Posted on 10/05/2017 9:10:39 AM PDT by Oshkalaboomboom
Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns. I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.
When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semiautomatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home.
As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Gun Comntrol means that one has established the proper grip and configured ones b0dy to be a steady platform.
Anything else is pure pap. Crap.
Every US citizen should be required to learn how to use a bolt action rifle. Make it a part of the education system.
You can’t shoot? You can’t vote.
Leah is getting lots of exposure for this article, which has now been published in multiple publications. Begins to set a good starting point to reset conversation.
If anybody is interested in FReeper comments, this article, from different sources, has been posted several times:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3591942/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3591761/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3591726/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3591655/posts
“Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.”
“We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence.”
Quick, rush her to the hospital, there’s something seriously wrong with her!
I usually give liberals a pass on this particular issue.
I believe it to be human nature to want to be “in control”.
No one likes to be something like Vegas can just happen and nothing can be done to prevent it. The thought terrifies most people, and can cripple them with fear and a overwhelming need to “do something” do anything” to prevent such an innocent from happening again.
But the sad truth is... NOTHING will EVER prevent someone from killing LOTS of people at random if they are willing to die in the process.
That’s just a fact. And no law will ever change that.
Nearly ANYTHING can be a deadly weapon.
Heck.. I could drop a wheelbarrow of bricks off a building overlooking a large parade or densely packed demonstration and kill many people. With a little planning and an average intelligence ... I could dump several barrows at once off multiple buildings.
The only source for gun control is a virtuous people, ground in faith to God.
Violence comes from the selfish, the Godless, the ungrounded.
We could start by unshackling the “free exercise” clause of the Constitution.
2nd amendment deniers and gun control extremists never stop their emotional illogical effort to take away legal possession of self defense mechanisms.
> NOTHING will EVER prevent someone from killing LOTS of people at random if they are willing to die in the process.
There’s a step in thinking that goes past this.
The question is about directly addressing known possibilities, and discouraging future attempts.
With 20,000 ticket buyers, three or four spotter+sniper pairs should have been covering all of the surrounding vantage points.
Then, the shooter would have been expected, spotted, and dealt with in, say, a minute rather than ten minutes.
This fool would not have expected that, but the next one would.
The psychology of it is that if they know they will be met promptly, and killed exogenously so to speak, they will move on to some other idea.
More failure of imagination is not an option.
Now, we don’t have any strong reason to expect venues to step up to this need, so for my part, I’m not going to any mass events. That’s rational.
Personal carry addresses MANY other contingencies.
Lots of talk on the news this morning about bump stocks. I’m concerned that the Repubs will ban these just to throw a bone to the gun grabbers. A bone here, a bone there, and the beast will just get hungrier.
Just a point out of curiosity, but from the last ten-thousand shootings in Chicago, is there any statistical data existing to say any of the ten-thousand was shot by a guy using a silencer? I know James Bond always shoots thugs with a silencer on, but in the real world....does anyone ever shoot folks with silencer?
“Gun control laws are mostly meaningless pap that don’t work? Who would have known? I wonder how much money they wasted on this “study?””
The fact that democrats want more gun control so bad they can taste it tells you all you need know as to what an evil concept it is.
I am sure, to the point of near metaphysical certainty, that if/when someone is murdered by someone holding a suppressed firearm, that the anti-gun media and the Dems (but I repeat myself) would scream about it for WEEKS.
Thus, I don’t believe that it has happened (not unless you view wild pigs in Texas as “people” - they’ve been killed by the truckload with suppressed rifles, many of which also have some kind of night vision or thermal sights).
I agree with you. Anyone with a modest amount of intelligence, access to a library or the internet, and evil intent, can kill (or, more properly stated, murder) a LOT of people very quickly. As sick as our society has become, the fact that something like this doesn’t happen more often is cause for some hope. Just think about all of the former “operators” out there - not to mention explosives experts working for mining companies or construction companies, not to mention chemists and engineers. You just need a tiny percentage of them to go postal, and suddenly you might as well live in Bosnia or Iraq (well, except that we have running water and air conditioning).
She had to study 33,000 murders to realize guns are supposed to be deadly? Dang lady. Just carry a rolled up newspaper for protection and let us know how that works out.
Liberals begin with the assumption that laws will keep guns out of the hands of criminals and sociopaths. It just somehow escapes them, that those kinds of people have zero regard for any laws as a matter of course.
Secondly, you could revoke the 2nd Amendment and (try to) confiscate every gun in the country, and the bad guys would get them anyway. And if they couldn’t, they’d find other means to kill, maim, and injure their victims.
So logically, the argument for gun control fails on its face, which leads any intelligent person to deduce that protecting the public is NOT the ultimate goal of the anti gun lobby.
I think y’all know the real reason they want our guns.
Few religions would praise a man for spending his last ten minutes of life killing or wounding 500 people. How sad that I must say "few" rather than none.
There's little doubt in my mind that the shooter did not believe in an eternal afterlife tailored to reward his behavior on earth.
I haven't read through the Ten Commandments recently but I believe that at worst they would be a nuisance and would definitely condemn the shooter's behavior.
Doctor: "Ms Libresco, The results of your cranial scan are back. At first we thought you had a tumor forming inside your skull, but on closer examination, we discovered that the growth is a brain."
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