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Gun Issues

You are here: Home / Archives for Gun Issues

And We Have an Active Shooter/Mass Shooter in Knoxville

by Adam L Silverman|  April 12, 20214:33 pm| 43 Comments

This post is in: Gun Issues, Gun nuts, Open Threads, Silverman on Security

Cheryl indicated in comments that there was an active shooting at a school in Knoxville.

Multiple agencies are on the scene of a shooting at Austin-East Magnet High School. Multiple gunshot victims reported, including a KPD officer. The investigation remains active at this time. Please avoid the area. pic.twitter.com/ViQirnQSpx

— Knoxville Police TN (@Knoxville_PD) April 12, 2021

A reunification site has been established at the baseball field behind Austin-East High School near Wilson and S. Hembree. https://t.co/zmQGzwb6cO

— Knoxville Police TN (@Knoxville_PD) April 12, 2021

From The Knoxville News Sentinel:

Multiple people have been shot, including a Knoxville police officer, at Austin-East High School on Monday afternoon, the Knoxville Police Department posted on its Twitter account.

Two sources with knowledge of the situation who are not authorized to speak about it also told Knox News the shooting had occurred. One source said the situation is no longer “active.”

Police and emergency workers flooded the neighborhood around 3 p.m., and have blocked off access to the school and parts of the neighborhood.

The school has been locked down, according to Knox County Schools spokeswoman Carly Harrington.

Knox County Schools has established a reunification site for parents to connect with their children who attend the school. It is at the baseball field behind the school near Wilson Avenue and Hembree Street.

Not a lot of information/reporting on this yet. I’ll update as/if/when information comes in.

Updated at 5:30 PM EDT

One killed in shooting at Austin-East High School, Knoxville police confirm. https://t.co/03cBwMsY6q

— knoxnews (@knoxnews) April 12, 2021

Open thread!

 

And We Have an Active Shooter/Mass Shooter in KnoxvillePost + Comments (43)

Open Thread: Biden Live on Gun Violence

by TaMara (HFG)|  April 8, 202112:37 pm| 44 Comments

This post is in: Gun Issues, Open Threads, Politics

VP Harris remarks start at 37:00 and then Biden at 42:00

Open thread

Open Thread: Biden Live on Gun ViolencePost + Comments (44)

I Will Never Understand Gun Nuts

by John Cole|  April 3, 20217:28 pm| 231 Comments

This post is in: Gun nuts, gun safety

This came across my twitter feed this morning:

extremely psycho shit thanks pic.twitter.com/E6Lfbe9lE6

— LB™️ “𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘧𝘧” 🛢 (@LydiaBurrell) April 3, 2021

WTF IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

I do not understand it. I do not understand the need to have a gun everywhere you go, I do not understand how they look at them as both toys and the underpinning of their masculinity and a part of who they are, none of it.

Maybe it is because I was in the Army and they were just tools and most of the time nuisances. Since I got out of the army, in the twenty years since, I have been around guns twice. Once I went to a range with a buddy who was big into guns, and was bored out of my mind. The second time I was at a house party and the host pulled out a gun to show me when he was liquored at like 1 am and I freaked the fuck out on him “Put that fucking thing away you fucking asshole, left the party, and never had anything to do with him again.

That’s it. So when I see all these sad clowns with their guns protection or to “fight the gubmint,” it just makes me laugh/cry. Anyone who thinks their fucking ar-15 or collection of pistols is gonna protect them from the government has never seen a fucking tank or infantry squad operate.

I Will Never Understand Gun NutsPost + Comments (231)

No Way to Prevent This… (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  March 28, 20214:09 pm| 126 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Gun nuts, Open Threads, Politics

Thanks to the coronavirus, The Onion didn’t have much of an opportunity in 2020 to retweet this classic headline over a photo of a recent mass shooting site:

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens https://t.co/c1FEE0smko pic.twitter.com/u0TucOuQ71

— The Onion (@TheOnion) March 23, 2021

As the pandemic recedes, mass shootings will likely tick up in a perverse spin on the “nature is healing” meme. President Biden came out strong for reinstating a ban on assault rifles, and good for him. But it’s hard to image enough lawmakers coming on board to end our country’s gruesome indulgence of gun fanatics, especially since virtually every elected Republican is or at least pretends to be a gun fanatic. Here’s one of them on a Sunday show:

"I own an AR-15. If there's a natural disaster in South Carolina where the cops can't protect my neighborhood, my house will be the last one that the gang will come to, because I can defend myself." — Lindsey Graham pic.twitter.com/PYTkLzvK1J

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2021

Could be Graham is telling a politically convenient lie about his plans to protect his collection of John C. Calhoun and Strom Thurmond memorabilia from hordes of South Carolinians who are lying in wait until the next hurricane triggers their insatiable desire to lay unclean hands on those priceless artifacts. But lots of people, mostly older white dudes, share those lurid Rambo fantasies, and until the rest of us say enough with this bullshit, nothing much will change.

