Come in, have a chair and talk -- but you have to demonstrate you can think!
"Our job is not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds, and to make the agony of decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking." - Fred W. Friendly (1915-1998)
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you mad." - Aldous Huxley
"If you have ever injected truth into politics, then you have no politics." - Will Rogers
As this analysis points out, we in the US are way out on a planet by ourselves when compared to the rest of the world in terms of numbers of guns and numbers of gun deaths.
Every once in awhile, an event like this one comes along to reinforce the image:
The NRA is in a tough spot these days. Between incompetent leadership and a mission that seems none too clear even to its members, things like this keep popping up from states that practically say "dump guns here". Don't forget that there are some in the NRA who think mandatory training of children in guns is a "good thing" -- and you thought Common Core was bad?
Yet as recently as 1999, the NRA actually supported background checks for gun purchases. For one of the most squirmy, wimp out of it performances of all time - see this.
LaPierre basically weasels his way around the fact that the improved gun check laws and purchase requirements that they once "supported" at least verbally but opposed in Congress are not effective. (If they are never enacted, how can they be ineffective?).
The NRA is looking more and more like a bunch of idiots that don't know what their message is or where they are going.
For me -- I will do what I usually do as elections approach. Look for those candidates that have received NRA donations and make sure to vote against them.
...more (this one shows why the very presence of guns in your residence raises the possibility you will be killed by one tremendously - something the CDC was researching until the NRA goons leaned on the wimpy Congress to abandon it).
...a final coda to the gun-crazy tragedies of this lead-filled month. The sad thing is it wasn't all that special a month by gunfire standards...in the United States. About 20 children per day, or 7,000 per year are injured or killed by a gun both accidentally and intentionally in the US. You need to go to a third-world country under constant war or civil unrest to match such a dismal record.
And finally...a chilling picture of what this looks like to the rest of the world, and what it might say for the US's continued involvement in the world, if people are too afraid to come here and bring their knowledge and ideas..
Despite my prior post...no this is not in the US. This is a polling place in the Ukraine. I certainly hope that is a toy weapon that innocent little girl is holding, and not an "adult" weapon carelessly put aside while voting. Still -- it makes for a thought-provoking picture from several perspectives doesn't it?
Sometimes even the tongue-in-cheek publication The Onion hits a truthful nail square on the head. Look at this about the epidemic of gun violence sweeping the US.
This is another cost of the rampant gun violence in the US -- burnout and frustration by the people who are left to patch up the victims, day after day, night after night. After all, they are just "collateral damage" for a society that reveres gun ownership far above life.
Another day, another idiot loose with an assault rifle and who knows what else..."exercising his second amendment rights" (based only on the second half of the second amendment of course).
Any sentient, intelligent, thinking being can quickly come to the conclusion we have a gun problem in this country.
Fortunately true thinkers want to know the facts, and this is one of the studies that scared the crap out of the NRA enough so that they exerted their bribery muscle to shut down all US studies on gun deaths. The NRA stance is "what you don't know won't hurt you...unless there is a gun involved".
Ten years ago (before most of the mass shootings), a study of 23 other high-income countries showed:
Firearm homicide rate in US - 19.5 times higher than the other countries
Firearm homicide rate for 15-24 year olds - 42.7 times higher
US "unintentional" firearm deaths were 5.2 times higher
80% of all firearms deaths among these countries occurred in the US
86% of women in these countries killed by firearms were US women
87% of all children ages 0 to 14 killed by firearms were in the US
The source is a report in the US Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health:
Some events just speak for themselves, and make you wonder why the US thinks it is the top of the heap -- and why easy access to guns is such a good thing....
I wrote earlier about the CDC study that scared the NRA so badly they had to marshal their political dollars to get their Washington lackeys to shut down research on it.
But even the NRA's bribery can't shut down public research using publicly available data (at least without somehow invalidating the First Amendment).
This very concise study uses available data to point out in a very obvious way (maybe even Glen Beck would understand it, but I wouldn't hold out any hope for Sarah Palin) the fact that the gun environment/culture/tradition in the US is not healthy, and far outside the norms for other countries in the world.
As I have said before, there are no easy answers but it should be plain to anyone that the status quo as to guns in the US is completely unacceptable.
While the gun lobby tries to shroud themselves in the American flag and a cloak of "values" based on the second half of a Constitutional amendment that was written nearly three centuries ago, it is refreshing to know that there is a sizable majority (90% of the public at large, 88% of gun-owners) who are calling "bull____" on the extreme position of the NRA and its most fanatical acolytes that worship the perverted notion that only when all the criminally insane own firearms, will we be "safe".
This article was published in the Religion and Values section by the Center for American Progress and outlines the backlash that it building against the ignorant, self-serving, and just plain non-thinking Senators that voted against the fairly mild, loophole-closing background check bill recently.
