Why So Many Mass Shootings?

[Beetlegeuse]

Why So Many Mass ̶S̶h̶o̶o̶t̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ Murders?

Ask The Right Questions And You Might Find Out

Dennis Prager | Posted: Jun 04, 2019 12:01 AM

This past weekend, Americans learned of another mass shooting, this time by an employee who decided to murder as many of the people he had worked with for years as possible. As of this writing, the murder toll is 12 people.

Every American asks why. What was the killer's motive? When we read there is "no known motive," we are frustrated. Human beings want to make sense of life, especially of evil.

Liberals (in this regard, liberals' views are essentially as the same as leftists') are virtually united in ascribing these shootings to guns. Just this past weekend, in a speech in Brazil, former President Barack Obama told an audience:

"Our gun laws in the United States don't make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon any time -- without much, if any, regulation. They can buy (guns) over the internet. They can buy machine guns."

That the former president fabricated a series of falsehoods about the United States -- and maligned, on foreign soil, the country that twice elected him president -- speaks to his character and to the character of the American news media that have been completely silent about these falsehoods. But the main point here is that, like other liberals and leftists, when Obama addresses the subject of mass shootings -- in Brazil, he had been talking about the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 -- he talks about guns.

Yet, America had plenty of guns when its mass murder rate was much lower. Grant Duwe, a Ph.D. in criminology and director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, gathered data going back 100 years in his 2007 book, "Mass Murder in the United States: A History."

Duwe's data reveal:

In the 20th century, every decade before the 1970s had fewer than 10 mass public shootings. In the 1950s, for example, there was one mass shooting. And then a steep rise began. In the 1960s, there were six mass shootings. In the 1970s, the number rose to 13. In the 1980s, the number increased 2 1/2 times, to 32. And it rose again in the 1990s, to 42. As for this century, The New York Times reported in 2014 that, according to the FBI, "Mass shootings have risen drastically in the past half-dozen years."

Given the same ubiquity of guns, wouldn't the most productive question be what, if anything, has changed since the 1960s and '70s? Of course it would. And a great deal has changed. America is much more ethnically diverse, much less religious. Boys have far fewer male role models in their lives. Fewer men marry, and normal boy behavior is largely held in contempt by their feminist teachers, principals and therapists. Do any or all of those factors matter more than the availability of guns?

Let's briefly investigate each factor.

Regarding ethnic diversity, the countries that not only have the fewest mass murders but the lowest homicide rates as well are the least ethnically diverse -- such as Japan and nearly all European countries. So, too, the American states that have homicide rates as low as Western European countries are the least ethnically and racially diverse (the four lowest are New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maine and Idaho). Now, America, being the most ethnically and racially diverse country in the world, could still have low homicide rates if a) Americans were Americanized, but the left has hyphenated -- Balkanized, if you will -- Americans, and b) most black males grew up with fathers.

Regarding religiosity, the left welcomes -- indeed, seeks -- the end of Christianity in America (though not of Islam, whose robustness it fosters). Why don't we ask a simple question: What percentage of American murderers attend church each week?

Regarding boys' need for fathers, in 2008, then-Sen. Obama told an audience: "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools; and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."

Yet, the Times has published columns and "studies" showing how relatively unimportant fathers are, and more and more educated women believe this dangerous nonsense.

Then there is marriage: Nearly all men who murder are single. And their number is increasing.

Finally, since the 1960s, we have been living in a culture of grievance. Whereas in the past people generally understood that life is hard and/or they have to work on themselves to improve their lives, for half a century, the left has drummed into Americans' minds the belief that their difficulties are caused by American society -- in particular, its sexism, racism and patriarchy. And the more aggrieved people are the more dulled their consciences.

When you don't ask intelligent questions, you cannot come up with intelligent answers. So, then, with regard to murder in America, until Americans stop allowing the left to ask the questions, we will have no intelligent answers.

[Obs]

From the statistics the number of mass kilings has fell in half since the 90's at its peak.

This is not victims in the statistics just mass shootings.

[Beetlegeuse]

One statistic they always manage to leave out.

americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/the_lie_that_will_not_die_and_the_truth_about_blac k_mass_shooters.html

For some odd reason the forum won't accept me posting this as a hyperlink.

[Couchlockd]

That damn guy whom invented the MAXIM

He's the one we need to point fingers at.

And Eugene Stoner

Bad bad men

[Obs]

americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/the_lie_that_will_not_die_and_the_truth_about_blac k_mass_shooters.html

[Obs]

I read that first post a little closer.
It is a great post.

[almostgone]

Why So Many Mass Shootings?

Ask The Right Questions And You Might Find Out

Dennis Prager | Posted: Jun 04, 2019 12:01 AM

This past weekend, Americans learned of another mass shooting, this time by an employee who decided to murder as many of the people he had worked with for years as possible. As of this writing, the murder toll is 12 people.

Every American asks why. What was the killer's motive? When we read there is "no known motive," we are frustrated. Human beings want to make sense of life, especially of evil.

Liberals (in this regard, liberals' views are essentially as the same as leftists') are virtually united in ascribing these shootings to guns. Just this past weekend, in a speech in Brazil, former President Barack Obama told an audience:

"Our gun laws in the United States don't make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon any time -- without much, if any, regulation. They can buy (guns) over the internet. They can buy machine guns."

That the former president fabricated a series of falsehoods about the United States -- and maligned, on foreign soil, the country that twice elected him president -- speaks to his character and to the character of the American news media that have been completely silent about these falsehoods. But the main point here is that, like other liberals and leftists, when Obama addresses the subject of mass shootings -- in Brazil, he had been talking about the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 -- he talks about guns.

Yet, America had plenty of guns when its mass murder rate was much lower. Grant Duwe, a Ph.D. in criminology and director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, gathered data going back 100 years in his 2007 book, "Mass Murder in the United States: A History."

Duwe's data reveal:

In the 20th century, every decade before the 1970s had fewer than 10 mass public shootings. In the 1950s, for example, there was one mass shooting. And then a steep rise began. In the 1960s, there were six mass shootings. In the 1970s, the number rose to 13. In the 1980s, the number increased 2 1/2 times, to 32. And it rose again in the 1990s, to 42. As for this century, The New York Times reported in 2014 that, according to the FBI, "Mass shootings have risen drastically in the past half-dozen years."

Given the same ubiquity of guns, wouldn't the most productive question be what, if anything, has changed since the 1960s and '70s? Of course it would. And a great deal has changed. America is much more ethnically diverse, much less religious. Boys have far fewer male role models in their lives. Fewer men marry, and normal boy behavior is largely held in contempt by their feminist teachers, principals and therapists. Do any or all of those factors matter more than the availability of guns?

Let's briefly investigate each factor.

Regarding ethnic diversity, the countries that not only have the fewest mass murders but the lowest homicide rates as well are the least ethnically diverse -- such as Japan and nearly all European countries. So, too, the American states that have homicide rates as low as Western European countries are the least ethnically and racially diverse (the four lowest are New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maine and Idaho). Now, America, being the most ethnically and racially diverse country in the world, could still have low homicide rates if a) Americans were Americanized, but the left has hyphenated -- Balkanized, if you will -- Americans, and b) most black males grew up with fathers.

