Patterico's Pontifications

3/23/2021

10 Killed in Boulder, Colorado Shooting [UPDATED]

Filed under: General — Dana @ 5:59 am



[guest post by Dana]

Another horrific mass shooting has taken place less than a week after a gunman killed 8 people in the Atlanta area:

A gunman killed 10 people at a King Soopers in Boulder on Monday afternoon, the latest in a grim litany of mass shootings in Colorado — this one including among its victims a police officer who was first to respond to reports of shots fired at the grocery store.

The suspect was taken into custody, but there were few answers in the following hours. Officials said it would take days to investigate the large crime scene and to notify families that their loved ones had been killed.

The workers and shoppers who survived the violent scene in the Front Range college town fled the store any way they could — if they couldn’t, they took shelter inside — as the shots echoed.

“It seemed like all of us had imagined we’d be in a situation like this at some point in our lives,” 57-year-old James Bentz said.

Only one of the deceased has been publicly identified. He leaves behind 7 children:

Boulder police Chief Maris Herold identified the deceased officer at a news conference Monday night as 51-year-old Eric Talley, who had been with the department since 2010 and was first on the scene of the shooting.

The names of the other victims will not be released until family members are notified.

Also, although a suspect is in custody, we don’t know his identity or what motivated him to go on the shooting rampage.

And there was this sobering thought by a shopper who was in the store at the time of the shooting:

“Boulder feels like a bubble, and the bubble burst,” Borowski said. “This feels like the safest spot in America, and I just nearly got killed for getting a soda and a bag of chips.”
He added: “It doesn’t feel like there’s anywhere safe anymore.”

Prayers for the families of the victims at this horrible time.

–Dana

UPDATE by JVW: National Review has more details, including the names of the shooter and the victims:

Police have identified 21-year-old Ahmad Al-Issa as the suspect in the grocery store mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., that left ten people dead on Monday.

[. . . ]

Police identified victims between the ages of 20 and 65, including Boulder Police Officer Eric Talley, 51; Denny Strong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowika, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jody Waters, 65.

Al-Issa has been charged with ten counts of murder.

Law enforcement officials did not reveal a possible motive for the shooting and investigators believe there were no other suspects involved.

[. . .]

The suspect’s brother, Ali Aliwi Al-Issa, reportedly told The Daily Beast that his brother is “very anti-social” and paranoid.

“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” Al-Issa reportedly told the outlet, adding that he believes his brother is mentally ill.

A Facebook page that appeared to belong to Al-Issa showed that his family had immigrated to the U.S. from Syria. The page featured quotes from the prophet Muhammad as well as posts about mixed martial arts.

Boulder sounds like an unusual place for Syrian refugees to end up. Perhaps one or more of the family members was studying at CU. And yet again we have the tale of family members who have ample reason to suspect one of their own is mentally ill, yet don’t do anything to remove weapons from the home (presuming they knew about the rifle, of course).

– JVW

148 Responses to “10 Killed in Boulder, Colorado Shooting [UPDATED]”

  1. Between the shooting last week and this week, that’s 18 families whose lives have just been turned upside down in the worst way possible. Normal, as they knew it, is gone forever. They are now forced on the arduous and heartbreaking journey toward a new normal.

    Dana (fd537d)

  2. There is evil in the world, and it’s its own motive, just waiting for means and opportunity.

    I don’t blame the people who try to attach a reason, any reason, to it, but evil needs no reason.

    nk (1d9030)

  3. High-capacity semiautomatic firearms are designed as antipersonnel weapons. Why should we be surprised when they are used that way? It’s time to pull the liability protection from their manufacturers.

    John B Boddie (d795fd)

  4. A freakin’ grocery store…with likely random victims. How senseless. I guess we now wait to see who the nut is, what type of gun he used, how he got the gun, was it a high-capacity magazine, did he have mental problems, what was the trigger, did people see it coming, what law could have prevented it, does Boulder allow concealed carry, etc. Colorado recently abolished the death penalty (becoming the 22nd state to do it). I’m not a fan of the death penalty….except in instances like this where there is virtually no doubt about the shooter and the sheer heinousness of the crime. I suppose living in a cage for the rest of your life is a steep punishment…but it doesn’t seem to balance the scales of justice.

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  5. although a suspect is in custody, we don’t know his identity

    Something is being hidden.

    Maybe the shooter is the son of a politician?

    BillPasadena (5b0401)

  6. It’s time to pull the liability protection from their manufacturers.

    Would be interesting when people use a Gignko knife as a murder weapon, or a Spalding baseball bat. Or when a drunk driver kills people with his Ford product.

    BillPasadena (5b0401)

  7. A freakin’ grocery store…with likely random victims. How senseless. I guess we now wait to see who the nut is, what type of gun he used, how he got the gun, was it a high-capacity magazine, did he have mental problems, what was the trigger, did people see it coming, what law could have prevented it, does Boulder allow concealed carry, etc. Colorado recently abolished the death penalty (becoming the 22nd state to do it). I’m not a fan of the death penalty….except in instances like this where there is virtually no doubt about the shooter and the sheer heinousness of the crime. I suppose living in a cage for the rest of your life is a steep punishment…but it doesn’t seem to balance the scales of justice.

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74) — 3/23/2021 @ 7:50 am

    letting this monster die of old age behind bars is an acceptable trade off for not executing innocent people.

    Time123 (cd2ff4)

  8. Wish i had something better to say in this situation.

    Time123 (cd2ff4)

  9. BillPasadena (5b0401) — 3/23/2021 @ 7:54 am

    Maybe the shooter is the son of a politician?

    Well, he is 21-years old. The Atlanta shooter was also 21-years old (and bought the gun the dday of the crime)

    https://nypost.com/2021/03/23/police-identify-ahmad-alyssa-21-as-suspect-in-boulder-shooting

    From his name, it sounds like he is a Muslim, so the most probable motive is support for Islamic terrorism. Unlike anti-Asian hate, which was actually wrong in that case, not a trope the major media want to run with.

    Another story

    https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-colorado-boulder-shooting-press-conference-king-sooper-20210323-mcgbcoontrbxrovg6japxjwtce-story.html

    No further details here.

    Twenty-one may be a most dangerous age. This person is an adult, and had had time to plan, but hasn’t had enough time to commit other crimes if he is not leading a life of crime, or to do something to fail a background check.

    Sammy Finkelman (03c829)

  10. There’s always going to be stupid people, so no rational motive is needed. What you can hope to avoid having is evil people.

    Sammy Finkelman (03c829)

  11. Ahmad Alyssa.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  12. In case you were wondering what the upcoming narrative will be, here is the take from my hometown paper:

    Like in previous tragedies, widespread calls for gun control were ringing out around the country on the morning after another unspeakable loss of life.

    Here is a demonstration of the cost of that pursuit of narrative:

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/noor-salman-pulse-massacre-wrong_n_5ac29ebae4b04646b6454dc2?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004

    Since the shooter has a Muslim sounding name, I worry the chase of any explanation other than Al Qaeda, ISIS, or other Mid East based terrorism will be very intense, as it was in the Pulse shooting.

    Appalled (1a17de)

  13. https://www.newsweek.com/who-ahmad-alissa-21-year-old-suspect-boulder-shooting-stable-after-sustaining-injury-1578119

    .. A Facebook page appearing to be that of the suspect features posts with quotes from the Islamic Prophet Muhammad.

    Of course, Muhammad was no more responsible for that than Donald Trump was for the storming of the Capitol on January 6 – people who spoke in his name, at least in part, were.

    Sammy Finkelman (03c829)

  14. Was he a fundamentalist nut or did he have some other reason?

    Time123 (306531)

  15. Mre from Newsweek:

    Boulder’s assault weapons ban, which was implemented in order to curb mass shootings, had been blocked just 10 days before the attack at the King Soopers grocery store.

    What’s that about? (by the way it is not clear that anything in this case would have been affected by the ban)

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/us/boulder-colorado-gun-laws.html

    The city of Boulder enacted bans on assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines in 2018 following the school shooting in Parkland, Fla. But a state district court judge ruled this month that Boulder could not enforce the bans.

    It was not known Monday night whether any weapons covered by the bans were involved in the shooting at the King Soopers grocery store.

    Judge Andrew Hartman ruled that under a state law passed in 2003, cities and counties are barred from adopting restrictions on firearms that are otherwise legal under state and federal law, The Denver Post reported. Gun advocates made that argument when they sued to overturn the Boulder bans shortly after they were adopted.

    The judge rejected the city’s arguments that the home-rule provisions of the state constitution gave it the power to adopt the bans as a matter of local concern, and that they were necessary because the state did not regulate such weapons. As of last week, lawyers for the city had not said whether they planned to appeal.

    An assault weapons ban in Denver was allowed to stand by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2006. But the circumstances were somewhat different. Among other things, Denver’s ban, unlike Boulder’s, had already been on the books for years when the 2003 state law was passed.

    An appeals court found that Denver had the right to adopt reasonable gun regulations despite that law. When the decision was appealed, the State Supreme Court deadlocked 3-3 with one recusal. That left the appellate decision, and the Denver ban, in place, but it did not set a binding precedent for other cases.

    It’s not clear from this whether there was a stay issued on the law or not.

    The thought occurs to me that, if there was no stay but now it became legal to purchase, news stories could have alerted the killer to the possibility of obtaining one, but there’s no way to tell or even guess from what I’ve seen so far..

    A Denver Post story that the killer may have read:

    https://www.denverpost.com/2021/03/18/boulder-colorado-assault-weapon-ban-order

    Boulder city attorneys will meet with outside counsel this week to decide how to move forward and whether they will appeal Hartman’s decision, city spokeswoman Shannon Aulabaugh said. The Boulder Police Department will not enforce the ordinance unless there is a later court ruling undoing Hartman’s decision, she said.

    Did the killer read in the newspaper or hear on the radio that it just became legal for him to buy the murder weapon and did he then do so? We’ll find out soon enough. It probably isn’t the case.

    There’s also a federal case but it’s waiting for the outcome of the final decision on Colorado state law

    Also from Newsweek:

    Court documents obtained by NBC News show the suspect was born in April 1999.

    Almost 22.

    Sammy Finkelman (03c829)

  16. Also seeing his name spelled Ahmad Alissa.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  17. UPDATE by JVW: National Review has more details, including the names of the shooter and the victims:

    Police have identified 21-year-old Ahmad Al-Issa as the suspect in the grocery store mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., that left ten people dead on Monday.

    [. . . ]

    Police identified victims between the ages of 20 and 65, including Boulder Police Officer Eric Talley, 51; Denny Strong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowika, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jody Waters, 65.

    Al-Issa has been charged with ten counts of murder.

    Law enforcement officials did not reveal a possible motive for the shooting and investigators believe there were no other suspects involved.

    [. . .]

    The suspect’s brother, Ali Aliwi Al-Issa, reportedly told The Daily Beast that his brother is “very anti-social” and paranoid.

