58
   

Guns: how much longer will it take ....

 
 
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Fri 6 Sep, 2024 07:22 am
Quote:
Colin Gray, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, allegedly gave his son a firearm
“with knowledge he was a threat to himself and others,” according to the father’s arrest warrant affidavit.

Colin Gray, 54, is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder
and eight counts of cruelty to children, the affidavit states.

His 14-year-old son faces four counts of felony murder after Wednesday’s mass shooting in Winder, Georgia.
(cnn)
0 Replies
 
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Fri 6 Sep, 2024 07:25 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Quote:
According to JD Vance, reality of school shootings is a bleak ‘fact of life’.
he wants people in this country to make more babies.

when they reach school age, go ahead and put them in harm's way, because 'murrka'...
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  3  
Reply Mon 14 Oct, 2024 06:30 am
Quote:
NRA chief involved in gruesome cat killing as college fraternity member
Doug Hamlin pleaded no contest to animal cruelty over 1979 incident in which fraternity cat was tortured and killed

Douglas Hamlin, who was appointed to lead the NRA this summer in the wake of a long-running corruption scandal at the gun rights group, was involved decades ago in the sadistic killing of a fraternity house cat named BK, according to several local media reports at the time.

Hamlin pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty brought against him and four of his fraternity brothers in 1980, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The charge was brought against Hamlin under a local Ann Arbor ordinance. All five members of Alpha Delta Phi were later expelled from the fraternity.

The details of the case, described in local media reports at the time, are gruesome. The house cat was captured, its paws were cut off, and was then strung up and set on fire. The killing, which occurred in December 1979, was allegedly prompted by anger that the cat was not using its litterbox.

The case caused such a furore locally that some students and animal rights activists wore buttons and armbands in memory of BK.

Hamlin served as the fraternity president at the time, according to the media reports. While Hamlin’s exact role in the killing is unclear, a report in the Ann Arbor News published in March 1980 – at the time of the court case – said that district court judge SJ Elden singled Hamlin out for criticism, saying he could have prevented it from happening as the leader of the fraternity.

The judge called the cat killing an “unconscionable and heinous” act and suggested the fraternity had tried to engage in a coverup to protect its members after the crime was exposed.

“Heartlessness must be in the job description to run the NRA,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety. “This revelation shows that the NRA has failed to turn the page on its scandal-plagued leaders and its doom spiral continues with Hamlin at the helm.”

One of the fraternity brothers who was charged at the time and spoke to the Guardian on the condition that his name would not be used said the incident had been “regrettable” and “not a good chapter for anybody”.

The Guardian contacted Hamlin through multiple spokespersons at the NRA and tried to reach Hamlin by phone but did not receive any response to questions about the incident.

Shelagh Abbs Winter, who was named in a media report as the student who reported the incident to authorities at the time, told the Guardian she recalled many of the details, including that she had felt compelled to report the incident to authorities after she learned what had happened from another student who was a pledge at the fraternity.

Winter was and remains an animal rights activist, and expressed surprise when she was contacted by the Guardian for this story, because she had not followed Hamlin’s career nor realized that the 1979 incident would still be personally relevant decades later.

“You don’t know how amazing this is to me, because I am a member of Moms Demand Action,” she said, referring to one of the most influential grassroots gun control advocacy groups in the country, which has proved to be a thorn in the side of the NRA. Winter said she remembered feeling threatened at the time for coming forward.

“Once a creep, always a creep,” she said.

A cook who worked at the fraternity at the time and asked not to be named said he recalled speaking to police and never returning back to work because he feared reprisal. “After it was disclosed that the police were investigating, a meeting was called, and the members were told to say nothing; not to cooperate; and not to, essentially, give up their brothers,” the person told the Guardian.

According to press reports, the charges were ultimately expunged from the men’s records after they completed 200 hours each of animal-related community service.

Hamlin was elected by the NRA’s board to serve as CEO in July. After graduating from college, Hamlin joined the Marine Corps and later began working at the gun rights group, serving as executive director of its publications division.

Hamlin’s promotion followed a New York judge’s ruling that the longtime head of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, would be barred from holding a paid position with the group after a jury found him guilty of misspending millions of dollars in NRA funds for his own benefit.


