http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-17/2012s-mass-shootings-and-some-gun-control-observations
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/17/2012 14:36 -0500
Submitted by George Washington on 12/17/2012 12:36 -0500
and how does this tie into societal dysfunction.........
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/17/2012 13:36 -0500
2012's Mass Shootings And Some "Gun Control" Observations
With the resurgence of gun control politics storming to stage center over the past 72 hours, and providing yet another fulcrum point of social division precisely at the time when the nation is already hopelessly divided on other key political talking points which look set to push the Fiscal Cliff debate unresolved into 2013, below we provide two useful benchmarks to frame the "gun debate." The first, courtesy of WaPo, is an interactive chart of all mass shootings, including all the relevant details, taking place in 2012. The second, is a dispassionate and fact-based observation courtesy of BusinessWeek of the realities and challenges facing politicians, and the broader society, as America grapples with 200+ years of Second amendment history on one hand, and a society that is ever more "troubled", and increasingly prone to violence and murder on the other.
First, click on the chart below for a jump to the WaPo's succinct and interactive chart showing all 2012 mass murders.
Second, we recommend everyone read the following narrative from BusinessWeek's Paul Barrett, titled "A Post-Newtown Guide to the Gun Control Policy Debate", in which without any attempt to score political brownie points (a rare occurrence these days), the author "reviews some of the proposals that politicians and others will talk about in coming weeks."
From BusinessWeek:
Demonization A couple of weeks before Newtown, our premier sports broadcaster used his Sunday Night Football halftime soapbox to issue a heartfelt appeal for reducing the prevalence of handguns. Responding to the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher murder-suicide, Bob Costas said, said: “Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.” Similar pained cries have echoed in the wake of the Connecticut disaster —for example, this column by the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik, entitled, “Newtown and the Madness of Guns.”
The emotionalism is understandable. Yet railing against guns in general gets us nowhere. What are Costas and Gopnik suggesting? Confiscating some, most, or all of the 300 million firearms already in private hands? The Second Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, says that’s not happening. Our democratically grounded political system says that’s not happening. The United States, for better or worse, is a gun culture. Nearly half of American households have one or more guns, according to Gallup. Publicly mourning the degree to which firearms are woven into the fabric of our society only plays into the hands of those who contend that any discussion about regulating guns is a pretext for prohibition. The hard truth for gun foes is that the firearms are out there, and they’re not going away.
Assault weapons President Barack Obama supports a reinstatement of the assault weapons ban, according to White Houseaides. After asserting this position during his 2008 campaign, Obama dropped it, fearing a politically costly fight with the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress. The Newtown shooting revives the issue because the killer used an assault weapon—more precisely, a semiautomatic military-style rifle—to kill most, and possibly all, his victims, according to the Connecticut medical examiner.
We tried an assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004. It didn’t work. To avoid the restrictions of a poorly written law, gun manufacturers simply made cosmetic design changes and then enjoyed a sales boom. American gun enthusiasts reliably buy more of any make or model opponents want to deny them. Moreover, while black matte military-style rifles may look especially ominous to the uninitiated, they’re not more lethal, shot-for-shot, than grandpa’s wooden-stock deer hunting rifle (which is derived from an earlier generation of military weapons). Fully automatic machine guns—capable of firing a stream of bullets as long as the trigger is depressed—are already unavailable, unless you have a special permit. And finally, any proposal to ban the manufacture and sale of new assault weapons would do nothing about the many millions lawfully owned by private citizens. Democrats are not going to propose impounding rifles already in private gun racks.
Large-capacity magazines The coming proposals to limit the size of magazines, the spring-loaded boxes that contain ammunition, are more relevant, if no less controversial, than assault weapons “bans.” In a mass killing, the lethality of a semiautomatic rifle (or pistol) relates to how quickly and often the shooter can fire before reloading. Law enforcement officials said Sunday that the Newtown shooter used multiple 30-round magazines with his rifle, firing something on the order of 100 rounds in a very short period.
It’s not difficult to buy a 50-round “drum” magazine. Banning civilians from owning such magazines, it seems to me, would not infringe on anyone’s Second Amendment rights. Perhaps the same could be said for 30-round magazines, or 20-round magazines. Choosing the cap is necessarily arbitrary. The assault weapons ban of 1994-2004 prohibited the manufacture and sale of new magazines exceeding 10 rounds. In theory, we could reinstitute that rule.
The problem with restricting magazine capacity is that to make such a limitation meaningful, Congress would have to ban thepossession of large magazines, not just the sale of new ones. Otherwise, the millions of big magazines already on the market will provide an ample supply to future mass killers. As a matter of political and law enforcement reality, are lawmakers prepared to send sheriffs and police out to take away all privately owned magazines exceeding 10 rounds? In the 1990s, the answer was no. Has that changed? I doubt it.
