Congressman Shot, Others Injured, At Congressional Baseball Practice
A Congressman was shot, and a staffer and security detail members injured, at a practice session for tomorrow's Congressional baseball game.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise has been shot, and at least four others injured, during a practice session in Alexandria, Virginia for tomorrow’s annual Congressional baseball game:
A gunman opened fire Wednesday morning on a baseball practice at a park in Alexandria involving Republican members of Congress, possibly injuring several including at least one lawmaker, Steve Scalise, the majority whip, according to police and a congressman.
Alexandria police would only confirm that a shooting had occurred and that one person was in custody.
Rep. Peter Kane (R-N.Y.), in an interview with The Washington Post, confirmed early details. King said Capitol Police confirmed the account to him.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told The Post that Capitol Police officers walked into the congressional gym around 7:30 a.m. Wednesday and told members about the shooting and said Scalise had been shot.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer tweeted: “Both @POTUS & @VP are aware of the developing situation in Virginia. Our thoughts and prayers are with all affected.”
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) Tweeted that “Shooter attacked a GOP baseball practice. Rifle. 50+ shots fired. 5 hit including Steve Scalise. I am not shot.”
The 7:30 a.m. practice in the park in the 400 block of East Monroe Street was the finally before Thursday night’s scheduled game between Republicans and Democrats at Nationals Park.
Brooks told CNN that he heard a loud “bam” behind third base.
“I see a rifle, and I see a little bit of a body and then I hear another bam and I realize there’s still an active shooter. At the same time I hear Steve Scalise over at 2nd base scream — he was shot,” he said.
Republican members of Congress, as well as Senators such as Rand Paul and Jeff Flake, were at the park practicing for an annual baseball game played by teams made up of Republican and Democratic legislators which is scheduled to take place tomorrow evening at Nationals Park in Washington. Apparently, Republicans have been using this particular facility at an Alexandria YMCA as a practice field for several years and their presence there during spring mornings is widely known. One member of Congress, South Carolina Congressman Jeff Duncan, who apparently had already left the practice told one reporter that he may have spoken with the shooter about a half hour before the incident when he was leaving the area. Whoever this person was reportedly asked either Duncan or another Member of Congress also leaving around the same time if the team practicing was made up of Republicans or Democrats. It was apparently at some point after that when the incident began with the shooter firing onto the field while Members of Congress practiced and members of the Capitol Police provided security. While there were some early reports that the suspect was dead, Alexandria police are reporting on their Twitter feed that he is “in custody,” and other press reports are saying that the suspect was taken to the hospital.
Senator Paul described the shooting during an interview on Morning Joe:
Sen. Rand Paul describes scene at GOP baseball practice where House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot https://t.co/ZHK26G4zSn
— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 14, 2017
And Congressman Mo Brooks from Alabama, who was among the first to get the word out to reporters of the incident, spoke with CNN about what happened.
“The gun continued to fire” .@RepMoBrooks gives first person account of shooting at baseball field in Alexandria https://t.co/2t5zZokBFs
— CNN (@CNN) June 14, 2017
As of now, there are no reports on the condition of Congressman Scalise or any of the victims, and no reports about the condition or identity of the shooter. There is also no word on either the identity of the gunman or what may have motivated him to act. Reports are suggesting, though that the weapon used was some form of “long rifle” that may or may not have physically resembled an AR-15 and that the weapon may have been equipped with a telescope to aid in shooting accuracy. Whether he had any other weapons is unknown. As more than one witness to the incident stated, though, it was fortunate that Scalise, who serves as House Majority Whip, was there with the Capitol Police because they were returning fire immediately. Senator Paul, in particular, said that he believes more people would have been shot if it hadn’t been for the fact that Scalise’s security detail began returning fire almost immediately. In his report to CNN, Brooks noted that one Member of Congress had brought his son with him to the practice but that they were able to get him into the dugout safely while shots were still being exchanged between Scalise’s security detail and the suspect.
As things stand, the information we have is fairly limited but it’s hard to believe that this was just a random event and that the shooter was likely aware of who was on the field before he opened fire. For one thing, it’s apparently well-known in the community that this field is used for practice by the Republican team for an event that has been an annual tradition for decades now. For another, the presence of so many cars in the area at such an early time of day would have seemed to have been a giveaway that something significant was getting away. In any event, as Senator Paul said, it’s fortunate that Congressman Scalise was on the team because otherwise there would have been no Capitol Police on the scene, and apparently, this is not an event that local police considered significant enough to have local security in place while the practice was going on.
Update: CBS News is reporting that the shooter has been identified:
JUST IN: Alexandria, Va., shooter has been identified as 66-year-old James T. Hodgkinson, law enforcement confirms
— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 14, 2017
The Washington Post has confirmed this:
The shooter at the GOP congressional baseball practice this morning is James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Ill., according to law enforcement officials. Hodgkinson, 66, owns a home inspection business. His home inspection license expired in November 2016 and was not renewed, state records show.
Hodgkinson was charged in April 2006 with battery and aiding damage to a motor vehicle, according to online records in St. Clair County, Illinois.
The report goes on to report that those assault charges were apparently dismissed. There are also reports that various social media accounts that may or may not belong to Hodgkinson show him to be posting material from the political left, but this has not been confirmed as genuine by law enforcement at this time and it isn’t even clear that police have been able to talk to the suspect as of yet since he was taken to the hospital.
Update #2: President Trump said in the brief statement from the White House that the shooter is dead:
Trump says the shooter is now dead from his injuries
— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) June 14, 2017
Meanwhile, we’re learning more about Hodgkinson and what appears to be the political rhetoric that may have motivated him to act. Additionally, it is being reported that the shooter was apparently a volunteer for the Bernie Sanders campaign last year, news which caused Senator Sanders to release a statement:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Wednesday he was “sickened” by the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and others at a congressional baseball practice, which appears to have been carried out by a former volunteer to his presidential campaign.
“I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign,” Sanders said in a statement delivered on the Senate floor.
“I am sickened by this despicable act. Let me be as clear as I can be: Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms,” he added.
The Vermont senator said real change can only be achieved “through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values.”
“My hopes and prayers are that Representative Scalise, congressional staff and the Capitol Police Officers who were wounded make a quick and full recovery,” he said.
“I also want to thank the Capitol Police for their heroic actions to prevent further harm.”
Here’s the video of the Sanders statement:
.@SenSanders statement that alleged shooter was presidential campaign volunteer: “I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms.” pic.twitter.com/iLjxDdnftN
< --- CSPAN (@cspan) June 14, 2017
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan also spoke from the floor of the House:
For all the noise and fury, we are a family. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. pic.twitter.com/ZbkXuwlbGk
— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) June 14, 2017
Scalise is undergoing surgery at present, but was said to be in stable condition and in “good spirits” prior to that.
No one is saying anything about the staff member who was shot in the chest.
Scalise has an A+ rating from the NRA…and a slug in his hip.
And he had a protection detail with him. Something Joe Citizen doesn’t have the luxury of.
Wonder how he feels about easy gun access, for every fwcking idiot that wants one, now?
If this was partisanship-related, I feel I need to condemn the use of violence. If it’s like most other attacks, the shooter probably has mental issues, diagnosed or not. And that’s the problem with giving guns out to everybody as freely as possible in the name of “rights”.
BTW…by the end of the day 90 other people are going to die of gun violence.
Enjoy your day…
@Franklin:
The shooter could be a mentally ill partisan. No, I’m not being facetious. Mentally healthy partisans do not attempt to address the issues by spraying bullets all over a baseball field.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl: Looks like you triggered the gun nuts with your logic. Here we go again – I sense another 300+ comment thread…
@CSK: Mentally healthy people don’t write off gun violence as simply a mental health problem either.
We can’t do much about having a certain percentage of the population mentally ill. However, there is this one lever we have, but the NRA refuses to let us pull that lever.
Best wishes to the injured for a speedy recovery.
It’s telling how in a room full of political junkies and generally opinionated people that this made almost no waves this morning. Bleary eyes watched the news on the break-room TV as coffee was retrieved and the nearly daily mass shooting raised few eyebrows. How sad for our society that such violence and body counts is so commonplace that it takes a legislator being included among the wounded for people to give a meh anymore.
@KM:
Yeah, it’s funny how Jonah Goldberg and other anti-terrorist neocons collectively shrug their shoulders at this sort of violence, but a brown guy with a knife shouting “Allah Akbar!” across the ocean demands our full and immediate attention.
Nations are supposed to provide security for their citizens…
@Franklin:
I’m sure it was a an anti-gun partisan.
No matter what the persons political persuasion…clearly he, or she, is just like ~90% of the other gun owners…categorically unfit to possess a fire-arm.
Another tolerant liberal.
The shooter is James Hodgkinson, 66, of Bellville, Illinois. He has one arrest–for damaging a motor vehicle–in 2006. Charges dropped or dismissed. Owned a home inspection business, but didn’t renew his license in 2016.
More to come, I’m sure.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting the gunman is a 66 year-old man from Belleville, IL.
The shooter is a Bernie Sanders supporter per his Facebook page.
@CSK: Agreed, I didn’t mean for my first two sentences to appear as either-or.
@Jack:
The word you are looking for Jack is terrorist. This man committed a terror attack on US soil but it will be downplayed as such in favor of such narratives as partisan politics, identity politics and gun issues. You went right to your preferred narrative missing the fact that this was inherently no different then what happened in London.
A nutcase decided to hurt /kill a whole bunch of innocent people for “reasons”, something no well-adjusted person would do. We do have a terrorist problem in this country – one where anyone angry or hateful enough can pick up a weapon and air their “grievances” in others blood. We as a society are becoming numb to this kind of horror and that is not OK.
Hodgkinson posted on his Facebook page that “Trump and Co. have to be destroyed.’
So he figured shooting up a baseball practice would accomplish that end?