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/14/nra-doug-hamlin-cat-killing
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Mon 14 Oct, 2024 06:50 am
@izzythepush,
Horrifying – yet not all that surprising. As the person who originally reported the crime said, “Once a creep, always a creep.”



0 Replies
 
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Wed 26 Mar, 2025 10:02 am

CNN News Alert:
Supreme Court upholds rules requiring background checks for 'ghost guns'

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Biden-era federal regulations on “ghost guns,” mail-order kits that allow
people to build untraceable weapons at home – handing gun control groups a rare win at the conservative high court.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for a 7-2 majority that included both liberal and conservative justices in one
of the most closely watched Supreme Court cases of the year.
0 Replies
 
thack45
 
  1  
Reply Fri 28 Mar, 2025 11:52 am
In 2017, after Stephen Paddock shot over 1000 rounds and killed 60 Americans from the broken out windows of his 32nd floor Las Vegas hotel room, the death count and other factors of the incident were terrifying enough to get a ban on "bump stock" gun modification accessories, a much more significant action than anything following a paltry 10 or 20 Americans randomly shot dead in public. BUT, just last year, the Supreme Court overturned that rule, and remains in the majority committed to the narrative that gun-entitlement is a right.

But before the bump stock ban, those old "mental illness" (and iirc, video games) angles were trotted back out by the gun-entitlement groups and then-president Trump.

Now, seven years later, again-president Trump has cut over 11 billion in funding for health services which address, among other things, mental health care. And just like the other agencies where Trump's administration has cut jobs and funding, it was a kneecapping, with no plans in place to unwind or sunset programs while Americans are currently involved with them – in perfect keeping with the easy-answers approach to governing that just enough voters preferred.

So for now, to justify cuts, we can victim-blame people who struggle with things like mental illness, and judges can credulously agree with well funded arguments that some things that can kill people can't kill people. Those are the easy answers. But next time there's a big one, and we're once again in the same old arguments with proponents of gun-entitlement, remember who decided that doing nothing was cheaper and easier, and why.
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  2  
Reply Tue 1 Apr, 2025 12:01 pm
This ain't America, look what happens when you try open carry over here.


Quote:
Man shot dead by police at Milton Keynes train station
Officers responded to reports of person carrying firearm, Thames Valley police say as IOPC launches investigation

A man has been shot dead by police responding to reports of a person carrying a firearm at Milton Keynes railway station.

Thames Valley police (TVP) officers were called to the station by members of the public at 12.55pm on Tuesday. The man was shot by police in the station square outside the building and died at 1.44pm.

At 2.26pm, about an hour and a half after TVP officers arrived on the scene, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) launched an investigation into the incident after being contacted by the force.

The force said: “Officers from Thames Valley police and British Transport Police were called to reports of a man carrying a firearm at Milton Keynes railway station, Elder Gate, Milton Keynes, at 12.55pm today.

“Armed officers from Thames Valley police responded and challenged the man, before shots were fired by police. Life-saving actions were immediately taken at the scene, but the man was pronounced dead at 1.44pm.

“There is not believed to be any further risk to the public at this time. We will provide more details as soon as we are able to.”

A spokesperson for the police watchdog, who described the investigation as being “in its very early stages”, said: “We were notified by TVP shortly after the incident and IOPC investigators have been sent to the station and the police post incident procedure to begin gathering information.

“Our thoughts are with the family of the man who died and all those who have been affected by this incident. Our role in these circumstances is to independently investigate all of the circumstances surrounding this incident including the actions and decisions taken by the police.”

Shivani Sharma, a reporter from LBC, said a witness told her “he heard screaming back and forth for around 30 minutes and the man refused to drop to the ground”.

British Transport Police officers were also on scene. A spokesperson said: “BTP received a report from Thames Valley police at 1pm today, of a man carrying a firearm at Milton Keynes station.

“Armed officers from Thames Valley Police responded and he was shot and pronounced dead outside of the station. BTP officers are on scene to assist our colleagues from TVP, and the station is open as normal.”

A witness told the Daily Mail they would have nightmares after seeing the “shocking” scene outside the station.

“I was having my coffee and I saw a police Volvo arrive, they said. “I heard a pop – I used to work with firearms in private security, I knew it wasn’t a car backfiring or anything.

