Illinois mall gives Nerf gun to boy who was told 'no' by Santa - "A 4-year-old was left in tears after an Illinois mall Santa said he couldn't have a Nerf gun for Christmas. So the mall, the maker of Nerf and the NRA stepped in... A video that went viral showed Michael DeCarlo, 4, asking Santa at Harlem Irving Plaza in Norridge, Illinois, for the Nerf gun. When the Santa said no, Michael's mom, Sabella, thought the Santa might not have heard Michael say "Nerf."... The mall posted an apology and a video on Facebook, said that the Santa had resigned. It sent another Santa to Michael's house with a surprise."
Laws Regarding Driving on Private Property - "Connecticut prohibits vehicle owners from driving without the legally required insurance, and does not limit its applicability to public roadways. In Washington, officers can enforce traffic violations such as reckless driving, negligent driving, vehicular homicide and hit-and-run traffic collisions on private property. Additionally, officers in some states can enforce speed laws on private roads within a Home Owner Association... In general, unlicensed drivers can operate vehicles on private property, but this is where the definition of private property comes into play. If the property is open to the public such as a mall parking lot or parking garage owned by an individual or company, licensing laws can be enforced... The same law applies to minors driving on private property. Minors without a state-required driver's license can drive vehicles and dirt bikes on private property with no public access, such as ranches and other rural private property, provided they have the consent of the property owner. However, if an unlicensed driver causes a serious injury or death while driving, the property owners – or parents or guardians if the driver is a minor – could be held liable for injuries and damages. Most U.S. states permit a police officer to enforce drunk driving laws on any property, public or private, because driving drunk is so inherently dangerous. For example, Mississippi’s DUI law says it’s unlawful to drive under the influence within the state. Likewise, Kentucky law states that drunk driving is illegal anywhere in the state. In other states, the law on DUI is more broadly worded, but the courts have interpreted the laws to apply to private property."
Gun nuts love to claim that cars aren't more regulated than guns by saying that you don't need a licence to drive a vehicle on private property. Which is not always true. And the state still has power over the use of cars on private property
Pat Benatar has stopped singing 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot' - "While the song's meaning is about strength and resiliency, Benatar said "you have to draw the line" and be aware of lyrics."
If she wants to play this game, how many of her old songs can she no longer sing?
Man fires gun at teens who said they mistakenly pulled in his driveway, authorities say - "Authorities on Tuesday said Virginia man was arrested after he fired a gun into a car occupied by three teenagers who said they wound up in his driveway by mistake. Spotsylvania County deputies said they were called to a home for a dispute on June 18 around 9:45 p.m. EDT. They were met at the address by Brent Alford, 49, who told authorities he noticed a vehicle was parked in his driveway. Armed with a handgun, Alford went to investigate, deputies said. Inside the vehicle were three teenage siblings, aged 17, 16, and 15, who said they were lost and had driven down Alford's driveway by accident... The bullet traveled through the taillight and hit items in the trunk before landing in the center of the back passenger area under the seat cushion"
All criminals will always have guns. Therefore any form of gun control will not help, because it will only cripple law-abiding citizens. Because we know beforehand who is a criminal and who is not
City's attempt to cut Texas man's grass leads to a standoff, a fire and his death, police say - "An attempt by Austin, Texas, officials to serve a search warrant and provide lawn care resulted in shots fired, an hourslong standoff, a house fire and a death... SWAT, mental health officers and a crisis negotiator arrived on scene, but could not get the man out of the home, leading to the lockdown of a nearby elementary school and the closure of several streets... Their main goal Wednesday was to get the man in compliance with the local homeowners association. “They attempted to cut the lawn for him, and this is the reaction they got”"
Clearly gun laws only affect law abiding citizens, and criminals will just ignore them, so they are useless. Everyone falls into one of these two categories and never transitions between them
I saw some gun nuts defending this because they hate the government. Too bad it was the HOA
Meme - "SWITZERLAND. 1 IN 2 CITIZENS HAS GUNS, LOWEST CRIME RATE IN THE WORLD Drew Shekler: "l am a Swiss citizen living in Switzerland. What this fails to mention is the fact that ammunition can not be kept at home. It must stay at the shooting range or milliary barracks. All men here must do "military time* it's more like boy scouts here until age 28. Also, concealed pistol permits are nearly impossible to come by. What the US should be looking to mimic from the Swiss is the fact that every single job here guarentees 4 weeks min paid vacation, 16 weeks paid maternity leave for new moms, and a secure safety net for people that find themselves unemployed. But hey the rifles are cool too :)"
12-year-old boy pulls gun on classmate in the US, demands Chicken McNugget: Police - "A 12-year-old New York City boy is accused of pulling a gun on a classmate and demanding that she give him her chicken nugget."
