Viva Las Vegas

[Wabash]

They're a gun assn / lobby advocating the safe use of guns, and the vast majority of its members are responsible gun owners

They were at one time. That changed in the 90's after Ruby Ridge and Waco. Then they became the siren screaming the Clinton's were coming to confiscate everyone's guns. And of course many of their idiot followers bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Gun companies (and their advocates) know there is a lot of profit in fear. And they keep that fever pitch running as high as possible. How many times have we heard that guns will be necessary to fight the tyrannical government that will inevitably ensue if no one has guns? It's as if that subset of gun owners believes Red Dawn was a documentary.

The paradox being that same group supports higher and higher spending on that same military.

[Fordama]

They were at one time. That changed in the 90's after Ruby Ridge and Waco. Then they became the siren screaming the Clinton's were coming to confiscate everyone's guns. And of course many of their idiot followers bought it hook, line, and sinker.

That's when I purposely let my membership laps. They are now simply a front for gun manufacturers and they do little more than whip their membership into an irrational frenzy and throw money at politicians.

[Wabash]

Here are excerpts of a letter the NRA sent to its members back in the 90's.

Link

Excerpt:

It doesn't matter to them that the semi-auto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.

In Clinton's administration, if you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens. Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge . . . Waco and the Branch Davidians. . . . Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for Federal agents wearing nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens. Not today, not with Clinton. Our calls to investigate these outrageous assaults on our Constitutional freedoms are routinely silenced by the anti-gun media. But that's no surprise.

In their defense that was before Blue Lives Matter.

A few days after that letter went out is when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Maybe that's a coincidence.

That letter is what President G.H.W. Bush claimed was the reason he resigned from the NRA's Board of Directors.

[Wabash]

At the recent CPAC NRA President, Wayne LaPierre, gave a speech where he stated:

Make no mistake, if the violent left brings their terror to our communities, our neighborhoods or into our homes," he concluded, “they will be met with the resolve, and the strength, and the full force of American freedom in the hands of the American people and we will win because we are the majority in this country.

Gotta keep people scared so they buy guns. Sales have dropped off since Trump became president.

[Bick]

I'd hardly call multi-million dollar ad campaigns against candidates that so much as favor background checks or not allowing people on the no-fly list to buy guns just "lobbying and advocating for the safe use of guns". It might have been a gun owners' group once upon a time, but anymore it's become a gun industry trade group and not much more.

I truly don't know much about the NRA, but the little I've read shows a different perspective regarding them being against background checks. Regardless, it seems an overwhelming majority of voters support them. Are cities unable to pass laws supporting more stringent gun control?

Have the more stringent laws made a difference in Chicago? I've read they aren't the MOST strict in the country, not that it is important distinction anyway.

I believe a more effective approach to preventing / mitigating mass shooting events is along the lines of a program called "Refuse to be a Victim". I don't believe there will ever be a good enough law that would prevent these or other terrorist actions - even if we went with making private ownership of firearms illegal ala Venezuela. Maybe fake news, but it seems Maduro turned around and gave some of the confiscated weapons to HIS supporters. Imagine that.

[Omar Bongo]

Have the more stringent laws made a difference in Chicago?

Remember when they had non-smoking sections on planes? Did that make a difference?


...even if we went with making private ownership of firearms illegal ala Venezuela

Venezuela?? That's the best example you could come up with?


..."Refuse to be a Victim"

You're joking, right?

[John Q. Public]

Regardless, it seems an overwhelming majority of voters support them.

The majority of voters don't support them. But the majority of red state voters do and the majority in most red districts do. The majority overall, though, supports background checks, gun registration and closing the gun show loophole - all of which the NRA opposes. The majority is also horrified that people on the no-fly list and people judged to be mentally incompetent can buy guns, no questions asked - both of which the NRA strongly supported. Hey. They're in the business of selling guns.

Yeah. What Omar said. Venezuela isn't a good example for much of anything, unless maybe you're comparing different branches of the Mafia. Better to look at Australia or any number of European countries.

