Another shooting, another 10 youth killed, and where is the Republican reaction?

[tobymerwin]

Thanks for pointing that out Kulindahr. It WAS Obama's "Fast and Furious" operation that flooded Mexico with U.S. guns.

That's incorrect. It comes from a study that lied about its data: most of the guns that are traced in Mexican crime come from the U.S. But the Mexican police understand how little use there is in trying to trace guns, so the only ones they do trace are ones they suspect come from the U.S. -- and not surprisingly, a majority of those do come from the U.S.

In fact, they keep finding guns that came into Mexico from the U.S. because officials in the Obama administration ordered gun dealers to violate the law and let straw purchases be made for the very purpose of getting those guns into Mexico.

 

[tobymerwin]

You are so devoted to your cause you can't even see the other side. I used to be a liberal democrat, then I finally listened to the arguments from the other side and really thought about it. I hope you open your eyes and start thinking for yourself soon.

You are eager to kill innocent life but get all weepy at the idea of punishing vicious murderers. And it is you democrats who want more poverty; millions and millions more in a never ending ending flood.

 

[tobymerwin]

The one common link I have found in the anti-gun movement is that almost all opponents of guns live in urban areas. I live in a rural area. Most of us have guns and we don't have the crime that urban areas do. This is not a gun control issue, it's another division in our country: urban vs. rural vs. suburban.

 

[opinterph]

This is not a gun control issue, it's another division in our country: urban vs. rural vs. suburban.

The Gun-Rental Loophole (Politico; August 2014)

The Tragic Insanity Of Gun Ranges (ThinkProgress; August 2014)

 

[Kulindahr]

And every statistic is a number of mostly innocent victims.
But you don't seem to care at all about them.
The kid who's shot in the back at a cafeteria, the little boy who's playing in their front yard, the friends that could have had a fist fight to sort out their differences, the wife who's been threatened at gunpoint by a jealous husband.

When you either start reading what I've written, or stop lying about it -- not sure which is the case -- we might be able to have a discussion.

 

[Kulindahr]

I was hoping you’d be able to link to an official resource that offers definitive evidence of the practice. Nonetheless, it is my “impression” that the National Crime Information Center does indeed retain specific data related to “denied transactions” that were attempted via the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

It's like trying to find out what rules the secret courts that decide when federal agencies can spy on us use: they're engaged in things they know they shouldn't be, so they make it very, very hard to discover what's going on.

 

[Kulindahr]

Combat veterans shoot down NRA ‘fantasy world’ of ‘good guys with guns’



http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/its...own-nra-fantasy-world-of-good-guys-with-guns/


I find it interesting there was an armed person in Oregon. Sounds like he gets it.

The story has changed. Originally, they reported they were kept from going. This sounds to me like justification of their inability to act: if they heard gunshots, they knew they had five minutes or so before any LEO response. At the very least, they could have moved in to surround the location and had information for the deputies when they got there. As for being mistaken for bad guys, that's a pretty lame excuse because if there is a number of people it's simple enough to have one inform the cops when they arrive that there are good guys already on the scene.

 

[Kulindahr]

That's incredibly depressing. Hero guy shot the victim.
There are some people I don't trust with scissors, and there they are wielding guns.

And yet liberals keep proposing things that will have no effect.


BTW, just as a comment on how impossible disarming criminals will be, it's now possible to use a 3D printer to make a personal rail gun -- no ammunition purchases necessary with it, since it can shoot finishing nails (among other things). It's darned close to silent, too.

 

[Kulindahr]

Thanks for posting a realistic point of view on this matter.

If being "realistic" means standing around doing nothing while people are being killed, then you can take your realism and shove it. How cold and uncaring we have become, when the default response is supposed to be "just let people die"!

 

[Kulindahr]

LOL yeah Thomas is such a bastion of reasoned centrism. I suggest you go look him up before calling me the fanatic. In any event, the POINT is that there is plenty of gaming the system and political maneuvering going on in the judiciary, it's silly to think otherwise.

I'm not sure there are any "bastions of reasoned centrism" on the court these days.