I think we will get there eventually, and Republican intransigence in the face of hideous events will make the blowback stronger than it would have been if they’d just accept the simple shit virtually everyone, including gun owners, agrees should be done, such as closing background check loopholes. But that’s how American democracy seems to function. Republicans get away with obstructing stuff most Americans want done until suddenly, they don’t get away with it anymore, and they lose decisively.

Anyway, that’s what I tell myself to keep despair at bay, and sometimes it’s even true. Open thread!

No Way to Prevent This… (Open Thread)Post + Comments (126)

Late Night Open Thread: Magical Objects of Worship & Veneration

by Anne Laurie|  March 25, 20211:51 am| 42 Comments

This post is in: GOP Death Cult, Gun nuts, Open Threads, Religious Nuts

If Republicans concede that yes, mass shootings are the price we pay for freedom, at least we can an honest debate. https://t.co/i1E275OXaa

— Alex Hazanov. (@alexhazanov) March 23, 2021

To its worshippers, a gun is not a tool, it is a powerful implement of magic. It makes a terrified woman equal to a violent home invader, a soft-handed aging man equal to an angry antifa mob, an overleveraged landscape contractor with a string of small-court claims and unpaid child support warrants equal to an uncaring bureaucrat. How can we lie-berals besmirch the honor of the Sacred Implement, and its loyal defenders?

And the Republican Party, desperate for continued electoral relevance, only too happy to court the Cult of the Mighty Gun, finds itself increasingly bound to the arguments of a tiny, self-centered minority…

show full post on front page

"Every time there's a shooting…" is a helluva way to start your defense of guns ?? https://t.co/T1OWLVIgYI

— Scott Upton (@uptonic) March 24, 2021

2 cases of voter fraud in 2020: let’s make it harder to vote

38,000 gun deaths a year in US: let’s make it easier to buy guns

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) March 23, 2021

Americans make up less than 5% of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45% of all the world’s privately held firearms. https://t.co/98yh4EX8ta

— Vox (@voxdotcom) March 23, 2021

Erick Erickson: The most heavily armed nation on earth also has the worst gun violence on earth. Here is my logical solution. pic.twitter.com/tXGS7Za6Rs

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) March 24, 2021

Herd immunity but for mass murder

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) March 24, 2021

It is 100% true and fair to say that the NRA did not murder all those people in Atlanta and Boulder. In the same sense as it's true and fair to say that Osama bin Laden did not fly the planes into the World Trade Center.

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) March 23, 2021

The biggest difference is that bin Laden's feelings were negative: he hated America.
The NRA's attitude is entirely positive: it loves America for giving it a chance to earn money on selling death. And it loves your children's deaths for earning the NRA money.
Love conquers all.

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) March 23, 2021

Late Night Open Thread: Magical Objects of Worship & VenerationPost + Comments (42)

Not Everything Is Terrorism: Boulder, Colorado Mass Shooting Edition

by Adam L Silverman|  March 23, 20219:01 pm| 75 Comments

This post is in: America, Ammosexuals, Crazification Factor, Domestic Politics, Gun Issues, Gun nuts, gun safety, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security

While it is early in regards to the investigation into yesterday’s mass shooting in Boulder, it is important to remember that not everything is terrorism. Even if it winds up terrorizing people. Terrorism in general and both domestic and what we call foreign terrorism (also doing business as just terrorism) have very specific definitions. And sometimes some acts technically fit the definitions, but would be better categorized as one of the forms of mass murder, such as serial or spree murders. Ted Kaczynski is probably the best example of this. Kaczynski’s terrorism campaign did have a political objective, however, the whole campaign and the motivations behind it were the result of Kaczynski’s delusions that arose from untreated mental illness. As such, Kaczynski’s behavior was far, far more similar to that of David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam Killer, than to someone like Eric Robert Rudolph. Like Berkowitz, Kaczynski’s beliefs and actions resulted from delusions that were part of their untreated mental illness. Rudolph had clear political and religious/ideological, doctrinal, and dogmatic objectives he wanted to achieve and the motivations to undertake his campaign is rooted in the racialized charismatic evangelicalism of the Christian Identity movement he was raised in.

The now identified shooter in Boulder is alleged by his family members to have been suffering from untreated mental illness. This included paranoid delusions that he was being both physically stalked and cyber stalked because of his Muslim faith. So far nothing reported has indicated any self radicalization into any form of religious or political extremism. Just that he was introverted, had a temper, was bullied in high school, seems to be suffering from paranoid delusions, and, as a result, that his family believes he is mentally ill.

