whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet."
[snark] I'm going to bomb an anti-abortion group in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He demands aborted fetus flesh, dammit! [/snark]
All snarkiness aside, I hope you can acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of Christians would condemn said hypothetical bombing/shooting of an abortion clinic, and be embarassed at the mention of it.
Islam, to my knowledge, is the only religion that violent acts in its name (i.e., Jihad ) invokes thousands cheering in the streets, even when it is civilian men, women or children who just happened to be standing there when the bomb went off.
Back on topic I just saw a news report (on Neil Cavuto) that a neighbor of the Lanza's disclosed that the mother had said it was becoming too difficult for her to deal with her autistic son's rages and tantrums, and she was about to have him committed. Which he had just become aware of, and angered him greatly.
Adam Lanza was also very jealous of his mother's time spent as a substitute teacher caring of children at the school. So the slaughter was apparently in his mind slaughter and payback for her time he percieved the school and children to take away from him.
I don't know if they found this only from interviewing friends and neighbors, or possibly getting information from the family computer, or staff at the institution who disclosed or verified this.
NEWTOWN, Conn. – The gunman who slaughtered 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school may have snapped because his mother was planning to commit him to a psychiatric facility, according to a lifelong resident of the area who was familiar with the killer’s family and several of the victims’ families.
Adam Lanza, 20, targeted Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown after killing his mother early Friday because he believed she loved the school “more than she loved him,” said Joshua Flashman, 25, who grew up not far from where the shooting took place. Flashman, a U.S. Marine, is the son of a pastor at an area church where many of the victims' families worship.
“From what I've been told, Adam was aware of her petitioning the court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed," Flashman told FoxNews.com. "Adam was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off.”
A senior law enforcement official involved in the investigation confirmed that Lanza's anger at his mother over plans for “his future mental health treatment” is being looked at as a possible motive for the deadly shooting.
Flashman was told Nancy Lanza had begun filing paperwork to get conservatorship over her troubled son, but that could not be confirmed because a court official told FoxNews.com such records are sealed. The move would have been necessary for her to gain the legal right to commit an adult to a hospital or psychiatric facility against his will. A competency hearing had not yet been held.
Adam Lanza attended the Sandy Hook School as a boy, according to Flashman, who said Nancy Lanza had volunteered there for several years. Two law enforcement sources said they believed Nancy Lanza had been volunteering with kindergartners at the school. Most of Lanza's victims were first graders sources believe Nancy Lanza may have worked with last year.
Flashman said Nancy Lanza was also good friends with the school’s principal and psychologist—both of whom were killed in the shooting rampage.
"Adam Lanza believed she cared more for the children than she did for him, and the reason he probably thought this [was the fact that] she was petitioning for conservatorship and wanted to have him committed," Flashman said. "I could understand how he might perceive that—that his mom loved him less than she loved the kids, loved the school. But she did love him. But he was a troubled kid and she probably just couldn’t take care of him by herself anymore."
The Washington Post reported that the distraught mother had considered moving with her son to Washington state, where she had found a school she thought could help him. Either way, according to Flashman, Nancy Lanza was at her wit's end.
A separate neighborhood source also told FoxNews.com that Nancy Lanza had come to the realization she could no longer handle her son alone. She was caring for him full-time, but told friends she needed help. She was planning to have him involuntarily hospitalized, according to the source, who did not know if she had taken formal steps.
Multiple sources told FoxNews.com Adam Lanza suffered from Asperger’s syndrome , a form of autism, and other unspecified mental and emotional problems.
Adam Lanza has also been described by those who knew him as highly intelligent, and a spokesman for Western Connecticut State University told The Associated Press he took college classes there when he was 16, earning a 3.26 grade point average and excelling at a computer course.
Alan Diaz, 20, who was friends with Adam Lanza at Newtown High School, said the [Adaam] Lanza he knew was ill-at-ease socially, but not a monster.
"He was a wicked smart kid," Diaz told FoxNews.com by email. "When I first met him, he wouldn't even look at you when you tried to talk to him. Over the year I knew him, he became used to me and my other friends, he eventually could have full conversations with us.
"I've heard him laugh, he has even comforted me once in a hard time I had," Diaz said. “A big part of me wishes I never dropped contact with him after he left high school, felt like I could have done something."
Flashman said nobody will completely understand why Adam did what he did.
“No one can explain Adam Lanza besides God and Adam Lanza, and I don’t even think Adam Lanza could explain Adam Lanza, to be honest with you.”
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet."
In the wake of a monstrous crime like a madman's mass murder of defenseless women and children at the Newtown, Conn., elementary school, the nation's attention is riveted on what could have been done to prevent such a massacre.
