Guns Are No Mere Symbol - They Silence Others

Not to belabor the issue of gun control in Virginia, but a piece in The Atlantic gets to the true agenda of the gun rights fanatics - many from outside of Virginia - who descended on Richmond this past Monday.  Coming fully armed as if going into war was not meant to be an exercise of free speech as alleged but rather had two different goals: (i) threaten and intimidate legislators, and (ii) silence those holding opposing views who did not attend Lobby Day out of fear for the physical safety. To me, it all underscores the reality that the gun lobby and those it manipulates care nothing for the rights of other citizens - much as hunters years ago ignored "posted" signs on my family's property and willfully trespassed on our property.  Their rights superseded our right to be safe on our own property. The mindset on display was all about wanting special rights and trampling on the rights of others. Here are article highlights:

Few places in the United States concentrate as much history in 14 acres as the grounds of the Virginia state capitol. Thomas Jefferson designed the capitol building; Patrick Henry laid its cornerstone; in 1807, Chief Justice John Marshall sat there to preside over the treason trial of former Vice President Aaron Burr. The capitol’s second floor displays a Carrara-marble statue of George Washington made by sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, considered the most accurate rendering of its subject. In 1861, a state convention voted there to secede; in 1865, United States Colored Troops re-raised the Stars and Stripes above it as Robert E. Lee’s retreating troops burned the city around them. A few days later, Abraham Lincoln stood at the equestrian statue of George Washington in Capitol Square and—for the first and only time—addressed an audience of freed slaves. In 1990, Lawrence Douglas Wilder, the first African American ever elected governor of a state, was sworn in on the capitol’s north steps. . . . . If there is holy ground in America, Capitol Square is part of it.

On Monday, hundreds of protesters stood outside the designated protest area with the weapons they fear the Virginia General Assembly will limit. Their presence underscores the many contradictions of this strange and ominous event.

To begin with, of course, the celebration of firearms took place on the 35th celebration of the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday (within that lies the contradiction that the Commonwealth of Virginia until 2000 tried to use the same day to honor King and the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson). King’s gift to the national conversation was a commitment to nonviolence, and his life was ended by an assassin with a firearm. Second, the day of the march had come to be known in Virginia as Lobby Day, a day on which citizens could gather in the square and, in the words of the First Amendment, “peaceably assemble, and … petition the government for redress of grievances.”

But note who was not in Capitol Square on Monday. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence had also planned to assemble and petition for gun-control legislation—as it had done in peaceful competition with gun-rights groups in previous years. This year, because of the threats of armed violence surrounding the gun-rights march, that gun-control demonstration had to be canceled. The delegate from Manassas, Lee Carter, the South’s only socialist legislator, went into hiding because of death threats. Carter had not, in fact, sponsored an anti-gun measure, but gun-rights groups spread disinformation on the internet that he had done so; his life—and his ability to function as a legislator—was endangered.

One group’s politics canceled those of others, in other words. Self-government in a democratic society is supposed to follow a model of openness—different ideas and points of view compete in a “marketplace of ideas” for the support of the people and their representatives. That model doesn’t work when one side kills the other, or even threatens to.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the national dialogue about the Second Amendment. As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his 2010 dissent in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the “right to keep and bear arms,” is fundamentally “dissimilar from those [the Supreme Court has] recognized in its capacity to undermine the security of others … Firearms may be used to kill another person.”

Second Amendment activists have, over the years, gone to great lengths to obscure the difference between gun rights and genuine civil liberties, especially the freedom of speech. After Virginia Governor Ralph Northam banned weapons from the square, gun-rights groups rushed to court to seek invalidation of the order. According to news reports, their lawyers “argued that prohibiting rallygoers from carrying guns would violate their Second Amendment right to bear arms and their First Amendment right to free speech” because “carrying guns is a form of symbolic speech.”

This is a potentially deadly confusion. The freedom to buy, own, and carry firearms, whatever its scope, is in no respect like the freedom of speech. Speech consists of words and launches ideas. “Symbolic speech” refers to signs, flags, photographs, and gestures that express those words and ideas. A gun is not merely a symbol; it is not like words or ideas. It is an instrument of violence and death, and its display amid a crowd is a threat.

The right to bear arms in political debate is not the power to speak for oneself; it is, at least implicitly, the power to silence others. It is not the right to persuade; it is the right to terrorize. It is not the right to participate in civil society; it is the power to threaten to disrupt, even to destroy it. As the historian Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2012, “When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.”

Hopefully, the armed fanatics - again, many not even Virginians - will galvanize legislators and the vast majority of Virginians who want gun control to refuse to be threatened and intimidated by those who seek to silence them.