Also read the full article in the New York Times by former Representative Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) who addressed the utter lack of humanity and cowardice of these Senators in her own "pull no punches" way.
In case you haven't noticed, politicians in Congress have not been representing their constituents or doing what their constituents wanted for at least the last decade. It kind of came to a head last week when Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte ran into a buzz saw at what was supposedly a carefully-scripted "town hall meeting" which was attended by a courageous and fiery woman named Erica Lafferty, the daughter of one of the adult Sandy Hook massacre victims (the adults in this tragedy have almost been forgotten)...who refused to follow the "rules" that the Republican Party handlers laid down.
The simple fact is that the Senator, and all the other Republican Senators (plus a handful of Democratic Senators who wish they were Republicans) essentially voted the NRA line...to continue to make all firearms including automatic and semi-automatic weapons with any size magazine available at will to convicted felons, the drug-addled, and mentally insane individuals. All it takes is to drag their knuckles to the nearest "gun show" or to find a compliant 'friend' or other private party to give, sell, barter the weapon to them.
Oh, and by the way this is something that up to 90% of the American public has indicated they want to control and clamp down on. No hunter, sportsman, or just plain gun enthusiast loses their weapons or even has to register. Simply keeping the wackos out of the equation as well as our open society is able.
The creators of these "rules" by the way for the meeting were none other than the handlers of George W. Bush....they knew they had a particularly stupid persona on their hands who could not be trusted to speak extemporaneously in public or respond to intelligent questions...so they came up with the whole "town meetings where only people that agree with us" thing was invented.
Maybe this will be a chink in the illogical, immoral, and overly-armed fortress of the "guns for the insane" lobby that returns us to what the Constitution and representational government SHOULD be about!
I got busy on Friday and Saturday so I just got around to watching the Shields and Brooks segment recorded on a very weird news day Friday when Boston was still locked down.
Their comments on the defeat of the gun control background checks though are what really interested me -- I don't think it was 'political structure' as much as it was floods of NRA money to certain pockets. Since the Senate just voted against the wishes of 90% of the American people so the Senators could keep their place at the pig trough....I don't think this is over yet. Particularly since we should start seeing some hard facts from the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) now that President Obama has restarted their research into one of the biggest health plagues in the US (other than health insurance companies) -- guns.
They have plainly shown their utter contempt and outright disdain for the working middle class American over the last several years and demonstrated again and again their childlike fealty toward mega-billionaires and job-destroyers as well as the operators of our national disgrace - the death panels we call health insurance companies. And of course they profess surprise when their party approval rating spirals ever lower.
But today they openly declared their dedication to the continued ability of the domestic violence perpetrators, murders, rapists, child molesters, criminally insane, and just plain convicted felons to continue to obtain weapons of any caliber and capacity at will...just by going to a gun show or finding a willing (or even unwilling if they can bully them) "private seller".
That's getting a little desperate for people to say nice things about the Repubs.
No wonder the rest of the world is increasingly convinced that the US is populated only by the insane!
The NRA continues to blast away at any chance they have of being considered even remotely sane...but then that is what people with high-capacity mags do right? After this little soiree at the National Press Club, it is apparent that they think that the second half of the Second amendment to the Constitution trumps the First and Fourth amendments completely.....
Unfortunately, the general public (who can barely stand to wait for the next brainless Tweet to appear) are demonstrating the typical waning interest that allows our elected political idiots to ignore anything that might cost them money. From a high of 60%-65% in favor of harsher gun laws, it is down now to a more 50/50 split according to latest polls. Still....that is a longer attention span than Americans usually demonstrate on anything.....too bad about the next mall, theater, concert, football or baseball game that falls prey to someone taking advantage of that second half of the Second amendment....
I have been busy with work and a technical course I have been taking online, so haven't had much time to post. But I couldn't resist when I saw this item.
THIS Washington DC....is what the people you are reputedly representing want...and this is HOW YOU GET THINGS DONE!
This article (from ProPublica) is based on an interview with Dr. Mark Rosenburg, who led the CDC's earlier (1990s) research into the causes, effects, and strategies for handling gun violence. It has been a conclusion in other smaller studies that the presence of guns in an area, society, whatever raises the death rate by a measurable amount. However it wasn't until things started to come together demonstrating the same facts at the national level that the NRA decided to jump on their "second half of the Second Amendment only" bandwagon and have a cow about it.
The NRA jumped all over the early results (outlined in the article) and forced its mindless Congressional lackeys to withdraw funding. President Obama recently requested that the research be funded and resumed, but there is little chance of that. The NRA owns their own political party, and they are certainly not the party of free-thinkers...not that there is such a thing anywhere.
You can see why they didn't want the news getting out!