Regarding religiosity, the left welcomes -- indeed, seeks -- the end of Christianity in America (though not of Islam, whose robustness it fosters). Why don't we ask a simple question: What percentage of American murderers attend church each week?

Regarding boys' need for fathers, in 2008, then-Sen. Obama told an audience: "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools; and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."

Yet, the Times has published columns and "studies" showing how relatively unimportant fathers are, and more and more educated women believe this dangerous nonsense.

Then there is marriage: Nearly all men who murder are single. And their number is increasing.

Finally, since the 1960s, we have been living in a culture of grievance. Whereas in the past people generally understood that life is hard and/or they have to work on themselves to improve their lives, for half a century, the left has drummed into Americans' minds the belief that their difficulties are caused by American society -- in particular, its sexism, racism and patriarchy. And the more aggrieved people are the more dulled their consciences.

When you don't ask intelligent questions, you cannot come up with intelligent answers. So, then, with regard to murder in America, until Americans stop allowing the left to ask the questions, we will have no intelligent answers.

Covered up at work so can't make a lengthy post.

Re: the attack on Christianity by the left. I'm currently working on reading this in my limited spare time. Very interesting.

https://www.amazon.com/DARK-AGENDA-D.../dp/163006114X

Regarding the "perceived" increase in shootings, very few people are raised to respect others in the way that many of us were taught to.

Awkwardly worded, but you get my drift.

[Obs]

This is an explanation of the current social engineering.

[Obs]

Destabilize demoralize and destroy.

[Beetlegeuse]

I had a poly sci professor in college who was a bleeding heart liberal but uncommonly bright and one of the nicest humans I ever met. He'd been a glider pilot on D-Day, but that's a story for another day. One of the things he taught me is that over time crime always appears to get worse, but the appearance doesn't always reflect the truth.

He explained that if you had 10 little country towns, each with a population of a thousand, and each of those towns had a town drunk who got loaded every Saturday night and stood on the town square hanging onto a lamp post and singing bawdy songs, the townfolk would just call it "local color." But if you had one small city of 10,000 with 10 town drunks who all gathered on the town square every Saturday night to sing bawdy songs, the townfolk would call it a crime spree. The "crime rate" would be exactly the same in either case, it just becomes more apparent (and more worrying) when you clump it all together.

So this perception is a natural consequence of cities getting larger. Plus the criminal types realize they're harder to make out in a crowded city than if they lived in Mayberry.

EDIT:
And oh by the way, the largest mass murder in US history before 2017 Las Vegas took place more than 90 years ago and didn't involve a single firearm.

[Obs]

I had a poly sci professor in college who was a bleeding heart liberal but uncommonly bright and one of the nicest humans I ever met. He'd been a glider pilot on D-Day, but that's a story for another day. One of the things he taught me is that over time crime always appears to get worse, but the appearance doesn't always reflect the truth.

He explained that if you had 10 little country towns, each with a population of a thousand, and each of those towns had a town drunk who got loaded every Saturday night and stood on the town square hanging onto a lamp post and singing bawdy songs, the townfolk would just call it "local color." But if you had one small city of 10,000 with 10 town drunks who all gathered on the town square every Saturday night to sing bawdy songs, the townfolk would call it a crime spree. The "crime rate" would be exactly the same in either case, it just becomes more apparent (and more worrying) when you clump it all together.

So this perception is a natural consequence of cities getting larger. Plus the criminal types realize they're harder to make out in a crowded city than if they lived in Mayberry.

EDIT:
And oh by the way, the largest mass murder in US history before 2017 Las Vegas took place more than 90 years ago and didn't involve a single firearm.

Perfectly put.
Cant get people to understand that the we have enough laws regarding every damn thing.

[C27H40O3]

One statistic they always manage to leave out.

americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/the_lie_that_will_not_die_and_the_truth_about_blac k_mass_shooters.html

For some odd reason the forum won't accept me posting this as a hyperlink.

Here you go:
http://Www.americanthinker.com/artic..._shooters.html


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[XnavyHMCS]

Why So Many Mass Shootings?

Ask The Right Questions And You Might Find Out

Dennis Prager | Posted: Jun 04, 2019 12:01 AM

This past weekend, Americans learned of another mass shooting, this time by an employee who decided to murder as many of the people he had worked with for years as possible. As of this writing, the murder toll is 12 people.

Every American asks why. What was the killer's motive? When we read there is "no known motive," we are frustrated. Human beings want to make sense of life, especially of evil.

Liberals (in this regard, liberals' views are essentially as the same as leftists') are virtually united in ascribing these shootings to guns. Just this past weekend, in a speech in Brazil, former President Barack Obama told an audience:

"Our gun laws in the United States don't make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon any time -- without much, if any, regulation. They can buy (guns) over the internet. They can buy machine guns."

That the former president fabricated a series of falsehoods about the United States -- and maligned, on foreign soil, the country that twice elected him president -- speaks to his character and to the character of the American news media that have been completely silent about these falsehoods. But the main point here is that, like other liberals and leftists, when Obama addresses the subject of mass shootings -- in Brazil, he had been talking about the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 -- he talks about guns.

Yet, America had plenty of guns when its mass murder rate was much lower. Grant Duwe, a Ph.D. in criminology and director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, gathered data going back 100 years in his 2007 book, "Mass Murder in the United States: A History."

Duwe's data reveal:

In the 20th century, every decade before the 1970s had fewer than 10 mass public shootings. In the 1950s, for example, there was one mass shooting. And then a steep rise began. In the 1960s, there were six mass shootings. In the 1970s, the number rose to 13. In the 1980s, the number increased 2 1/2 times, to 32. And it rose again in the 1990s, to 42. As for this century, The New York Times reported in 2014 that, according to the FBI, "Mass shootings have risen drastically in the past half-dozen years."

Given the same ubiquity of guns, wouldn't the most productive question be what, if anything, has changed since the 1960s and '70s? Of course it would. And a great deal has changed. America is much more ethnically diverse, much less religious. Boys have far fewer male role models in their lives. Fewer men marry, and normal boy behavior is largely held in contempt by their feminist teachers, principals and therapists. Do any or all of those factors matter more than the availability of guns?

Let's briefly investigate each factor.

Regarding ethnic diversity, the countries that not only have the fewest mass murders but the lowest homicide rates as well are the least ethnically diverse -- such as Japan and nearly all European countries. So, too, the American states that have homicide rates as low as Western European countries are the least ethnically and racially diverse (the four lowest are New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maine and Idaho). Now, America, being the most ethnically and racially diverse country in the world, could still have low homicide rates if a) Americans were Americanized, but the left has hyphenated -- Balkanized, if you will -- Americans, and b) most black males grew up with fathers.