“When I went out people were crowding around and I could see the hole in his stomach and blood gushing out. They turned him to look for an exit wound and then laid him flat and started doing compressions. I heard him gasping.”

Police put a cordon in place around the area and several entrances to the station were closed off. London Northwestern Railway said there had been no impact on services.


https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/01/man-shot-dead-by-police-at-milton-keynes-train-station
0 Replies
 
hingehead
 
  2  
Reply Tue 15 Apr, 2025 08:12 pm
Blind man gets license to carry permit to make a point about Indiana gun laws

https://www.wishtv.com/news/i-team-8/blind-man-indiana-concealed-carry/
0 Replies
 
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Thu 28 Aug, 2025 09:57 am

shameful...

https://i.ibb.co/YBRYgqvx/capture.jpg
0 Replies
 
jespah
 
  2  
Reply Thu 28 Aug, 2025 02:45 pm
After the killing of 2 children in a Minneapolis church while praying, I want to see one of these idiots just try to explain that these deaths were just the cost of doing business (or that they were crisis actors, paging Alex Jones down in the sewer where he lives). And at the same time try to refute what seems like pretty incontrovertible evidence that prayer doesn't do diddly.
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Fri 29 Aug, 2025 04:36 am
@jespah,
According to officials the shooter was "obsessed with idea of killing children," yet the guns used in the shooting were all legally purchased.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  2  
Reply Sun 31 Aug, 2025 12:27 pm
The police in Houston detained a person after a 10-year-old boy who had knocked on a door was shot on Saturday night.
Quote:
A 10-year-old boy was in critical condition after he was shot while playing the “ding dong ditch” prank in Houston on Saturday night, the authorities said.

The Houston Police Department responded to a report of a shooting just before 11 p.m. in the east area of the city, the department said.

The boy, along with several friends, had approached a home in their neighborhood and knocked on the door of a residence, the police said.

In the doorbell ditch prank, better known as the ding dong ditch, a person rings a doorbell and tries to run away before anyone opens the door.

On Saturday evening, “the person inside that house came out and shot at the 10-year-old,’’ Lt. Amber Khan of the Houston Police Department told KHOU, a local CBS affiliate, at the scene.

She added that “the 10-year-old sustained a couple of gunshot wounds.”

Emergency responders with the Houston Fire Department transported the boy to a hospital, where he was in critical condition on Sunday, according to Shay Awosiyan, a spokesman for the Police Department.

It was not immediately clear if there were any other injuries in the shooting
NYT

0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  1  
Reply Tue 9 Sep, 2025 05:25 am
The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing

Quote:
On a sunny day in Grapevine, Texas, three drones are buzzing around the head of a test dummy balanced on a pedestal. It's part of a demonstration outside the National School Safety Conference.

"We use drones to stop school shootings," says Justin Marston, the CEO of Campus Guardian Angel, the company selling the drones. In the event of a shooting, remote pilots fly the drones, housed at the school, at the shooter. They shoot pepper balls and run the drones into the shooter to debilitate them.

The technology is one example on a long list of products schools can buy to deter a shooter.

There have been more than 400 school shootings since Columbine in 1999, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. The latest was last month, when a former student opened fire at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Two students were killed and at least 18 others were wounded.

In the wake of those shootings, an industry has emerged to try to protect schools — and business is booming. According to the market research firm Omdia, the school security industry is now worth as much as $4 billion, and it's projected to keep growing.

"The school safety and security industry has grown rapidly over the past decade," says Sonali Rajan, senior director with the research arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for gun control. "The challenge right now is that these school safety products, the vast majority, have absolutely no evidence guiding their effectiveness."

What's for sale

Inside the school safety conference, vendors in an expo hall showcase panic buttons, bullet-resistant whiteboards, facial recognition technology, training simulators, body armor, guns and tasers.

Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their U.S. business. Now they're the majority.

"It's not right. We need to solve this problem. It's good for business, but we don't need to be selling to schools," McDermott says.

Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments, and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.

"Being prepared and having these devices in the schools is essential," she says. "Some people want to put their heads in the sand and pretend like it's not going to happen to them."

The expo hall is just one part of the conference, organized by the National Association of School Resource Officers, or NASRO. The group also trains school-based police officers on a variety of topics, including how to work with kids who have experienced trauma, and how to intervene before violence occurs.

