'Murphy's law' and Walmart toddler shooting

I guess this is my first post of 2015, from CNN:

The toddler was able to unzip the pocket and grab the gun -- without being noticed. He was also able to grip the gun and exert sufficient force to fire, at least three rounds...

'Murphy's law just came into play today in so many ways and there are irreversible consequences for that'...

Murphy's law, my ass!

This just goes to show, once again, that carrying guns around is inherently unsafe. Because a gun, when used as intended, hurts or kills people. 

So now this two-year-old kid is fated to grow up with all kinds of guilt and remorse that he will struggle with and probably never comes to grips with because, let's face it, HIS MOM WAS A F---ING IDIOT. (UPDATE: A nuclear scientist idiot). And apparently her relatives are idiots, too.

Call me a cynical liberal SOB, but I don't feel sorry for her. But indeed I do feel sorry for her son and her other family members who witnessed her shooting death in... Walmart of all the godforsaken places. 

What's it gonna take to shake the belief out of the right-wing gun nuts? I mean, what possible metaphysical event would have to happen to make them change their minds? Can you even imagine what would be horrible enough?

I'm sure this won't do it. It would have to be... oh... I don't know anymore. A school filled with bullet-ridden children hasn't done it... a few times. Certainly this won't.  

I try to retain my liberal optimism and faith in people, but... I just don't see what it's gonna take. These people are blinded, fully, and to their own detriment. And self-inflicted pain is not a factor. They just chalk it up to God or fate, the morons, and keep on keepin' on.

I'm at a loss for words. 

Guns in Kroger and the myth of the open-carry Old West

You never know what mortal dangers you might face at the Kroger pharmacy, so be packing!

This story from HuffPo gives me deja vu from February 2013, because gun nuts have chosen Kroger stores to carry their AR-15s into as a display of their "rights." My response then still applies:

Imagine being with your child or grandchild and seeing this guy walk into the Kroger or Walmart before you toting an AR-15. At that moment, I guarantee that you won't be thinking, "Hooray for the Second Amendment!" You'll immediately go into fight-or-flight mode, fearing for the life of your child. You might use your own gun, preemptively, if you have one, creating all kinds of deadly confusion.

You might dial 911 and precipitate a costly and dangerous emergency, or a standoff situation if the guy is itching for it. In any case, I guarantee that you wouldn't not feel terror, it's just human instinct.

This is the country that the NRA and GOP have given us. This is not the country of our grandparents; there's nothing "conservative" or traditionally American about a guy casually walking into a grocery store with a deadly weapon that can fire more than 120 rounds per minute.

On the flip side, I have a second protest against an open-carry society: ironically, it would dull the instincts of those who carry guns to protect themselves and put them in danger. I mean, if everybody's carrying a gun and there's nothing alarming about that anymore, then how much time would you have to react if one of those folks in the crowd decides to point and shoot you? A second, maybe. Whereas if you see a guy with a gun today, in most cases, you're either immediately running away, calling the police or getting ready to defend yourself.  

That's why even in the Old West, where today we imagine everybody and his granny was packing, in fact many towns practiced gun control, for example in famous Dodge City, as my man Leonard Pitts recently pointed out: "Forget that myth about open carry’s Old West roots."

Kroger Under Fire From Gun-Control Moms

By Ben Hallman

August 18, 2014 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1Arb9Ly

Studies: The more guns, the fewer museums and libraries

Well knock me over with a feather!  For some reason guns don't jibe with museums and libraries!

Let's stop pretending that gun owners are defenders of "freedom;" more likely, they are backwards bumpkins who lower our security and quality of life. 

Where gun stores outnumber museums and libraries

By Christopher Ingraham

June 17, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1oAE7qc

Militarization of America's small town police

I've commented before about the militarization of America's local police, despite the lack of any increase in crime or threats to them.

Essentially there is an arms race going on inside America: cops perceive crime to be going up (untrue) and citizens to be better armed (true); meanwhile, citizens perceive cops to be better armed and equipped (partly true), so some of them buy more guns, ammo and armor-piercing bullets to maintain an advantage over "the Man" or Big Government in case it decides to "take over" or come for their guns. Then cops see what ordinary citizens are packing and conclude they need armored vehicles and high-powered rifles, etc. to protect themselves. A highly-armed citizenry also fosters an "us against them," quasi-fascist mentality among police, instead of "serve and protect."