[Omar Bongo]

Australia, yes. Numerous measures were adopted after some guy killed 35 people in a cafe in 1996. They banned automatics & semiautomatics, adopted new licensing requirements, established a national firearms registry, instituted a 28-day waiting period and bought and destroyed more than 600,000 privately owned firearms (Australia has a population of about 24 million). Interestingly, the NRA was there spending money and lobbying against any actions to make guns harder to buy...the a-holes.

"The number of mass shootings in Australia—defined as incidents in which a gunman killed five or more people other than himself, which is notably a higher casualty count than is generally applied for tallying mass shootings in the U.S.—dropped from 13 in the 18-year period before 1996 to zero after the Port Arthur massacre. Between 1995 and 2006, gun-related homicides and suicides in the country dropped by 59 percent and 65 percent, respectively..."

https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... ol/541710/

[Wabash]

I truly don't know much about the NRA, but the little I've read shows a different perspective regarding them being against background checks. Regardless, it seems an overwhelming majority of voters support them. Are cities unable to pass laws supporting more stringent gun control?

Yes, they are. But it is meaningless if the neighboring city or state has lax gun laws. Which is the case. There is even a term for it.

Iron Pipeline

Have the more stringent laws made a difference in Chicago? I've read they aren't the MOST strict in the country, not that it is important distinction anyway.

The Chicago narrative seems to be out in force with Fox Newsy types since this shooting. The local media in Chicago doesn't agree with that statement.

Chicago gun laws not as strict as GOP candidates claim

But Chicago's gun laws aren't as tough as their reputation suggests. They once were, but courts have overturned or gutted many of them in recent years, forcing a city that once banned handguns and gun shops to allow both.

Former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was determined to keep handguns out of residents' hands and he fought every legal challenge to Chicago's gun restrictions during his 22 years in office. But the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a big blow to Chicago's gun laws in 2010 when it struck down the city's handgun ban.

Chicago quickly enacted a gun ordinance that proponents said included some of the nation's toughest regulations, but the city was forced to scrap some of the provisions that most angered gun rights advocates.

And to my earlier point of the Iron Pipeline.

It said nearly 60 percent of recovered guns used to commit crimes in Chicago from 2009 through 2013 were first sold in states with more lax gun laws. Neighboring Indiana was the biggest source, with 19 percent of all recovered guns having been sold there first. But they came from far and wide, with Mississippi second at 6.7 percent.

Just days ago, a Chicago man was sentenced to nearly three years in prison after pleading guilty to helping purchase 43 firearms from gun shows and individuals in Indiana to sell on Chicago's South Side.

[broman]

Overlooked in Trumps rally in Alabama

They hate to admit it. Including we have a Supreme Court justice, Judge Gorsuch, who will save how about a thing called your Second Amendment, right. OK, remember that? [Applause] If crooked Hillary got elected, you would not have a Second Amendment, believe me. You'd be handing in your rifles. You'd be saying here, here, here they are. [Booing] You'd be turning over your rifles.
https://factba.se/transcript/donald-tru ... er-22-2017

NRATV

I want to issue you a warning this morning, the Democrats and their anti-gun Dianne Feinstein circus don’t care about bump stocks, those recoil spring-loaded stocks that turn common use rifles into automatic weapons, they care about destroying the Second Amendment. They want to ban bump stocks in Congress, through legislation. The deceitful gun haters will use every trick in the book to attach all kinds of anti-gun amendments to that bill, universal background checks, waiting periods, purchase limits, you name it.
https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017 ... ent/218161

Trump before Las Vegas, NRATV after Las Vegas.

[not4u13]

We're learning more every day. One of the more astonishing facts to me is that everything this guy acquired and used appears to have been done legally. Under current law, this could happen again and again. We're pretty fortunate it hasn't happened more often. 500 plus wounded. He had scopes. He was using people for target practice. He had cameras outside to alert him to people coming to stop him. I'm quite surprised he shot himself as it seems he was ready to take down anyone who tried to stop him. Maybe he saw something through his scope that made him briefly human, who knows. Pure speculation and we'll likely never know.

About guns though. If now is not the time to talk seriously about improvements to our gun laws, then there will likely never be a good time. This one should be close to home for all of us. I'm sure you are all aware of the connections to the Pacifica and Kennedy football programs.

