Drastic new steps in gun control necessary

None of the shocking news stories reproduced immediately below would have occurred as they did had the shooters involved not had access to unlimited firepower with which to murder their fellow humans in an efficient and wanton manner.

 Surely before God, the weekend of April 3-5, 2009, has produced enough ghastly news of gun-related violence in the United States to prompt the most cowardly Republican politicians from the most backward corners of the nation to finally agree to more stringent gun control.

 Assault rifle and handgun confiscation should be the first goals of a new gun law. No civilian should own a military assault rifle. And the man or woman with a license to own a .357 Magnum pistol should be a rare exception in the near future.

Any politician unwilling to support sweeping gun legislation after the present mayhem should be swept from office as soon as possible. We don't need such cowards with their fingers to the wind in our government. We need men and women in office who will do that which is right—not that which is politically expedient nor that which lobbyists from the National Rifle Association demand.

And to those who will trot out the tired old bromides about "guns not killing",  "if guns are criminalized, only criminals will have guns", etc., etc., etc., I say to you to stand aside as right-thinking Americans forge a solution to the challenge of unstable fools with more guns and rounds of ammunition than brains. We have had enough. We are not intimidated by you gun nuts or by the NRA.

Americans, we as a people possess enough collective intelligence to solve this problem of millions of handguns and assault rifles in the hands of people who should not have them. Let's roll up our sleeves and commit to solving the grave problem at hand.

Police: Father kills 5 children, then himself in Washington state murder-suicide

By PHUONG LE Associated Press Writer

GRAHAM, Wash. April 5, 2009 (AP)
 
A father apparently shot to death five of his children, ages 7 to 16, at their mobile home and then killed himself near a casino miles away, police said Saturday.

Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff, called it a domestic violence situation and a murder-suicide.

"We believe they all died of gunshot wounds," Troyer said.

Police found the father's body early Saturday in his still-running car near the Muckleshoot Casino in Auburn, about 30 miles south of Seattle. He had apparently killed himself with a rifle, although no note was left in the car, Auburn Police Sgt. Scott Near said.

Later in the day, Pierce County deputies checked the mobile home, which is about 20 miles southeast of the casino, and found four of the children dead in their beds and the fifth in the bathroom.

Neighbors in the Deer Run mobile home park, a neat, well-kept community nestled among towering evergreens, were shocked and weeping at the news.

"How could something like this happen?" asked Mary Riplinger, whose kids were playmates of the slain children. "Everyone's asking: Why did he do it? It's not right."

The mother of the victims was not at home, Troyer said. Deputies were called to the mobile home after a relative stopped by and saw a child lying motionless on a bed through a window, but couldn't get anyone to answer the door.

He said investigators believe the husband and wife were not estranged.

"Clearly she's been very traumatized," Troyer told The News Tribune of Tacoma. "You kind of get hardened to seeing people who are killed because of their own bad actions. But these kids died through no fault of their own. This is something you never want to see."

Authorities did not release the names of the family, but Troyer identified the dead children as four girls and a 7-year-old boy.

Another neighbor, Dale Lund, told The Seattle Times the 7-year-old boy who was killed played at times with his grandson and the boys shared the same school bus stop and attended the same elementary school together.

3 officers killed in Pittsburgh shooting

At least 12 people, gunman dead in New York shootings

Shootings occurred at American Civic Association, which helps immigrants, refugees

April 3, 2009

(CNN) -- A lone gunman killed at least 12 people and himself Friday in an immigration services center in Binghamton, New York, a government official said.

The gunman carried identification that said he was 42 and from upstate New York, the official said.

A warrant is being obtained to search the suspected shooter's home in Binghamton, another law enforcement source said.

Officials would not name the suspect.

Five people were wounded, the official said.

Three victims were taken to Wilson Medical Center with gunshot wounds to various extremities, Wilson spokeswoman Christina Boyd said.

A fourth victim was taken to another area hospital, Boyd said.