A seemingly ordinary guy, with easy access to high-powered weaponry. Because he’s an older white guy it’s a mental health discussion…..
What I want to know is when Trump is going to ban old white guys from entering the country, just to keep us safe while we can figure out what is going on?
@KM: This is inherently different than what happened in London. This liberal douchebag Bertard didn’t shoot people at random, he was looking specifically to shoot/kill Republicans.
Keep preaching tolerance, liberals. Maybe one day you will understand what it means.
@Jack:
I was just commenting on idiots who should not b allowed to possess a gun…and there you are.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl: Aww, cupcake. If you think I internalize anything you say, you are delusional.
@Jack:
Who put the gun in the shooter’s hand? The very Congressmen who were shot. No gun = no shooting.
And don’t force us to list the many, many, many cases of right-wing terrorism in this country.
@michael reynolds: That’s like blaming big pharma for someone swallowing a bunch of pills. Go back to writing children’s books, they may actually believe the crap you shovel.
Hey guys,
This is a sensitive time, so let’s remember the rules:
1) This has nothing to do with the availability of guns. Guns are good, guns are kind, guns love us.
2) If the shooter was ideologically to the left, this was a fascist move because liberals all hate freedom.
3) If the shooter was on the right, he was mentally ill and this had nothing to do with politics.
4) The real victim here is Donald Trump.
5) The real villain here is the Public Theater.
6) Maybe if we all ignore Jack he will finally go away.
Given how many guns are out there, it’s surprising that this type of thing doesn’t happen all the time.
Oh, wait, it does.
Well, that settles it, nothing to see here. Good luck to the victims, they have our thoughts and prayers, for whatever good that will do. It’s a pity that nothing can be done about this sort of thing.
The second greatest tweet ever needs an update to fully address this.
“I didn’t think leopards would eat MY face,” congressman from the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party says in a statement.
(The greatest tweet ever was from Woody Allen’s son, wishing everyone a happy Father’s Day, or as they call it in his house, brother-in-law’s day)
@Jack:
What the hell, man? Did anything I said sound like remotely like tolerance or do you need your hearing checked?
Can you not be a hater for 5 minutes and recognize that this sort of thing happens because damaged people think they have the right to kill others in the name of their “cause” without jumping to your preferred storyline? That we keep seeing story after story about some angry person deciding blood in the streets is the best way to make their point? Somebody gets fired? They come in and shoot up the place. Somebody reads BS fake news and tries to shoot up a pizzeria. This guy seems to hate on Republicans so what’s he do? Decides to shoot up a place full of them.
I know you are pro-gun but Jack, even you can agree that this was a man who never should have had this weapon. He turned it against innocents solely because he wanted to HURT them. He picked his targets suitable to his irrational state and in the process committed a terrorist act. He’s no different then the ISIS nuts – they wanted to kill generic Brits, he seems to have wanted to kill generic Repubs. There can be no tolerance for such horrific acts or people but they are intrinsically the same whether you want to admit it or not.
Let’s just not hurt or offend guns. They are complicated and sensitive beings. Just like cars. If I’m hit by a car driven by an Irish-American, it’s totally fine to insult the Irish. He was probably drunk. But it’s just offensive to hate a machine.
Same thing goes with guns. Don’t even attempt to understand the complicate psyche of a mass-produced firearm.
And Steve Scalise–for a guy who had no problem speaking with David Duke the world has taken a weird and violent turn, hasn’t it?
Also, let’s not forget that the least powerful people in the world are the people who are busy trying to take away health care for 23 million in order to finance a tax cut for the rich. They are being forced to do this because they have no other choice. These people who seek out positions of governmental control are innocent as f–k.
It’s everybody else, from normal citizen to madman lone-wolf gun nut, who has total power. Like if you have a chronic condition, it’s your fault for having not having earned 300K or whatever it takes. Don’t be angry or divisive or anything. Just accept it, or watch Fox.
@KM: Now, now, Mr. Hodgkinson was a law abiding citizen just moments before he opened fire. Virginia allows open and concealed carry of long guns with no special permits.
Mr. Hodgkinson was simply exercising his second amendment rights, and you cannot restrict his constitutionally granted rights. That would be unthinkable.
Besides, as many members of the Tea Party have reminded us with their signs, “the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants.”
I can’t yet find any confirmation of Trump’s claim that Hodgkinson is dead.
@CSK:
It’s usually safe to stop right there….
Why do we have a Second Amendment? It’s not to shoot deer. It’s to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!
Senator Rand Paul says hi.
@Jack:
Actually, we do blame Big Pharma because Big Pharma lied about addiction issues and knowingly produces many times more pills than there are prescriptions for.
Now, explain how you shoot a guy without a gun.
@michael reynolds:
Please do. Include the number of wounded and dead.
I’ll bet you include the Elliot Rodgers, Sandy Hook, Aurora theater, Tucson, San Bernardino and Orlando Pulse shootings as right-wing terrorism.
You should turn down your heated rhetoric before they inspire anymore shooters. Your Rules.
@Tony W:
It is indeed.
Considering laws against marijuana have done nothing to stop marijuana consumption, I’m bewildered what “gun control” is supposed to do. Really, what are your proposals? Ban guns? How? Would that actually do anything?
Also keep in mind these events are not commonplace. Violence has been decreasing all the time and is lower than it’s ever been. We’re not in a gun violence epidemic. If you believe that, you’re swallowing Trump’s marketing campaign.
It should also be pointed out that the only reason this wasn’t worse was that a Capitol Police security detail was there. With guns.
Laws didn’t stop the shooting. Only another gun did.
The fact that the shooter seems to be a Bernie supporter (if we have the right guy) makes me wonder. I’ve commented here a few times that when I was younger non-governmental violence was associated with the left, and not as much with the right. (Of course there was lots of violence on the right too. Witness that Neo-nazis were prevalent enough that they made it into the original Blues Brothers movie as a subplot. But on the left things like the Symbanese Liberation Front and MOVE, or the Red Brigade in Europe seemed to fade away. ). But I’ve been wondering if we are starting to see that tide turn again. There was a semi-riot recently in… (Oregon?) where thousands of leftists confronted a few dozen white nationalists and the police were confiscating make shift weapons from the leftist side, more so that the alt-right clowns. And the intolerance on certain campuses has had a number of assaults and violent intimidations associated with it.
@Gustopher:
How do you conceal carry a long gun?
@Paul L.:
Oh STFU, you are in no position to talk about heated rhetoric. The GOP is the font of heated rhetoric. Limbaugh, Infowars, Breitbart, I mean really, just STFU or you risk creating a black hole of hypocrisy.
For those who haven’t checked I’ve updated the post with additional information about the shooter and a statement from Senator Bernie Sanders, for whom the shooter had apparently been a campaign volunteer at some point.
@Jeremy:
That’s because, apparently, you aren’t very smart. Look up gun violence statistics for other nations that have strict gun control. (Why do you think the terrorists in London used a van and knives?) Whle you are at it look up the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The US is a violent nation by any comparison. 90 people will die in the US today due to gun violence.
@Jeremy:
Run off and explain your logic to Kim Jong Un. He clearly needs nukes to deal with the fact that we have nukes. And of course the Ayatollahs need nukes. Because everyone armed, 24/7, is the way we want the world to be. Just look at Somalia: everyone’s got an AK and life is wonderful.
@Jeremy: Every year, about 30,000 people in this country are killed by guns. This is about the same as the number who are killed by cars. That sounds like an epidemic to me — a long running epidemic.
Cars give us independence and transportation. They make modern life possible in about 80-90% of the country. We get something very tangible for those deaths.
Guns give us… what? Dead and injured people, and little paper targets with holes in them, and a few dead deer. Is that a good trade off?
These events really are commonplace. Had today’s shooter been a better shot, there would have been a lot of dead people. Reports are that he got off 30-50 rounds. Hooray for poor marksmanship.
@Jack:
Apparently you don’t understand the opiod crisis. No surprise. You probably think big tobacco is innocent as well.
@michael reynolds: “Now, explain how you shoot a guy without a gun.”
Oh, be fair. The Jacks of the world love the idea of shooting guys without guns. Preferably darker skinned guys without guns.
(And yes, I know what you mean — but it’s so rare for such a sloppy sentence to come from this professional writer, I felt compelled…)
@Jeremy:
@wr:
I walked into it.
This guy was clearly a nut-job who never should have been allowed to own a gun.
What he did was a despicable, cowardly, and pointless act.
Having made that perfectly clear…
We have a President who openly admires and aligns with authoritarians. Who is odds with the Judiciary. Who is at odds with the Legislative. Who has openly discussed abridging the First Amendment. Who is trying desperately to discriminate based upon religion. Who almost immediately after taking office tried to remove sanctions from our enemy with absolutely no reciprocation. Who openly demands loyalty to himself from Public Servants, and not to the Constitution. Who openly discusses jailing those who disagree with him. Who is clearly guilty of obstruction of justice.
Republicans blindly defend all of the above…and wish for nothing more than to pretend our enemy did not attack us last year.
The far right loves to talk about second Amendment remedies. Well…when that happens I promise you that the tyranny will come from the right…and the remedies will come from the left. Today’s supine Republicans would have been called Loyalists in the 18th Century. Today’s Democrats are the only ones that can be called Patriots.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
Do your statistics account for differences in culture, population size, GDP, and the like? No? Why not?
@michael reynolds:
I agree that there is a problem. But how much of it is actually about guns, and not about other issues? Like the drug war, police brutality, that sort of thing.
And the issue with Somalia is not that they have AK-47s. It’s because they don’t have a government, or rule of law, or enforceable contracts, or property rights, or even, you know, basic liberalism like tolerance and all the things I just mentioned. I would think that would be a bigger impact on their quality of life than other factors; ignoring them makes you look like a fool.
@Gustopher:
And how much of that is due to gang warfare over selling drugs? How much of it is because of police firing their guns off for no reason? Or badly secured gun lockers?
