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I was just watching meet the press (they show it at 4 am in Australia - which is OK for Me because the frikin electrical storm just woke me up).
They are saying that the gunman reads Mien Kampf and the primary Target was a Jew. Conclusion: This must be a Racist attack...
That would be as sane as saying this guy plays D&D and the Seantor wore a Steel Gray Rose (the Symbol of Tharizdun the dark god of the Abyss)...
The fact is that the US has sacrificed the people at the bottom for the purpose of self preservation and you expect the 300 million of them to go quietly while those at the top continue to govern in a way that does not represent the Majority or grant them to right to represent themselves.
Get ready for an age of carnage.
"I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno."
Here's his favorite books from his youtube site.
Notice how these guys left The Communist Manifesto out, because it didn't exactly fit the point they were trying to make.
There's a few more in there I don't reckon the jackboot set would cotton to overly well.
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"I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno."
Here's his favorite books from his youtube site.
Notice how these guys left The Communist Manifesto out, because it didn't exactly fit the point they were trying to make.There's a few more in there I don't reckon the jackboot set would cotton to overly well.
The Phantom Tollbooth...thats an antigovernment book if ever I saw one.
"There's a new bird on my right shoulder. The beak is two feet and lime green. The rarest bird on earth, there's no feathers, but small grey scales all over the body. It's with one large red eye with a light blue iris. The bird feet are the same as a woodpecker. This new bird and there's only one, the gender is not female or male. The wings of this bird are beautiful; 3 feet wide with the shape of a bald eagle that you could die for. If you can see this bird then you will understand. You think this bird is able to chat about a government? "
another quote from his Youtube account. I think he may have actually seen that bird there on his shoulder.
With this guy, I'd think a book's interest would have more to do with the sound and meter and power of the words than the actual message of the book.
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"There's a new bird on my right shoulder. The beak is two feet and lime green. The rarest bird on earth, there's no feathers, but small grey scales all over the body. It's with one large red eye with a light blue iris. The bird feet are the same as a woodpecker. This new bird and there's only one, the gender is not female or male. The wings of this bird are beautiful; 3 feet wide with the shape of a bald eagle that you could die for. If you can see this bird then you will understand. You think this bird is able to chat about a government? "
Coming soon to Bestiary 3. :)
maybe everyone should shut up until real facts are released.You want people to let facts get in the way of their unfounded opinions? Sheer madness, I tell you!Hotair had an article here on when people wait for the facts, and when they don't.
This guy was a loon. All the gun laws I know of talk about background checks to keep people like that from getting guns, clearly they worked here. (sarc) I'm not going to blame Sarah Palin anymore than I'll blame President Obama.
If guns are outlawed...
** spoiler omitted **Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go order a half dozen copies of KQ 16 to send to family.
Good link.
Yes, by my logic in an ideal world we would all give up cars and rely on walking, bicycles and public transit to get around. Not because they kill more people than guns, but because they are very harmful to our environment. The reason I have a car, and haven't given it up is because I'm a hypocrite and have gotten too comfortable with the luxuries our modern lifestyle provides to just make all those changes on my own, but at least I'm willing to recognize that (and I'm not saying that you aren't). If the government were to put forward a proposition that said that we could only drive electric cars or something of that nature, I'd probably support it. It would be like having your wife make you become a vegetarian- you don't really want to or like the idea, but you know deep down that it's for the best.
The difference between a car and a gun is that although a car can easily kill you, and more people die from car accidents than gun violence, a car's sole purpose isn't too kill people. They don't put crash test dummies out to see how effectively a car can run people down.
I drive on a few different highways to get to my current job. I'm aware that I'm far more likely to be killed by a car than by a gun, which is another reason why I don't understand why having a gun makes people feel safe. You and your loved ones are far more likely to die in a car accident or from cancer than being shot. How's carrying or owning a gun really going to make you more safe?
I should concede that banning guns won't solve the problem of gun violence. Clearly it won't. It would be like the prohibition, which didn't work. Gun violence won't stop unless people actually don't want to have guns, in which case you don't really need a law to tell them not have them. I'm suggesting that instead of banning guns people should just refuse to support gun culture by having anything to do with them, and I realize that once again I'm being a bit of hypocrite saying these things since I happen to enjoy some video games, movies, and rpgs that glamorize gun violence, though I don't own, possess or wish to possess a real gun.
