‘The National Rifle Association's (NRA's) Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer, Wayne LaPierre, must be feeling particularly proud of his accomplishments today. Over these past many years Mister LaPierre and his NRA have worked harder than any organization other than the Republican Party, to make massacres like that at Virginia Tech not only possible, but certain. One can only imagine the pride and sense of accomplishment that the Wayne LaPierres and Tom DeLays and Bill Frists and Trent Lotts and Newt Gingrichs of the United States must be feeling today.

After all, it isn't everyday that an organization and its lapdog political party's policies achieve history-making status. And for a group like Mister LaPierre's NRA, what could be more gratifying than knowing that all the money stolen from the association's membership through outrageous fear-mongering tactics and paid to Republican Congressmen, generated THE policies that have resulted in the most confirmed kills in the history of the United States? Jesus H Christ, sweet success! The NRA and Republican Party have actually managed to accomplish with a bullet, that which requires terrorists a bomb to achieve.’

The NRA and Republican Party: Killing Our Kids One Massacre at a Time

Arizona Weighs Bill to Allow Guns on Campuses

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: March 5, 2008

PHOENIX — Horrified by recent campus shootings, a state lawmaker here has come up with a proposal in keeping with the Taurus .22-caliber pistol tucked in her purse: Get more guns on campus.

The lawmaker, State Senator Karen S. Johnson, has sponsored a bill, which the Senate Judiciary Committee approved last week, that would allow people with a concealed weapons permit — limited to those 21 and older here — to carry their firearms at public colleges and universities. Concealed weapons are generally not permitted at most public establishments, including colleges.

Ms. Johnson, a Republican from Mesa, said she believed that the recent carnage at Northern Illinois University could have been prevented or limited if an armed student or professor had intercepted the gunman. The police, she said, respond too slowly to such incidents and, besides, who better than the people staring down the barrel to take action?

She initially wanted her bill to cover all public schools, kindergarten and up, but other lawmakers convinced her it stood a better chance of passing if it were limited to higher education.

“I feel like our kindergartners are sitting there like sitting ducks,” Ms. Johnson said last week when the bill passed the committee by a 4-to-3 vote.

This is a generally gun-friendly state, where people are allowed to carry a weapon on their hip without a permit as long as people can see it. Even so, Ms. Johnson acknowledges that her views come from the far right — she recently described herself, half-jokingly, she says, as a “right-wing wacko.”

Still, the proposal has troubled advocates of gun control here and elsewhere because it appears to be gaining popularity and has fed long-smoldering debates over restrictions on carrying firearms.

Since the Virginia Tech killings last April, other states have weighed similar legislation, to the disbelief of opponents, who note that the odds of lethal attacks are small, despite the publicity they attract.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a Washington nonprofit organization, said 15 states were considering legislation that would authorize or make it easier for people to carry guns on school or college campuses under certain conditions. Those states include Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and Virginia, according to the center, but it considers the Arizona proposal particularly egregious because it would not only allow students and faculty to carry such weapons, but staff members as well.

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Gus: if there is a way to multiply the chances of a great massacre, this is it... All you need is one loopy maniac who is after the ultimate vicarious thrill of playing "self-defence" after starting a small carnage... Bang bang! One can see blood everywhere, bullets flying in all directions. Not knowing where the original fire came from, "well-intended" people shooting willy-nilly at everything that moves would make the US army friendly-fire results look tame.

And I have this niggling feeling, these great gun-toting vigilante could also be Christians "who praise the Lord EVERY Sunday..."

see toon at top... 

8yo shoots himself with Uzi at gun show

Authorities in Massachusetts are investigating a gun fair where an 8-year-old boy died after accidentally shooting himself in the head with an Uzi submachinegun while under adult supervision.

Christopher Bizilj lost control of the weapon on Sunday at the Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo at a sportsman's club in Westfield, a city about s 155 kilometres west of the state capital Boston, police said.

He was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Under Massachusetts law, children can legally fire a weapon if they are supervised by a licensed instructor and have consent from a parent or legal guardian.

But gun control advocates said the boy should never have been allowed to fire the military-grade weapon.

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I may have told this story on this site before, but I can't trace it.

When I was in the US, deep in the swamps of Louisiana, we went to a "farm" that looked like a hillbilly-concentrate. There, "daddy" was enraged because young "Billy" about 6yo had just lost his BB gun and could not remember where... The kid was being beaten into a pulp and cried and cried... Daddy had quite a few guns himself, all to be seen lying around without being "locked away". The Junkyard was a challenging parallel "scrapheap" in a weird universe of shoot-it-because-it-moves... 

Tea/coffee might have been whiskey-ed... Magnificent sunset though... Great sky to go and shoot crows... see toon at top...