Second Amendment Doesn’t Protect Right to Assault Weapons

While the husband and I are planning to get hand guns and concealed carry permits in light of the growing anti-LGBT agenda flowing from Der Trumpenführer's regime, we are strong gun control supporters, especially when it comes to assault weapons, the weapon of choice of terrorists and other mass murderers.  Thus, I was thrilled to see that the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled en banc to uphold a Maryland ban on the sale of assault rifles.  The full opinion can be viewed here.  The Court's common sense ruling hinged on several concepts: (i) that military weapons need not be in the hands of individual civilians, (ii) communities and states should have the right to regulate weapons that pose a dangerous threat of mass death, and (iii) gun manufacturers should not be able to use the courts to circumvent legislatures.  Slate has details on the ruling.  Here are highlights:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4^th Circuit ruled that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect assault weapons—an extraordinary decision keenly attuned to the brutal havoc these firearms can wreak. Issued by the court sitting en banc, Tuesday’s decision reversed a previous ruling in which a panel of judges had struck down Maryland’s ban on assault weapons and detachable large capacity magazines. Today’s ruling is a remarkable victory for gun safety advocates and a serious setback for gun proponents who believe the Second Amendment exempts weapons of war from regulation.

In 2013, Maryland passed a law barring the sale, possession, transfer, or purchase of what it dubbed “assault weapons,” including AR-15s, AK-47s, and semiautomatic rifles. It also banned copies of these firearms and large capacity magazines. Gun advocates sued, alleging that the law violated their right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment. A district court rejected their claims, but a panel of judges from the 4^th Circuit reversed that rejection, holding that the Maryland law infringed on gun owners’ Second Amendment rights—and that gun regulations must be subject to the extremely demanding “strict scrutiny” standard. The full court voted to vacate that decision and rehear the case, and Tuesday’s decision marks a vigorous rejection of that extreme stance.

The majority opinion opens with a disturbing account of several recent mass shootings enabled by the kind of assault weapons that Maryland seeks to ban. In Newtown, Aurora, San Bernardino, Orlando, Binghamton, Tucson, Virginia Tech, and Fort Hood, mass shooters used either military-style rifles or high-capacity magazines, significantly increasing the ultimate death tolls. Newtown, in particular, compelled Maryland to ban these weapons. The state recognized that the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller protects citizens’ right to keep handguns in the home. But it argued that the firearms it had proscribed constituted “dangerous and unusual weapons,” which the Heller court said could be outlawed.

A majority of the 4^th Circuit agreed with Maryland, holding that the weapons it forbade were sufficiently similar to M-16 rifles to fall outside the ambit of the Second Amendment.

“Whatever their other potential,” the court wrote, these weapons “are unquestionably most useful in military service. That is, the banned assault weapons are designed to kill or disable the enemy on the battlefield.” 

“The next effect of these military combat features,” the majority concluded, “is a capability for lethality—more wounds, more serious, in more victims—far beyond that of other firearms in general, including other semiautomatic guns.” . . . .  It is a weapon of war, not the tool of self-defense envisioned by the Heller court.

Although the majority held that these weapons fell outside the scope of the Second Amendment altogether, it also noted, as an “alternative basis,” that even if the amendment applied, the Maryland law would still be constitutional. Since the law does not “effectively disarm individuals or substantially affect their ability to defend themselves,” it would only be subject to intermediate scrutiny if the Second Amendment applied. And the law meets that level of scrutiny because it is “reasonably adapted to a substantial governmental interest.”

The most striking part of Tuesday’s decision is a concurrence written by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee. Wilkinson joined the majority opinion, but he wrote separately to express his discomfort with the gun lobby’s strategy of using the courts to increase access to dangerous firearms:

As Heller recognized, there is a balance to be struck here. While courts exist to protect individual rights, we are not the instruments of anyone’s political agenda, we are not empowered to court mass consequences we cannot predict, and we are not impaneled to add indefinitely to the growing list of subjects on which the states of our Union and the citizens of our country no longer have any meaningful say.

Wilkinson also criticized the dissenting judges, as well as the plaintiffs in this case, for attempting to take gun regulation out of democratic sphere almost  entirely. 

His panegyric to judicial restraint with regard to Second Amendment interpretation is quite moving:

Disenfranchising the American people on this life and death subject would be the gravest and most serious of steps. It is their community, not ours. It is their safety, not ours. It is their lives, not ours. To say in the wake of so many mass shootings in so many localities across this country that the people themselves are now to be rendered newly powerless, that all they can do is stand by and watch as federal courts design their destiny—this would deliver a body blow to democracy as we have known it since the very founding of this nation.

In urging us to strike this legislation, appellants would impair the ability of government to act prophylactically. More and more under appellants’ view, preventive statutory action is to be judicially forbidden and we must bide our time until another tragedy is inflicted or irretrievable human damage has once more been done.

I may be dating myself, but Wilkinson was a young professor at the University of Virginia School of Law when I was a law student. 

The Fruits of Right Wing Demagoguery

One hears ad nausea about how Christofascists "hate the sin, and love the sinner" as they spew vile anti-LGBT vitriol, never giving a care about the possible violence they are inciting. Indeed, after the Pulse massacre, some "godly Christian" pastors stated that the victims got what they deserved and/or that they wished more had been killed.  Fast forward and such talk appears to have been the motivation of a would be "Christian warrior" in Las Vegas who was fortunately caught before he could put his murderous plans into action.  Every time you hear a Southern Baptist bellowing anti-LGBT statements or parasites like Tony Perkins deliberately disseminating lies and untruths, know that somewhere a would be mass killer is listening and coming to believe that murdering others is righteous.  Here are highlights from KTNV TV 13:

A 24-year-old Las Vegas man has been charged for making terrorist threats in a video that was posted on YouTube.

