On Vegas, Shootings, and Gun Control

We will get gun control the day after a mass shooter successfully targets the conservative political class instead of a random crowd of people. As long as it’s liberals or average citizens dying, it won’t happen.

I always felt that if we have an amendment that says the founders made because the tree of freedom ever so often needs to be refreshed by blood of tyrants and it was put so the government can’t disarm the populace it would be good to keep it… but it seems to have been neutered anyways (can we really revolt using semi-auto’s when the government has rocket launchers and tanks?) and it may be poorly worded. Perhaps the focus should be on maintaining the militias, mandatory militia training in order to become citizens and carry guns or something like that. And then you train them and regulate the people with guns. And tanks. People should really have tanks to capture the spirit of law. Or a citizen army at least… But ya, with this my views have shifted from absolute freedom, to the damn thing needs to be regulated but to keep the initial spirit – the government should fear the citizen’s militias.

It was white people – this is there NY.

The blood of those killed and wounded in Las Vegas is squarely on the hands of the NRA and each and everyone of its cowardly members. When a horrific event like Las Vegas happens the NRA goes dark because they don’t want to draw attention to themselves and their guilt. Most of the shit politicians they own, and they own a lot, go silent too. Only a few stand up to hypocritically bemoan that NOW is not the time to discuss gun control or POLITICIZE the current tragedy. Much better to wait a few weeks until any push to action can be smothered and swept under the rug –as it always is.

What we have in the US is an anti-social, psychotic gun culture. It is aided and abetted by the NRA, gun manufacturers, gun sellers, 535 criminally responsible members of Congress, a majority of reactionary Supreme Court justices, and the current moronic President, one in a long line. Heck, even the “sainted” Bernie Sanders luvs himself some guns. And anyone remember this photo of Obama?

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/02/white-house-releases-photo-of-obama-shooting-shotgun/

There is no right to bear arms in the US Constitution. This right was invented by the gun nut Antonin Scalia in Heller. The Framers parsed every word and if they had wanted to insert a personal right to bear arms they damn well would have. Instead they talked about a right to bear arms only with regard to militias, a model for defense that has not been used in this country for 180 years, i.e. no militias no right to bear arms, period, full stop. Usually it’s the conservatives who get all up in arms about inventing rights, but not I guess when it is some “right” they want. So we had the spectacle of Scalia, the original originalist on the Court doing twenty kinds of legal gymastics to avoid the black letter meaning of the Second Amendment. That is it doesn’t say what it says. It says what those caught in our sick gun culture want it to say. QED. End of argument. And to top it off, Scalia came up with this absolute right to bear arms in a case which supposedly only dealt with handguns.

The lack of a right to bear arms does not equate to a prohibition on gun ownership. Ian has listed some common sense types of guns that people can own. But assault, semi-automatic weapons, kits that can convert to automatic use, extended clips, ammunition such as armor piercing and hollow point rounds, should be outlawed, not just the sale but the ownership. I would recommend too a tax on handguns, the proceeds of which would be used to cover the costs to society of gunshot victims. And I would place caps on the manufacture and importation of firearms into the country. We have tens of millions of guns in this country. It will take decades to work our way down to manageable, socially responsible levels of guns. This is not an argument, as the gun lobbyists and fanatics would have it, never to begin the process. Rather it is an argument to begin as soon as possible.

As far as I’m concerned the media is complicit in terrorist bombings and mass shootings. It gets off on this shit. It’s a fetish. And it amplifies it with its non-stop coverage. The copy cat effect is a known phenomenon but the media doesn’t care. It provides inspiration for the next shooting and the next bombing and on and on it goes. And it’s all to help sell more medication, insurance, cars and retirement services to an audience that increasingly cannot afford that shit. I’m waiting for the day, which won’t be long now, that these spectacles start occurring concomitantly. That will really f*ck the media up. They won’t know which one to cover and instead they’ll start walking around in circles babbling gibberish.

It happens Che, Marie Antoinette and her cohort had no idea what was coming. I’m reluctant to say “it may take longer than we would like” but… it’ll take longer than we may like.