From The Daily Beast:

The motive for the nation’s second major mass shooting in a week remains unknown, but a family member said he believes the alleged shooter—a former high-school wrestler who was born in Syria but raised in Colorado—is mentally ill.

Ali Aliwi Alissa, 34, told The Daily Beast in a phone interview that his brother was paranoid, adding that in high school he would talk about “being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him.”

“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” he said.

He said he was sure the shooting was “not at all a political statement, it’s mental illness.”

“The guy used to get bullied a lot in high school. He was like an outgoing kid, but after he went to high school and got bullied a lot, he started becoming anti-social,” the brother said.

In one Facebook post, the suspect appeared to express fears that someone was targeting his phone for Islamophobic reasons.

“Yeah if these racist islamophobic people would stop hacking my phone and let me have a normal life I probably could,” he posted in July 2019.

He made similar allegations months earlier, accusing his former high school of hacking his phone. He asked Facebook followers for information about laws against phone hacking, and said he suspected someone was starting rumors about him, which “set off” the alleged hacking.

On Facebook, his politics appeared mixed throughout several camps. He shared an article rebuking Donald Trump’s stance on immigration, but also posted about his own opposition to gay marriage and abortion.

A day after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, Alissa had shared a Facebook post from another user that read, “The Muslims at the #christchurch mosque were not the victims of a single shooter. They were the victims of the entire Islamophobia industry that vilified them.”

If – and it is early days in the investigation, so it is a big if – Alissa is in fact mentally ill and the shooting was as a result of his paranoid delusions, even if investigators do get an explanation out of him, it may not make any sense to anyone else. If Alissa is in fact mentally ill and he is put on an appropriate therapy regimen and the paranoid delusions go away, he may still not be able to provide a coherent motive for his actions even as the reality of what he did is able to finally sink in.

Mental illness is a weird thing when it comes to motivating violence. When I was a post-doc at UF one of my colleagues was beaten to death by her foster son who she was in the process of adopting. She’d helped to save him from the foster system and from a life of being largely abandoned by parents that couldn’t take care of him because of their own demons and problems. He loved her fiercely. And yet one day they got into an argument and something was said that triggered all the trauma that he’d endured from his birth parents, in the foster system, from schools and social services not set up to actually resolve these types of problems and he beat her to death with a baseball bat. Apparently he’d been writing about his anger for several days and had confided in his girlfriend, so this wasn’t completely spur of the moment. And he did realize what he did, panicked, tried to cover it up for several days by claiming she was out of town, and he is now in Florida’s maximum security prison where he’ll spend the rest of his life. However, I’m pretty sure that to this day, over fifteen years later, if you asked him what set him off that day or why he did it, he still cannot provided a coherent answer other than she made him angry.* The only real answer, as insufficient as it is,  is that on that day, for a brief, unfortunate moment all of the years of trauma he’d endured came into contact with something that Barb said to him and now two lives were destroyed.

While we wait for more information to come out, it is important to remember that sometimes there aren’t answers. That doesn’t excuse what Alissa did yesterday, nor does it make it right. But it is important to remember in our hyper-politicized, 24/7, chasing the headlines, controversy creates cash news media culture that not everything is terrorism. Sometimes it is just a tragedy. But there are a lot of subject matter experts – both real ones and self promoting charlatans – on social media, as well as a news media that needs controversial content to attract eyeballs across multiple platforms, that has a vested interest in driving the events of yesterday into very specific directions. Not everything is terrorism. Not everything has a nice, neat answer or resolution. That doesn’t mean there may not be a political component to yesterday’s events, such as the ability of someone whose family says has untreated mental illness to be able to easily purchase a firearm. Or the NRA’s, as well as other similar groups’, stupid fight to remove every last reasonable firearms regulation at every level of government aided and abetted by every Republican member of the House and the Senate. All of these people, from the talking heads on TV to “terrorism” experts on twitter to the GOP senators that decided to put on a show during a committee hearing today on gun violence all have a vested interest in this being something that is considered newsworthy. Domestic terrorism, radicalized Islamic terrorism, an excuse for those commie Democrats to grab everyone’s guns, etc. There are two real issues here: untreated mental illness and easy access to firearms by everyone in the US, including those who are mentally ill. That’s where the focus should be. Everything else, unless some startling revelation occurs as to motive, is a sideshow intended to raise people’s visibility – terrorism experts, anchors and pundits, politicians, and special interest groups – and then monetize that visibility.