Just because you are responsible with your guns doesn't mean that other people will be. There are numerous instances where some guy who keeps guns in the house with no real intent to use them on someone has come home drunk and done something stupid with a firearm.By that logic, your going to give up your car, right? Because a) they kill more people then guns, b) some people arent responsible
It is my belief that sometimes you need to give up certain liberties for the betterment of society as a whole. I believe this is one of those cases.Now, I realize that americans in particular value their "freedoms", and so do I, but I also value the greater public good and well being, and I realize that sometimes we all need help being responsible, and that there are times when we should sacrifice freedoms for the greater good.
Sure. Some of us will give up our 2nd ammendment. But you have to give up your 1st ammendment ones, for teh betterment of society. SOund good?
For example, I would support laws that would ban the use of gas powered cars. I realize that by doing so I would be giving up a certain amount of freedom of choice, but this sacrifice would in the long run make our world a better place and offer a brighter future to our children, so in my view it would be worth it. However, we live in strange times, where people are willing to sacrifice all sorts of liberties in the name of Homeland security, but still want to be free to have their guns, smoke, drink, eat terrible food and drive cars that poison the air, which are all far more likely to kill them than a terrorist.
Silly example. There isnt anything useful, to replace them yet- electric powered cars cant replace trucks and bigger vehicals which are still necessary.
Actually, given the current airport scans, people arent exactly willing to give up many of thier liberties. More then a few things homeland security is doing have people outspoken.
Your a prime example...
The other thing about these stats is that this is reported incidents not actual incidents. Canada is pretty high on the list, but that isn't necessarily because there are more, it may just be more an instance of us having more a tendency to report them.
That site has all that information as well. However linking to it is a problem as changing the checklist at the top doesn't change the url.#5 Canada
#9 United States
#13 United KingdomBurglaries per capita
#7 United Kingdom
#9 Canada
#17 United StatesAssaults per capita
#6 United States
#8 United Kingdom
#9 Canada
That said, owning a firearm doesn't have anything to do with religion any more than owning a sword or a battle hammer would. Yes it can be used to kill someone but then so can just about anything you pick up, you could choke a person to death stuffing cotton balls down their mouth, use a ham bone to bash someone's head in or even choke someone to death with the belt you use to hold you pants up.It's not the inanimate object, it's the intent of the person that picks it up that makes an item deadly or not.
This begs the question as to why we can't all have a personal nuclear weapon. Suitcase nukes for everyone more or less.
Obviously the answer is because they are to dangerous - a single nut case takes out the downtown core of an entire city. In the end we are back to drawing lines. I can see the argument for a hunting rifle. I can't really see the argument for a hand gun and I'm flabbergasted by the need for a high powered machine gun.
That said, owning a firearm doesn't have anything to do with religion any more than owning a sword or a battle hammer would. Yes it can be used to kill someone but then so can just about anything you pick up, you could choke a person to death stuffing cotton balls down their mouth, use a ham bone to bash someone's head in or even choke someone to death with the belt you use to hold you pants up.It's not the inanimate object, it's the intent of the person that picks it up that makes an item deadly or not.
This begs the question as to why we can't all have a personal nuclear weapon. Suitcase nukes for everyone more or less.
Obviously the answer is because they are to dangerous - a single nut case takes out the downtown core of an entire city. In the end we are back to drawing lines. I can see the argument for a hunting rifle. I can't really see the argument for a hand gun and I'm flabbergasted by the need for a high powered machine gun.
That said, owning a firearm doesn't have anything to do with religion any more than owning a sword or a battle hammer would. Yes it can be used to kill someone but then so can just about anything you pick up, you could choke a person to death stuffing cotton balls down their mouth, use a ham bone to bash someone's head in or even choke someone to death with the belt you use to hold you pants up.It's not the inanimate object, it's the intent of the person that picks it up that makes an item deadly or not.
This begs the question as to why we can't all have a personal nuclear weapon. Suitcase nukes for everyone more or less.
Obviously the answer is because they are to dangerous - a single nut case takes out the downtown core of an entire city. In the end we are back to drawing lines. I can see the argument for a hunting rifle. I can't really see the argument for a hand gun and I'm flabbergasted by the need for a high powered machine gun.
Indeed. A good friend of mine from a hunting family mentioned to me once that he viewed handguns as the weapons of assassins, and that there was a stark preference for rifles in his family as opposed to handguns due to their duplitious nature.