Las Vegas police say they were notified on July 2 by Interpol via Google about a suspicious/threatening YouTube video.

Although Google had removed the video, they were able to provide a link for a detective to watch the video.

In the video, a man named Bryce Cuellar reportedly showed off two rifles and was wearing a military flak vest and night vision goggles.

Cuellar reportedly said in the video that he is tired of the government trying to take away his First and Second Amendment rights and says that he cannot wait to use his rifle in the manner in which the founding fathers intended.

He also said that he wanted to kill "gays, faggots, lesbians and satanists" and claimed to be a Christian warrior. Cuellar also said that he is tired of America and would begin killing soon.

Police also checked his Facebook page and found posts about the Orlando shooting and posts that outlines his anti-government, sovereign citizen and militia ideologies. Police say that Cuellar has become increasingly more radical and aggressive in his videos over the past 3 years. Based on the video and statements, Cuellar was charged with terrorist threats. He was also placed on a mental health hold at the time by Clark County Detention Center staff. 13 Action News was able to find a YouTube page that appears to be connected with Cueller. The YouTube channel has almost 161,000 subscribers and the channel's videos have been viewed more than 73 million times.

Cueller is being held at CCDC on $100,000 bail. He is scheduled to be in court on Sept. 1.

161,000 subscribers - that is frightening.  Yet, GOP and Chrisofascist extremist continue to stoke the flames that can ignite someone like Cueller - usually so that they can gain votes or line their own pockets with money.

Encouraging Political Violence is No Joke

William Kennedy Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith, the nephew and sister of President John. F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, have a joint op-ed in the Washington Post which should be required reading for all Americans, even though I sadly suspect that doing so would have little effect on the Christofascist/white supremacist core of the base of today's Republican Party.  Encouraging political violence even through a "joke" as Donald Trump's disgusting apologists are now trying to defend Trump's possible encouragement of the lunatic gun rights crowd to assassinate Hillary Clinton and/or federal judges.  Here are op-ed highlights:

On April 4, 1968, the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, Robert Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency in Indianapolis. Bobby conveyed the news of King’s death to a shattered, mostly black audience. He took pains to remind those whose first instinct may have been toward violence that President John F. Kennedy had also been shot and killed. Bobby went on, “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

That speech has crystallized into the single most enduring portrait of Bobby’s candidacy. Because it was extemporaneous, it conveyed directly, and with raw emotion, his own vulnerability, his aspirations for his country and a deep compassion for the suffering of others. Bobby concluded his remarks that night by urging those listening to return home and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Those words mattered. While there were riots in cities across the nation that night, Indianapolis did not burn.

Today, almost 50 years later, words still matter. They shape who we are as a people and who we wish to be as a nation. In the white-hot cauldron of a presidential campaign, it is still the words delivered extemporaneously, off the cuff, in the raw pressure of the moment that matter most. They say most directly what is in a candidate’s heart. So it was with a real sense of sadness and revulsion that we listened to Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, as he referred to the options available to “Second Amendment people,” a remark widely, and we believe correctly, interpreted as a thinly veiled reference or “joke” about the possibility of political assassination.

Political violence is a terrible inherent risk to any free society. Dictators and strongmen like Vladimir Putin have an answer. They are surrounded and shielded by force at all times. They do not brook dissent. In democracies, we expect our leaders to be accessible and, by and large, they want to be. Inevitably, that makes them vulnerable and the loss of a leader at a crucial time impacts family, country and even the world, for generations. Anyone who loves politics, the open competition of ideas and public participation in a free society, knows that political violence is the greatest of all civic sins. It is not to be encouraged. It is not funny. It is not a joke.

By now, we have heard enough dark and offensive rhetoric from Trump to know that it reflects something fundamentally troubled, and troubling, about his candidacy. Trump’s remarks frequently, if not inevitably, spark outrage, which is followed by a clarification that, in lieu of an apology, seeks to attribute the dark undertones of his words to the listener’s twisted psyche. This fools no one. 

But what to make of a candidate who directly appeals to violence, smears his opponents and publicly bullies a Gold Star family, a decorated prisoner of war and a reporter with a disability, among others? 

The truth remains that words do matter, especially when it comes to presidential candidates. On that basis alone, Donald Trump is not qualified to be president of the United States.

