99% of TX churches have some form of day care/school on premises, making them no carry zones- regardless of 30.06/30.07 signage.

Maybe Joel Olsteen can afford to hire security, but any neighborhood church I’ve been to has been a wide open target.
 
I hear that the "good guy" in the Texas church shooting affair that plugged the killer was also armed with an AR-type rifle. While some gun rights advocates are jubilant about that fact, I was somewhat disappointed. I was hoping he was using some sort of good old-fashioned "Texas"-type rifle--like maybe his grandpappy's well-used Winchester Model 94 saddle carbine in .32 Special. I feel I am a pretty "classic" sort of guy, but especially when it comes to firearms.
 
Yeh, ARs are now the official Bad Guy Gun according to the liberal media. This does not fit the narrative. The truth is every good ole boy in Texas has an AR and a deer gun.
 
In other news, most drunk drivers use Toyota’s and Fords as their weapons of choice.

79942665-2F25-41D7-8365-39CC8E7E0CE4.jpeg
 
I hear that the "good guy" in the Texas church shooting affair that plugged the killer was also armed with an AR-type rifle.

Jan, I feel almost hesitant to raise this, but I thought I'd get your opinion - if you're prepared to offer one - on the Las Vegas mass shooting.

I've been astonished by some comments that a friend of mine has been making about the Las Vegas attack being a "false flag" attack (ie staged by the government for some nefarious reason). When asked why he thinks so, he says:
- Too many shots fired in quick succession - he considers it was not possible for one person to fire so many shots;
- Supposedly no spent shell casings showing in the photos of Paddock's hotel room;
- Insufficient evidence of traumatic injuries and no reports of people subsequently dying of shock after being shot; and
- "Forensic acoustics" apparently proving that there was a second shooter.

Frankly, I suspect that "forensic acoustics" is a load of rubbish, at least in a situation like this, as it seems to me that there are lots of different factors which would affect any attempt at such analysis, such as the specific gun and type of ammunition used as that affects muzzle velocity and bullet speed; the distance to each target; the angle of impact; whether there were ricochets; knowing the precise impact point of the particular shot being analysed; and perhaps most significantly, a large number of echoes/sound bouncing off various surfaces.
 
Well, I'm a great believer in applying Occam's famous razor to matters like this.

As for "too many shots," with the rifles Paddock was shooting, it would be no great feat for him to empty a 30-round magazine and reload every 10 seconds or so, and that would be by pulling the trigger every time in a conventional manner. The "bump stocks" presumably speeded up his rate of fire, probably with a considerable loss of precision. He was shooting for 10 minutes. That means he could have fired 1,800 rounds, at a very conservative estimate.

A quick search for images of Paddock's body and his hotel room will show it strewn with empty cases.

I don't quite understand what is meant by "insufficient evidence of traumatic injuries and people subsequently dying of shock." My impression was that the hospitals of Las Vegas were jammed with shooting victims.

I think you are quite right about echoes. On occasions when I was hunting and let off a shot, I could almost swear another shooter was not too far off as the echo bounced off the walls of a neighboring canyon even though I knew nobody else was in the area. I believe echoes were probably a main cause of the belief in a "second shooter" in the JFK assassination.

And why on earth would "the government" stage such a nefarious slaughter? Why especially would the Trump administration sanction the massacre of country music fans, who were probably disproportionately Trump supporters?
 
Thanks, Jan, and I entirely agree.

It's strange, as he's otherwise very intelligent but when it comes to conspiracy theories such as this, he seems to turn off his normal analytical abilities and instead starts to analyse things in a very strange way, with a very definite slant towards blindly accepting what he wants to believe.

And why on earth would "the government" stage such a nefarious slaughter? Why especially would the Trump administration sanction the massacre of country music fans, who were probably disproportionately Trump supporters?

He believes in a group of shadowy members of "the powers that be", a cabal of extremely rich families (the Rothschilds, naturally, plus others) who control all world affairs and who want to disrupt the current status quo. Of course, he hasn't explained exactly how this will benefit them.

Sometimes he talks of how this sort of thing gives an excuse for increased law and order, thus increasing government power, which has some weight. However, if we really look at who benefits from these events, I think it would mostly be the NRA and gun manufacturers, as every time there's a massacre, more people seem to sign up to the NRA and people rush out and buy more guns in case the government tries to ban some category of firearm. Therefore, following his "cui bono" logic, it's possible that it's all a plot by the NRA and small arms manufacturers!
 