And 30,000 — if that is indeed the actual number, since you don’t provide a citation — is 0.009375% of the population. Agree, nobody should die from gun violence. But that’s a pretty damn small epidemic. And again, subtract from that number:
– Gang warfare because of the black market in drugs
– Police brutality
– Suicides
And that number would be even less.
@Facebones:
Have you heard of 3D printers?
@Gustopher: Also, a very good friend of mine prevented a sexual assault because he had a handgun. So there’s a good use for firearms.
And you should look up how gun control was used to hurt and oppress black Americans for decades. Might make you reconsider.
Right-wing rules of engagement:
-If the crime is committed by a brown person, then his entire race is to blame
-If the crime is committed by a non-Christian, then his entire religion is to blame
-If the crime is committed by a white liberal, then all liberals are to blame
-If the crime is committed by a white conservative, then it was either a rare mental health issue for which no other conservative has responsibility or else it was self-defense
And you wonder why I can’t take conservatives seriously.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl: Oh, one thing that I missed:
So, without guns, the attacker would have just ran over everybody with a van and then stabbed them. And that would somehow be better, less horrific than what happened today?
Hmm, I suppose van and knife control aren’t far behind…
@Pch101: FWIW I agree with this completely.
@Jeremy:
Nice try. Gun violence in the US far exceeds other western Nations. Obfuscate with NRA talking points all you want. It won’t change the facts.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
Again, are you accounting for gang warfare over the black market in drugs, police brutality, and suicides?
Well, are you?
Explain to me how gun laws are supposed to work when, you know, we have all those incidents being reported in Chicago.
And FWIW, I’m not a member of the NRA, and I don’t even own a gun. I just don’t see how gun control is supposed to actually fix anything, except give government more control over individuals.
@Jeremy: so, 30,000 dead per year is ok with you? And roughly 10x that number maimed?
I don’t subtract suicides, gang violence, the war on drugs, or even drunken Vice Presidents shooting someone in the face. I value human life, and don’t look for reasons to put them into another bucket where they don’t matter that much. Except for that guy who went hunting with Cheney, he deserved to get maimed.
These are all things that would be reduced if there were fewer guns. We have, give or take, as many guns in America as people. It makes complicated problems, like America’s drug policy, into deadly problems.
Guns kill 30,000 Americans a year. That’s ten times 9/11. That’s 9110. Every year. If we simply shrug at gun violence, shouldn’t we just shrug about terrorism as well? Just the price of a free and open society.
@Jeremy:
Are you really that stupid?
Rhetorical question…
Is it bad that I only read through to see if this one would turn into a gun nut thread or a Libertarianism Rocks! thread?
(because you just know that it’s usually going to be one or the other …) 😀
If the shooter targeted democrats you’d all find some way to blame Sarah Palin.
@Gustopher: I agree that it sucks. But it is not an epidemic. That is all I am pointing out.
And if we ended the drug war, restrained police, and did something about not stigmatizing people with mental illness and helping people get psychological care, that number would be even lower.
@HarvardLaw92:
I see asking questions is no longer appreciated. But tell me, Harvard Lawyer, how would gun control actually work? How would you implement it? How would it be done? And how are you going to get over resistance to it? Same question to Daryl’s other brother Darryl, to whom I can also ask if he’s that stupid.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!
Still, it’s odd how those killers usually prefer guns when they can get them, and how having access to them correlates with higher murder rates.
Is it possible that guns make killing easier and more convenient? Hmmm…
If vans and knives were just as useful for killing as were guns, then soldiers would just use switchblades and Dodge Grand Caravans to fight each other. Maybe, just maybe, guns are better suited to the job.
The problem is less guns than people who buy guns with the idea that they are solutions. It’s like a husband who hires a private investigator to follow his wife around so he knows that she is faithful. A person who does that is not going to be convinced that the innocent pictures the investigator shows him are proof. What is she doing when she’s not in a picture? And how innocent is that exchange with that man? Etc.
Cars are very similar. There’s tons of blowback with vehicles, which happen to be very good utilitarian solutions to a problem of getting from point A to point B.
Guns in daily life are a solution to nothing, unless you are a drug dealer, or hiking in a place with mountain lions, or are in a position in which a gun is needed, i.e. when another person with a gun or a weapon is threatening you.
So it’s unclear what they are for. Except it is very clear. People don’t buy them as solutions. They buy them for the blowback, for the reverberations; because they are fetishes. The best case is that people who grew up hunting use guns as a means to recreate the same vivid experiences they had with hunting. Every other reason is just crap.
@Modulo Myself:
Guns are used by white folks to defend themselves from Knee-grows. That’s really what this is all about.
@Pch101:
Left-wing rules of engagement:
-If the crime is committed by a Muslim, his motive will never be known.
-If the crime is committed by a Christian, all Christians are to blame.
-If the crime is committed by a black person, it’s because of Institutionalized Racism.
-If the crime is committed by a woman, the Patriarchy is to blame.
-If the crime is a shooting, the NRA is to blame.
Further, every proposal by Republicans means:
-They are LITERALLY Hitler.
-Is straight from the Goebbels playbook.
-People will literally be falling over dead in the street.
-That they hate children.
-That they hate black people.
-That they hate women.
-They are bringing back Jim Crow.
And you wonder why I can’t take Leftists seriously.
@Pch101:
Sure, but they are also used to create dangerous criminals in the minds of gun owners. The idea that the world is less dangerous once you own a handgun is untrue. Guns are mediums for people who want the world to be more dangerous.
@Modulo Myself:
Wow. Talk about Losing.
* The absurd absolute.
* An analogy. Which is useless when arguing
* You think you know why people you have never met buy guns.
And I expect a personal attack after this post.
@Jeremy:
Cradle to grave registration & licensing, with destruction of any weapons found to be unregistered / unlicensed. Mandatory registration of ALL transfers, of any type, to anybody (and yes, this includes family members & bequests). Mandatory training & certification as a prerequisite to licensing, with mandatory retraining and recertification on a periodic basis (ideally yearly). Placing the burden of establishing satisfactory mental health on the purchaser, with the presumption that all potential purchasers are unfit until they prove otherwise. Mandatory civil liability which accrues not only to the shooter, but also to the registered owner of the firearm. Mandatory duty to flee as a requisite component of any self-defense claim. Abolishment of immunity from civil damages as the result of intervening into / attempting to defuse a situation with a firearm. Abolishment of concealed carry under any circumstances (and this includes police officers). Triple the police budgets. Federal preemption of state level firearm control laws.
And that’s just for starters. You may commence your libertarian hissy fit at your convenience, but remember that you did ask …
The same way you implement any other scheme of regulatory control – via the police and arrest power of the state. You’d be surprised how many Gadsden nuts turn complacent when they’re facing the possibility of prison. You’d also be surprised how many “hell no I won’t register my guns” types will turn complacent after a few of them have been bankrupted and left homeless in civil court.
I’m not being critical, really, except that guns are fantasies for people who can’t voice their own.
@TM01:
Weak comeback.
I would recommend that you try being original, but I suppose that would be impossible for you.
@TM01:
Obviously it’s because you swallow right wing propoganda whole.
I mean…that list is laughable….
@Jeremy:
Dude, the purpose of the 2d amendment was to ensure that plantation owners would be allowed to raise militias to hunt down runaway slaves. That’s why we have guns. We have guns because white people are terrified that black, Latino, Muslim people might try to gain some measure of power. The 2d Amendment is the ‘perpetuation of white power amendment.’ You want stats?
Here’s more, a nice running list of children injured or killed by guns.
Fun fact: 1,700,000 children are in homes with unlocked, unsecured guns.
I know this is a political blog, but it’s days like this when I hate the Internet.
The bottom line is, 5 people were shot while playing baseball . That’s F’d up no matter how you slice it.
I don’t care what the victim’s political affiliations are, and I don’t care what the shooter’s are.
We need to stop this BS where we view fellow Americans as “the enemy” because their politics/ideology differs from our own. I concede that this has been a problem for longer on the right, but violent rhetoric from the left has also gotten much more disturbing of late.
Incidents such as this are not a surprising result.
@HarvardLaw92:
No hissy fit. Your response is generally reasonable. The only things I disagree with are the mandatory duty to flee (perhaps you can educate me on why this is desirable), tripling police budgets (considering all the cases of police misconduct I see, and all the times they misuse their resources, I don’t think giving them more resources to misuse is desirable), and federal preemption of state gun laws (I think federalism is a good thing, but I can be convinced otherwise on this issue.)
I have questions about the registration aspect — I’m not against it per se, just cautious about creating registries and indexes of citizens, as it sounds quite Orwellian to my ears. I’ve always been down with mandatory training, particularly in defense shooting, as a requirement for owning a gun. As for abolishing concealed carry, I assume that means open carry would become default? I really have no problem with that. Being transparent with having a gun on you might be a good thing, as it might deter possible attackers from carrying out their crimes. Would you assault an old lady if she had a Derringer strapped to her hip? (Or on her handbag? Is that a thing? Can you strap a Derringer to a purse strap?)
As for the last part, I would urge caution. Don’t be too heavy handed. That may have worked in the past. But I believe tempers are high enough that if this were to happen en masse it could get very ugly. There are over 300 million guns in this country, and many many gun owners. Hopefully that might get defused if vigorous legal defense stops more egregious examples.
At least you’re not arguing for door to door searches to confiscate guns, as I expect many in this forum would support.
@michael reynolds: And gun control has also been used for decades to oppress minorities and perpetuate white power as well. So it goes for both sides.
If vans and knives are just as useful for killing as are guns, then why do conservatives feel vulnerable if they don’t have guns?
Just head over to the Toyota dealer and get a minivan for self-defense. At least it will serve some useful purpose. (Good luck using a Glock to carry home your stuff from Costco.)
Ironically, I see more thoughtful discussions on Facebook than OTB nowadays.