What Researchers Learned About Gun Violence Before Congress Killed Funding
by Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica, Feb. 25, 2013, 2:07 p.m.
President Obama has directed the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence as part of his legislative package on gun control. The CDC hasn't pursued this kind of research since 1996 when the National Rifle Association lobbied Congress to cut funding for it, arguing that the studies were politicized and being used to promote gun control. We've interviewed Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who led the agency's gun violence research in the nineties when he was the director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
We talked to Rosenberg about the work the agency was doing before funding was cut and how it's relevant to today's gun control debate. Here's an edited transcript. There's been coverage recently about how Congress cut funding for gun violence research, but not much about what the agency was actually researching and what it was finding. You were in charge of that. Tell us a little bit about what the CDC was doing back then.
There were basically four questions that we were trying to answer. The first question is what is the problem? Who were the victims? Who was killed? Who were injured? Where did they happen? Under what circumstances? When? What times of the year? What times of the day? What was the relationship to other events? How did they happen? What were the weapons that were used? What was the relationship between the people involved? What was the motive or the setting in which they happened?
The second question is what are the causes? What are the things that increase one's risk of being shot? What are the things that decrease one's risk of being shot?
The third question we were trying to answer is what works to prevent these? What kinds of policies, what kinds of interventions, what kinds of police practices or medical practices or education and school practices actually might prevent some of these shootings? We're not just looking at mass shootings, but also looking at the bulk of the homicides that occur every year and the suicides, which account for a majority of all gun deaths.
Then the last question is how do you do it? Once you have a program or policy that has been proven to work in one place, how do you spread it? How do you actually put it in place? So what were you were able to find before funding got cut off?
One of the critical studies that we supported was looking at the question of whether having a firearm in your home protects you or puts you at increased risk. This was a very important question because people who want to sell more guns say that having a gun in your home is the way to protect your family.
What the research showed was not only did having a firearm in your home not protect you, but it hugely increased the risk that someone in your family would die from a firearm homicide. It increased the risk almost 300 percent, almost three times as high.
It also showed that the risk that someone in your home would commit suicide went up. It went up five-fold if you had a gun in the home. These are huge, huge risks, and to just put that in perspective, we look at a risk that someone might get a heart attack or that they might get a certain type of cancer, and if that risk might be 20 percent greater, that may be enough to ban a certain drug or a certain product.
But in this case, we're talking about a risk not 20 percent, not 100 percent, not 200 percent, but almost 300 percent or 500 percent. These are huge, huge risks. I understand there was also an effort to collect data on gun violence through something called the Firearm Injury Surveillance System. What did that involve?
We were collecting information to answer the question of who, what, where, when, and how did shootings occur?
We were finding that most homicides occur between people who know each other, people who are acquaintances or might be doing business together or might be living together. They're not stranger-on-stranger shootings. They're not mostly home intrusions.
We also found that there were a lot of firearm suicides, and in fact most firearm deaths are suicides. There were a lot of young people who were impulsive who were using guns to commit suicide. So if you were able to continue this work, what kind of data do you think would be available today?
I think we'd know much more information about what sorts of weapons are used in what sorts of firearm deaths and injuries.
Let's say you look at robbery associated homicides, and you find that in those homicides certain weapons are used in almost all of them and that these weapons come from a limited number of sources and that those weapons are not used by people to defend their home or to hunt or to target shoot. Then you can say, "Here's a type of weapon that seems to be only used in criminal enterprises and doesn't seem to have any legitimate uses, and maybe we ought to find a way to restrict the sales or access to that type of weapon."
I think it's also important to look at what the impact of these data might be.
If you look at how many deaths have occurred between 1996, when there was this disruption to surveillance and research, and now, so that's 16 years, and if you assume that there are about 30,000 gun deaths every year, you're talking about 480,000 gun deaths over that period of time.
If even a fraction of those deaths could have been prevented, you're talking about a significant impact in terms of saving lives. Lawmakers are now trying to figure out what the most effective policies might be to curb gun violence, and how to implement them. What were you beginning to find on that?
The largest question in this category is what kind of larger policies work? Does it work, for example, if you have an assault weapon ban? Does that reduce the number of firearm injuries and deaths? In truth, we don't know the answer to that. That requires evaluation.
Does gun licensing and registration work to reduce firearm injuries and death? We don't have the answer.
The policies that make it easier to carry concealed weapons, do those reduce or do those increase firearm injuries and deaths? We don't have the answer. Do gun bans like they have in the city of Chicago, work? We don't have the answer yet to those.
These require large-scale studies of large numbers of people, over a long period of time to see if they work or don't.
I don't think those studies were fully funded or completed. How do you think the gun control debate might be different today, if you had been allowed to continue that research?