:( Morons. Situation seems hopeless, if dead children won't change your mind then nothing will.
 
They're saying the shooter was Antifa in the comments section on Order-Order on an unrelated subject.

Someone's posted this photo:

fc1866a4c3dfd44a640b14464f6182276dd4d49dab72856918f008d9a08c5e64.jpg


Edit: That's clearly not the vacant dead eyed loon they have in custody!
 
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Why Is There So Much Gun Violence In The US?
2018 MARCH 3
tags: Gun Control, gun homicides, Mass Shootings, second amendment
by Ian Welsh
Alright, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. The simple fact is that, compared to other developed countries, the US has a lot of gun violence.

One can wave ones hands and say “well, cars kill more people”, or point out that statistically you’re damn unlikely to die in a mass shooting (just like you aren’t going to die from terrorism), yet, relatively speaking, America has more mass shootings and school shootings than any other developed nation.

It is important to understand the scale, however. This chart from the Intercept is useful:

School-shootings-from-the-Intercept.jpg

Screen-Shot-2018-02-27-at-1.30.01-PM-1519756226 James Alan Fox and Emma E. Fridel, “The Three R’s of School Shootings: Risk, Readiness, and Response,” in H. Shapiro, ed., “The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education: Forms, Factors, and Preventions,” New York: Wiley/Blackwell Publishers, June 2018.

Alright, so first off, it is INSANE to arm teachers. School shootings, while a problem, are relatively rare, but what we do know is that when people have guns they are more likely to use them. If we were to, say arm 5 teachers per school, at approximately 128,000 schools in America, we’d have 640,000 teachers with guns. This to stop an average of 10 deaths a year from school shootings.

How many of those teachers with guns would use them, on themselves, their students, their families or other people? I guarantee, absolutely, that it will be more than 10 people a year. Far, far more.

“Hardening” schools is deranged. Having cops and guns and so on in schools is a pathetic admission of social pathology that is off the scale and it’s bad for students. Schools should not be prisons: well, not any more than they already are by design, keeping young kids cooped up and sitting down when they’d rather be doing something else (and probably should be, but that’s another article).

All right, so much for that argument. let’s move back to our original question. Why is America a pathologically fucked up mess? Most adult Swiss males have assault rifles, they do not go on killing sprees (they do kill themselves a lot, though.) Americans do. Nor do they have nearly as high gun homicide rates.

Of course, those Swiss have those guns locked up and understand they are to be used for their military duties only.

A comparison of international rates finds that the US has about three times more gun deaths per capita than the next highest nation—Finland, with Austria close behind. But the Fins and Austrians are three times more likely to blow their own brains out, rather than someone else’s, while Americans kill with guns almost as much as they commit suicide with guns.

The summary of a WHO study is worth reading.

Even though it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the United States accounted for 82 percent of all gun deaths. The United States also accounted for 90 percent of all women killed by guns, the study found. Ninety-one percent of children under 14 who died by gun violence were in the United States. And 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed by guns were in the United States, the study found.

Right…

So, there are two factors here. Social pathology and deadliness. China (not on the above list) has strict gun controls and a lot of violent people. It doesn’t have a lot of gun deaths, instead it has mass killing sprees with knives.

But when you look at those sprees what you find is that they’re less deadly, because while knives are dangerous (very hard to defend against), it’s also hard to kill a lot of people with them.

So the idea that having less guns available would make attacks less deadly passes the sniff test. Of course it would. Remember the Las Vegas shooting? One asshole in a hotel room shooting into a concert crowd?

I have little time for those who say that if deadly automatic weapons with large clips were hard to get there would be less gun deaths from shootings. It is also true that wounds from assault rifles are far worse than wounds from handguns, by the way.

One may wish to argue that there is social utility to people having guns that is worth the deaths. We think the convenience of getting around in cars is worth car deaths. But one has to make that argument. If the social utility is “can fight the government”, well, that’s an argument that isn’t clearly the case. (See this long article for the full “will guns let Americans defeat their government?” argument. ) But, perhaps most tellingly, Americans have been in a long slide to loss of their rights and guns haven’t stopped that slide.

One might also argue that owning military guns is an intrinsic good. Owning them and knowing how to use them has social utility in some fashion.