Sad that this site has fallen like that over the past several years.
@Jeremy:
It serves to reduce the likelihood that using a firearm will be someone’s initial “go-to” option. Using a firearm should be the option of absolute last resort, to be employed only if there are no other viable options available.
Which is typically to varying degrees a consequence of their inability to pay to attract talent. Nobody said that statement necessarily entailed hiring more cops (although I’d have one on every block if it were left up to me). It was intended to entail facilitating the hiring of better cops and giving them better training.
A reflection of my contempt for the concept of states. Left up to me, we’d have one unified government, one unified set of laws, and 50 administrative districts. States add nothing beneficial and a great deal that is detrimental.
With 50 states, you effectively have an entire country with gun control laws equal to those of the most lax jurisdiction. It’s meaningless for, say, New York to have draconian gun control laws if all that you have to do to get around them is drive to Pennsylvania.
Or Georgia …
Because state borders are lines on a map. They aren’t walls.
@Jeremy:
You have a source? Because this smells like NRA bullshit.
@Pch101:
Well, maybe you should read this, where a black man had a gun to protect himself from the Klu Klux Klan. And to protect a friend from domestic violence.
Much more convenient, if your home is surrounded by Klansman, than trying to run out to your car and running them all down. But I guess you’d rather have African-Americans killed by Klansman than being able to protect themselves. Or women being beat up by abusive boyfriends.
@Todd: I agree, this attack was entirely disrespectful to the game of baseball. Baseball is about long stretches of inactivity punctuated by someone adjusting their junk. The use of firearms in such a situation is unseemly.
This was an attack not just on America, but on America’s pastime.
If only something could be done. Guns don’t kill people, organ damage and blood loss kills people.
Oh well, the victims will just have to settle for our thoughts and prayers. Good luck with that.
Maybe we could arm all the baseball players. Pistols in the infield, and long guns in the outfield.
@michael reynolds: Nope. Written by a black man, no less:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gun-control-will-not-save-america-from-racism-622.
@HarvardLaw92:
1. Okay fair.
2. I think that’s not an issue of budgets. Maybe they should have better hiring practices, like not hiring people with low IQ.
3. Terrible idea. It’s not very robust. If the feds make a mistake, everyone suffers. You can’t tailor policies for different localities with different demographics. Instead, by spreading it out, federalizing and decentralizing political power, you create a more robust political system. Imagine if the Kansas tax cuts were done federally. Instead of wrecking everything, they just wrecked Kansas, and gave everybody an idea of what not to do. Not quite possible in a unitary state. For certain issues — namely, protecting human and civil rights — it is right for that to be under federal jurisdiction. Other issues? I’m not sure.
Also, forgot to mention this earlier, but since pretty much every state and the feds have background checks, registration, all of that, I’m not sure how it actually will stop gun violence. But I understand the need for some smart regulation in this area.
@Jeremy:
I don’t think you’ll find many of us who have a problem with the concept of you (or anyone) keeping a gun within the home for protection (with the caveat that liability for any accidents which are caused by it is 1) strict and 2) falls onto your head as the homeowner).
It’s these nuts who are determined to take them into Wegman’s / walk around with them on their person in public who generally give us indigestion.
@Jeremy:
Anecdotes are not data.
Exceptions to the rule do not disprove the rule.
Why do so many people on the right struggle with such basic logical concepts?
@Jeremy:
Right, so your argument is that because gun laws have at times been used to disadvantage 13% of the population, we have to allow the other 87% to have unfettered access to guns. So that the 13% can do what? Engage in open combat with the 87%?
ALL laws are applied unfairly against African-Americans, that is not an argument for getting rid of all laws. Is it? No, it isn’t. Laws against speeding are used unfairly against blacks, so no more speed limits? Laws against murder are used unfairly against blacks, shall we legalize murder?
Like I said: NRA bullshit.The NRA specializes in superficial arguments that are gobbled up by people already so deeply in love with guns that other parts of their brain cease to function. The NRA arguments never hold up to scrutiny. Never. Not once. You might want to hone your critical thinking skills.
@HarvardLaw92: Yeah I don’t like those people either. They’re just assholes. And the Wegmans are perfectly within their rights to ban people from bringing firearms onto their property (except for police, obviously.)
@Jeremy:
We pay first year attorneys straight out of law school 162 grand a year with a 25 grand bonus. Pick up a clerkship and we’ll toss in an additional 75 grand. Do you think we do that because we’re just generous guys who want to spread the wealth, or do you think that we do it because talent costs money (and you have to pay it to attract it)?
Want better cops with higher IQ’s? Offer them more money and see if it makes any difference.
Hence: elections. Do you think that voters will be 1) more or 2) less engaged in the political process – and in doing the heavy lifting required to make informed choices – if they only get one bite at the apple?
@michael reynolds: The NRA has absolutely nothing to do with this. The writer, AFAIK, is not an NRA member. You’re using the acronym as a shorthand to not even bother to critically think. At least I use my noggin. What are you doing with yours? Just trotting out “Oh I guess we should abolish laws against murder” just show that you’re unserious and just as stupid as the (90+%) conservative commentators who bother to post here.
And in fact, yes, a lot of laws should be abolished. A lot of laws are on the books only to protect the privileged and powerful from having their positions threatened by people below them. All of those laws should be done away with. The ones that actually protect individual rights — which yes, include laws against murder — should obviously be kept. But we can do a fair lot of trimming.
@Jeremy:
Because it avoids the fight with all possible injuries and death that implies. In case it needs to be be stated, that’s the good outcome. I’ve never fully understood why conservatives think the obligation to avoid violence on behalf of the individual carrying a deadly instrument is a bad thing. It’s somewhat analogous to pedestrians and cars – as the driver of the multi-ton barreling machine capable of crushing and killing soft flesh, you have the duty and obligation to avoid pedestrians even though they are more nimble then you. The pedestrian can dive out of the way unlike a car, get to a safe place unlike a car and generally react faster then the driver attempting to fight physics slowing tons of metal down. So why is the driver held to be responsible? Because they are in control of the massive pile of moving death, and should therefor operate it with care to those not protected by said metal. Driving would be a very different experience if pedestrians had the obligation to give way to vehicles instead of the other way around.
The duty to retreat makes sense with the understanding that life is preferable to death in all cases and that owning a device that can kill makes you more likely to use said device. It doesn’t favor one over the other but recognizing a level of control that needs to be maintained for society to not become a free-for-all. You are not supposed to WANT to shoot someone even in defense of self; it’s last ditch effort, not first priority or best practices. Retreat is not a sign of cowardice but rather a will to live.
@HarvardLaw92:
1) Wasn’t there a police department that won a court case saying it had the right to not hire people with an IQ above a certain level? That’s what I was referring to.
2.) Considering Trump, I think I would like a lot less people voting. If we’re basically having the nutjobs on Twitter voting more often, I think that would lead to more terrible outcomes.
@KM: And as I replied to HL earlier, fair. I was actually saying something similar to you when there was an attack on the DC metro last year and a conservative friend of mine was saying people should have gotten up and done something. And I’m like, “Yeah, but if you’re not trained, what are you going to do?”
And I totally agree that nobody should want to end a life. I don’t own a gun because frankly I don’t think I should have one, I know my limitations. I don’t even want to be in that position. But I also don’t see restricting that right as fixing anything.
@Pch101: I’m not on the right, but thanks for playing “American Tribalism” today.
@KM: If we were a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles, there would be an obligation to at least try to turn the other cheek before escalating.
@Jeremy:
Yes, and the policy in question was predicated on reducing turnover while maintaining budgetary restrictions. Their rationale was that – to put it bluntly – dumber people are less likely to quit because of low wages or the relative monotony of the job than smarter people are. Short version: they made a business decision that limiting their applicant pool to dumber people would cost them less.
Which brings us back to what I said earlier …
Trump was at least partially, if not largely, the result of low participation. I’d add in the perception that most people hold: that the decisions which most directly affect them occur at the state level. They’re less engaged with the federal, and you can see the result (on both sides of the aisle.)
@HarvardLaw92: Ah, did not know that, thanks.
@@HarvardLaw92::
Shout-out to a fellow Weggies lover 🙂
Nuts indeed. For god’s sake, people have left loaded weaponry on It’s a Small World in WDW before! Who’s gonna attack you in the Magic Kingdom, Jafar???
@Jeremy:
And who gets to inform the carrier – the 16yr old deli counter girl? As someone who worked there in my youth, we had a hell of a time keeping selfish people from bringing pets in let alone any weaponry. I had one woman leave a Shitzu dressed up in a bassinet while she wandered and eight different customers freak out over a abandoned baby. The woman turned aggressive when confronted and asked to leave the store – god only knows how it would have went down if she was armed. The police were not amused, nor was the manager.
It’s blatantly unfair to put a low-paid employee in harm’s way like that. Yes, in harm’s way because you don’t know how the carrier will react. You want to carry? Fine but there are places where its just not appropriate no matter much 2nd Amend invoking happens.
“6) Maybe if we all ignore Jack he will finally go away.”
Yeah, like either one of those two things is going to happen. :-/
Meanwhile, during this discussion, there has been a workplace shooting in San Francisco. Gunman killed 2 victims and himself.
@Jeremy:
You were doing great up to this point. I’d dare you to find one liberal on this forum who supports broad door-to-door confiscation searches
@Jeremy:
I somewhat agree. Knowing own’s limitations is considered laudable because so many don’t. Frankly, if I had more trust in my fellow man’s ability to admit they don’t have this, I’d be a much bigger 2nd Amend supporter. As pointed out upthread, the lip service is for self-defense but in reality they are treated as portable conflict resolution / solutions. The fact that the resolution tends to be deadly isn’t a downside to many.
I have to say when I caught this news and it was already being reported that it was a white guy, I immediately thought, I bet it is a Bernie Bro gone off the deep end.
