In Charleston West Virgina, a guy armed with an AR-15 started shooting at a crowd celebrating at a graduation party. Things didn’t turn out as the shooter had planned. He ended up dead because he was shot by a woman armed with a pistol for self defense.
I’m sure that liberal heads will explode over this one. “But he had an AR-15, an Assault Rifle! How could it be that a woman with a pistol could stop a guy with an Assault Rifle?”
Well, it’s like this, an AR-15 is just a rifle. There’s nothing magical about it, clearly this lady kept her cool and had good aim. Mischief Managed! Or if you prefer, FAFO (Fuck Around and Find Out).
She stayed and cooperated with the police when they arrived. Had this lady not been there, had she not been armed it’s likely that there would have been a lot more bloodshed.
I caught a reference to this tweet on another site from Founding partner of Puck News Julia Ioffe yesterday as well. I was only able to track it back as far as a Fox News article, it looks like it’s being “disappeared” from other sites I saw in passing.
It almost made me wish I had a Twitter account so I could point out to this individual that she was an idiot.
She’s also a hypocrite. On the one hand she’s pushing for gun control because of 19 Children who were murdered on the other hand she’s Pro Abortion.
I’m not sure I would have tweeted this… But the thought that went through my mind was;
“Ms. Ioffe, in fact you can perform retroactive abortions with an AR-15. What’s the difference if the child is left to die after being born, on a tray in a clinic, or torn to shreds with a suction device, or in gunfire from an AR-15? They’re still dead. Aren’t you Pro-Abortion?“
I know that’s really brutal.
Ms. Ioffe received a hail of Tweets calling her out. She has since deleted her original Tweet.
She was trying to say that if AR-15s were used in abortions, then conservatives would demand a ban on AR-15s. She failed miserably.
I probably wouldn’t have fired off my comment. Not because I’m ashamed of it. I’d have typed it and then thought about it and decided that since I typed it in anger it’s one of those things that shouldn’t go out to the whole world.
My comment would have been very insensitive and inappropriate given that I’d have sent it as a reply to Ms Ioffe on the very day of the Robb Elementary School shooting.
Even today it’s raw and brutal. I put it here because my readership isn’t in the millions, and everyone here has been warned that I sometime say really off color things.
Had I fired that off in direct response to her Tweet, all of her followers would have been inadvertent recipients of my ire.
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.
As a child growing up in Florida, I remember going to Walt Disney World before they actually had a park.
We drove and drove and then there was a sign that said something like, “Welcome to the Future Disneyworld” There was a place to eat, and a gift shop of course. They also had mockups of the park as the designers envisioned it, and a nice little tour that explained what they were going to do to the area of what was essentially a kind of marshy chunk of land.
For a kid it was pretty neat, even though there weren’t any rides or much of anything else. After all I’d already been to Disney World well before it opened. Several years later, I went to Disney World and mostly remember the monorail.
Even then, large portions of what would become the entire park were still under construction. We were fairly regular visitors then. Each time we went it was a revelation because newer sections of the park opened. I recall ticket books and the like. That’s where the phrase, “E-Ticket Ride” came from.
After we moved out of Florida our visits to Disney World became less frequent and when I got to visit Disneyland in California, I was honestly disappointed. It was so small, noisy, cramped, and I guess due to the scale, it just seemed cheap. Yeah, Disney World spoiled me.
I think in the 35 or so years I’ve been in California, I’ve been to Disneyland maybe 3 times. At least one of those visits was back in the day when corporations could buy the park for an afternoon or evening and have private events. I honestly don’t know if corporations can still do that or if they would these days.
The last time I looked into going to Disneyland or Disney World I quickly dismissed the idea because it had become prohibitively expensive even with discount coupons offered by the company I worked for.
Occasionally, over the years I’ve been invited to join friends at Disneyland and after looking at the prices, politely declined. For that kind of money, I’d rather go to Las Vegas and enjoy more adult shows or entertainment. And so, Disneyland and Disney World dropped off my radar decades ago.
What I’ve been surprised to learn is that Disney World has enjoyed freedom from full taxation, and autonomy in their operations in Florida for 50 years. That kind of benefit had never crossed my mind. Like most folks, I assumed that Disney World had in fact been providing tax revenue to the state of Florida.
I applaud the Florida Legislators for stripping Disney of their tax exempt status. It sends a very clear message. Stay out of politics you’re a business, BE a business!
I suppose in truth they have indirectly paying taxes via sales tax and various tourism taxes from hotels, restaurants, airfares, and car rentals for tourists visiting the state. But no matter how you slice it, Disney had a dang good sweetheart deal. Even if they were paying reduced taxes, over 50 years that has to have added up.
You also have to wonder what the environmental impact of Disney World has on the vast tract of land they occupy. The trash alone must be monumental. Food waste, paper, plastic, human waste, you name it. Typically, Disney parks are immaculately clean. But in the case of Disney World… Where does it all go? What happened to the natural environment in that swath of Florida? Was any of it preserved?
To be fair, in the 60’s undeveloped Florida land was seen as opportunity and in need of development. Then, very little concern was paid to environmental issues. I strongly suspect that had it been practical the Florida Everglades would have been paved over for housing projects.
Disney could have kept its mouth shut about the Florida Parental Rights Bill. Certainly some of the Disney lawyers must have read the bill and informed Disney executives that much of the media hyperbole was not factual.
The Parental Rights Bill wasn’t an open assault on LGBT… lmnop people everywhere.
I do have a concern now that because of the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and over the top dramatics, that there may be an open assault on all LGBT people’s rights.
My concern is not due to the Parental Rights Bill. It’s due to the reaction and conflation of what I think of as the vocal lunatic fringe, the LGBT… lmnop, with the LGB community at large.
That conflation coupled with the “Normal” LGB community’s parroting of whatever the HRC or as OutSpoken puts it, “Gay Inc.” tells them to believe or think, may set gay rights back by decades.
The LGB community fought very hard for a very long time to win the rights that they were guaranteed by The Constitution of the United States. In many cases, those rights could arbitrarily be abridged for no other reason than they were homosexual.
LGB folks have the right to marry, to not face discrimination in housing, their workplace, or any other aspect of their lives. That was what we were fighting for, and we’ve achieved it for the most part.
Will we stand by while a lunatic fringe seizes our voice and uses it to polarize parts of the nation who tolerate us, into our enemies?
The gender fluid, crossdresser activists, should not, and do not speak for all the LGBT community. Nor do virtue signaling corporations.
Let the LGB community speak for ourselves. Generally, we just want to live our lives, love who we love, live quietly, and be left the hell alone.
It’s time for the LGB community, the real LGB community to stand up and roar.
The first and best place to start is roaring at Disney and the “lmnop” fringe by siding with the Florida legislature. Yes, I said side with Florida lawmakers.
Children should not be sexualized in the schools, Full DAMN Stop! Parents have the responsibility for their children’s behaviors until they’re 18, Parents should also have the right to generally determine what their children are taught in public schools. Public schools prohibit teaching a religious belief system, it could be argued gender fluidity is simply another belief system. Disney World should be paying fair taxes and should not enjoy a sweetheart deal if they’re going to enter into politics. Disney World is an entertainment venue, not a Political Action Committee. If they choose to be a PAC, they shouldn’t be, in effect subsidized by Florida tax payer dollars.
Most LGB people knew there was something different about them from an early age. But at that early age, the difference was irrelevant to them. Something that was an occasionally passing thought, quickly and easily superseded by a sparkly butterfly, or the next baseball game.
The time to address the difference is when the difference becomes an irrefutable issue that occupies a lot of a child’s brainpower. For most, it started at puberty, 3rd graders typically aren’t there yet.
After children have entered puberty, and are questioning all the weird changes in their bodies and minds, I’m all for providing useful education and the knowledge that they’re not alone or abnormal. Until then, let children be children and don’t trouble them with sexuality or pronouns.
I call upon my brothers and sisters in the LGB community to stand up to the insanity. Say “No” to the fringe, remind them that we are inclusive but that a larger majority of us are quite content being the gender we are, and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Remind them that it is our work, our voice, and our lived lives they are usurping. Perhaps remind them of the old adage: They’re nothing scarier than a full grown adult queen.