As someone who was just a few miles away from that tragedy, I'm shocked and deeply upset over what happened. I've shopped at that supermarket and bought ice cream for my kids at that strip mall.
I am also upset and depressed to see people rush to use the horror for their own political ends. Sheriff Clarence Dupnick soon jumped on his soapbox, blaming the incident on inflammatory mass mdia and right-wing radio even though (at the time) there was no clear evidence of the shooter possessing any coherent political agenda.
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One former high school friend Tweeted about knowing the accused gunman: "He was a pot head and into rock, like Hendrix, The Doors, Anti-Flag," she wrote. "I haven't seen him in person since 2007 in a sign language class. As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal and oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy. He had a lot of friends until he got alcohol poisoning in 2006 and dropped out of school. Mainly a loner, very philosophical."
Not sure how legit this is, but beyond political influence (which may have been left leaning, again not sure) he sounds like a classic paranoid/delusions of grandeur nutbag.
What self-aggrandizing interests? I'm pointing out the obvious. The rhetorical tone from the right in this country since Obama was elected has been nothing but fear, fear, fear, they're-destroying-America, death panels, socialism, secret Muslim, fear, fear, fear, next-time-we'll-be-armed, water-the-tree-of-liberty, buy-gold-because-the-world-is-going-to-end!
Yes, and completely ignoring other obvious facts. Hence, self-aggrandizing .
Who had crosshairs on Congresswoman Giffords' name on her website? I think it was Sarah Palin. You can point to incidents of leftist extremism easily enough, but irrationality is mainstream for the FOXNews, Palin, Beck set. This "Both sides are bad, ya'll" nonsense is an apology for all the right-wing nuttery that has this county paralyzed.
And somehow you aren't apologizing for the left-wing nuttery that goes on with the likes of Olbermann, O'Donnell, and Maddow? Please...my hypocrisy meter is registering well over the "stinkbomb" level. Both sides are indeed filled with crackpots and blowhards. That is the main reason why most people label themselves as independent nowadays, as the major political parties have been co-opted by the opposing fringes. If you remove the blinders and listen to both sides, you might be able to discern that. Just an observation based on your tone.
And for the record, this was an act of insanity and he might have found an entirely different target under different circumstances; but in this case he was attracted to the political flames being fanned by the far right.
Bogus on its face, since only now are more facts coming out. He hated religion (not exactly a right-wing pasttime), had videos of burning American flags (again, not exactly a conservative activity), had among his favored readings "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf" (again, not popular reading material on the right). I could go on, but I get the feeling it wouldn't make a difference.
And yes I realize this is a tragedy, and I am so goddamn angry that this happened that I am not going to tolerate right-wing apologists anymore.
So, name calling, is it? Nice...the last resort of the desperate when faced with facts one has a hard time dealing with. A tragedy such as this has no business being politicized by anyone. Why not wait until more facts are known before jumping on the bandwagon of political ignorance?
The one thing that is clear right now is that the guy is a true nut-case. We may learn more about his motivations in the future, but I think its premature to cast aspersions on who is to "blame" for his actions. Maybe it was just his own fault?
Thanks for listening...
Phil plait basically sums up my position on these events.Phil Plait's blog
What self-aggrandizing interests? I'm pointing out the obvious. The rhetorical tone from the right in this country since Obama was elected has been nothing but fear, fear, fear, they're-destroying-America, death panels, socialism, secret Muslim, fear, fear, fear, next-time-we'll-be-armed, water-the-tree-of-liberty, buy-gold-because-the-world-is-going-to-end!Yes, and completely ignoring other obvious facts. Hence, self-aggrandizing .
Who had crosshairs on Congresswoman Giffords' name on her website? I think it was Sarah Palin. You can point to incidents of leftist extremism easily enough, but irrationality is mainstream for the FOXNews, Palin, Beck set. This "Both sides are bad, ya'll" nonsense is an apology for all the right-wing nuttery that has this county paralyzed.And somehow you aren't apologizing for the left-wing nuttery that goes on with the likes of Olbermann, O'Donnell, and Maddow? Please...my hypocrisy meter is registering well over the "stinkbomb" level. Both sides are indeed filled with crackpots and blowhards. That is the main reason why most people label themselves as independent nowadays, as the major political parties have been co-opted by the opposing fringes. If you remove the blinders and listen to both sides, you might be able to discern that. Just an observation based on your tone.
