Twenty-six people are now dead in Newton, Conn, 20 of them little children in the Sandy Hook Grade School. Shot dead by a 20-year-old man armed with high-load magazine pistols, those handy rapid-fire guns with their quick-load clips --such a useful weapon when you need to mow down little kids in huge numbers.
The President wiped away a small tear and called for a national dialogue. Congressmen called for a "conversation" about guns. The NRA placed a few leash-jerking calls to their wholly owned Congresspeople, making sure they're locked down tight. A few people even called for placing more guns in the schools, arming teachers and principles. Heck, why not carry permits for the kids.
Gun registrations upped as Santa's Wish List spiked to include the buying MORE guns for Christmas. (The perfect gift! Be sure to include lots of high-load magazines.) Pundits went on the air to ask, "How many kids must die before America comes to her senses?" ignoring the fact that Americans love their guns more than they do their children, so the number of kids dying is limitless. Twenty? Forty? One hundred? Not a problem. Plus, America's highly competitive and right now, this killer failed to top the number killed at Virginia Tech rampage, so that record still needs to be beaten. Twenty kids murdered only made it the second highest deadly rampage. Not good enough.
All the boo-hooing will go on for a few days, our fake "national mourning," that makes us feel good while doing nothing to solve the problem. Then it will be back to the same-old.
Except for the families in Newton. And they don't count.
Happy Holidays.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
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11 comments:
Apparently the guns used were all handguns, "legal" and belonged to the mom. To ban assault rifles etc makes sense, but I can't see the day when Americans are not allowed to own guns of any kind. Don't know the solution to this.
"But to think that somehow gun control.......or increased gun control......is the answer, in my view, that would have to be proven".
That was our Senile Senator McCain commenting last year, when a Norwegian right-wing extremist slaughtered 77 people in a nightmare attack using an AR-15 with a 100-round magazine.
For every complex problem he seems to have an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong (H.L. Mencken).
Shirley Montague-Devine
"I agree on all points. Further, letting someone with Mental Health issues loose in the community whether he is depressed, Alzheimers, etc is extremely dangerous. The killer in Conn. was depressed, brilliant, never committed a crime. Mental Health is a serious & dangerous issue. I fear for the community. Someone rushed to judgement. There are 3 schools within reasonable distance of the Taylors."
Shirley Montague-Devine
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I agree on all points. Further, letting someone with Mental Health issues loose in the community whether he is depressed, Alzheimers, etc is extremely dangerous. The killer in Conn. was depressed, brilliant, never committed a crime. Mental Health is a serious & dangerous issue. I fear for the community. Someone rushed to judgement. There are 3 schools within reasonable distance of the Taylors.
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2012/12/13/2327159/montana-de-oro-suicide-taylor.html#storylink=cpy
Am I seeing this correctly? Did she just compare George Taylor to the Sandy Hill shooter? Disgusting!
Sandra sez:"Apparently the guns used were all handguns, "legal" and belonged to the mom."
The story is changing as more information comes out. It seems now that most of the shooting was done with the assault rifle. The picture of the shooter and his Mom will start emerging slowly. The author of "Columbine" (A brilliant if harrowing book about the Columbine shooting) has repeatedly stressed how wrong the initial narrative was about Columbine. I suspect the same false narrative is out there now and will change as more info comes in.
One question remains unanswered: Why do we allow military arms on our civilian streets? You don't hunt with those guns. And how many homes need protections from hoards of Chinese soldiers coming over the walls in assault formation? Apparently we have militarized our civil lives, which is really interesting. Armed for assault waves even as we watch a movie or go out to dinner.
Re Shirley's comment: Think she's trying to connect the Taylor tragedy with the Sandy Point killing in order to make the point that deranged people are often capable of terrible behavior. Which is another issue we don't deal with very well: mental illness.
Which is apt, considering that I believe we are a seriously deranged nation, armed to the teeth, full of fury and paranoia, gobbling anti-depressants by the armload, loading our kids up with pills so they'll sit still in school, a country with a crappy mental health system,(the lack of services in this County is well known to anyone who's tried to get a loved one help), a nation seething with an unquiet mind, and, did I already note, armed to the teeth?
And we wonder why we keep having these mass shootings? The wonder is we don't have more.
As for what we can do, well, banning and having a buy-back of all military style weapons would be a start. (And after D-day if you're caught with one, you do serious jail time.) Ditto regarding any and all high load magazines and semi-automatics. A good old .45 revolver will work just fine on burglars. Ditto a shotgun. Both those will put very large holes in the middle of a bad guy climbing in your window. Anything more than that moves out of the realm of "self defense" and into something that needs 'splaining. Maybe to a mental health professional?
Yes, we surely don't need machine guns to protect our homes & property from thieves and the mentally disturbed.
Hopefully, Congress & the NRA will now be motivated to compromise as you suggest, but not to the extreme degree that occurred in the UK.
During the years which the British gov't took away most gun rights, the notion that a citizen had the right to armed self-defence during a home invasion came to be seen as vigilantism.
One poor bugger in Britain was convicted (in 2000) and is now serving a life term for blasting a couple of felons that broke into his home for the third time.
His so-called crime was using an unregistered shotgun and taking the law in his own hands!
We certainly don't want to go to the "extreme degree that occurred in the UK," where in 2011 there were 58 murders by firearm, compared to 8,775 in this country. No, we certainly don't want to go there, do we.
Besides Ann, we don't have a gun problem, or a crime problem, or a violence problem, we have a God problem. Just ask Mike Huckabee. If we didn't kick God out of our schools and communities, according to the Huck, He would have been right there, I guess defecting the bullets with His super-shield or whatever. So God's the problem. Not guns. And there you have it.
Ah, yes. Mike Huckabee. Well, bless his little 'ol heart. sigh.
There are a couple of basic questions we all need to answer, as a nation. How many dead kids are needed before we actually get serious about the statistics regarding gun deaths? And do something serious about those numbers?
And is it really necessary for our citizens to be armed with military weapons? Is the average Joe facing home invasion by a cohort of Chinese soldiers en mass? If the answer is no, then all high-fire, military-style weapons need to go. If Dirty Harry is right, and a .45 revolver will blow a man's head clean off, then a individual load (no quick change hi-load clips allowed) revolver will "defend" a man's castle just fine, thank you. And give victims of a crazy, a few seconds of reload to either get away or take him down, which is out of the question if he's got a 30 bullet magazine and a 10 second reload.
This country is sick and it isn't because prayers aren't allowed in the schools.
It's under a second to reload, somewhat more for the bulkier 150 rounds. Full Auto Conversion kits for the "Reduced to semi auto" legal to sell assault rifles are apparently very easy to get.
There is a slow increase in the incidents per year. I'm sure its due to the ideation of the "going out in a hail of bullets", that is reinforced in turn by the media's barrage of platitudes in the need to take advantage of temporarily increased ratings.
It's interesting to note that in the league of shame, California has the highest rate of gun crimes in the nation, 1,220 per 100,000, about double that of Texas which came in second @ 699, Pennsylvania 470 and New York 445.
With respect to violent crime rates, surprisingly the UK leads the planet with 2,034 per 100,000, South Africa 1,609, Canada 935, USA 466 and Australia 92 .
Fog: Your first statistic doesn't match your second. Calif shows a 1,220 per 100,000 for a gun crime? doesn't match USA- 466 per 100,000. ??? Which is right. Either way, it's waaaaaaayyyy too high.
Alon: certainly there's copycats and what was unthinkable years ago seem now routine with only the numbers of dead changing.
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