Every American is forced to live in the shadow of guns. We are uniquely threatened among western peoples.
Some years back I was with a British couple at the Edinburgh Fringe watching Jim Jeffries (before his epic gun routine, IIRC). A guy in the audience got very loud and abusive – as in the show has to stop and house lights have to come up to deal with him. My British friends were annoyed; but I, being an American, was looking for the nearest exit in case shooting started.
An American is infinitely more likely to be shot than a Frenchman, a Brit, a Spaniard, an Italian, or a German. They don’t have to think, ‘gun,’ every time there’s an outburst or a fender-bender or a drunken disagreement. We do. We actually have to teach children in many areas of this country how to cower under a bed or hide in a bathtub when shooting starts.
Guns are a disease in this country, a disease deliberately spread by people like Steve Scalise.
So, I am sorry for the brave Capitol Hill police. Glad the shooter is dead. But an NRA pimp like Scalise, a man who labors ceaselessly to give guns to everyone, a man who has contributed to arming murderers, gets shot in the ass? I’m sorry, but that’s just karma with a sense of humor.
@KM:
I love Wegmans 😀
If I miss anything about NY as a consequence of being over here, it’s Wegmans. The novelty of visiting the bakery for bread and the butcher for meat and the cheese shop for cheese and the magasin for produce and the fish shop for fish wears off rather quickly.
The quality is far better, no doubt about that, but doing that round of shops every day just to eat isn’t my idea of a good time.
(or my wife’s, hence the new live-in … :-/ )
@HarvardLaw92: Ha, I remember that from living in Europe. And the tiny fridges make it pretty much a necessity to go daily. The Supermarche helps a bit, but those aren’t always located where you need them.
Still though, the quality…
@HarvardLaw92:
Carrefour, dude.
@Jeremy:
And yet you voted for the poster child of the privileged…who has done nothing to date but aid the privileged…and will do nothing ever but help the privileged.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl: I voted for third party candidate Gary Johnson. I would never vote for Trump. Not once. Not ever.
Again, thanks for playing “American Tribalism”, but you fail. Big time.
Ever stop failing, Darryl?
@michael reynolds: or Monoprix
@michael reynolds: This convinces me that you’re nuts. I lived the first 16 years of my life next door to a gun shop and I never had to be taught about hiding under the bed or in the bathtub or anything like that. It was never a concern.
Gun violence is not as widespread as you think it is. Mass shootings are not that widespread. The media, however, in the search for ever higher ratings, obsesses over each and every incident, making it appear that they are far more common than they are.
Again, I’m at least using my noggin, Mike. Not sure what you’re doing with yours.
@Jeremy:
Every day 90 Americans die by gunshot. That means every month we lose as many Americans to guns as we lost on 911. A 911 every month, every year, forever.
Yeah. No need to be concerned.
@Jeremy:
I can personally testify that students are now taught what to do in an active shooter situation. I was visiting campus to pick a young cousin and was unaware a drill was in progress. It was *frightening* until I clued in to what was going on. Even more so were the dead eyes the kids had when practicing – as far as they were concerned, it was no different then a fire drill. Fwcking heartbreaking.
Work also has drills of this nature in which you are depressed as hell to realize how much glass is in modern offices and how little cover a cube affords. If it hits the fan, I have a handy wall of windows to smash out and escape. The rest of my floor is not so lucky and have little recourse to seek shelter. The receptionist broke out in tears when it occurred to her she’d likely be the first to go. We’ve been lucky in that the one most likely to go postal when fired didn’t but it was still unpleasant AF.
Mass shooting are relatively rare, statistically speaking. That much is true. However, those odds go up exponentially with certain factors that are on the rise: angry ex-coworkers, lax guns laws, mental illness, existential anger without a target, etc. We can now add bitter partisanship onto the list.
Gun violence in the US is a statistical fact. Arguing against basic facts is just ridiculous.
@michael reynolds:
Months of violent rhetoric and imagery directed at Donald Trump and his supporters is capped off by a progressive loon shooting at Republicans on a baseball field, and you want to talk about gun control?
Yeah, we should all be very concerned by such intellectual and spiritual corruption.
By the way, the Centers for Disease Control says 7,195 Americans die every day. That’s more than 9/11 every day, every year, forever. It also means those 90 deaths from guns is less than 1.25% of the daily total.
The Association for Safe International Road Travel also says 101 Americans die very day in road crashes, a number that could undoubtedly be drastically reduced if we mandated blood alcohol locks on all ignition systems and governors on all motors so no vehicle could go faster than 55 miles an hour. Yet for some reason, saving those lives doesn’t seem to interest many people.
Mike
@michael reynolds: I agree that it’s sad and deplorable, but at the same time, that still accounts for <1% of the population. And again, how many of those would not happen if we didn't force drugs into the black market? If we properly reined in police officers? If we did more to stop suicide? Then it would be even lower. This is not a mass epidemic all over the place. And it is getting lower all the time. Also, at no point did I say there was no need to be concerned. I see that you're resorting to putting words in my mouth, because with all your intellect, you can't actually form an argument. Just concede already, it will save you embarrassment.
@KM: That’s unfortunate. I have never worked in a place where we had mass shooter drills, which is odd, because that would make sense for many of these places. Not all of them, to be sure, but a good number. I also never had a mass shooter drill on my college campus, and I graduated about seven or eight years ago.
@Pch101: I’m not arguing against facts. What I am saying is that that 30,000 a year number is very, very tiny (0.009375%), and it takes in all sorts of different, unrelated causes. In fact, by making it out to be more than it actually is, it is you who are arguing against facts and reality.
And besides, nobody has actually proven how gun control would have prevented this tragic incident. I’m still struggling to understand how they would.
@Jeremy: “And in fact, yes, a lot of laws should be abolished.”
Oh, I get it now. You’re seventeen. Okay, carry on.
@Jeremy:
The US homicide rate is the highest in the developed world.
Perhaps we should require you to be the guy who personally delivers the news of gun homicides to the families and friends of the victims. Go tell them to their faces how “tiny” it is.
@Lounsbury: I was initially relieved to hear it was a white guy. Less chance of a Reichstag fire sort of response, even if he’s a Bernie Bro.
@Pch101: As a percentage or just raw number? Because if it is the latter, that’s probably because we have a much greater population than most countries in the developed world. (I still don’t know if China is part of the developed world or not.)
@wr: The One Percent thank you for your diligence in helping them maintain their control over politics and make sure that legislation serves their whims, and not the general public.
These Capitol Police officers were bodyguards assigned to protect Representative Scalise because of his leadership position.
I can not find any comfort in Trump’s words today.
@Jeremy:
You love guns therefore a 911 every month is just one of those things. There are also not ‘mass epidemics’ of murder, rape, extortion and yet, amazingly, we have laws against those things. Just how many dead Americans does it take to get your attention? 30,000 is nuthin’, so 50,000? 100,000? A million?
We bust a gut trying to make cars safer because they also kill a lot of people. We spend money on food safety which kills far fewer. We immunize against diseases that kill far fewer. We spend billions trying to stop terrorists who represent far less of a threat than guns.
You have no rational argument to offer.
@Jeremy:
You might as well wear a sign around your neck that says, “Hi, my name is Jeremy, and I failed my statistics class. Twice.”
It should be clear what a “rate” is. You should refrain from discussing things that you clearly do not understand.
@Jeremy:
I have several friends who are teachers, elementary school up through high school. All of them have had to practice active shooter scenarios with their students.
@Jeremy :
I believe that they will become more prevalent as the trend continues. Previously things like this were confined to certain venues, hence the old terminology being “going postal” and being somewhat of a dark workplace joke. Once they started hitting schools, concerned parents began demanding training in the unlikely event their school was next. Snowballed from there…
Practically speaking, they are worth holding. I’m a big fan of being prepared and it never hurts to be aware of your surroundings and how to protect yourself. Much like the trend of having zombie-related events to teach first aid and emergency prep, these are worth holding to make people aware of how to survive should the worst occur. Credit for public knowledge of these kinds of things is being given for the low causality rates in the latest attacks in Europe.
Still sad though. 6yr olds shouldn’t have had to learn to shelter under desks to avoid A-bombs. They shouldn’t have to learn to stand on toilets to avoid shooters, either. Both will have the same efficacy in the end as well. Alas, the world has never been particularly kind.
@Jeremy:
Yeah…if I voted for Trump I would say I didn’t vote for Trump, too.
By the way, on the rarity of mass shootings, Philip Bump over at WaPo has a short blurb that states:
That really doesn’t seem that rare to me, or at least not as rare as it should be.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
Soon it’ll be like trying to find a Nazi in Germany post April 30, 1945. We’re going to have a whole country full of people who all voted for Not Trump.
@Jen: My son’s in 7th grade and has done active shooter drills for pretty much his entire schooling so far.
@TM01:
It’s just a bunch of foaming at the mouth malcontents now.
I live in a rural area. My husband grew up using guns, they were like a tool to him. He was in the military as well. However, he has never hurt anyone. All those years of access to guns and he never shot anyone. However, he did shoot a rabid racoon or two.
What happened today was horrible. These events always are. But it is worth noting that most people who own guns are not dangerous or scary people. Assuming they all are is not going to help deal with issues like this.
It is not an either or kind of thing….not all gun control is a bad thing, and not all gun owners are crazy killers. But the politics of the issue make compromise impossible and so here we are yelling at each other and nothing changes.
This is again, as it is with unfortunate frequency, entirely relevant.
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl: Please try to contain your glee over Republicans being shot.
@HarvardLaw92:
I see now way such laws will result in yet more black people going to prison for non-violent offenses. Still, I appreciate you at least spelling out your vision for a police state.
