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Congressman Steve Scalise Among 5 Shot at Baseball Field (nytimes.com)
From a New York Times report: A lone gunman opened fire on Republican members of the congressional baseball team at a practice field in a Washington suburb Wednesday, using a rifle to shower the field with bullets that struck five people, including Steve Scalise, the majority whip of the House of Representatives. Two members of Mr. Scalise's protective police detail were wounded as they exchanged gunfire with the shooter in what other lawmakers described as a chaotic, terror-filled ten minutes that turned the baseball practice into an early-morning nightmare. Police said a total of five people were shot, two critically. Standing at second base, Mr. Scalise was struck, in the hip, according to witnesses, and collapsed as the shots rang out, one after another, from behind a chain-link fence near the third-base dugout. Witnesses said Mr. Scalise, of Louisiana, "army crawled" his way toward taller grass as the shooting continued. Alternative source: NBC News, CNN, BBC, NPR, WashingtonPost, and WSJ.
Update: 06/14 15:40 GMT: In remarks at the White House, President Trump said the Alexandria shooting suspect has died from injuries.
Update: 06/14 15:40 GMT: In remarks at the White House, President Trump said the Alexandria shooting suspect has died from injuries.
Nope. Any gun control law that is strong enough to be effective would run a foul of the 2nd amendment. And the 2nd amendment is never going to go away as long as the US stands as a country.
This is getting out of hand... WAY out of hand. The specific targeting of the right needs to end. I'm not talking about the nut jobs with guns, but those who engage in irresponsible verbal targeting that encourage the nut jobs with guns and provide them targeting.
Come on folks, all this hateful rhetoric needs to come to a full and final stop. Those on the other side of the isle are NOT (in general) trying to do harm to others or the country and it's way past time we stop trying to claim they are. Attach the principles, argue about what the country should do, discuss the issues, but leave the personal attacks and outlandish claims alone.
This shooting illustrates just one of the reasons why this is important..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Own it.
Clearly, antifa tactics are moving to a new level.
But For the sake of the environment, Hodgkinson did use steel ammunition, rather than lead.
when did police stop being people??
Where did I say they did? I said "good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun" as an argument against gun control doesn't work with police as the good guy because even with gun control in the US police would remain armed. Unless you are arguing that the US would full on ban all guns and disarm most police at the same time, which any reasonable person would agree would not happen.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The thing is, most of them don't want to. It's a cry for help./p>
Most of them who don't wan't to die choose a method that has a greater chance of being stopped, I think. I'm not a mental health professional, but I unfortunately have some direct experience.
I have a daughter who suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, and like many BPD sufferers has tried many times to kill herself. For a few years there, we were at the ER at least three or four times per year, except when she was institutionalized. When she was institutionalized we also got the chance to be sometime-parents to a bunch of other girls with similar problems, and we became friends and have kept in touch since, so my experience is broader than just her.
I own many guns, and because of her disorder I've been careful to always keep them locked up... except one time. I'd been teaching a shooting class so I had a couple of .22 pistols in my truck, and I was in a hurry when I got home and didn't get them locked up right away. She took one, with the intention of killing herself with it (all previous attempts had been with pills). When I went out to get the guns I realized immediately what had happened and called the police (who knew her well). They, and we, began searching intensively for her.
When we found her, she had the gun, but had carefully unloaded it and thrown the ammunition into a swampy area. She told me that she had realized that she didn't actually want to die, and that if she used the gun no one would be able to intervene to keep her from dying.
I'm not going to claim that there aren't some people who kill themselves with a gun who wouldn't kill themselves if they didn't have a gun. But I think that most people who choose a gun choose it specifically because they aren't crying for help and really just want to end it. If they were crying for help, they'd do something more like what my daughter usually did: Take a bunch of pills then make sure she was with people who would notice and act to save her. Those who really want to die and don't have access to a gun can jump in front of a bus or a train, or off a tall building, or run a hose from their tailpipe when they're certain no one will be around all day, or any of a hundred other methods with just as high a probability of "success".
(Aside: My daughter is doing much better. It's been over three years since she attempted suicide. She still struggles with her disorder but is doing much better at building a life in spite of it. She sees a therapist weekly -- her own choice, which is important. We made her go to therapy for years, but it's dramatically less effective than when the person actually wants the help.)
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In the leftist world view, property is a collective agreement. Ownership of property can only exist within the structure of a well-functioning society. In Mad Max anarchy, you have no right to property beyond what you can personally defend. You might be able to personally defend your own small homestead, but property beyond that is yours only by virtue of the state that you live in. So, to the leftist, the question is not about who "deserves their property" or not, its about allocation of resources to maintain and sustain the social order that make ownership of property possible in the first place.
"Second, this correlation holds true with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates.
So I take it South Africa wasn't included in the study?
That's a fair point. A quick google for violent crime rates in South Africa shows a (murder) trend that increases rapidly and peaks in the early 90s, then falls:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The difference is that leaded gas was still widely used there after the peak. I did find an article talking generally about violent crime in South Africa:
http://www.iol.co.za/dailynews...
The political climate I think is the big thing. Negotiations regarding ending Apartheid started in 1990 and ended with the election in 1994. That violent crime increased up to those negotiations and then decreased to 1970s levels afterward doesn't seem to me to be a coincidence. I imagine that's overshadowing everything else, including whatever effects leaded gasolline are having on their (still very high!) violent crime rates.
case in point: It was *my* fault I was upset at her for cheating on me because if I hadn't checked her email I wouldn't have known.
I cannot imagine a more on-point and succinct description of BPD. That's exactly the sort of thing BPD sufferers do.
How did you handle it? How did you guide your child towards the help they needed or did you have to go with the "I'm your parent and I said so" route? because with BPDs forceful coercion doesn't really do squat (at least with adults).
Coercion, basically, and no, it didn't really accomplish much to help her get better. The main things it did were (a) keep her alive, because while she was institutionalized she was under a level of supervision that made killing herself all but impossible, a level of supervision that no parents could ever provide in a home setting and (b) force her to learn a set of tools that she could use to manage her BPD, if she chose to.
Even that was not remotely without cost. In fact, at one point it looked seriously possible that I might go to prison. We had her in a day treatment facility, and while there she convinced the therapist that her issues were all our fault, that we were verbally, emotionally and sometimes physically abusive (but that there were no marks because we were careful while she was in treatment and we were under scrutiny). She stopped just short of accusing me of sexual abuse, and actually did accuse her older brother, which led to some seriously unpleasant interactions with the police and child and family services. To this day I'm not sure why she didn't make the allegation against me; it would have been so easy for her. She's a very bright girl (woman, now), charming, personable and convincing, and she had that therapist wrapped around her finger.
The day treatment therapist believed her to the extent that he ordered us to put her into residential treatment. If we didn't, he'd write an affidavit for the police, attesting to all of our abuse. So, we put her in residential treatment. There, the therapist was wiser and she had less room for twisting the truth. The program she was in wasn't specific for BPD, it was structured for troubled teens generally, with a specific focus on substance abuse but with a recognition that substance abuse in kids is almost always a symptom as much as a problem itself. But it did include a pretty deep focus on identifying base truth and eliminating self-deception, and the therapist and staff were quite good at recognizing what was truth and what was not (calling on us as needed). The program also taught a lot of excellent strategies for self-management and even included a little bit of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, though not Dialectical Behavior Therapy (the variant of CBT that has proven most effective for BPD). The program taught, and she learned... but she didn't actually apply it until much later.
Here's another BPDism: when we put her in residential treatment, she was convinced that we had done it to "get rid of her". Never mind that the program required heavy parental and family involvement, to the point that we were at the facility seven days per week, and her treatment pretty much took over our entire lives (to the detriment of our other kids, unfortunately). Not to mention the money. Her facility was actually incredibly cheap as such things go, but it was still almost $10,000 per month. Luckily we had good insurance that covered most of it. When the massive commitment of time and resources we'd made was pointed out to her, she just argued that we only did that so we'd look good to family and neighbors. The level of brain-twisting required to follow BPD logic is enormous.
When she finally "graduated" from the treatment, after more than a year, she was actually quite improved, but still extremely hard to live with. Eventually, though, she tried to kill herself again and went back in. She was there a total of three times. By the third, they didn't keep her long because they re
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