Gunnuttery category archive

Guns fuel the drive for courtesy.

Overland Park (Kansas–ed.) police are searching for a man who fired several shots at another driver’s car Monday morning near 79th Street and Metcalf Avenue.

The road-rage incident began about 7:30 a.m. near 91st Street and Metcalf Avenue, police Capt. Todd Chappell said.

It’s not even slowing down, is it?

Three people were injured after gunfire erupted at Lone Star College North Harris campus on Tuesday afternoon.

The shooting happened about 12:20 p.m. at the campus at 2700 W. W. Thorne, near Aldine Westfield, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.

At least two of the victims were wounded in the shooting and rushed to Ben Taub General Hospital. One of them was critically wounded. Details about the other person’s wound and condition were not released.

Via the Daily Banter.

Read more »

Zandar zones in on the WATB factor in gunnuttery:

It’s funny how in the blink of an eye, law-and-order minded wingers have gone from screaming about the need for mandatory sentencing, three strikes laws, and giving prosecutors the power to actually deal with those who break the law, to, now that firearm legislation is the question of the day, yelling that America’s various district attorneys and prosecutors are power-hungry pocket dictators.

You can’t make this stuff up:

As gun rights activists celebrated the turnout at gun shows for national Gun Appreciation Day Saturday, police responded to at least thee accidental shootings that left five people injured at shows across the country.

They can’t even be trusted amongst their own kind.

Follow the link for the inventory.

Addendum:

Noz explains what it means.

From a study by the Combatting Terrorism Center of the United States Military Academy:

Conservatives are claiming that the report is biased, apparently because it’s based on facts and numbers and stuff that actually happened.

In the San Jose Mercury-News, Jason Dempsey asks,

Does the NRA Want to Turn America Into Afghanistan?

Follow the link to find out why he asks.

Reg Henry takes on gun nuts’ pretzel logic. A snippet:

Consider the irony: Every self-professed patriot becomes teary-eyed about the flag and those whose job it is to fight to protect it — and rightly so. By and large, members of the Armed Forces today are widely admired and respected.

But if guns were used in an effort to overthrow a tyrannical government, guess who the enemy would be? Why, those same men and women of the Armed Forces marching under that same grand old flag. The president, if a reminder is needed, is their commander in chief.

(snip)

. . . the word “tyrant” has been devalued and dumbed down to the point of meaninglessness. What we have is a government that some people don’t like . . . .

Elsewhere, PoliticalProf considers the properties of gunnuttery.

Tarrrrgetttt practice! courteously, of course.

Morans.

You can’t make this stuff up.

An armed guard at a Lapeer, Mich., charter school — hired in the wake of the Newtown massacre — made a “breach of security” this week when he left his gun unattended in the bathroom “for a few moments,” Chatfield School Director Matt Young told the Flint Journal. The gun was unloaded.

Via Delaware Liberal.

Thom covers the politics of the origins of the Second Amendment.

It was all about fear of slave revolts.

Watch a follow-up discussion here. (It gets lively at about the eight minute mark.)

See additional comment at Bob Cesca’s place.

Chattel slavery is America’s original sin. It stains us still.

Dick Polman reviews the gun nuts’ war against facts. A nugget:

Why, perchance, was the gun lobby so fearful of basic data and scientific inquiry back in the early ’90s? Duh.

In 1992 and 1993, a team of respected gun research experts – financed and sponsored by the CDC – concluded that keeping guns in the home actually increased the risk of homicide and suicide in the home. The studies were published in the New England Journal of Medicine (homicide study, here). The gun lobby freaked out. The studies flatly contradicted the lobby’s contention that guns in homes make people safer.

The gun manufacturers freaked out, too. If word got around that gun-owning households were less safe – and, worse yet, if future researchers came to that same conclusion – gun manufacturers might sell fewer guns. And since the abiding goal is to increase revenue and maximize profits, the solution back then was obvious. Future gun violence research had to be squelched.

Read the rest.

Warning: Language

Jay Bookman writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

According to some, the primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure that citizens have enough firepower to overthrow the federal government, should it become necessary to do so. If the government ever loses its fear of such a revolt, the theory goes, our liberty ends and tyranny begins.

Let me be blunt: That is mythological claptrap. But like a lot of mythological claptrap, it can push weak-minded people — the Timothy McVeighs of the world — to do stupid and dangerous things.

And whom does he cite as his authority? Justice Scalia.

Follow the link for the evidence.

Click for a larger image.

Mary Jo Mellone asks, “What about my right–to be let alone?”

I don’t own a gun. I am in the majority in this nation, and I feel discriminated against because I have to concede my rights to a minority that oppresses me in the name of exercising its rights.

I cannot go comfortably to the mall, parking lot, church, hair salon — it is hard to keep these mass shooting scenes nicely lined up in memory — because somebody who is sure the world is out to get him can arm himself and then go out and prove his point. Even the last refuge of our peace and tranquility, the national parks, are no longer either; you can pack heat, and I have to sit next to you on the tour bus.

Hazard County, indeed.

At Psychology Today, Jonathan Gottschall examines the credibility of claims that violence on television, in movies, and in video games leads to shootings. A nugget:

Second, the evidence that violent media promotes violent behavior is actually pretty shaky. Violence is a great—perhaps the great—staple of the entertainment economy. As a society we guzzle down huge amounts of fake violence in television shows, novels, films, and video games. And yet, a determined fifty year search for real-world consequences of fictive violence hasn’t found conclusive evidence of a causal linkage. Some researchers argue that the more violent media we consume, generally speaking, the more likely we are to behave aggressively in the real world. But other researchers disagree, picking studies apart on methodological grounds and pointing out that many hundreds of millions of people watch violent television and play violent games without developing the slightest urge to kill. As scientists like Steven Pinker point out: we consume more violent entertainment than we ever have before and yet we’ve never been at lower risk of a bloody demise. The more violent entertainment we’ve consumed, the more peaceable and law-abiding we’ve become.

Video games don’t kill people. Gun nuts kill people.

Visit, politely. (Link fixed.)

A 17-year-old boy shot himself in the chest this morning while handling a gun at an East Side home.

(snip)

“The victim was visiting a 19-year-old friend and they were handling a handgun when the weapon discharged, hitting the victim in the chest,” Sgt. Sammy Morris said.