@TM01:
While I rarely agree, I think this brushes on an important point. Throughout the Obama presidency, I was worried that hysterical Republican rhetoric could lead some nut to do something awful. And that fear has only been enhanced over the last six months as Trump opponents have been comparing him to Hitler and claiming that his policies will literally kill millions of people. Whenever some Right Wing nut has done something, this board has filled with blame for Republicans, even accusations that they are engaging in “stochastic terrorism” (a concept I think is garbage) by trying to stimulate violence. Is there going to be similar introspection on the rhetoric used on Trump and the Republicans.
Yeah, I know, I know. The Republicans really are evil and so it’s justified.
Ultimately, the only one who bears blame here is the gunman. But I also said that about Right Wing shooters.
I see that my exasperation with the left will not end this day.
I ask how gun control laws would have prevented this incident. All I get are, “Look at these figures!” and emotional outbursts. But where is the the concrete “Policy X leads to Outcome Y”? Nowhere in sight. Only Harvard has really attempted to do so, and while some of his ideas I think have merit, not one would have stopped today’s event.
And speaking of figures, Michael Reynolds, I find it rich you trot out dead kids. Excuse me sir, but how many children did Barack Obama kill with his drones? And your candidate, Hillary Clinton, would she not have continued this policy unabated? Oh, I forgot, they’re brown kids, they aren’t as valuable as white kids in America. I shouldn’t really expect otherwise from a man who wants to put Raqqa under a mushroom cloud.
And wr flippantly dismisses my call to abolish tons of laws. I find it very surprisingly a supposed liberal supports throwing black men in jail for having pot. Oh, what? Did you not realize the Controlled Substances Act was a law? What did you think it was? A mere notion?
And Darryl flat out claims that I’m a Trump supporter..why? Because he has nothing else? Because he thinks that somehow that insult will cow me? Do I need to show you my Gary Johnson t-shirts or lawn signs? Why should I? I could show you my Libertarian Party membership card and you would still insist that I voted for Trump, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever. (I’m trying to think which of my positions makes me a Trumpkin. Is it legalizing weed? Stop bombing foreign countries? Opening up the borders and letting in more immigrants? Gee, those really are some Trump like positions.)
Face it. You old farts care more about scoring rhetorical points against Republicans than actually fixing things. People are suffering, and you’re here relying on snark to get a few upvotes. And that’s not just this forum, it’s across the country. Jeff Sessions, a former member of the KKK who hates civil rights and wants to turn back the clock on marijuana legalization is about to confirmed as Attorney General. So what does the left do? Blow it’s load on Betsy DeVos, who had the unmitigated gall to suggest that parents should be able to choose a different school for their children if their school is failing. Quelle horreur! What’s next, choosing a different daycare? Now that’s just crazy talk!
I’m sick and tired of things getting worse in this country. They’re not across the board, but in politics, they definitely are. I’m tired of rhetoric. I want results. I want things to improve. But they’re not going to improve if you dismiss out of hand any new ideas or any questions about your own, and just return to tired, old, shopworn lines that got us into this situation in the first place. That’s just going to get you more Trump. That’s just going to continue the deterioration of our body politic.
But you know what? It doesn’t matter. You’re all ideological dead-enders. You’re not going anywhere, you’re not accomplishing anything. Just sliding more and more into irrelevancy. I thought maybe asking some questions about how to fix things would elicit some thoughtful discussion — why the hell would I ever think that? None of you are serious about fixing anything.
Oh, and before I go, my state voted for Clinton — so yeah. I voted for Gary, and my state voted for Clinton anyways. No way to pin Trump on me. But continue saying so if it soothes your butthurt egos. (And Mike, go back to writing fiction. You’re pretty good at it. Not as good as your wife, mind you, but still pretty good.)
@Pch101: Oh, I’m sorry, I just assumed, since I’m dealing with a moron, that you were not using the term correctly.
@Jeremy:
Lame comeback.
The high US homicide rate is not exactly a secret. Well, except to you, apparently.
@Hal_10000:
And how does that help to fix the problem, exactly?
The difference between the left and the right with this issue is that the left wants a solution while the right wants to avoid responsibility. You don’t provide any answers that might prevent some people from getting shot.
@Jeremy:
So far as I’ve seen, they most likely could not have prevented this. He was, as far as we’ve learned thus far, a fairly boring person in the heart of the country who legally owned firearms. Most gun control measures I’ve heard proposed wouldn’t have done much if anything in this case. He still could drive cross-country, live at the local YMCA, and then use his weapon in an horrific fashion.
The interesting thing to me is that I’ve made a similar point about things like travel bans and halts on refugees not stopping any terror incidents in this country, because most of those have been perpetrated by people here in the US legally, and yet conservatives still clamor for the passage of these tactically impotent proposals. So, pot/kettle, and so forth.
@Jen: @michael reynolds: @Tony W:
We ended up in the 4ème, about a half-mile from Notre Dame / mile from Musée du Louvre.
Don’t ask 🙄 Short version: wife sees enormous 1869 hôtel particulier, wife wants hôtel particulier, wife gets hôtel particulier … I learned long ago that selecting a house is a joint exercise for us – she selects it and I pay for it 🙂
We have a few Carrefours, as well as Monoprix and G20, but they’re all much smaller than what you’d normally expect from a supermarché, somewhat inconvenient to get to, and the quality wasn’t exceptionally better than the shops. In some cases it was a good bit less.
The shops thing was mostly me exploring my new environs, since this neighborhood is so accessible on foot. It was a phase that didn’t last long 😀
@Pch101:
No. The Left wants strict gun control, whether it’s a solution or not. That is the goal. Incidents like this are post-facto rationalization. You’ll notice that no matter what the circumstance, gun control is always the answer. And no matter how much the research shows that gun control, at best, makes little difference, they will still claim it works. This is not a solution; it’s grafting a policy preference onto a problem.
Just Marxists being Marxists.
@Hal_10000:
24M fewer people with health insurance — which is basically the only way to afford health care, unless you are independently wealthy.
Obviously, not everyone without access to health care will die from a preventable death, less than 5% over a four year period (let’s assume the next president fixes things, but that the rolling window of how long it takes for policies to take effect). Let’s go with 1%.
We are still talking about hundreds of thousands of people dying earlier. No, perhaps not millions, but still a large number.
@Jen: No one is going to ban guns or go around seizing them. Modest restrictions on the obviously insane need to happen, and we need to make the same change we made on drunk driving — it went from acceptable to strongly condemned in about a generation.
Even with a massive change in our culture, with as many guns as people in this country, it would take decades to get them out of circulation.
But, not adding additional guns that can kill too many people too quickly would be a perfectly reasonable start. If this shooter only managed to fire 10 rounds instead of 50 — or, if not this man than the shooter in five years time, when the cheap and available guns can’t shoot as quickly — the carnage would be less.
@Hal_10000:
I’m a former prosecutor. Have we met??
I tend to value order and security over liberty if I have to choose between them. I’m not sure that’s ever been a secret around here.
@Hal_10000:
Bullshit. When have we tested the idea of genuine national gun control? Never. So a claim that it does not work is invalid.
If you go to foreign examples, you can take a look at Australia which banned private guns and saw a big drop in murders. Or you can look at every other developed nation and see quite unmistakably that access to guns goes hand in hand with violent crime.
@michael reynolds:
We keep going over this, so:
Australia’s drop in murder was less than the US’s over the same time. Even as a percentage.
And no, access to guns does not track violent crime. It only does so if you cherry pick.
@michael reynolds: Seriously. We can look around the world and see in real time these policies at work, and working. Yet in America there’s a big question mark, there’s all this argument.
Over something we can SEE working pretty much everywhere else.
WTF?
No, but we have fifty states and hundreds of cities that have tried various law of varying restrictions. You know this because you cite those cities and states when those law appears to work but then wave away those cities and states away when the laws don’t (e.g., “Connecticut’s laws cut violence! But ignore Chicago because guns can move!”)
@HarvardLaw92:
Yeah, we had the same thing in Tuscany. The giant stores were all on the west side of Florence, we were out in Pelago (don’t bother, it’s a dot) so we had the shop-shop-shop routine with a string bag, or the dinky local co-ops, or the long haul around Florence to Carrefour and Ipercoop.
We’re still looking at London and are thinking Marylebone in part because they have a convenient (if not cheap) Waitrose as well as the Selfridge’s and M&S basements. (Speaking of not cheap.) That plus a cigar bar.
You can afford a hôtel particulier with a $1.12 Euro. We managed to hit the $1.60 Euro. Lucky you.
Opiod deaths: 33,000 per year. About the same as guns and cars.
Just another example of 30,000 deaths we do want to address, while ignoring guns.
@Hal_10000:
Let’s go broader. The murder rate (irrespective of the type of tool used to cause the homicide) here in France is right at 1.31 per 100,000 (and that takes into account the Paris shootings), which is an outlier. It’s normally closer to 1 per 100,000.
In the US, it’s nearly 4 (or 5, depending on which period you’re examining) times higher.
Is that because the US is a more violent society by nature, or could it possibly be at least partially related to the prevalence of guns in US society? More to the point, does the US have so many more guns because it’s a more violent society, or is it a more violent society because it has so many more guns. Food for thought …
@Hal_10000:
The nifty thing is that gun control actually works. We see what happens when it gets implemented in other developed countries.
That’s another thing about the right — it absolutely refuses to look at the world outside the United States for solutions to its problems. It’s as if there isn’t another country on the planet that has studied something or figured it out.
@HarvardLaw92:
In the post I linked above, I argued that it was because we are more violent.
@michael reynolds:
All I’ll say to that is a little over 16,000 sq ft and somewhat improved but still lacking 1860s insulation values. A little over $12m for the house itself and I’m finding myself shelling out around €2,800 per month just in utilities. The things we men will do for
sexlove … 🙂The best / worst part is that she has pretty much decided that she wants to make the move permanent. My best hope at this point is that I’ll eventually get to retire in Brittany / Normandy and spend my twilight years listening to the ocean instead of keeping EDF/GDF financially afloat for the rest of my life …
@Hal_10000:
So the question becomes: are we more violent due to the long term prevalence of guns, or do we owe that long term prevalence of guns to the fact that we’ve just always been a violent society?