Luckily, some years ago, two famed economists, William Landes at the University of Chicago and John Lott at Yale, conducted a massive study of multiple victim public shootings in the United States between 1977 and 1995 to see how various legal changes affected their frequency and death toll.
Landes and Lott examined many of the very policies being proposed right now in response to the Connecticut massacre: waiting periods and background checks for guns, the death penalty and increased penalties for committing a crime with a gun.
None of these policies had any effect on the frequency of, or carnage from, multiple-victim shootings. (I note that they did not look at reforming our lax mental health laws, presumably because the ACLU is working to keep dangerous nuts on the street in all 50 states.)
Only one public policy has ever been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.
The effect of concealed-carry laws in deterring mass public shootings was even greater than the impact of such laws on the murder rate generally.
Someone planning to commit a single murder in a concealed-carry state only has to weigh the odds of one person being armed. But a criminal planning to commit murder in a public place has to worry that anyone in the entire area might have a gun.
You will notice that most multiple-victim shootings occur in "gun-free zones" -- even within states that have concealed-carry laws: public schools, churches, Sikh temples, post offices, the movie theater where James Holmes committed mass murder, and the Portland, Ore., mall where a nut starting gunning down shoppers a few weeks ago.
Guns were banned in all these places. Mass killers may be crazy, but they're not stupid.
If the deterrent effect of concealed-carry laws seems surprising to you, that's because the media hide stories of armed citizens stopping mass shooters. At the Portland shooting, for example, no explanation was given for the amazing fact that the assailant managed to kill only two people in the mall during the busy Christmas season.
It turns out, concealed-carry-holder Nick Meli hadn't noticed that the mall was a gun-free zone. He pointed his (otherwise legal) gun at the shooter as he paused to reload, and the next shot was the attempted mass murderer killing himself. (Meli aimed, but didn't shoot, because there were bystanders behind the shooter.
In a nonsense "study" going around the Internet right now, Mother Jones magazine claims to have produced its own study of all public shootings in the last 30 years and concludes: "In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun."
This will come as a shock to people who know something about the subject.
The magazine reaches its conclusion by simply excluding all cases where an armed civilian stopped the shooter: They looked only at public shootings where four or more people were killed, i.e., the ones where the shooter wasn't stopped.
If we care about reducing the number of people killed in mass shootings, shouldn't we pay particular attention to the cases where the aspiring mass murderer was prevented from getting off more than a couple rounds?
It would be like testing the effectiveness of weed killers, but refusing to consider any cases where the weeds died.
In addition to the Portland mall case, here are a few more examples excluded by the Mother Jones methodology:
-- Mayan Palace Theater, San Antonio, Texas, this week: Jesus Manuel Garcia shoots at a movie theater, a police car and bystanders from the nearby China Garden restaurant; as he enters the movie theater, guns blazing, an armed off-duty cop shoots Garcia four times, stopping the attack. Total dead: Zero.
-- Winnemucca, Nev., 2008: Ernesto Villagomez opens fire in a crowded restaurant; concealed carry permit-holder shoots him dead. Total dead: Two. (I'm excluding the shooters' deaths in these examples.)
-- Appalachian School of Law, 2002: Crazed immigrant shoots the dean and a professor, then begins shooting students; as he goes for more ammunition, two armed students point their guns at him, allowing a third to tackle him. Total dead: Three.
-- Santee, Calif., 2001: Student begins shooting his classmates -- as well as the "trained campus supervisor"; an off-duty cop who happened to be bringing his daughter to school that day points his gun at the shooter, holding him until more police arrive. Total dead: Two.
-- Pearl High School, Mississippi, 1997: After shooting several people at his high school, student heads for the junior high school; assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieves a .45 pistol from his car and points it at the gunman's head, ending the murder spree. Total dead: Two.
-- Edinboro, Pa., 1998: A student shoots up a junior high school dance being held at a restaurant; restaurant owner pulls out his shotgun and stops the gunman. Total dead: One.
By contrast, the shootings in gun-free zones invariably result in far higher casualty figures -- Sikh temple, Oak Creek, Wis. (six dead); Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. (32 dead); Columbine High School, Columbine, Colo. (12 dead); Amish school, Lancaster County, Pa. (five little girls killed); public school, Craighead County, Ark. (five killed, including four little girls).
All these took place in gun-free zones, resulting in lots of people getting killed -- and thereby warranting inclusion in the Mother Jones study.
If what we care about is saving the lives of innocent human beings by reducing the number of mass public shootings and the deaths they cause, only one policy has ever been shown to work: concealed-carry laws. On the other hand, if what we care about is self-indulgent grandstanding, and to hell with dozens of innocent children being murdered in cold blood, try the other policies.