The Right's Frightening Cult of the Second Amendment

There are many things that are frightening about today's GOP base: religious extremists, open white supremacists and racists, raging homophobes, male chauvinists, the celebratory embrace of ignorance, etc.  But perhaps one of the most frighten aspects is the far right's love affair with guns and willingness to use violence against those deemed "other" - hence the growing number of murders of unarmed black males by police.  Tied to this mindset is a growing belief that if their views are threatened, then an armed response is warranted.  To justify this insanity, the meaning of the Second Amendment has been perverted and claims are now widely made that the Founding Fathers wanted arm revolution to be an option against the very form of government they labored so hard to create. It is, of course, total batshitery.  But then, so id much of what now passes for thought and intelligent discourse among the slobbering, spittle flecked masses of the GOP base.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at this disturbing development.  Here are excerpts:

[T]o a remarkable extent, the default position of conservatives has less and less to do with arguments about the efficacy of gun regulation or the need for guns to deter or respond to crime. Instead, it’s based on the idea that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S. government. 

This was once an exotic, minority view even among gun enthusiasts who tended to view the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to gun ownership not to overthrow the government but to supplement the government’s use of lethal force against criminals. Treating the Second Amendment as an integral legacy of the American Revolution appealed to gun rights advocates who sought firm ground against regulations with no possibility of compromise.

But more importantly, it gave a dangerous edge to the claims of conservative extremists—who recently began calling themselves “constitutional conservatives”—that their ideology of absolute property rights, religious rights and even fetal rights had been permanently established by the Founders who added in the Second Amendment to ensure any trespassing on their “design” by “tyrants” or popular majorities could and should be resisted. 

Nowadays this revolutionary rationale for gun rights is becoming the rule rather than the exception for conservative politicians and advocates.

Perhaps the most surprising statement on this subject from a Republican presidential candidate was by a rare figure who dissents from the right-to-revolution talk, per this report from Sahil Kapur at TPM a few months ago:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz's argument that the Second Amendment provides the "ultimate check against government tyranny" is a bit too extreme for potential 2016 rival and fellow Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

"Well, we tried that once in South Carolina. I wouldn't go down that road again," Graham said, in an apparent reference to the Civil War. "I think an informed electorate is probably a better check than, you know, guns in the streets."

Graham joked about this, but liberals generally are not amused by the suggestion that “patriotic” Americans should be stockpiling guns in case “they”—it’s not clear who, of course—decide it’s time to start shooting police officers and members of the armed forces in defense of their liberties, which in some cases are perceived to be extremely broad. Indeed, a lot of Second Amendment ultras appear to think the right to revolution is entirely up to the individual revolutionary. Here’s Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, the darling of the GOP Class of 2014, talking about this contingency in 2012:

I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere...But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.

You can wonder, as I often do, how people like Ernst would react to such rhetoric if it were coming from a member of a black nationalist or Islamist group. But clearly, there’s no point in progressives seeking any “compromise” with them on gun issues. They can only be defeated by a true mass social movement supporting reasonable gun regulation. But it’s important to understand that according to the Cult of the Second Amendment, opponents of gun measures have every right to fire back, literally.

The Ease With Which Mass Shooters Get Guns

As Republicans in particular are disavowing that any serious changes to America's insane gun laws are needed and trying to shift blame to mental illness and anything and everything other than the ease with which guns can be acquired.  And in most instances, we are not talking about the types of guns used by legitimate hunters or  a simple hand gun for protection in one's home (not that I believe this is a legitimate reason to have a hand gun).  Slate has put together a history of the mass shootings that have occurred since November, 2009.  In EVERY instance, some or all of the guns, including automatic weapons, were legally purchased.  What is the answer?  A drastic change in America's gun laws - perhaps something akin to what Australia enacted after a horrific mass shooting.  First, highlights from Slate:

On Thursday, after Chris Harper Mercer shot and killed 9 people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, President Obama gave the latest in a tragic series of addresses in response to mass shootings in the U.S. "It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm to get his or her hands on a gun," he said.

But it is remarkably easy to get your hands on a gun in this country. Of the 11 shootings that prompted Obama to give a public address, eight were committed by gunmen who’d bought at least some of their firearms legally, some just days before their massacres. Several had histories of criminal behavior and mental illness that fell just shy of prohibiting their gun purchases—and in one case, a bureaucratic slip-up in the routine FBI background check was at fault. Here’s how the guns in each attack came into the hands of the killers.

Shooting: Military base at Fort Hood, Texas
Date: Nov. 5, 2009
Perpetrator: Nidal Hasan
Guns: FN Five-seven semiautomatic pistol and Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. He killed 13 people and injured more than 30.
How he got them: Guns Galore, a gun shop in Killeen, Texas, sold Hasan the gun legally three months before the shooting. He was not required to register the firearm on the base, because he didn’t reside there.

Shooting: Gabrielle Giffords constituent meeting in a Tucson, Arizona, parking lot
Date: Jan. 8, 2011
Perpetrator: Jared Lee Loughner
Gun: Glock 19 9 mm semiautomatic handgun. Loughner killed six people and shot 13 more, including Rep. Giffords.
How he got it: Arizona, which has some of the laxest gun laws in the country, passed a law in 2010 that allowed people to buy guns for concealed carry without a permit. Though guns cannot be sold to people with severe mental illness and though Loughner was suspended from his community college for mental health issues, no court had ever declared him mentally unfit, so his on-the-spot background check at a gun outlet came up clear.