It's hysteria on both sides; it's a vicious circle.  And it all starts with fear stirred up by crazy right-wing rhetoric.

War comes to Pulaski County, Indiana

By Radley Balko

June 9, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1l0Mgff

Right-wing rhetoric partly to blame for shooting sprees

Kudos to Paul Waldman for telling it like it is: relentless, crazy right-wing rhetoric is indeed responsible for stirring some disturbed gun nuts to go on shooting sprees [italics and emphasis mine]:

But the argument that no sane person could actually believe many of the things conservatives say shouldn’t absolve them of responsibility. When you broadcast every day that the government of the world’s oldest democracy is a totalitarian beast bent on turning America into a prison of oppression and fear, when you glorify lawbreakers like Cliven Bundy, when you say that your opponents would literally destroy the country if they could, you can’t profess surprise when some people decide that violence is the only means of forestalling the disaster you have warned them about.

To my conservative friends tempted to find outrageous things liberals have said in order to argue that both sides are equally to blame, I’d respond this way: Find me all the examples of people who shot up a church after reading books by Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman, and then you’ll have a case.

I would go even further than Waldman: conservatives spewing such radical rhetoric should not only not be surprised when some people take what they say literally to its "logical" conclusion; conservative radicals have no moral leg to stand on whatsoever. They don't even have the right to condemn these shooters, because they stand do not stand at a moral distance from these shooters like the rest of us do.

Alas, my satisfaction in being right on gun control is little consolation. Nothing is going to change because half of America is nuts about guns; and the shooting rampages will continue....

How much does right-wing rhetoric contribute to right-wing terrorism?

By Paul Waldman

June 9, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1n275d6

Sandy Hook anniversary and America's gun sickness

Whenever FOX needs somebody to say why gun control is bad, they call on John Lott.

Here Lott is gloating that stricter gun control hasn't come to pass one year since the Newtown massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary where 26 people were shot and killed, including 20 children ages 6-7, most of them left beyond recognition even by their parents. Here is the website created by the 26 families in their memory.

As I've described before in meticulous detail, when it comes to gun violence, Lott bends and twists the truth. For instance this: "But gun control advocates aren’t giving up. They are patient, and they have money."

They are spending more money lately, but gun control advocates are still being outspent 13 to 1 by gun rights groups.

Sure, Lott can gloat about even more lax gun control laws passed since Sandy Hook in Red States such as Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota and Kansas, while only a few states such as New York and Delaware passed even more strict gun control laws. 

But he can't simply lie that a clear majority of Americans opposes gun control. Over the past 10 years, the share of Americans favoring stricter gun laws has fluctuated between 44 and 60 percent, with the most recent Gallup figure at 49 percent in favor, 37 percent for the status quo, and 13 percent for even less strict gun laws.  

So, about half of Americans have a sickness that's killing all of us, and they need an intervention. Indeed, since 9/11, about 364,000 Americans were killed by firearms. That's more Americans than died in combat in the Civil War. 

The truth is though, fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to own guns. So how are gun makers' profits at an all-time high since Sandy Hook? Easy. They use the NRA to scare fewer people into buying more and more guns to "defend" themselves against tyrannical Big Government and hordes of non-existent criminals (usually in the guise of minorities). 

It's a sickening paradox, but gun rampages like Sandy Hook are good for gun makers, because as soon as politicians make a peep about sensible measures afterwards like universal background checks, the NRA's fear machine cranks into high gear -- "They're coming to take your guns away!" -- Red States make pre-emptive attacks on existing gun laws, and sales to gun nuts go through the roof again.

1 year after Newtown, support for stricter gun control has disappeared

By John Lott

December 13, 2013 | FoxNews

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/12/13/1-year-after-newtown-support-for-stricter-gun-control-has-disappeared/?intcmp=HPBucket

U.S. needs an intervention on guns

About half of America is insane about guns and the other half cannot cure their illness:

There have been fewer than 20 terror-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and about 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms. If any European nation had such a record and persisted in addressing only the first figure, while ignoring the second, you can bet your last pound that the State Department would be warning against travel to that country and no American would set foot in it without body armour.