And for the record, this was an act of insanity and he might have found an entirely different target under different circumstances; but in this case he was attracted to the political flames being fanned by the far right.Bogus on its face, since only now are more facts coming out. He hated religion (not exactly a right-wing pasttime), had videos of burning American flags (again, not exactly a conservative activity), had among his favored readings "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf" (again, not popular reading material on the right). I could go on, but I get...
1. Could you please cite examples of rhetoric using a firearms motif by a democratic candidate standing against Olbermann, O'Donnell, and Maddow in the mid-terms? Can you also provide a citation of democratic presidential hopeful or former/current president using such rhetoric about the same?
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@Torillan
Classic misrepresentation and diversionary tactics to avoid dealing with the argument.
It's clear some people are afraid that they have just lost political capital and are scrambling for equivocations and sanctimonious pleas to just merely call this a tragedy and move on, paying no attention to the atmosphere in which it happened, afraid this is some kind of "self-aggrandizing" victory for the other side. But that's not going to happen. That would be childish and stupid.
The man was a lunatic and his actions have nothing to do with true American conservative values; but we disregard the milieu in which he chose to thrust his derangement at our own peril.
As to your assertion that we should all give up guns...I also don't agree with that, though you've given your reasons well enough and I understand why you have your opinion. As someone upthread mentioned, most gun crimes are done with illegaly obtained guns anyway...taking away law-abiding citizens guns would not change that fact.
A big part of the problem here is that its relatively easy to obtain a gun and the way it is done usually defaults to the gun being illegal.
An easy example is a citizen living in a rough neighborhood that has no criminal record. The local gang approaches said citizen and through a combination of threats and bribes convinces him or her to buy them guns which are dutifully handed over to the gang. Of course any crime the gang does using these guns come from ones that where obtained illegally - after all the guy that got them never legally gave or sold them to our gang members.
Make the guns themselves illegal and getting illegal versions gets harder. Maybe more importantly you want to drastically cut back on ammunition production. It'll be decades before all the guns vanish from society but if every single bullet costs $400 then the price of using existing guns jumps dramatically - it also starts to concentrate such valuable resources into the hands of organized crime as the small time players sell their ammo for the cash. One won't manage to disarm organized crime but they usually stick to targeting each other and are generally rational in how they conduct their business.
On another note - you mention gun crime coming from illegal guns. What happens to the statistics when you just count homicide? My suspicion is that you'll suddenly see a big jump in legally owned guns being used. This stems from the nature of homicide where a high percentage of homicides are not crime related at all - they are domestic disputes that got way out of hand. In some sense the 'average' murder in the western world is the factory shift worker that convinces his supervisor to let him off early and who walks into his bedroom to find his wife and best friend making squelching noises on the bed. While such cases still turn into murder without a gun (a candle stick can be a pretty nasty weapon) its harder to actually kill with the candle stick.
Well yeah I'm in another country, where once upon a time in our dark old days we could (I used to as a kid) walk down to the local corner store to buy BB guns, or across the gunstore where the guy would happily load us kids up with .22's and as much ammo as we could carry out.
Rifles were everywhere (pistols not so much) and the only restriction was no (sale of) automatic rifles... semi-auto were fine.
After a few particularly bloody decades of gang warfare (mostly bikies)where bystanders were killed, Police shootings, Armed robberies spiralling out of control, several mass shootings in shopping centres etc and the final straw of 33 people being killed at a tourist attraction by a sniper ("I was just eatig my peas, and the next thing I knew there were bodies everywhere" jokes the killer) we just gave it up.
An amnesty was declared, and people compensated for hanfding in their illegal weapons.
You have a right to a gun in this country as long as you can show reasonable need/use (if farmers). You may buy limited firearms (bolt action rifles, some shotguns, etc) and there are very strict regulations about how and where you keep them - usually requiring a significant investment in a gun safe etc.
By clamping down on firearms as much as we have, those that need them still have them. There still exists recreational shooting and we have enviable hunting areas.
What we no longer have is mass shootings.
What we no longer have is a proliferation of guns, legal or otherwise, being turned on people going about theor day to day lives.
What we no longer have is the bad old days of gun crime out of control.
Molon Labe indeed.
By disclosure, I love guns, I enjoy all the goodness and challenge they offer - Indeed my rifle is my best friend.
But when the working day is over my friend gets a good clean and is left in the armoury at work. There is no need, nor want, to have a gun in the home.
