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Post by bjd on May 26, 2022 11:26:49 GMT
I can't find it now but it was a guy, "who gets angry easily" according to his ex-wife, who went to work with a gun and shot a bunch of his co-workers. I guess you're right, Mick, not enough victims to make the headlines.
While looking for the article, I found this from the Sacramento Bee: "...consider the latest insane variations on the theme of the American mass shooting, which represent a tiny fraction of American shootings overall. The perpetrators, victims, motivations, and locations are as diverse as America itself.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that in 2020, amid the onset of the pandemic and record gun sales, firearm homicides surged 35% nationwide to a quarter-century high. Guns are now used in nearly four of five homicides and more than half of suicides in the United States.
The CDC was only recently freed to report such data, which went uncollected for more than 20 years due to a congressional provision prohibiting federal promotion of gun control.
And it is true that cataloging the sheer number and variety of shootings can only lead to the conclusion that the problem is the shooting. Every attempt to turn the discussion to prison sentences, mental illness or domestic terrorism is fundamentally an obfuscation, a misdirection or a distraction.
No country is free of the criminal, the hateful, the sick or the desperate. Few share our enthusiasm for ensuring that they are armed."
I put boldface on the most incredible sentence of this editorial.
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Post by mickthecactus on May 26, 2022 12:20:17 GMT
You couldn’t make it up....
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Post by fumobici on May 26, 2022 14:28:37 GMT
Are they so blindly stupid that they can’t see that this doesn’t happen in countries where guns are banned? Have you ever met a US Republican? They are stupid, dangerous, and evil in equal measures.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 26, 2022 15:35:58 GMT
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Post by casimira on May 26, 2022 16:38:15 GMT
There is so much confusion surrounding the massacre in Texas. It is all mainstream media driven and the various accounts are clearly meant to suit whatever political agenda suits them and their "cause".
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Post by mickthecactus on May 26, 2022 16:46:16 GMT
The only thing that matters is starting some form of gun control or the small children of America don’t have much to look forward to.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 26, 2022 17:07:30 GMT
The way it's going, there won't be any small children.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 26, 2022 17:14:51 GMT
I was passing in review all of my teachers from grades 1-6 with the idea of teachers being armed. Not a single one of them would have survived, although I now have a fantasy of wrinkled old Sister Beatrice pulling an AK-47 out of her robe and exterminating the bad guy.
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Post by casimira on May 26, 2022 17:19:05 GMT
The only thing that matters is starting some form of gun control or the small children of America don’t have much to look forward to. I agree but don't see it happening anytime soon. Likely not in our lifetime sadly. And, the fact that it's based on each individual state in the US to determine what their stance is on gun control only makes it that much more unlikely.
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Post by bjd on May 26, 2022 18:39:12 GMT
And, the fact that it's based on each individual state in the US to determine what their stance is on gun control only makes it that much more unlikely. It seems to me that the founding fathers really screwed it up and Americans should tear up the constitution and start again: representation in the Senate by population, more federal power in matters important to the country, no life appointments for supreme court justices, no "well-armed militia" in a country with an army. It has been 250 years since the constitution was written by a small group of wealthy landowners. Times have changed.
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Post by mickthecactus on May 26, 2022 19:26:00 GMT
Well written bjd. The chances of it happening are of course nil at present.
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Post by mickthecactus on May 27, 2022 16:46:18 GMT
My favourite, Mr Cruz, born in Canada btw, thinks the answer is to lock more doors so the gunman can’t get in.
A school with maybe 1000 children who can’t get out.
Great idea Ted. Keep counting the NRA dollars.
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Post by mickthecactus on May 27, 2022 17:44:18 GMT
Now I hear the police didn’t go in in case they got shot.
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Post by bjd on May 27, 2022 18:25:30 GMT
Cruz was born in Canada because his father was working in the oil industry in Alberta.
I too was surprised that the police didn't go into the school for an hour. Old farts with guns but no courage. So what's the point in having these armed police outside schools?
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Post by casimira on May 27, 2022 19:03:57 GMT
I remember years ago I was involved in an installation of a butterfly garden at a neighborhood school.
On the weekends when more volunteers and students were available to weed, water etc. during the week the garden needed watering. We had a list of people scheduled to do this.
The only access to water during the week involved having to go inside the school with watering cans etc.
Despite the fact that the security guard on duty knew me by face, each and every time I had to enter the building, I had to go through a metal detector. Some days 6 or 7 trips back and forth.
It used to really irritate me so bad and on top of the heat and schlepping involved I did understand the need for them to enforce the rule.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 27, 2022 22:26:00 GMT
Now I hear the police didn’t go in in case they got shot. The initial story of what happened on Tuesday in Uvalde fit the Republican myth. Police spokespeople told reporters that a school district police officer confronted the shooter outside the building before he barricaded himself in a classroom, killing 19 and wounding 22 others in his rampage.