The American Way
By BOB HERBERT
Published: April 13, 2009

...

Reluctant to talk at first, the woman eventually whispered, “I’m the grandmother of the kid that killed those cops.” She said her name was Catherine Scott and that she was praying for her grandson, Richard Poplawski, who is 22 and being held in the Allegheny County Jail, and for the three officers he is accused of gunning down: Stephen Mayhle, who was 29; Paul Sciullo II, 37; and Eric Kelly, 41.

The officers were killed a week and a half ago as they responded to a disturbance at the house. Police said they were met there by Poplawski, who was wearing a bulletproof vest and was armed with a variety of weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle.

“My grandson did a terrible thing,” said Ms. Scott. “There is no mercy for what he did.”

Mercy or not, there is no end to the trauma and heartbreak caused by these horrifying, blood-drenched eruptions of gun violence, which are as common to the American scene as changes in the weather.

On the same day that the three Pittsburgh cops were murdered, a 34-year-old man in Graham, Wash., James Harrison, shot his five children to death and then killed himself. The children were identified by police as Maxine, 16, Samantha, 14, Jamie, 11, Heather, 8, and James, 7.

Just a day earlier, a man in Binghamton, N.Y., invaded a civic association and shot 17 people, 13 of them fatally, and then killed himself. On April 7, three days after the shootings in Pittsburgh and Graham, Wash., a man with a handgun in Priceville, Ala., murdered his wife, their 16-year-old daughter, his sister, and his sister’s 11-year-old son, before killing himself.

More? There’s always more. Four police officers in Oakland, Calif. — Dan Sakai, 35, Mark Dunakin, 40, John Hege, 41, and Ervin Romans, 43 — were shot to death last month by a 27-year-old parolee who was then shot to death by the police.

This is the American way.   Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s
attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans
have been killed in nonterror homicides, most of them committed with
guns. Think about it — 120,000 dead. That’s nearly 25 times the number of
Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

read more of Bob Herbert and see toon at top...

A teenage boy has been shot in the head during a hunting accident in northern NSW.

Emergency service workers went to the Garrawilla State Forest, halfway between Coonabarabran and Gunnedah, after hearing a 15-year-old boy had been hit by a bullet from a high-powered Triple-Two rifle on Sunday, the ABC reports.

It is believed the boy was with a group of people, including his uncle, who was carrying the rifle, when it accidentally discharged.

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meanwhile, on the same day if you scroll down the page of letters, at have-a-gun-for fun club:

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The latest NSW firearms licence figures show that many ''city slickers'' are far from being ''gun-shy'' (''City slickers may be gun-shy, but out west they're up in arms'', April 24-25), with hundreds of licensees in and around inner suburbs, from Glebe to Bondi, Enmore to Annandale. This goes to show, yet again, that the ''redneck'' stereotype peddled by gun prohibitionists is just like the rest of their tired rhetoric: shrill and emotive nonsense.

Shooters and hunters are drawn from all walks of life, and the ongoing growth in legal firearms ownership clearly demonstrates that an ever-increasing number of everyday Australians are taking an interest in this safe, challenging, family-friendly activity.

Samara McPhedran Chairwoman, International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting

-----------------------

Which instantly reminded me of:

picture by Gus...

and see toon a top

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/17/3068580.htm

Two mass shootings that killed 29 people in Texas and Ohio have reverberated across the United States, as Democratic presidential candidates called for stricter gun laws and some accused President Donald Trump of being a white nationalist.

• In Dayton, Ohio, a gunman killed nine people, including his sister
• The El Paso shooting is being investigated as a possible hate crime
• The attacks come less than a week after a 19-year-old gunman killed three people

Dozens were also wounded on Saturday and early Sunday in the attacks, which occurred within just 13 hours of each other.

The carnage has shocked a country that has become grimly accustomed to mass shootings and heightened concerns about domestic terrorism.

The first massacre occurred on Saturday morning (local time) in the heavily Hispanic border city of El Paso, where a gunman killed 20 people at a Walmart store before surrendering.

Authorities have linked a racist, anti-immigrant screed posted online shortly before the incident to the man arrested over the shooting, 21-year-old Patrick Wood Crusius.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-05/2-mass-shootings-in-less-than-24-...

No loonies with guns before president trump?... Idiots... 

Read from top.

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/24266

See also:

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/8/2/tony_timpa_family_lawsuit_bodycam_...

A warning to listeners and viewers: This story contains disturbing footage. In Texas, newly revealed police body-cam video shows Dallas police officers laughing and joking as an unarmed man having a mental health crisis lay dying in their custody. The incident occurred in August of 2016, after 32-year-old Dallas resident Tony Timpa called 911 for help, reporting he had taken drugs and was off his medication for schizophrenia. The video shows officers pinning Timpa face-first into the ground for 14 minutes as he pleaded to be released. After Timpa became unresponsive, the officers stood over his unmoving body, mocking him as though he had fallen asleep.