I like the puritanical jihad approach. Vegas is the Mecca of the Prosperity Christian cult, the concert goers collateral damage in a suicidal assault on the golden calf, on the den of iniquity, city of vice. I haven’t seen in reports that he was particularly religious, but it is as plausable as any other speculation right now.

I have heard the statement for years that”they don’t need auto and semi auto weapons” but I have a question why does my car have a speedometer that goes to 120 mph,or why are cars legal for the road that can do over 150. That is totaly illegal in the US but people have them and the number of dead and injured dwarfs what is at Vegas. Just wanted to ask and see what the reply is.

This society has always had firearms; this society has only relatively recently had mass shootings.
The better question is; for what reason?
When that question is answered; fix the problem (it ain’t guns).

This society has always had firearms

Think how much more effective the Boston Tea Party would have been with automatic weapons. Or Bacon’s Rebellion? Automatic weapons level the playing field. Every man is now an army unto himself or herself. That’s coming next too — female mass shooters. It’s just a matter of time so keep the better & more powerful guns rolling off the fully automated assembly line to sell to all those dispossessed by automation. What a great formula for depopulation.

A Far Cry

I’m all for reasonable gun control laws (I don’t think people need fully automatic weapons under any circumstances), but there’s more going on here than just that. Some countries, like Norway and Sweden, have very high gun ownership rates and very low murder rates. And the countries with the highest number of gun-releated deaths are not the countries with the most gun ownership. I think cultural violence problems are just as much if not more to blame than gun ownership.

Americans are, quite frankly, just more violent than their European counterparts. We should be talking about that alongside gun control. But it’s verboten to bring up for some reason.

>Think how much more effective the Boston Tea Party would have been with automatic weapons. Or Bacon’s Rebellion? Automatic weapons level the playing field. Every man is now an army unto himself or herself.

Small arms aren’t the main killer in war, and are marginal compared to artillary and heavy machine guns

>Check the demographics. For example, Chicago, Baltimore, Camden, Los Angeles, etc., these statistics are readily available. The “whites” aren’t the ones killing folks in the US.

Does it hurt to be that stupid?

Small arms aren’t the main killer in war, and are marginal compared to artillary and heavy machine guns

I’m assuming you’re assumption is that Paddock, if he was the shooter, was using small arms even though the media narrative’s implication is that the automatic weaponry is large arms.

We’re not talking about conventional military versus military war any longer. We’re talking about one on one or one on many civilian versus civilian war. It’s inevitable in a country with many more guns than people amidst diminishing resources and economic opportunity.

Yes, it hurts to be that stupid so therefore you’re really hurting.

You’re not going to defend yourself against the big bad gubmint with more guns and you just proved it. That’s the most prominent reason gun freaks come up with for their own personal arsenals and you have just adroitly stated that they’re useless against the military’s heavy armaments. I agree.

Well still no known motive. The guy wasn’t trying to off OJ who was nearby listening to the concert, but out of sight with his parole officer.

Paddock was a multi-millionaire, no debts, no political affiliations, and by all accounts had it good.

It reminds me of the Amish Schoolhouse shooting a decade ago where again a guy with everything just decided to kill.

We’ll probably never know what went on in his brain.

V. Arnold, rabid gun rights advocate all the way from the sex slavery capital of the world, Thailand, chiming in on the latest mass shooting. He hates America but is zealous about Americans’ right to bear arms up to and including nuclear weapons one day in the not too distant future no doubt.

Seriously, when the media & LE developed the profile of Paddock I thought it was V. Arnold. I thought to myself, considering how V. Arnold foams at the mouth with rabid hatred of America and Americans and every hour on the hour every day asserts Americans deserve what they get and he hopes they get it soon, surely he had to be the shooter considering his penchant for Asians and this guy Paddock had an Asian girlfriend.

Maybe V. Arnold will be the next shooter. You never know. Or maybe V. Arnold wrote the script to this shooting and based it loosely on himself. You never know.