@Hal_10000:
That is a non-answer.
Every society has people who are violent or who have the potential for violence.
You don’t want to do anything to hinder them or to make them less effective. This is akin to saying that we shouldn’t wear seat belts because vehicle deaths are a symptom of bad driving and belts won’t improve their driving. The argument simply makes no sense because we know that the belts actually work.
A guy who doesn’t have a gun is less likely to inflict damage. I don’t need to help him to find Jesus, I just need him to be so weak that he can’t do very much with his impulses.
@JKB:
I am sure you cited that quote in response to Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, etc. calling Democrats traitors, right?
@Hal_10000:
There is something remarkably precious about complaining about how people dehumanize their political opponents and citing your own post where you repeatedly refer to a former Vice President as Algore.
@Jen: Now being reported he had a domestic violence charge. There is a common thread to be found among many of these incidents.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl: we need guns to protect ourselves from democrats- who are the most violent people/party in America.
the violent rhetoric from dems of all shapes/sizes/power has gone unfettered and has a hand in this recent attempt of mass murdering members of the GOP.
the msm is funny, with their “what could have provoked him” bs . but get real- they did!
@Gustopher:
And–going back to the original topic–these ‘hundreds of thousands of people’ and their loved ones all have access to guns. ☹
@Pch101:
Well, we’re big, tough Americans. We wouldn’t want to emulate those soft, wussy Euros or funny-talking Aussies, and especially not those damn Canadians, who are just failed Americans anyway.
Effective gun control and universal healthcare and decent public transportation are for pussies!
@Pch101:
Nonsense. You act as though the only thing standing between us and violence is gun control. As though depriving the law abiding of weapons will magically make the violent among us impotent. I admire this near religious faith in the power and wisdom of government. But we’ve seen crime plunge for twenty years without any gun control. We’ve seen gigantic drops in violence worldwide. You can reduce violence without gobbling up people’s freedom.
Every country has it’s dose of violent people and idiots. But in United States they have easy access to guns, that make a lot of difference.
@Hal_10000:
I’ve been threatened by knives twice in my life.
Both times, I came out of it just fine (annoyed, but unhurt and without having anything stolen) because the guy with the knife had to make a choice that he didn’t want to make when I posed a threat in return.
If those guys had had guns instead, it would have been a different matter. They could have threatened me without putting themselves at risk. The one-sided nature of such an encounter can lead to a very different outcome.
This idea that we must purify the culture is pure Miss America world peace BS. That is a completely ridiculous lofty unattainable bar that it is effectively the same as doing nothing.
It isn’t complicated. If guns are illegal, it gets harder to shoot people. The chav in England and the junkie in the Netherlands would be considerably worse if they had guns, and those societies are wise to restrict access to guns. They maintain no illusions that they are going to reduce crime by engineering perfect people.
If the terrorists in London had had guns, they would have been far worse; because they didn’t, armed police had them dead in eight minutes, avoiding some gunfight that could have been catastrophic. Get real.
Kids, it begins …
Special counsel is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice
I hope they didn’t order their stationery yet 😀
@Gustopher:
There have been 152 mass shootings this year.
This one was 153.
There have been 163 days so far this year.
That is why it has had a “… meh” reaction.
We have grown accustomed to The Black Parade.
@michael reynolds:
Wow… when was living in Rio, Carrefour was the big store. Culture shock. French concept translating into Brasilian Portugese.
However Zona Sul rocked, had ordering via website and delivery to the third floor walkup.
I loved them!
I wonder if they would deliver Globo and Diet Antarctica Guarana to Colorado.
@Blue Galangal: That is interesting, and that is, one would think, a logical and desirable gun control measure: once you have a domestic violence conviction, one should lose his or her right to own a firearm.
@HarvardLaw92: My vision of heaven looks a lot like Honfleur.
@Jeremy: “But they’re not going to improve if you dismiss out of hand any new ideas or any questions about your own, and just return to tired, old, shopworn lines that got us into this situation in the first place. ”
Right. Only your college-dorm libertarian “ideas” aren’t new. They just sound new and fresh to someone who knows absolutely nothing about anything.
The defining element of the pro-gun-control side has been their eternal wrongness. In the 90’s we were told that the violence epidemic would get way worse without strict gun control. Over the next twenty years, the number of guns doubled and gun control laws were loosened and violence .. well, it actually fell 50%, faster than in countries that had strict gun control. When conceal-carry was introduced, we were told it would lead to carnage in the streets and well, it didn’t. There is zero correlation between the level of gun ownership and the level of murder — either from state-to-state or from country-to-country (the only way you can pretend is by exclusively focusing on gun murders, not total murders) and despite millions being poured into research by people like Bloomberg, researchers have failed to show a causal basis with unbelievable cherry-picking. The NRC’s own meta-analysis years ago show no indication that gun control worked.*
(*The only other thorough study was supposedly Lott’s. But given that he can’t reproduce his results and is using the excuse of every pseudo-scientist of “oh, the hard drive crashed” I discount his More Guns, Less Crime thesis in its entirety.)
And yet, every time this subject comes up, the gun control crowd’s response is “Fewer guns means fewer deaths! End of story! [mic drop].” Gun control is the Left’s answer to the Right’s position on global warming. They are certain they are right and facts be damned.
@Hal_10000:
I’m not convinced that gun control would work, but not having guns would prevent so many of these murders. If we lived in a country where firearms were possessed only by the State and by (almost certainly) people who needed them for criminal activity this type of shooting spree, or the one in SF, and the next or the one before that, etc. etc. would not happen.
And it’s hard, from any utilitarian point, to see what would be lost.
@Hal_10000:
As the population ages, violent crime goes down. This has been true throughout the industrialized world, not just in the United States.
Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, many people who used to die of their wounds now survive them.
The reality is that the US has the highest homicide rate in the developed world, and about two-thirds of those homicides involved guns. You have no plan for addressing that, and we can see that you never will.
It isn’t as easy to use knives and vans to kill people. Obviously, it isn’t impossible, but it is more difficult. When it comes to killing, making it more difficult is good.
Guns are also just fantasies for incurious humans. There was a right-wing blogger who took his life a month or so ago. His entire online world was devoted to wingnut nonsense, which included a huge interest in guns. In a world of some balance, a grown man’s love for weaponry would be something of a warning sign. But in America it’s more like a hobby–like painting landscapes on the weekends, or sailing.
@Pch101:
Not only does it take some level of skill, it also takes intent. Blades and fists require getting in someone’s space…. meaning *you* are also in *theirs*. It takes a lot more nerve to try and kill someone when their hot breath is in your face and fear is in their eyes. It allows cowards to feel brave and do something they NEVER would have dreamed of doing otherwise. The first lesson for any marital art or combative sport is usually to stand there and learn to take a hit; after all, if you can’t stand the sensation, wtf are you doing here? Fighting is not for the squeamish.
That’s why guns get touted as the great equalizer. No skills needed, no time spent training up, no effort towards physical fitness – just some loser artificially pushed out of his weight class. Yes, it allows a 90lb woman to face down a 280 behemoth for her own safety but it also emboldens the creep down the street to try his luck instead of not starting sh^t. As Chris Rock once said, “I ain’t going to the gym! You got pecs, I got Tecs”
@KM:
I know that one thing that helped me is that while my assailants were motivated by a desire for my cash, I had anger and a sense of moral outrage. All things being equal, outrage beats greed every time.
They wanted an easy mark. When the mark isn’t so easy, they move on and hope to find a better one.
If they had had guns, I may not have been able to write this post, because I would be dead. At the very least, I would have almost certainly been robbed and I may have been hurt, perhaps badly. Same guys with the same intent, but very different results.
I am bemused by seeing how quickly this thread morphed into a leftist gun control gripe. The actual issue is a left-wing, pro-Sanders terrorist escalating the violence against Republicans and/or those who disagree with them. Not satisfied with rioting in Berkeley, Portland, Evergreen College in WA state, Kathy Griffin’s obscenity, the murder of a Trump-like Caesar in a NY play, raw name-calling on CNN and well, I could go on ad nauseam, but now we see that the “progressive” left has upped the ante to actual assault on the government.
It behooves Republicans to arm themselves.
@John430:
If your skill with firearms is on par with your wit, then you aren’t going to hit anything.
@John430: Something that gets lost in these discussions is this — just because someone has anger control issues and expresses his anger by shooting people, that doesn’t mean that his outrage isn’t justified.
We have the most corrupt administration in history, and a Republican congress willing to commit to a moral and ethical limbo to cover for it.
I’m not going to defend the shooter’s actions, but he was right to be outraged.
Some percentage of Americans are violent by their nature and probably shouldn’t have access to guns. Until we know otherwise, it seems reasonable to put this man in that category. This incident means no more or less than the shooting in San Francisco. Man gets angry, man gets gun, man starts shooting. It’s America. I’d like to change that aspect of America, but it ain’t gonna happen.
@Gustopher:
One guy’s madman is another guy’s “Second Amendment Person.”
Let’s face it: If some rightwing fruitcake took a shot at a Clinton or an Obama, then these right zingers would either disavow responsibility or else say that the Democrat had it comin’. At the end of the day, these guys are whining, moaning first-class hypocrites filled with self-pity.
@Liberal Capitalist:
The best places to buy produce in Brazil you’ll find in the small farmers’s markets or in these roadside vendors on trucks. And smaller neighborhood or small city grocery stores usually have better produce than large big box stores like Carrefour, Extra or Wal-Mart. Coastal cities usually have a small market where fishermen sell their produce, that’s the best place to buy seafood.
Brazil has a very high homicide rate and a criminality problem. On the other hand, Brazilian politicians don’t fear deranged people shooting them because deranged people don’t have easy access to guns. That makes a lot of difference.