Too bad the other classmate didn't have a gun too, which would've solved the problem
Why school shootings don’t happen in Israel (& the Polish government’s outrageous lies) - "There is therefore much anger in Israel, among both right and left, that in the US, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its supporters wrongly cite Israel as a country which allows easy access to guns... The gun death rate in Israel is low by international standards: about two homicides per 100,000 people in Israel. Most of those are the result of clan and gang warfare among some of Israel’s Arab minority, where there is a proliferation of illegal weapons, mostly smuggled in from the Palestinian Authority... Contrary to what many in the United States believe, owning a firearm in Israel is neither common nor easy. Applying for a license is a grueling process, often taking months of security checks and training courses. Keeping that license requires an investment of time, effort, and money... I drove into the nearest town to get the necessary forms signed by my family doctor, who certified that I’m not taking any medication that might impair my alertness, that I have no history of psychological disorders, and that I’m more or less in my right mind—at least most of the time. And then it was off to the shooting range. Together with 15 others, I stood in line for half an hour to have my designated self-defense weapon examined, tested for any malfunctions that would endanger myself or passersby. The serial number was matched with the paperwork to make sure the weapon was legally mine and had not been put on any watch lists. Another 40-minute wait (part of it spent in the Sukkah outside the range chatting with an elderly veteran of four of Israel’s wars) and we were ushered into the range for our training session... If your weapon is stolen from your house and you cannot prove that a safe was broken open to get at the weapon, then you are a criminal and may do jail time. And if we ever have to use a weapon in self-defense? You had better be certain that you had no other recourse, that you did what you could to warn the attacker, and that had you not taken action, at least one innocent life could have been lost. And you may still do jail time... There is something seriously wrong about a system where a disturbed young man can acquire deadly weapons as easily as buying a new laptop. Where children can treat firearms as casually as toys... the United States? A country bounded by friendly regimes and by neutral water. Apparently a nation lacking natural enemies may simply become its own enemy."
Clearly, if Israel had more guns and it were easier to get them, there would be even fewer gun deaths and their low murder rate would be even lower
Man who shot Colorado gunman was killed by officer - The Globe and Mail - "Johnny Hurley was hailed by police as a hero for shooting and killing a gunman they say had killed one officer and expressed hatred for police in a Denver suburb. But when another officer rushed in to respond and saw Hurley holding the suspect’s AR-15, he shot Hurley, killing him"
Presumably the gun nut logic will be that we don't need the police, since they only screw up by shooting "good guys with guns". Apparently civilians never make mistakes - only the government
Why does the US have such a high rate of gun murders? - " Why does the US have such a high rate of gun murders, by far the highest in the developed world? Is it because of guns, or is there something else going on? Maybe America is just more prone to crime, say, because of income inequality or cultural differences? A landmark 1997 study actually tried to answer this question. Its findings — which scholars say still hold up — are that America doesn't really have a significantly higher rate of crime compared to similar countries. But that crime is much likelier to be lethal: American criminals just kill more people than do their counterparts in other developed countries. And guns appear to be a big part of what makes this difference. The seminal work here is a 1999 book by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, called Crime Is Not the Problem. Zimring and Hawkins set out to examine what was, at the time, the conventional wisdom: that America had a uniquely terrible crime problem, one without any parallel in other developed democracies. They found, pretty definitively, that the conventional wisdom was wrong. "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher," they write. "Violence is not a crime problem." Zimring and Hawkins determined this by looking at 20 developed countries' overall crime rate and rates of violent death. They found virtually no connection between the two, indicating that a country's level of violent death wasn't determined by its overall crime levels... It's not because, as you might think, American violent criminals are just more likely to kill people... "A far greater proportion of Los Angeles homicides grow out of arguments and other social encounters between acquaintances [than robbery or rape]," they find. This is where guns enter the story. The mere presence of firearms, according to Zimring and Hawkins, makes a merely tense situation more likely to turn deadly. When a gang member argues with another gang member, or a robber sticks up a liquor store, there's always a risk that the situation can escalate to some kind of violence. But when people have a handheld tool that is specially engineered for killing efficiently, escalation to murder becomes much, much more likely. And indeed, that's what Zimring and Hawkins's data found. "A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," they explain. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime fifty-four times as deadly in New York City as in London." Guns, not criminality per se, are the problem... "Robbery and assault rates ... reveal several Western nations that rival the United States," a 2011 review found. "While the level of lethal violence in the United States is probably the highest in the Western world, it is hard to make the case for US exceptionalism when it comes to non-lethal violence."... "Some of the behaviors that we think of as fundamentally linked with violence may stay quite steady as the violence rate goes down, as you get a better handle on the gun issue," he explained. New York's recent tightening enforcement of gun laws serves as a good example. According to Pollack, New York didn't effectively reduce its heroin use rate or solve underlying problems such as poverty — the things that gun rights advocates often claim actually contribute to gun violence. But New York did tighten gun restrictions, which coincided with less violence."