Shooting: Movie theater in Aurora, Colorado
Date: July 20, 2012
Perpetrator: James E. Holmes
Guns: Holmes used a semiautomatic Smith & Wesson M&P15 (a variation on the military’s M16 weapons), a 12-gauge Remington 870 shotgun, and a semiautomatic .40-caliber Glock 22, killing 12 and injuring 70 . . .
How he got them: All three guns were purchased legally in 2012 between May 22 and July 6 at three different Colorado gun stores.  

Shooting: Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin
Date: Aug. 5, 2012
Perpetrator: Wade Michael Page
Gun: Like Holmes and Loughner, Page used a semiautomatic handgun.
How he got it: Page purchased the gun legally in a Milwaukee-area store. At the time of the shooting, the Brady Campaign on Gun Violence had named Wisconsin among the 10 states with the fewest gun restrictions.

Shooting: Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut Date: Dec. 14, 2012
Perpetrator: Adam Lanza
Guns: First, Lanza shot and killed his mother with a .22-caliber Savage MK II-F bolt action rifle. At the school, Lanza used an AR-15 semiautomatic, like Holmes. Lanza killed 26 people in total and injured two before killing himself.
How he got them: Both guns belonged to Lanza’s mother.

Shooting: Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.
Date: Sept. 16, 2013
Perpetrator: Aaron Alexis
Gun: Alexis began the attack with a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun (he also took a 9 mm pistol from a police officer at the scene after shooting him). He killed 12 people and injured eight before killing himself.
How he got it: Two days before the massacre, Alexis bought his shotgun at a store in Northern Virginia that claims to be the “only gun shop inside the Beltway.”

Shooting: Military base at Fort Hood, Texas
Date: April 2, 2014
Perpetrator: Ivan Lopez
Gun: .45-caliber Smith & Wesson M&P pistol. He killed three and injured 14 before killing himself.
How he got it: Lopez purchased his gun legally at the same Killeen, Texas, store that sold Hasan the gun he used in the first Fort Hood shooting. 

Shooting: Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas
Date: April 13, 2014
Suspect: Frazier Glenn Miller Jr.
Guns: Remington Model 870 shotgun and a handgun. Frazier allegedly killed three people.
How he got them: John Mark Reidle of Missouri allegedly bought the shotgun at a Missouri Walmart four days before the massacre, because Miller’s former felony conviction prohibited him from owning a gun. The handgun is of unknown provenance. 

Shooting: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina
Date: June 18, 2015
Suspect: Dylann Roof
Gun: .45-caliber Glock. Roof killed nine people and injured one.
How he got it: A flaw in the FBI’s background check system allowed Roof to buy the handgun at a South Carolina store eight days after his 21^st birthday.  

Shooting: Two military centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee
Date: July 16, 2015
Perpetrator: Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez
Guns: . . . a 12-gauge shotgun, a 9 mm handgun, and an assault weapon along the lines of an AK-47. He killed five people and injured two.
How he got them: A friend of Abdulazeez’s said the gunman had bought four firearms from an online arms sale site . . . At least some of the guns were obtained legally.

Shooting: Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon
Date: Oct. 1, 2015
Perpetrator: Chris Harper Mercer
Guns: Harper Mercer brought six guns with him on his shooting spree—five handguns and a rifle—and owned eight others, including pistols, four other rifles, and a shotgun. He killed nine people and injured seven before he was killed by police.
How he got them: All were purchased legally.

So how did Australia end its insanity and mass shootings?  Think Progress looks at the way sanity prevailed.  Here are excerpts:

In 1996, a gunman opened fire at a popular tourist destination on the Australian island of Tasmania. Using a semiautomatic rifle, he killed 35 people.

Australia responded by reforming their gun laws. High powered rifles and shotguns were banned and uniform gun licensing requirements were imposed for the guns that remained legal. The country also implemented a buyback program which resulted in the destruction of more than a million firearms. 

In the last 19 years, there have been no mass shootings in Australia, defined as five or more people being shot.

The effort in Australia was not particuarly partisan. It was led by John Howard, Australia’s very conservative Prime Minister. Rather, the gun control measures were seen as a matter of basic humanity and common sense.

America has done nothing.  In the wake of Oregon mass murder, Australians are disgusted and perplexed by the American response. . . . . The disgust is not limited to Australian shores. The New York Times struck a similar note. “Mass shootings have become an unsurprising part of American life, with lame public rituals in which politicians express grief and then retreat quickly into denial about this scourge,” the paper’s editorial board wrote Friday.

