Free Republic

There’s a Way to Stop Mass Shootings, and You Won’t Like It.That’s right. You’re not going to like it because it’s going to require you to do something personally, as opposed to shouting for the government, or anyone to “do something!”You ready? Here it is:“Notice those around you who seem isolated, and engage them.”If every one of us did this we’d have a culture that was deeply committed to ensuring no one was left lonely. And make no mistake, as I’ve written before loneliness is what causes these shooters to lash out. People with solid connections to other people don’t indiscriminately...

Last week I wrote a column that burnt the internet down about how a good guy with a gun could’ve “dissuaded” with hot Cor-Bons coming out of his pistol at 1100 feet-per-second the murderous weasel who wasted nine lives and wounded several others at Umpqua Community College. As usual, and on cue, my detractors (cough… liberals) said how insane I was to augur for guns in the hands of a trained and licensed civilian on campus. I was hammered with the standard and oft times disastrously deadly blah-blah “wisdom” that we must wait for the cops to sort it out....

What does Barack Hussein Obama wish to achieve by politicizing mass shootings?  “Safe and sane gun laws? What are they? For a lot of progressives it entails a “a gun-free society.” I know I’m going to sleep better, now that Hilz has finally stated her position on gun control: she thinks it’s time for responsible gun-owners to 'take back' the 2nd amendment from those dangerous, nut-job extremists in the NRA. And she does this while managing to squeeze out a few tears (just to prove her humanity).And just in case you don’t think she’s willing to take on the NRA, let...

Technology has made life immeasurably better. We now have the sum total of human knowledge in our pockets and at our fingertips. This connectivity has made communication much easier – we can now reach anyone at just about any time. Ironically, the largest impediment to human-to-human communication is not the technological barriers that have been erected, but we humans ourselves. There was a time, or so I’m told, when a handshake or someone’s word was enough. Communication was unambiguous. A deal was a deal. Leave it to people to screw up that simple societal bargain. You can Google just about...

After America learned of the latest mass shooting at an Oregon community college, President Barack Obama delivered remarks in which he lamented the loss of good, innocent people and then added: "Somehow this has become routine. ... We've become numb to this." By the next day, Obama had a remedy: "Be a single-issue voter." If you want to stop mass shootings, Obama argued, don't vote for candidates who oppose federal background checks and "gun safety laws." Nine adults who should be alive today are not, while the 26-year-old shooter got what he wanted -- to leave this earth in what...

In his speech on the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon last week, President Obama sounded more upset about America's gun laws than about the horrific massacre. We barely had the preliminary facts about the shooting, the shooter and the victims, and he was already lecturing the nation again on gun control. Instead of calling the nation to prayer, he said we would learn about the victims in the coming days and then "wrap everyone who's grieving with our prayers and our love." Those words out of the way, he immediately pivoted to complaining that "our thoughts and prayers are...

Since most statistics on mass shootings in the world compare apples and oranges by not correcting for population, let’s get a chart that makes sense, shall we?

Important read, but downloading the paper will get more attention for the research. An FBI report released on September 16th, 2014 makes the assertion that active shooter attacks and deaths have increased dramatically since 2000 – both increasing at an annual rate of about 16 percent. As the headline in the Wall Street Journal stated: “Mass Shootings on the Rise, FBI says.” But the FBI made a number of subtle and misleading decisions as well as outright errors. Once these biases and mistakes are fixed, the annual growth rate in homicides is cut in half. When a longer period of...

Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post has another article on guns. But Ingraham explicitly ignores the FBI’s definition on mass shootings, but there are reasons for these definitions. The cases he ends up with involve very few murders and are heavily biased to include gang and other criminal activity. Curbing gang violence is important, but the causes and solutions to it are dramatically different than for the vast majority of mass public shootings, where the point of the attack is to kill or wound as many people as possible in a public place. After 2012, mass killings were defined by...

After the Charleston massacre, President Obama made this comment: “the unique mayhem that gun violence afflicts upon this nation.” The three worst public mass shootings and nine of the worst 13 public mass shootings occurred outside the US. Of these cases, nine occurred in developed or “advanced” countries. The worst public mass shooting are as follows: 1) Utoya, Norway, July 22, 2011: Anders Behring Breivik used a gun to kill 67 people and wound 110 others. Still others were killed by bombs that Breivik detonated. 2) Sousse, Tunisia, June 26, 2015: Seifeddine Rezgui, a college student, used a gun to...