Regarding religiosity, the left welcomes -- indeed, seeks -- the end of Christianity in America (though not of Islam, whose robustness it fosters). Why don't we ask a simple question: What percentage of American murderers attend church each week?

Regarding boys' need for fathers, in 2008, then-Sen. Obama told an audience: "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools; and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."

Yet, the Times has published columns and "studies" showing how relatively unimportant fathers are, and more and more educated women believe this dangerous nonsense.

Then there is marriage: Nearly all men who murder are single. And their number is increasing.

Finally, since the 1960s, we have been living in a culture of grievance. Whereas in the past people generally understood that life is hard and/or they have to work on themselves to improve their lives, for half a century, the left has drummed into Americans' minds the belief that their difficulties are caused by American society -- in particular, its sexism, racism and patriarchy. And the more aggrieved people are the more dulled their consciences.

When you don't ask intelligent questions, you cannot come up with intelligent answers. So, then, with regard to murder in America, until Americans stop allowing the left to ask the questions, we will have no intelligent answers.

Beetle, where did this come from? I will have to check the author and date, etc...
THANKS!!! This will be a good addition to the finishing touches of my thesis (I am still working on it)... This is the kind of info I was looking for.

[Beetlegeuse]

The web address to the article is hotlinked in the headline.

https://townhall.com/columnists/denn...d-out-n2547380

[EDCG19]

Society is falling apart and the media likes to play on these shootings more and more which causes more people to continue the cycle

[Beetlegeuse]

The roots of crime and violence are almost entirely cultural. The presence or absence of guns does not alter the nature of culture.

Gun crimes are the exclusive province of criminals with guns. Thinking you can stop gun crime by taking guns away from the law-abiding is as stupid an idea as proposing to take candy from the skinny to prevent obesity.

Outside of the urban cesspools, America has a gun crime rate comparable to Belgium. The urban cesspools are what they are because of cultural rot. They have a decayed social order because the demoncrat party since the administration of LBJ has specialized in recruiting the underprivileged and minorities into its tent by selling them on the idea that they don't have to be responsible for any of their shortcomings. Or misdeeds. Absolved them of all blame and or responsibility. Anything in their life that's wrong is someone else's fault. And provided you elect them (the demoncrats), government can and will make sure you get three hots and a cot (and an iPod and Air Jordans and an obamaphone) regardless how much of a deadbeat underachiever you are.

Since America won her independence, there's been only one war of note fought in the American states (neither Alaska nor Hawaii were states during WWII). In that same 244 years, Europe has had the First French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Greek War of Independence, the 2nd French Revolution, the 3rd French Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence, the Italian Wars of Unification, the Crimean War, the Wars for German unification, the Serbo-Bulgarian War, the Greco–Turkish War, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the 1st Balkan War, the 2nd Balkan War, WWI, WWII and the Bosnian war. Plus the Soviet annexations of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, which was a war of a different sort.

Seems to me the Euroweenies would be safer if they disarmed their goddam armies and gave all the guns to the civilians.

But the chief reason the Euroweenies are so committed to a disarmed populace is the fear that any guns released into the wild eventually will fall into the hands of the Leftists, which serves to destabilize the state. In America, it's the lefties wanting to disarm the Rightists because they represent the preservation of the status quo.. Which is one of the many reasons why social controls that work in Europe won't necessarily yield the same benefit in America. Because Euroweenies are Euroweenies, and Americans are something altogether different.


The most scholarly accounting of civilian-owned firearms in America I have yet seen was -- at a minimum -- 412 million. And possibly as many as 660 million (government records are rather inexact). That analysis was published about two and a half years ago and Americans at present are buying guns about twice as fast as in any year pre-Sheikh Obama (piss be upon him), so the updated figures should be several millions higher still.

The existence of 412 million guns (at a minimum ~30 months ago) in civilian hands raises two further points.

1. There are about 130 million households in America. When there's already enough guns in circulation for every American household to have -- at a minimum -- 3+ guns, what great tragedy do you think you're averting by preventing still more guns escaping into the wild? Do you seriously think 413 million guns will make America a more dangerous place than 412 million does?

2. Those guns are not uniformly distributed but probably 1/3rd to one-half of all households are armed. Which makes for at a minimum 40-ish million armed households. I would argue the timing of the spike in guns sales and the rise of Sheikh Obama (PBUH) is not mere coincidence and that Americans haven't turned to hoarding guns for purposes of squirrel hunting.

I would argue that Americans are buying guns in record numbers in preparation for engaging in a fight to preserve the Republic. And I base that conclusion of first-hand knowledge of people who are hoarding guns.

Note also that America today has in excess of 10 million living veterans. All of whom once raised their right hand and swore an oath to defend the US Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And that oath was not administered with any expiration date. Many, like me, still consider it our sacred duty, despite the fact we no longer break starch every morning.**

Which begs the second question. How many American gun owners -- most of whom have never committed a breech of the peace any more serious than a traffic violation -- are you willing to have killed so you can deprive them of their firearms? Because many will fight to the death to keep theirs. Which begs the further question, how many law enforcement officers are you willing to send to their graves in the pursuit of a disarmed public? Because many of us grizzled old veterans are pretty good shots. And we'd sooner die than break that oath.


And one last point. While Sheikh Obama (PBUH) was busy proving himself the greatest firearm salesman in all of history, what happened to gun crime in America?



It was trending downward.

If you looked at that chart closely, you might call to question why I specifically selected statistics of non-fatal gun crimes. It's because all statistics for murder or homicide or other crimes resulting in loss of life are skewed positively over time because (over time) trauma care gets better, especially so in time of war.

Thanks to the relentless pursuit for improvement in trauma medicine it would be expected that more shooting victims would survive in 2018 than had survived in 2008 -- even if the gun crime rate remained exactly the same. So homicide statistics tend to be positively skewed over time. There always will tend to be fewer homicides over time for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the crime rate.*

* Yes, I know that the firearm community and conservatives like to crow about any decline in the "murder" rate, and no, I don't have a clue whether they're being deliberately deceptive or if they're simply unsophisticated thinkers (my guess is the latter), but to cite changes in the murder/homicide rate over any given period without adjusting it against changes in the gun crime rate over the same period renders the point moot.

The survival rate, on the other hand, will tend to be negatively skewed because the number of those who survive being shot will increase over time, even if the rate of shootings is unchanged, for the simple reason that the ER saved more of them.

So I specifically selected the statistic of survivors of violent firearm crimes because the most derogatory point you can make about it is it under-represents my point.

And America's longest ever period of continuous warfare began in 2001, Dubya's Global War on Terror. The most radical advances in trauma care since the invention of the tourniquet followed. Plus a surge in gun sales that boggles the mind.

Which points to the fact that the decrease in gun crimes almost certainly is under-represented by this chart, if anything. Since 1993, gun crime in America probably has decreased well more than the 400% depicted, despite a coincident and stratospheric increase in numbers of firearms in civilian hands.