Well, in fairness, you never see both of them in the same place at the same time./s

Who would have thought a year ago that we would see gay, liberal and now multi-millionaire mass shooters. This must surely be a sign that we have too much freedom and too many rights. The collectivist commies among us know that we need a strong paternal regime to mechanically weed out the ideas about rights that produce this bad behavior.

The gun grabbing cult is well developed and their tactics are repeated every time we have this type of shooting. First they wheel out the ‘reasonable gun control’ gurus who are lying through their teeth. They open the door of the clown car full of the loony power hungry gun banners who can’t wait for the opportunity to attack and vilify gun owners and our oldest natural right to bear arms.

These people are clever but not too bright and they quickly display their authoritarian nature for everyone to see. After reading the warped statements made by these gun grabbers it’s amazing that anyone would view giving them power to make decisions about anything as rational.

Ian, I am not a fan of semi-auto rifles, and even the NRA does not defend the “bump stocks” that the Vegas shooter apparently used, but a bolt gun with a typical 5 round magazine could have killed just as many people in Vegas.
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The 1966 Austin tower shooter used a bolt action hunting rifle. That incident held the record for most killed for decades.
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Lee Harvey Oswald used a bolt action rifle. As the famous line in “Full Metal Jacket” says, “Oswald got off three rounds with an old Italian bolt action rifle in only six seconds and scored two hits, including a head shot!”
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72 minutes passed before cops entered the Vegas shooter’s room. How many aimed shots could be fired by a sniper with a bolt action rifle in 72 minutes?
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Another issue: say you outlaw sales of semi-autos and/or hi-cap magazines. What are you going to do about the MILLIONS of semi-autos already out there? Are SWAT teams going to bust down the door of every home in America looking for semi-autos? Do we have enough jails to house all the gun owners who will be arrested? Do we have enough morgues to handle all the bodies that will result from the SWAT raids? Think Waco and Ruby Ridge multiplied by thousands.
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So I don’t think outlawing certain guns is a practical or effective solution. It’s a shallow strategy that ignores the social causes of violence. Homicide rates correlate to inequality, so fix the inequality. It’s not that complicated.
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My state, Idaho, has never had a mass shooting (except for the mass shooting of Native Americans). Despite being armed to the teeth, Idaho’s homicide rate is similar to Europe’s and lower than Manitoba’s. Yet 72 Idahoans died of the flu in 2016. You are far more likely to die of the flu in Idaho than die from a mass shooting.

Look at Australia. In response to a mass shooting they banned civilian ownership of semi-auto guns and haven’t had a mass shooting since. It was simple and effective. And the studies that show how effective have just recently been coming out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/10/03/how-australia-beat-the-gun-lobby-and-passed-gun-control/

At this point I support taking all the guns away and shutting down the gun manufacturers because if they can’t sell them in America they’ll try to sell them to undeveloped and developing countries similar to what the big tobacco companies do with cigarettes. The gun toters have proven that they are unworthy and instead of using the guns against the enemy, the corporate state and the wealthy elite, they are using them against their brothers and sisters who are barely hanging on as it is. No more guns — they are obviously not the answer and in fact only make matters worse.

We’re not going to overcome Leviathan with guns. Wits and fortitude is what it will take. Violence will only undermine the effort and violence is what THEY want.

A lot of posts and I didn’t see the term “mental illness” pop up once.

I don’t know fellas, I’m not sure that we can have an honest discussion about this issue without talking about how we can help some of those who are truly going into psychotic territory. Almost all (if not all) of these mass shootings are done by people who have truly lost their grip on their own humanity.

Would making all of these automatic weapons disappear cut down on the body count? Maybe. Probable even. But I have to believe that even if we made the scale of the tragedy smaller in terms of the number of lives lost we would still have this problem.

Maybe we are ignoring the main issue here: We have abandoned some truly troubled people to the gentle embrace of the pharmaceutical and medical industry.

Just saying…..