But, again, the more guns, and the more guns whose purpose is to kill large numbers of people quickly, the more gun deaths are possible. And whatever level of social pathology you have in a society which makes people want to be violent, guns will make that violence more deadly.

So let’s talk social pathology. First off, it isn’t intrisically “multicultural society!” because Canada is multicultural and has a lot less gun deaths and murders than America. I live in Toronto, which is more multicultural than any major American city, and has a lot less gun deaths than many American cities.

It may be that Americans are just a bunch of violent assholes and always have been. The country was won with genocide, and founded in slavery (no, don’t even) and that’s just who Americans are, and they’ve never gotten over it.

I… suppose? Culture is a thing, violence does get handed down from father to son, and from perpetrator to victim, who then goes on to victimize. Beat your kid, and your kid is quite likely to be violent to other people. This is robust in the scientific literature.

But parenting has changed, and parents are less violent to their children than in the past. They’re controlling assholes who give their children no freedom these days, of course, but they generally don’t hit them.

The thing is, the evidence supports this:

gun-violence-rate-US.png


Gun violence, in fact, is declining. It rose with the boomer cohort, both because young people commit more crime, and because American society went off the rails starting in the late 60s, but it’s declined since a peak in the early 90s, despite Millenials, a large generation, coming on line.

America is less violent. The 90s was, in fact, the peak, and this is true of school shootings as well.

So, no problem, right?

Wrong. Here’s the mass shooting data.

mass-shooting-in-the-us.png


Well—that doesn’t look so good. Americans are killing less retail, and killing more wholesale. Of course, we’re talking a few people, very few, but the far end of the curve has been pushed into mass homicide territory, and it looks bad.

So, how about something simple.

Around the late 60s America’s economy starts to go to shit. Yes, I know this is my go-to argument for a lot of America’s problems, but that’s because, well, it’s true. 68 is where working white class wages peak. The 70s see social struggle, especially around African American liberation, and a lot of violence (including bombings).

And in 1980 Reagan is elected and he and his movement does this—

US_incarceration_timeline-clean-fixed-timescale.svg_.png


BOOM!

Here’s a simple thing well known to criminologists. You put people in prison, they tend to come out nastier than they went in. You criminalize victimless crimes (like drugs) and a lot of people who would never be violent, become violent because they are forced to become criminals to engage in behaviour the state doesn’t want, but which isn’t innately harmful to anyone but themselves.

So, we have a criminalizing trend, an economy which is getting shittier, and a change in parenting from violent to non-violent.

And the kids raised by violent parents (yes, that is the GI generation, don’t say otherwise) are violent when under economic pressure or when stuff they think is their right, and which was legal when they were young, is made illegal.

But as the children become adults who were not raised violently, retail violence decreases despite social pathology.

This is probably aided by the widespread use of legal mood altering drugs, often from childhood, of anyone who shows any spirit or unwillingness to sit like a tranquilized animal in a classroom while a teacher drones on, or in an office, doing meaningless work for an asshole boss for a shitty wage.

Unhappy with your life because your life is, actually, shit? No, no, no. The best way to solve that isn’t to change your life, or society, it is to drug you.

So, kids who weren’t treated violently become adults, and they are, in large numbers, drugged to the gills.

Is this “the cause?” Who knows. But it’s a narrative that fits a lot of the facts and a narrative that doesn’t explain the mass shootings…

Homicide rate drops, mass shootings increase. And very much an American thing, though other nations dip their toe into the pool on occasion.

Why?

Well, perhaps part of it is that the US continues to get worse and worse off. You see this in the opiate epidemic, which I consider to be clearly caused by economic despair moving from blacks to working, lower and lower middle class whites. (The economy dropped off a cliff for blacks in the 80s.)

It isn’t, of course, that the poors always do the deed, it is that everyone is aware that their economic situation is precarious. Lose their job and get blackballed or wind up sick with more than their insurance will cover (easy even with good insurance) and that middle-class American lifestyle is gone. And for more and more people it has just slid away. A hundred thousand here, a million there, a financial crisis over there, and hey, you’re on the street.

Even if it hasn’t happened to you, the knowledge that it can is always there. Economic life in America is a game of musical chairs, with some chairs having spikes on them, and there not being enough chairs period. And if you don’t have a chair to sit in when the music stops, well, your life is endless misery—well, until your life ends.

And the guns are there. And people are angry. And the far end of the bell curve moves over and over and over and it lands on just a few people. But they have access to military weapons and the knowledge is out their of how to train and prepare in order to do maximum damage. There is a “gun culture”, the internet, and easy access to everything they need.