**breaking starch:
a reference to the arcane (pre-BDU) practice in the armed services of dressing each morning in a freshly-laundered and heavily starched "fatigue" or "khaki" uniform. The starch could he heard to crackle as one donned trousers and blouse. ergo they sounded as if they were breaking.

[Ashop]

No morals. No faith. No fear of consequences.

[Beetlegeuse]

This article amounts essentially to peer review of the data used by Dr. John Lot in the video I posted in another thread.


New CPRC Research: How a Botched Study Fooled the World About the U.S. Share of Mass Public Shootings: U.S. Rate is Lower than Global Average

The most salient bits from the linked article:

“Because of faulty research, it is widely believed that a disproportionate share – 31% – of the world’s mass public shooters occurred in the United States,” said Professor Paul Rubin, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics, Emory University. “In fact, John Lott’s careful analysis of a very large data set – 437 – pages – shows that the proper number is about 2%, less than the U.S. share of world population. One can only hope that this important research will correct the record.”

Professor Carl Moody, College of William & Mary offered the following: “This is an important paper. The assertion that the US is responsible for 31 percent of worldwide mass shooters is patently absurd. Anyone who doubts the veracity of Dr. Lott’s analysis is welcome to download, for free and in Excel format, the entire Global Terrorism Database (https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/contact/). There they will find, with a simple back of the envelope calculation, that worldwide since 1970 there have been 58,445 mass firearm attacks. Of these, 402 have occurred in the United States. The US is, according to the GTD. responsible for less than one percent of all mass shootings (0.69 percent) since 1970. Dr. Lott’s calculations are much more carefully done, but Professor Lankford’s analysis is clearly not in the ballpark. Also, social scientists seldom have laboratories. Replication is the only way to verify claims. Any academic who refuses to share his or her data for replication purposes deserves to be shunned.”

[Emphasis added]

The article also notes that Professor Lankford (the author of the bogus article) was confronted with Lott's data refuting his study, to which he replied ...

I am not interested in giving any serious thought to John Lott or his claims.

[Beetlegeuse]

This comes from an unabashedly right-wing source but, as John Adams said, "...Facts are stubborn things...."

Typical mass shooter a white male? Think again

Photo montage shows every suspect in 2019 attacks

[Beetlegeuse]

From a not-quite-so right wing source:

51% of Mass Shooters in 2019 Were Black: Only 29% Were White

No, mass shootings are not a “white man’s” problem.


Follow the link in the headline if you'd like to read the entire article, but it concludes thusly:

What mass shooters like Cho and Crusius really want is to be celebrities. And the media makes that happen. It broadcasts their manifestos, plasters their photos everywhere, and makes them famous.

And then the next mass shooter uses them as his inspiration.

This is something I've been advocating since the 1980s, which was known in the Intel community as "the Terror Decade" because you had a world-wide flurry of terrorist activity; Baader Meinhof, 15 May Organization, May 19th Communist Organization, Al-Dawa, Carlos the Jackal, Ejército Popular Boricua, followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, The Greens, Islamic Jihad Organization, ETA, Hezbollah, the IRA and about a hundred more.

They do what they do to gain notoriety for themselves or their cause. De-weaponize terrorism by not naming the people or organizations perpetrating the crimes in news reports.

[Beetlegeuse]

Sean Hannity has an interesting idea. Surround every school in the country with a ring of armed guards, retired LEOs and military types who donate 15 hours per week to be school guards. In return for their voluntary service, they are exempted from all income taxes, federal, states and local, on all other jobs or sources of income they might have.

Three Ways to Tamp Down on Mass Killings

By Robert VerBruggen

August 5, 2019 9:11 AM

Very briefly:

1. Stop giving these people the infamy they crave. These incidents are obviously contagious — a reality increasingly backed up by good research — and we in the media need to do a better job of keeping killers’ names out of our stories and, in general, being less sensational in our coverage.

2. Monitor online activity for warning signs. There have been three mass killings now tied to websites where individuals congregate to celebrate such atrocities. The government needs to monitor these sites and pay folks a visit when they give off warning signs. If these sites were to shut down because various service providers stopped doing business with them, I would not lose any sleep over it, however sympathetic I am to Big Tech’s critics in a lot of ways.
11

3. Keep guns away from dangerous people. Anyone who thinks gun control is an obvious, surefire panacea should look at the RAND Corporation’s enormous review of the gun-violence literature from last year, which uncovered “no qualifying studies showing that any of the 13 policies we investigated decreased mass shootings” — and also threw some cold water on the most aggressive claims about Australia’s gun confiscation, a measure far more forceful than anything we could implement here. One might also consider that guns are not the only way to commit mass murder: Explosives were used at Oklahoma City, the Boston Marathon, and numerous mass-casualty incidents in the first half of the 20th century here in the U.S.; an arson in Japan killed at least 35 people just last month; and a vehicle attack in France killed 86 in 2016.

But we could still do more to keep firearms away from individuals who’ve shown themselves to be a danger. I wholeheartedly support David French’s crusade for carefully crafted “red flag” laws, which allow people close to a troubled individual to bring him to the attention of the authorities, who, after providing due process, can take away his guns. I am also a squish on universal background checks, though the potential for good there is much greater for run-of-the-mill gun violence than for mass shootings, as mass shooters generally pass background checks already.

[Obs]

Slip and fall accidents account for more injury deaths of older Americans than any other form of injury. In total, over 15,000 people 65 or older die annually from slip and fall injuries close to 2 million are treated in emergency rooms for injuries suffered as result of a slip and fall.


WE HAVE BIGGER PROBLEMS where is the outrage?

1,196 killed in 2018 in mass shootings.

Buuuuuut.... Guns are scary to someone who has never used one.

We got bigger problems.

[Beetlegeuse]

We Need Criminal and Crazy Control, Not Gun Control
When criminals and psychos aren’t locked up, then everyone ends up in jail.

Daniel Greenfield , August 9, 2019

Mass murder is not a gun control problem.

In 2003, Kim Dae-han, a middle-aged taxi driver, killed 192 people and left 151 others wounded, by setting a South Korean subway train on fire using paint cans filled with gasoline. In 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Muslim terrorist, killed 86 people and wounded 458 others by ramming a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in France. In 2001, Muslim terrorists killed 2,977 people and injured 6,000 more, by using box cutters to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings.

Guns are a tool. There are a whole lot of other devastating ways to kill lots of people.

American mass killers often use guns because they’re convenient and available. There are plenty of alternatives like trucks, boxcutters, pressure cooker bombs and paint cans full of gasoline.

Mass murder isn’t caused by the tools you use. The Nazis were not inspired to kill Jews by the invention of Zyklon B. The Japanese did not decide to kill hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians because of the availability of airplanes. The Soviet Communists did not commit their acts of mass murder because their arms stockpiles didn’t need a waiting period to obtain machine guns for their mass shootings.

Murder is not a technical problem. It’s a moral problem. It happens because of internal decisions made in the mind, not external tools. The tools are used to implement the decisions of the mind.

A society with mass murder is experiencing a moral problem.

