292 MASS shootings so far this year in the United States

I wonder when Senator Harry R. changed the tradition of the Senate requiring only a simple majority? Maybe a simple majority was the original tradition before a super majority became the tradition?

 

Well regardless of the MEDIUM of speech, the effect is the same. In each case the speech is communicated, just in different forms. On the other hand, a nuclear bomb obviously has a slightly different effect than a single shot musket which was the highest power arm at the time that the Second Amendment was written. And to be fair, an assault rifle also has a different effect.

Well what is a "typical" soldier?

 

What a collection of straw man arguments! We’ve seem a lot of that from Trumpsterland lately.

I can’t think of anyone who is calling for executing people for being caught with an unregistered gun.

Second, drunk driving has nothing to do with mass shootings, or with Trump’s constant race baiting.

Third, the gun problem became so large because the NRA invested heavily in making sure more and bigger guns remain easy to obtain in the US.

In that respect you’re right. If we enacted an assault weapons ban now, it would probably be nearly a decade before it had any notable impact on the the number of mass shootings.

Which is not an excuse for not doing so, despite your putting it up as a reason not to.

But it is interesting to note that the reactionary right has now been furnished with a new talking point.

In the past, the gun nuts have whined when statistics on how widespread mass shooting in the US actually are. In their minds, only the shootings they see on TV should be counted, and not them, if that can be avoided.

Now, they’re embracing that bigger statistics, so they can blame anything other than the bigotry and white supremacy that is part and parcel to their fuhrer’s message, and the prime motivator of the mob in Charlottesville and the gunman in El Paso.

 

He didn’t.

The 60 vote threshold for ending debate (the filibuster in its current form) has been around for at least two decades, and was effectively used by GOP during the Bush years.

Harry Reid’s mistake was in not changing the rules to bring back the “talking filibuster”. Making the opposition stand in the well of the Senate and argue their case (or read the phone book) for hours and days on end, while the unblinking eye of the television camera stares at them.

As the GOP prepares to block any meaningful gun legislation once more, something like the talking filibuster would make and excellent political tool, forcing the GOP to own their opposition rather than hiding behind procedural tricks.

 

Typically caring a rifle and a Kabar. In WWII a typical Squad would have a BAR man. In Vietnam each soldier typically carried an automatic weapon. An Advancement in firearms. That automatic weapon is a light assault rifle. In my humble opinion.

 

Hoping you’re right.

 

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/methodology
Mass shooting is defied as an incident where 4 or more people were shot or killed.

 

So what?

 

I think not making that change was the biggest mistake the Democrats made in early 2009.

Had they made the Republicans stand in the well of the Senate and oppose unemployment benefits and stimulating the economy as 750,000 people a month were losing their jobs would have been quite effective.

It would have pulled the rug right out from under McConnell and Ryan.

This is something Trump understands. He knows taht the national debate has moved to television, social media and to a lessor extent, the blogosphere.

I think he is as aware as anyone else that the national mood has shifted. El Paso is Trump’s Hurricane Katrina moment.

Trump is now hoist on the petard of race baiting and dog whistles that he built his politics on.

 

There are many issues that the US has that other countries do not have to deal with. Many of those issues are part of the reason we have more gun deaths. The guns are just a symptom, not the disease.

If I really feel I need a bookshelf, I can grab a hammer (weapon) and some nails (ammo) and build one. If I REALLY feel I need a bookshelf and do not have a hammer or nails, I can still build one if I get creative. The motivation to build that bookshelf is the fact that I REALLY feel I need one.

So, to me, the "gun control" issue boils down to this. Some people build crappy bookshelves, so some people want to ban hammers and nails from everybody just so that some people do not build crappy bookshelves. They do not look at WHY some people feel the need for a bookshelf.

I have said many times that I am all in favor of methods to attempt to limit hammers and nails from getting into the hands of crappy bookshelf builders. However, I am not in favor of restricting the rights of law abiding bookshelf builders. So far, I have heard no solution being presented that would be a reasonable compromise to reduce the number of crappy bookshelves while still maintaining the rights of the law abiding bookshelf builders.

Any suggestions?

 

Notice the inversion the right wingers are all adopting now.

In the past, they tried to parse the definition of mass shooting, and try and prevent that the real definition of a mass shooting was essentially one that everyone saw on TV.

But now a mass shooting has been incontrovertibly linked to the race baiting and bigotry that is so core to the Trump message. So, inevitably, they have to try and make excuses for it by embracing the broader definition in order to deflect from the fact that the El Paso shooting was all about Trumpism.

The problem with that inversion is that all of these incidents is the ready and easy availability of guns.

 

Not being able to pass on your gun to Eddy, the convicted drug dealer, without going through checks on a national data base

 

I agree that the gun show and the internet loopholes needs to be fixed. However, how many of these mass shooters bought their guns from a gun show, from the internet, or got the gun from a friend?

Also, what is a convicted drug dealer doing with a gun...no matter how he received it? Do you think Eddy is going to worry about laws or a National database when he is already breaking the law by just having a gun in his possession? Wouldn't the person that gave Eddy the gun already be in violation of the law by giving a convicted felon a gun?

 

The seller should have to check a database before passing on the gun to Eddy. The data base will show that Eddy is a convicted drug dealer and the data base will state that the seller is committing an offense if he passes on the gun to Eddy. The data base will keep a record of these gun transactions

 

I do make a distinction between attacking an individual and attacking entire groups of people, not that I think that Trump is guilty of that in the way that the media and Democrats say that he is, but he is certainly guilty of it.

 

...and "animals." Even though when Trump said "animals", he was CLEARLY talking about the human waste members of MS-13 who cut kids' heads off.

 

So the stabbing in California yesterday with 4 people is considered to be a "mass stabbing"? Is this semantics?

