard
@Roger Moore:
This is going to be a tough nut to crack as these people are often as bigoted as they come, and that means the GOP/Fox News usual bag of tricks of deflection onto their favored boogey men works astonishingly well. Which makes deflecting onto something else really hard to do, and easily undone.
These people want to hate, and they want their leaders to tell them who to unleash their hate upon.
Getting them to redirect their fear in constructive ways means destroying the GOP (and with it Fox news and the dirtbags who operate it).
You are dealing with authoritarian followers and they’ve locked onto their authoritarian leaders, people who are now in nearly unassailable positions in our society. The leaders are at best amoral and at worst outright sociopaths; the followers listen and obey uncritically with a sense of moral righteousness. Nations have been undone before from this unhealthy and destructive pas de deux.
edit: “I think the fear is innate; it’s part of who they are.” Read Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians. I believe he makes this observation, that fear seems to be innate in authoritarian followers. It’s how their mind works.
OmerosPeanut
If only his family members had been armed in order to fight back.
…am I doing this right?
PeakVT
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Also good for stabbing giant arachnids.
imonlylurking
I found this story fairly awful:
http://www.startribune.com/local/west/187610601.html
The guy was stopped before he could kill anybody. He got past the background check by switching his first and middle names around.
Mike B
Apparently, the gun nuts are trying to get their
massacres in ahead of a possible assault weapons ban…
Pococurante
@Mark S.: I somehow doubt a fifteen year old bought these guns legally.
A fifteen year old may well be a “gun nut”. But s/he is not a legal adult.
Another Halocene Human
@Machine-Gun Preacher (formerly Ben Franklin): Really? Because there might as well be. This goon killed six people including himself. His license had been suspended FOUR TIMES. How do you get suspended that many times and KEEP your CDL class A is something I’d dearly love to know the answer to.
I say, if these ID laws for voting pass muster, so would insurance for gun fondling. Both are a tax on a “right”.
Another Halocene Human
I have an issue with “strict constructionists” who can’t be arsed to look at the language of the law in the context in which it was written, much like “biblical literalists” who don’t know jack shit about history or Judaism but try to extract tortured readings from a translated text and give them force of law in their communities.
How is it that refusing to restore rights to felons, who are disproportionately African-American, both a violation of the 2nd Amendment and a violation of the 14th?
In essence, we have created the second-class citizenship that both amendments were intended to prevent.
Feudal/medieval states worldwide were typified by laws creating castes based on who was and wasn’t allowed to bear arms.
Pococurante
@Another Halocene Human: Because folks refuse to push for enforcement of existing regulations or laws. That is not “sexy”.
@Another Halocene Human:
@imonlylurking: Which shows regulation, and more importantly enforcement, actually works.
Again, note enforcement.
Crime, and murderous crime, continues to drop. Precipitously.
At some point confusing responsible gun owners with gun nuts will fade away as well.
jefft452
@Machine-Gun Preacher (formerly Ben Franklin): “There is no Right to Drive a Car.
It’s a privilege”
Bullshit
It is a licensed activity, with preset requirements for getting a license, and administrative procedures to revoke said license
A big campaign donor’s 8 year old kid cant get a license just because the Governor wants him to have one
And the head of the DMV cant arbitrarily deny or revoke licenses for capricious reasons
I hate the phrase “Driving is a privilege, not a right”
In fact it is neither
kabiddle
I was impressed that after A Mitchell blabbed on with a senator about gun legislation right in the middle of O’s entrance to the capital (I agree — give it a rest for the day!), he did not once mention the word “gun” during his inaugural address but we all know what he said when he said it whether you liked it or not. Good for him — he didn’t take the bait.
What made me sit up straight is that right out of the gate after his preamble he forcefully and very intentionally named climate change as a major threat whether you like science or not. And then immediately went to sustainable energy technology = environment = jobs = leadership = American Exceptionalism. This is a good day.
Joe f
Is it easier to get the crazy out of someone’s heads or the gun out of their hands? I have a better chance of recognizing that someone is packing heat than I do recognizing that they are packing Crazy homicidal or suicidal thoughts.
My best friend was gunned down in cold blood by his brother on September 29 of this year and then his brother drove 40 minutes to shoot himself in front of his parents. They found an assault rifle in his trunk with 400 rounds of ammunition. They later found over 600 pounds of ammunition and two other rifles hidden away at the company’s warehouse. I only live 30 minutes from Newtown Connecticut, which happened less than two months after this incident, so I’ve seen it straight in the face.
But this ain’t about me, not even just a little bit, how much blood does the tree of liberty required to live?