Lessons From the Latest Virginia Shootings: Gun Control Reform is Needed NOW

While much of the far right is obsessing over the race - and sexual orientation - of the shooter in the shocking on air murder of two TV journalists outside of Roanoke, Virginia yesterday, sane people are once again citing the problem that made the murders far more likely: America's insane gun laws that continue to make America like something out of the Old West and an international embarrassment.  The far right loves to bloviate about "American exceptionalism." When it comes to our gun control laws, America is exceptional: exceptionally stupid. A column in the New York Times looks at the ridiculousness of the current gun control laws and things that could be readily done to drastically reduce gun carnage if politicians would grow a spine and stand up to gun manufacturers and the lunatics of the GOP base.  Here are highlights:

The slaying of two journalists Wednesday as they broadcast live to a television audience in Virginia is still seared on our screens and our minds, but it’s a moment not only to mourn but also to learn lessons.

The horror isn’t just one macabre double-murder, but the unrelenting toll of gun violence that claims one life every 16 minutes on average in the United States. Three quick data points:

■ More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides every six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

■ More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.

■ American children are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway, a Harvard professor and author of an excellent book on firearm safety.

Bryce Williams, as the Virginia killer was known to viewers when he worked as a broadcaster, apparently obtained the gun used to murder his former co-workers Alison Parker and Adam Ward in response to the June massacre in a South Carolina church — an example of how gun violence begets gun violence.  

Whether or not Williams was insane, our policies on guns are demented — not least in that we don’t even have universal background checks to keep weapons out of the hands of people waiting to go boom.

The lesson from the ongoing carnage is not that we need a modern prohibition (that would raise constitutional issues and be impossible politically), but that we should address gun deaths as a public health crisis. To protect the public, we regulate toys and mutual funds, ladders and swimming pools. Shouldn’t we regulate guns as seriously as we regulate toys?

Gun proponents often say things to me like: What about cars? They kill, too, but we don’t try to ban them!

Cars are actually the best example of the public health approach that we should apply to guns. Over the decades, we have systematically taken steps to make cars safer: We adopted seatbelts and airbags, limited licenses for teenage drivers, cracked down on drunken driving and established roundabouts and better crosswalks, auto safety inspections and rules about texting while driving.

This approach has been stunningly successful. By my calculations, if we had the same auto fatality rate as in 1921, we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually from cars. We have reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent.

Yet in the case of firearms, the gun lobby (enabled by craven politicians) has for years tried to block even research on how to reduce gun deaths. The gun industry made a childproof gun back in the 19th century but today has ferociously resisted “smart guns.” If someone steals an iPhone, it requires a PIN; guns don’t.

The United States is an outlier, both in our lack of serious policies toward guns and in our mortality rates. Professor Hemenway calculates that the U.S. firearm homicide rate is seven times that of the next country in the rich world on the list, Canada, and 600 times higher than that of South Korea.

We need universal background checks with more rigorous screening, limits on gun purchases to one a month to reduce trafficking, safe storage requirements, serial number markings that are more difficult to obliterate, waiting periods to buy a handgun — and more research on what steps would actually save lives.

Australia is a model. In 1996, after a mass shooting there, the country united behind tougher firearm restrictions. The Journal of Public Health Policy notes that the firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven years, and the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.

Here in America, we can similarly move from passive horror to take steps to reduce the 92 lives claimed by gun violence in the United States daily. Surely we can regulate guns as seriously as we do cars, ladders and swimming pools.

The Perversion of the Second Amendment

One aspect of the GOP's agenda of "God, guns and gays" is to oppose any restriction on an individuals rights to own guns - even guns that no have no connection to sportsmanship or even logical self-protection.   A new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,”looks at the Founding Fathers' original intent for the 2nd Amendment and, like so much else that the far right has perverted the conclusion is that unrestricted gun ownership was never within the Founders' contemplation.  Sadly, supposed "originalists" like Antonin Scalia ignore this reality.  The result?  Murder and mayhem in America on levels unknown in other modern developed nations.  Here are highlights from a column in the New York Times:

Three days after the publication of Michael Waldman’s new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Elliot Rodger, 22, went on a killing spree, stabbing three people and then shooting another eight, killing four of them, including himself. This was only the latest mass shooting in recent memory, going back to Columbine.

In his rigorous, scholarly, but accessible book, Waldman notes such horrific events but doesn’t dwell on them. He is after something else. He wants to understand how it came to be that the Second Amendment, long assumed to mean one thing, has come to mean something else entirely. To put it another way: Why are we, as a society, willing to put up with mass shootings as the price we must pay for the right to carry a gun?

The Second Amendment begins, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” and that’s where Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, begins, too. He has gone back into the framers’ original arguments and made two essential discoveries, one surprising and the other not surprising at all.

The surprising discovery is that of all the amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights, the Second was probably the least debated. What we know is that the founders were deeply opposed to a standing army, which they viewed as the first step toward tyranny. Instead, their assumption was that the male citizenry would all belong to local militias. As Waldman writes, “They were not allowed to have a musket; they were required to. More than a right, being armed was a duty.”

Thus the unsurprising discovery: Virtually every reference to “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” — the second part of the Second Amendment — was in reference to military defense. Waldman notes the House debate over the Second Amendment in the summer of 1789: “Twelve congressmen joined the debate. None mentioned a private right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting or for any purpose other than joining the militia.”