And—BOOM, a few of them go off.

Solutions? Well, again, they come in two flavors. End the pathology and/or make it harder to be really lethal. So, less access to the most lethal weapons, or stop treating people like shit.

People who are happy, have people they love and are optimistic about their future, outside of war, do not go on mass killing sprees. Does not happen. Provide a society where people know that one slip up or bad bounce doesn’t mean social, economic and possibly real death; a society where people are happy and optimistic and don’t have to put up with bad bosses because they don’t need to keep a specific job, because they can always support themselves, and there’ll be a lot less mass shootings, suicides and drug addicts.

Lot nicer society to live in, too. Might have to give up having as many billionaires, though. I’m sure there are a few people who will miss them, but really, having to kneel or bend over for billionaires to make a good living gets old fast and they aren’t needed for a good economy. The 50 and 60s had far fewer really rich people and were a lot better.

Final word. I had my first gun when I was 12. I grew up with hunters. I’m not “anti-gun”. But no one I knew ever felt the need to own an assault rifle. Most didn’t even own any handguns: hunting rifles and shotguns. Rural people need guns. They don’t need guns designed to kill people, unless the society is pathological. And if it is, perhaps you should make it less pathological?

It isn’t, actually, that complicated to do so. Your great-great grandparents and great-grandparents did it during the Great Depression and World War II. If they can, you (we) should be able to.

Perhaps get on that, rather than arguing about whether or not a teacher with a gun, barricaded in a classroom, can hold off a shooter. Because when it gets to that debate, your society is in the shitter.
 
Two related concepts.

Alienation and anomie.

It’s telling that these killers tend to both be white and male. Asian, African, and Hispanic Americans all have stronger senses of communities than white Americans do: white Americans essentially have their church community and little else. Females also tend to have closer ties with others and are more communal and thus feel less alienated on average.

Alienation and anomie. To some degree it’s the darkside of our extreme individualism (which in turn is tied to higher rates of mental illness and suicide). It’s also the darkside of the secularization of America, robbing people of place, belonging, and purpose. And I say that as an atheist.

But it is American. The FBI keeps a database of mass killings globally (4+ people). Fairly accurate within the 40 or so largest countries (gets spotty due to data issues after that). These killings occur more frequently in the US by quite a lot and when they occur are more likely to occur at schools in the US. Little to do with guns (which impact the severity quite a bit, but not really the frequency).
 
doesn't this:

It’s telling that these killers tend to both be white and male. Asian, African, and Hispanic Americans all have stronger senses of communities than white Americans do: white Americans essentially have their church community and little else.
contradict this:

It’s also the darkside of the secularization of America, robbing people of place, belonging, and purpose.
?
 

A comparison of international rates finds that the US has about three times more gun deaths per capita than the next highest nation—Finland, with Austria close behind. But the Fins and Austrians are three times more likely to blow their own brains out, rather than someone else’s, while Americans kill with guns almost as much as they commit suicide with guns.

The summary of a WHO study is worth reading.

Even though it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the United States accounted for 82 percent of all gun deaths. The United States also accounted for 90 percent of all women killed by guns, the study found. Ninety-one percent of children under 14 who died by gun violence were in the United States. And 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed by guns were in the United States, the study found.

The WHO study is not comparing like with like. The USA should be compared with Central and South America.

So, there are two factors here. Social pathology and deadliness. China (not on the above list) has strict gun controls and a lot of violent people. It doesn’t have a lot of gun deaths, instead it has mass killing sprees with knives.

But when you look at those sprees what you find is that they’re less deadly, because while knives are dangerous (very hard to defend against), it’s also hard to kill a lot of people with them..

China feels a lot safer than the USA and Europe and it is in general when it comes to street crime. Much safer. The people who are doing the knife attacks in China are Muslims. Same issue we know have in Europe.


Here’s a simple thing well known to criminologists. You put people in prison, they tend to come out nastier than they went in. You criminalize victimless crimes (like drugs) and a lot of people who would never be violent, become violent because they are forced to become criminals to engage in behaviour the state doesn’t want, but which isn’t innately harmful to anyone but themselves.

Well known to any criminologist of worth, that drugs are not victimless crimes, just ask the Mexicans.

Two related concepts.

Alienation and anomie.

It’s telling that these killers tend to both be white and male. Asian, African, and Hispanic Americans all have stronger senses of communities than white Americans do: white Americans essentially have their church community and little else. Females also tend to have closer ties with others and are more communal and thus feel less alienated on average.

Alienation and anomie. To some degree it’s the darkside of our extreme individualism (which in turn is tied to higher rates of mental illness and suicide). It’s also the darkside of the secularization of America, robbing people of place, belonging, and purpose. And I say that as an atheist.

But it is American. The FBI keeps a database of mass killings globally (4+ people). Fairly accurate within the 40 or so largest countries (gets spotty due to data issues after that). These killings occur more frequently in the US by quite a lot and when they occur are more likely to occur at schools in the US. Little to do with guns (which impact the severity quite a bit, but not really the frequency).

Other countries have similar issues of alienation and anomie. The UK for instance. If the UK had similar gun laws and interest in gun ownership then I believe we would see a similar level of gun violence per capita as the USA.

It's too easy to say that Asians, Africans and Hispanic Americans have stronger communities. Those stronger communities may be negative as regards the rights of the individuals. We also see in the UK that fathers from African/West Indian heritage are often absent from the family and they leave wives and girlfriends holding the baby.

I don't think there's any quick fix for the USA. Gun laws are not going to work, the resistance, the 2nd Amendment and the fact there's already millions out there, means that this cannot be fixed or changed.

It has to be answered at the cultural level and also identfying and removing pyschos from the general population for effective treatment.
 
doesn't this:


contradict this:


?
No. White Americans probably rely on church more than minority-Americans for a sense of community and belonging (who, for example, tend to stronger senses of family and much more extended family networks). America is increasingly secular, with church playing an increasingly smaller role in people’s lives, leading to greater anomie and alienation.

To be clear, I’m not making the argument that not going to church has led to mass killings. It is probably one of a number of factors which has led to psycho-social conditions which have led to an increase in mass killings.
 
The WHO study is not comparing like with like. The USA should be compared with Central and South America.



China feels a lot safer than the USA and Europe and it is in general when it comes to street crime. Much safer. The people who are doing the knife attacks in China are Muslims. Same issue we know have in Europe.




Well known to any criminologist of worth, that drugs are not victimless crimes, just ask the Mexicans.



Other countries have similar issues of alienation and anomie. The UK for instance. If the UK had similar gun laws and interest in gun ownership then I believe we would see a similar level of gun violence per capita as the USA.

It's too easy to say that Asians, Africans and Hispanic Americans have stronger communities. Those stronger communities may be negative as regards the rights of the individuals. We also see in the UK that fathers from African/West Indian heritage are often absent from the family and they leave wives and girlfriends holding the baby.

I don't think there's any quick fix for the USA. Gun laws are not going to work, the resistance, the 2nd Amendment and the fact there's already millions out there, means that this cannot be fixed or changed.

It has to be answered at the cultural level and also identfying and removing pyschos from the general population for effective treatment.
I’m not suggesting in any way that those communities don’t have problems. I was having a conversation the other day with two foreign colleagues, an Indian woman and a Chinese woman, and we all agreed that a) if you had to be a woman, the United States was probably the best place in the world to be one and b) if you had to be a woman in the United States, being a white woman is the best: Asian-American, Hispanic-American, and African-American cultures are considerably more patriarchal than white culture. I was only pointing out that white Americans deal with greater alienation and anomie and that this is likely a downside of being very individualistic.

There is a good study comparing individualism within the United States, Vandello and Cohen 1999, that pretty clearly indicates that people can be too individualistic. I don’t want to say that individualism is the only cause of alienation and anomie in the United States, but it might be the primary. We are growing more individualistic as a nation, and as many of the social institutions which mitigated its negative psycho-social side effects wane, we may be seeing those now manifest more frequently. In the 1940s and 50s, Robert Merton was trying to understand this, and a lot have happened in the last 70 years.

I don’t know about alienation and anomie in the UK, but it does not surprise me that they are experiencing it as well.

The spate of stabbings in China at schools 2010-2012 follow a similar pattern to the mass killings in the United States. Mentally ill individuals who are upset at or disturbed by society in general and confused as to their place in it.
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2010-05/09/content_19999560.htm
What is interesting here are elements of a copycat effect. I wonder to what degree collectivism played in its rapid and fairly uniform diffusion.