According to a 2013 Pew Research study, 37 percent of households had an adult who owned a gun — 24 percent said they owned a gun, and 13 percent said someone else in their household did. There are about 319 million people in the United States, so that means there are about 118 milion gun owners in this nation. Mother Jones reports there have been 69 mass shootings in the last 30 years. The Washington Post says, A Congressional Research Service report published in 2013 counted 78 incidents over roughly the same period, in which 547 were killed. That means,...

It looks like four party goers happened upon some gang members. Fortunately, one of the victims had his permitted concealed handgun. This dramatic defensive gun use got attention in Chicago, but if the permit holder hadn’t been at the scene, having multiple victims shot would have made national news. From the Chicago Tribune: A Gresham man fired on a group of people leaving a party, only to be shot himself by one of the victims, a military service member with a concealed carry permit, authorities said. The military member and three others were leaving a party Friday night in the...

There's No Place Else Like This:: By: Larry Walker II ::Reminiscent of Secretary of State Kerry's now infamous speech in Mexico, in which he erroneously declared that temperatures in Europe and in Vietnam were at “unprecedented” levels, and had broken "every record that's ever been seen", last week, referring to the latest school shooting in Oregon, Potus 44 proclaimed, "We're the only developed country on Earth where this happens. And it happens now once a week. And it's a one-day story. There's no place else like this."Really? Are we the only developed country on Earth where school and mass shootings...

The source of information for this news post came from Roger Hedgecock’s 1/17/13 radio show. Here’s the link. Fast forward to 21:13 for Roger’s comments. The five worst mass killings, where a firearm was used, have a common thread. Hint #1: They didn’t belong to the NRA. They don’t fit the stereotype of the “red-neck” gun owner. Check it out … Ft Hood: Registered Democrat/Muslim. Columbine: Too young to vote; both families were registered Democrats and progressive liberals. Virginia Tech: Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff. Colorado Theater: Registered Democrat; staff worker on the Obama campaign;...

An Arizona rancher and Republican congressional candidate said during a primary debate Saturday that the vast majority of mass shootings in the United States are committed by Democrats. “If you look at all the fiascos that have occurred, 99 percent of them have been by Democrats pulling their guns out and shooting people,” Gary Kiehne, who is running for the state's 1st U.S. Congressional District, said during Saturday's GOP primary in Florence, Arizona. “So I don’t think you have a problem with the Republicans.” When asked how he would protect gun rights, Kiehne, a hotel owner and member of the...

The school in Newtown. The Sikh temple in Wisconsin. The movie theater in Aurora. America’s angst over shootings in public places is growing, and for good reason. According to a study obtained by Yahoo News, rampages like the Washington Navy Yard and Los Angeles airport shootings have tripled in recent years. The report, written by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University, will be published next week in the “FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin,” a training publication for criminal justice professionals. Researchers considered only active shootings in public settings where the primary motive appeared to...

Right-wing politics are key to a murderer’s motivations; leftism must be ignored.Let me venture a guess, and wager that you have heard very little about the political preference of the young man who, on Friday, walked into his high school and tried to murder his teacher. On the face of it, this is a blessing, for in all but the most extreme cases a murderer’s ideological proclivities are wholly irrelevant to his crime. The “why” really matters when a terrorist group shoots up a mall, because the “why” explains the action. But when a man bears a grudge against his...

Investigators are planning to release a long-awaited report on the Newtown school shooting, nearly a year after the massacre of 20 children and six women inside Sandy Hook Elementary School.

After every mass shooting, I write a variant of the same column. Perhaps I'll republish this one when the next attack happens. The increase in mass shootings over the course of the past several decades is not imaginary. In 2000, The New York Times analyzed 100 mass shootings between 1949 and 1999 and found that 73 of them had happened since 1990. Since 2000, according to Mother Jones magazine, there have been 33 more, including the recent massacre at the Navy Yard. The majority of the killers have untreated mental illness. A significant portion of the political and journalistic worlds...

The next mass shooting will take place on February 12, 2014, in Spokane, Washington. It will be committed by an emotionally disturbed, 38 year-old white man who will kill seven people and wound six more at a place he used to work using a semi-automatic handgun he purchased legally in the state. That, at least, is what a look at the data on past such shootings might indicate. We'll say at the outset: Every assertion in the first paragraph is a function of probability, not fact. The next mass shooting — which will happen somewhere, sometime — will almost certainly not be in...