So much for the cope that without guns, criminals will just use whatever other weapons are available (which anyway begs the question of why one needs a gun to defend one's self, since other weapons are just as effective)
Easiness of Legal Access to Concealed Firearm Permits and Homicide Rates in the United States - "Shall-issue laws are associated with significantly higher rates of total, firearm-related, and handgun-related homicide."
Weird. We are told that concealed carry is very effective to deter crime because criminals don't know who is armed
Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander - "From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University... It was far more common for police or bystanders to subdue the attacker or for police to kill the person, according to the center’s national data... “There’s been this statement: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ That’s factually inaccurate because of the word ‘only,’” said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice expert at the University of Alabama who has written books and research papers about mass shootings. Nonetheless, gun-rights advocates, including the National Rifle Association, used that phrase on social media to draw attention to what happened in Indiana... Lankford believes it would be a mistake to think armed civilians can be relied upon to regularly stop mass shootings. “While it’s certainly a good thing in this mall shooting that someone was able to stop it before it went any further, let’s not think we can substitute that outcome in all past and future incidents,” Lankford said. “If everyone’s carrying a firearm, the risk that something bad happens just gets much larger.”"
Doesn't impede gun nut fantasies. One called this a biased source, even though ALERRT is a partnership between Texas State University and the police, and the FBI named it the National Standard in Active Shooter Response Training
School Shooters: The Myth of the Stable Home - "Out of this sample of 56 school shooters, only 10 (18%) grew up in a stable home with both biological parents. In other words, 82% of the sample either grew up in dysfunctional families or without their parents together (for at least part of their lives). Though the focus here is on shooters in the United States, following this listing are shooters from other countries who came from broken homes or unstable families"
Someone got very upset when I posted this, and then posted something "refuting" it without realising that it was an "analysis" of the very same thing I quoted, and claimed that I had gotten wrecked and was embarrassing myself. If you want to do a further breakdown, of the 56 US school shooters that Langman cites, 29 lived in single parent/broken households for at least part of their time as children and 5 lived without both biological parents for an extended period of time.
According to US census data, over two thirds of families with their own children under 18 are married couples (as opposed to single parent households). So there is a clear over-representation of children from single parent households among school shooters.
Given that we know that single parenthood is a risk factor in crime, we should not be surprised that it's a risk factor in this form of mass shooting
The Hidden Consequences of School Shootings - Freakonomics - "LEVINE: One of the things that we noticed when we started thinking about the Sandy Hook school shooting, is the extent to which gun sales skyrocketed in the months afterwards. So, Sandy Hook was in December of 2012. There was an enormous spike in gun sales from the period of December, right after the school shooting, through early April of 2013. And we can identify the timing of it almost perfectly to the political discussions that were taking place at that time. Those discussions ended up being unsuccessful. They did not lead to any new legislation. When they ended, gun sales returned to normal. What we were interested in what is the impact of having 3 million additional guns, purchased in a relatively short period of time. And it turns out that there is a very large spike in accidental gun deaths that lines up perfectly with the surge in gun sales, which unfortunately led to the deaths of essentially the same number of children through these subsequent deaths as occurred in the Sandy Hook shooting itself. Just because there are more guns out there, someone accidentally picked it up and a bad thing happened...