But as more details are emerging today, they are undermining the myth itself.
Robb Elementary School, where the murders took place, had already been “hardened” with the town investing more than $650,000 in security enhancements, but the shooter apparently entered through an unlocked door. The Uvalde police department consumes 40% of the town’s budget and has its own Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit. And yet, the stories that are emerging from Uvalde suggest that the shooter fired shots outside the school for 12 minutes before entering it and that he was not, in fact, confronted outside. Police officers arrived at the same time he entered the school, but they did not go in until after he had been in the building for four minutes. Seven officers then entered, but the lone gunman apparently drove them out with gunfire, and they stayed outside, holding back frantic parents, until Border Patrol tactical officers arrived a full hour later.
Parents tried to get the police to go in but instead found themselves under attack for interfering with an investigation. One man was thrown to the ground and pepper sprayed. U.S. Marshals arrested and handcuffed Angeli Rose Gomez, whose children were in the school and who had had time to drive 40 miles to get to them, for interfering as she demanded they do something. Gomez got local officers she knew to talk the Marshals into releasing her. Then she jumped the school fence, ran in, grabbed her two kids, and ran out.
A Texas Department of Safety official told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tonight that the law enforcement officers at the school were reluctant to engage the gunman because “they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.”I have posted today's essay by Heather Cox Richardson here and there on social media, even knowing that the only people who will read it are those who have long known we need gun control. Here is more from the same essay: In 2004, a ten-year federal ban on assault weapons expired, and since then. mass shootings have tripled. ... there were about 400,000 AR-15 style rifles in America before the assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994. Today, there are 20 million.Full article: heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-26-2022?s=r
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Post by bixaorellana on May 28, 2022 1:59:42 GMT
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Post by mickthecactus on May 28, 2022 11:17:11 GMT
Just heard there are 400m guns in private hands.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 28, 2022 14:21:41 GMT
The reports from the children who lived through the massacre are devastating. If you are a US citizen, collect those news stories and post them on social media in the hope that you might get through to some of your fellow citizens. Everyone who supports "open carry", the "freedom" of uncontrolled weaponry in our country is ABETTING these attacks. One school, one church, one shopping mall, one music festival after another suffers murder by a well-armed private citizen who is protected by a jackass interpretation of the second amendment. It won't stop until that is sanely addressed and the shithook conservatives are no longer holding the rest of the country hostage with their twisted lies and exploitation of people's fears and prejudices. Speaking of which, the excrescence recently allowed to shit on the US from a position of highest power for four years says this: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/28/school-shooting-strengthens-case-for-guns-donald-trump-tells-nraWhy in the name of the god that everyone rushes to pray to after yet another preventable tragedy is "lobbying", i.e., bribery allowed and promoted in the US?
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Post by mickthecactus on May 28, 2022 15:53:06 GMT
Why pray to a god after the event? Wouldn’t before be better?
And if this god is so omnipotent why does he/she allow it anyway?
Perhaps he/she has a malicious sense of humour ?
All this praying time could be put to so much better use.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 28, 2022 16:44:16 GMT
They are just glorifying Satan.
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Post by whatagain on May 28, 2022 17:40:11 GMT
Hardcore Republicans are prolifers but allow guns. Their reasoning must be to have unwanted children being born so they can be shot later. And then they will pray.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on May 28, 2022 21:06:28 GMT
I don't understand how republicans can still have so much power seeing as they obviously don't give a hoot about the American people.
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Post by questa on May 28, 2022 23:07:05 GMT
What I find totally weird is the people who want to surround themselves with child-killing hardware are the same people who are fighting to prevent termination of certain hazardous pregnancies.
Consistence is not a strong point among the crazies.
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Post by mossie on May 30, 2022 7:00:55 GMT
What a total prat. Thick as shit.
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Post by bjd on May 30, 2022 7:04:51 GMT
Even thicker are those who continue to vote for him.
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Post by mickthecactus on May 30, 2022 9:36:53 GMT
I am moderator on a cactus forum which is about 90% active Americans.
In the off topic section I started a thread to see what the reactions were of the average educated American. Somebody posted the following this morning:-
"I do own guns but I'm not a gun fanatic. I can't in good faith give up my guns, that would leave me unable to protect my family and I from those who wish to do us harm or take what we have worked hard to own. That is the belief shared by most Americans and that will never change."
Is America now so lawless?
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Post by bjd on May 30, 2022 11:14:03 GMT
Is America now so lawless? I think a better question would be, "Is America now so fearful?" Why do all these people assume they are going to be robbed, attacked and be harmed in some way that they feel the need to have guns?
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Post by mickthecactus on May 30, 2022 11:57:37 GMT
I did ask if this was real or just perceived. No reply so far.
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Post by bjd on May 30, 2022 13:25:34 GMT
I'm surprised that Fox News hasn't classified the whole country as a no-go zone.
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