The local police command center said SWAT teams are still inside, clearing the building.

The shootings began about 10:30 a.m. ET at the American Civic Association, which helps immigrants and refugees, a law enforcement source said.

More than a dozen people were wounded, and 20 to 40 people may have been taken hostage, the source said.

"This is a horrible situation," Gov. David Paterson said.
 
"There's no available data on what's going on there other than the fact that lives have been lost."

Two people were led from the building in plastic handcuffs, WBNG reported. It was not immediately known whether the two were under arrest.
 
Video from the scene showed a person on a stretcher being taken to an ambulance.

The Press & Sun-Bulletin said that about 10 people came out of the building shortly after noon. They emerged with their hands on their heads. The police searched some of them, the newspaper reported.
 
About 12:40 p.m., another 10 -- clad in white sheets -- came out of the rear of the building, the newspaper said.

Spokesman Richard Kolko said the FBI is sending hostage negotiators and an evidence response team to the scene. The agency has an office in Binghamton, and agents are being sent from offices in Albany and Syracuse as well.

Nearby apartments were evacuated, and Binghamton High School was on lockdown, it said.

"Within minutes, [the situation] turned into one just flooded with police," Bob Joseph, news director of WNBF Radio, told CNN.

The American Civic Association helps immigrants and refugees with a number of issues, including personal counseling, resettlement, citizenship and reunification, and provides interpreters and translators, according to the United Way of Broome County, which is affiliated with the association.

Rashidun Haque, who owns a nearby convenience store, said police had him and his four customers stay inside and away from the windows.

"I'm really shaky, because this kind of thing -- it's a small city, it's a beautiful city, but nothing goes down serious like this," Haque said.

Eight killed in North Carolina nursing home rampage
 
Carthage, NC
March 29, 2009

(CNN) -- An armed man shot and killed seven patients and a nurse at a Carthage, North Carolina, nursing home Sunday morning before being wounded during a shootout with a police officer, authorities said.

Three other people, including the police officer and a visitor to the nursing home, were wounded in the attack, Carthage Police Chief Chris McKenzie said. The police officer was treated and released, McKenzie said.

The slain patients ranged in age from 78 to 98, Moore County District Attorney Maureen Krueger said. The man accused of carrying out the attack, 45-year-old Robert Stewart, was in custody, and his condition was unknown Sunday night, McKenzie said.

Stewart was not an employee of the nursing home -- the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center -- and he did not appear to have been related to any of the patients, she said.

"There is still more to be uncovered as far as his purpose in being there," she said.

A witness told CNN affiliate WRAL that Stewart was armed with a rifle, a shotgun and other weapons. The officer who stopped him, Justin Garner, "acted in nothing short of a heroic manner" and probably prevented the carnage from being worse, Krueger said.

Stewart faces eight counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony assault on a police officer, and other charges are pending, she said

Carthage is about 60 miles southwest of Raleigh.
 
Sunday's killings were the latest in a series of high-profile but apparently unrelated rampages in March, including the killings of 10 people by an Alabama man who was then killed by police. At a southern Illinois church, a man shot and killed the pastor and stabbed two parishioners...

Alabama shooting spree suspect Michael McLendon kills 10 and self in Kinston, Samson and Geneva

By Leo Standora
New York Daily News
 
March 11, 2009

An Alabama man with an assault weapon burned down his mother's house around her, shot his grandparents, aunt and uncle dead, then killed five other people Tuesday before turning the gun on himself, authorities said.

Coffee County coroner Robert Preachers identified the shooter as Michael McLendon and said he was in his 30s...

Authorities gave no motive for the rampage that claimed victims in several homes in the small towns of Kinston, Samson and Geneva and along the highway connecting them. Two of the dead were a sheriff deputy's wife and 3-month-old child... .
_______________________________

But according to redneck fools in this nation of idiots, the shooter had a 2nd Amendment right to an assault rifle--irregardless of his stability or lack thereof and irregardless of the fact that assault rifles are military weapons designed to kill as many humans as possible as quickly as possible.

Should Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress seek to reinstitute a ban on the sale of assault rifles, the hue and cry from "sportsmen" in Coffee County, Alabama, and a thousand other flyspecked sparrow fart locales will be overwhelming.

They will want Obama impeached or worse. They and lobbyists for the National Rifle Association will vow to destroy the career of every lawmaker supporting the assault rifle ban.

Assault rifles should not be in the hands of civilians. 

Period. 

Those presently held by civilians should be confiscated at once.

Oh, yes--it CAN be done.

Southerners said they would never again show fealty to the United States of America, but they did.

Segregationists said they would never accept blacks into their midst, but they have.

State and federal powers of coercion are tremendous. 

The old boys can be brought around.

The datelines of the shootings change.

The names and number of the victims change.

And the deranged shooters' stories vary in their particulars some.

Yesterday the victim was Bill Gwatney, chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party.  A handgun brandishing discount store worker who had lost his job murdered Gwatney in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Why Gwatney was blamed for that job loss we don't yet know.

Three weeks ago-on July 28-the victims-six wounded and two dead-were members of a Unitarian Church congregation in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Their attacker opened up on them with a 12-gauge shotgun because he "hated liberals".

These sad and disturbing stories from the American Heartland all have a common thread:

An emotionally unstable man murdered innocent people with a firearm that should not have been available to him.  Period.

I am unwilling to entertain at this time that tiresome and shop worn bit of National Rifle Association-inspired semantic obfuscation about "guns not killing". 

Anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that a gun is designed and manufactured for the express and primary purpose of inflicting trauma to living flesh so that the animus or life spark residing in that flesh is forced to separate from said flesh permanently-die.

But I've written all of this before.  I've written it again each time another shooting incident of major proportion occurred in this gun happy nation of swaggering 2nd Amendment devotees.

And that was far too often.

Rather than present my common sense arguments once more, I am reproducing a recent major statement of mine about the need for stricter gun laws in America.  It was done in April 2007 at the time of the Virginia Tech massacre.

In truth, I don't expect this presentation to change any opinions or influence any legislators to alter any laws re: the availability of guns in America. 

Neither presidential candidate has, to my knowledge, made a forthright statement about gun control in the face of Bill Gwatney's murder August 13.  In all likelihood, neither candidate will have the courage to make a statement.  This, because both Obama and McCain know the NRA and other gun lobbying organizations can, with one mailing to members, destroy a presidential candidate's chances in this nation of fools.

I believe that the idiots have prevailed in our nation.  I no longer entertain a hope the madness that is 21st Century America will turn itself around, pendulum like, so that things get better. 

I think our once hopeful, though always flawed, experiment in representative democracy is descending into its final death throes of chaos and dissolution.

D. Grant Haynes
August 14, 2008

_______________________________________

It's time to confront the gun lobby

April 18, 2007

Americans are busily soul searching one more time after another mass killing at an educational institution.

This time the setting was a university rather than a secondary school.
But the ghastly spectacle that unfolded at Virginia Polytechnic University in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16 when a disaffected student--Cho Seung-Hui, 23--systematically executed 32 innocent students and faculty members was fully as terrible as other such recent massacres in America--only worse.

More were killed at Virginia Tech than at Columbine High School in Colorado eight years ago. And the killer's cold-blooded and methodical resolve, as well as an inexplicable lack of appropriate and timely responses from police officers on the scene, will put the Virginia Tech massacre in a class apart always.

Media pundits, politicians, university administrators, psychologists, clergymen and others talk endlessly now about what lessons might be learned from Virginia Tech.

The university should have had a better evacuation or lock down protocol in place.

University and other police officers should have been more diligent in protecting students from Cho Seung-Hui's rage after his first shooting spree in which he killed two individuals more than two hours before he reappeared on campus to kill 30 more students.