In 1939, the Supreme Court upheld the nation’s first national gun law, the National Firearms Act, which put onerous limits on sawed-off shotguns and machine guns — precisely because the guns had no “reasonable relation” to “a well-regulated militia.”But then, in 1977, there was a coup at the National Rifle Association, which was taken over by Second Amendment fundamentalists. Over the course of the next 30 years, they set out to do nothing less than change the meaning of the Second Amendment . . 

Waldman is scornful of much of this effort. Time and again, he finds the proponents of this new view taking the founders’ words completely out of context, sometimes laughably so.

The critical modern event, however, was the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision, which tossed aside two centuries of settled law, and ruled that a gun-control law in Washington, D.C., was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. The author of the majority opinion was Antonin Scalia, who fancies himself the leading “originalist” on the court — meaning he believes, as Waldman puts it, “that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask what the framers and their generation intended in 1789.”

Waldman is persuasive that a truly originalist decision would have tied the right to keep and bear arms to a well-regulated militia. But the right to own guns had by then become conservative dogma, and it was inevitable that the five conservative members of the Supreme Court would vote that way.

“When the militias evaporated,” concludes Waldman, “so did the original meaning of the Second Amendment.” But, he adds, “What we did not have was a regime of judicially enforced individual rights, able to trump the public good.”

The take away?  When you hear some moron blathering about their right to bear arms, realize that they should have "I'm a cretin" tattooed across their forehead because their very words underscore their ignorance and lack of knowledge of true history.

 

Massacre at Navy Yard Again Shows Need for Strict Gun Control

 

One of the biggest error made by the Founding Fathers was including the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights of the U. S. Constitution or at least not adding very limiting language.  Despite America's transformation from a rural semi-wilderness nation where guns were needed for hunting food and protection against raiding native America attacks to a modern developed nation where few need a gun for any reason other than to compensate for fears of inadequate penis size or out of racist fears about "dangerous black men," the Second Amendment continues to be applied in a manner that allows an ongoing slaughter in America.  Yes, I am virulently anti-gun and in my view anyone who claims they need a gun for "protection" is either a cretin or a lunatic.  The presence of guns in homes and society increases danger rather than lessens it. Yesterday's shooting spree in the Washington Naval Yard underscores that severe limits on gun ownership are needed.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post editorial on the issue:

FOR ALL the unknowns about Monday’s mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, there was a nauseating familiarity to the unfolding events: the witness accounts of chaos and fear; the plea from officials for the public’s help; the number of dead revised upward and then revised upward again.

we are confronting another mass shooting, and today it happened on a military installation in our nation’s capital,” said President Obama. Another mass shooting. Again, again, again.

This time, at least 12 people were killed when, for unknown reasons — as if there ever could be reason — a gunman opened fire on workers hurrying to start a new week at the venerable military complex in Southeast Washington. About eight other people, including at least one police officer, were injured in the 8:15 a.m. incident in Building 197, which houses the Naval Sea Systems Command. Once again, Americans silently extended sympathy to the families of those so senselessly killed. 

How did he acquire his weapons (an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol were reportedly found on him), and how did he bring them onto a gated facility?

Life does go on, through Columbine in 1999, through Virginia Tech in 2007, through Sandy Hook in 2012. Each atrocity provides a jolt to the nation and then recedes with little effect, until the next unimaginable event occurs, except each time a little more imaginable. Everything was supposed to change after a man with a semiautomatic weapon mowed down 20 elementary school children in their classrooms last December. But for the politicians, nothing changed. Now, another massacre, another roster of funerals. Again, again, again.

Guns only cause death and mayhem.  No one needs one despite the NRA/gun manufacturer propaganda to the contrary.  I'm sorry, but I have zero respect for gun owners. Absolutely none.

Gun Deaths - The Price of "Freedom"?

I am an unapologetic advocate for strict gun control laws.  Some of my Republican neighbors would hotly debate the issue, but the truth is that America has an insanely high number of gun deaths - there have been 1,280 since the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in December according to Huffington Post and 1,475 according to Slate which included suicides and police shootings.  Some are suicides - gun availability increases suicide rates and successful completions - some are murders, others are accidental.  But the results are all the same.  Individuals needlessly dead thanks to 2nd Amendment fanatics and gun manufacturers.  The composite image of victims is via Huffington Post.  Here are a few article highlights:

It was Christmas night when Sincere Smith, 2, found his father’s loaded gun on the living room table of their Conway, S.C., mobile home. It took just a second for Smith’s tiny hands to find the trigger and pull. A single bullet ripped into his upper right chest and out his back.  .  .  .  .  Sincere died on an ambulance gurney as he was transferred to a second hospital in Charleston.

There were 29 other shooting deaths across the U.S. on Christmas. A soldier was shot and killed in his barracks in Alaska. A man was murdered in the parking lot of Eddie's Bar and Grill in Orrville, Ala. A 23-year-old was shot at a party in Phoenix. A Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department employee was killed in a drive-by.

A 20-year-old Louisville, Ky., man was shot and killed after walking his sister home. On Christmas Eve, he had posted an R.I.P. on his Facebook page for a friend and former classmate, who had been gunned down that day.