Sarah Mendoza, a school resource officer in Yoakum, Texas, who attended the conference, says she finds that aspect most meaningful.

"I just sit there and I talk to them and I listen," she says of working with students. "My connection with the kids is so important because they're the ones who are going to come and tell me, 'Hey Mendoza, this is what's going on. Can you help us?' or 'Hey Mendoza, this is how I'm feeling today. What can I do to make myself better?'"

Mo Canady, the executive director of NASRO and a former police officer, says school resource officers are in one of the most challenging policing roles.

"We're asking a lot of that officer. We're asking them to be the best tactical person their department could offer," Canady says. "We're asking them to be the best informal counselor."

But when a shooting happens, he says school resource officers need any tools they can get.

What works to prevent school shootings

Gun violence experts say simple things like locked doors can make a difference. Authorities say that likely saved many lives last month in Minneapolis. But a locked door doesn't necessarily prevent a shooting.

Researchers say investing in school communities that promote a culture of emotional support and trust, as well as robust mental health services, are key to preventing gun violence, as most school shooters are current or former students and are suicidal.

Jillian Peterson, who leads the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University, has interviewed people who planned a school shooting, but didn't carry it out. She said there are often two key reasons they change their minds: The first is that they had trouble accessing a firearm – which is why, she says, safe storage laws are crucial.

The other is that someone helped a young person find hope while they were in crisis.

"We're spending billions of dollars that could be going to mental health or counselors, all the stuff that we know creates inclusion," Peterson says.

Still, she says, she understands the allure of an impenetrable school.

"I think it preys on people's worst fears," she says. "How do you say no to something if you're telling me it might save my kid's life? Of course I want that thing."

She said trying to buy safety feels very American, just like school shootings.

npr
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Sep, 2025 02:54 pm
@hightor,
Charlie Kirk has been shot dead.

You reap what you sow.

Despite what the politicians say political violence has a huge place in America politics, because gun violence plays a huge part in American life, from mass shootings to trigger happy cops and everything in between.

At least this time it was some Nazi piece of **** instead of an innocent school kid.
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Sep, 2025 03:39 pm
@izzythepush,

how ironic...

Quote:
Video posted on social media shows the moment Charlie Kirk was shot and the seconds leading to the incident.
Kirk was being asked questions about mass shootings in America.

“Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?” a person asks.
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk responds right before he is shot.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09/10/us/charlie-kirk-shot-utah
0 Replies
 
jespah
 
  3  
Reply Thu 11 Sep, 2025 09:22 pm
@hightor,
hightor wrote:

The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing

Quote:
...

What works to prevent school shootings

Gun violence experts say simple things like locked doors can make a difference. Authorities say that likely saved many lives last month in Minneapolis. But a locked door doesn't necessarily prevent a shooting.

Researchers say investing in school communities that promote a culture of emotional support and trust, as well as robust mental health services, are key to preventing gun violence, as most school shooters are current or former students and are suicidal.

Jillian Peterson, who leads the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University, has interviewed people who planned a school shooting, but didn't carry it out. She said there are often two key reasons they change their minds: The first is that they had trouble accessing a firearm – which is why, she says, safe storage laws are crucial.

The other is that someone helped a young person find hope while they were in crisis.


"We're spending billions of dollars that could be going to mental health or counselors, all the stuff that we know creates inclusion," Peterson says.

Still, she says, she understands the allure of an impenetrable school.

"I think it preys on people's worst fears," she says. "How do you say no to something if you're telling me it might save my kid's life? Of course I want that thing."

She said trying to buy safety feels very American, just like school shootings.

npr

{added red is mine, for emphasis}

Have you ever noticed that a lot of bridges have razor wire around the areas where it's easiest to climb up? This is to prevent desperate people from jumping and committing suicide. It's called means restriction.

By making it just a little bit more difficult to climb up and kill themselves, means restriction prevents suicide. How small is the amount of difficulty thrown into the equation? It may take longer to climb. Or a person might go home (or to a hardware store) to buy wire cutters. Or they might not relish the thought of ripping their clothes (or their skin) on the wire—which includes people who tried anyway, and realized it was painful and inconvenient.

