So the antis have been making my job hard as of late.
Generally when there is a mass shooting, the antis don’t even wait for the victim’s arterial pressure to drop before they start making political statements about how their pet laws would have stopped EVERYTHING bad from happening. See if they wait before the facts are known, then the sheer stupidity that background checks, or gun bans would have stopped anything isn’t apparent yet.
Still with France they seem to have known better. France has all the magical gun control, and from all observations that made it WORSE!
Still it was only a matter of time before they bit the hook. Let’s start with Joan:
I have said before, as have many others, all it will take to terrorize cities and countries all over the world is a few terrorists with guns- likely assault type guns. The shooters in Paris appear to be extremists who succeeded in an attack on a group of journalists who had written political and religious satire that they didn’t apparently like. I think we can all remember the attack on Mumbai (164 people dead, 308 injured) where a lot of people were killed by terrorists and the city was paralyzed by the attack. Recently there was an attack in Canada by a “lone wolf” who had a gun and terrorized Ottawa ( 2 dead including the shooter) for hours. And we can’t forget about the DC sniper case (10 dead, 3 injured) which kept cities on the east coast of our country on high alert as the 2 snipers moved from place to place randomly killing innocent people. This was a case of home grown terrorism and we have had more than a number of these kinds of incidents in our very own country. And in Norway, an extremist with a gun killed 77 innocent Norwegians. The shooter purchased his high capacity magazines in the U.S.
Now let’s pull this apart, India, Canada, and Norway are all bastions of strict gun control, further she missed the terrorist attack in Sydney Australia. Of course Joan attempts to tie the Norway attack to the United States, despite the importation of the magazines already being a crime. Also odd that she mentioned the shooting attack in Canada, but not the ramming attack on the same day. Radical Islam, same body count, similar motives…but without the gun, there was no “Gun Death”, so that is totally ignored! See they don’t want to ban cars because they USE cars!
Still let’s look at the beltway sniper compared to all these other attacks. First up all the other attacks were full-on frontal assaults where the killings were done in a matter of hours by shooters in the open. The Mumbai attacks were a tad different as it was an international incident, still the largest bloodshed was all done inside of 24 hours and again in the open. Now the beltway attack was a sniper-style attack where single victims were chosen and engaged before the team moved to a new location, and the shots were taken from a sniper blind constructed in the trunk of a sedan. The killings went on this way for several MONTHS, with the police being totally baffled at how the shooter was operating.
The behavior of these killers were DRASTICALLY different from the other ones. Can you imagine why? If discovered by either civilians or police these killers could have been engaged by people who were armed. Such a threat didn’t exist in any of the other locations except if they were engaged by armed law enforcement. Even in France many of the LEOs who responded did not have firearms.
The worst of this is that known terrorists can actually buy guns and ammunition legally in America. Yes. It’s true. I have written about this many times before. We have what some call a “terror gap” in our gun laws where the names of those on the terror watch list are not sent to the FBI’s list of prohibited purchasers to stop them from buying guns at a licensed gun dealer. And then, of course, anyone can buy a gun from a private seller at a gun show, flea market or through an Internet site. This is the definition of insanity.
Well except these attacks didn’t happen in America! They happened in places where ALL CITIZENS are treated the same as American prohibited persons, and Joan fails to mention the SINGLE US shooting attack the shooters were NOT on a watch list.
After watching the PBS Frontline special on Tuesday night named “Gunned Down” (about the NRA), one would think all is futile. The NRA has won everything and the gun safety groups might just as well pack up and go home to put our heads in a hole.
Given the logic you’re using for gun control, I would say that assessment would be advisable…
Yes, Wayne LaPierre has pulled off something that is pretty unbelievable and bold. He has managed, along with the corporate gun lobby and its’ minions, to convince some Americans and a whole lot of politicians that there is absolutely nothing we can do about terror attacks, domestic shootings, 2 year olds shooting their own family members, suicide by gun, and all of those mass shootings. And this is, according to the gun lobby members who agreed to be interviewed for the show, about freedom. If we pass any common sense gun safety legislation, gun owners will lose their freedoms? Apparently these folks never think about the freedoms lost by those who are killed by guns. Watching the parents of several of the Sandy Hook children on the Frontline special was painful. How can anyone not understand that this is the ultimate loss of freedom?
Well maybe because all of your proposals would have PREVENTED NOTHING, and you yourself have been VERY friendly to the idea of confiscating guns. So in Joan’s perfect world the United States is reduced to where France is right now…disarmed, and people being gunned down by terrorists!
So back to what happened in France and the connection to the American gun culture. The corporate gun lobby has long stood in the way of an International Arms Treaty.