In fact, if we take the entire history of U.S. warfare vs. the past 50 years of gun deaths, our national sickness looks even worse:

The figures from Congressional Research Service, plus recent statistics from icasualties.org, tell us that from the first casualties in the battle of Lexington to recent operations in Afghanistan, the toll is 1,171,177. By contrast, the number killed by firearms, including suicides, since 1968, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, is 1,384,171.

Porter believes it's time for the rest of the world to intervene and stop the bloodshed in America, since we Americans are mentally and physically incapable of ending it ourselves.

American gun use is out of control. Shouldn't the world intervene?

By Henry Porter

September 21, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3jxv3

The Duh files: States with more guns have more gun murders

As long as 40 percent of the U.S. is crazy about guns, researchers must continue to do these types of studies to prove the obvious: more guns = more gun murders.

Gun Violence Study Links State Levels Of Gun Ownership And Homicide

By Braden Goyette

September 14, 2013 | Huffington Post

A new study of gun violence published by the American Journal of Public Health found that states with greater levels of gun ownership tend to have higher rates of gun-related murder.

The study, conducted by Boston University professor Michael Siegel and coauthors Craig S. Ross and Charles King III, examines this relationship in all 50 states from 1981 to 2010. The researchers found that "for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent."

The authors note that, though they can't prove a causal relationship between higher levels of gun ownership and homicide, "states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides."

Their findings echo past studies about the relationship between gun ownership and homicide, though Siegel, Ross and King look at the relationship over a larger window of time than previous research.

According to a fact sheet from the Harvard School of Public Health:

Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.

A more localized 1993 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which focused on the most populous counties in Tennessee, Washington and Ohio, found that "keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide."

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Perverse states' reaction to Sandy Hook

It's sickening to think that the real result of the Sandy Hook gun rampage -- a shooting spree that killed eight boys and twelve girls, between six and seven years of age -- was even more lax gun control laws in more states, including: Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota and Kansas.

The faces of those shot and killed in Sandy Hook. The price of liberty?

Of course, you won't hear that in the U.S. lib'rul media.  You can only see that in a British newspaper.

If you live in one of the above-mentioned states, you're living among the crazies.  Are you one of the psychos, or somebody who knows the cure?

If you're one of the gun nuts, then none of the insane statistics cited below will matter to you, because no amount of dead children can equal the price of your "freedom" to bear assault-type weapons and semi-automatic handguns with big clips and avoid a criminal background check.

Defenseless little kids shot up at school.  Just as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the rest of our Founding Fathers imagined it.  Right.

UPDATE (09.12.2013):  In reply to this post, one of my GOP friends gave me one of the gun nuts' fallback arguments: alcohol kills more people than guns, so unless the Left is serious about banning alcohol, they don't have a right to talk about regulating firearms. 

(Nor should we spend $ billions on missions to Mars while children are starving in Africa, I suppose.)

So I sighed and reminded him that guns have no positive benefits, unlike alcohol. (Two exceptions: law enforcement and hunting; but hunters can pass background checks and they don't need banana clips to kill deer).  You can't shoot yourself or others in moderation. 

Besides, we regulate alcohol purchase and consumption myriad ways, and ban it for citizens under 21. A kid can legally own a rifle but not drink. It's a crime to buy a kid a beer but buying him a handgun is fine. You can't bring beer to a public school or library but you can take a gun. You can't drive while drinking but you can drive with a gun. We have public health campaigns against alcoholism, yet doctors and public health officials must remain silent about the dangers of guns. The state can take your kids away if you're an alcoholic, but not if you keep guns lying around the house. And we impose sin tax on alcohol ... but trying imposing a tax on ammunition!  The gun nuts would explode.

Yes, besides alcohol there are a few things that kill more people every year in America than guns: automobiles, prescription drugs.... Would the gun nuts have us outlaw pharmacies before we can have a reasonable conversation about regulating firearms?

Guns and kids: the youngest casualties of America's infatuation with firearms

By Ana Marie Cox

September 10, 2013 | Guardian

The cover of the recent Children's Defense Fund report (pdf) on gun violence in the United States carries a single statistic:

The number of children and teens killed by guns in one year would fill 134 classrooms of 20 students each.

