Another major school shooting today ... Newtown, Conn

Idiot!

Re: Frank Apisa (Post 5224025)
No, it's just black Americans that Obama wants to keep on the democratic plantation.

Epidemiology and clinical aspects of stray bullet shootings
in the United States
Garen J. Wintemute, MD, MPH, Barbara E. Claire, Vanessa S. McHenry,
and Mona A. Wright, MPH, Sacramento, California

BACKGROUND: Stray bullet shootings contribute to a sense of risk in affected communities but have rarely been studied. We describe the
epidemiology and clinical aspects of stray bullet shootings in the United States.

METHODS: We defined a case as a shooting event involving death or injury to a person and meeting criteria for a stray bullet mechanism of
injury. From March 1, 2008, to February 28, 2009, we conducted real-time surveillance using two automated Internet news
searches for the term ‘‘stray bullet.’’ Secondary searches were performed to identify new cases and additional news reports.

RESULTS: We reviewed 1,996 nonduplicate news reports for 501 shooting events, of which 284 (56.7%) met our case criteria. There were
317 persons injured by stray bullets, of whom 65 (20.5%) died. Most cases (59.2%) involved interpersonal violence. When
compared with persons killed or injured in firearm-related assaults or unintentional shootings generally in the United States in
2007, those killed or injured by stray bulletswere more likely to be female (44.8% and 10.7%, respectively; odds ratio, 7.4; 95%
confidence interval, 5.9Y9.3) and outside the age range 15 years to 34 years (55.5% and 27.0%, respectively; odds ratio, 5.6;95%
confidence interval, 4.3Y7.3). Most stray bullet victims (81.4%)were apparently unaware of the events leading to the gunfire that
caused their injuries. Shooters were predominantly male (95.9%); 62.0% were aged 15 years to 34 years. Eighteen deaths
(27.7%) occurred at the scene of the shooting and 55 (84.6%) on the day of the shooting. The case-fatality ratio for stray bullet
shootings was somewhat higher than that for firearm-related assaults or unintentional shootings in the United States in 2007.
http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/vprp/publications/straybulletJTrauma.pdf

Stray bullets bring death and mayhem across US this week
June 26, 2012
by Jim MacMillan

Officials are blaming stray bullets for several homicides this week, as well as igniting an 8,000 acre wildfire and destroying a cache of Fourth-of-July fireworks. One stray bullet killed a sleeping child in Minneapolis this morning:
http://guncrisis.org/2012/06/26/stray-bullets-bring-death-and-mayhem-across-us-this-week/

Stray bullet kills sleeping child
Jun 26, 2012
A child is dead after a stray bullet ripped through a wall and struck him while he slept in Minneapolis Tuesday morning.

A Minneapolis Police spokesman says the boy, who is believed to be 5 or 6 years old, was sleeping on a couch in a home on the 4500 block of Bryant Avenue North when gunfire erupted shortly after 8:30 a.m.

Adults in the home called 911 and the child was rushed to North Memorial Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

There were a number of other adults and children inside the house at the time the child was shot. One adult received minor injuries from fragments or material deflected by the bullet but no one else was affected.

Police on the scene are interviewing a number of people but say at this point no one has been arrested or is in custody.

The shooting scene is approximately 20 blocks from the home where 3-year-old Terrell Mayes was fatally shot exactly six months ago.

Terrell's mother Marsha Mayes came to the neighborhood to talk to reporters about Tuesday's senseless death of the young child and her son's murder, which remains unsolved.

"Surreal," she told reporters. "Now this baby. It's wrong."

Mayes says she makes her remaining kids stay inside in an attempt to keep them safe but adds that the two shootings prove that people in north Minneapolis aren't safe anywhere.

