Thanks to the NRA there are 17 more dead school kids.

N.R.A. and G.O.P., Together Forever

FOR years, Republicans have effectively outsourced their thought leadership to the loudmouths at the end of the bar. But perhaps the most extreme example of that trend has been the issue of guns, where the party has ceded control to a gun lobby that has built its brand on absolutism.

And now, again, we are about to see the consequences of that abdication. Congress did nothing in the wake of the mass murder of children at Sandy Hook, and except for a largely symbolic ban on bump stocks, it’s likely that nothing meaningful will happen in the aftermath of the shootings in Las Vegas. Instead, Republicans will round up all the usual clichés and excuses for inaction.

We’ve seen this before, and it is a script written by the National Rifle Association. The N.R.A.’s blessing of restrictions on bump stocks — devices that make semiautomatic weapons fire faster — is designed to pre-empt anything more serious by giving the illusion of action. It substitutes accessory control for actual gun control.


I saw firsthand how the N.R.A. worked six years ago when I was a conservative radio talk show host in Wisconsin. The context is important here: I was a longtime supporter of Second Amendment rights and had backed state legislation that would allow law-abiding citizens who passed training courses and background checks to carry concealed weapons (as every state now allows in some form). More than 16 million Americans have the permits.

In 2011, concealed-carry legislation was poised to pass both houses of the Wisconsin Legislature until the N.R.A. decided that it did not go far enough. It insisted that the Second Amendment should preclude even minimal safety requirements for concealed carry. The N.R.A., claiming that it was supporting what it calls “constitutional carry,” demanded that anyone be allowed to carry a concealed handgun without training, background checks or permits of any kind.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/opinion/sunday/nra-republicans-gun-lobby.html

I certainly would get behind any legislative regulation which slows down the rate of Kills in these type of incidents. They will occur, but we certainly do not need to put military weapons in the hands of civilians.

They say alarms should have gone off after reading the shooter on social media. He set off a fire alarm so that students would file out of classrooms. No way this psycho should get his hands on a AR-15. What our country needs is less shooting victims and more cold dead hands. Damn the NRA snowflakes.

Wordslinger wrote:

Telstar wrote:They say alarms should have gone off after reading the shooter on social media. He  set off a fire alarm so that students would file out of classrooms. No way this psycho should get his hands on a AR-15. What our country needs is less shooting victims and more cold dead hands. Damn the NRA snowflakes.

I pray that some gun nut takes out Wayne La Pierre.  It's only fair.  

He who lives by the bullet should be prepared to swallow the bullet.

Wordslinger wrote:
I pray that some gun nut takes out Wayne La Pierre.  It's only fair.  

It's not Wayne La Pierre, it's US! We vote into office the assholes who refuse to pass reasonable gun laws.

@donald j trump
Just spoke to Governor Rick Scott. We are working closely with law enforcement on the terrible Florida school shooting.

@stonekettel
Doing ... what?

The killer is in custody.

The kids are dead.

The fu<k are you two idiots doing?

polecat wrote:@donald j trump
Just spoke to Governor Rick Scott. We are working closely with law enforcement on the terrible Florida school shooting.

@stonekettel
Doing ... what?

The killer is in custody.

The kids are dead.

The fu<k are you two idiots doing?

       

(We need another emoji for approbation without the happy appearance. This stuff is dead serious.)

RealLindaL wrote:

polecat wrote:@donald j trump
Just spoke to Governor Rick Scott. We are working closely with law enforcement on the terrible Florida school shooting.

@stonekettel
Doing ... what?

The killer is in custody.

The kids are dead.

The fu

       

(We need another emoji for approbation without the happy appearance.   This stuff is dead serious.)

Take a guess what they are doing polecat.

#BREAKING: Well-Regulated Militia Opens Fire On Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School In Parkland, Florida; Cheap Thoughts And Useless Prayers Now Being Rushed To The Scene ... more on this soon-to-be-forgotten-and-then-repeated story as it develops ...

Deus X wrote:

Wordslinger wrote:
I pray that some gun nut takes out Wayne La Pierre.  It's only fair.  

It's not Wayne La Pierre, it's US! We vote into office the assholes who refuse to pass reasonable gun laws.

I doubt I voted for a single one of them. Apparently, my votes are meaningless.

I don't know why they even report mass shootings as news anymore. It's hardly "news" any more than a car wreck is news now. It's just a part of American life at this point. There've been 18 school shootings in 2018 already, and today's February 1th. They'll talk about this nonstop for a week, but by the end of the month there'll probably be another one. The murder of a bunch of kids is something that America has decided to accept, so people can have weapons they don't need for any practical purpose.

I'm a gun owner, I like guns, but there's a reasonable point to everything. Target shooting is fun, hunting is a good thing, and everyone should be able to protect their home. You can do all those things with conventional weapons. An AR-15 is a military weapon designed to kill people. To paraphrase the almighty Skynyrd, "it ain't no good for nothin' else." You don't need that in a lawful society. It's not needed for home protection, unless you're expecting "der Germans" to come over the hill, in which case you're a silly fuck who needs medication more than you need access to ordnance. A lot of the people who hoard them have fantasies in their heads of "fighting off a tyrranical government," but those people watch too many movies and are fucking stupid right out of the box. If the government was really worried about you having those things, you think they'd let you have 'em? They've got tanks and drones and 100-round-a-secnd miniguns and smart-bombs and gas and overwhelming numbers. Ruby Ridge and Waco didn't teach those people who they are? Shiiiiiiit. Fight off the government. Goddamn joke, that is.