That's just a more dramatic way of stating an already staggering figure – 2,694 in 2010. Most of the report's 73 following pages are devoted to restating it. Sometimes, this done to illustrate the chilling frequency of such deaths:

• One child or teen died every 3 hours and 15 minutes

• Seven children and teens died every day, more than 20 every three days

• Fifty-one children and teens died every week

Other times, the same set of statistics (all from the Centers for Disease Control) is used to drive home the magnitude of the tragedy, relating it to the kinds of violence we think we understand:

Nearly three times more children and teens were injured by guns in 2010 than the number of US soldiers wounded in action that year in the war in Afghanistan; 82 children under five died from guns in 2010, compared to 55 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.

And then, there's the shameful comparison to other countries:

US children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from a gun than their peers in 25 other high-income countries combined.

Put it slightly differently:

US children and teens made up 43% of all children and teens in these 26 countries but were 93% of all children and teens killed by guns.

The report is an exercise in word problem reformatting, a hideous nightmare of a standardized test in which every answer is both "all of the above" and wrong. We have failed. The numbers in the examples change, but the fact they illustrate is big and ugly and refuses cosmetic adjustment: the United States, despite a meekly gratifying downward trend, continues to kill its young people with guns at rate more in line with war-torn nations than the prosperous, peaceful countries we presume to lead. In a different, but equally upsetting report, the World Health Organization observed (pdf):

With the notable exception of the United States, most countries with youth homicide rates above 10 per 100,000 are either developing countries or countries caught up in the turmoil of social and economic change.

The repetitiveness of the statistics reflects desperation, I think. One can picture the authors' frantic oneupmanship in coming up with ways to make the truth as vivid as possible: compare it to war! Compare it to Sandy Hook! And, of course, show us the victims – not via pictures of the violence itself, thank God, but in descriptions of who they were: post-Sandy Hook stories salt the wound:

Steven Curtis, 12, dead after accidentally shooting himself in the head with his father's gun. Caroline Sparks, 2, shot in the chest and killed by her five-year-old brother. Tayloni Mazyck, 11, caught in gang crossfire and paralyzed for life. The list goes unrelentingly on. (As of July, the New York Daily News found 120 children had been killed by gunfire since Sandy Hook; they relied only on news reports, not CDC surveys. The end number will be undoubtedly, horrifyingly larger.)

The report wallops us over the head with statistics because its authors can't reach through the pages and throttle us. The frustration is as understandable as it is evident, for as gruesome as the statistics about violence are, the recounting of what legislation has and has not passed is even more dispiriting. Over and over, the public's willingness (even eagerness) to tighten gun laws has been outmatched by the cowardice of politicians in mysterious thrall to the National Rifle Association.

The whimpering death of the Toomey-Manchin bill has been examined at length; the CDF notes further that, beyond the Senate voting against regulations, a majority of Americans were for (assault weapons ban, background checks):

Several proposals to weaken existing gun violence prevention measures received more 'Yes' votes than the background checks provision. They included a concealed-carry reciprocity proposal and a provision to prevent veterans who are mentally incapacitated from losing their right to own a gun without a court hearing.

The news gets worse as we get closer to home, where state legislatures reacted to Sandy Hook primarily by widening access to firearms andweakening regulation. You read that right: more states passed pro-gun legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook than there were states that passed stricter gun control. Maryland, Connecticut and New York and New Jersey all tightened gun laws; Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kansas all somehow relaxed their gun laws – by extending the number of places one can carry a concealed weapon, by allowing guns in schools, by instituting "stand your ground" laws, or adding the right to own a firearm to the state constitution.

Colorado reigned in some gun rights after the Aurora massacre in July 2012; today, it is at the center of an NRA-sponsored recall, to be decided this week. Another state legislature, Missouri, both liberalized conceal carry and took unprecedented step of nullifying all federal gun laws – outlawing the federal government from enforcing its gun restrictions within the state. The bill was passed and then vetoed. This week, the legislature will meet in a special session to override the veto.

The Missouri proposal goes beyond the kind of passive quasi-civil disobedience of, say, medical marijuana laws, or even those rebellious legislatures that have sought to nullify Obamacare. The Missouri law would punish federal enforcement of legally enacted statutes by setting criminal penalties for federal agents, and prohibiting state officials from co-operating with federal efforts.

This is insanity.