America’s moral problem is more complex than that of Nazi Germany or its Communist counterparts. We don’t have a government that is actively killing people. Instead we have a government that has made it easy for killers to operate by dismantling the criminal justice and immigration systems, making it very difficult to stop the three primary categories of killers, gang members, terrorists and the insane.

And media corporations have been allowed to glamorize killers who seek fame through massacres.

Gun controllers insist that the Founding Fathers never anticipated the problem of mass shooters. That’s probably true. But they would have also never tolerated the conditions that brought them into being, a permissive criminal justice system, a failure to institutionalize the mentally ill, and a media that promotes these acts of violence under the guise of condemning them and clamoring for gun control.

The America of the Bill of Rights could have had modern weapons without constant mass shootings.

The Founding Fathers understood that murder was not a technical problem, a matter of tools, but a moral problem. The Bill of Rights was meant for a moral society. It cannot function in an immoral one.

"Government would be defective in its principal purpose were it not to restrain such criminal acts, by inflicting due punishments on those who perpetrate them," Thomas Jefferson wrote in a Virginia criminal justice bill submitted a few years after authoring the Declaration of Independence.

It is not the purpose of government to control weapons, but to control criminals.

Western countries have instead focused on controlling guns, while failing to control criminals. This has led to absurdities such as ‘knife control’ in the UK and public bollards to control car rammings. Flying has become an experience once relegated to traveling to Communist dictatorships. Gun control measures encourage doctors to inform on their patients. Schools implement zero tolerance for pocket knives.

When criminals aren’t locked up, then everyone ends up in jail.

When we fail to lock up criminals, society becomes a prison. When we don’t institutionalize the insane, then society becomes the insane asylum. When we don’t stop foreign gangs and terrorists from entering our country, then we wake up to realize that we are living in El Salvador, Mexico, Pakistan or Iraq.

A moral society locks up dangerous people while a progressive society locks up everyone.

Gun control is a sensible measure in a society where criminals, madmen and terrorists freely roam the streets. This attempt to turn society into a prison won’t work because of the problem of scale. You can prevent guns from entering a prison of thousands of people, but not a country of millions.

“We should be more like Europe,” the gun controllers say.

But then why are French and Belgian soldiers deployed across major cities after Islamic terrorists carried out attacks with heavy firepower that killed over a hundred people? You can get a ‘military weapon’ in the capital of the European Union for $1,000 in under an hour. Gun control doesn’t work there. Or here.

There are two ways to cope with mass shootings and killings.

We can work to turn our societies into giant prisons in the hopes of impeding that 0.1% of the population which is inclined to violence over drugs, deranged fantasies or the Koran from shooting up malls, ramming cars into crowds, setting off pressure cooker bombs or flying planes into skyscrapers.

Or we can get rid of that 0.1% and actually have a free and safe society.

We’ve tried turning our country into a giant prison while failing to protect our borders, crack down on gangs or stop the psychos. And the experiment has devastated virtually every major city, cost tens of thousands of lives, made flying miserable, and brought our country to the brink of destruction.

Maybe we ought to try common sense instead.

Either that or we can pass the latest raft of “common sense” gun control laws that haven’t worked before while letting every Islamic terrorist and Latin American gang member enter the country, while letting every Chicago gang continue fighting its feuds, and while letting every deranged monster plot an attack while ignoring the warning signs until it’s too late. Surely gun control will stop all of them.

Every single one.

Constitutional conservatives often echo, “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” But they neglect the obvious corollary. “Don’t lock up the guns, lock up the killers.”

Murder is a moral problem.

When societies such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan kill, it’s everyone’s moral problem. But when societies such as ours enable killers by failing to restrain them, that’s also true. A society engaging in mass murder has to remove its leaders. But a society where mass killers operate has to restore its morality by removing those, as Jefferson put it, “whose existence is become inconsistent with the safety of their fellow citizens.” Their existence is physically inconsistent because it’s morally inconsistent.

What unites mass killers, the terrorists and the psychos, the Neo-Nazis and the Antifas, the gang members and the drug dealers, is that their moral outlook is completely incompatible with ours.

Some criminals don’t have a moral outlook at all. Mentally ill killers may be so out of contact with reality that they are incapable of having a moral outlook. And terrorists have their own moral outlook, but one which would turn our society into a killing field and prison overseen by Islamists, Nazis or Communists.

The Left insists that we ought to take away guns and other freedoms equally from everyone.

We all ought to live in prison. Or none of us should live in a prison.

And we’ve tried it their way for three generations. We’ve built walls everywhere except around our borders. We share our communities with criminals and the insane. Every house has an alarm system. There may be as many as a million law enforcement officers in the United States. Are we better off?

The first prerequisite to any morality is understanding that actions originate within individuals. The Left is hopelessly immoral because it believes that actions originate within external social conditions. It insists that murder is caused by the social conditions of capitalism, the gun industry or poverty. It justifies its own massacres as attempts to remedy the social conditions of capitalism by force.

That’s why murder thrives under leftist governments, whether in Venezuela or Chicago.

If we want to stop mass killings, we have to restore a moral society based on individual responsibility. The alternative is living in one giant progressive prison with the killers, the psychos and the terrorists.

Either we control the criminals or we lose all control over our own lives.

The moral equation of murder wasn’t altered by the technology of the automatic weapon. The most ancient societies in the world have known how to deal with it. We chose to forget.

When Cain slew his brother with a rock, G-d drove him out of the civilized lands.

G-d did not ban rocks. He banned murderers.

If we want to stop killings, mass or singular, we have to drive our own Cains out of our civilization. Or reconcile ourselves to living in a society where Cain has a gun and Abel is always on the run.

[Beetlegeuse]

Bunny-huggers more dangerous than the KKK? Who knew?

Leaked FBI Report Shows Left-Wingers Are a Bigger Threat Than White Supremacists

By Pluralist | Aug 10, 2019

With liberals sounding the alarm about a supposed revival of white supremacy, a leaked report suggests that the FBI is actually more concerned about left-wing extremists.

The FBI’s 2018-2019 Consolidated Strategy Guide, an annual summary of the agency’s security priorities, was released Thursday by The Young Turks, a leftist media network. According to the internal report, the FBI is worried about an “elevated” and possibly “growing threat” from “black identity extremists,” or “BIEs.”

A rise in racialized attacks on law enforcement officials first came to the FBI’s attention following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent acquittal of the officers involved, the report said.

“The FBI judges BIE perceptions of police brutality against African Americans have likely motivated acts of pre-meditated, retaliatory lethal against law enforcement in 2016 and will continue to serve as justification for violent incidents,” the document said. “While BIEs target white law enforcement officers, all law enforcement officers are considered BIE targets for their participation in this perceived unjust system. BIEs often view African American police officers as race traitors.”...


...When it comes to the supposed scourge of white supremacy, by contrast, the FBI identified only a “medium threat.” The agency noted that white supremacist groups are in longterm decline and predicted that their membership will continue to fall throughout 202o.