Background checks Here is where there’s room for achievable, meaningful improvement. The existing computerized background-check system screens out felons, minors, and other prohibited categories. The system has gaps, however. It covers only sales by federally licensed firearm dealers. “Private collectors” are allowed to sell guns without background checks. By some estimates, 40 percent of all sales slip through this gaping loophole. It ought to be closed. Nonlicensed sellers could be required to conduct their transactions via a licensed dealer, who would receive a small fee.
Improving the background-check system would make it more difficult for some significant number of shady characters to obtain guns. (They could still acquire them illegally, of course.) The Newtown shooter tried to buy a rifle at a local store shortly before his rampage and was turned away when he wouldn’t submit to a background check.
However, an improved background-check system would not have stopped the Newtown killer from doing what he did: scooping up his mother’s legally acquired guns before shooting her and all those teachers and children. Mass killers tend to be young men who, despite deranged minds and evil hearts, prepare carefully. Some have clean records before going berserk. Others obtain their weaponry from relatives or friends. Fixing background checks is worth doing. It won’t stop the next Newtown.
Mental illness Now we are getting to the heart of the matter. Congress and executive branch agencies at the federal and state level can do more to make sure that disparate and often disorganized records of individuals who’ve been found to have serious mental health problems find their way into the background-check system. The law already prohibits people who’ve been adjudicated mentally ill from buying firearms. We need to do a better job of collecting and disseminating the relevant information.
Many who are dangerously mentally ill escape treatment that would prevent them from harming themselves and others. Short of mass murder, hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people commit crimes and end up in prison without adequate antipsychotic medication. It’s too difficult for relatives, friends, teachers, and others to civilly commit dangerously mentally ill individuals before they do harm.
Taking steps well short of incarceration—our current de facto policy for warehousing the dangerously mentally ill—would be a humane alternative for all concerned, and it could prevent school shootings. This is not gun control, per se, yet it deserves urgent attention.
Personal responsibility People who own guns need to keep them away from children and psychologically troubled members of their households. With the right to own firearms comes great responsibility. We don’t yet know all the details about the Newtown killer and his deceased mother. Yet it’s hard to imagine what she was thinking: a disturbed, antisocial, 20-year-old son and a half-dozen guns?
The most important gun control can’t be legislated. It’s common sense.
and another view on gun control........
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-12-17/gun-control-big-picture
Gun Control: The Big Picture
Preface: I was raised to be against guns. My parents hated guns, and believed that they only lead to crime and to accidental shootings.
Raised in a blue state, I had the stereotype that militias were made of crazies … and so the “right to bear arms” as part of a “well-regulated militia” seemed like a nutty anachronism.
And I have long been deeply influenced by leading voices for non-violence, such as Gandhi and King. So – Until recently – I was pro gun-control. As such, I understand that gun control arguments very well.
Gandhi and the Dalai Lama Were AGAINST Gun Control
I was surprised to learn that two of the best-known promoters of nonviolence in history were not opposed to guns. Indeed, Mahatma Gandhi taught that we must first be brave enough to use guns to defend ourselves, and only then can we be qualified to use non-violent methods. For example, Gandhi wrote in his book, An Autobiography (page 446):
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest … if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity.
As Gandhi wrote in Doctrine of the Sword:
I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence.***When my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence.***Hence also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.
In Between Cowardice And Violence, Gandhi wrote:He who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honour by non-violently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live for ever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the biddingof a bully …[When violence] is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission.***
A man who, when faced by danger, behaves like a mouse, is rightly called a coward.Not knowing the stuff of which nonviolence is made, many have honestly believed that running away from danger every time was a virtue compared to offering resistance, especially when it was fraught with danger to one’s life. As a teacher of nonviolence I must, so far as it is possible for me, guard against such an unmanly belief.Self-defence … is the only honourable course where there is unreadiness for self-immolation.As quoted in the Seattle Times, May 15, 2001, the Dalai Lama said:If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun. Not at the head, where a fatal wound might result. But at some other body part, such as a leg.
What the Founding Fathers Said About Guns
The Second Amendment had more to do with freedom than historical militias. Here’s what the Founding Fathers actually said about arms:Laws that forbid the carrying of arms, disarm only those who are neither inclined, nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants. They serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1764What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.
– Thomas Jefferson
Those who beat their swords into plowshares usually end up plowing for those who didn’t.
– Ben FranklinArms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property… Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them.
–Thomas PaineA free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.
– George WashingtonGuard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined…The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.
–Patrick Henry.
Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?
– Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot, Debates at 386.The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.
–Samuel Adams, debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87.
The right of the people to keep and bear…arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country…
–James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789).(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation…(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
–James Madison.If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government…
– Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist (#28) .
The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.
–Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-B.To disarm the people is the best and most effective way to enslave them.
– George MasonThe supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.
–Noah Webster, “An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787) in Pamplets on the Constitution ofthe United States (P.Ford, 1888)[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.
– Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.
But SOMETHING Must Be Done to Stop the School Shootings!