Conservatives and liberals alike can use the tragedy of children's deaths as evidence of the need for their favored policies. After all, gun rights advocates want more guns in schools, they argue, for the greater safety of the children. They might even deny the relevance of concealed-carry laws and stand-your-ground provisions to the issue at hand. What does banning raids from the federal government's "jackbooted thugs" (in NRA president Wayne LaPierre's famous formulation) have to do with those classrooms full of dead kids?

There is only a shuddering half-step between between the general availability of firearms, their lax regulation, and the death of children. States with background checks have 16% lower gun fatality rates.  Child access prevention laws reduce accidental shootings by as much as 23%. Australia passed a strict assault weapons ban and mandatory buy-back program (the US law once on the books had no such program) in 1996 – and hasn't had a single mass shooting since.

I'm not even sure the CDF believed this report would change that many minds: to anyone disinclined to believe that strict gun laws work, the report is just a recitation of bad things happening because of bad guys (even if a lot of those "bad guys" are other children). Perhaps the point of the report was more modest: just to let people know what is happening, what violence is going on beneath surface, as politicians and lobbyists posture. Though, who knows: Missouri has the fourth most gun deaths in the nation, the sixth most deaths by firearm for children under 18 and is a favorite transit point for gun-traffickers (in a July raid that may be deemed illegal next week, federal agents seized 267 illegal weapons) and look what's happening there.

We're beyond the point of "what will it take" when it comes to sane gun laws. The tragedies that should spur protests and marches and petitions happen quietly every day.

Gun nuts infringe on 1st Amend. to protect 2nd

Once again, gun nuts prove that they are willing to sacrifice the 1st Amendment and Americans' right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness... all to make it illegal to talk about the dangers of guns.

Doctors' Questions About Guns Spark A Constitutional Fight

By Scott Hensley

July 19, 2013 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/16JJ29d

Poll: 29 percent of Americans potential traitors

Forget profiling and surveilling Muslims, Arabs or Chechens, why aren't we profiling and tracking this self-identifying 29 percent of Americans?  You can see the poll results here.

These people are obviously gearing up mentally if not in reality for treason and armed insurrection. Where's the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security when we need them?

Seriously though, let me ask my Republican friends to imagine the FOX headline, "Poll shows 29 percent of immigrants/blacks/Northerners/Democrats think 'armed revolution' might be needed."  If you saw that on FOX, would you react with nonchalance?

No, pro-gun conservatives would be climbing the ceiling, ringing every alarm bell they could find.  

Moreover, has there ever been another time in American history when 29 percent of Americans thought this way?  Well, maybe in 18th century when Americans did not have any representation.  But that's not the case now.  

No, this is not good, not good at all.  These are folks who don't respect the scoreboard of democracy and are about to take matters into their own hands.  

These poll results are ugly any way you spin them.

Poll shows 29 percent of voters think 'armed revolution' might be needed

May 2, 2013 | FoxNews

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/02/poll-shows-2-percent-voters-think-armed-revolution-might-be-needed/?test=latestnews#ixzz2SEpN5MlD

Punish Starbucks for its sellout on guns

I'm always keen to find a new reason to boycott Starbucks. It's no coincidence that Mike Myers chose Starbucks as the parent company of Dr. Evil.  Starbucks' hypocrisy with regard to guns is vile: 

Starbucks admits the risk to its employees and customers by banning guns at its Starbucks' corporate headquarters. Why should only senior management be protected? Gunshot accidents have already been reported in Starbucks stores.

For better or worse, today much social change seems to gain traction only at the consumer-retail level:

According to Elliot Fineman, CEO of the National Gun Victims Action Council (NGAC), we are at the "secondhand smoke" moment in the gun debate--the moment when people realized that smokers endangered everyone not just themselves and they were no longer tolerated. When corporations and consumers stood up to Big Tobacco and banned smoking in stores, restaurants and public spaces, laws soon followed.

Like second-hand smoke, the public is now beginning to see that gun proliferation is a constant threat to children and innocent bystanders that is getting worse through the aggression of gun rights' activists and lawmakers' inaction.

But even Starbucks, aka Evil Inc., cannot top the hypocrisy of our U.S. Congress. You can't very well carry a firearm into congressional galleries or hearing rooms. Even crazy pro-gun Republicans aren't so stupid as to risk getting shot by other crazies, even as they promote gun-owners' "right" to put Americans' lives at risk everywhere else.  