Will

PS: I know many of you aren’t mechanically inclined and never seen the inside of a machine shop so don’t take this as an insult. Converting a semi to a full auto is child’s play. Even making components to convert a normal single shot into an auto isn’t that tough. (Ever look at the insides of a Browning Auto 5? It was designed what, a hundred and twenty years ago?) Manufacturing a decent revolver or bolt action is a sophomore level ME lab class…. it isn’t that tough. As long as machining is as accessible as it is now it is maybe not productive to waste time talking about limiting access to some of the simpler gun designs.

Mass shootings are a big bright shiny object that the media cannot turn away from. But they are a distraction from the main forms of gun violence in the United States. 10,000 or so people a year in the U.S. are victims of homocide, but more than 20,000 per year turn their guns against themselves. Since guns are a particularly efficient method of suicide, and since americans have so many guns, their rate of gun suicides are many times higher than comparable countries. Furthermore, people are killing themselves in middle age, and leaving kids behind who are going to need decades of mental health support and counseling. But at the same time, the more downscale white communities where suicides are prevalent are savaging their own health care and mental health and addiction support infrastructure. The consequence of this is simply massive social pathology in struggling communities that simply have no resources for dealing with it.

Robert Jackson says

Check the demographics. For example, Chicago, Baltimore, Camden, Los Angeles, etc., these statistics are readily available. The “whites” aren’t the ones killing folks in the US.

Gun violence affects black communities and white communities in different ways. In black communities, gun violence is conditioned by the massive physical and economic insecurity in poor minority neighborhoods. But in white communities, gun violence manifests itself as self-harm and suicide.
There’s a prevalent tendency among many, like Robert jackson, to claim that only homicidal gun violence is a problem and there’s ‘nothing you can do’ about suicide. But that’s b.s.
And it’s absolutely shocking to me that people would seek to make excuses for the massive pathology caused by gun violence in not-so-well-to-do white communities. Do they think it’s okay to externalize the costs of that pathology on the rest of the community, while handicapping the community’s capacity to respond to it? What do they think is going to happen to kids who grow up with the trauma of a suicidal parent, without any long term mental health support? Are they really surprised that the long term consequences of this violence are taking such a toll on these communities?

@Will

The gun grabbers are using their ‘assault weapon’ creation to spread fear that has little to do with the mechanics of semi-auto firearms. Visual triggers and military conflation are their tactics and they often use the term auto to help the rubes think machinegun when they see these weapons.

My l905 Browning patent humpback would be banned under their dangerous semi-auto description and it was subject to gun control restrictions at the time it was first produced.

The semi-auto banning frenzy is just a hyped opportunity to make gains against the evil gun owners who stand in the way of ‘progressive’ restrictions on natural rights. Under all this hoopla is the continuing push to topple the second amendment and ban all guns in private hands so that the Statists and their wise minions can inform us about what is good and proper from their safe spaces.

@Willy

I saw a great screenshot showing the view from one of those commie terrorist drones at the DAPL wild Indian uprising. The picture shows a LEO on the ground shooting a rubber bullet at the drone and you can see the blue rubber round exiting the gun barrel.

This and other video agitators were trying to film the cops during the Warrior clan’s attacks and make it appear the cops were the violent instigators during these planned incursions.

Two guarantees to hear from “control” advocates in these debates:

Guarantee #1—-Not even a bare pretense of giving a damn about how the weak and helpless (women, the aged) are to be able to defend themselves from criminal violence when they dare to leave their houses.

Guarantee #2—Not even a bare pretense of understanding what it means to have more than 300,000,000 firearms already in circulation, and that they do not age or deteriorate significantly over time.

Fifty years I’m hearing the same nonsensical, emotion-driven drivel.

Are the downscale white communities where suicides are prevalent . . . savaging their own health care and mental health and addiction support infrastructure? Or are the Upper Classes savaging all that for them, from beyond and above? And in fact, are the UpperClasses carefully engineering an addictogenic social atmosphere and pressures-grid for the downscale white communities to begin with?

differentclue: The alliance btw the right wing elite and the white majority is pretty transparent. The elite have adopted a radical libertarianism that denies the reality of social solidarity per se. Unfortunately, libertarianism is a non-starter for the masses because they understand the reality of their dependence on strong public institutions and tax transfers. However, the masses can be persuaded to be functionally libertarian if they are made to swallow the idea that govt. has been refitted to serve other, undeserving people, rather than the true, loyal citizens. Of course, the elites have spent decades heightening the contradictions and exploiting the ugliness that was already there. But let’s not pretend the white majority has not been ready and willing participants in a revanchist project.