"All I can say to 'em is, another one," Mayes said, when asked about what she told her survivng children when they asked about Tuesday morning's murder. "They say 'mama, the same way?' I say yes, the same way. They say 'mama, when's it gonna stop?' What can you tell em, nothing but stay in the house. Staying in the house ain't even good. Look what happened."
http://www.valleynewslive.com/story/18883561/stray-bullet-kills-sleeping-child-in-minneapolis

Victims of stray bullets often children
August 4, 2011
Ryan Gabrielson

Chris Rodriguez was taking a piano lesson around 4:30 p.m. on Jan. 10, 2008, at a North Oakland music school. Across the street, an inebriated man robbed a gas station, firing three shots at an attendant.

None of the bullets hit their intended target.

Instead, one cut through the school’s wall and Chris' spine, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, paralyzing the 10-year-old boy’s legs.

That shooting spurred the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis to examine stray bullet injuries and deaths.

The findings from a year’s worth of data, to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, show Chris' case was not an anomaly. Young children make up a disproportionate number of victims, and buildings do not reliably stop bullets.

There is no data set that tracks stray bullet injuries in the United States. So Dr. Garen Wintemute, the program director, and his research team relied on press reports of such shootings from March 2008 through February 2009.

Kids ages 14 and younger made up about 31 percent of the 317 people hit by stray bullets nationwide in cases the study identified (see chart below for full details). This age group accounts for only 20 percent of the general population, U.S. Census Bureau data shows.

A majority of the shootings were “incidental to violence,” but 81 percent of those wounded did not know who pulled the trigger.

This detachment, in which victims cannot see the violence coming, fuels fear in neighborhoods where crime is common.

“People don’t let their children play outside; they don’t go outside themselves,” Wintemute said. “They do all their business in the morning when, as it turns out, the risk of these shootings is the least.”

Most victims survived, as Chris has.

Twenty-eight percent of victims were indoors at the time, with a stray bullet moving through wood, drywall, brick or tile.

A relatively small number of injuries (13) involved celebratory shots fired into the air. Although rare, those bullets are particularly dangerous.

“When fired into the air, bullets can return to the ground at speeds greater than 200 (feet per second), a sufficient force to penetrate the human skull and cause serious injury or death,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote in a 2004 report on New Year’s Eve gunfire in Puerto Rico.

Wintemute is completing a more extensive report that will include case studies in addition to the numbers. But he says there are few ways to reduce stray bullet injuries without reducing gun violence.

“We could recommend that the outer walls of buildings be bulletproof, or that there be a bulletproof area within each home or apartment, that shower stalls be made of steel,” Wintemute said. “But that’s crazy talk.”

http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/victims-stray-bullets-often-children-11886

The vast majority of black American males shooting black American males happens
in Blue state cities with the strictest of gun controls in place for quite some time.

In 1995, while running for reelection, President Bill Clinton released a campaign ad in which the narrator declared, "Bill Clinton did something no president has ever been able to accomplish: He passed and signed a tough law to ban deadly assault weapons." Then Clinton himself appeared in the spot and boasted he had taken "deadly assault weapons off our streets." Clinton was referring to the assault weapons ban he had achieved as part of a massive anti-crime bill enacted the previous year. With this legislation, the last major gun control law produced by Washington, Clinton had scored a headline-making political victory, overcoming the fierce opposition of the formidable National Rifle Association. But he had racked up, at best, only a partial policy victory, for the ban was riddled with loopholes and did little to curtail the availability of semiautomatic weapons. Two decades later, as President Barack Obama initiates an effort to enact effective gun control measures in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the 1994 fight holds plenty of lessons for him and his allies.

In the ensuing war with the NRA, which was adamantly opposed to the assault weapons ban (even a ban severely weakened through legislative compromise), Clinton used police officers, who argued they were being outgunned by criminals and mad men, as his backup. The fight, as Clinton orchestrated it, was not a soft-on-crime Democratic politician versus the all-American NRA; it was cops versus the extremists of the gun lobby. As the political pros of today might say, Clinton flipped the optics.