Police officer 1: “Wake up!”

Police officer 2: “Haha! I don’t want to go to school, Mom!”

Police officer 3: “Five more minutes, Mom!”

Police officer 2: “Five more minutes, Mom! Haha!”

Police officer 1: “First day. You can’t be late!”

At no time did the officers check to see if Timpa was breathing or had a pulse. By the time paramedics arrived on the scene and began administering CPR, Timpa was dead. The video directly contradicts claims made by the Dallas Police Department defending the officers’ behavior. After headlines, we’ll go to Dallas to speak with a lawyer representing Timpa’s family.

You can smell Uncle Rupert working hard to protect his investment in Trump. This is why Gus feels that The New York Post is using our DT's Miranda Devine to write forcefully :

The bodies in El Paso were barely cold when Beto O’Rourke started blaming President Trump.

“He is a racist, and he stokes racism in this country . . . We have a president with white nationalist views in the United States today,” the failing Democratic presidential candidate told CNN all Saturday night and Sunday.

He likened Trump’s “anti-immigrant rhetoric” to something out of the Third Reich. “He is an open, avowed racist and is encouraging more racism in this country and this is incredibly dangerous . . .

“Let’s connect the dots here on . . . who is responsible for this right now.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper cut to the chase: “Do you think President Trump is a white nationalist?”

“Yes, I do,” said Beto.

What disgusting opportunism from a man whose first recorded reaction to the news of Saturday’s massacre in his hometown was a weird smile, quickly supressed, a man so lacking in empathy, he once wrote of his teenage fantasy of plowing his car into two children crossing the road.

But when it comes to publicity for his ridiculous presidential bid, he’s never had it so good. CNN can’t get enough of him.

It doesn’t get uglier than scoring political points on the deaths of 20 people.

Read more of Devine:

https://nypost.com/2019/08/04/beto-exploits-tragedy-for-sake-of-politics/

-----------------------------

I rarely agree with Miranda Devine sentiments, but on this occasion I still don't. No so much because she tries to defend trump the opportunist against someone else opportunism, but because the issue is bigger than this... As seen from top, the Americans are gun mad. And it is likely that the shooter at El Paso (hey, it's a Spanish name! — like Los Angeles, hey!) would have found another "hatred" motivation, including shooting for shooting's sake. The Hispanics were there and they took the bullets with whatever intent in the cabeza of the mad man. 

Thus Miranda is half right to condemn the Democrats using this tragedy as an anti-Trump campaign. The Democrats should have a bit more heartfelt humility and try to be a bit more bipartisan on the problem of guns. But Trump did not help, blaming all the US ills on the immigrants who speak Spanish... The blame really is on the entire loony psyche of this nation, were freedom is sacrosanct. Most of us are mad, but ther could be more mad in the USA than anywhere in the world — even in the White House.

So the cover of the New York Post is erroneous: with its sleeve on its moralitioning, it promotes the ban on all military weapons for sale over the counter. Fair enough. What the NYP does not tell you (possibly with a wink) is that these weapons are already banned for the general public "by the Trump administration", the Trump administration has also asked the States to tighten their gun registration laws. Meanwhile the Federal legislators are still too afraid to tackled the gun lobby. Here is the NYP cover:

Yep, the NYP is jumping on the ban the gun waggon — with a wink... because this cover is a lie. The gun makers have bypassed the legislation by manufacturing an attchement that turns semi-automatic weapons into full automatic weapons by using the recoil... 

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/24266

and: 

US President Donald Trump says "serious discussions" are taking place between congressional leaders on "meaningful" background checks for gun owners following two mass shootings.

On Twitter, Mr Trump also said he had spoken to the gun lobby group National Rifle Association (NRA) so their views can be "represented and respected".

The NRA opposes extensive checks. 

Democrats want the Senate to be recalled from recess to enact immediate legislation on gun control.

Mr Trump - who did not specify which steps he would support - weighed in after days of disagreement on how the US should respond to its latest mass shootings.

As he prepared to leave the White House on a trip to New York, he said: "Frankly, we need intelligent background checks. This isn't a question of NRA, Republican, or Democrat."

But he singled out mental health issues, saying: "We don't want people who are mentally ill, people who are sick - we don't want them having guns."

• What we know about latest US mass shootings 
• Does Trump's plan to end gun violence make sense?

Mr Trump earlier tweeted that he was "the biggest second amendment person there is" - referring to the part of the US constitution which grants the right to bear arms - but that "common sense things can be done that are good for everyone!"

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49292111

Read from top. Remember when: