Mr Turnbull said that the media mogul had an extraordinary ability to influence political opinion in the United States.  The political demographic of Fox News viewers was predominantly Republican and not in favour of gun reform, he said, and the network could be a ‘‘game changer’’ on the issue.
‘‘Is Fox News prepared to run the risk of alienating or offending some of its core demographic?’’ he asked.
‘‘The New York Times writes editorials calling for gun control; they’re  kind of preaching to the choir.’’
Mr Murdoch’s initial tweet to his 379,800 followers has so far generated about 3028 retweets and 523 favourite

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/turnbull-targets-murdoch-over-guns-20121217-2bii3.html#ixzz2FImaz6Ur

Uncle Rupe's influence on political opinions in the Unites States?????? Cripes!!! What about here, comrad Turnbull????? Haven't you see how the merde-och media manipulates perceptions beyond the pale?...

 

 

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...

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/4388#comment-9371

There are so many questions to be answered,” CNN keeps telling us — but there is only one, really.

It is: how do we stop mad young men from acquiring, and using guns on humans?

That Adam Lanza was autistic, a child of divorce, mathematically brilliant, scorned by his brother and father, nagged by his mother, or incompetent with girls doesn’t matter. It matters only that he was mad for a while and got three guns and used them. He wasn’t going to be cured easily, or prevented easily from doing what he did. He failed to buy a gun, and used his mother’s three guns. There were locking systems in the school, but he smashed his way in, or got in early.

What is to be done?

Well, there is a solution. Most gun-murders are by males under twenty-six, and gun-suicides too. If any male under twenty-six found with a gun were arrested and put in gaol for six months, the number of grieving, shattered Americans would come down by a million, and the number of American gunshot victims come down by twenty-two thousand a year.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/international/the-solution-to-sandy-hook/

 

University research confirms empirical insurance data: people under 25 are totally loopy... Actually from the age of 12 to around 25, the brain of young adolescents rewires itself and, if you have not noticed, young men are prepared to do crazy dangerous stuff... Young women too... The empirical insurance data for drivers under 25 is horrendous. Premiums should be 10 times what they are for the rest of the population. But by law, if my memory is correct, insurance cannot charge youngsters more than three times the normal rate of insurance...

But the university study sticks... Young people can be mad, impulsive and dangerous... Not at al times but one needs only ONE EVENT to make sad news... Who does not have a young one, in one's extended family, who was killed by another young driver driving TOO FAST? Or was the young driver him/her self?...

As Newtown continued to mourn its dead yesterday and a Presidential task force convened to consider how to tackle America’s firearms addiction, much of the rest of the country was busy stripping gun-shop shelves bare of any items that might be prohibited by a new federal ban.

Independent gun-shop owners such as Austin Cook of Hoover Tactical Firearms in Alabama reported a stampede of customers anxious to buy assault rifles like the one used by Adam Lanza to kill 26 people, including 20 young children, at a Newtown primary school. Lanza also killed his mother and himself. “I can’t keep them in the store,” Mr Cook said of the weapons.

It is a sad tradition in America that each mass shooting is followed by a surge in gun sales, in part because people calculate they need more firepower to protect themselves. That explains why the days since last Friday have also seen a surge in sales of special backpacks for school children lined with bullet-proof material. Their manufacturers allege they work well as shields in classroom firefights.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/newtown-massacre-

 

Today, given America's high levels of gun violence and crime, and the repeated mass casualty shootings that are occurring across our nation, the need for a regulatory response should be clear. It's long past time to break the NRA's stranglehold on the debate.

We must re-establish a clear link between gun violence in our society and public policy. Passing an updated, and stricter, version of the old Assault Weapons Ban (which also prohibited high capacity magazines), coupled with a vigorous voluntary buy-back program targeting existing lawfully-purchased assault weapons already in private hands, as well as legislation closing the Brady Act's gun show loophole, are critical first steps.

At the same time, we should also enact legislation applying strict limitations on the number of guns that people are permitted to purchase at one time - no more than one gun every three months sounds like a reasonable limit to me - coupled with mandatory waiting periods of a meaningful duration after any purchase is made before an individual can actually pick up their new weapon.

Finally, we should ban .50-calibre rifles. As George Zornick has noted:

"According to a Congressional Research Service report, these weapons - freely available at most gun retailers - 'could be used to shoot down aircraft, rupture pressurized chemical tanks, or penetrate armored personnel carriers' and 'have little sporting, hunting, or recreational purpose.'"

We ought to take these extremely dangerous guns off the market and out of private hands.

Regardless of the specific measures selected, this much is clear: we cannot vow "never again" without also saying yes to gun control.

Michael Stafford works as an attorney in Wilmington, Delaware and writes an op-ed column nationally syndicated in the United States by the Cagle Post. You can follow him on Twitter.

Is gun ownership Christian?

By Lisa Miller, Published: January 26

According to the startling results of a survey released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute, 57 percent of white evangelicals live in homes where someone owns a gun (compared, for example, with 31 percent of Catholics.) And more startling, even after 20 first-graders were slaughtered in Connecticut at the hands of a madman with an assault rifle, 59 percent of white evangelicals continue to oppose tighter restrictions on gun laws.