The mental health community should have done a better job of intervention when Cho Seung-Hui had, over several years' time, displayed symptoms of mental illness.

There is ample blame to go around in this botched and bungled phantasmagoric mess that, seemingly, could not have been handled in a worse way than it was handled.

But in all of the hand-wringing 24-hour non-stop media reportage and speculation about Blacksburg, few professionals and fewer politicians with their fingers to the wind and their campaign coffers chock full of National Rifle Association dollars in some cases, have been willing to state the obvious.

Cho Seung-Hui could not have murdered 32 people so efficiently in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16 without access to two pistols and endless rounds of ammunition for them.

Cho was a brooding youth. One of his teachers had identified him as deeply troubled because of the excessively violent nature of his fictionalized scenarios. She had even referred him for counseling.

He had had encounters with the university police over allegations of stalking others.

He had been described as a potential menace to himself and others by a mental health professional.

Should not these facts alone have been a red flag sufficient to dictate a more than perfunctory look at him when he sought to acquire death-dealing handguns?

That should have been the case and would have been in a more sensible culture.

Had minimally effective gun control laws been in place in Virginia when Cho sought to purchase his pistols and cartridges, he would have been denied a permit and 32 dead Virginia Tech students and faculty members would be alive today.

For all practical purposes, anyone in this nation can obtain a firearm, regardless of his or her emotional stability, maturity, or legitimate need for the weapon.

This is wrong and is cause for people in more sane societies to fear for their very lives when contemplating a trip to America. This writer knows whereof he speaks because he lived in Great Britain for a time and was asked often about the danger of being gunned down in America.

What must they all think today?

More stringent gun control is the only answer to the madness of disaffected youths and others who, repeatedly, have walked into schools and work places and murdered innocent people.

But cowardly Democrats who should be at the forefront of gun control legislation are already distancing themselves from calls for tougher gun laws in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy.
 
Congressional Democrats fear the wrath of the National Rifle Association and that organization's clout with a certain segment of American voters too much to do what they know is both right and desperately needed.

Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D-NV) squelched serious talk of more rigid gun controls following the Virginia Tech shootings. The Associated Press reported Reid's lackluster and cowardly response to questions of stricter gun control as blood was being mopped at Virginia Tech.

"After the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid cautioned Tuesday against a 'rush to judgment' on stricter gun control....

"I think we ought to be thinking about the families and the victims and not speculate about future legislative battles that might lie ahead," said Reid... ."

And you should also be thinking about the families and the victims of the next such massacre, Senator Reid.

A ban on the sale of assault rifles in the United States--one that was in place from 1994 until 2004 when a Republican Congress permitted it to expire--should be reinstated as soon as possible.

And handgun acquisition requirements should also be made more restrictive as soon as possible.

The American with a legitimate need for a personal handgun--certainly and especially a license to carry such a weapon on his person--should become a rare exception rather than the rule.

The Cho Seung-Hui's of this nation should never be permitted to purchase a handgun or an assault rifle. Background checks prior to the sale of a pistol should be infinitely more thorough--modeled, perhaps after the British system.

The only viable solution to the epidemic of mass killings at American educational institutions and work places is to drastically reduce the number of guns in the hands of Americans.

This can be done and should be done.

And to those who would at this point trot out the tired old bromide, "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns", one can only observe that we must start somewhere and at some point in time.

The process may take decades, but if assault rifle acquisitions are stanched altogether and handguns are made infinitely more difficult to obtain, there will be ever fewer of each in circulation over time.

That would represent a move in the right direction and would be a fitting memorial to those who gave their lives at Virginia Tech because Virginia's gun laws had permitted a psychologically impaired youth to acquire the instruments to murder 32 people on a morning that will live in infamy throughout American history.

How many more Virginia Techs must occur before our elected representatives muster the courage to confront the gun lobby and do what must be done ?