Just one quick, final note: this tragedy was definitely compounded because Alissa had ready access to a rifle he had purchased on 16 March. In this case, based on the reporting in The Daily Beast, a Ruger AR-556, which is Ruger’s AR pattern rifle. If Alissa had, instead, purchased a different rifle, Ruger or otherwise, it might not have made much difference in the number of casualties. Using a bolt action or lever action rifle would have slowed things down a bit as the rifle would have had to be manually cycled after each shot. But many of these manually loading rifles still come with either detachable box magazines or with integral to the rifle tube magazines. Not every non AR or AK pattern rifle is a single shot rifle. Every single non AR pattern rifle that Ruger sells with one exception – all bolt action – have either an integral tube magazine or a box magazine allowing the rifle to be loaded with between 4 and 10 rounds with the factory magazines. The same is true for the majority of lever action rifles. Getting caught up in a discussion of AR rifles is a rabbit hole. The one definitely confirmed problem here – Alissa’s ability to get a rifle – and the one unconfirmed, but suspected one – that Alissa was suffering from paranoid delusions as a result of untreated mental illness – are the two immediate concerns. Especially in regard to each other provided his family’s speculation’s about his mental health are correct. The issue is not that he purchased an AR 556 rather than the Scout or the Precision or a lever action rifle. The issues are that both his family and some friends suspected he was having mental illness related problems – such as paranoid delusions – nothing was done about that and that he was also able to easily obtain a rifle. And that the American political system has decided that mental illness isn’t really a public health crisis and that the solution to each and every one of these mass murders by mass shootings, regardless of motivation, is to do nothing because doing anything is somehow un-American and unconstitutional, none of which is true.

Open thread!

* If you click through to that article, you’ll see that my description isn’t lining up 100% with the reporters. I knew Barb, she was a friend and a colleague. I knew her foster son, though not well. I’m also the person that went over and packed up her things for her parents, as a favor for the departmental administrative staff, so they could take what they wanted home with them after the crime scene people and the local cops released the apartment and the apartment complex could have the apartment prepared to for a new renter. You’ll notice in the reporting that her son could not articulate an actual coherent reason for why he did what he did when he did it other than “she was holding me back” and he was angry. In reality he was doing well in school, was a successful athlete, and had a lot of potential opportunities he never would have had had he not met Barb. But mental and emotional trauma is a hard thing. And it sometimes leads people to do terrible things. And this was one of those times.

Not Everything Is Terrorism: Boulder, Colorado Mass Shooting EditionPost + Comments (75)

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Our Devoutly *Un*regulated Militia

by Anne Laurie|  March 23, 20216:14 pm| 92 Comments

This post is in: GOP Death Cult, Gun Issues, Open Threads

I was wondering why this article was suddenly getting traffic until I opened it and realized I have now written twice about #Boulder Officer Eric Talley. Once in 2013 when he rescued a bunch of ducklings. And today, when he was killed in the line of duty: https://t.co/VdprBIvjby pic.twitter.com/ATvBAa99Jy

— Mitchell Byars (@mitchellbyars) March 23, 2021

show full post on front page

Boulder’s assault weapons ban, meant to stop mass shootings, was blocked 10 days before grocery store attack https://t.co/EdcvtsVsZd

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 23, 2021

Make the judge dig the graves. https://t.co/XFVYHTVfHx

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) March 23, 2021

"I hope so. I don't know. I haven't done any counting yet," Biden tells reporters in Ohio when asked if he has the political capital to make changes on gun measures right now, after a gunman yesterday killed 10 people in Boulder with an AR-15 style rifle.

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) March 23, 2021

The NRA tweeted this right after a mass shooting. https://t.co/5Y7hlggqyW

— Miranda Yaver, PhD (@mirandayaver) March 23, 2021

To drive a car you have to have a license. Have to have insurance. Have to obey a laundry list of laws and regulations with legions of cops to enforce it. There are special licenses and additional laws for any vehicle considered particularly dangerous. https://t.co/hqFNNj3jog

— Zeddy (@Zeddary) March 23, 2021

After every mass shooting Republicans hide behind vehicular death stats as a reason to do nothing.

Then they roll up to drunken MAGA rallies in an 8-foot tall F-150 with coal stacks, Ben Hur spikes, and antlers on the grill labeled "Protester Plow"

— Zeddy (@Zeddary) March 23, 2021

ask your kids what to do. they’ve been trained.

— Peloton InfoSec Analyst (Incident Response) (@CalmSporting) March 23, 2021

The United States has institutionalized mass shootings. Their reappearance as the country begins to emerge from the pandemic really is a bitter sign that things are returning to normal.https://t.co/4AifB6xNtT pic.twitter.com/NaLjbdp7Ak

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) March 23, 2021

The 1/6 GOP could best be described as favoring the bullet box over the ballot box. https://t.co/MRzRzXyqHW

— Zeddy (@Zeddary) March 23, 2021

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Our Devoutly *Un*regulated MilitiaPost + Comments (92)

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