So you’re saying the terrorists in France got their guns from the United States? Yeah, I doubt that!
Also we have a similar article posted from the National Gun Victims Action Counsel:
The brothers were entered into the U.S. government’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) system, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center watch lists and finally into the U.S.’s “no fly” list, reports Yahoo News. The “no fly” list prevents people who are considered a “threat to civil aviation or national security” from buying any ticket for commercial aircraft in the United States.
Yet, because of the U.S.’s insane gun laws, the brothers, if they lived here, could amazingly have gone into any licensed gun dealer and legally bought as many guns as they wanted because being on the “no-fly” list does not make someone a prohibited gun purchaser in the United States!
Yet attacks like this are NOT happening in the United States! That seems to be a big thing missing here.
Other examples of insane U.S. gun laws include gun manufacturers being the only consumer industry exempt from liability lawsuits, guns not being required to be registered or their owners licensed and no background checks conducted for gun show and private sales.
Yeah, that’ll stop terrorists! Just like it did in all the other countries that had licensing and registration. Licensing and registration that has been used to deny access to guns, and confiscate arms. Gee, why won’t we just lie down and play along with them??
One example is the NRA actually agitates for laws that allow soldiers diagnosed with PTSD and people with severe dementia to legally purchase guns. What could go wrong? And, recently, the NRA got guns legalized in national parks and on Amtrak trains–ironically on the property of the same government it says wants to confiscate guns.
And where have the problems been?
The gun lobby also defends sales to civilians of TrackingPoint’s “can’t miss” sniper rifle which has no defensive use and is ready-made for terrorists, insurgents and hate groups. Its ads show a 12-year-old girl hitting a target 1000 yards away–ten football fields–every time.
Again, where have the problems been?
Domestically we see this same flawed logic. They claim that areas with strict gun control have high crime because guns are being smuggled by criminals from gun-friendly states. Of course the evidence doesn’t show that, but even if it DID, why are the smugglers behaving so well in the gun friendly areas? Why aren’t the violent gangs proliferating into these areas? Why aren’t the terrorists conducting these kinds of attacks.
The truth is GUN CONTROL is enabling these attacks, and the lack of response of the antis shows they KNOW this.
He has managed, along with the corporate gun lobby and its’ minions, to convince some Americans and a whole lot of politicians that there is absolutely nothing we can do about terror attacks, domestic shootings, 2 year olds shooting their own family members, suicide by gun, and all of those mass shootings. And this is, according to the gun lobby members who agreed to be interviewed for the show, about freedom.
And Joan seems to have a major problem with this – especially the part about ‘freedom’.
Yes, we can do something about all those problems; that has never been the question. We simply have to give up our families — hey, no kids in the house, no children being accidentally shot or shooting someone right?
We can prevent domestic shootings by rounding up every firearm, everything that can be used to make a firearm. Might not reduce the murder rate but we can reduce shootings.
We can really make a dent in firearm related deaths by rounding up every firearm in the country. Just go door to door, searching everyone’s home regardless of probable cause.
See, all we have to do is give up any pretense that We, The People have any control over our lives; yeah, that freedom she blithely dismisses.
And then we will be free to wonder if we will be the next Charlie Hebdo or Syndey Australia or Canada….or Rwanda — but hey, the deaths will be morally superior because no guns were used.
They are once again conflating facts… no real surprise… And they WOULD strip us of our ability to defend ourselves without a single shred of remorse…
A small thing.
Gun makers are not absolved of normal product liability. If your S&W explodes in your hand due to a flaw in design or workmanship they are liable. The exemption made was they are not liable for the misuse of their product by third parties.
An exemption that I really think should apply to EVERY manufactured good.
A great point!
You beat me to it. That exemption, while not written into law for any other industry, generally comes out in court.
Ford is liable if the brakes are bad on whole manufacturing runs of F250 trucks and people get hurt/killed as a result, and more so if it can be reasonably proven they knew about it and failed to correct it. But if someone uses an otherwise-safe F250 to run down a bus full of nuns, a field trip of orphans, a meeting of rabbis, and a clown, Ford cannot reasonably be held liable for the misuse of their truck. That’s what we call “common sense”.
The PLCAA was and is necessary because despite that “common sense” the antis crow about, liability lawsuits were still filed against firearm manufacturers for the clear misuse of their products.
Even QC errors an auto maker would be liable, and possibly the dealership depending on protocols. IE The current F-150 is a marvelously designed truck, but Ford ships one unit that has a hairline crack in the master cylinder which cracks under driving stress causing the breaks to fail and chaos to ensue. Even that Ford can be held liable. See also the Firestone lawsuit on Ford Explorers being sold with under-inflated tires.