    “When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” Al-Issa reportedly told the outlet, adding that he believes his brother is mentally ill.

    A Facebook page that appeared to belong to Al-Issa showed that his family had immigrated to the U.S. from Syria. The page featured quotes from the prophet Muhammad as well as posts about mixed martial arts.

    Boulder sounds like an unusual place for Syrian refugees to end up. Perhaps one or more of the family members was studying at CU. And yet again we have the tale of family members who have ample reason to suspect one of their own is mentally ill, yet don’t do anything to remove weapons from the home (presuming they knew about the rifle, of course).

    – JVW

    JVW (ee64e4)

  18. Boulder sounds like an unusual place for Syrian refugees to end up. Perhaps one or more of the family members was studying at CU. And yet again we have the tale of family members who have ample reason to suspect one of their own is mentally ill, yet don’t do anything to remove weapons from the home (presuming they knew about the rifle, of course).

    It’s harder then you think, even when it’s the right thing to do. Friend had a lot of trouble with an older family member who was shooting enthusiast who was starting to lose acuity.

    Time123 (306531)

  19. At the end of Sunday, March 14th, the City of Brotherly Love hit 100 homicides for the year, 24 more than the same date in 2020, a year which finished just one killing under the all-time record of 500 set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, and The Philadelphia Inquirer never even mentioned it. As of 11:59 PM yesterday, eight days later, ten more people in Philly had been sent early to their eternal rewards. While the Inquirer website’s main page does reference the Associated Press story on the Boulder killings, there is no mention at all that the same number of people were murdered in the city over the past eight days.

    Murder is so commonplace in Philadelphia that, unless there’s something special about the victim, the Inquirer, one of our nation’s oldest newspapers — predating The New York Times by more than two decades — and the (purported) newspaper of record in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, doesn’t report on homicides at all.

    The only difference is that ten people were killed in the same killing spree, but, in the end, Boulder will have a far lower homicide rate than Philadelphia has.

    The Dana in Kentucky (fa23a0)

  20. Dana in Kentucky,

    you could do the same with Chicago and other cities. The number of mass shooting events dwarf these, but because they are common and not useful to the agenda, they aren’t mentioned.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  21. It’s harder then you think, even when it’s the right thing to do.

    I can imagine. I’m sure it’s a lot like convincing your elderly family members to give up driving, for their own good and for overall public safety reasons.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  22. Family is setting up an insanity defense for the animal, that’s what I think they’re doing.

    nk (1d9030)

  23. Colorado abolished the death penalty just last year. I bet some of them regret that vote now.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  24. NJRob wrote:

    Dana in Kentucky, you could do the same with Chicago and other cities. The number of mass shooting events dwarf these, but because they are common and not useful to the agenda, they aren’t mentioned.

    Having spent fifteen years in the Keystone State, I do pay more attention to foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia.

    Our Windy City barrister’s home town gets more ink about homicides there, but, due to Philadelphia’s lower population, the City of Brotherly Love had a higher murder rate, 31.60 per 100,000, than Chicago’s 28.38, last year.

    Let’s tell the truth here: the vast majority of the murder victims in our large cities are black males, frequently with criminal records themselves, so nobody really cares. If one thug bumps off another, it’s pretty much a win-win situation: one thug gone and another — at least if he gets caught — locked up, so ‘decent’ society really just shrugs our collective shoulders and orders another latte.

    But six Asian women, and ten presumably innocent (white?) people in Boulder, now that’s a story!

    The Dana in Kentucky (fa23a0)

  25. Mr Murdock wrote:

    Colorado abolished the death penalty just last year. I bet some of them regret that vote now.

    Why? Even in states which have capital punishment, in most of them the condemned men are never actually executed.

    Now, Georgia is different: 76 men have been executed in the Peach State since the restoration of capital punishment in 1976, so Robert Aaron Long could not only be sentenced to death for the eight massage parlor murders a few days ago, but actually see that sentence carried out.

    Of course, the left, seeing that six of the victims were of Asian descent want to add a hate crimes charge to Mr Long’s case, as though there’s something more that they can do to him beyond a capital sentence. I called that virtue signaling.

    I have to ask: are the two non-Asian victims somehow less dead than the six Asian ones?

    The Dana in Kentucky (fa23a0)

  26. Of course, Muhammad was no more responsible for that than Donald Trump was for the storming of the Capitol on January 6 –

    I have a low opinion of Muhammad and his legacy, but there’s a glaring difference that seems to have escaped your notice.
    Donald Trump is not a somewhat shadowy figure from 14 centuries ago. He walks among us still and commands the personal loyalty of millions. He directly encouraged his devotees to “fight like hell” and coerce the legislature to overturn the election immediately before the storming of the Capitol, after he had personally riled them up for months and then specifically called on them to be in D.C. for a “wild” protest that very day, and after he got involved in planning a rally that was authorized only for the Ellipse to add a march to the Capitol.

    And then afterward, he praised the mob for their actions on his behalf — which argues against the claim that he absolutely did not want anything like the storming of the Capitol to happen.

    Why is it so hard to acknowledge these indisputable facts about Trump’s part in provoking the riot?

    Radegunda (f4d5c0)

  27. Sometimes the killings are by white people, sometimes by black people, sometimes by mentally people (which may be our case today) sometimes by Islamic terrorists, sometimes by white supremacists (who can forget Dylann Roof? I think a lot of people have) and sometimes, to start a trend, sociopathic Colorado teenagers. And of course there’s the guy in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock, who broke all kinds of records by killing 60, and injuring more than 400 more, who so far as I know never had a motive assigned.

    What connects them all is that they happen in the U.S., that they use guns, that the U.S. is a heavily armed country, and that we have a reputation in other countries for fairly random and unusually high levels of gunfire.

    Perhaps something should be done. But I’m guessing not much will be.

    Victor (4959fb)

  28. 14. Time123 (306531) — 3/23/2021 @ 8:56 am

    Was he a fundamentalist nut or did he have some other reason?

    Yes, the Newsweek description of what was on his Facebook page doesn’t really tell you. Is it even the right person? But some sources do a correct one.

    Here are some facts:

    https://heavy.com/news/ahmad-al-issa

    Al Issa Lived ‘Most of His Life in the United States’ & His Facebook page Said He Was Born in Syria

    … His Facebook page, which has now been deleted, said he lived in Syria until moving to the United States when he was about three years old.

    “born in Syria 1999 came to the USA in 2002,” he wrote on his Facebook profile. “I like wrestling and informational documentaries that’s me.”

    This crime has not been classified as terrorism because the Boulder police is still the lead agency and not the FBI. It is not even considered a hate crime.

    NBC’s Pete Williams said….the suspect’s family members revealed he “suffered from fairly severe mental problems, paranoia, thought people were always chasing him.”

    More:

    Alissa’s Brother Said He Was Mentally Disturbed & Paranoid; His Motive Remains Under Investigation

    That’s not inconsistent with it being a hate crime. The reports of being chased was when he was in high school. He was attending college studying Computer Engineering – class of 2022, according to his Facebook page.

    The supermarket was near where he lived. One brother went there right after the shooting looking for their third brother, who left to run errands and found his brother in police custody.

    One person who escaped said he thought many people had imagined being in such a situation at some point n their lives.

    There was a pharmacy in the store where people were standing in line for a Covid-19 vaccine shot. At least one woman standing in line was shot.

    The gunman killed one police officer (in addition to his other victims) and was shot in the leg. He was using a “patrol rifle,” whatever that is. At the time the gunman was taken to the hospital he was merely considered a person of interest, because they hadn’t sorted things out yet. There’s lots of video. There’s video of police taking a man in his underwear (already having received emergency treatment?) into custody (handcuffed) and being led by police to a stretcher. There’s video that was livestreaed that starts just seconds after the first shots rang out. It shows more gunshots and people probably laying dead. The whole thing lasted about ten minutes.

    Sammy Finkelman (03c829)

  29. thanks sammy

    Time123 (53ef45)

  30. What Is A Patrol Rifle? Alleged Gun Used in Boulder Shooting
    …….
    Patrol rifles are the firearms most commonly employed by tactical units and are often carried by police officers on patrol, according to a report in the International Journal of Police Science and Management.

    The National Institute of Justice 2019 report on Patrol Rifles for Law Enforcement describes these weapons as “semiautomatic or have semiautomatic firing mode and magazine-fed” and are designed and intended to be fired from the shoulder using the energy of the explosive in a fixed metallic cartridge to fire only a single projectile through a rifled bore for each single pull of the trigger.
    ………..

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  31. Perhaps something should be done.

    So easy to say, Victor, but now try to make actual concrete proposals which would (1) allow Americans to continue to exercise their Second Amendment rights according to all existing legal precedents established by the court system and (2) prevent guns from falling into the hands of people who are evil (a challenge) or mentally ill (an even greater challenge).

    About the only sort of law that could be passed today that might have made some small difference is a law that would require family members to confiscate guns from those with mental health issues, or at the very least report mental health worries to law enforcement who would then come, social worker in tow, and confiscate the guns. But obviously that is going to be very very controversial, and its the sort of law that in the end probably only works to punish families like the Al-Issas after the crime is committed rather than truly to prevent the sort of mayhem that their brother/son undertook.

    As it is, I would imagine that the shooter’s brother admitting that they knew he was struggling with mental issues opens the family up to lawsuits from all of the victims. Along with the pain of seeing their family member commit this barbaric act, they have to know that they will be probably be financially ruined between financially contributing to his defense and fighting off lawsuits.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  32. Rat-a-tat-tat; America is back!!

    … and Putin smiled.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  33. And yet again we have the tale of family members who have ample reason to suspect one of their own is mentally ill, yet don’t do anything to remove weapons from the home (presuming they knew about the rifle, of course).

    And really, responsibility starts there. There are some that say “get rid of all the guns” [as if you could], and we won’t have to worry about the crazy people. Except in places like the UK they use knives, swords and hatchets. Or throw acid.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  34. But sure. Let’s have a new gun control bill: only citizens may have guns. That would have prevented this, right?

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  35. Boulder sounds like an unusual place for Syrian refugees to end up.

    It would be fine, though, for wealthy Syrian expats.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  36. @33 Good point, Kevin.
    While you’re at it, could you tell us how many mass murders were committed in the UK with knives, swords and hatchets over the past decade? How about the number of mass murders using these implements in the USA?

    John B Boddie (d795fd)

  37. Perhaps something should be done.

    So easy to say, Victor, but now try to make actual concrete proposals which would (1) allow Americans to continue to exercise their Second Amendment rights according to all existing legal precedents established by the court system and (2) prevent guns from falling into the hands of people who are evil (a challenge) or mentally ill (an even greater challenge).

    About the only sort of law that could be passed today that might have made some small difference is a law that would require family members to confiscate guns from those with mental health issues, or at the very least report mental health worries to law enforcement who would then come, social worker in tow, and confiscate the guns. But obviously that is going to be very very controversial, and its the sort of law that in the end probably only works to punish families like the Al-Issas after the crime is committed rather than truly to prevent the sort of mayhem that their brother/son undertook.