History is interesting, but something has to change. Kids are getting murdered in their own schools.We agree …The Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience published a study in 2001 showing that one modern anti-depressant is associated with violent acts.David Healy and David Menkes from Cardiff University, and Andrew Herxheimer from the UK Cochrane Centre, published a study in 2006 showing that antidepressants can cause severe violence in a small number of individuals.Numerous other mental health experts say that anti-depressants may be a substantial factor in school shootings and other gun-related violence. And see this, this, this,this. If you have any doubt about this, please watch these videos:
* * *
Indeed, the number of school shootings,murders and murder-suicides, workplace violence, road rage, and random violence by soldiers by people taking anti-depressants is staggering.
So - whatever else we do to address school shootings - we must either stop pushing anti-depressants on kids or at least stop selling guns to people taking anti-depressants.
How Useful is a Gun Against Tyranny When the Government Has Bigger Weapons?
Of course, the usefulness of a gun as a defense against tyranny depends partly on the types of arms possessed by the government.
As George Orwell – author of 1984 – pointed out in the Tribune (October 19, 1945), the effectiveness of arms in preventing tyranny partly depends on whether the average citizen can afford the current weapon of choice possessed by the government:
The connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon–so long as there is no answer to it–gives claws to the weak.The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans–even Tibetans–could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one …The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon–or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting–not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.
If he were alive today, Orwell might say that – unless the American people create and adopt high-tech ways to defend themselves – guns will not be able to compete with drones, robots and other high-tech weapons created by the virtually unlimited American military budget.
On the other hand, as John Aziz notes:
The vast majority of America’s 285 million guns are in Republican states, which are unlikely to be disarmed easily, even with an overwhelming Federal consensus. Some might even try to secede from the Union.
In other words, gun ownership as a deterrence to a tyrannical government might work better in Red States – where a lot of people have guns – than in Blue States.
Note: I strongly believe that safety training is essential. Keep weapons away from kids, and lock up the bullets SEPARATELY so children can’t find them. It is also easy to hang weapons above arm-reach of youngsters. Please be safe.
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/12/17/nra-shuts-down-facebook-no-tweets-since-school-shooting/
NRA Shuts Down Facebook, No Tweets Since School Shooting
December 17, 2012 12:53 PM
The National Rifle Association has maintained social media silence since the elementary school shootings last Friday. (KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – National Rifle Association officials have kept quiet in the wake of Friday’s elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., and they also shut down their Facebook page and have not had any Twitter activity since Friday morning.
The powerful American pro-gun lobby’s Facebook page was deactivated on Saturday. The page had been celebrating its social media success last week with a posted photo thanking its 1.7 million “Likes” on the social network. And the typically active official NRA Twitter – which has over 63,000 followers — has not had a post since the morning of the attacks when it announced, “10 Days of NRA Giveaways – Enter today for a chance to win an auto emergency tool!”
The social media silence comes as many legislators and members of the media have begun calling for stricter laws on gun control after 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school. Lanza also killed his mother at their home.
Effort to restrict access to high-powered weapons is likely to face fierce opposition from many Republicans in Congress who say restrictions violate the U.S. Constitution’s right to bear arms.
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Asked on “Fox News Sunday” why Americans would need to own semi-automatic weapons, Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said, “Well, for the reason George Washington said: a free people should be an armed people. It ensures against the tyranny of the government, if they know that the biggest army is the American people.”
Gohmert added, “Once you start drawing the line, where do you stop? … Gun laws don’t work.”
However, many gun control supporters believe this is the time for legislative action.
“It’s time for the president, I think, to stand up and lead and tell this country what we should do – not go to Congress and say, ‘What do you guys want to do?’ This should be his number one agenda,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
President Barack Obama campaigned on gun control in 2008, but he has expanded gun rights in his first four years in office, signing legislation that would allow people to carry weapons on Amtrak trains and in national parks.
U.S. lawmakers have not approved a major new gun law since 1994, Reuters reports.
Many believe that the NRA’s silence on the issue is not permanent.
“The move is most likely only a temporary one to avoid the heated debate that would have been certain to occur on the NRA’s wall,” writes TechCrunch.”Which in turn would have increased the pressure on the group to comment publicly at a time it clearly hopes to lay as low as possible.”
The NRA’s social media silence comes after the controversy set off in the wake of America’s last mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., that left 12 people dead. A secondary NRA Twitter account tweeted, “Good morning, shooters. Happy Friday! Weekend plans?” just hours after James Holmes went on a shooting spree in July.
and how does this tie into societal dysfunction.........
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-17/newtown-shooting-syndrome-troubled-society
Newtown Shooting: A Syndrome Of A Troubled Society?
In a concerning shift of sentiment, a majority of Americans, based on a new WaPo-ABC poll, now see the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary as a sign of broader problems in society (as opposed to an 'isolated' incident). While there remains widespread - and intense - opposition to banning the sale of handgunds in general (though high-capacity ammo clip restrictions are just as broadly despised), from the 2007 Virgina Tech shootings to this year's Aurora theater massacre, the poll results below suggestsocietal problems are becoming ever more critical in our nation's thinking.
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