A Way to Force Sane Gun Laws—Boycott Starbucks

By Martha Rosenberg

March 28, 2013 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/martharosenberg/way-force-sane-gun-laws-boycott-starbucks

God, guns and... that's it.

Texans should invent a Bible that shoots bullets, if they haven't already.  Texan Robert Rodriguez could put something together in a jiffy, I'm sure.

What the Hell Has Happened to Texas?

By Robert L. Cavnar

March 8, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/ZyaZ1m

FOX: Could there be a 'Second American Revolution'?

Great journalism!  Fair & Balanced!  (A pro-gun host, an NRA lawyer, and a pro-gun sheriff who threatens violent revolution.)  Nope, no pandering to the NRA at all, just tough, smart reporting.  And anyway, treating what-ifs as if they were real news is is not nearly as dangerous as some kids playing video games in their basements, no sir.

Seriously though, it is totally irresponsible of FOX to debate hypothetical scenarios (government confiscating guns, or a government gun registry) that nobody in government including Obama has proposed, and to scare gun owners and encourage crazies to go over the edge.  

Then again, beating the crazy conservative hornets nest with a rhetorical stick just to see what happens next is what FOX does best.

Second American Revolution on the horizon?

February 24, 2013 | FOXNews

URL: http://video.foxnews.com/v/2186710402001/second-american-revolution-on-the-horizon/?intcmp=obnetwork

Violent entertainment does not cause gun murders

Like I always say, reliance on statistics and empiricism is what separates liberals from conservatives:

The reality is that there is no evidence linking violent games to mass shootings. We tend to return to this particular element, and it's interesting to see how quickly people like to latch on to this noncorrelation as if it were truly meaningful. The notion that mass homicides are linked to violent media was debunked as far back as 2002 by the U.S. Secret Service, which found that school shooters didn't consume high levels of violent media. But as a society we tend to focus on video games because it's easy to do so. 

Yeah, and what about older adults who go on shooting sprees?

Curiously, no one seems interested in investigating the effects of media popular among the elderly. Our attention to video games in the cases of some shootings but not others is what psychologists call confirmation bias, and it creates the illusion of a correlation where there is none. It's worth asking ourselves why we keep returning to video games despite the lack of evidence to support its link to violence. 

People around the world play the same violent video games and watch the same violent Hollywood movies and TV shows, but they don't commit as many gun murders either in absolute terms, or per capita. Conservatives complain about the so-called lib'rul media, but seriously, what kind of media bias is it when there is no factual or statistical basis to prove the connection between gun murders and violent entertainment, yet it keeps on getting reported as fact? 

What I find especially galling is that die-hard gun rights supporters seem quite ready to restrict the 1st Amendment by limiting what people can watch or play in order to protect the 2nd Amendment from any restrictions. They like to pay lip service to freedom of expression -- "There is no 1st Amendment without the 2nd" -- but it seems they are quite willing to do without the 1st to keep the 2nd, if that's what it comes down to. 

Americans are nuts about firearms, period. No intellectual or moral contortion is too twisted for them to justify their unlimited access to deadly firearms that have no other purpose than to kill many people in seconds.  

Video games didn't cause Newtown rampage

By Christopher J. Ferguson

February 20, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/20/opinion/ferguson-adam-lanza/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

Gun nuts defend Confederate, not U.S., Constitution

YES!  Finally somebody else had the balls to say it: 

Although nullification, secession and armed conflict are not exclusively Southern responses to Obama's gun safety agenda, they certainly are much stronger there than elsewhere and they reflect the historical reality that these same false constitutional doctrines helped pave the way to the Civil War - the only episode of mass treason in US history.  

Once you allow this simple historical fact to sink in, the whole notion of "constitutional conservatism" finally starts to make sense. You see, the constitution these folks are referring to is not the Constitution of the United States of America.  It's the constitution of the Confederate States of America, whose entire reason for existing was to preserve the institution of slavery, and the political power of the slave-owning elite. 

And that constitution, thankfully, has already been shot full of holes, in the bloodiest war in American history, which it was the cause of. Nothing tells us more about what "constitutional conservatives" are really up to than a look back at the horrors of that war, and the unspeakable evils that it sought to preserve and protect. 

If these gun nuts want to re-fight the Civil War then, in the immortal words of George Dubya Bush: "Bring 'em on." The result will be the same. Just ask Randy Weaver and David Koresh.