 

What?

Trump has done plenty of both. We can bury you in video of him doing both.

 

So you want regular people to have access to information on other people? Would that be an invasion of privacy?

Isn't selling a firearm to convicted felon a crime in itself (18 US Code 922(d))? Isn't Eddy's (a convicted felon) attempt to purchase a firearm a crime? Do you think Eddy is really concerned about buying a weapon legally?

 

Trump 2020!

 

Any person that has a conviction is on public records anyway.

You wrote "Isn't selling a firearm to convicted felon a crime in itself" The answer is no if you claim that you did not know he is a felon. Basically, a get out clause for the seller to pass on his gun to anyone

 

Nah. They’re just immigrants suffering from economic uncertainty looking for a new life for their families

 

I believe that mass stabbing would be correct as this specifies the weapon used.
Which means we must also have mass baseball bat attacks if 4 or more people are killed or injured, such as this.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/man-wiel...njured-3-outside-denver-strip-club-police-say

 

I believe, in the future, a form of portable laser will be available for use as a personal self defense weapon. Expect that everyone will have to wear special protective glasses to keep their eyesight safe from a criminal laser attack intended to blind the victim.

 

No.

In 1806, the Senate did not restrict the total time allowed for debate.
In 1917, Rule XXII was amended to allow for ending debate (invoking "cloture") with a two-thirds majority, later reduced in 1975 to three-fifths of all senators.

The link between pot and mass shootings may be closer than we think.

Greedy states are scrambling to legalize this deceptively dangerous drug at a time when American youth is suffering from an unprecedented mental health crisis.

We don’t yet know much about the mental state or drug use of the El Paso or Dayton killers. But a former girlfriend of Dayton killer Connor Betts, 24, has indicated he was mentally ill, and two of his friends interviewed by reporters this week mentioned his previous drug use.

The list of mass killers who were heavy users of marijuana from a young age, from Aurora, Colo., shooter James Holmes and Tucson, Ariz., shooter Jared Loughner to Chattanooga, Tenn., shooter Mohammad Abdulazeez.

The drug is proven to trigger mental illness.

President Trump was right to highlight mental illness in his remarks Wednesday on the El Paso and Dayton shootings.

We know from a 2018 FBI report that 40% of “active shooters” in the US between 2008 and 2013 had been diagnosed with a mental illness before the attack and 70% had “mental health stressors” or “mental health concerning behaviors.”

So for anyone actually interested in preventing future such massacres, the so-called “red flag” legislation Trump is advocating to deny people with mental illness access to firearms is the most logical measure and the one most likely to be embraced by both sides of politics.

But it also should apply to marijuana use, seeing as the two go hand in hand.

You can’t address the youth mental health crisis without considering the effect of rising teen marijuana use.

We’ve known for more than a decade of the link between marijuana and psychosis, depression and schizophrenia.

In 2007 the prestigious medical journal Lancet recanted its previous benign view of marijuana, citing studies showing “an increase in risk of psychosis of about 40 percent.”

A seminal long-term study of 50,465 Swedish army conscripts found those who had tried marijuana by age 18 had 2.4 times the risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia in the following 15 years than those who had never used the drug. Heavy users were 6.7 times more likely to be admitted to a hospital for schizophrenia.

Another study, of 1,037 people in New Zealand, found those who used cannabis at ages 15 and 18 had higher rates of psychotic symptoms at age 26 than non-users.

A 2011 study in the British Medical Journal of 2,000 teenagers found those who smoked marijuana were twice as likely to develop psychosis as those who didn’t.

Another BMJ study estimated that “13 percent of cases of schizophrenia could be averted if all cannabis use were prevented.”

That’s more than 400,000 Americans who could be saved from a fate worse than death.

Young people and those with a genetic predisposition are most at risk, particularly during adolescence, when the brain is exquisitely vulnerable.

The evidence of harm is overwhelming, and it defies logic to think that legalizing marijuana won’t increase the harm.

And yet marijuana activists pretend there is no problem and baby-boomer lawmakers, perhaps recalling their own youthful toking, ignore the science.

To make matters worse, the marijuana sold at legal dispensaries today is five times more potent than the pot of the 1970s and ’80s, according to a thoroughly researched new book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson: “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Violence and Mental Health.”

Berenson reports that the first four states to legalize marijuana, Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington, have seen “sharp increases” in violent crime since 2014.

If we care about mental illness, which has been spiking up at an alarming rate in recent years among young people, especially teenage boys, we should care about the convincing evidence of marijuana-induced psychosis.

We didn’t have to wait for three mass shootings in two weeks to know that young males are in crisis.

Youth suicide is at an all-time high and rates of serious mental illness in this country are on the rise, especially among people aged 18 to 25, the cohort most likely to use marijuana.

Young people born in 1999, the birth year of the El Paso shooter, were 50% more likely than those born in 1985 to report feeling “serious psychological distress” in the previous month, according to an alarming study published this year in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

With all we know, it’s time to put the brakes on marijuana legalization before it’s too late.

Donald Trump flew to Dayton and El Paso Wednesday signaling gun law concessions and trying to unite the nation, but his enemies only stepped up an increasingly unhinged demonization campaign.

Take the MSNBC intelligence analyst who suggested on air that the president was sending a sly code to neo-Nazis by ordering that US flags fly at half-staff through Thursday evening to mark last weekend’s mass shootings.

In his crackpot theory, former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC’s “11th Hour With Brian Williams” that Trump’s choice of Thursday’s date, 8/8/2019, is “very significant in the neo-Nazi and white-supremacy movement.”

That’s because “the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet and, to them, the numbers “88” together stand for “Heil Hitler.”

This is just madness. When the president’s foes are so determined to paint him as the devil, they only hurt themselves and help him.