I would like to think that we would have had answers to what works and what doesn't work. I would hope that we know whether the kind of bans and restrictions that they have in Chicago really make a difference or don't. I would hope that we would have had information about whether an assault weapon ban saves lives or doesn't. Unfortunately, when you don't have those data that really show you, scientifically, whether or not something works, then you end up with people making statements like the following, "Obviously, the assault weapon ban didn't work, because Columbine happened."
That's kind of like saying, "Vaccines don't work because someone got the flu." The Obama administration is asking Congress for $10 million to pursue gun-related research. If you had that budget and you had your old job, what would you use the money to look at?
I think we'd want to look at what the impact of different policies would be, both restricting and enabling policies.
The other thing that I would make sure we looked at is not just how do we prevent firearm injuries, but how do we also protect the rights of legitimate gun owners? I think it would be very important to look, for example, at legislation that restricts access by certain people to firearms. Let's say these might be people who have committed felonies or people who have been adjudicated mentally ill.
People often think that there are maybe three things we should consider passing right now, something like an assault weapons ban, a ban on large capacity magazines, and background checks on all gun purchasers.
The truth is that there's not going to be a simple, magic pill or even three pills that cure the whole problem. If you look at suicides and the whole range of homicides and firearm injuries, the answers are going to come, bit by bit, over time, incrementally.
It's not one, two or even three things that are really going to solve the problem. They may salve our conscience, but they won't solve the problem. The research is really, really important. We really need to find out what works, so that we can save more lives.
It's been presented to people that research is going to hurt legitimate gun owners. That's the threat and how the NRA leadership has often presented it to the NRA membership. "Any sort of research is only going to result in your losing all your guns."
That's a tactic of fear. It's not at all the case. There are things we can do that will both reduce firearm injuries and protect the legitimate rights of gun owners and protect the children and their families.
Another quality session with Shields and Brooks on the PBS NewsHour. This is how reasonable people think and disagree, laying the groundwork for progress. There will be sadly, no such intelligence emanating from Congress in Washington, DC anytime soon. I guarantee you will learn more here than in a week of watching the ignorant shouting heads on any of the cable news channels.
There is little doubt that the current gun sales regulations covering "licensed" gun dealers already on the books are just barely functioning. Constant interference by the NRA and outright self-interested meddling in Congress (frequently in service to the well-heeled gun lobby) existing regulations have been pretty much gutted and have crippled the ATF so that they are unable to come anywhere near the annual inspections of licensed dealers that they are allowed (a meaningless maximum inspection rate set by the NRA and happily passed by Congress).
In 2011 alone, the inspections of licensed gun dealers that the ATF was able to perform turned up nearly 177,500 guns that dealers could not "find" -- either in inventory or in their sales records. After a lot of work by the ATF with the dealers, the number was whittled down to 18,500 - a number the ATF called "a significant threat" to public safety. In 2010 they discovered 30,000 missing guns, so this is not an anomaly.
Seems like a pretty weak set of regulations, which are no good unless they have enough teeth. Frequently all a dealer has to do is turn the business over to a relative, appeal a license revocation in court which will take years to resolve while they continue operating, or even worse for the public, take the inventory "private" and escape any kind of regulation at all.
The NRA keeps saying "enforce the laws we have". The current laws are not doing the job -- but if the NRA would 'do the right thing' for a change and stop crippling the very enforcement that they claim to encourage, things might be very different.
There are a few scattered gun buy back programs being announced or pursued by local governments and law enforcement, primarily because Washington DC is in its usual paralyzed state...largely by the torrent of NRA money flowing through the halls of Congress. This is bringing out some people who don't mind showing their ignorance...of either simple mathematical probability or logic, or both.
It is impossible to gauge the effectiveness of a gun buyback program in advance because it is not possible to tell if a particular gun belongs to a nut case, or will be stolen by or belong to one in the future. It is impossible to gauge the effectiveness of a buyback after the fact, because once a gun is destroyed...the probability is absolutely zero that it will ever be used to take a life or multiple lives.
Likewise, it is dangerous to assume cause and effect afterwards. Australia had a quite successful gun buy back after a mass shooting outraged the country (and their politicians actually work for the people they represent). They have not had a mass shooting since...but can the two be linked? Not necessarily nor with any certainty, although they also outlawed semi-automatic assault weapons permanently at the same time so there are multiple factors at work here.
The only unassailable truth is that if the 'right' gun is part of a buy back, it can save many, many lives. If Nancy Lanza had decided that she really didn't need to own a death-dealing assault-style semi-automatic weapon in time, not only would many innocent children and adults be alive...but she might be as well although it seems there were plenty of other weapons in easy reach of Adam Lanza.
People who try to equate through logic or probability the effects of a gun buy back are the same gullible idiots who keep the casinos in Las Vegas so profitably afloat. It doesn't matter how many times you have flipped a coin and how many results have been the same -- every flip is still a 50/50 proposition.