I think in many instances, a school shooting occurs and then there’s sort of a knee jerk response where we feel like we have to do something. And that includes reconstructing school entryways to make sure that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to enter the school if your entry hasn’t been approved. Active shooter drills. All these things are very expensive. All of these things have not such strong proven track records of being effective. And it’s possible that one of the things that they do do is take away money from things that we can be doing to, for instance, provide greater psychological assistance to the kids who were exposed, where we know there was direct harm done to those children. I think of Uvalde was a perfect example of the training, the school construction. All of the things that we think we’re doing, trying to help our children didn’t seem like they were all that effective in that particular instance."
Clearly there is no point in having gun control because criminals will always be able to get guns, so gun control will only hurt law-abiding citizens
Meme - the right: "it's not a guns problem, it's a mental health crisis!"
everyone: "so you're saying we should provide universal access to things like mental health services?"
the right: "Woah there"
Copes include saying that they should be locked away, that the government can't run it, that this is ok as long as the government provides guns, that everyone in the US has access, that covid lockdowns have damaged mental health more than mental health programs can help, that the healthcare field promotes mental illness, that government policies caused the mental health crisis and to tell the person posting this to kill himself
Man Dies After Shooting Himself in the Groin While Attempting U-Turn—Police - "A Charleston man fatally shot himself in the groin while attempting a U-turn in his car, according to police in South Carolina. Ahmad Gardner, 35, was driving east on Rivers Avenue, near Mall Drive in Charleston, on Tuesday morning when the incident occurred."
School Shootings: Horrific but Statistically Rare | City Journal - " Politicians and journalists cannot resist exploiting the deaths of schoolchildren, but the ghoulish wall-to-wall coverage serves no purpose except to terrify adults and kids. Contrary to what you’ve heard from Biden and the media, school massacres like the one in Uvalde are exceptionally rare events. They actually occurred more often in the 1990s than recently—but back then, there wasn’t an army of satellite trucks competing around the clock to chronicle the horror. “There is not an epidemic of mass shootings,” says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has been tracking these events for decades and helps keep the AP/USA Today/Northeastern Mass Killing database. “What’s increasing and is out of control is the epidemic of fear.” As Fox notes, the annual odds that an American child will die in a mass shooting at school are nearly 10 million to 1, about the odds of being killed by lightning or of dying in an earthquake. Those are also about the same odds that any American will die in a mass public shooting like the recent one in Buffalo. Such numbers, of course, are no consolation to the grieving parents and families in Uvalde and Buffalo, but neither is the frenzy to manipulate these tragedies for ratings and political gain... Surveys show that half of Americans worry about being the victim of a mass shooting, and a third of them avoid going to certain places and events because of this fear. More than 60 percent of parents worry that their child will be killed in a mass shooting at school. Children do need to be better protected from criminals, and there might be ways to make schools safer, but students don’t need the active-shooter drills now conducted in over 95 percent of the nation’s schools, and which are associated with higher levels of depression, stress and anxiety. Nor do children and parents need to hear the deceptive statistics promoted by the press and the White House’s fearmonger-in-chief. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” Biden asked in his speech after the Uvalde killings, portraying them as the continuation of a decade of ceaseless slaughter by citing the “900 incidents of gunfire” on school grounds since 2012. But few students died in these incidents, which typically occurred outside the school building and often involved non-students going there after school hours. When Fox totals the number of students killed by any sort of gunfire at school in the past decade, including the victims in Uvalde, it works out to 10 deaths per year—among more than 50 million students. “Hundreds of children die every year in drowning accidents,” he says. “We need lifeguards at pools more than armed guards at schools.” Journalists are similarly deceptive when they call Uvalde the 27th “school shooting” of this year, or classify the spree in Buffalo as one of the hundreds of “mass shootings” in America annually. But these “mass shootings” typically don’t result in more than one death, if that, and the ones with multiple fatalities typically involve family disputes at home, gang conflict, or other criminal activity like drug dealing or robbery. They’re not random acts of terror like that in Buffalo, which meets Fox’s criteria for a “mass public shooting”: one in a public place with at least four fatalities that are not related to gang conflict or other crimes. On average, a half dozen of these occur annually. Mass public shootings at schools are much rarer: a total of 12 in the past 34 years."