@John430: I live in WA state. There was no rioting at Evergreen.
Meanwhile, since the start of the year, a white woman in GA shot a black teen who walked past her house; a white supremacist stabbed a black student and commissioned army officer in MD; another white supremacist stabbed an elderly black man in NYC (and planned to kill others before he was caught); a white supremacist in Portland stabbed three white men, killing 2 of them, because they defended two teenage Muslim girls who he was harassing; and multiple instances across the country have been caught on camera of white people screaming at and threatening people of color and Muslims in stores, parks and even children’s birthday parties. Most of these people, except the guy in Portland, have proudly proclaimed themselves to be Trump supporters.
@KM:
No, he can’t.
Glad I could help.:-)
@Jeremy: I used to do it by carrying it underneath my overcoat or duster.
@Jeremy:
Is the US the only nation in the world where there is gang warfare over the black market in drugs?
Police brutality and suicide are also world wide phenomena. If there are differences in any of these correlations, they may not be related to drugs at all. The ultimate problem with this argument is that in the absence of specific evidence showing that gun ownership in the US skews these correlations, your speculation is just that–speculation.
@John430:
Keep beating that victim drum, schmuck 🙂
@HarvardLaw92: It’s the only reason that I read the thread for this type of topic.
Politico has an item today with some background on yesterday’s shooter. For example:
There’s more in the article.
@HarvardLaw92: Putz calling the kettle black
@Monala: I perhaps misused a word but student gangs walking around the campus at night threatening others who disagree with them is vigilantism
All of your examples are of a racist nature and hardly any could be related to Republicans. Leftists often use racism and religious bigotry to mask their true feelings. You sound like one of them.
The Trump haters mask their true disgust which is for America and it’s Constitutional right to hold differing opinions. I’m no big fan of Trump although I voted for him. I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for the female enabler of her sexual predator husband. There is a reason that couple are called Hill-Billy.
@Gustopher: We have the most corrupt administration in history, and a Republican congress willing to commit to a moral and ethical limbo to cover for it.
Show me something from a conclusive court ruling. So far it’s all allegations from the left indulging in their usual mental masturbations.. Unless of course you’re referring to the Obama Administration.
@Jen: Are they really called “supermarches”? When I was studying French (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) they were called “hypermarches”.
@Just ‘nutha ig’nint cracker:
Hypermarkets are larger than supermarkets and have non-food items, similar to a department store. (Think Walmart or Target vs. a regular supermarket.)
@michael reynolds: @Hal_10000: Enough of the dueling statistics blather. We can’t control this issue because we need to be better people than we are in order to do it under the circumstance that we have for our system and culture. Just accept that we are too selfish to consider the needs of our fellow humans and let it go. ti’s dead already! This war is lost until our grandchildren get to make whatever changes they want.
@HarvardLaw92: No one cares. All they know is that (now particularly) you are a self-confessed fascist who is coming to take all their guns. You even admitted it to Jeremy (yes, everyone knows you actually didn’t, but we’re making arguments here not truth).
@michael reynolds: Don’t go to London unless you can stand the damn British winters. (Rainy. Gloomy. Gets slightly less gloomy at 9 AM, fog, cold, mist…back to darkness at 4pm. And did I mention that it rains?) The place is so damn NORTH.
I stuck it out through two winters but then had to vamoose to Nebraska, which has lotsa snow in the winter but at least has SUN.
@john430:
Right, that’s far worse than actually being a sexual predator. Makes sense!
@Kylopod: You actually doubt that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator?
@john430: the perpetrators in most of those events were both Trump support and people who were members of white supremacists groups or held very public white supremacist beliefs. It’s not racism to point them out. When these people are boasting about their support of the Republican president, you’re lying if you say these incidents have nothing to do with Republicans. In fact, the one I gave a pass to, the Portland terrorist, was alsoa Trump supporter in the general election, even though he supported Sanders in the primaries.
@john430:
What I think on that matter isn’t the point. The point is that you justified your support for Trump on the grounds that Hillary “enabled” her husband’s sexual predation, which seems a strange rationale given that Trump has also been accused of sexual assault by multiple women (more than Bill Clinton, in fact) and was even caught boasting about it on tape. And it’s doubly strange since “enabling” assault (something I do not agree Hillary was guilty of, but let that pass) pales in comparison to actually, you know, committing it.
Just remember that John is a complete dunce who would embrace a right-wing Christian authoritarian dictatorship, and it all starts to make sense.
Kylopod,
(more than bills slick willy in fact) «- lol you can’t be serious??
@Junkboxgrad: There are actually three woman who have accused Clinton of sexual misconduct: Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick, the latter of whom accused him of rape. The Jones lawsuit was deemed by the Republican judge to lack legal merit, and Broaddrick gave a sworn deposition that the rape never occurred, though she later walked back on this denial.
Trump has been accused of sexual assault by more than 15 women over the course of many years. There’s no evidence these charges came from the “cash-propelled Clinton propaganda machine.” Additionally, his ex-wife Ivana claimed he once raped her, though she later retracted the claim. And, of course, he was caught on tape openly boasting about forcibly kissing and groping women, a claim he retracted when he realized it might hamper his presidential ambitions.
One final thing. Your quote mentions the “sexism allegations about Trump,” and it seems to be referring to the sexual assault allegations. But Trump’s long record of sexist remarks and behavior aren’t “allegations” at all; they’re part of the public record.
The pretzel you must contort yourself into to cast Clinton as a sexual predator but Trump as pristine in that department is a wonder to behold.
@Pch101: Calling me a dunce as you parrot the spoon-fed propaganda that you and your brotherly trolls puke up is funny. Look in the mirror if you want to see someone intellectually challenged.
@john430:
“I know you are but what am I?” was a decent comeback when you were six years old.
At your age, not so much.
Low energy. Sad!
@Pch101: I give up! I can’t stoop to your level of boorishness and your level of ignorance, intolerance and racial and religious bigotry. They were all rejected by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Shintoists, Hindi and Sikhs, et al eons ago.
You remain a misogynist and a misanthrope, incapable of being around your betters. I dunno your race, creed or color but I’m guessing that you don’t have any respect for them either, you are probably filled with self-loathing and only capable of just repeating what your puppet masters tell you.
Adios, arsehole.
@john430:
It’s hilarious how you use terms such as “bigotry” when you obviously have no idea what they mean.
@Pch101: I know that when one looks up the dictionary meaning of bigot they list your screen name. They also list a synonym for Pch101. See Troll.
72 hours later, and has any self-awareness set in around here?
Of course not. I kid, I kid.
The second comment posted:
28 approving up-votes for Scalise deserved it.
Here are a couple of harsh truths the mob here doesn’t want to admit.
1) Hodgkinson’s political expressions and beliefs are virtually indistinguishable from several of the more popular commenters here. Cut and paste most of his comments here, attribute them to wr, michael reynolds, or Daryl’s other brother Darryl/C. Clavin/Sam Malone, and unless the aforementioned people objected to the impersonation, no one could tell the difference.
2) For about a year now, there has been a steadily increasing trend of violence by leftists against Trump supporters, Republicans, and conservatives in general. Threats have become riots, assaults, serious injuries, and now an attempted mass assassination of Republican legislators. And the response here? Complete silence, occasionally interrupted by derisive mockery of the whiny people who don’t understand that “politics ain’t beanbag.”
3) At this point, any conservative or Trump supporter who makes their beliefs known in public should consider any forceful confrontation as an imminent threat of bodily harm and react accordingly. Because those are the new rules. Your rules. Especially if the “antifa” people are masked. Because too many people have been hit, pepper-sprayed, had their head split open by a bicycle lock, and now shot.
You people had your chance to police your own side, and you didn’t. Hell, you egged him on. In recent times we’ve seen popular entertainers shoot Trump in the head (Snoop Doggy Dog), pose with Trump’s severed head a la ISIS (Kathy Griffin), and brutally stabbed to death (Shakespeare In The Park). You’ve allowed this to become normalized until we’ve reached the point where supporting Trump is to risk death.
So, is this your wake-up call, or do we have to wait for someone to actually get killed? You almost got that this week, but your Bernie Bro wasn’t a good enough shot.
I’ll save the drama. You’ll hit the snooze button on this wake-up call, and find a way to blame the people being attacked and beaten and shot, and not the attackers.
@john430:
LMAO
VICTIM! I AM A VICTIM!
GFYS, and have a nice day 🙂
John8675309 is such a snowflake.
@HarvardLaw92: GFYS A fitting comment from an intellectually bankrupt law “perfesser” from Harvard Law School of the Ozarks in Buttlick Hollow.
Big snowflake.
@Pch101: Under the spreading chestnut tree Pch101 sat, amusing himself by abusing himself and catching his love in his hat.
I’m pretty sure that John8675309 is in his sixties or so, yet on his best day, his comebacks are on par with those of a middle school student. Kinda feel sorry for the poor bugger.
Yuge snowflake.
@Pch101: You should be grateful for John comments here. If you didn’t have that excuse to avoid the topic at hand — how left-wing hatred almost killed a member of Congress — you’d have to…
Nah, who am I kidding? You’d find some other excuse to avoid the truth that you have played a part (albeit a small one) in normalizing hatred and violence against people you hate for their political beliefs.
So give John his due. He does the rabid leftists here a Yuge favor by falling for your diversions and letting you dodge the ugly truth.
@Walther: NAH, I don’t really fall for their diversions. Just learning dirty tactics from them. You just gotta punch back twice as hard. You are spot on that HarvardLaw and Pch101 are rabid.
@Mr Bluster:
So, what’s the problem? If you see someone about to commit assault (and sometimes a “tomato” isn’t just a simple fruit), stop them from doing so. And if you act in good faith to prevent an assault, you shouldn’t have to worry about being punished for that action.
Think of it as a slightly less violent version of Obama’s “if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”