I'm also glad knowing that any punk kid running down the street at night is also 99.9% likely to be unarmed.
Well yeah I'm in another country, where once upon a time in our dark old days we could (I used to as a kid) walk down to the local corner store to buy BB guns, or across the gunstore where the guy would happily load us kids up with .22's and as much ammo as we could carry out.
Rifles were everywhere (pistols not so much) and the only restriction was no (sale of) automatic rifles... semi-auto were fine.
After a few particularly bloody decades of gang warfare (mostly bikies)where bystanders were killed, Police shootings, Armed robberies spiralling out of control, several mass shootings in shopping centres etc and the final straw of 33 people being killed at a tourist attraction by a sniper ("I was just eatig my peas, and the next thing I knew there were bodies everywhere" jokes the killer) we just gave it up.
An amnesty was declared, and people compensated for hanfding in their illegal weapons.You have a right to a gun in this country as long as you can show reasonable need/use (if farmers). You may buy limited firearms (bolt action rifles, some shotguns, etc) and there are very strict regulations about how and where you keep them - usually requiring a significant investment in a gun safe etc.
By clamping down on firearms as much as we have, those that need them still have them. There still exists recreational shooting and we have enviable hunting areas.
What we no longer have is mass shootings.
What we no longer have is a proliferation of guns, legal or otherwise, being turned on people going about theor day to day lives.
What we no longer have is the bad old days of gun crime out of control.
Molon Labe indeed.
By disclosure, I love guns, I enjoy all the goodness and challenge they offer - Indeed my rifle is my best friend.
But when the working day is over my friend gets a good clean and is left in the armoury at work. There is no need, nor want, to have a gun in the home.I'm also glad knowing that any punk kid running down the street at night is also 99.9% likely to be...
Can you disclose your line of work?
To PH: You mention why shouldn't people be willing to give up some rights and give up guns. What rights are you speaking about? The right for women not to fear being helpless against a man trying to assault them?
Now here we have social engineering I could get behind.
New rules - every adult female 25 and over must own a hand gun in working order that is loaded and it must be on them or in an accessible place when they are in their homes (some consideration to be granted for woman with young daughters). In any incidence where you could be asked to show your drivers license your also asked to display your firearm which comes equipped with a light that glows green if the hand gun thinks its mechanically sound and loaded, red otherwise. Failure to have her gun or have the gun loaded results in a fine, say $120 per incidence.
All such handguns, when grasped, test the DNA in the surface skin cells, if that DNA has a Y chromosome they won't work. The safety won't release. A;; other hand guns and automatic or semi-automatic weapons are illegal.
The goal of this social experiment is to have it so all adult women are armed to the teeth but none of the men are. While I certianly don't think this would eliminate gun crime I bet it reduces it dramatically. It'd certianly be an interesting experiment.
Gun control has been shown to be a failure. In teh US at least. The cities and states that have the strongest gun control have the worst crimes.America was founded on the everyman principle.(among many other things). Never going to happen.
No it hasn't. However Gun Control does have a major problem, mainly the states with loose purchase and sale laws which make it ridiculously easy to obtain firearms which are then smuggled into states with tighter restrictions.
The problem with gun control is that it does need to be enacted on a Federal level and that restrictions need to be uniform.
I'm going to agree with this. Hand guns are distressingly easy to get in Canada and that's largely because its pretty easy to sneak them over the border. Mexico is in the middle of a brutal drug war that has spilled over into the general population and again a large number of the weapons used in this war originate in America. Ergo, unless all jurisdictions follow gun control its not going to be very effective.
Can you disclose your line of work?
Sure, I was in Security and CPP for over a decade.
Now I Infanteer :)
However, there are a large number of other factor that could be involved as well. Just two that I noticed are that, based on what I learned in Geography, the nations that have lower rates have generally more homogeneous and less urbanized populations than the U.S. that could certainly play a role as well. I don't think that we could point to just one factor and say that is the cause without further study.
True - but Toronto is a large urban center with an extremely diverse population (almost 50% of the population was born in some other country - probably some poor other country to boot). Nonetheless the murder rate is phenomenally low by American standards. In most other regards Toronto is pretty similar to many other north American cities. We watch the same kind of media, engage in the same kind of unhealthy living etc. Now I don't think that illegal guns are the only reason that Toronto has a low rate of homicide, we do a lot of social engineering up here as well (so far as the budget can afford) and that does help.
Locking thread.