 

[Kulindahr]

Why do you think the military created the large magazines that hold so many bullets? It wasn't because soldiers constantly fire the weapons in training; it was because when they fire under pressure on the battlefield, the spray will hopefully find at least one of the intended targets.

The function of full automatic is not to hit targets, it's to make the other guy keep his head down. Of the veterans I know who saw actual combat, every last one says that full auto is useless if you're actually trying to hit someone.

Besides that, large magazines aren't so you can "spray and pray", as it's called, they're because in many cases the bad guy just keeps coming. Two officers I chat with online say they've both been in situations where a fellow officer emptied a sixteen-round magazine, hitting the bad guy with better than half the rounds, and another officer had to keep shooting to stop the guy.

 

[Kulindahr]

http://www.freep.com/story/news/loc.../woman--home-depot-shooting-charged/73863544/

And this is why people should not have guns. She opened fire on a property crime and "tried to shoot out the tires." She never hit the car despite unloading in a busy parking lot. She is fortunate no one was killed because she would be facing a charge of murder instead of what she now faces.

Reason #1 why people should stick to plastic toy guns if they don't have balls or a vagina; a gun adds nothing and only gets one into more trouble.

The same argument could be made to say kids shouldn't play football and no one should drive cars: because some people aren't safe with them doesn't mean we take them away from everyone.

A major point of America was "that every man be armed". The Founding Fathers agreed on that, Federalist and anti-Federalist both. So they put a provision in the Constitution to manage the situation. That liberals ignore that and want to add more and more laws that have no effect tells me that all the talk of loving the Constitution is just hot air -- liberals love the Constitution no more than does Dick Cheney.


BTW, your last line is despicable in its falsehood: guns kept me from being assaulted with deadly intent, kept a gal I know from being rape, and kept a group of kids from being molested -- and those are just the situations in my own life. To say that "a gun adds nothing" is to prefer that I have been assaulted, the gal have been raped, and the kids molested.

 

[Kulindahr]

So I'm assuming that the push to actually do something about guns has once again died down as most Americans turn their attention to pumpkin spice lattes?

It's died down because liberals go back to proposals that will do nothing except bother the already law-abiding, and lack the balls to hold La Pierre to his rhetoric. Where's the proposed legislation for a comprehensive, in-depth national mental health care system? Where are the proposals that are actually authorized by the Constitution?

 

[Kulindahr]

The American government should create a really special monument for the gun dead.
Something similar to the Vietnam war memorial but much bigger for the on going gun dead to hundreds of years into the future dead.

Hell, no!

Then they could be proud of themselves. The American government needs to be pelted with rotten fruit until they act on the authority in the Constitution to discipline the militia! The Article I Section 8 powers to organize and discipline the militia are the bridge between the two clauses of the Second Amendment: those elements are how to get from a laissez-faire collection of variously armed citizens to something resembling a "well-regulated militia". Shooting off rounds in a parking lot is far from "well-regulated"; the minimum punishment for such a thing should be ninety hours of training in what to do and especially NOT to do as an armed citizen.

 

[Kulindahr]

nice piece on the 2nd Amendment: http://www.vox.com/2015/10/15/9540747/video-second-amendment-musket?ref=yfp

Seems to back my opinion about those gun advocates who say the amendment is there to allow ordinary citizens to resist a tyrannical US government; when any amount of common sense will tell you that even though the weaponry that citizens can possess (legally and illegally) that has gotten a lot more lethal since the amendment was written; a citizen's weaponry does not come anywhere near the weaponry that the US government posses through its military. Can anyone say Blackhawk helicopters or stealth fighters or NAVY SEALS

Another piece putting forth the KKK version of the Second Amendment: "state militias". That view was smashed by the Fourteenth Amendment, a primary purpose of which was to let everyone know that the right to keep and bear arms was an individual right held by all citizens -- so the southern states couldn't use their state militias to go around disarming (and then assaulting) blacks.


BTW, if you think the U.S. military would fire on American citizens, you've given up on American anyway and already surrendered to a total police state.