Also, you blame the ‘free trade conspirators’ for ‘jobicide’. But when the well paying jobs left the rust belt, they didn’t go first to China. They went to the low-tax, low-wage, union-busting, impoverished U.S. States where they could pay much lower wages. Capital has always taken advantage of uneven geographic development to lower wages and reduce rights and benefits. People in low-tax, union-busting states didn’t complain until they started getting undercut.

Another question: How was Mr. Paddock able to bring all those assault rifles into his hotel room? Remember, this is a hotel/casino in Las Vegas—-sure to have plenty of security and surveillance. Surely SOMEONE must have thought it “Odd” that one guest should be hauling a plethora of luggage or boxes into a hotel room, considering that one stays in such a place on for only a temporary amount of time.

And, having learned Mr. Paddock was, actually a retired accountant, that puts the financial question in a different light in terms of how he could afford such an pricey array of guns and ammunition.
However, I STILL think all these mass shootings are all part of some secret underground social-engineering conspiracy just the same.

@ Che Pasa

In recent years, violent crime had a big increase. So, you are citing statistics in a disinformational way.

Try this: As inequality increases, more hard times for the poor, so they will turn more to crime.

Get it?

Why is an establishment accountant who’s planning on killing himself anyways, shooting at common citizens instead of corrupt power players?

Reading further about this situation I learned Mr. Paddock was quite a well-to-do individual.
But, still, the idea of spending ALL THAT MONEY ON weapons? Clearly it denotes a type of mindset.

By the way: Gun ownership makes perfect sense for self-defense and hunting. Provided the owners are well-trained in handling said firearms. And have a good head on their shoulders as well.

@Ché Pasa

I think it’s a cultivated cultural value. The rich and powerful used to be seen for what they are: a motley mix of deserving business wizards and players and self-entitled alphas who’d step on anybody to get ahead. Back in the day everybody hated Mr. Potter and loved George Bailey. They could separate out the deserving businessman who added value to society from the narcissistic asshole that took it away. But in more recent times, disrespecting the weak seems to have turned into an outright hatred for their being that way, regardless of circumstances. Those kind of cultural values are fully sociopathic. And they came from somewhere.

@CP

This may be difficult for you to understand but the number of guns someone owns and the reasons for legally owning those guns are none of your business. This fact is frustrating for the snowflake gun grabbers because they need to find reasons to undermine legal gun owning rights. They can[t find enough weak minded and easily led rubes to vote them into power so people who vote for gun rights supporting candidates are targeted with their favorite tool the personal smear.

The gun grabbers are puffing up like toads again showing their self centered certainty about what’s best for everyone else. Nancy Pelosi the creepiest of the California collectivists has revealed a little more of their true agenda with her authoritarian statement that background checks even universal ones will not be enough to satisfy their gun grabbing agenda.

RC — fear of the Other coming to steal your stuff and rape your women is noted.

Peter — who’s talking about “grabbing guns”? Not me. The point is to understand what drives so many rich white weirdos to amass such arsenals of weapons that are sometimes utilized to slaughter concert goers or anybody else that’s handy. And to counter whatever it is that impels such behavior.

And yes it very much is “my” business.

for posterity in the event that this is a dead thread. re: Poisonous Pedagogy: this is the simplest synthesis of her theme that i could find:

Polish Ph.D. and author Alice Miller (1923-2010) rejected her lengthy practice of Freudian analysis and spent the next decades of her life immersed in the childhood causes of psychopathic violence and cruelty later in life, as well as early experiential causes of simple neuroses and personality disorders.

It’s Miller’s belief that most all psychiatric models fail mightily in rejecting childhood treatment as the key to later mental health status and interpersonal relationships, which has allowed parental and institutional cruelty to flourish for far too long.