    As it is, I would imagine that the shooter’s brother admitting that they knew he was struggling with mental issues opens the family up to lawsuits from all of the victims. Along with the pain of seeing their family member commit this barbaric act, they have to know that they will be probably be financially ruined between financially contributing to his defense and fighting off lawsuits.

    JVW (ee64e4) — 3/23/2021 @ 12:23 pm

    tax bullets based on muzzle energy. Say .1$ a lb-ft over 50 lb-ft. and 1$ a lb-ft over 75lb-ft. Cap it at 50$ a round to keep big game hunters from going bankrupt. Or put in a tax rebate on up to 20 rounds.

    This would drastically raise the cost of ammunition and reduce the amount of ammunition in circulation. 22 short would be affordable but if you wanted .45ACP or .223 it would get pricey fast. You can target shoot with a 22 and drop down to a subsonic to save money. A few rounds for home defense and hunting are affordable but it’s a lot harder for a crazy person to kill a bunch of people.

    The point would be to make ammunition that’s good for killing people more costly and less common. Very few of these lunatics have excessive resources.

    I wouldn’t want to see this law put into place, but it’s not an unsolvable riddle.

    Time123 (cd2ff4)

  38. High-capacity semiautomatic firearms are designed as antipersonnel weapons.

    They are designed as an effective deterrent to attack and a self-defense solution. Like other tools they can be misused. They are rarely used in criminal activity.

    If a product is sold in the millions, but is misused in the 10s, it isn’t exactly a slam-dunk argument that it was designed to be misused.

    As someone suggested upthread, should Ford be responsible every time some drunk takes their F-350 the wrong way on the freeway? Because that happens with the same regularity as one of these shootings.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  39. How about the number of mass murders using these implements in the USA?

    More toddlers drown in bathtubs each year (~70) than people who die in mass shootings. We can play this all day.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  40. @39. According to Wiki it’s 517 people killed last year in mass shootings.

    Time123 (cd2ff4)

  41. One thing that bothers me in this. According the the LAPD, the “Columbine Rule” for responding to active shooters is “First armed responder waits for second armed responder, then both go in.” Had this been followed, the officer would have waited for a backup and they might have then stopped some of the killing. Later, the officers camped out and demanded the shooter give up. Seems like the Boulder police learned nothing at all from Columbine.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  42. High-capacity semiautomatic firearms are designed as antipersonnel weapons.

    They are designed as an effective deterrent to attack and a self-defense solution. Like other tools they can be misused. They are rarely used in criminal activity.

    If a product is sold in the millions, but is misused in the 10s, it isn’t exactly a slam-dunk argument that it was designed to be misused.

    As someone suggested upthread, should Ford be responsible every time some drunk takes their F-350 the wrong way on the freeway? Because that happens with the same regularity as one of these shootings.

    Kevin M (ab1c11) — 3/23/2021 @ 12:53 pm

    you would not believe the amount of work Ford does to keep their vehicles from hurting people. They’re regularly sued by plaintiffs alleging they didn’t do enough.

    Time123 (cd2ff4)

  43. JVW

    As it is, I would imagine that the shooter’s brother admitting that they knew he was struggling with mental issues opens the family up to lawsuits from all of the victims. Along with the pain of seeing their family member commit this barbaric act, they have to know that they will be probably be financially ruined between financially contributing to his defense and fighting off lawsuits.

    I am unaware of any such lawsuits. Did you have some in mind?

    Your idea of protection orders brought by family members or friends against dangerous people with guns is a good one and something that some states have instituted successfully. It is of course generally opposed by the NRA and other gun rights groups because in some instances somebody might be temporarily separated from their guns when perhaps they aren’t really a danger. And this is a worse thing that some who are dangerous are allowed to keep their guns.

    So it goes. By the way I suspect we differ in the correctness of the Supreme Court’s attempt to time travel to the brains of the Founding Father’s and their writing of the Second Amendment.

    Victor (4959fb)

  44. @38 & @39

    “They are designed as an effective deterrent to attack and a self-defense solution.” which is the same as saying they are designed as antipersonnel weapons.

    Yes, they can be misused, and they have been misused to lethal effect.

    If you want to quote statistics of children dying in bathtubs, it’s you who is playing, not me.

    It makes sense to me that if we want to keep these weapons out of the hands of those who are likely to misuse them, it is reasonable to incentivize all parties in the supply chain to identify such individuals and deny them the ability to purchase. This includes manufacturers and retailers.

    I am under no illusion that it will be possible to identify all would-be mass murderers. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider reasonable measures to try to limit their number.

    John B Boddie (d795fd)

  45. 26. Radegunda (f4d5c0) — 3/23/2021 @ 10:27 am

    I have a low opinion of Muhammad and his legacy, but there’s a glaring difference that seems to have escaped your notice.

    Donald Trump is not a somewhat shadowy figure from 14 centuries ago. He walks among us still and commands the personal loyalty of millions.

    That makes him potentially more dangerous, but my point was hat someone’s words can be used without there being intent to do the same precise thing as people might be being encouraged to do.

    He directly encouraged his devotees to “fight like hell”

    A totally meaningless figure of speech that cannot be understood as meaning physical combat. And if it means anything soecific, Trump was describing what he himself was doing in challenging the election results.

    https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-save-america-rally-transcript-january-6

    …And again, most people would stand there at 9:00 in the evening and say, “I want to thank you very much,” and they go off to some other life, but I said, “Something’s wrong here. Something’s really wrong. Can’t have happened.” And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

    The “we” is all of the people led by Trump, and the “you” is the generic you.

    and coerce the legislature to overturn the election immediately before the storming of the Capitol,

    First point is that Trump wanted the legislature to do that, which they can’t do if they have their proceedings interrupted and are forced to recess. Second point is that Trump wanted to coerce them politically.

    … we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women….We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections, but whether or not they stand strong for our country….And by the way, it’s much more important today than it was 24 hours ago. Because I spoke to David Perdue, what a great person, and Kelly Loeffler, two great people, but it was a setup. And I said, “We have no back line anymore.” The only back line, the only line of demarcation, the only line that we have is the veto of the president of the United States. So this is now what we’re doing, a far more important election than it was two days ago…

    …I want to thank the more than 140 members of the House. Those are warriors. They’re over there working like you’ve never seen before, studying, talking, actually going all the way back, studying the roots of the Constitution, because they know we have the right to send a bad vote that was illegally got….And the only unhappy person in the United States, single most unhappy, is Hillary Clinton because she said, “Why didn’t you do this for me four years ago? Why didn’t you do this for me four years ago? Change the votes! 10,000 in Michigan. You could have changed the whole thing!” But she’s not too happy.

    You could almost laugh at this.

    Most important, if he had gotten every Republican to side with him he still wouldn’t have won. The problem is now will local Republicans be honest in counting votes or will Donald Trump make many of them into fraudsters. The jury is still very much still out.

    Trump said:

    The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.

    Donald Trump was probably being lied to about there being a viable strategy for him to win, and probably also being lied to about what was going to transpire.

    Sammy Finkelman (3997eb)

  46. after he had personally riled them up for months and then specifically called on them to be in D.C. for a “wild” protest that very day,

    And it is not clear what that means. Trump said that it would be wild in one tweet back in December, and the website for the rallies was called wildprotest.com. I assume the organizers knew the reason – I’m not so sure Trump did. That didn’t, and couldn’t, help him.

    and after he got involved in planning a rally that was authorized only for the Ellipse to add a march to the Capitol.

    It wasn’t authorized only for the ellipse. It was also authorized for the Capitol, although wasn’t any permit for a march.

    Retrieved from the memory hole:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20210106005050/https://wildprotest.com

    And then afterward, he praised the mob for their actions on his behalf — which argues against the claim that he absolutely did not want anything like the storming of the Capitol to happen.

    He was telling them to go home. Trump was delusional, or sold a delusion, but I don’t think he would have been deluded into thinking that storming the Capitol would help him. Trump said he was going to speak there.

    To think that Trump wanted this to happen, you’d have to think he was conspiring with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keeepers and the three [III] percenters, but I don’t think he’s going to get indicted – and this will be fully investigated.

    Trump’s speech could not have done this, especially if he was not part of a conspiracy.

    And another Alex Jones was also on video with Ali Alexander (the person who got the permit for the Capitol rally) telling people that (maybe for cover but still) that they should head thataway to hear Trump speak.

    Why is it so hard to acknowledge these indisputable facts about Trump’s part in provoking the riot?

    Because he couldn’t have by the means that is asserted.

    Sammy Finkelman (3997eb)

  47. Where Trump said he speak at the Capitol:

    After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you.

    There at the Capitol, not in the march.

    Sammy Finkelman (3997eb)

  48. According to Wiki it’s 517 people killed last year in mass shootings.

    How do they define “mass shooting”? Any situation where guns are involved and more than one person is shot? You are really going to have to provide a link because the “estimates” are all over the place. even on Wikipedia.

    Here’s a link from Wikipedia that shows much lower numbers: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/93/Total_deaths_in_US_mass_shootings.png/330px-Total_deaths_in_US_mass_shootings.png

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  49. you would not believe the amount of work Ford does to keep their vehicles from hurting people.

    Hurting the passengers, sure. Pretty sure the gun industry works hard at preventing guns from blowing up when fired. But Ford does nothing to prevent Joe Four-Six-packs from driving the wrong way in his F-350 and plowing into a family in their Accord.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  50. Fatal wrong-way driving crashes are happening more often. According to the latest data analysis from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, there were 2,008 deaths in the U.S. from wrong-way driving crashes on divided highways between 2015 and 2018, an average of 502 deaths a year. That is up 34% from the 375 deaths annually from 2010 to 2014.

    https://info.oregon.aaa.com/heading-the-wrong-way-with-wrong-way-driving/

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  51. We should ban alcohol. Right? I mean, look at the carnage!

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  52. @49, no. There are design requirements on the other vehicle as well as pedestrian protection.

    Time123 (9f42ee)

  53. I am under no illusion that it will be possible to identify all would-be mass murderers. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider reasonable measures to try to limit their number.

    Let’s use liability law as you suggest. Families are responsible for guns falling into the hands of their crazy offspring. We have red-flag laws; families that ignore the danger posed by paranoid, schizophrenic or perpetually angry family members and fail to notify authorities that the person may have guns are the point at which the system fails.

    But, no, we’ll blame the gun manufacturers, because why? Hint: it has nothing to do with gun safety.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  54. @51, tried that. Didn’t work. And still have a lot of restrictions around the sale of booze.

    Time123 (9f42ee)

  55. @49, no. There are design requirements on the other vehicle as well as pedestrian protection.

    Still, 500 dead every year, and rising.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  56. @51, tried that. Didn’t work. And still have a lot of restrictions around the sale of booze.

    Yes, of course. I’m just bringing it up because it didn’t work. Gun homicides kill fewer though.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  57. All those that love placing more restrictions in the 2nd Amendment freak out when you mention voter ID and claim it’s an unconstitutional restriction on the right to vote. Why is that?

    NJRob (eba26b)

  58. @48. I pulled numbers from 2019. Here’s the link. I’m not super invested in the narrative . I just looked up the claims and posted what I found. I agree with you that it’s not our number 1 issue as a nation. But the only nations with more deaths by fire arms then the US are the ones Trump called sh*tholes. It’s not impossible to change. It just means different trade offs.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2019

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

    Time123 (36651d)

  59. Suing gun and car makers is small-time. I’m looking forward to the Greatest Lawyer Of All Time who will sue farmers for producing a product that when used as directed for its intended purpose makes people fat.

    Never mind.

    nk (1d9030)

  60. “ All those that love placing more restrictions in the 2nd Amendment freak out when you mention voter ID and claim it’s an unconstitutional restriction on the right to vote. Why is that?”

    – NJRob

    Because voting doesn’t kill people when it’s misused, maybe?

    Constitutional tends to beget discussions of proportionality.

    Leviticus (6e3cbe)

  61. Because voting doesn’t kill people when it’s misused, maybe?

    Tell that to the Venezuelans.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  62. Senator Frito Bandito (R, TX.,) will now lecture us on the firearms protocol of Cancun, Mexico.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  63. @53 Let’s use liability law as you suggest.

    Yes, that is what I suggest, and I suggest we include manufacturers and retailers in sharing the liability. At present, neither has any stake in limiting access to machines expressly designed to kill human beings.

    John B Boddie (d795fd)

  64. Venezuela nothing. Try England. Where the right to self-defense has been entirely abolished, a pair of pliers is an illegal weapon, and people are prosecuted for fighting off burglars who broke into their homes.

    nk (1d9030)

  65. I think we should sue the Democratic Party because it was during JFK’s Presidency that the Armalite platform and the 5.56 NATO round were adopted by the U.S. military.

    nk (1d9030)

  66. 1. Lets be real, if you aren’t a hunter (using a regular hunting rifle) or a target shooter (using a regular target shooting rifle, shot-gun, or hand-gun) then the job of a gun is to kill people. That’s it’s purpose. It isn’t a bath tub or a car or anything where killing people is incidental and accidental, killing people is the purpose of a gun. That’s it’s job. If a person points a gun at someone and shoots them, the gun has been used as intended. Anyone who can’t look that in the eye shouldn’t own a gun.

    2. Nobody is going to fight off the US military with their personal weapons arsenal. If the gloves every came off, the US military could wipe out the entire population of several countries in less than an hour. James Johnson isn’t going to hold them off with his black-market machine gun.

    3. If your position is that we can’t have any kind of gun control because anyone owning any kind of gun they want is an absolute right then your position is also that mass shootings are the price we pay for the right to own guns. It’s certainly a position a person can have and that person can still be sorry that a mass shooting happened, but the position is still that those deaths are worth it to maintain the right to own a gun.

    4. The argument that no gun control laws would prevent mass shooting is disingenuous. If we had some kind of decade long outbreak of domestic violence using red coffee cups and we outlawed the sale of red coffee cups, in ten years there would be much fewer red coffee cups in homes and less domestic violence using them. If the Georgia shooter had had to wait 3 days, maybe he would have come to his senses (maybe not, but we don’t have a lot of data on people who had the impulse to mass murder one day and were prevented from doing so that day and so decided not to, we do have suicide data, which says that if you prevent someone from committing suicide once, they are less likely to try again). Any kind of gun control that reduces the overall availability of guns will almost certainly reduce gun violence. the only real question is a person’s tolerance or lack of tolerance for those laws, but don’t pretend they wouldn’t work at least partially.

    5. If you can’t hit what you are shooting at in your first 10 shots, you should reconsider your ability to defend yourself with your weapon.

    6. Most people are basically law abiding until they aren’t.

    That’s the reality, and we have to be able to look at reality. Our criminal justice laws are meant to prevent innocent people from being imprisoned, the price is that some guilty people go free and they may commit crime, even murder, again. That’s a reality. Gun ownership also has a reality to look at.

    7. Nic is some kind of crazy-liberal anti-gun person who has never seen a handgun/rifle and would be scared to see one. Nope (in fact, my office is next to our SRO’s office, so I see a visibly armed person almost every weekday). I am not some hippy-dippy everything is peace and love ban all the death machines person. I grew up around guns, there are a lot of military, law enforcement, and hunters in my family. But I don’t have a gun kink either. A gun is a tool, not a ritual object. It isn’t a symbol of freedom or manhood or anything for me, it’s just a tool that needs to be used with appropriate knowledge and safety precautions and I believe that sometimes we need to discuss the price we are willing to pay for them and to acknowledge that that is, in fact, the price we pay.

    Nic (896fdf)

  67. Excellent comment, Nic.

    nk (1d9030)

  68. @67 Nic – an excellent comment.

    As it stands today, mass killings are the collateral damage from the second amendment, as you point out in your comment.

    John B Boddie (d795fd)

  69. @nk and @JohnB Thanks!

    Nic (896fdf)

  70. Reactions to this tragedy are akin to those which led to the War on Drugs. The thinking goes like this: “Drugs are bad. Let’s outlaw them.” Ah, but then come the unintended consequences.

    We’ve been fighting that war for 50 years, and what is the result? Drugs are everywhere, addicts steal things or sell their bodies to get money for drugs, organized crime fights over the lucrative black market (with horrible collateral damage), and Mexico is corrupted from top to bottom.

    An effort to ban guns would yield similar results. It would create a black market for guns, raise the price of those now illegal guns, and foment crime all around as criminals stole things to buy guns, burglarized homes to obtain them, and rushed to cash in on the black market. And you can bet your sweet a$$ that guns would be smuggled into the country, just like drugs and people are now.

    Then we’d have a situation where criminals possess countless illegal and untraceable guns. No, they’re not going to defeat the U.S. military, but they could sure wreak havoc on ordinary citizens, especially the ones who complied with the law and surrendered their guns.

    Round up all the 350 million guns in the U.S., you say? That would require a fascist-like government with SWAT teams conducting door-to-door searches and excavations of people’s back yards, because there will be many people who hide their guns.

    Sure, accuse me of straw man arguments. Fine. However, what I laid out will happen in direction proportion to whatever restrictions you enact.

    norcal (01e272)

  71. His living companions knew about the Ruger he bought in the last ten days or so.

    He’s so young, he really hadn’t burned the bridges mentally ill people do, or accumulated offenses, and possibly his family never understood the full significance of his paranoid behaviors.

    But about that gun – he was being reckless with it right away, and in my opinion, if this little snippet from an affidavit reported in the WAPo is accurate, he was possibly contemplating suicide and/or homicide : “‘Al-Issa had been talking about having a bullet stuck in the gun and was playing with the gun,’according to the affidavit. Others in the home were ‘upset with Al-Issa for playing with the gun in the house and took the gun,’ according to the woman cited by police in the affidavit. She told police she believed Al-Issa had retrieved the weapon.”

    SarahW (08f5d7)

  72. Nobody is going to fight off the US military with their personal weapons arsenal.

    Very few people expect they are going to fight off the U.S. Military, despite the jaundiced view that anti-gunners hold of gun nuts. And only the most suggestible gun owners really believe that they are going to be fighting off the invading Chinese or North Korean Army, even though those make for fun movies if the soundtrack music is fairly good. But people do want high-powered weapons to combat a variety of potential assailants, whether it be a rogue cop on a killing spree, a local criminal gang who is set on doing business in your neighborhood, a bunch of angry rioters set on burning down your business or home, or any number of malevolent actors out there.

    Any kind of gun control that reduces the overall availability of guns will almost certainly reduce gun violence. the only real question is a person’s tolerance or lack of tolerance for those laws, but don’t pretend they wouldn’t work at least partially.

    There are estimated to be 16 million AR-15 rifles in the United States. At most, maybe two or three of them are used in any given year for a mass shooting (despite what people might think, pistols are used far more often in these shootings than rifles are). So let’s say that over a 20-year period that maybe as many of 50 of these rifles are going to be used in this heinous manner.

    If we confiscate half of the 16 million AR-15s — my calculator suggests that would be 8 million — do you think there will be a linear relationship and the number of mass shootings are going to drop by 50% too? I don’t, but who knows, maybe I have it all wrong. But what is a rational plan for getting rid of these weapons? Maybe you could offer every owner $10,000 for each AR-15 they voluntarily turn in. If we managed to claim each one, that would cost us $160 billion (not counting what we spend collecting, storing, and destroying the rifles) which is turning into a rounding error in the Biden Administration, so perhaps that is doable. Or maybe we hedge out bets and offer $100,000 for each turned-in rifle, since that comes out to $1.6 trillion and we’re getting used to dealing in trillions of dollars these days.

    I’m not trying to mock your earnest concern about these sort of issues, I’m just warning that there aren’t very many palatable answers for how to deal with this, and certainly none that don’t cost a great deal of money and don’t expand government bureaucracy in a troubling way. At a time when there are activists who are openly talking about ways to abridge the First Amendment in the name of social harmony, I’m not too keen on those who want to abridge the Second Amendment as a trial run.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  73. @71 norcal That is an argument, but when we look at the situation on the ground, it isn’t what happens. If you compare Seattle and Vancouver BC for example (similar populations, media market, crime rate, high level of interaction between them, including smuggling, etc) Seattle has a much larger gun-violence rate than Vancouver BC while Vancouver has much stricter gun laws.

    Nic (896fdf)

  74. @74 Good point. I think culture is a huge factor in this. For some reason, Canadians are more mellow and law-abiding. Maybe it’s their approach to the drug problem. 🙂

    The culture in the U.S. contributes to the problems I described.

    Also, I’ll bet the U.S. has many more non-hunting guns per capita than Canada. To get rid of them would require an all-powerful government. I don’t want to see that.

    norcal (01e272)

  75. Someone who thinks the military will be used to enslave the public isn’t the one I want to listen to when it comes time to take away the public’s guns.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  76. @JVW @73 The “we need guns to fight the government” is an argument that gets brought up regularly in the gun control discussion though and there were a fair number of proponents of “watering the tree of liberty” in the last decade or so.

    What if you don’t confiscate any of the 16 million AR 15s? What if you just delegalize the sale of them so they are out of the market? How many will be available to use in 30 years? What if we had taken them permanently out of the market in the 1980s? How many would be available today? (not actually saying we need to make AR-15s illegal to sell, more a thought exercise and yes, the data from the assault weapons ban wasn’t particularly indicative, but that law as weird and 10 years isn’t long in the life of a firearm so I don’t know that the data was good). Really, though, if you look at guns used in crime it’s 9mm Luger that people should be talking about. ARs are flashy, big, and scary looking, but the Luger 9mm is what criminals commonly use.

    @norcal@75 I agree that culture does make a difference, though there is a fair amount of (non rahrahUSA) cultural exchange between Seattle and Vancouver. And I’d bet that the number of guns per capita was similar not that long ago, though it is probably very dis-similar now. I don’t particularly want Canada’s specific gun laws myself, just using it as a comparison point.

    @NJRob@76 It is a silly argument, both in the not-likely-to-happen and if-it-did-your-weapons-wouldn’t-make-a-difference aspects, isn’t it, but people do seem to make it.

    Nic (896fdf)

  77. @JVW @73 The “we need guns to fight the government” is an argument that gets brought up regularly in the gun control discussion though and there were a fair number of proponents of “watering the tree of liberty” in the last decade or so.

    What if you don’t confiscate any of the 16 million AR 15s? What if you just delegalize the sale of them so they are out of the market? How many will be available to use in 30 years? What if we had taken them permanently out of the market in the 1980s? How many would be available today? (not actually saying we need to make AR-15s illegal to sell, more a thought exercise and yes, the data from the assault weapons ban wasn’t particularly indicative, but that law as weird and 10 years isn’t long in the life of a firearm so I don’t know that the data was good). Really, though, if you look at guns used in crime it’s 9mm Luger that people should be talking about. ARs are flashy, big, and scary looking, but the Luger 9mm is what criminals commonly use.

    Guns are highly durable and easily repairable. What you want to accomplish would take many decades. More then 30. Ammunition is neither. Tax ammunition based on muzzle energy, which is a decent stand in for lethality. Tax powder as well which will discourage re-load operations that want to get around the tax. Put a floor on muzzle energy so you can target shoot with small slow rounds. (e.g. 22 sub sonic) and put in a tax refund (with receipt and affidavit that all ammunition was use for hunting o pest control) for a modest number of rounds for hunters. Make a carve out for shooting ranges to skip the tax on ammunition used on site.

    This will raise the price of ammunition and thus diminish the demand. If every .223 or 7.62 round costs over a 100$ nut cases aren’t going to just run out and buy a box when they feel sad. People concerned about personnel protection can still access it and train with their weapon.

    Time123 (36651d)

  78. The issue of gun control is a thorny one, especially when it comes to preventing gun-related deaths. The most common gun-related death comes from the use of handguns, not AR-15s or other long guns.

    Deaths from mass casualty attacks last year sat around 500. A trivial amount when compared to the thousands of other deaths from non-mass casualty attacks.

    Yet, Democrats are fixated on banning high-capacity magazines and AR-15=type guns – but those aren’t going to solve the problem. And no one is talking about banning handguns, the gun type with the most deaths to its name.

    I get the sense that most politicians just want to do something for the sake of doing it, knowing that bad people will still get guns and still commit crimes, including murdering people with their weapons.

    But they will sure feel better.

    That said – do I have an answer? Nope. Not at this point. But going forward, the one thing I would do is institute a law saying that everything legal gun sold to a person has to include fingerprint ID technology that would only allow the lawful owner to shoot the gun. Stolen guns are used to murder a lot of people. I believe a law like that would save a lot more lives than banning extended magazines or assault-style weapons.

    Hoi Polloi (15cfac)

  79. The overwhelming majority of gun owners are level headed and responsible. The exceptions would not take kindly to well-intentioned friends or family gently requesting they hand over their firearms. (From my cold dead hands and all that). Here I have to wonder if we can’t think of one or two hot-headed friends or relatives we wish weren’t a gun owner.

    I don’t have an answer either. It might be worth noting that the Founders were not above confiscation of firearms during the revolution when public safety was at stake. And they weren’t too careful, in theory they were only taking guns from suspected loyalists but in practice in some instances it was indiscriminate. This was pre-2A of course.

    But I know we couldn’t do that today.

    JRH (52aed3)

  80. A captious person might wonder why we let in a Middle East Muslim family into the country, and just a year or two after 9/11 to boot.

    nk (1d9030)

  81. A captious person might wonder why we let in a Middle East Muslim family into the country, and just a year or two after 9/11 to boot.

    nk (1d9030) — 3/24/2021 @ 8:23 am

    Any evidence that the fact he’s Muslim and a Syrian refuge played a roll in his motivation? If not this just looks as if you dislike Muslims.

    Time123 (36651d)

  82. The overwhelming majority of gun owners are level headed and responsible. The exceptions would not take kindly to well-intentioned friends or family gently requesting they hand over their firearms. (From my cold dead hands and all that). Here I have to wonder if we can’t think of one or two hot-headed friends or relatives we wish weren’t a gun owner.

    I don’t have an answer either. It might be worth noting that the Founders were not above confiscation of firearms during the revolution when public safety was at stake. And they weren’t too careful, in theory they were only taking guns from suspected loyalists but in practice in some instances it was indiscriminate. This was pre-2A of course.

    But I know we couldn’t do that today.

    JRH (52aed3) — 3/24/2021 @ 8:05 am

    I don’t think it would be a net benefit to doing this, but given that our Homicide rate is about 4 times that of the UK, France, Isreal and Canada it’s clear that there’s some opportunity to improve.

    Time123 (36651d)

  83. @JVW @73 The “we need guns to fight the government” is an argument that gets brought up regularly in the gun control discussion though and there were a fair number of proponents of “watering the tree of liberty” in the last decade or so.

    The government includes your local sheriff, police, FBI, ATF, the SWAT teams famously attached to the Department of Education, and so on. I’m not a big advocate of the loud mouths who talk about fighting off law enforcement, but I’ve been around enough to know that there are plenty of cases in which law enforcement is corrupt and can’t be trusted to act in the public interest. Having an armed citizenry at the very least makes a corrupt law enforcement agency think twice about harassing citizens. But I’ve never heard — or if I have, I have never taken seriously — any fools who think they will repel the Third Armored Corps if push comes to shove.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  84. Any evidence that the fact he’s Muslim and a Syrian refuge played a roll in his motivation?

    Reports are that his social media (now scrubbed, naturally) were full of the typical Muslim grievances against the culture which rescued him from his dysfunctional homeland.

    And of course, as is so typical in these cases, he had a violent past yet no one saw fit to prevent him from owning weapons. In oh-so-politicially-correct Boulder could part of the reason have been that law enforcement and the judicial system didn’t want to be seen as targeting a Muslim immigrant?

    JVW (ee64e4)

  85. This will raise the price of ammunition and thus diminish the demand. If every .223 or 7.62 round costs over a 100$ nut cases aren’t going to just run out and buy a box when they feel sad. People concerned about personnel protection can still access it and train with their weapon.

    Time123 (36651d) — 3/24/2021 @ 6:29 am

    I see you enthusiastically endorse poll taxes.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  86. Any evidence that the fact he’s Muslim and a Syrian refuge played a roll in his motivation?

    Reports are that his social media (now scrubbed, naturally) were full of the typical Muslim grievances against the culture which rescued him from his dysfunctional homeland.

    And of course, as is so typical in these cases, he had a violent past yet no one saw fit to prevent him from owning weapons. In oh-so-politicially-correct Boulder could part of the reason have been that law enforcement and the judicial system didn’t want to be seen as targeting a Muslim immigrant?

    JVW (ee64e4) — 3/24/2021 @ 8:56 am

    I saw a few tweets about his social media presence. But none of the examples I saw were strident or Anti-American. I saw one where he called Trump and A-hole but the rest were about the positive impact immigrants have. Do you have info to the contrary?

    I agree with you that we don’t take the warning signs of mental illness seriously.

    Time123 (441f53)

  87. This will raise the price of ammunition and thus diminish the demand. If every .223 or 7.62 round costs over a 100$ nut cases aren’t going to just run out and buy a box when they feel sad. People concerned about personnel protection can still access it and train with their weapon.

    Time123 (36651d) — 3/24/2021 @ 6:29 am

    I see you enthusiastically endorse poll taxes.

    NJRob (eb56c3) — 3/24/2021 @ 9:00 am

    You think this is some kind of ‘gotcha’ but it’s not. In addition to your comparison being dumb I’ve made it clear I don’t really support the idea, only that it’s a functional step that could be taken and still comply with the 2A.

    Time123 (36651d)

  88. Yes, that is what I suggest, and I suggest we include manufacturers and retailers in sharing the liability. At present, neither has any stake in limiting access to machines expressly designed to kill human beings.

    But that’s not why you want to do it. You want to drive them out of business.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  89. Nobody is going to fight off the US military with their personal weapons arsenal.

    An excellent argument against a standing army.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  90. Nobody is going to fight off the US military with their personal weapons arsenal.

    An excellent argument against a standing army.

    Kevin M (ab1c11) — 3/24/2021 @ 9:33 am

    I think that debate ended in the very early 1800’s

    Time123 (441f53)

  91. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg7hWN-wS3Q&t=25s

    Off topic, but racist Mazie Hirono explicitly states that she will vote against all white people for Biden’s cabinet.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  92. Time123,

    it’s not dumb. It’s the functional equivalent and if poll taxes are an unconstitutional restraint on voting rights then equivalent taxes are an unconstitutional restraint on 2nd Amendment rights. Can’t get any simpler than that.

    But your attempt to waive your hands and dismiss it instead of explaining how they aren’t the same is telling.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  93. <em If the Georgia shooter had had to wait 3 days, maybe he would have come to his senses (maybe not, but we don’t have a lot of data on people who had the impulse to mass murder one day and were prevented from doing so that day and so decided not to, we do have suicide data, which says that if you prevent someone from committing suicide once, they are less likely to try again).

    The only thing that waiting periods impact are gun suicides. Perhaps that’s worth it. But when you say “oh, we have this one restriction, why not this next restriction?” then you are arguing FOR the slippery slope.

    Example: Consider what has happened with tobacco. Thirty years ago one could smoke nearly anywhere and a pack of cigarettes cost less than a dollar. Then came sensible restrictions (e.g. no smoking in elevators and grocery stores). Now, you cannot smoke in your own home in some places and last I looked a pack of cigarettes cost to $10m ostly tax. This kind of steady “progress” of “sensible restrictions”, pushed by those that hate a product, should be instructive. God knows the alcohol producers understand this, as do the gun makers.

    Did you know that the NRA signed onto FDR’s Firearm Act, with the understanding that it would be this far and no further? And then, no sooner was the ink dry and Congress was pushing for further restrictions. The NRA learned from that.

    Any kind of gun control that reduces the overall availability of guns will almost certainly reduce gun violence.

    This is almost certainly false. Most mass shootings take place in gun-free zones.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  94. As it stands today, mass killings are the collateral damage from the second amendment, as you point out in your comment.

    They are also collateral damage from banning guns in certain areas. Mass shootings in places where guns are allowed tend to have far fewer victims.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  95. Any evidence that the fact he’s Muslim and a Syrian refuge played a roll in his motivation?

    As much evidence as there is that if not for the kind of gun we don’t like, he would have gone on to be the next Mahatma Gandhi.

    nk (1d9030)

  96. I think that debate ended in the very early 1800’s

    There have been many periods since where the “standing army” was just a shell, and the citizenry had at least a powerful deterrent. Since World War II this has not been the case, but it was as recently as the 1930s.

    Pretty sure that it wasn’t true in 1861 either. Later, after Reconstruction ended, they passed the Posse Comitatus Act, preventing the use of any standing army against the citizenry. FWIW.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  97. if poll taxes are an unconstitutional restraint on voting rights

    Well, to be fair, poll taxes are unconstitutional because have an AMENDMENT that says poll taxes are unconstitutional.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  98. @90 “But that’s not why you want to do it. You want to drive them out of business.”

    No, I want them to stop marketing high-capacity semi-automatic antipersonnel weapons to anyone who shows up with some money to purchase them.

    The problem I’m trying to address is the continuing series of mass executions using these weapons. It appears that you don’t think of this as a problem. I hope I’m wrong about that.

    John B Boddie (d795fd)

  99. And if we’re gonna get personal, à la

    If not this just looks as if you dislike Muslims.

    I don’t know how much more woke it is to stigmatize mental illness.

    nk (1d9030)

  100. if poll taxes are an unconstitutional restraint on voting rights

    Well, to be fair, poll taxes are unconstitutional because have an AMENDMENT that says poll taxes are unconstitutional.

    Kevin M (ab1c11) — 3/24/2021 @ 10:11 am

    You beat me to it.

    Time123 (441f53)

  101. “Did you know that the NRA signed onto FDR’s Firearm Act, with the understanding that it would be this far and no further? And then, no sooner was the ink dry and Congress was pushing for further restrictions. The NRA learned from that.”

    The NRA also supported the Mulford Act, because the wrong people were carrying guns. Similar to current Republican voter suppression work, the wrong people are voting.

    Davethulhu (6ba00b)

  102. And if we’re gonna get personal, à la
    If not this just looks as if you dislike Muslims.
    I don’t know how much more woke it is to stigmatize mental illness.

    nk (1d9030) — 3/24/2021 @ 10:13 am

    I actually don’t care about being woke or not.

    If the race and religion of the perp are relevant then they’re worth talking about. As we did with nuts that attacked an army base a few years ago.

    But if they didn’t have anything to do with the act then bringing it up looks like a quilt by association. So far it looks like the murderer was mentally unstable and that their illness led them to commit a horrible act of violence. If there were some indication that his faith or ethnicity played a roll then I’ll take it back.

    Time123 (36651d)

  103. Nk, I want to add something. I know this isn’t universal but I don’t think that doing, saying, thinking, or believing one offensive thing automatically makes some a bad/bigoted/offensive person. It might contribute to the things that make them flawed. But we’re all flawed.

    Time123 (441f53)

  104. Well, to be fair, poll taxes are unconstitutional because have an AMENDMENT that says poll taxes are unconstitutional.

    Kevin M (ab1c11) — 3/24/2021 @ 10:11 am

    And the 2nd Amendment explicitly states “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

    That doesn’t mean tank tops.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  105. https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/boulder-shooter-isis-sympathizer-leftists-hardest-robert-spencer/

    Well it seems that there is plenty of evidence that his sympathy was with radical islamic groups and with the radical leftist victimization mindset.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  106. Later, after Reconstruction ended, they passed the Posse Comitatus Act, preventing the use of any standing army against the citizenry. FWIW.

    Except when the regular Army have been deployed against citizens. Federal troops were deployed after the PCA was enacted to break strikes in the late 1800s and early 1900s; sent to quell civil disturbances in the 1940s (Detroit and Philadelphia) and 1960s (Detroit, Washington, DC, Chicago, and Baltimore); the 1970s anti-war protests (where the Army conducted domestic spying activities); and at Pine Ridge reservation (Wounded Knee); and the 1990s (Los Angeles, something I remember well since I worked downtown at the time). Source

    There are enough exceptions to the PCA to drive an army through.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  107. Well, to be fair, poll taxes are unconstitutional because have an AMENDMENT that says poll taxes are unconstitutional.

    Kevin M (ab1c11) — 3/24/2021 @ 10:11 am

    And the 2nd Amendment explicitly states “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

    That doesn’t mean tank tops.

    NJRob (eb56c3) — 3/24/2021 @ 10:53 am

    And yet I can’t buy a hand grenade, weapons grade plutonium, or a belt fed machine gun. Looks as if it’s not an absolute right.

    Time123 (36651d)

  108. https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/boulder-shooter-isis-sympathizer-leftists-hardest-robert-spencer/

    Well it seems that there is plenty of evidence that his sympathy was with radical islamic groups and with the radical leftist victimization mindset.

    NJRob (eb56c3) — 3/24/2021 @ 10:55 am

    Were you able to get to any of the links that supported their claims? Both Chrome and Edge failed to load jihadwatch and gave me a privacy error/warning.

    Time123 (36651d)

  109. Worked just fine for me on Brave. Guess Google and Microsoft have a problem with Mr. Spencer getting the public to read his sites.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  110. Okay, I’m going to chime in here. Does anyone else remember the first mass shooting at a school? Well, maybe not the very first, but certainly the first in modern times, or my living memory. The shooter was a . . . sixteen-year old girl, Brenda Ann Spencer.

    First day of school, second semester, my senior year, January 1979. Woke up in the morning, went to school, and by the end of the day, the whole world had changed.

    Brenda Ann had told her father that she was interested in hunting, so for Christmas he gave her a .22 rifle. A few weeks later, she pretended to be sick, so she wouldn’t have to go to school, and when her parents went to work, she set up a sniper’s nest in her bedroom and opened fire on the elementary school across the street. She killed a principal, a security guard, and wounded eight children.

    Once she ran out of ammo, she simply sat down to play with her dolls and toys. The police were afraid to breach her room, because she said she had a gun, but when they finally did, the captain asked her, “Why?” And she said, “I don’t like Mondays.”

    That’s about as rational explanation you will ever get from a school shooter, or any other mass murderer. But, hey, at least the Boomtown Rats got a hit single out of it, about a month later.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2I84-A9duY

    The silicon ship inside her head
    Gets switched to overload
    And nobody’s gonna go to school today
    She’s gonna make them stay at home

    And Daddy doesn’t understand it
    He always said she was good as gold

    And he can see no reason
    ‘Cause there are no reasons
    What reason do you need to told

    Tell me, “Why?!”
    I don’t like Mondays
    Tell me “Why?!”
    I don’t like Mondays

    Tell me, “Why?!”
    I don’t like Mondays
    I want to shoot the whole day down

    Now, explain that. What would possess a teenage girl, who had no history of mental disease or violent tendencies, to ask her father for a rifle, pretend to be sick, and then open fire on an elementary school?

    You can’t explain it. No one can.

    All these other shootings, we try to rationalize the motive of the offender, why he acted out. But to date, no one has been able to explain why Brenda Ann acted out.

    Gawain's Ghost (b25cd1)

  111. I went to google and grabbed some links on His social media. Looks like it got eaten. Which is frustrating.

    Heavy.com had the most detailed profile of the shooter. It doesn’t present anything that makes it appear that his crimes were motivated by Islamic extremism. a few excerpts below. To me it looks like he was Muslim, and mentally ill, and that one element of his paranoia was that he was persecuted because of his faith.

    Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa’s Facebook page includes hints of paranoia and discussions of his Muslim faith. He wrote on social media that he believed he had been “hacked” and “stalked” due to his religion, racism and false rumors.

    Alissa’s Facebook page, which has now been deleted, includes references to supposed hacks and stalking. It hints at paranoia, and Alissa said he believed his former high school had hacked him. Alissa had not posted publicly since September 18, 2020.

    He wrote in March 2019, “Just curious what are the laws about phone privacy because I believe. my old school (a west) was hacking my phone. Anyone know if I can do anything through the law?”

    Alissa’s older brother, Ali Alissa, told the Daily Beast he believed his brother had mental health issues. He said Ahmad Alissa was often paranoid and believed people were following him.

    “When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” Ali Alissa said.

    Alissa’s most recent Facebook post was shared from the Muslim Hub.

    “The Prophet said: ‘If a Muslim plants a tree or sows seeds and then a bird, or a person or an animal eats from it, it is regarded as a charitable gift,” the post said.

    In a post where he said he was being stalked, he wrote he believed racism was at play.

    In September 2018 he shared a story about Trump and possible tapes of the former president using racial slurs.

    He wrote, “Even if they released the tapes his base would probably throw a party for him. He could do whatever hew ants and his base would still support him regardless of what he says or does.”

    That same day he shared a story about Trump’s approach to refugees and wrote, “Trumps such a dick.”

    Time123 (441f53)

  112. NJRob, Duck Duck Go worked. There was nothing linked from that page that showed Islamic extremism. There is a tweet from Jack Posobiec that claimed he had anonymous sources about him but that’s the strongest evidence provided. He said a few rude things about Trump, but “trump can suck a d***” isn’t much of a political smoking gun.

    Still looks like it was mental illness.

    Time123 (441f53)

  113. @time@79 30 years was an example 😛 a gun well taken care of definitely will last a long time. My father has his grandfather’s WWI rifle (he doesn’t shoot it, it’s an antique) and the last time he had it professionally checked out and cleaned, the guy said that if he wanted to shoot it, they needed to replace the firing pin, but other than that it looked good. A gun not taken care of, though, may not last that long and not selling them would take new ones out of the market.

    @JVW@85 Honestly, over the long term you couldn’t even really fight off law enforcement with your personal weapons arsenal. They are pretty militarized these days. (I am not saying that militarized police are a good idea, but it is what it is.)

    @Kevin@91 Even if we took it back to the national guard and/or the reserves as today’s equivalent to Ye Olde Militia, no one personally could hold out against them. Many countries couldn’t hold out against our Reserves or National Guard.

    @Kevin@95 The only thing we have good data on for the US that waiting periods impact are suicides. We don’t actually do a very good job of collecting data on gun violence due to politics, but I would bet you’d also get a decrease in gun related domestic violence incidents. To track mass shootings we’d need decades of data under consistent laws because our sample size of incidents of mass shootings/ year is low for statistical purposes.

    And everything is a slippery slope. Laws are a slippery slope, once you have one law, pretty soon you’ll have another. It is up to us as a population to say that these laws are OK and these laws are ones we don’t want, regardless of the topics the laws cover.

    @Kevin@96. Not really. The mass shootings this year have been in Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Florida. None of those is a particularly low gun-owning populous.

    Nic (896fdf)

  114. @time@79 30 years was an example 😛 a gun well taken care of definitely will last a long time. My father has his grandfather’s WWI rifle (he doesn’t shoot it, it’s an antique) and the last time he had it professionally checked out and cleaned, the guy said that if he wanted to shoot it, they needed to replace the firing pin, but other than that it looked good. A gun not taken care of, though, may not last that long and not selling them would take new ones out of the market.

    My grandfather gave me his bird hunting gun that he used pre-WW2. I still use it.

    Time123 (441f53)

  115. @106. And the 2nd Amendment explicitly states “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

    No.

    The Second Amendment, quilled by and for white males of property in an era of single shot-muskets, square-rigged sailing ships and slavery explicitly states:

    “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” – source, BoR/Nat’l Archives

    A lot of arcane 18th century thought by so called ‘originalists’ cling to musings posed by long dead men of the late 1700’s and is pretty much outdated for the life and times of the 21st century. Perhaps Franklin would be curious over the wonders of our day, but for the most part, they’d all be befuddled and lost in today’s fast moving world –be it AR-15s or Apollo 15– unless of course you still feel we should still hang horse thieves and keep those darkies in the fields pulling cotton. The document is for the living, hence honing it with some mature common sense to fit the life and times for the benefit of those alive– be it granting women the vote or recognizing a person is not property. It means nothing to the dead.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  116. @117, I don’t agree with every point. But that was very well written and thoughtful.

    Time123 (441f53)

  117. “He said a few rude things about Trump, but “trump can suck a d***” isn’t much of a political smoking gun.”

    Oh no, I guess I’m an islamic terrorist too.

    Davethulhu (6ba00b)

  118. It wasn’t remotely well written. It was childish and dismissive. The Constitution must be interpreted in the context in which it was written for it to mean anything. A “living, breathing Constitution ” just means you make it up as you go along because you don’t want to or cannot make the effort to amend it.

    NJRob (01c8a6)

  119. It wasn’t remotely well written. It was childish and dismissive. The Constitution must be interpreted in the context in which it was written for it to mean anything. A “living, breathing Constitution ” just means you make it up as you go along because you don’t want to or cannot make the effort to amend it.

    NJRob (01c8a6) — 3/24/2021 @ 2:10 pm

    I’m making a distinction between “I agree with your point” and “You have presented your point in a compelling and well written way.”
    This struck me as a well written presentation of his point.

    Time123 (53ef45)

  120. 120.It wasn’t remotely well written.

    “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” – source, BoR/Nat’l Archives

    No.

    It wasn’t.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  121. The Constitution must be interpreted in the context in which it was written for it to mean anything.

    =the context in which it was written=

    Must?

    1789. The era of single-shot muzzle-loaded muskets; quills and parchment; square-rigger sailing ships; powdered-wiggers in pantaloons sipping warm ale from lead-pewter tankards, dining on squirrel stew, peeing and pooping out back in a ditch behind the inn before a visit to the local knocking shop; a time when persons are bought/sold/owned as property; where a no-vote woman’s place was literally in the home, churning butter; where bleeding you dry was advanced medicine and it took two weeks to travel 120 miles… and 3 months to cross an ocean. Apollo 15 did it in 12 minutes.

    A time when… there was no… baseball.

    Must, Little Buddy?

    Nah.

    ‘…no phones, no lights, no motor cars; not a single luxury; like Robinson Crusoe, its primitive as can be.’ – ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ CBS TV, 1964-67

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  122. @114 yes I looked too. Neither of the links provided provided evidence that the shooter is an Isis sympathizer, just claimed he is. I’m not arguing that he’s not, he may well be.

    JRH (52aed3)

  123. Absence of evidence on the internet is only evidence of common sense.

    nk (1d9030)

  124. NK I’ve read a lot of your comments on here — mostly in lurk mode. And for my money you’re possibly the best commenter on here. That comment and the assumption you are making are silly.

    Anyway here is an analysis of that claim that I found by searching “Isis Colorado” on twitter. Yes, it is an Arabic fact checking site so maybe that disqualifies them in some eyes. If actual evidence is out there I guess we will see. But so far actual evidence of the guy supporting ISIS is no where to be seen. Claims otherwise are increasing.

    “No credible news source or official has spoken about ties AIissa may have had with ISIS. Twitter user Jack Posobiec, (who has spread misinformation before) claimed that his knowledge about the shooter’s motivations came from a White House official, yet has provided no confirming evidence. The National Review then published an account from activist Laura Loomer who spoke on behalf of an anonymous source in Boulder law enforcement. While anonymous sources are sometimes vital to big stories, the sources here have not been verified by credible platforms.

    Alissa is 21 years old, and his family emigrated from Syria when he was a small child. His brother told CNN that he had at times been bullied for his name and for being Muslim, and this may have contributed to mental health issues and anti-social tendencies. Screenshots captured before the shooter’s Facebook page was removed show that he disliked former President Trump, and worried about Islamophobia and the treatment of U.S. immigrants. VICE reports that he even once publicly mourned the deadly ISIS attack on a nightclub in Paris in 2015 by adding a French flag filter to his Facebook photo.

    Barring further evidence, it remains only a rumor that Alissa had any sympathies towards, or ties with ISIS.”

    JRH (52aed3)

  125. er, to clarify, I’m assuming that you were assuming he supports Isis based on rumours. That might be a silly assumption of my own.

    JRH (52aed3)

  126. That comment and the assumption you are making are silly.

    I agree. I am engaging in absurdism. Heavily.

    But not trolling. Because it’s not my intent to derail the thread. Only to highlight the bias for preferred narratives when things like this happen.

    And I agree that Laura Loomer is not a reliable source by any stretch.

    nk (1d9030)

  127. Any evidence that the fact he’s Muslim and a Syrian refuge played a roll in his motivation?

    As much evidence as there is that if not for the kind of gun we don’t like, he would have gone on to be the next Mahatma Gandhi.

    nk (1d9030) — 3/24/2021 @ 9:49 am

    nk, stop making me laugh so much!

    norcal (01e272)

  128. You know why the Brits invented the sandwich, don’t you, norcal? So they could outlaw knives and forks.

    nk (1d9030)

  129. 🙂

    norcal (01e272)

  130. The killer undressed himself leaving on only his shorts. I think this was because he knew that if so, he’d be least likely to be shot. It was calculated. And then in response to a question, he asked for his mother

    He was one FBI’s “radar screen” for some reason – in connection with another person. But that was all they would say.

    He had a history of violence and was arrested twice. Once they accepted as a motive an excuse that he’d been bullied – but the thing he complained about had happened at least weeks before.

    He bought the rifle 6 days before the murders (4 days after it became legal to possess it there?)

    The Atlanta killer bought his the same day.

    Sammy Finkelman (ab785c)

  131. District of Columbia v. Heller (554 U.S. 570 (2008)) held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes. There seems little doubt in Scalia’s opinion that the Founders did not intend the right to possess a firearm depended on membership in the militia (which consisted of the male citizenry at large).

    Personally, I would extend the right to bear any firearm that can be carried by an individual soldier. This would not include hand grenades or nuclear weapons, as they are explosives, not firearms.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  132. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/03/the-geek-in-pictures-contra-grabber-edition.php

    Charts, graphs and facts. The politically incorrect edition.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  133. @133. No doubt Scalia shunned Federal security and a kept a single shot musket by his butter churn and a flintlock pistol on his nightstand. The Lord makes mistakes; giraffes, wax beans, bacon grease and Scalia. The ‘opinion’ of the bought-ad-paid-for-conservative Scalia was dead wrong; the consequences don’t matter to Scalia anyway; Scalia is dead; God called him home whilst on a hunting trip to shoot more of the Lord’s creatures– then sent him to Heller. See the light: that’s how we know there’s a God. 😉

    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/us/politics/scalia-led-court-in-taking-trips-funded-by-private-sponsors.html

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  134. More on the liability idea, and gun makers being responbile for gun misuse since “guns are only for killing.”

    Several states (NY just today) are legalizing marijuana. Marijuana’s sole purpose is intoxication and modern versions of pot do not lend themselves to mild dosings.

    So, who is responsible for MJ-related deaths? The vendors? The state that allowed it? Or is it just the person who misused it, even though the vendors and the state have deeper pockets and more vulnerable to lawfare deterrents?

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  135. Personally, I would extend the right to bear any firearm that can be carried by an individual soldier.

    In the Miller case, the Court ruled against possession of a shotgun, since shotguns are not typically useful in a militia setting. But of course automatic weapons are, so that decision had to be ignored, and was.

    I do not see any bright line for limited such weapons, but I would create one: Individuals may obtain and possess any firearm that is available to any civil authority in their state. If the civil authorities chose to disarm and rely on billy clubs, then they can insist the citizenry do as well. If they want to all have automatic weapons, then everyone else can too.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  136. There are enough exceptions to the PCA to drive an army through.

    That was the point of the FWIW

    Also, Little Rock (1957), where the 101st airborne enforced desegregation of Central High. This was mostly because the governor, after promising Ike one thing, did another and Ike wanted to make a point about federal law being supreme. The fact that the Soviets were using the issue to great effect was another.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  137. The 101st Airborne in Little Rock:

    Roadblock Alpha was the scene of the day’s most dramatic incident. The barrier had been thrown up in an intersection a block east of Central High. There, in the first olive moments of Tuesday morning, ringleaders began organizing their men. A lanky, lantern-jawed major watched them from beside a sound truck. His voice rasped over the loudspeaker: “Please return to your homes or it will be necessary to disperse you.” They didn’t budge. “Nigger lover,” one of them muttered, and another called, “Russian!” A man in a baggy brown suit shouted to the others, “They’re just bluffing. If you don’t want to move, you don’t have to.”

    The major ripped out a command. Twelve paratroopers with fixed bayonets formed a line and braced their rifle butts against their hips in the on-guard position for riot control; it brought each bayonet on a line with the crowd’s throats. Again the major snapped an order, and the soldiers moved forward. The mob retreated. The man in the brown suit held his ground until the last moment; then he broke and ran. He didn’t run far, however. The Army had won the first skirmish, but the showdown was yet to come. The black children hadn’t even reached the school.

    That moment arrived in a crisp, swiftly executed maneuver. Central High’s 8:45 bell rang. Simultaneously the barricade at Park Avenue and Sixteenth Street opened to admit a lead jeep, an Army station wagon, and a rear guard jeep. They braked together in front of the school, and the Negro children emerged from the station wagon as three platoons of paratroopers ran up on the double with rifles at port arms and formed a semicircle, shielding the children with a hedge of bayonets. A fourth platoon, lining up on either side of the black students, escorted them up the steps. The crowd watched in stunned silence. Then a woman cried brokenly, “Oh my God! The niggers are inside!” Others shouted, “They’re in! They’re in!” Another woman screamed and tore at her hair. The crowd shifted, tilting forward.

    At Roadblock Alpha the throng had thickened. Again the major said harshly, “Let’s clear this area right now. This is the living end! I’ll tell you, we’re not going to do it on a slow walk this time.” Nothing happened, and he ordered the paratroopers to resume their advance. As they came on, the crowd recoiled, hopping, to the front lawn and then to the veranda of a private home, all the time yelling that this was private property, that the troopers had no right to come after them on it. The soldiers didn’t miss a step. Up on the porch they came, and then across it as the mob scrambled backward from the bayonets.

    Those who hesitated were being methodically pushed off the piazza when one of them struck back. He was C. E. Blake, a Missouri-Pacific switchman who had been among the most active agitators during the past two days. Blake seized a soldier’s rifle barrel and dragged him down. As they sprawled together another paratrooper reversed his M-1 and clouted the switchman’s head with the steel butt. Blood streaming from his scalp, he crawled away on all fours shouting at photographers, “Who knows the name of that lowlife son of a bitch who hit me?” Without a glance in his direction the troopers continued to move out while a stony-eyed sergeant called, “Keep those bayonets high—right at the base of the neck.”

    William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  138. In the Miller case, the Court ruled against possession of a shotgun, since shotguns are not typically useful in a militia setting. But of course automatic weapons are, so that decision had to be ignored, and was.

    No doubt in a future SC case the Court will need to decide what types of weapons Miller permits (the gun at issue was a short-barrel shotgun, not a standard long-barrel, and possessed by criminals, not law-abiding citizens). I would think a short barrel shotgun would be “typically useful” in a militia setting.

    From the Heller opinion:

    ……….
    We may as well consider at this point (for we will have to consider eventually) what types of weapons Miller permits. Read in isolation, Miller’s phrase “part of ordinary military equipment” could mean that only those weapons useful in warfare are protected. That would be a startling reading of the opinion, since it would mean that the National Firearms Act’s restrictions on machineguns (not challenged in Miller) might be unconstitutional, machineguns being useful in warfare in 1939. We think that Miller’s “ordinary military equipment” language must be read in tandem with what comes after: “[O]rdinarily when called for [militia] service [able-bodied] men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.” 307 U. S., at 179. The traditional militia was formed from a pool of men bringing arms “in common use at the time” for lawful purposes like self-defense. “In the colonial and revolutionary war era, [small-arms] weapons used by militiamen and weapons used in defense of person and home were one and the same.” State v. Kessler, 289 Ore. 359, 368, 614 P. 2d 94, 98 (1980) (citing G. Neumann, Swords and Blades of the American Revolution 6–15, 252–254 (1973)). Indeed, that is precisely the way in which the Second Amendment ’s operative clause furthers the purpose announced in its preface. We therefore read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns. That accords with the historical understanding of the scope of the right, see Part III, infra.25
    ……..

    I actually disagree with the above. Short barrel shotguns are inherently useful for law-abiding citizens to possess. There should be nothing inherently wrong with a responsible citizen owning such a weapon.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  139. I agree, Rip. A short-barreled shotgun is the most effective defense inside a home. It’s also the least likely to result in collateral damage, as shotgun pellets are unlikely to go through walls.

    norcal (01e272)

  140. 45-47: It’s becoming clearer what was the idea behind the storming of the Capitol.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/us/politics/oath-keepers-proud-boys-capitol-riot.html

    The new disclosure about the links between two extremist groups was contained in a motion filed late Thursday night by prosecutors seeking to keep Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, in jail before his trial. Prosecutors cited several of Mr. Meggs’s private Facebook messages in which he told others that as many as 100 Oath Keepers planned to be in Washington for a rally in January answering a call by President Donald J. Trump.

    “He called us all to Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!!” Mr. Meggs wrote on Dec. 22. “Sir yes Sir!!! Gentlemen we are heading to DC.” …

    …Lawyers for some of the other nine Oath Keepers charged with Mr. Meggs in a conspiracy to disrupt the certification of the presidential election have nonetheless argued in their own court papers that they were not preparing for an offensive assault on the Capitol, but were instead getting ready for potential violence from leftists. Lawyers for some Proud Boys charged in connection with the riot have made similar arguments in filings and in court.

    By the day after Christmas, however, Mr. Meggs appeared to have abandoned all discussion of antifa and was focused on overturning the results of the election. On Dec. 26, the new court papers say, he wrote a message announcing that “Trumps staying in” and planned to use the “emergency broadcast system on cellphones” to invoke the Insurrection Act, effectively establishing martial law.
    “Wait for the 6th,” Mr. Meggs wrote, “when we are all in DC to insurrection.”

    Invoking martial law was something that Mike Flynn had proposed in a private meeting with Donald Trump and Sidney Powell, at which there were also White House officials coming in and out, including the White House counnsel.

    But Trump had rejected that idea!

    Why he rejected it – I think the answer was that it was not legally justified and if you want to add something else, the military could not be expected to go along, or some at least residual attachment to his oath of office. And also Donald Trump was not about to start a civil war or launch a failed coup.

    The riot was an attempt to give Trump another chance to say yes to martial law

    Wose idea was this? (martial law)

    Well, I can’t believe it was Mike Flynn’s and certainly not Mike Flynn’s alone. And Mike Flynn didn’t need Trump to stay in office – he had already been pardoned. And what connection did Mike Flynn have with the Oath Keepers?

    None tat I know of. But both Mike Flynn and the Oath Keepers had some connection to Russia. Mike Flynn you know and the as for the Oath Keepers:

    There is something called the Russian Imperial Movement based in St Petersberg, Russia and it has an offshoot called the base – a literal translation of al Qaeda – this is al Qaeda for white Christians – ad the Base has contacts with extremist groups in the United States.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/world/europe/capitol-far-right-global.html

    ….Matthew Heimbach, an organizer of the 2017 violent far-right protest in Charlottesville, Va…pent years working to forge alliances with like-minded groups in the Czech Republic, Germany and Greece.

    He even hosted a delegation from the Russian Imperial Movement in 2017, several years before the United States declared it a terrorist organization. Members of the group, which runs paramilitary-style camps to train Russian and foreign nationalists in military tactics, spent two weeks in the United States and traveled extensively.

    Photographs of the trip show Mr. Heimbach and one of the group’s leaders, Stanislav Shevchuk, posing with a Russian imperial flag in front of the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

    Mr. Heimbach, who denounced the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and claims to have renounced white nationalism, said he had also taken his Russian guests to Dollywood and the Country Music Hall of Fame in Tennessee.

    The Path Keepers are part of that collection of group that got training from Russia

    https://freebeacon.com/national-security/russian-group-offered-paramilitary-training-to-u-s-neo-nazis

    Five people involved in the Unite the Right rally in August 2017 were identified by their Twitter handles in an internal “general orders” document produced as a guide for rally participants.

    “We are expecting to have a large number of friendly people attend this rally ranging from Alt-Lite, Oath keepers, Proud Boys, and Trumpists to Identitarians, Neo Confederates, national socialists and other Alt Right groups,” the document states. “It is important that every group regardless of ideological differences work together at the event.”

    I don’t have anything like a dmoking gun or even a good clue, but it is looking very possible that the Capitol Hill riot was instigated by Vladimir Putin – who maybe didn’t understand that it had no chance of causing Donald Trump to declare martial law – successfully.

    And by the way, Kelly Meggs was lying to his followers when he said Donald Trump wanted them to make it wild – at least not his way. <b Donald Trump was not on board That in fact, was precisely the reason for the riot. To make it easier for Donald Trump to declare martial law.

    Sammy Finkelman (6975b4)

  141. @141 You’re right, norcal. A short-barrel shotgun is the best weapon for home defense. In fact, it was the preferred weapon of choice for US soldiers, particularly special forces, in Viet Nam. The reason why was because, in the jungle, the average kill range was eight feet or less.

    It takes a great deal of skill and training to shoot a long-barrel rifle or shotgun with accuracy. And those types of weapons are not very useful in close combat. They’re more for long-distance shooting. A short-barrel shotgun, with a pistol grip, whether pump-action or semi-automatic, like a 12-guage riot shotgun, is the weapon you need for home defense or close quarter combat. You don’t need to aim, or calculate trajectories; just point and pull the trigger.

    However, the fact remains that the vast majority of cases of gun violence, well over 90%, involve handguns. Very few involve rifles or shotguns, and even fewer involve military-style “assault weapons,” as they are called. It’s just that those that do get more attention in the media.

    This is why I don’t understand the obsession with banning “assault weapons.” Do these people really think that passing a law is going to make these weapons disappear? No, it’s only going to drive the market for them underground. Anyone who wants to buy a weapon like that can and will.

    It’s just like Prohibition. You want to ban alcohol? Are you kidding me? People have been consuming alcohol for over 10,000 years. They’re not going to stop, because you passed a law. Especially if that law does not apply to other countries, like for example Mexico, Canada and Ireland, or numerous other countries. All Prohibition did was provide the Mob, that is organized crime, with a profit motive; gangs set up speak easies and smuggling routes, and made millions.

    It’s the same with the illicit drug law act. You want to ban certain substances? All that does is drive their consumption underground, where the Mob already has the smuggling routes and distribution points set up. All the War on Drugs accomplished was to provide a profit motive for organized crime.

    It won’t be any different for guns. As long as there is a market, there will always be a buyer and seller.

    And more violence and disruption. Have we learned nothing since 1938?

    Gawain's Ghost (b25cd1)

  142. Hear, hear, GG!

    norcal (01e272)

  143. #142

    The Kevin McCarthy call with Trump does not square with this interpretation. It also seems inconsistent with the US Government’s slowness in bringing in support for the Capitol Police.

    Appalled (1a17de)

  144. I’m about as strong a supporter of the 2nd Amendment as you will ever come across. I believe that if you want, and can afford, to have a nuclear missile silo in your backyard, you have every right to build one. Same with flamethrowers and anti-tank missiles, or RPGs as they are called. Hey, the government has tanks, and the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is so that civilians can protect themselves from government tyranny.

    However, I do have reservations. I believe in common sense gun control. That means licensing and training. Regardless of the firearm, demonstrate proficiency with the weapon and knowledge of its lawful use.

    In no way does that infringe on your right to keep and bear arms. What it does is insure the proper use of them.

    I mean, seriously, look at what we require of police officers and military personnel; those who are licensed to carry firearms. Mandatory training, constant practice at the gun range, and if a weapon is discharged in the line of duty, mountains of paperwork and lawsuits galore.

    It doesn’t make any sense. It does when it comes to armed official–demonstrate proficiency with the weapon and knowledge of its lawful use. If that’s the standard for military personnel, it should be the standard for civilians as well. Hell, the Rangers, SEALS, and Delta forces require their soldiers to disassemble and reassemble their weapon blindfolded! Try that with your hunting rifle in a garage.

    Proficiency with the weapon and knowledge of its lawful use. To me, that is that should be mandatory before the purchase of any firearm. I mean, you can’t very well form a “well regulated” militia with a bunch of yahoos who have never held or shot a gun before, and don’t know what they’re doing with it.

    Otherwise, the result is anarchy and mass murders everywhere. Demonstrate proficiency with the weapon and knowledge of its lawful use. That should be the minimum requirement for the purchase of a firearm. Attend regular training at the gun range.

    That is what is required of the military and police. No less should be required of civilians, assuming they’re allowed the same weaponry.

    Gawain's Ghost (b25cd1)

  145. Correction: The shooter lived 30 miles away from the supermarket. Did any other family member live there?

    Investigators are both retracing his steps and trying to develop a blow b y blow account of the crime.

    Sammy Finkelman (6975b4)

  146. I later read thaat the killer lived 15 miles (not 30 miles) from the grocery store.

    Sammy Finkelman (6975b4)


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