Okay, i was gobsmacked by the latest mass shooting today. I have to state that I came from a family that had guns (sensibly locked up) and my dad taught me to shoot. While I would have been more interested in reruns of “Rhoda” I was a crack shot. I just have no interest in owning firearms. I also have no interest in denying firearms to people who want them. But I have to pause when another of these mass shootings happen. I can’t get a driver’s license without proving proficiency.
Sorry to be Debbie Downer, but a friend was a victim of gun violence (which she thankfully survived) and I think we we need to better address the idea that people should be able to possess firearms, but we need to weed uot the crazies.
End of rant..
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Guns definitely make it far easier to kill. That’s an indisputable truth. But 89 million gun owners didn’t kill anyone today. Or yesterday, or the day before. I certainly didn’t. Well over 300,000 have died in car crashes in the last decade; I’d have thought gun related deaths would have been greater than traffic deaths, since those gun deaths include suicides (which make up 60 percent of gun deaths). and accidents.
My 8th grade science teacher was beaten to death with a baseball bat. Ted Bundy raped, tortured and killed 30 women with nary a shot fired. Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono killed ten women in 4 months with their bare hands. (And dry cleaning fluids, but mostly their bare hands) Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 young men the same way. John Wayne Gacy killed almost twice as many as Dahmer (33), and he preferred strangling them, too. OJ Simpson managed to kill 2 people in less than 10 minutes without a gun. We also seem to have more than our fair share of sociopaths. There certainly needs to be one of the oft referenced “National Conversation” about why we crank out so many. I think in this age of 24 hour news, we’ll definitely see more and more copy cat crimes. We get that a lot here, too.
I think America definitely gets top prize for violent crime among civilized countries, and many of those crimes are gun related, and I get that a lot of people are afraid of guns, especially those from places where they aren’t allowed to have any.
But many parts of this country ARE still quite rural. If I am lucky and one of the four patrol cars for the entire county happens to be on my side of the county, they might get here in half an hour if the weather is good and the dirt roads aren’t muddy. If they’re in the central part, it’s an hour, and if they’re on the eastern edge, they will tell you to do what you have to do. (Not that we need to be told, and most of us don’t even bother calling)
We don’t have grizzlies, but we do have black bears, bobcats, coyotes, cougars, none of which I’d shoot unless absolutely necessary, as well as some meth cookers from Chicago, who I’d shoot in a heartbeat if they put one foot on my property. They broke in to our house when it was still vacant right after we bought our place, and the cops didn’t do a thing. They don’t have fingerprint kits, and we weren’t in the house when it happened, so there was no witnesses and we only have a judge and jury once a month, so they’re reluctant to charge anyone they have to house that long without rock solid evidence.
My neighbors across the road saw the truck parked right in the middle of the road in front of our place at 2 o’clock in the morning, and they knew our place was empty, and that we were in CA, so they called the sheriff, who informed them that it was not against the law to park, and that the deputy had already patrolled the area and was headed back the other way to finish his patrol.
And I absolutely understand all that; we have limited financial resources here. We can’t depend on getting help right away, nor would we want to. We enjoy our freedom and are proud of being able to take care of ourselves instead of cowering like a rat in a hole waiting for someone else to rescue us.
If one doesn’t like guns, one should simply move to Bermuda.
I’ve been trying to decide if I want to jump into the fray, and I guess I do. I also grew up in a household with guns. We were taught to respect them and use them as tools. My entire family are hunters and fill their freezers every fall, I don’t own a gun nor do I hunt, (although I feel like I should because I eat meat, but that is an entirely different conversation!) but I respect the rights of those who do. That being said, this country is effing batshit crazy! We need to have a real dialog about this epidemic. There is no need for anyone to own an assault rifle, you don’t use those to hunt anything but humans. We need to talk about background checks, screenings for potential buyers, the stranglehold the NRA has on our politicians and a whole host of other things, but our “Leaders” are afraid to touch it.
Remember when Obama was elected and people were freaking out about their guns being taken away? It didn’t happen, gun sales rose.
Please don’t let me hear another person say that we need MORE guns. ‘If only a good guy with a gun had been there, they would have stopped it.’ That’s a load of crap. I stayed out of this conversation when it came up last time. It was Tom’s post then too, and the horrible thing is that I don’t even remember which incident it was. Was it another school? It could have been one of the highway shootings, one of the cops murdered, a movie theatre or a church. That is the frequency with which these things happen and that is horribly sad and unacceptable.
Having been stalked by an ex cop for years, while every level of law enforcement covered it up, and the Dept of Justice told me they saw no need for an investigation, I can tell you that the US govt doesn’t want the extent of mental illness in this country recognized. Besides the cost to set up a truly effective, accessible treatment system, the military has always discouraged discussion of war trauma, of which we have plenty.
