Friday, December 21, 2012

Is There Anything We Can Do About Mass Murder?

...that we have these shootings almost ritualistically is horrible.  Here is a good article at Mother Jones - it's quite complete.   Is There Anything We Can Do About Mass Murder?
Update, December 15: Click here for our coverage of the Newtown school massacre. This story has been updated to include data from that event.

In the fierce debate that always follows the latest mass shooting, it's an argument you hear frequently from gun rights promoters: If only more people were armed, there would be a better chance of stopping these terrible events. This has plausibility problems—what are the odds that, say, a moviegoer with a pack of Twizzlers in one pocket and a Glock in the other would be mentally prepared, properly positioned, and skilled enough to take out a body-armored assailant in a smoke- and panic-filled theater? But whether you believe that would happen is ultimately a matter of theory and speculation. Instead, let's look at some facts gathered in a two-month investigation by Mother Jones.
In the wake of the slaughters this summer at a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 62 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. Moreover, we found that the rate of mass shootings has increased in recent years—at a time when America has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of new laws has made it easier than ever to carry them in public. And in other recent rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, they not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed.  (Click on the link above to read the entire story).

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Ongoing Battle Between To Have Guns Or Not To Have

The shooting of young children and teacher in their classroom is beyond horror and makes one think about the human mind and how it can become horribly corrupted.  But what one has to realize is that guns cannot act by themselves...just as knives, bombs and arrows cannot act by themselves.  They need a human agent to trigger them into activity.  If we had better collection of data that could be processed for information about  whether the purchaser of a gun had medical issues or was a previous felon then that would solve the majority of the problem.  Guns can be used to protect oneself and family or it can be used for murder.  The two have to be distinguished and a sane policy arrived at.  Not this knee jerk reaction every time one of these killings happen.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The Obama Record

The Obama Record: The chief executive who swore to faithfully execute the nation's laws picks those he'll ignore and makes up others through regulation and executive order. He sees no need for a Congress or Constitution...  
...In his State of the Union address a year later on Jan. 27, 2010, he shamefully scolded the justices on national television for "having reversed a century of law" in the Citizens United ruling in which the court was protecting the freedom of political speech enshrined more than two centuries ago in the First Amendment. We agree with Justice Samuel Alito's eloquent rebuff of the president, in which he was seen mouthing the words "Not true."
Then came ObamaCare, which would prove to be a monumental assault on the First and 10th Amendments to the Constitution. ... Never before had a citizen of the United States been required to purchase a product just for being a citizen of the United States.
The Constitution according to President Obama also requires a suspension of the First Amendment guarantee that Congress shall make no laws restricting the free exercise of religion. Arguably, the Congress did no such thing in passing ObamaCare. But it left the door open when it replaced "We The People" of the Constitution with "the Secretary shall determine," a phrase that appears in the bill a mind-boggling 1,563 times.  READ here...