I didn't even know about that 'concealed-carry at the mall' shit.
I watched Martin Bashir on MSNBC today. It was comedy gold the way he cited exactly what Ann Coulter described, and selectively omitted the facts in exactly the way Ann Coulter described above.
It has become axiomatic that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. In the case of the first responders to the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, it was 20 minutes, to be exact.
That’s the picture that is emerging from the 911 calls from that terrible day. Twenty minutes. I have tried in vain to imagine my 7-year-old grandson, his defenseless classmates and their equally defenseless teacher being shot to death one by one while waiting 20 minutes for police to arrive. It is a scenario too terrible to conjure in my mind. To imagine local law enforcement personnel taking a full one-third of an hour to respond to such a monstrous event is infuriating. And yet, there it is. Those who wish to protect themselves and their loved ones in almost any situation should not depend on government. How many times have we seen it before?
On September 11, 2001, government failed to protect the unsuspecting victims on those four airplanes, as well as those on the ground. On Flight 93, it was courageous passengers, taking matters into their own hands, who stopped those Islamist monsters from making that day even more infamous.
In September 2005, government — federal, state and local — completely failed the people of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina flooded the city’s poorest section. Those who were willing and able to take care of themselves and their families were spared. Many of those who counted on government simply perished.
Even the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last September, was a case study in brave volunteers, not government — especially not this government — making a difference.
And in every mass shooting, in every school or other public place, in every corner of this country, government has betrayed the very people it is sworn to protect, usually by declaring a “gun-free zone” or some other absurd control on the right of private citizens to render protection for themselves, their families and their neighbors.
On October 16, 1991, in Killeen, Texas, an assailant drove his pickup truck through the front window of the Luby’s Cafeteria. He then shot 50 people, killing 23 of them, before turning the gun on himself. Two of those victims were the elderly parents of Suzanna Hupp, whose revolver was useless to her because it was 100 feet away in the glove compartment of her car. Hupp later was elected to the Texas Legislature on a platform of allowing Texans to carry concealed handguns, legislation she successfully pushed through and which then-Governor George W. Bush signed into law.
On April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, two misfit high school students decided to murder as many of their teachers and classmates as possible. Their subsequent rampage — again carried out in gun-free zone — left 13 innocent victims dead.
On April 16, 2007, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech), a lone gunman shot and killed 32 people, wounding 17 others. Another school, another gun-free zone.
A few months later, just before Christmas, on December 5, 2007, in Omaha, Nebraska, a 19-year-old loner walked into the Von Maur department store at the Westroads Shopping Center and murdered eight innocent shoppers. As I wrote in a column at the time, “This individual looked at the ‘no concealed weapons’ sign and read, ‘Murderers welcome here. Please come in and shoot as many people as you like. No one here is capable of stopping you. Even our mall security officers are not armed.’”
January 8, 2011, at a Tucson, Arizona, supermarket, 6 people were murdered and 13 others wounded, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who miraculously survived a bullet through her brain.
July 20, 2012, Aurora, Colorado, in a movie theater that does not allow law-abiding citizens to carry their licensed, concealed firearms, 70 people were shot, 12 of them fatally, by a single shooter.
And now, most recently, we have Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, with its horrendous toll of 26 dead — 20 of them 6 and 7-year-old children. As usual, no one there was allowed the tools to protect them. One of the teachers reportedly huddled with her students in hiding and assured them, “The bad guys are here now. We just have to wait for the good guys to get here.”
Sadly, the good guys didn’t arrive for 20 minutes.
I'd agree that it pays to be armed and have the option to defend yourself.
You can still keep your distance and wait for the cops to arrive. But have the ability to protect yourself if they don't.
We just had a little kid kill his brother with one of his dad's guns. More guns isn't always the solution and articles that promote it leave out all the accidental shootings & deaths that happen like that one. Like anything else it's not a black & white issue.
They're just as hazardous, if not moreso, than firearms. More people die from car accidents everyday than from weapon malfunctions. The logical step, from your point of view, would be to increase regulations when it comes to vehicles as well as restrict the sale of certain types of cars that don't meet your chosen standard of engine power (analogous to rifles and high capacity clips).
You can make some comparisons but you could do that with almost anything.
My main reason for posting about the shooting is I've seen so many of these one sided pro-gun articles that omit all the accidental deaths that happen because somebody had a gun.
We just had a little kid kill his brother with one of his dad's guns. More guns isn't always the solution and articles that promote it leave out all the accidental shootings & deaths that happen like that one. Like anything else it's not a black & white issue.
