Gun Legislation, Crime, and Events

[Crazy Cat Gentleman]

 

[pfife]

 

 

[Crazy Cat Gentleman]

 

[Crazy Cat Gentleman]

JFC

 

[Crazy Cat Gentleman]

 

[pfife]

This latest GOP childrens event is a total collapse of the conservative plan for dealing with a mass murderer.  Their ass is completely bare.   

Congress is well along the path of doing nothing.

[Crazy Cat Gentleman]

you forgot the sarcasm quotes around "plan".

or I guess those are probably implied at this point.

Edited May 28, 2022 by Crazy Cat Gentleman

[CMRivdogs]

Worth a read from Tim Miller

https://www.thebulwark.com/in-uvalde-the-most-enraging-press-conference-in-american-history/

Quote

In the coming days there will be a desire to obsess only over the unfathomable failures of those who were charged with keeping these kids safe. The poor teacher who left a door ajar. The MIA resource officer. The cops, excuse me—the SWAT Team—that posed on Facebook in tactical gear with weapons of war looking like they were prepared to head to the Donbas, but were apparently unequipped to take on a lone teenager who was slaughtering their town’s children.

But the main thing to take away from all of that is not that their failure can be reversed. It’s that in a nation with 130,000 schools there will always be some kind of human error when responding to an active shooter. God willing those errors won’t be as catastrophic as they were in Uvalde. But there will always be errors.

Parkland had an armed officer and the single point of entry that the “door control” crowd is now so obsessed with. Sandy Hook was breached by the killer firing through a window next to a locked security door. Santa Fe High School in Texas had put in place a school shooting plan with armed officers, before 10 were killed.

Can we develop better procedures for dealing with shooters in school? Probably. Schools have been wargaming these scenarios for years already, though. And yes, we can and should provide more funding for schools to help make them safer.

But when a child is able to access two assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of bullets—and are able to massacre a dozen innocents in the blink of an eye—then there is no level of door control or resource officer training that can reliably stop them.

There will always be a teacher or a kid who leaves a door open. There will always be a resource officer who is outmatched by the child Rambo with a military arsenal. There will always be a moment where kids are moving between classes, or to lunch, or to chapel, or to the football game, or to the bus and where all of the carefully designed safety precautions fall apart. And yes, there will always be fallible police officers scared for their own lives making split second—or in this case 3,600 seconds—calculations revealing that they are unfit for duty and should not be entrusted by their communities with all of that unused tactical gear.

So yes, absolutely, we should do anything in our power to make schools safer.

But the important takeaway from Uvalde shouldn’t be that next time we just need perfect cops, and unimpeachable protocols, and more competent “good guys with guns.” Time after time we’ve seen that this isn’t possible in the real world. The military understands that plans rarely survive first-contact with the enemy. The fetishists insisting that “guns don’t kill people, doors do,” do not.

The only way to actually protect these kids is to make it harder for their peers to get the deadly weapons that have allowed so many shooters to evade so many cops and so many safety procedures.

 

[pfife]

guns don't kill people, cyber gaming kills people

"cyber gaming"?

cyber gaming

got some real experts on the case here 

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, CMRivdogs said:

Worth a read from Tim Miller

https://www.thebulwark.com/in-uvalde-the-most-enraging-press-conference-in-american-history/

 

yup. And this is exactly what is going to happen. Obsession with the details will be the prime political distraction from the pro gun side to obfuscate the issue. What it comes down to is that there may be some perfect world in which America's weapons nutballs can have have their deadly high power toys without it turning into he country into the shambles that America is today, but it's utopia, you can/will never get to that world. It's much easier to just get rid of the stupid deadly toys to get back to some measure of a sane society.

Edited May 28, 2022 by gehringer_2

[pfife]

Imagine actually arguing that the founding fathers woulda been down w/ 4th graders getting slaughtered and then also hero worshiping those founding fathers.  sick shit

[pfife]

3 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

yup. And this is exactly what is going to happen. Obsession with the details will be the prime political distraction from the pro gun side to obfuscate the issue. What it comes down to is that there may be some perfect world in which America's weapons nutballs can have have their deadly high power toys without it turning into country into the shambles that America is today, but it's utopia, you can/will never get to that world. It's much easier to just get rid of the stupid deadly toys to get back to some measure of a sane society.

I think the discussion of the details also helps inform the purveyor of the next GOP Children's Event 

[pfife]

similarly, how many times did this 18 year old go through the drills meant to stop him?

[pfife]

2 minutes ago, pfife said:

similarly, how many times did this 18 year old go through the drills meant to stop him?

And.... if the shooters are learning from the drills how to defeat the drills, that would make those who are proponents of this strategy..... groomers. 

[chasfh]

19 hours ago, Archie said:

Why should I not be able to protect myself and my family?  This country is very dangerous and the democrats and their policies are to blame.  It will only get worse as long as they are in office.  I'm not too worried because there is no way they are taking guns from people.

Good lord, what kind of shit are you into so deep that you have to be heavily-armed to confront people intent on coming into your home and murdering you and your family??

[Tiger337]

51 minutes ago, pfife said:

guns don't kill people, cyber gaming kills people

"cyber gaming"?

cyber gaming

got some real experts on the case here 

He was playing wordle.  

[CMRivdogs]

I'm old enough to remember that when one or two people in the class misbehaved, the whole class was punished. And that was back in the "good old days  (50's and '60s). Same with employers, If one or two folks broke the rules, privileges were removed.

 Now the pampered employees of the NRA need to feel the same pain.