Never mind that hitting the water at the kind of velocity you'd kick up from the top of, say, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in NY would be like hitting cement. But I'll take it, if it keeps someone alive for another day. A day when they might start to get the help that they need, or at least something positive in their life happens, and they postpone their chosen day to die. The more postponements, the better for them, yes?

This is all well and good for people choosing jumping off a bridge as their means of ending their lives. But according to the CDC, firearms are used in over half of all suicides. See: https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

Note: the most recent data is from 2023. That page also says that men are 4 times more likely to commit suicide than women. The race with the second-highest incidence of suicide was non-Hispanic whites (although the CDC cautions that sometimes the data they're pulling from plays fast and loose with who's considered to be Hispanic, or not.

Then there's the NIH data, see: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9712777/

They say {I added the line breaks to make the numbers more readable}:
Quote:
In all age groups,

55% of men and 30% of women used firearms;
28% of men and 29% of women hanging/suffocation;
9% of men and 32% of women poisoning, and
8% of men and 9% of women “other” methods.

Men age < 45 had higher likelihood of firearm and/or hanging/suffocation use than those age 45–64. Women age<45 also had higher likelihood of hanging/suffocation than those age 45–64.


That article also says {again, I added the red}:
Quote:
The findings call for the following suicide prevention strategies: (1) restricted access to firearms; (2) improved access to mental health/substance use treatment; (3) improved long-term and palliative care services for those (mostly older adults) with physical health problems; (4) financial/housing support policies to mitigate economic hardship; and (5) more research to identify effective strategies to curtail the increasing use of firearm and hanging/suffocation among young and middle-aged adults.


So, why not use means restriction on firearms as a means of lowering the number of successful suicide attempts? Frame it not as a rights issue, but as a way to keep people from offing themselves. And since the demographics of people who use firearms as their means of self-destruction tend to skew male and non-Hispanic (both white and Native American), doesn't that play right into MAGA's concern over the very Nazi-era "Great Replacement Theory" where white people are being 'replaced' by people of color?

Add such a strategy to their own push to get white folks to have more kids (good luck with that one; kids are expensive!), and the MAGA crowd might just get behind this, at least to the extent of keeping their precious white dudes alive long enough to add to the population.

And don't they also want their precious white children to stay alive to shore up their numbers?

Then quit being insane about gun fetishes and require background checks to weed out violent felons and the mentally ill and use—oh, look, it's those magic words again—means restriction on them.

Meet MAGA where they mentally are, and convince them that it was their idea all along....
hightor
 
  3  
Reply Fri 12 Sep, 2025 05:56 am
@jespah,
If we can devise a way of making money off of restricting firearms sales we might be on the way to solving the problem.
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Fri 12 Sep, 2025 06:26 am
According to the reports, the Kirk assassination was accomplished with a 30.06 caliber bolt action hunting rifle, once a common sporting arm. (I actually have one myself.) This is different from the assault-styled semi-automatic weapons which have become de rigueur for violent gun nuts these days. When I learned that it was a single shot from maybe two hundred yards away I immediately thought it would likely be a hunting rifle. While both types of weapons are equally lethal (Oswald used a bolt action rifle), deadly mass shootings have really skyrocketed since the assault weapons ban was allowed to expire.

The would-be "sniper" in the Butler shooting basically fired a half dozen rounds in the general direction of Trump and ended up killing a spectator. And we know that high capacity assault weapons have been used in nearly all the school shootings. I have no objection to restricting the sale of firearms and ammunition, waiting periods, licensing of handguns, and registration of firearms. But I really think that assault weapons, as a class, represent the greatest immediate danger in terms of sheer firepower and their appeal to psychotic individuals.
0 Replies
 
hingehead
 
  3  
Reply Fri 12 Sep, 2025 03:30 pm
I’m starting to think that they won’t even support banning arms sales to the mentally ill because that would be disarming their power base.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Fri 26 Sep, 2025 07:08 am
Today, in a trial concerning vigilante justice, the Bonn (Germany) Regional Court sentenced a defendant to five and a half years in prison for attempted manslaughter. The 75-year-old man had fired ten shots at a fleeing burglar.

A clear case of vigilante justice, the judges said. The defendant never intended to call the emergency services, according to the presiding judge in her reasoning for the verdict, ‘because in his view it would have taken the police too long to arrive.’ The defendant wanted to take the law into his own hands.


Just saying.
0 Replies
 
 

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