I think it should be a law that you have to keep a lock on your gun to prevent it from being fired when you are not carrying it, especially when there are children or teenagers in the house who can find them in the closet. And that if someone does not secure their weapons, and they result in killing someone, that the owner is accountable for not securing the weapon, that allowed the crime to occur.
Not banning weapons across the board, but legally requiring gun-owners to personally be responsible for securing their weapons.
Cars are just as dangerous as guns, in the hands of someone using it irresponsibly, on drugs, alcohol, mentally agitated, texting, or otherwise driving carelessly.
I don't offhand know the statistics for auto deaths annually, but I'd wager they're at least tenfold higher than gun deaths.
My main point was those types of "everybody needs a gun" articles omit all the deaths that occur because more people do own guns. Why leave those gun deaths out?
You can get into all kinds of niches like "handgun violence", more broad "gun murders", and "accidental shootings", but together it was about 12,000 gun deaths for 2007.
Car deaths were about 37,000 for 2008, And 33,000 for 2009.
So auto deaths are about 3 to 4 times the number of gun deaths. And I didn't see the number, but elsewhere I saw that 2011 had the lowest number of auto deaths in decades.
The point being, cars are statistically more dangerous than guns. Which I believe was Pariah's point.
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
My main point was those types of "everybody needs a gun" articles omit all the deaths that occur because more people do own guns. Why leave those gun deaths out?
I don't believe I left anything out. That 12,000 number includes both gun murders and accidental deaths.
It not that everybody needs a gun, but that everyone should have the option --every adult-- to own a gun for self-defense. And short of banning guns, I advocated laws to force them to own and store guns responsibly, kept in safes or gun-locks when not carried as a concealed firearm. I think what I proposed is pretty reasonable, and I've never heard anyone from the Left or Right propose it.
We just had a little kid kill his brother with one of his dad's guns. More guns isn't always the solution and articles that promote it leave out all the accidental shootings & deaths that happen like that one. Like anything else it's not a black & white issue.
It seems to me all the laws to prevent this sort of thing are already in place. What happens is that the laws are ignored. What would make a ban on the future sale of assault rifles any different?
The gun control party really seems callous to me on this issue.
These guys are nuts, but they are not dummies. That is why they don't attack a police station, or their local armory. They attack where guns are not.
They are cowards who mostly shoot themselves when the police arrive most likely out of fear of a gun fight.
It takes two seconds or less to swap out a magazine, it takes police at least 3-10 MINUTES to just GET to the scene.
You can talk prevention, enact any gun control laws you like, but unfortunately the day will come that the system fails and another gunman will begin a mass murder.
So my question is; What do you do once the shooting starts?
Is your answer really to wait while a maniac is turning children into tiny corpses?
I don't think anybody is talking about just passing out pistols to the faculty and hoping for the best. It would at this time be a help to have somebody at the school for the sake of security that is trained in the use of and carries a firearm.
As for the story you mention, the gun didn't fail the household, the father failed his children by being irresponsible with his firearm.
Just like the Newtown shooter's mother failed her child, and her community by being irresponsible with her firearm.
This presents some interesting facts I didn't know, about Lanza's mother being a survivalist, and his father being a wealthy executive who provided for his wife and son, so that she didn't have to work. And that the father was a witness in a large lawsuit.
I agree that Obama manipulated the Sandy Hook shooting to push for tearing down the 2nd Amendment, which fortunately failed.
But beyond that, this video goes way the fuck off the deep end into Alex Jones territory. ("MK Ultra" is supposed to be some kind of widespread government mind control program since at least the 1970's using drugs to program people, and this is the first time I've seen it mentioned in the same breath with the Sirhan-Sirhan shooting of RFK.) But entertaining, to be sure.
The real and largely unexplored point in this topic is how Obama politicized and exploited this, and tried to turn it into a push to crush the 2nd Amendment. Which, fortunately, failed, and created some loss of political support for the Democrats. And even cost two anti-gun Colorado Representatives their seats in recall elections.
This political cartoon captures the full irony of this, in view of Obama's "Fast and Furious" scandal, Libya policy and Syria policy:
How this president gets even 37% support at this point just amazes me.