Research in the last 10 years shows that life threatening trauma, especially repeated trauma, causes genetic changes that cumulatively manifest as mental illnesses. (Think military, first responders, abused children and the severely impoverished.) These genetics are passed on to their children, who will likely experience their own traumas and additional genetic changes, and on and on.
So it’s easier for the government to scream for gun control than to admit how badly it’s messed up the treatment system – since the Kennedy administration. Gun control is partly the answer, but it doesn’t prevent wars from being declared by sociopathic politicians.
Sorry guys for the rant, but this info is out there, it’s just that politicians don’t want to have to deal with it. And it’s our survival at stake, since it’s only getting worse.
There is no scientific basis for anything in your second paragraph, hence the lack of citations. If the “info is out there” (that the Gubmint wants to keep from us, for reasons hinted at but not substantiated), you’d have referenced your source material.
As luck would have it, one CAN quantify the cumulative effects of, say, US imperialism, civil war, or environmental terrorism. None of these effects include changes in genetic markers that predict or cause insanity or madness. (Advances in medicine, streamlining and updating diagnostic methods, and investing in and expanding access to mental health programs will increase the likelihood of accurately identifying mental health problems and in getting care to those who need it. That is separate and distinct from claims that insanity is invariably caused by trauma and that that trauma can be genetically “inherited.”)
Madness exists throughout the world, as does trauma, the exploitation of children, exposure to carcinogens, and a criminal lack of worker’s rights and protections. There’s only one country in the world, however, that has school shootings every week, that is home to right-wing, anti-government terrorists who commit mass murders in the name of their boner or their god or their white supremacy or their tree o’ liberty.
By the by, the Yehuda paper you’re hinting at (theorizing but not proving the epigenetics of trauma from Holocaust survivors) has been debunked: it has not been replicated, only one generation was studied, the sample size was too small and inconsistent, there’s no indication what possible mechanism could account for transmitting the perceived “trauma,” and the notion of hypermethylation-as-trauma is borne out by the data and could be readily accounted for by environmental factors. It’s a poor study that was misinterpreted (to the point of pseudoscience) by the popular press.
Further, epigenetics “enthusiasts” would like people to believe that there’s been a substantial and causal link established between PTSD and specific forms of non-partnered / domestic violence (after excluding drug and alcohol abuse and access to mental health care and substance abuse programs), like mass murders. There is not.
So much hand-waving and grasping-at-straws, in order to avoid talking about gun control and licensing.
As a lawyer who has to go through security screenings for weapons every time I walk into a federal building, I am infuriated that the government refuses to do ANYTHING to control weapons except when it comes to protecting their own asses.
Everywhere else watches the U.S. in disbelief as guns have killed just over 280,000 citizens in the last decade. Horrible shootings like this happen in lots of countries but not with sickening regularity. We also watch with incredulity when your president is treated like a pariah for even trying to tackle the dominence of the NRA! Glad to see from comments that some people in this interest group feel differently.
No civilian needs a gun, period.
I mostly agree, except for those families who do still use them to put food on their table, or protecting yourself or your farm animals from marauding grizzly bears (is that even a thing?) out in some remote area, or other circumstances that 99.9% of American civilians won’t experience. Guns should be regulated into near extinction.
Guns should be regulated out of existence. If one is worried about grizzlies, one should sell the farm and move to Bermuda.
This aint’ no rant, this is reality.
It’s funny. I love horror films, I actually often enjoy stylized violence, a la Kill Bill, in the cinema, but in reality, the idea of a gun, in actual real life, is utterly horrifying. For most Europeans it is that way. The whole gunslinging, freedom of the wild west horse shit that has filtered down through the American psyche since the beginning is so alien. Stupid, in fact. That is the only correct word, in honesty.
I second this, having lived in northern New Mexico.
Well said, Tom.
I don’t believe in weapons. I think that the future of our planet/world/society depends on wisdom not on strength.
So fed up. If you are too and would like to work to getting some common sense gun laws please consider joining Moms Demand Action. http://momsdemandaction.org/take-action/
There’s no evidence the shooter was “a crazy.” He did, however, live in a town whose sheriff boasted that enforcing even minor gun control efforts (like background checks) was “unconstitutional” and that he wouldn’t obey federal and state mandates.
One of his online posts shown today on CNN was signed “Lithium_Love.” I think crazy is a darned safe bet. Even without the lithium reference, when was the last time a member of your family barged into a school and killed people? Look a bit different now?
And another referenced Nazi iron crosses. And he idolized, but didn’t quite understand, the IRA. So what? Not every malicious, cruel, inhumane, attention-seeking, wrathful act makes the actor insane. Creating a manifesto that references the fame of other mass murderers indicates reason, not madness.
That was the most measured rant I’ve ever read.
Obama is trying so hard to help the hardline gun toting USA see reason. We are watching in disbelief from over here,
Portia xx