BTW #2, that article is so full of falsehoods it's disgusting. Two, for examples: yes, there were machine guns at the time of the writing of the Constitution (so the piece opens with a falsehood); no, the Supreme Court decisions in 2008 and 2010 were not the first times the Court recognized the Second as protecting an individual right (it's listed at least a dozen times as an individual right in SCOTUS decisions).

The gun haters have to rewrite history to make their case.

 

[Kulindahr]

^^ Exactly. And the belief that the purpose of the 2nd amendment is there to protect against government would also enable the crazies to carry 50 mm machine guns mounted on their cars, drive tanks down the street, and have GPS guided bombs? It's a stupid reason advocated by the "we all should carry a gun" crowd.

What is more powerful than a gun is the smart phone you carry around in your pocket. All one has to do is watch what is happening in Israel or with the police abuses and that is how you deter a crazy government, crazy citizens, or sway public opinion. Why do you think North Korea and China don't allow Facebook? It's not because they dislike Mark Zuckerberg.

Do ordinary soldiers commonly go about with machine guns mounted on cars? Do the go about with machine guns at all?

Either deep ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation lie behind that argument -- to "keep arms" did not apply to crew-served weapons (actually there was an exception if you were a businessman with substantial property to protect -- an interesting twist that let merchant ships and warehouses and even what we today would call ranches have small cannon and the time's version of a machine gun).

 

[Kulindahr]

True with plenty of space to engrave the thousands of new names that will be added over the years. All of the gun violence in my Country makes me ashamed.

Be ashamed of Congress: Article I Section 8 specifies their authority to do something, and almost no one in either party is interested.

Ben Franklin's lament that God would have sent a famine, or pestilence, or worse, but must truly have hated America because what He gave us was Congress is even more true today.

 

[Kulindahr]

The Gun-Rental Loophole (Politico; August 2014)

The Tragic Insanity Of Gun Ranges (ThinkProgress; August 2014)

I've never quite figured out where gun ranges as a business fit into the militia model the Framers used in the Constitution. While they were entirely aware that progress in weapons was inevitable, and so wouldn't be terribly surprised at the differences in today's personal weapons, I suspect that they would have found the idea of gun ranges quite strange -- but then they expected that everyone would be armed and probably belong to an organization where shooting would come with training and discipline (much more like the Swiss model than ours).

The loudest complaints in this situation come from gun range owners, though: as the Think Progress article noted, the law doesn't ALLOW them to do background checks for rentals! It's quite parallel to the gun show situation, where for years private sellers have wanted to be able to get an NICS check done, but the law didn't allow them to (giving politicians the opportunity to decide there was a "loophole"... which they made themselves). Just as many gun shows have figured out a work-around (the earliest was to require all sales at a show to go through a licensed dealer; a private seller would technically sell his gun to a dealer, who would then do a background check and re-sell it to the buyer), some gun ranges have come up with their own: they don't rent, but they do sell a gun, and just buy it back for a slightly lesser amount later in the day -- since they're selling it, they get to do an NICS check (so far, I haven't heard that the feds have complained that the same guns keep getting sold to people and bought back on a regular basis).

 

[Kulindahr]

Someone mentioned that our phones and tablets are powerful weapons. If the TPP passes Congress, that will no longer be true: internet and phone providers will be required to spy on us for the government and pass on any "suspicious" communications. What's "suspicious", of course, will depend on how prosecutors are feeling, since any citizen at random ca now be picked from a street and convicted of federal felonies at will (read Three Felonies a Day).

 

[opinterph]

… to "keep arms" did not apply to crew-served weapons

I remember that line of reasoning from one or more threads in the past. I can’t recall how the theory was developed and put forth as a matter of fact. Please remind me.

GPS guided bombs?

Bullets are actually relatively small missiles.

I imagine that so-called “smart bullets” are not regarded as crew-served weapons. At any rate (and perhaps looking forward technologically), it makes me wonder if measuring what specific type firearm devices citizens have the right to carry should be determined according to what members of the military carry.