Where’s my safe space? Where’s my bottle? Where’s my reparations? Okay, a bit sarcastic…
I am offended though. After the horror of Elementary School kids being shot in their own classroom, Elementary School Kids? The politicians, the media, and everyone else jumped in with both feet to start pushing gun control again.
Our moronic halfwit in chief had to shoot his mouth off again with his “Deer in Kevlar,” and “People couldn’t buy cannons,” bullshit. So Joe, you’re saying that back at the founding of this country we could go and buy Human Beings, but not a Cannon?
You do realize Joe, that early cannons could be produced by a decent blacksmith with a large enough quantity of iron and a knowledge of casting large metal objects. Those cannons, had no moving parts! If you get down to it, an early cannon is nothing more than a large pipe with one end blocked and a small hole for a fuse. I swear, the moron in chief would do so much better if he just kept his mouth shut.
I digress…
I’m offended that these people couldn’t let the nation take a breath. They couldn’t allow us a freakin moment to process the enormity of what happened.
Instead, these animals had to try to capitalize politically on the tragedy.
Shame on them! Shame on them all!
It’s since come out that the killer wasn’t a deranged white supremacist. (Apparently an LA Times reporter was disappointed about that.) Although the shooter was certainly deranged!
He’d purchased the weapons legally, submitting to the required background checks. He had a number of red flags that were completely ignored. He shot his grandmother after saying he was going to do it on FaceBook, then he went back to Facebook to say he’d shot his grandmother.
He posted on Facebook his intention to shoot a school. He sent via a social media platform, unsolicited photos of guns to a female who was a complete stranger.
He had, according to two different acquaintances from his High School, cut his own face, (for the fun of it…) Others who attended High School with him said that he’d always been a bit off, scary, overly aggressive, or easily enraged.
He is reported to have been shooting at the school, after crashing his vehicle and making his way over a fence onto school grounds.
It took police 10 minutes to respond to the reports of shots fired. There was no School Resource Officer at the school, (in other words, there was no-one present to mount any kind of defensive action.) Some reports are saying that this killer had time to barricade himself in the classroom, and that he may have entered through an unlocked exterior door.
There are many questions to be answered where it comes to the police response.
One for example is that an off duty Border control agent received a message from his wife about an active shooter incident, while he was in a barber’s chair. This Agent has a child in that particular school and armed himself with a shotgun he borrowed from his barber. Then he went to the school and entered the wing where his child’s classroom was located. He helped get students from that wing, including his child out of the school and to safety.
The question here is, how does an unarmed off duty boarder agent have the time to arm up, get to the school, make entry, and start getting children out of the school with help from a few deputies, while the main force of police is still standing around in front of the school?
I think the hearings and testimony will be most interesting to read through.
To be sure, this is a tragedy. It is not however the fault of the gun, the gun manufacturers, the NRA, or gun lobbyists (as Chief Moron in charge would have us believe).
This tragedy is 100% the fault of a single deranged individual. It was his hand that loaded the gun, his hand that pulled the trigger, and his insanity that drove his actions.
The failure here is not that he could legally pass a background check and purchase a weapon.
The failure is that no-one paid any attention to the insanity the person before them presented. Even if they did pay attention, there was nobody to call, and no method to get this person the help they needed or the hospitalization they deserved.
Some of his coworkers have spoken about how easily he became agitated or angry while at work. It’s not like nobody noticed, “This child ain’t right.”
If someone reported him to the police, the police had no actionable violations, even if they had arrested him he’d be out in 8 hours or less. If someone reported him to social services, they had nothing more than a 72 hour hold they could put him in and probably no hospital with an open bed.
That’s the situation I live with in my neighborhood. There’s a female human, (I use that term loosely,) up on the next block who routinely screams she’s going to shoot, stab, castrate, bludgeon, or otherwise kill the man she lives with. Her behavior is no longer limited to just her house or property. Now her physical violence is being inflicted on the neighborhood. Her verbal violence has become commonplace over the past 20 years and no-one pays much attention to her ranting and raving.