A 10-year-old in Memphis, Tenn., Alfreddie Gipson, was accidentally shot to death by gun purchased by an older brother, who had gotten the weapon after being bullied at school. Gipson was jumping on a bed when the gun slipped out of a mattress. It discharged when his 12-year-old brother tried to put it back, their mother said at a vigil.

There were at least 41 homicides or accidental gun deaths on New Year's Eve. On New Year's Day, at least 54 people died from bullet wounds.

Through Google and Nexis searches, The Huffington Post has tracked gun-related homicides and accidents throughout the U.S. since the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn., on the morning of Dec. 14. There were more than 100 such deaths the first week after the school shooting. In the first seven weeks after Newtown, there have been more than 1,280 gunshot homicides and accidental deaths. Slate has counted 1,475 fatal shooting incidents since Newtown, including suicides and police-involved shooting deaths, which The Huffington Post did not include in its tally.

When is the madness going to stop?

Republicans and NRA Refuse to Admit Their Complicity in Connecticut Massacre

The usual suspects on the right are once again denying that their love for unrestricted gun ownership played any role in the deadly massacre in Connecticut that left 28 dead, including 20 children.  One former Republican compatriot of mine sums up the rush to deny responsibility in this comment on my Facebook page:

Michael, it is nearly impossible - as soon as a weapon is outlawed, it gets manufactured with an altered design, which no longer makes it the outlawed gun. Don't politicize this most horrific tragedy - it is not a "Republican" moment for you.

This from a person who I once thought was rational.  I'm sorry, but this tragedy DOES need to be politicized because only by politicizing the nightmare and pointing fingers at those who have created a legal framework where guns that allow shooters to kill dozens in mere minutes are perfectly legal will we as a nation see the much needed changes to the nation's gun laws.  And here in Virginia, the Republican controlled General Assembly repealed the limit on the number of guns one can purchase per month, turning Virginia once again into the gun capital of the east coast.  It is political because one political party continues to make it possible for guns such as those used in this slaughter readily available.  As I said yesterday, in my view there is absolutely no reason why any civilian needs to have an automatic or semi-automatic assault rifle.    My former compatriot seemingly has conveniently forgotten the GOP's stance on guns:

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Republicans have strengthened the pro-gun-rights portion of their party platform, including a new call for unlimited bullet capacities in guns, in a defiant response to criticism that followed recent mass shootings at a Colorado cinema and an Arizona congresswoman's gathering.

The 2012 platform, approved this week by GOP convention-goers who nominated Mitt Romney for president, also endorses "stand your ground" rights for gun owners. That legal concept, which says gun bearers don't have to retreat if they feel threatened in a public place, drew national attention after February's fatal shooting of an unarmed Florida teenager by a neighborhood watch volunteer.

"We invite Americans to consider this platform, a call for dramatic change in government," Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell said in his convention speech Tuesday.

Yes, Taliban Bob, we do need to educate ourselves and hold the GOP responsible for the recklessness of its position on guns and its opposition to any meaningful gun control.   

One voice of sanity on this issue is New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg who has to deal with guns flowing into his city from states like Virginia that undermine law enforcement efforts in that city.   Here is what Bloomberg said in a statement released yesterday:

"With all the carnage from gun violence in our country, it's still almost impossible to believe that a mass shooting in a kindergarten class could happen. It has come to that. Not even kindergarteners learning their A,B,Cs are safe. We heard after Columbine that it was too soon to talk about gun laws. We heard it after Virginia Tech. After Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek. And now we are hearing it again. For every day we wait, 34 more people are murdered with guns. Today, many of them were five-year olds. President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown. But the country needs him to send a bill to Congress to fix this problem. Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership - not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response. My deepest sympathies are with the families of all those affected, and my determination to stop this madness is stronger than ever."

To my former GOP compatriot I again say that this IS political and it needs to be politicized so that the political party that continues to enable such madness is held responsible.  I'd also suggest that my former compatriot stop drinking the Kool-Aid being dispensed by the NRA and other right wing groups.  It is bad enough that the GOP has become largely a party of religious fanatics and white supremacists.  The GOP doesn't have to continue to enable madmen to slaughter innocents as well simply to kiss the ass of people like Wayne LaPierre, president of the NRA who sounds eriely like my former GOP friend:

Eleven days ago—since when two mass shootings have taken place, this one in Newtown and another earlier this week at a shopping mall in Oregon—the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) president, referring to yet another shooting, bemoaned the media “[seizing] on the back of this national tragedy to try to piggyback their anti-Second Amendment national agenda right on top of the back of the national tragedy and try to force it on Americans all over the country.” Mr LaPierre, like the NRA’s Twitter page, has been silent today.

The article quoted above had another telling passage:

As it happens, halfway around the world, on the same day, a deranged man attacked primary-school students at a school in China’s Henan province. He had a knife. Twenty-two students were wounded. None died. Adam Lanza had a pair of handguns, and a .223 semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle, which looks like this: