12.15.12
Big ups, gun lobby!
Orders of magnitude beyond appalling:
The 26 victims who were shot inside a Connecticut elementary school on Friday were each hit by more than one bullet, most of them from the high-powered assault rifle wielded by the 20-year-old suspect, the state’s chief medical examiner said on Saturday …
“I believe they were all first-graders,” [the medical examiner] said.
It is the modern National Rifle Association and public figures like Ted Nugent who have worked so that Americans and cowardly politicians sit lamely by and accept the fool’s hall of fame idea that semi-automatic assault rifles are just natural for sporting fun.
We’ve learned Adam Lanza’s mother “liked guns.” And no one can ask ask the woman why on earth she wanted so many, including the assault rifle.
How did she come to be someone who viewed such things as upper middle class consumer items to covet? It didn’t happen all by itself.
This article, written on the 4th of December and entitled “Guns for fun,” is a now unintentional example of a national psychopathy — the fruit of the NRA.
It digs up a UCLA professor of law who explains shooting an AR-15 creates an adrenaline rush, one which is fun. The man dryly adds that a lot of things are “fun” and create an adrenaline rush, but are also illegal, like driving 150 mph or making videos of small animals being crushed to death under someone’s feet.
Point well taken.
Some excerpts:
“Gun control advocates ask, ‘Why does anyone need this particular kind of gun, like an AR-15 (an assault rifle similar to the one used by the U.S. military)???? Winkler says. “The reason people like an AR-15 is because it’s fun to shoot.???
Shooting a firearm, he says, triggers the same chemicals in the brain as riding a roller coaster—endorphins and adrenaline. “I was out at the range two weeks ago, shooting an AR-15,??? he says. “It was a lot of fun.???
“If you look at the cover of a gun magazine today, you’re going to see one of two things: Compact guns for concealed carry, or assault rifles.??? They cater to what [a gun control advocated interviewed by the publication] calls “self-defense freaks, extremely paranoid people, emboldened by the stand-your-ground laws,??? and “hardcore insurrectionists.??? Insurrectionists, [people who says they believe] they need to arm themselves against the government, in particular are the dominant voice in the pro-gun side of the debate, he says.
“They believe they have an individual right to check government by force of arms,??? he says. Insurrectionists are a vocal fringe group, he says, not at all representative of most gun owners …
Bearing in mind that most NRA members, and gun owners in general are either hunters or sportsmen and not crazies, people have a right to have assault rifles like AR-15s, [a representative of the NRA told the publication], regardless of whether or not they really need them. “It’s the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs,??? she says. “Just because it’s someone’s opinion that someone doesn’t need it isn’t a legally viable reason to ban them.???
You should read the entire thing, including the comments — there are only three.
I.T. said,
December 15, 2012 at 7:16 pm
If you take a good, hard look at the murder stats, you’ll see US , excluding it’s black population (7000 homicides per year )has about the same murder rate as Europe.
5K per 260 000K is 1.92 per 100K. Which is below the European average of 3.5. Northern Europe has 1.5 though, Western just 1.0.
Switzerland, which, for the record, allows ownership of semiautomatic weaponry has 0.7.
Czech Republic where I live has 1.7. And we can and do buy semiautomatic rifles, though you have to get something like a driver’s license to do so.
Rampages like these are nothing more than statistical noise.
They happen here too, and no one loses much sleep over them, mostly because one happens every couple of decades. Last non-family related one was in 1973. A narcisstic truck driver with a grudge against everyone.
Reality is, that banning semiautomatic rifles in the United States would create a civil liberties shitstorm of epic proportions due to all the gun-clinging right-wingers who’d be convinced it’s a prelude to totalitarianism, take a great amount of resources to implement, and would result in what?
Fifty, or maybe a hundred saved lives a year? That’s about how many people get killed by lightning or drown while taking a bath..
Hey, you were once a scientist. Look at the fucking data. No one’s managed to establish any kind of relationship between gun ownership and murder rate.
Sure, methods change, but does it matter whether someone is stabbed or shot to death?
George Smith said,
December 16, 2012 at 10:24 am
Reality is, that banning semiautomatic rifles in the United States would create a civil liberties shitstorm of epic proportions due to all the gun-clinging right-wingers who’d be convinced it’s a prelude to totalitarianism, take a great amount of resources to implement, and would result in what?
See here. WhiteManistan, which is where the civil liberties civil war would start, just lost its margin of victory vis-a-vis the whole.
http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/2012/12/16/on-dealing-with-those-who-need-to-be-dealt-with/
We already have a shit storm of epic proportions here. The battle’s worth waging to marginalize the NRA and its enforcing/lobbying/marketing.
but does it matter whether someone is stabbed or shot to death?
Empirically, Newtown is not on your side. With a semi-automatic AR-15 you can mow a mass of people down, something you can’t with a knife.
2. 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/nine-facts-about-guns-and-mass-shootings-in-the-united-states/
Note curve about decreasing violence in the US, too. Which is still not a justification to not begin a political war on the NRA at the ballot box and, subsequently, through eventual legislation.
I.T. said,
December 16, 2012 at 1:51 pm
. Which is still not a justification to not begin a political war on the NRA at the ballot box and, subsequently, through eventual legislation.
Who’s gonna start that war? Starry-eyed idealists? Because it seems to me that gun control movement has been almost completely defeated. They no longer have the funding they used to, and pushing gun control has become very difficult.
Meanwhile more people have guns or carry permits than ever, nationwide gun laws are less stringent, and homicide is still down.
I don’t see how gun control is important, or politically interesting.
Debt, the student loan bubble.. inflation, the sorry state of the economy are more pressing issues.
With a semi-automatic AR-15 you can mow a mass of people down, something you can’t with a knife.
There’s this pensioner who killed a dozen people by inadvertently running them over. IIRC, nuts in China managed to kill a dozen kids with knives in some cases.
George Smith said,
December 16, 2012 at 3:52 pm
No, not starry-eyed idealists. Just a large number of people sick of being bullied by the gun lobby. The NRA is inextricably tied to the GOP and that’s a party that has been beaten demographically, one that stands to be beaten worse going forward. You just have to put them on more public stages and let them be themselves. The arguments appeal to the coterie but turn everyone else off. So I framed it as part of larger political problem, which is how to further shrink and marginalize WhiteManistan.
It wouldn’t and won’t be easy but it’s possible to demonize the NRA because it would just be being accurate. It would be great to see commercials of GOP politicians and miscellaneous white guys loudly bitching about tyranny and their ‘Constitutionally’ guarenteed right to buy Bushmasters. Heck, they make them themselves, they just need more front and center airing, give the majority a good look, not just on cable tv shows.
There’s this pensioner who killed a dozen people by inadvertently running them over.
Yes, happened out here. This is an argument Ted Nugent would try to make. In fact, I’m sure he’s working on one like it for a piece in the WaTimes this week.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html
Still not quite the same.
CDV has been writing some good things on this, including similar observations that all one has to do is put the GOP or some random monster from the gun lobby on video, they can’t help being alienating.
http://wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com/2012/12/post-sandy-hook-larry-platt-of-gun.html
Here’s a bit from a New Yorker piece that ran in April, after another slaughter. I cited from it in another post but didn’t repost the direct statistics included in it.
There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American …
The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world … Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five.