Essentially, she believed that when children were either neglected, abused physically and/or emotionally, and reared in accordance with a ‘might makes right’ authoritarianism, they weren’t able to build authentic selves, the natural ones that were instead stifled, preventing the victimized children giving voice to their emotions, personal truths and creativity. She described how personally empowering the simplest loving kindness is, and how toxic the long term effects of withholding it, or worse, being ruled by punishment, rather than simple discipline, meaning teaching…or learned personal developmental accountability…is
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Of course there are varying degrees of silencing or manipulating children to bend their wills through coercion and deception, but she and her mentor Katharina Rutschky named both the individual and institutionalized practices poisonous pedagogy. She explains that since children are pretty much hard-wired to love their parents, they tend to internalize abuse or neglect as their own fault, and repress their anger, hurt and indignity where unless one day let out into the light of day, it brews more poisons that will one day be heaped on others, as in bullying, coercion, revenge, and violence, either latent or actual, and/or turned inward, creating depression, shame and guilt, most of which stays buried and unrecognized (repressed), ‘poisonous perpetrators and voices’, unidentified.

https://shadowproof.com/2012/12/21/poisonous-pedagogy-and-our-culture-of-violence/

tonight la luna bella is full, a harvest moon that i hope will make the coyotes out in the field yelp and howl.

So the question is whether Americans want to limit or eliminate mass murder — or whether they can be convinced to want it.

Mass murder goes right back to the origins of Euro-colonization and settlement of the Americas. It has never stopped; in one form or another it continues throughout the Western Hemisphere, most prominently in the United States — as well as wherever the United States projects its power.

Of course there are deep seated cultural, historical and psychological reasons for it, but it doesn’t have to be this way. I argue that it is this way, and it continues to be this way because certain interests — including the government and many businesses — benefit from periodic incidents of mass murder. So long as they benefit (more power, more profit!) they will do nothing substantive about the problem that largely afflicts someone else, not them. Not only will they do nothing substantive about the problem, they will actively thwart anyone else doing anything about it.

We’ve seen this pattern before, and we’ve seen it changed before. A couple of examples come to mind: campaigns against drunk driving and tobacco use, eg.

Neither was considered a serious social problem — until it was. Laws were ultimately passed to partially control those problems, but as important, maybe more important, was/is the social pressure against driving under the influence and tobacco use. That social pressure was brought to bear in part through persistent campaigns by advocates against very powerful forces opposed to any substantive change.

We can point to quite a few issues that have been successfully dealt with in a similar way. When it comes to guns, though, the persistent advocacy campaign has always come from the opponents of controlling the problem of mass murder and other forms of gun violence.

It doesn’t have to stay that way. Turn it around.

” NR permalink
October 5, 2017

All the right-wing simpletons who comment here really need to read Caleb Keeter’s statement about the massacre. There were lots of “good guys with guns” at that concert, and none of them could do a damn thing to stop someone shooting at them with automatic rifles from 30 stories up.”

Yes, yes, NR, from now on, all self-defense situations will be ones where the attacker is 32 floors up with multiple automatic weapons. Jeez, sometimes sarcasm is inadequate.

Who was that “simpleton” you referred to? Got mirror?

@realitychecker

Oh, nothing I say could possibly compare to the sheer stupidity of your contention that the only reason little old ladies can walk down the street without being attacked is because they’re allowed to carry assault rifles.

@ NR

And you, as usual, are showing yourself to be another idiot.

You want to talk about old ladies with assault rifles? Really? Is that where you think the meat of this issue is?

Hard to discuss complex issues with simple minds.

@realitychecker

You’re the one who brought it up, not me. You said we can’t have gun control because women and the elderly won’t be able to defend themselves–ignoring the fact that they aren’t defending themselves with automatic weapons in the first place.

C-Span is doing a segment right now on the latest FBI violent crime numbers.

There has been a 22% increase in homicides over the last two years worth of statistics.

Stop talking about the “decline” since the 90’s. This is the current reality.

Pull your heads out of your asses, why doncha?

Same guy from C-Span has an op-ed in the New York Times today. Educate yourselves a little.