The issue of firearms has, at times, taken a high-profile position in United States culture and politics.[90] Mass shootings have continually generated political debates about gun control in the United States. There is a sharp divide between gun-rights proponents[91] and gun-control proponents.[92] This leads to intense political debate over the effectiveness of firearm regulation.[93] Democrats are more likely to support stricter gun control than are Republicans.[94]
Incidents of gun violence and self-defense also generate debate. In 2007 12,632 murders were committed using firearms and 613 persons were killed unintentionally.[95] Surveys have suggested that guns are used in crime deterrence or prevention around 2.5 million times a year in the United States.[96][97][98][99] The American Journal of Public Health conducted a study that concluded "the United States has higher rates of firearm ownership than do other developed nations, and higher rates of homicide. Of the 233,251 people who were homicide victims in the United States between 1988 and 1997, 68% were killed with guns, of which the large majority were handguns."[100] The ATF estimated in 1995 that the number of firearms available in the US was 223 million.[101]
They fail to note that while 19,000 people die of gun-related deaths annually, they are still less than 40% of gun deaths. The majority -- 61%-- of gun deaths are suicides.
A long article, with many details. Even police and paramedics trained to deal with violence had trouble dealing with seeing the aftermath of the crime.
It's difficult just reading the description of it.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court refused Tuesday to shield a major arms manufacturer from potential liability in the 2012 school shooting that left 26 students and educators dead in Newtown, Conn.
The justices' action allows a lawsuit filed by parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School victims to move forward at the state level, on the allegation that Remington Arms marketed the military-style rifle used in the mass shooting "for use in assaults against human beings."
The case tests the reach of a 2005 law passed by Congress to protect firearms manufacturers from being held liable for crimes committed by gun purchasers. That law was hailed by the National Rifle Association, but it included exceptions, including one for violating rules related to marketing and advertising.
Kind of deceptive, you have to read into it a ways to see they're talking about the Connecticut State Supreme Court, and not the U S Supreme Court.
Even with the CT Court's go-ahead on a lawsuit, that seems to me a very tough needle to thread. You have to prove that the gun manufacturer is directly responsible, despite that they only manufactured the guns, guns that then went through distributors and retailers, that the mom went through a background check and obtained multiple guns legally, that on top of that she trained her son how to use them responsibly. The obvious responsibility is with the mentally ill son, and the mother who had arms around her son, despite his clear Asbergers autism illness, and his anger at his mother for not being able to adequately care for him herself that made her plan to institutionalize him, that he knew about, that triggered his killing spree, first against his own mother, and then against the students she took care of at school.
To me this is just exploitation by Democrat/Left gun control fanatics. And perhaps judges who are gun control advocates as well.
Originally Posted By: article
Gun control advocates have said a victory by the families in the long-running dispute could lead to more lawsuits and damaging disclosures involving the firearms industry.
The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in March that Remington can be sued because of the way the AR-15-style Bushmaster rifle was marketed. The families' lawsuit contends that Remington glorified the gun in advertising aimed at young people, including in violent video games.
The Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza, was 20 when he shot and killed his mother at home, then went to the Newtown school and gunned down first-graders and educators. Lanza then killed himself.
I'm just not seeing a basis for a lawsuit here. The mother, not Adam Lanza, purchased the weapons, and went through multiple background checks to purchase each of them. She taught her son responsible use. There is no evidence that Adam Lanza ever saw the ads the families' lawyer cites. Again, a very tough needle to thread. Adam Lanza's motive was mental illness and personal revenge against his mother, not how tha guns were marketed. How the guns were marketed seems irrelevant, since his mother, not Adam Lanza, is the one who bought them. That seems to me to throw the case out of court from the outset.
Yeah, a bit more clearly phrased in the Reuters article. I still don't follow the logic of the lawsuit or why the U S Supreme Court would confirm the decision of the CT Supreme Court, as the mother purchased the guns, not Adam Lanza, and therefore the advertising marketing of the guns is irrelevant. Even if Adam Lanza saw the advertising, it would have to be proven that it is what motivated Adam Lanza, and yet his motives again are clearly mental illness and revenge against his mother.
I've increasingly seen that judges are often not the detached objective protectors of the written law we would like to believe they are. Perhaps it was ever thus, or perhaps they have increasingly become judges who cave in to public opinion rather than enforce the legal standard (John Roberts, in his written decision about Obamacare), or judges who twist the law to conform it to their own liberal ideology or identity politics (Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg), or as can be observed watching any number of episodes of Judge Judy, a judge can takes a personal dislike for a plaintiff or defendant and that colors their ruling.
I'm sure there are many good judges who believe in the rule of law and enforce it, just as there are good cops, good doctors, good teachers, and a select few who let their biases twist their decisions. Or even good judges who occasionally make bad decisions.
But I have to admit, I increasingly see the law as something often twisted by corrupt actors to conform to their personal agenda, whereas 15 or 20 years ago I had near-absolute confidence in its being uniformly and fairly enforced. Now I see it as quite often a tool of revolutionaries who have infiltrated the legal system.
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