P.S. -- Rand Paul's complaints about "King Obama" prove he is a blithering idiot who doesn't understand our Constitution or system of government. Even worse, he doesn't have his dad's wit, simple charisma, consistency or the courage of his [absolutely wrong] convictions. I'll say it again: these scions of prominent politicians are the worst kind -- Rand Paul, Mitt Romney, Dubya, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Al Gore -- and we should avoid them like the plague, because they are out to prove something, not to do what they think is right.

Gun lobby's bad aim shoots down myth of 'constitutional conservatism'

By Paul Rosenberg

February 6, 2013 | Aljazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132371127714836.html

If an armed ex-Navy Seal isn't safe, who is?

Even an armed Navy Seal isn't safe in today's gun-crazy US of A!  RIP, Chris Kyle.

And irony of ironies, self-proclaimed hero sniper Kyle recently warned President Obama not to take his guns away.

Gee, maybe if Obama had taken Kyle's guns away, so that Kyle wasn't at the shooting range that day, he'd still be alive!.... But that's crazy talk. Obviously Kyle either didn't have enough guns on him at the time, or there should have been an armed guard with him at this Ft. Worth gun range (I mean, an armed guard in addition to his armed veteran buddy, who was also shot dead). 

More and deadlier guns are the only defense against more and deadlier guns, m-hm.

Seriously though, this double gun murder relates to my post from the other day about the idiot walking into a Kroger with an AR-15 and causing a near-emergency. Kyle's shooting death illustrates my point that a society where everybody is casually packing heat is not safer but actually more dangerous -- and not for the commonsense reason that more guns = more shootings, as all liberal-progressives know -- but also because even gun owners lose their natural, reasonable fear of other armed people. 

I mean, normally, if you see a stranger carrying a gun, or pulling out a gun, you're either thinking about cover/defense or trying to shoot him before he shoots you, if you're carrying a gun. But once you get used to the idea that everybody's legally packing heat in the most mundane of settings, then your natural instincts become dulled, you lose your edge, and before you know it, your fellow 2nd Amendment lover exercising his Right to Carry has just shot you dead before you could even reach for your firearm.  

Ex-Navy sniper, another military vet killed at Texas gun range

February 3, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/03/justice/texas-sniper-killed/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

AR-15s at Kroger: What the NRA and GOP have given us

Is this what you pro-gun right-wingers want??

Imagine being with your child or grandchild and seeing this guy walk into the Kroger or Walmart before you toting an AR-15. At that moment, I guarantee that you won't be thinking, "Hooray for the Second Amendment!" You'll immediately go into fight-or-flight mode, fearing for the life of your child. You might use your own gun, preemptively, if you have one, creating all kinds of deadly confusion.

You might dial 911 and precipitate a costly and dangerous emergency, or a standoff situation if the guy is itching for it. In any case, I guarantee that you wouldn't not feel terror, it's just human instinct.

This is the country that the NRA and GOP have given us. This is not the country of our grandparents; there's nothing "conservative" or traditionally American about a guy casually walking into a grocery store with a deadly weapon that can fire more than 120 rounds per minute.

And the best part? It was perfectly legal. This is looney tunes! This is America ca. 2013. (Sigh). 

Man Who Brought Loaded AR-15 Into Kroger Grocery Store Will Not Face Charges, Police Say

By Hunter Stuart

January 28, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/14oKvDU

What a Day to Appreciate Guns Across America

You can't make this stuff up, folks. Well, I guess you can't be surprised though. 

And the day's not even over yet, there could very well be more accidental discharges before they finally put their guns away and go to bed!

Just think: If every day were Gun Appreciation Day (aka "Shoot Yourself Or The Unlucky Guy Next To You Day"), there could be at least 1,460 more accidental shootings of the most deserving dumbasses a year. Oh, one can only dream!...

Gun Appreciation Day Celebrated With Accidental Shootings at Gun Shows in North Carolina and Ohio 

By Taylor Berman

January 19, 2013 | Gawker

Two people were wounded Saturday afternoon after an accidental shooting at the Dixie Gun and Knife Show in Raleigh, North Carolina. The incident apparently occurred at a security check point when the owner of a 12-gauge shotgun was asked to remove his gun from its case. Somehow, the gun discharged, shooting a man in the hand and a nearby woman in the side.