The police can’t touch her, social services can’t touch her, and it’s my belief that she’s a ticking time bomb. Her saga will only end when she’s harmed someone and shattered and unknown number of lives.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
It sounds a lot like the Texas shooter, or the Brooklyn grocery store guy, or, or, or…
The problem to address is not the guns. The problem that needs to be addressed is a fundamental one.
Where does my right to be safe and secure in my person and property begin, and where do a deranged person’s rights end?
If lawmakers want to make laws and spend money, why don’t they start by working on mental health legislation?
There are a shit ton of Americans who have one or more guns in their homes who have never gone on a shooting spree. On the other hand, there are a lot of Americans who are, (or were,) in real need of mental health services and can’t access them. Those folks are the folks that have a propensity to go on shooting sprees and kill innocents.
Just for clarity’s sake. AR-15 does not stand for Assault Rifle 15. It stands for Armalite Rifle model 15.
Many gun manufacturers make AR-15 rifles, each with their own flourish and manufacturer label. At its heart, an AR-15 is an AR-15, and all of them work the same way. The legal ones are semi-automatic, (one round per trigger pull,) all are based on the original modular design of the Armalite Rifle company.
One can be purchased legally in most states for anywhere from $800 to $3000, depending on options.
Our politicians are quick to seize on the AR-15 as something that must be controlled. Okay, so they want to ban assault rifles. What exactly is an assault rifle? If politicians succeed in banning AR-15s. They’ll only remove a portion of available guns. What about the other guns? The rifles and handguns that aren’t banned? A lever action rifle, or a pump action shotgun, a revolver, or a semi-automatic pistol, all fling a wad (or wads) of lead at high velocities. All can inflict injury and all can cause death.
When lawmakers are talking about gun legislation what are they trying to legislate? The number of rounds that can be fired before reloading? The speed at which rounds can be fired? The caliber of the rounds being fired? What exactly are they trying to control?
Because the lawmakers are so imprecise about what they’re legislating, it leads me to believe that they’re trying to take away all guns. Regardless of the constitutional violation of doing so, if lawmakers were to succeed in removing all guns. (An impossible task) I’m sure that people would simply migrate to Compound or Recurve Bows. Or as in the case of the UK, knives.
The point is, some people will always seek to kill other people. In the case of deranged individuals, the weapon is far less important than the motivation. I think it was in Japan, one knife wielding crazy person wounded 20 people on a subway platform. I don’t recall how many died. This guy was walking through the crowd stabbing people and a lot of the people on the platform didn’t realize there was a threat at first.
Which leads back to addressing the real source of the problem. Mental health. Lawmakers need to enact legislation that provides the services to address mental health issues and where necessary remove individuals from society at large that are obviously a threat.
People who, for instance fantasize about killing, people who consistently state they’re going to kill someone specific or people at large, people who post threats on social media, etc.
When a neighborhood calls the police repeatedly about a disturbance where someone is screaming, “I’ll shoot you, I’ll stab you, I’ll kill you,” perhaps the police should send the person somewhere that they can get help. What should not happen is that the neighborhood stops reporting the issue because nothing is ever done.
School teachers are taught to look for signs of abuse in children. Perhaps they should also be taught to look for signs of mental health issues, and report them. Early intervention is much better than having to stop an active shooter.
So many of our politicians, pundits, and wags, jump up on their soapboxes after a tragedy like the Texas shooting. They demand, “Commonsense gun control”. I say they’re screaming to fix a symptom, not the disease.
New York and California have some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. I think both state have “Red Flag” laws where the guns of an individual can be seized and held in police custody until the owner is proven fit and competent.
I ask how is it possible that you can have a grocery store in New York become a killing ground? How is it that you can have a San Bernardino Shooting at a county office? If gun laws worked, these shooters wouldn’t have had the guns in the first place.
How about we take the elephant in the room outside? Let’s rise to the challenge of addressing that mental illness isn’t being treated, but it should be.
To our politicians, pundits, and wags. At least have the decency to let the bodies cool before making your political grandstand moment.