“The FBI further judges ongoing attrition of national organized white supremacy extremist groups will continue over the next year, yielding a white supremacy extremist movement primarily characterized by locally organized groups, small cells, and lone offenders,” the report says.

Also flagged as security threats were “animal rights” and “environmental extremists,” along with Islamist terrorists and abortion extremists.... [emphasis added]

[Beetlegeuse]

Mass shootings aren’t growing more common – and evidence contradicts common stereotypes about the killers

August 7, 2019 9.37am EDT

The linked article has too many charts and links and whatnot but the key points are these.

* No respectable study has yet so much as intimated any connection between violent video games and mass murders.

* Claims by demoncrats and other neo-communists notwithstanding, whites are underestimated per capita among mass murderers. Blacks are overrepresented by about 25% and Latinos commit mass murder at more than double their per capita representation.

* There is no clear link between mental illness and mass murder but what sane man sets out to kill large numbers of strangers against whom he has no material grievance? So an improved mental health care system couldn't hurt.

* There has not been any recent and precipitous increase in mass murder. From 2006 on there have been on average 22.5 mass murders per year (+/-4), the high (27) in 2008 and the low (18) in 2010. Rates of other violent crimes have decreased dramatically in the last 25 years so why the rate of mass murders should be so stable is a question worth investigating.


It closes ...

...Mass homicides are horrific tragedies and society must do whatever is possible to understand them fully in order to prevent them. But people also need to separate the data from the myths and the social, political and moral narratives that often form around crime.

Only through dispassionate consideration of good data will society understand how best to prevent these crimes.

[Beetlegeuse]

Are AR-15 Rifles a Public Safety Threat? Here's What the Data Say

Is it true that the AR-15, a popular firearm owned by millions of Americans, is a unique threat to public safety?

Friday, January 11, 2019

For the ADHD types among you, the upshot is:

...[I]t would take almost one-hundred years of mass shootings with AR-15s to produce the same number of homicide victims that knives and sharp objects produce in one year....

[Beetlegeuse]

Complete documentation on the source website but there's too many graphs, charts and hotlinks for it to be reproduced here.

New CPRC Research: Mass Public Shootings are much higher in the rest of the world and increasing much more quickly

22 Nov , 2018

Executive Summary

The U.S. is well below the world average in terms of the number of mass public shootings, and the global increase over time has been much bigger than for the United States....

[Beetlegeuse]

The mass murderers at Christ Church and El Paso were ecofascists

Before the slaughter of dozens of people in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas this year, the accused gunmen took pains to explain their fury, including their hatred of immigrants. The statements that authorities think the men posted online share another obsession: overpopulation and environmental degradation.

The alleged Christchurch shooter, who is charged with targeting Muslims and killing 51 people in March, declared himself an "eco-fascist" and railed about immigrants' birthrates. The statement linked to the El Paso shooter, who is charged with killing 22 people in a shopping area earlier this month, bemoans water pollution, plastic waste and an American consumer culture that is "creating a massive burden for future generations."

The two mass shootings appear to be extreme examples of ecofascism - what Hampshire College professor emeriti Betsy Hartmann calls "the greening of hate."...

[Beetlegeuse]

What Do 26 of 27 Deadly American Mass Shooters Have In Common?

by John Boch | Aug 22, 2019

... “On CNN’s list of the “27 Deadliest Mass Shootings In U.S. History,” seven of those shootings were committed by young males since 2005. Of the seven, only one—Virginia Tech shooter [scumbag’s name redacted]—was raised by his biological father throughout childhood.”

Life for [Parkland killer] was no different. His adoptive father died when [the loser] was very young, and his adoptive mother had a difficult time raising him.

America’s boys are in serious trouble. As Warren Farrell’s new book, The Boy Crisis, explains, boys are experiencing a crisis of education, a crisis of mental health (as in the case of [the Parkland loser]), a crisis of purpose. And at the root of it all is fatherlessness. ...

[Beetlegeuse]

[satire]

Study Shows Leading Cause Of Gun Violence Is Those You Disagree With Politically

POLK, UT—An exhaustive new study from the CDC reveals that the leading cause of gun violence in America is your political opponents. Researchers looked at a number of potential causes of gun violence such as mental health, family situation, cultural shifts, gun laws, rap music, videogames, sugar consumption, and the actual gunman, but by and large, the most prominent cause of gun violence was what most already suspected. The fault lies with those who you disagree with politically.

Researchers say they almost forgot to even consider the idea that the shooter had any volition or free will of their own. After looking into it, they said that the gunman was, "...a moot point. The fact is, even if the gunman didn't act, your political opponents would have caused the violence one way or another," lead researcher Karl Porkenheimer. "They wanted this in the first place."

Other findings include:

* 99% of gun violence will end the moment your political opponents are wiped from existence
* A large amount of gun violence is prevented every year by vulgar tirades against your political opponents online
* Tests revealed large traces of blood on the hands of your political opponents

"These results are pretty conclusive," said Porkenheimer. "Your political opponents are the real problem here. Americans have a lot of work to do, and that work starts with calling those you disagree with politically murderers. If enough of us can manage to do that, just maybe we'll see a shift in these horrible attacks."

[/satire]

[Beetlegeuse]

Guns Prevent Thousands of Crimes Every Day, Research Shows

How many lives are actually saved by gun ownership?

It never fails. A split-second after a mass shooting occurs, grandstanders and ideologues issue statements demanding new gun controls—even if the laws already on the books failed or the laws they want would have made no difference. Case in point: the tragic incidents in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, in early August 2019.

The message is clear: Guns cause violence. Tax them, take them, ban them, regulate them. Do something, maybe anything! Such knee-jerk, emotional responses are dangerous, writes Charles W. Cooke in National Review, “for when a nation sets up a direct pipeline between its emotions and its laws, it does not keep its liberty for long.”

Guns Don't Kill People, They Save Them

Liberty isn’t the only thing likely to be lost when gun laws are passed to appease emotions over reason, evidence, logic, and rights. Lives will most assuredly be lost, too. Lots of them.

This raises a point amplified in another context almost two centuries ago by Frederic Bastiat in his famous essay with a title that sums it up, “That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen.”

How many lives are actually saved by gun ownership? This is a supremely important question that the grandstanders and ideologues usually—and conveniently—ignore. It’s a matter that came immediately to my mind when I learned of an incident here in my own town of Newnan, Georgia, a few days ago. The headline in the Newnan Times-Herald read, “Man Hospitalized After Being Shot Outside Bar.”

A little after 1:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, August 17, police arrived at Fat Boys Bar & Grill to respond to a shooting. A customer had threatened other patrons, prompting the establishment’s security to forcibly remove him. Enraged at being kicked out, he declared he was going to get a gun “and shoot the place up.”

This very angry (and possibly intoxicated) man then busted the window out of a friend’s car in the parking lot, grabbed a .40 caliber handgun from inside the car, and began firing in the air. In the meantime, Ben McCoy, a man who witnessed all of this from inside his own vehicle, happened to have his rifle with him. Before he could use it, he was shot four times by the man wielding the .40 caliber handgun, who then fled into the woods.