Clinton also fully deployed his Cabinet to line up votes for the assault weapons ban. Vice President Al Gore (from Tennessee), Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen (from Texas), and Attorney General Janet Reno (from Florida) leaned on swing votes, especially Democratic legislators from conservative districts who were grousing about being forced to vote for gun control and against the NRA. (At one point during the legislative fisticuffs, though, the White House signaled to Capitol Hill Democrats that it would be willing to dump the assault weapons ban to win passage of the larger crime bill.) Clinton and his allies talked about crime and safety, not the evils of gun ownership. As Newsweek reported at the time, "By enlisting police and repeatedly stressing their support for hunting, the Democrats looked anti-crime rather than anti-gun."

It worked. By tethering the cop-backed assault weapons ban to conservative policies within a bill that doled out lots of money to various constituencies, Clinton bagged enough votes on both sides of the aisle for passage, even as staunch liberals and ardent conservatives voted against the crime bill. (The assault weapons ban passed by a two-vote margin in the Democrat-controlled House.) Clinton vanquished the NRA. It was an impressive political feat for the first-term president.

But to what end? The assault weapons ban proved of little value where it counted most: on the street. The legislation prohibited the manufacture, possession, transfer, and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, yet it defined assault weapons in a manner that would allow gun manufacturers to skirt the ban without much trouble. It exempted 650 firearms and grandfathered in weapons and ammo clips produced or purchased before the enactment of the ban. "It was better to get what we got than nothing," the former Justice Department official says. And the measure's prohibition on high-capacity clips was probably its most effective provision. "Ultimately, the 1994 ban was almost meaningless because it was so defectively drafted," says Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, who worked for the House subcommittee on crime in 1994.

The law did little to affect gun violence. Prior to the ban, nervous gun owners and dealers stocked up on assault weapons and the high-capacity clips, and afterward gun manufacturers made cosmetic changes to semiautomatic weapons so these guns would not violate the new law. And the 1994 federal ban was passed with a built-in 2004 expiration date. When the time ran out, then-President George W. Bush did nothing to extend the law. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama called for reviving the assault weapons ban. But after he became president, his administration took no steps to do so. Guns were too hot (politically) to touch.

The .223 caliber Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle reportedly used by Adam Lanza in the Newtown shootings was the sort of weapon gun control advocates had hoped to prohibit with the 1994 ban. Yet even though the state of Connecticut passed its own assault weapons ban, modeled on the 1994 federal law but with no sunset clause, this particular gun was legal in the state because Bushmaster had made a slight and insignificant change in its design to evade restrictions.

Now Obama has committed to a robust gun control program. At a White House press conference on Wednesday, he announced that he had asked Vice President Joe Biden, who helped draft the 1994 crime bill, to lead an initiative that would propose a variety of gun safety measures by the end of next month. And the president ticked off several proposals that would likely be included in the Biden recommendations, with an assault weapons ban topping the list that also included a ban on the sale of high-capacity ammunition clips and background checks for all gun purchases.

As Obama assumes this tough mission, he can look back to the 1994 episode for guidance on how to win the politics and how to avoid screwing up the policy. Clinton savvily enlisted the law enforcement community and made good use of his Cabinet. Obama could emulate both moves. (He has instructed members of his Cabinet to help craft recommendations for Biden's task force.) Yet to make sure his efforts yield real-world results, the president will have to be mindful of policy particulars and not repeat the errors of 1994. "If you're going to be effective, you have to have a broad-based ban on weapons and on ammo," the former Justice Department official says.

Re: Frank Apisa (Post 5224041)


Once again you ignore Obama's abuse of black Americans... I guess you are cool with it.

Re: Frank Apisa (Post 5224041)

WaterBuoy's got his blinders on...

Keep in mind America's population is around 300 mil while UK's population is around 62 mil

Strict gun controls in one geographic area don't work if you can go into a neighboring area, easily make gun purchases, often by straw purchasers, and just as easily bring them into the area with strict controls.