An obvious question occurs in light of these results: How do such Christians reconcile their stalwart commitment to the Second Amendment with their belief in a gospel that preaches nonviolence? The Christian Lord allowed himself to be crucified rather than fight the injustice of the death sentence imposed on him. “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also,” he says, in the Gospel of Matthew. The Bible is mute on the matter of guns, of course, but it is impossible to imagine that Jesus would find anything good to say about them.

With the Newtown tragedy so fresh and its victims so innocent, conservative Christian leaders are not falling over themselves to proclaim in public their pro-gun theologies. Neverthless, such arguments do exist. I will address some of them, moving generally from unpersuasive credos to more-convincing assertions of individual rights and responsibilities.

The Second Amendment is approved by God. This, at least, appears to be the argument on the home page of the Christian Gun Owner Web site. It goes like this: The authors of the Constitution were acting under the guidance of God, therefore the Constitution is itself inspired by God. This argument is a subset of the bigger “American exceptionalism” worldview. God has special things in store for this country, and its founding documents bear the imprint of that specialness.

read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/is-gun-ownership-christian/2013/01/25/c7afe7fe-6724-11e2-93e1-475791032daf_print.html

 

As I have mentioned before, though Christ was a peace loving non-violent bloke, the religious books such as the bible and the quoran (Mohammad was a warrior) are full of god telling his troops to go and beat the shit out of those idol-loving neighbours... Victory was only assured by unshakable faith though sometimes the troops got a hiding in reverse for their "sins".... Sure, no gun on the battlefields then, though they were of course in god's blueprints. Thus anything sharp, stones, vengeance, rage and bile were the weapons of choice...

Nothing has changed much except by now, the god of guns has descended upon us...

 

But the two men struck up a partnership. Vos would be temporarily hired as a lobbyist for the NRA, helping LaPierre press the gun lobby’s agenda on Capitol Hill. And when Vos formed the company Blue Sky Productions, which would become involved in importing tens of millions of dollars of military rifles, LaPierre signed on as his partner, state and federal records show.

Together, the two friends would play an instrumental role in the early growth of America’s civilian market for military-style weapons.

The legislative changes that LaPierre supported as the NRA’s chief lobbyist in the mid-1980s opened the door to the import of military-surplus weapons, which effectively had been banned for two decades. The legislation helped make a new, more powerful class of firearms more readily available to civilian gun owners and begin to shift the profile of American gun ownership.

The arms deal put together by Vos’s company — a $58 million venture to import 50-year-old American-made M-1 rifles from South Korea back to the United States — proved so lucrative that other gun merchants immediately tried to follow its lead. Other importers would seek to bring in more military weapons, not just American but also foreign-made arms such as Russian Kalashnikovs and Israeli Uzis, and new business associations sprang up to represent their interests in Washington.

The Blue Sky deal may have helped whet the appetite of American consumers for more and more military-style weapons. Before long, American manufacturers stepped up domestic production of such firearms, including semiautomatic assault rifles and high-capacity pistols, to meet the burgeoning demand.

Some in the gun industry say this transformation was inevitable, regardless of the Blue Sky deal, as technology evolved. Just as cellphones became lighter and more powerful, they say, so did firearms.

But Josh Sugarmann of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center says the 200,000 rifles imported by Blue Sky were “basically the first of the military weapons marketed to the civilian population. If you were going to draw an ‘assault weapons timeline,’ it would start with the M-1 and eventually end up where we are today.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nra-lobbyist-arms-dealer-played-key-role-in-growth-of-civilian-market-for-military-style-guns/2013/05/03/4ee1945a-b268-11e2-baf7-5bc2a9dc6f44_print.html

 

See image at top...

 

Jennifer Longdon was one of at least 750,000 Americans injured by gunshots over the last decade, and she was lucky not to be one of the more than 320,000 killed. Each year more than 11,000 people are murdered with a firearm, and more than 20,000 others commit suicide using one. Hundreds of children die annually in gun homicides, and each week seems to bring news of another toddler accidentally shooting himself or a sibling with an unsecured gun. And perhaps most disturbingly, even as violent crime overall has declined steadily in recent years, rates of gun injury and death are climbing (up 11 and 4 percent since 2011) and mass shootings have been on the rise.

Yet, there is no definitive assessment of the costs for victims, their families, their employers, and the rest of us—including the major sums associated with criminal justice, long-term health care, and security and prevention. Our media is saturated with gun carnage practically 24/7. So why is the question of what we all pay for it barely part of the conversation?

Nobody, save perhaps for the hardcore gun lobby, doubts that gun violence is a serious problem. In an editorial in the April 7 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, a team of doctors wrote: "It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis."

And solving a crisis, as any expert will tell you, begins with data. That's why the US government over the years has assessed the broad economic toll of a variety of major problems. Take motor vehicle crashes: Using statistical models to estimate a range of costs both tangible and more abstract—from property damage and traffic congestion to physical pain and lost quality of life—the Department of Transportation (DOT) published a 300-page study estimating the "total value of societal harm" from this problem in 2010 at $871 billion. Similar research has been produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the impact of air pollution, by the Department of Health and Human Services on the costs of domestic violence, and so on. But the government has mostly been mute on the economic toll of gun violence. HHS has assessed firearm-related hospitalizations, but its data is incomplete because some states don't require hospitals to track gunshot injuries among the larger pool of patients treated for open wounds.

read more: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america

See image at top.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/02/opinion/editorials/mass-shootings-congress.html

Since Orlando, at least 585 people have been killed and 2,156 have been injured in mass shootings.

Read from top...

 

see also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/32185