There should be no available legal modifications that could turn a weapon into anything similar to a fully automatic rifle. While I'm in favor of limiting magazine size to no more than 10 rounds, that would not have solved anything in this case. He had enough guns he could just switch to another. Even if there was some sort of lockout mechanism that prevented a new magazine from being loaded for 30 seconds after the ejection of a magazine, that wouldn't help if the shooter could just switch to another gun.

I find it very hard to stomach that so many seem to feel we shouldn't do something. While I'm in favor of states rights, the right to bear arms is a federal one. As such, I think it should be regulated at a federal level. I live in Texas for crying out loud. Open carry capital of the world.

Gun safety education won't fix this problem. Only the responsible will attend and those are not the people doing the shootings.
Background checks assume that past behavior is a predictor of future actions. While that is sometimes true, many of these shooters have no previous warning signs. We should keep them or it could be even worse, but it would not have stopped this one.
Waiting periods are also good, but would have done nothing here. This guy was patient and calculating.

Pretending there are no gun laws though is just as bad as pretending we don't need to do something different, but something different is required. No more excuses.

Oh, and if I had the answers, I'd tell you. I don't. Thinking we need answers or we can't talk about it is about as stupid as the saying guns don't kill people. I think there are 58 people that were enjoying a concert in Vegas that would beg to differ.

[John Q. Public]

I'm curious if it changed any attendees minds on gun laws. It was a country music festival, so it was probably heavy on supporters of lax-ish gun laws. I imagine many, if not most, had never heard of a bump stock but I wonder if any have given any thought to our "God-given" right to acquire arsenals of weapons, or if maybe any now think that guns do kill people.

And I really hope nobody's stupid enough to bring up the "if more concert-goers had guns" argument. That police lieutenant did say that it demonstrated a need for police to carry rifles, but I seriously doubt any cop would be dumb enough to think he could hit (only) one of a couple hundred hotel windows from the middle of a panicked crowd at a distance of a thousand meters. Or at least I hope not.

[Bick]

I can't tell what it is you are actually advocating. So rather than debate what I think you're saying, what exactly do you want to see happen, and how do you propose we get there?

[John Q. Public]

Short-term and not all that effective measures would be registration, waiting periods, licensing and that sort of thing. The only effective solution, though, would be a very long-term change in the way Americans view acts of violence of any kind. Which ain't gonna happen in any of our lifetimes.

[MDDad]

Excellent post, not4u13, as usual.

If there's a person on the planet who isn't sickened by what happened in Las Vegas, I hope I never meet him. That was an act of indescribable cruelty and indifference to other human beings. However...

Whenever something like this happens, we seem to ask the same question, "How can we prevent this from happening again?" The short answer is, we can't. For some reason, we've developed the hubris to believe we can eliminate dangers by legislating them out of existence. We can't. As has been pointed out before, we are over 300 million people with more than 300 million firearms. If we melted them all down tomorrow, something like this could happen again within a month or two. We can and should think of ways to make it more difficult for anyone to do this again. But we are a people in love with our violent Wild West heritage, and it's reinforced a thousand times a day. We can't legislate that away, anymore than we can eliminate all auto accident deaths by legislating seat belts, air bags and baby seats. Unfortunately, where there's a will, it will usually find a way.

[Wabash]

I refuse to believe nothing can be done. I will agree that 100% elimination is impossible.

Other democracies don't have this problem. We should be willing to examine how they manage this issue.

[MDDad]

Other democracies don't have this problem partly because of this:

...we are a people in love with our violent Wild West heritage, and it's reinforced a thousand times a day.

[Wabash]

Most Americans don't own guns. The majority of guns are owned by a single digit percentage of the populace. So I don't believe that thought is universal.

Within that group is a minority of individuals who own guns for sporting purposes like hunting.

[Bick]

You refuse to believe nothing can be done. I'm in agreement.

But I can't tell what it is you are actually advocating. So rather than debate what I think you're saying, what exactly do you want to see happen, and how do you propose we get there?

[Professor Fate]

The majority of guns are owned by a single digit percentage of the populace

Maybe in California, but actually, if you google it, you'll see that studies show that anywhere between 36% and 48% (depending on which study you read) of households have at least one gun in them.