Fortunately, despite being hit in the chest, stomach, left arm and right thigh, McCoy is recuperating, and the assailant was quickly apprehended. No one was killed, but the situation would likely have been tragically different if Ben McCoy and his rifle hadn’t distracted the gunman.

Of course, in this particular incident it’s most unfortunate that an innocent man was shot. Don’t lose sight of the fact that his very presence, with a rifle, still prevented what could have been a bloodbath that might have even killed him too. What’s far more common is innocent gun owners using or brandishing a weapon and saving lives without any injuries at all except sometimes for the assailant. I chose this example because it was local and I wanted to express appreciation to Mr. McCoy.

Gun Effectiveness

I checked online and found some fascinating numbers. A good website with footnotes and references to authoritative sources is GunFacts.info. There I learned the following:

Guns prevent an estimated 2.5 million crimes a year, or 6,849 every day. Most often, the gun is never fired, and no blood (including the criminal’s) is shed.
Every year, 400,000 life-threatening violent crimes are prevented using firearms.
60 percent of convicted felons admitted that they avoided committing crimes when they knew the victim was armed. Forty percent of convicted felons admitted that they avoided committing crimes when they thought the victim might be armed.
Felons report that they avoid entering houses where people are at home because they fear being shot.
Fewer than 1 percent of firearms are used in the commission of a crime.

If you doubt the objectivity of the site above, it’s worth pointing out that the Center for Disease Control, in a report ordered by President Obama in 2012 following the Sandy Hook Massacre, estimated that the number of crimes prevented by guns could be even higher—as many as 3 million annually, or some 8,200 every day.

Another excellent source of information on this topic (and many more current issues) is the Gun Control page at JustFacts.org. (Full disclosure: I serve on the board of directors of JustFacts because I believe in the organization’s objectiveness, accuracy, and integrity.)

Defensive Gun Use

In “Defensive Gun Use is More Than Shooting Bad Guys,” James Agresti, founder and president of JustFacts, provided overwhelming evidence from multiple sources showing that defensive gun use is more common and effective than anti-gun fanatics like The New York Times suggest or will admit. Agresti says that “people who use a gun for defense rarely harm (much less kill) criminals. This is because criminals often back off when they discover their targets are armed.”

John Lott, author of the book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, another outstanding source for info on this subject. He writes:

By 66 percent to 32 percent, economists and criminologists answer that gun-free zones are “more likely to attract criminals than they are to deter them.” A 60 percent to 40 percent margin thinks that guns in the home do not increase suicides. And a 62 percent to 35 percent spread says that guns are used in self-defense to stop crime more often than in the commission of crime.

This may explain why even The New York Times hasn’t yet put a billboard up by its offices that screams, “This is a Gun-Free Zone. There are No Guns Here.”

If we can just confiscate the estimated 350 million guns in the country, you might ask, then won’t we eliminate the offensive use of firearms, so we won’t need any of those many defensive uses? Good luck with that. Is there any reason to believe that such a war on guns would be any more successful than the government’s war on drugs? Even a fifth-grader could tell you that it would be largely the innocent who would be disarmed. Criminals would have no problem keeping their guns or getting replacements on a thriving black market.

So that leaves me with gratitude for the Ben McCoys of the world, the law-abiding gun owners who are every bit as important as the cops—and likely even more so—in the effort to keep the innocent safe and sound.

[i_SLAM_cougars]

This might be the most meaningful post I’ve ever read on here or anywhere

[Beetlegeuse]

Jim DeMint:
Mass shootings driven more by 'culture' than lack of gun control,
can't be solved by Congress

By Nick Givas | Fox News

"...It's more symptomatic of a decline in our culture -- I'm not sure any new laws are going to help that," DeMint said on "America's News HQ."

"Congress could do more than anything else by setting a better example of how to treat people... They're probably the biggest instigators of hate and racism and violence in the country right now. So, they need to look inward at just how they behave..."

"...More federal laws are very unlikely to help... Red flag laws, 15 states already have them... and we see that they’re not working. They actually give someone who has a grudge against you the ability to send police to your house, to take your guns away, [and] drag you into court."

DeMint also commented on the rallying cry to ban "weapons of war" and said if guns were outlawed, mentally unstable people would still find ways to forge weapons and hurt innocent bystanders...

"...We don’t have [any] indication that trying to pass laws to keep certain types of guns away from people -- they’ll just move to another type of gun, and we've seen that. If they can’t get a gun, they'll use a knife -- they'll create bombs... as long as you’re trying to look at federal laws that target everybody, you generally miss the criminals... I want to stop this, but I don’t see any evidence that federal laws can do it...."

[Beetlegeuse]

Amid Demands for Tougher Gun Laws, A Different Voice Emerges

...“Restricting the implements of violence while ignoring the causes is futile. Our nation’s capital, with some of the most restrictive gun-ownership laws in the country, clearly illustrates this point. Washington has a gun murder rate of 18 per 100,000, and the city’s gun-control laws did not protect our organization. Nationwide, as many as 80 percent of gun-related crime involves illegal guns.”...

...“The promises of security through more government restrictions will only serve to erode our freedoms while providing little protection.”...



Tony Perkins: Solution to gun violence isn't what you think, says former police officer

...Our nation’s founders understood the importance of faith and morality working hand in hand in our republic to restrain the worst of our human nature. George Washington in his farewell address at the end of his second term as president included several pieces of advice for preserving America's prosperity, security and happiness.

He observed: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

Washington was not alone in this conviction. John Adams, the second president of the United States, recognized the limitations of our laws. In speaking to the Massachusetts militia, Adams said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Some will be quick to say that nearly 250 years later, America has moved beyond the faith that inspired nation builders. That is a tragedy. Today our culture increasingly marginalizes public faith and religion, pushing it from the public square. But in the process, we've lost public morality, common decency and virtue, which are essential to freedom.

To achieve security for our families and communities while preserving the freedom that has made America great, we have only one option: Restore morality by renewing our commitment to the free exercise of religion. In other words, we should protect, not prevent, religious freedom.

Our baser nature clearly is not changed by passing more laws. The promises of security through more government restrictions will only serve to erode our freedoms while providing little protection. Rather, the solution to the gun violence plaguing our nation will be found in a willingness to recognize, as did the Founders, that as a people we are dependent upon and accountable to an omniscient God. It is only from such an understanding that morality and public virtue become commonplace, which is essential for freedom.

As Americans, we must carefully consider the path we take in addressing this present and growing crisis. New gun laws never achieve what a commitment to the Golden Rule can accomplish. America will be safer if all of us do unto others as we want them to do unto us.

[Beetlegeuse]

CARNO: A Big Push For Gun Control Is Coming To Congress In September

On Sept. 4, there will be mark-ups presented and hearings conducted on three new gun control bills:

* The “Keep Americans Safe Act,” which would ban any ammunition magazines over 10 rounds.
* The “Extreme Risk Protection Orders Act of 2019,” which would remove access to firearms from people who are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.
* The “Disarm Hate Act,” which would prevent someone convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime from obtaining a firearm.

