News is breaking that a high school in Parkland Florida is on lock down with an active shooter still at large. Broward County sheriff is reporting 20 to 50 casualties. Welcome to the new normal in America where the NRA has purchased the Congress, and gun lickers control the debate.
Today in Tokyo, Trump said that the mass shooting in Sutherland Springs Texas yesterday was “a mental health problem” and “not a guns situation”. As we’ve pointed out before, every country has mental health issues, but the ONLY country that has a mass shooting problem is the United States. The difference between us and other developed countries? Guns. Hundreds of millions of guns.
The Sutherland Springs shooter was 26 and had received a bad conduct discharge from the Air Force in 2014 after serving a year in a military jail for assaulting his wife and his child. He bought his assault rifle at an Academy in San Antonio. How in the hell can an individual with this kind of criminal record? Answer – The background check system in this country SUCKS. Many records are still paper. Not all criminal records make it into the system. NO mental health data gets into the system unless a court adjudicates a person incompetent.
In short, any idiot, criminal, and weirdo can easily put his hands on a weapon(s) with a high capacity magazine and all the ammo he can afford. This is not a mental health problem, Donald, it’s a GUN problem. Hundreds of millions of guns.
Remember our reporting about the “militia” group American Freedom Keepers who waltzed into Little Cambodia last month with a racist motorcycle club, running out FEMA and other workers and declaring themselves in charge? Remember how we wrote about how gun crazies often try to recast themselves as dewy-eyed do-gooders when their gun-slinging gets them into a world of trouble?
Welp, things are not going well for AFK, as they’ve been named in a lawsuit filed by the City of Charlottesville and others for the riots that they made worse by their gun toting presence in August. AFK was named among other groups, especially the one that calls themselves the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia, a bunch of gun nuts from Latrobe Pennsylvania led by “Colonel” Christian Yingling (yeah, sure), whose image was all over the media that weekend declaring himself and his crowd in charge.
The filing is pretty clear and certainly damning of the actions of our friends and the other private militia groups who decided to take over “peacekeeping” (translation: protecting violent racists) at the time. NOW, instead of begging for money to burnish their image for their “charity” work in Texas, they get to beg for money for lawyers. They’re calling themselves the Charlotte 32 as if they’re some poor persecuted group of innocents. They also love themselves some Latin. Their new motto copied from Wikipedia is Si vis pacem, para bellum, which translates roughly to “If you want peace, prepare for war”. It seems like a pretty silly motto, being that they started the war in Charlottesville by showing up and trying to take over.
You can bet they’re pretty worried, too. The lawsuit states:
“In language that dates back to the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, Article I, Section 13 of the Virginia Constitution provides that “in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.” A section of the Virginia Code is dedicated to prohibiting “unlawful paramilitary activity,” as specified therein. See Va. Code Ann. § 18.2-433.2. And another state statute forbids falsely assuming the functions of any peace officer or law-enforcement officer. See id. § 18.2-174.”
Oh, and it gets better:
“As the United States Supreme Court has long recognized, ‘Military organization and military drill . . . are subjects especially under the control of the government of every country. They cannot be claimed as a right independent of law.’ And for good reason: ‘[T]he proliferation of private military organizations threatens to result in lawlessness and destructive chaos.'”
That lawlessness certainly happened in Charlottesville with one death and many injured. This suit makes for pretty juicy reading for 79 pages. Among other things, the City of Charlottesville seeks injunctive relief to keep these dangerous screwballs out of Charlottesville in an effort to take their city back from racists and weirdos.
And it’s not a moment too soon.
Hell came to a grinding halt today, frozen solid. For the first time since Charlton Heston started screaming, “From my cold dead hands!” the NRA blinked and is endorsing “additional rules” on the sale and use of bump stocks, used to convert a merely deadly weapon into a mass murder machine. For those who don’t know, bump stocks are devices that allow the recoil of a rifle to reset the trigger of a semi-auto weapon into full auto without taking your finger off of the trigger. The murderer in Las Vegas had TWELVE, yes, I said TWELVE semi-auto rifles fitted with bump stocks, which were used very effectively to shoot over 500 people in about 11 minutes, killing 58 innocents. He had a number of other weapons with him, apparently in the just in case he wanted to kill more people if needed.
Even congress is starting to come around; we’ve learned that apparently the magic number for a mass shooting is 500 in order to get a congressvarmit to do something besides look down their own trousers to make sure everything is still there. Those little old run of the mill shootings that kill 20 to 40 victims at a time don’t seem to ring the bell, but shooting 500 damn sure does. Republicans are falling all over themselves to ban bump stocks, but they’ll probably stop there and set a new threshold for maybe universal background checks at around 1,000 or more victims.
I’ll take what I can get, and hope the devil can’t find any ice picks.
First, let me state one critical fact – EVERY OTHER DEVELOPED COUNTRY ON THE PLANET HAS FIGURED THIS ONE OUT. The United States is the only country with the chronic problem of mass shootings.
A few points:
So what’s the difference? Why do we have such a wrenching problem with mass shootings? The difference is the omnipresence of guns.
The US is awash in a tsunami of guns that is drowning our country and the lame gun laws we manage to enact are designed to fail to protect our society from people who have no business owning a gun. As a country, the US is 4.4% of the world’s population, yet we own 42% of the world’s guns. Let that sink in. Our homicide rate in the US is over 300% that of the average of the rest of the OECD.
The problem here is obvious. The solution is simple. The population of the US is not crazier, or more evil than other countries’ populations. The only factor that makes our country an outlier is the overwhelming presence of guns. Guns can be easily acquired in private sales with no background check. Guns are trafficked by the millions. The NRA has successfully stifled research into gun violence, has kept the ATF hamstrung in enforcing existing laws, and has even prevented the electronic tracking of guns from being done.
The real crime here, besides the massive murders of innocents, is that committed by our elected representatives who have taken hundreds of millions of dollars from the NRA and other pro gun industry lobbyists to keep us awash in guns.
That’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.
The toll from the mass shooting last night is currently 50+ dead, around 400 wounded. Hospitals in Las Vegas are running out of blood. The shooter, thankfully dead now, had at least 10 rifles with him. At least one was an automatic rifle using high capacity magazines. The rounds were reported to be 7.62 X 39 mm, designed by the Soviets in WWII and commonly used in rifles like the AK-47 and variants. Most rounds of this type have a muzzle velocity of around 2,400 feet per second, and it will do a lot of damage when it makes contact. These rounds are designed for one purpose – killing people very effectively, and that’s what happened last night.
Little is known about the shooter so far except that he is from Mesquite Nevada. That’s right, the same Mesquite Nevada as Cliven Bundy, the infamous head of the Bundy family and anti-government weirdos who threatened to kill federal agents and whose sons occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon early last year. Coinkidink? One can only hope.