[CMRivdogs]

 

[chasfh]

The more I think about this, the more I’m coming around to the idea that TV shows and movies from Hollywood are partly to blame for this present state of political affairs regarding guns.

Not because I believe TV shows and movies are inspiring these shooters in the first place. I don’t believe that at all. Millions of people, including kids, watch these shows, and yet we don’t have millions of mass shooters going around causing deadly mayhem. As common as mass shootings are in the news, it’s still a few hundred or so per year, making it essentially a one in a million circumstance in a country of 330 million people with access to 400 million guns. 

I do believe, though, that it’s a problem how TV shows and movies make shootouts look so easy and manageable, where the cops always win the encounter and always within just a couple of minutes, the shooters always end up dying or apprehended, and the cops go unscathed, or at least are wounded only mildly in a way that preserves their pretty model faces for their next agency headshot. When people imagine police engaging armed criminals, it is the sanitized TV show and movie scenes they are playing in their heads, and not the chaotic, messy, bloody, deadly encounters that actually do occur (when cops actually engage, that is), since hardly anyone has ever seen a shootout live and in person.

That’s the part where millions of people watch these TV shows and movies, and while only a few hundred people perpetrate mass shootings each year, millions more people come away with the idea that when there is a mass shooting in a public place, the cops will swoop in and save the day—just like they see on the screen. That’s part of what I think is behind the political call for more police at schools and more guns in schools, and in fact all other public spaces. People weaned on these shows and movies think the shootouts are all very manageable, going all the way back to the days of the movie western.

We can’t legally stop Hollywood from making such shows and movies, and we can’t legally make them change the way they portray such scenes, since millions of people thrill to the sight of shootouts that seem dangerous for a minute until the good guys inevitably prevail, as required by emotionally-soft American audiences, and giving audiences exactly what they want is good business. So that’s probably not changing. But I bet that if Hollywood somehow showed less of this, or portrayed it in a way that showed how messy and chaotic and dangerous and deadly shootouts really are, even to the good guys with guns, people wouldn’t be as adamant, or blasé, about the idea that America should have even more guns being wielded in public spaces. 

[gehringer_2]

5 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I do believe, though, that it’s a problem how TV shows and movies make shootouts look so easy and manageable, where the cops always win the encounter and always within just a couple of minutes

you are spot on again. 

[chasfh]

10 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

I'm old enough to remember that when one or two people in the class misbehaved, the whole class was punished. And that was back in the "good old days  (50's and '60s). Same with employers, If one or two folks broke the rules, privileges were removed.

 Now the pampered employees of the NRA need to feel the same pain.

Isn’t the idea of punishing the whole group for the actions of an individual intended to inspire the group to wield their own brand of justice against the individual, out of sight and earshot of the authority figure? Not necessarily by pummeling them in their beds with bars of soap wrapped in hand towels, but still trying to divide the individuals in the group into factions so they can be conquered and controlled?

[gehringer_2]

This was written by John LeCarre 40yrs ago in 1980. It's stuck in my head ever since. It's a scene placed at night at the site the assassinated body of an old retired agent. The police inspector is walking LeCarre's spymaster - George Smiley, through the crime scene.

"Most people expect to be shot in the chest really, don't they, sir?" the Superintendent remarked brightly. He had learned that small talk sometimes eased the atmosphere on such occasions. "Your neat round bullet that drills a tasteful hole. That's what most people expect. Victim falls gently to his knees to the the tune of celestial choirs. It's the Telly that does it, I suppose. Whereas you real bullet these days can take off an arm or leg, so my friend in brown tell me."

The effect has been growing in the population pretty much ever since the the Hollywood Western and Gangster movies where every gun death depicted had to be in service the Hayes morality code. 

We are conditioned from the time we first turn on a television to associate the firing of guns with good outcomes - the good guys never die, the bad guys can never shoot straight, the right guns always win the day. The reality is that the firing of a gun in anger virtually never has good outcome for anybody.

[Jim Cowan]

I don't think it's Hollywood at all, I think it has to be something a lot deeper in your culture. 

[gehringer_2]

13 minutes ago, Jim Cowan said:

I don't think it's Hollywood at all, I think it has to be something a lot deeper in your culture. 

but when you say culture, I assume you are talking about what produces these guys, what Chasfh (I think)  and I are getting at is why enough of the larger public, who aren't all necessarily gun nuts, fall for the "good guy with a gun/I want a gun in my house to protect me", or even, "I'm OK if my neighbor wants a gun his house to protect him",  politics instead of realizing that they are chasing unicorns. True, this wouldn't even matter if guns were not so available here, it's a knock on effect but it influences the politics of why change doesn't happen, that's it harder to get a consensus even on the part of people who don't own guns to take away the guns of others.

Edited May 28, 2022 by gehringer_2

[Jim Cowan]

1 minute ago, gehringer_2 said:

but when you say culture, I assume you are talking about what produces these guys, what Chasfh (I think)  and I are getting at is why enough of the larger public, who aren't all necessarily gun nuts, fall for the "good guy with a gun/I want a gun in my house to protect me", or even, "I'm OK if my neighbor wants a gun his house to protect him",  politics instead of realizing that they are chasing unicorns. True, this wouldn't even matter if guns were not so available, it's a knock on effect but it influences the politics of why change doesn't happen.

And what I am thinking is that in the 1880's eastern newspapers were writing romanticized accounts of the lawlessness out west, and Buffalo Bill could tour those eastern cities to sold out crowds.