Terrorism is awful, but much easier to understand. People have been killing others for some purpose (Good or bad) just about forever. People killing people for no reason is for that reason more disturbing (at least on an incident by incident basis; terrorism, war, crimes of passion, and gang violence clearly have a larger impact...it’s just those are all more comprehensible).
 
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This puts me in mind of D.H. Lawrence's famous quote: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted."

God, that makes me proud to be an American!
 
There are a couple places in British Columbia I’d happily go to. But I’m also happy in Texas. I can see the thoughts and prayers flying overhead from where I’m sitting.
 
It was interesting that in the latest shooting in Texas, the killer was using a .38 revolver and a shotgun. Neither of these are high-firepower weapons. I'm somewhat surprised the kid ran up such a total.

I have been pondering this whole problem of these mass shootings. The argument that it is "the ready availability of military-style semi-automatic firearms" really doesn't hold. I first got really interested in firearms about 1953-4, and those things were all over the place while I was growing up--M1 Carbines, M1 Garands including shortened "Tanker" Garands, Johnson Automatic Rifles, FN Model 49s, German G-43s, and probably some others I don't remember. In fact, you could get them by mail order until late 1968. The AR-15 in commercial form came out in the early 1960s. The Ruger Mini-14 appeared in the early '70s and was extremely popular. More military-style semi-automatic weapons came out in the '70s. Yet during this whole period, we had one major mass shooting--Charles Whitman in Austin in 1966. (He used an M1 Carbine for most of his killing.) We didn't have anything comparable until the McDonald's massacre in 1984. Semi-automatic rifles from the former Eastern Bloc and China began pouring into the country in the late 1980s--semi-auto AKs and SKSes. Yet this mass shooting problem was still less common. (The Luby's cafeteria shooter in 1991 used pistols).

I really believe that the frequency of these shootings has been caused by the universality of the Internet. A lot of the motivation, I believe, stems from a twisted desire for notoriety. In fact, some of these shooters are regarded as almost heroic. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of Columbine infamy have a sizable coterie of twisted admirers. Another one of that ilk is Elliot Rodgers, "The Supreme Gentleman," now a hero to many of the "incels." And so it goes. Three decades ago, if you died while committing a terrible crime, your name would appear on the evening news and in the daily papers for a couple of days, and then you slipped into near-oblivion. Nowadays, you can enjoy a sort of cyber-immortality. Anyway, such is my theory.
 
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^An insightful essay--jibes closely with my own views on this dreadful "fad." Other than that Klebold and Harris both used shotguns, articles possessed by an enormous percentage of the American male population as did the Santa Fe killer, I don't see much similarity in their weaponry. This shooter used a .38 revolver, again a ubiquitous firearm. Klebold and Harris both used cheap "assault" type firearms--a Hi-Point 9mm carbine and an Intratec Tec-9 assault pistol.
 
I was raised Texan Democrat (independent now because politicians and politics are just awful); I think Texan Democrats are a lot more comfortable with guns than are Democrats in other states. I’ve never encountered anyone in Texas, Democrats included, that had a problem with pistols, shotguns, or hunting rifles. I wonder if this will change that. I doubt it though. Gun culture is pretty embedded here, and the most gun loving guy I know (also has come close to making the Olympic trap team twice) is a pretty hard left Democrat. I bet the Democrats in places like Montana are the same. A lot of it is just being comfortable around guns (though I do think they should be more regulated, like cars are).

In general, I think America would be much better off if national parties acted like their state level counterparts in opposing political states (e.g., Democrats acting more like Texas Democrats and Republicans acting like Massachusetts Republicans). Being in a “hostile” environment reduces the predilection to adhere to party orthodoxy.
 
It was interesting that in the latest shooting in Texas, the killer was using a .38 revolver and a shotgun. Neither of these are high-firepower weapons. I'm somewhat surprised the kid ran up such a total.

I was thinking of this exactly. Even if he was a good shot, it takes some effort and time to be able to kill 8 and injure more. Where were the safety officers. I remember when I was in high school, there was always a police officer on the premise of the campus assigned by the district.

I am not a member of the NRA, but I think the constant finger pointing at the organization is a cop out. There have always been guns, but mass shootings have been a recent phenomenon; i actually believe gun control will not prevent any of these situations; China is a perfect example.

I am not sure what the solution is, but I think it starts at home.
 
The earlier children get experience with guns, the safer everyone will be. You grow up with guns, you are safe with guns.
 

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