Meanwhile, in an entirely unrelated incident, a man at the Medina County Gun Show was shot and injured later Saturday afternoon.

As the Daily Intelligencer notes, today is both Gun Appreciation Day and Guns Across America. What a perfect way to celebrate!

UPDATE: And there was another shooting. A man shot himself in the hand while loading his gun outside the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife Show gun show in Indianapolis.

Locke, Hobbes and history v. Gun nuts

Paul Rosenberg is absolutely right in his philosophical argument that lasting liberty is incompatible with individual gun ownership; but he spends most of his time refuting the less deeply held belief of the pro-gun crowd: that freedom-loving individuals need guns for their own security.  

Rather, the gun nuts' main argument against reasonable gun control is that we the people need more and deadlier guns to overthrow our government if it ever becomes tyrannical.  

This is a bad and eristic argument in favor of individuals' unrestricted access to all types of deadly guns. Yet it's difficult to refute using purely inductive logic because something similar has never happened -- especially in the most powerful country in the history of the world with a military of 3 million and all the wizz-bang futuristic weapons you can think of.  For argument's sake, such a nation has never gone from democratic to tyrannical and tried to oppress its own people.

And so we liberals can only make reasonable, rational arguments to the effect that we the people wouldn't stand much of a chance fighting such an evil government. And in the meantime, 30,000 gun deaths a year (including 9,000 gun murders) is a high price to pay for the "freedom" to defend ourselves in such an unlikely what-if scenario. (I actually think flesh-eating zombies taking over is more likely, but that's just me....)

What's more, as I told my Uncle T. (who subscribes to this argument) over Christmas, if the United States government ever did become so murderous and tyrannical, then it would mean there were at least 1,000 lapses in our democratic vigilance leading up that moment that had nothing to do with our weapons or guns. It would mean we the people largely had ourselves to blame for it. *

Apropos, Rosenberg points out that John Locke and the Founding Fathers had no idea how important peaceful protest would become in securing the freedom and civil rights of so many millions of people, starting about 160 years later.  (That's yet another thing they never imagined, in addition to AR-15 semi-automatic rifles in the hands of madmen....). 

And so despite the Founding Fathers' lack of prescience...

... that doesn't mean that Locke's underlying logic has died. To the contrary, the issue of the consent of the governed has never been more alive than it has been in the last few decades. But what's most interesting is that it's taken such a strong turn toward non-violent, unarmed revolution, seen most recently in the peaceful successes of the Arab Spring. Of course these did not succeed everywhere, and violent struggle emerged in several countries, yet it should be remembered that nothing remotely like this was even conceivable at the time that Locke wrote. And yet, the underlying thrust of his logic has been supremely vindicated by the non-violent lineage of Thoreau, Gandhi, King and Mandela - a lineage that stands directly opposite to the gun-crazed vision of the NRA. [Emphasis mine - J]

What I should have added to Uncle T. was that, as Mark Ames recently pointed out, gun ownership actually decreases our democratic vigilance since guns give far too many Americans an unearned sense of complacency, or a sense that the mere act of owning firearms is a "rebellious" thing in and of itself... and meanwhile they sit at home on their couches while the plutocrats corrupt our government and screw the Average Joe's of the country who "cling to their guns and religion," instead of those gun owners being politically active. (And no, being an NRA member does not make somebody politically active.)

... (Sigh) But these are all reasonable things to say to unreasonable people. That's why I'm mostly preaching to the pro-gun control choir here.

* And I added to Uncle T. the unoriginal thought that a better defense of our liberty against government tyranny than the 2nd Amendment is our professional, all-volunteer military and the esprit de corps instilled in our troops who vow to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. It's one thing for them to shoot armed baddies overseas; but it's quite another thing for them to obey orders to shoot and kill their fellow citizens at home, armed and unarmed alike. To defend their countrymen is the exact reason most of them sign up in the first place!  And so, this argument in favor of the unrestricted right to bear arms is quite insulting to our U.S. servicemen and women.

Locke and unload: Why the NRA doesn't understand rights

It's the exact inability of guns to secure our freedom that establishes the foundation for our civil government.

By Paul Rosenberg

December 27, 2012 | Aljazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/20121226104857715225.html