Nope. What those guns do is... what they did yesterday. I'm not saying I wouldn't want an AR-15, because they're fun to shoot at targets with... but I am willing to accept not letting them be available to the public because limiting people's abilities to kill hundreds in a short period of time is a LOT more important than any fun you or I might have target shooting. I know this is a country full of the culture of selfishness, but there's got to be a limit to everything, and it's time to quit ducking the facts and claiming "guns don't kill people, people kill people" or whatever. Yeah, if all there are is shotguns and deer rifles and handguns, people will still get shot and killed... but there'll be a whole lot fewer. And yeah, if there are no guns at all, psychos will still kill, using a knife or an ax or whatever. In which case you'll have deaths and injuries of two or three, not seventeen, thirty, or NINE HUNDRED, like the Vegas shooter. Just cracking down on mental health isn't enough.

Last week I found out that a friend of mine's step-grandson was the shooter in the Kentucky shooting last month. His family's wrecked now. That kid's story is pretty hellish -- his dad had just died and he went online to talk about it and ended up crying, and his classmates mocked him for crying. About the death of his dad. Sheesh. I wouldn't mock someone for crying over the death of hamster, because even that hurts, but... getting mocked for being sad because your parent just died? Somehow, society's lost a lot of empathy. I don't blame that shooter for hating his classmates for that, but shooting up the school's not justifiable at all. He went and found his step-dad's gun and... bam. Two people died, lots of injuries. And now we have this kid killing almost 20, over far less.

So, yeah, there's a mental health problem -- and a general empathy/bullying problem -- the country needs to address. But meanwhile, you do something to limit the killing power of people. We'll always have a mental health problem, but if people don't have large-capacity semi-autos so easily available, it'll lessen the cost of it.

The same people who don't want to even talk about controlling firearms are the same people who keep lists of how many illegal aliens commit a crime (spoiler alert - they haven't killed as many as have died in pretty much any mass shooting you can claim) and they want to spend billions on a wall to keep them from crossing the border... even though very, very few of 'em get here that way. The same way they fret over abortion while electing people whose policies result in huge infant mortality rates. "Pro-life." Ha ha and ha.

And these grabasses want me to take them seriously. Fuhhhhh-uhhh-uhhhhck YOU.

We're all pretty old here. I think we were all around back in 1982. Remember what happened with the Tylenol? Some craze-oid put cyanide in a few Tylenol caplets. Seven people ended up dead, and for a month or so the whole nation was thrown into a mass panic. Your odds of getting a poisoned Tylenol were about the same as winning the lottery, and you could fit all the victims into a Honda Civic but still, it was enough to cause huge changes in the pharmaceutical industry, because people demanded it. To this day we have tamper-proof packaging, and you never see capsules anymore, just caplets. That's because of seven people dying, 36 years ago.

Now we're on mass shooting #18 in six weeks, and there were tons more in the years before that, and... nobody's gonna do a goddamn thing. They're going to pass on "thoughts and prayers" as if that's not a joke, as if "Ooops, what's really wrong is we forgot to remind God that we don't want our children shot!", and the news is going to scream "when will someone do something?!?"

And then we'll do it all again next month.

Or, maybe I'm being too much of an optimist. Maybe it'll only be next week.

Same as it ever was...

After a morning watching idiots try to label the shooter as a "Latino Hillary supporter" and "a member of Antifa" (the fascination with Antifa on the right is one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen... they're like maybe 100 vegans bicyclists!) and all kinds of other desperation shit, it's looking like the guy was... another damn white supremacist. A group called Republic Of Florida is claiming him.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/nikolas-cruz-trained-with-florida-white-supremacist-group-leader-says

I poked around their website a while. They look like the typical 4chan "meme magic" twerps and use a lot of the same slang Pkr's let slip a few times (wouldn't surprise me much if the cringing Nazi-suckup wasn't one of 'em -- judging from their pictures they're a marshmallow militia that'll take anybody). They do the usual "Heil Trump!" stuff, have the typical right-wing sub-third-grader grasp of grammar, and play to the same role-playing pretend-armyman makebelievey horseshit all their kind fetishize. I don't know if the shooter was actually one of 'em, but they look like the kind of chairborne rangers confused loser gunwank kids like him would seek out.

Anyway, I don't care what the shooter's ideology was all that much -- anybody who opens fire on kids is a scumbag, be he left or right -- but since they were trying to brand him as a "leftist" I'm wondering how the spaghetti-arms on 4chan going to handle the pictures of him in his MAGA hat.

Wednesday’s mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that has left at least 17 kids dead is a good time to remember how hollow and vacuous many of our elected officials’ “thoughts and prayers” sentiments are. While the NRA and the Republican Party spend the next many hours discussing mental illness and how the real issue is the mental illness that they are completely unwilling to tackle regardless of how many people die, let’s remember that meaningful gun safety laws could be enacted right now. Those laws haven’t been created because the NRA owns the Republican Party. A few months ago the New York Times put together a list of the senators and congressmen and women who receive the most financial funding from the NRA. Here’s the list with each Republican:

Sen. John McCain (R-AR) $7,740,521

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) $6,986,620  

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) $4,551,146

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) $4,418,012

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) $3,879,064

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FLA) $3,303,355

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) $3,124,273

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) $3,061,941

Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) $2,896,732

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) $2,861,047

Rep. French Hill (R-AR) $1,089,477

Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) $800,544

Rep. David Young (R-IA) $707,662

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) $385,731

Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-MT) $344,630

Rep. Don Young (R-AK) $245,720

Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) $221,736

Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) $201,398

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) $158,111

Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) $137,232

[...]
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/2/14/1741437/-A-reminder-of-the-NRA-s-top-ten-funded-elected-officials-in-both-the-House-and-the-Senate

The fucker was twice reported to the fbi and made no secret of his intentions all over the web.

Wtf does it take to make the existing systems work? Bigger more authoritarian systems? Ya right.