Liberals tell us that you're more likely to die from a lightning strike than a terrorist attack in the US, so if you worry about the latter but not the former you're racist. Yet they're obsessed with mass and especially school shootings
Sean Baad's answer to Have any US cops trained with British Police or vice versa? If so, what did you think of the other nations take on policing? - Quora - "My brother did some training in the US… California I believe but I could be wrong. His overwhelming takeaway from it all was that the police in the US are almost universally terrified at all times. The very real threat of ANYONE they stop possessing a gun makes life very different... it adversely affects the quality of policing (and the public’s perception of policing) because, by necessity, the police in the US are MUCH more heavy-handed and aggressive. They need to create the impression that, if you have a firearm, it would be a very bad idea to reach for it. While there is a lot of focus on de-escalating situations in the UK, that isn’t really applicable so much in the US."
Of course, it's easier to just hate on the police in the US. But clearly, the solution is even more guns
Officer shooting leads to better training - "In 1998, a deputy sheriff in Georgia made a traffic stop. The dashcam video has been used to train officers all over the country in the cost of hesitation."
Police officer pulls a speeder over, sees him screw around, lets him get up and go back into his vehicle to get a gun and gets shot and killed, because he is reluctant to shoot the idiot. Those who keep condemning the police ignore the fact that the abundance of guns makes policing in the US more difficult than in other developed countries
Firearm Laws and Firearm Homicides: A Systematic Review - "In the aggregate, stronger gun policies were associated with decreased rates of firearm homicide, even after adjusting for demographic and sociologic factors. Laws that strengthen background checks and permit-to-purchase seemed to decrease firearm homicide rates. Specific laws directed at firearm trafficking, improving child safety, or the banning of military-style assault weapons were not associated with changes in firearm homicide rates. The evidence for laws restricting guns in public places and leniency in gun carrying was mixed."
Gun nuts will still keep chanting Washington DC and Chicago
What Do We Know About the Association Between Firearm Legislation and Firearm-Related Injuries? - "Firearms account for a substantial proportion of external causes of death, injury, and disability across the world. Legislation to regulate firearms has often been passed with the intent of reducing problems related to their use. However, lack of clarity around which interventions are effective remains a major challenge for policy development. Aiming to meet this challenge, we systematically reviewed studies exploring the associations between firearm-related laws and firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries/deaths. We restricted our search to studies published from 1950 to 2014. Evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries suggests that in certain nations the simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths. Laws restricting the purchase of (e.g., background checks) and access to (e.g., safer storage) firearms are also associated with lower rates of intimate partner homicides and firearm unintentional deaths in children, respectively. Limitations of studies include challenges inherent to their ecological design, their execution, and the lack of robustness of findings to model specifications. High quality research on the association between the implementation or repeal of firearm legislation (rather than the evaluation of existing laws) and firearm injuries would lead to a better understanding of what interventions are likely to work given local contexts. This information is key to move this field forward and for the development of effective policies that may counteract the burden that firearm injuries pose on populations."
The effect of legislation on firearm-related deaths in Canada: a systematic review - "Evidence supporting the effectiveness of Canadian firearms legislation in the reduction of homicide and accidental death rates is inconclusive; a decrease in firearm-related suicide rates was observed by most studies, but evidence of method substitution was also identified. Re-evaluation of existing laws may be beneficial to build an improved and effective evidence-based national framework for prevention of gun violence."
When you already have strict gun laws, going even more strict doesn't really help for non-suicides
Federal gun bill shows Liberals 'out of touch' with Nunavut, says MP - "Nunavummiut need to hunt to feed their families and to protect themselves from dangerous predators such as polar bears"
Ottawa withdraws controversial amendments to firearms law - "The Liberal government has withdrawn a series of controversial amendments to pending firearms legislation, Bill C-21, that some firearms owners say would have unfairly targeted hunters and farmers... C-21, as originally drafted, was designed to ban handguns. The amendments expanded its scope. Because the amendments strayed so dramatically from how the bill was initially written, opposition parties questioned whether the changes were even admissible under parliamentary rules... What's needed in this minority Parliament, Mendicino said, is support from either the NDP or Bloc — parties that withheld support in the face of backlash from rural dwellers and some Indigenous peoples... Critics said a ban on popular hunting rifles would do little to make Canadians safer when many crime guns are handguns illegally smuggled over the U.S. border."