Hate crimes=thought police. I'll hate whoever the fuck I please and you can pound sand up your ass if you don't like it. Red Flag laws are an attempt to deprive gun owners of their firearms without constitutionally-guaranteed Due Process. And 10-round magazines don't make sweet-fuck-all's difference.



But if they restrict magazine size again, I swear by Jupiter's cock that I'll buy a semi-automatic belt-fed FN-made M249S just to fuck with Chuck-U Schumer and Nancy Pelosilly.



Feeds from a STANAG magazine, a 200-round box or a disintegrating link belt that's as long as you can afford it to be.

[Beetlegeuse]

Secret Service Finds School Shootings are Preventable, Shooters Show Warning Signs in Advance

File this under least surprising news of the day. The US Secret Service has studied school shooters and found that — shockingly — almost none of them “just snapped.” To the contrary, virtually every one of them exhibited warning signs and, as such, the murders they committed could have been prevented.

Probably the most egregious of all of these was the Parkland massacre, committed by a student who put up more red flags than May Day parade at Lenin’s tomb.

The study was conducted by the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center and concluded, in part, that “schools may need to think differently about school discipline.” To which anyone who’s been paying any attention would reply…duh.

The problem comes when the “different approach” to take is something along the lines of what’s being advocated by woooly-headed social justice advocates like Elizabeth Warren who thinks the solution is to remove all armed security personnel from the nation’s schools.

Because leaving America’s schoolchildren completely vulnerable to those who would murder them is the only fair, socially responsible thing to do. Or something.

By Colleen Long, Associated Press

Most students who committed deadly school attacks over the past decade were badly bullied, had a history of disciplinary trouble and their behavior concerned others but was never reported, according to a U.S. Secret Service study released Thursday.

In at least four cases, attackers wanted to emulate other school shootings, including those at Columbine High School in Colorado, Virginia Tech University and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

The study by the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center is one of the most comprehensive reviews of school attacks since the Columbine shootings in 1999. The report looked in depth at 41 school attacks from 2008 through 2017.

The information gleaned through the research will help train school officials and law enforcement on how to better identify students who may be planning an attack and how to stop them before they strike.

“These are not sudden, impulsive acts where a student suddenly gets disgruntled,” Lina Alathari, the center’s head, said in an Associated Press interview. “The majority of these incidents are preventable.”

Nearly 40 training sessions for groups of up to 2,000 are scheduled. Alathari and her team trained about 7,500 people during 2018. The training is free.

The Secret Service is best known for its mission to protect the president. The threat assessment center was developed to study how other kinds of attacks could be prevented. Officials use that knowledge and apply it in other situations such as school shootings or mass attacks.

Since the Columbine attack on April 20, 1999, there have been scores of school shootings. Some, like Sandy Hook in 2012, were committed by nonstudents. There were others where no one was injured. Those were not included in the study.

The report covers 41 school attacks from 2008 through 2017 at K-12 schools and were chosen if the attacker was a current or former student who used a weapon to injure or kill at least one person at the school while targeting others.

“We focus on the target so that we can prevent it in the future,” Alathari said.

Nineteen people were killed and 79 were injured; victims included students, staff and law enforcement. The research was launched following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.

The Secret Service put out a best practices guide based on some of the research last July to 40,000 schools nationwide, but the new report is a comprehensive look at the attacks.

The shootings happened fast and were usually over within a minute or less. Law enforcement rarely arrived before an attack was over. Attacks generally started during school hours and occurred in one location, such as a cafeteria, bathroom or classroom.

Most attackers were male; seven were female. Researchers said 63 percent of the attackers were white, 15 percent were black, 5 percent Hispanic, 2 percent were American Indian or Alaska Native, 10 percent were of two or more races and 5 percent were undetermined.

The weapons used were mostly guns, but knives were also used. One attacker used a World War II-era bayonet. Most of the weapons came from the attackers’ homes, the investigators reported.

Alathari said investigators were able to examine detailed information about attackers, including their home lives, suspension records and past behaviors.

There’s no clear profile of a school attacker, but some details stand out: Many were absent from school before the attack, often through a school suspension; they were treated poorly by their peers in person, not just online; they felt mistreated; some sought fame, while others were suicidal.

The key is knowing what to look for, recognizing the patterns and intervening early to try to stop someone from pursuing violence.

“It really is about a constellation of behaviors and factors,” Alathari said.

The attackers ranged in age but were mostly young adults, seventh-graders to seniors. More than three-quarters initiated their attack after an incident with someone at school.

In one case, a 14-year-old shot a classmate at his middle school after he’d been mocked and called homophobic names. The attacker later reported the victim made comments that made him uncomfortable and they were the final straw in his decision to attack. Seven attackers documented their plans and five researched their targets before the attack.

Thirty-two were criminally charged, with 22 charged as adults. Most took plea deals. More than half are incarcerated. A dozen more were treated as juveniles. Seven committed suicide and two were fatally wounded.

Alathari said the report shows that schools may need to think differently about school discipline and intervention.

The report does not weigh on political topics such as whether guns are too accessible or whether teachers should be armed.

She said their goal is to make schools a safer place where no more attacks occur.

[Beetlegeuse]

This guy calculates that IF you banned all magazines of more than 15 rounds capacity, and IF you could get ALL of the old larger-capacity magazines out of circulation, it MIGHT save as many as 12 lives a year.

But that's entirely speculative (and the author acknowledges as much) because it presumes that anyone possessed of a rage so fierce that he is intent on mass murder is TOO DAMN DUMB to just bring MORE MAGAZINES to the party.

His upshot is that mass murders are so infrequent, and magazine capacity is insignificant in other firearm crimes, so using mass murders as the rationale for banning standard capacity mags is a tempest in a teapot.

[Obs]

This guy calculates that IF you banned all magazines of more than 15 rounds capacity, and IF you could get ALL of the old larger-capacity magazines out of circulation, it MIGHT save as many as 12 lives a year.

But that's entirely speculative (and the author acknowledges as much) because it presumes that anyone possessed of a rage so fierce that he is intent on mass murder is TOO DAMN DUMB to just bring MORE MAGAZINES to the party.

His upshot is that mass murders are so infrequent, and magazine capacity is insignificant in other firearm crimes, so using mass murders as the rationale for banning standard capacity mags is a tempest in a teapot.

What are you fighting for?
You gonna stop the spread of liberalist ideology with these posts?

Are you gonna change someones mind?

Any mind that influenceable is useless.

Those that know... KNOW

Those that don't, never will.

[Beetlegeuse]

What's got you in such a chipper mood?

[Obs]

What's got you in such a chipper mood?

I just dont get it anymore.
Politics are a waste of time and life.

It doesnt matter who you vote for it doesnt matter what someone believes. Its just a waste of life.

Look...

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