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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.
Gun Free Zones work!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That's a good point. Anybody who's planning to commit mass murder will surely stop when he finds out gun ownership is illegal.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
We need to ban cars and trucks instead, a lot more people die in car accidents.
#DeleteFacebook
>50-100 shots
>only hit 5 people
more than likely.
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
Soap box, ballot box, ammo box. There's nothing happening in the USA right now that can't be fixed by judicious use of the second after some campaigning with the first.
I am curious as to the shooter's personal politics and motivations. Hopefully they're more nuanced than "He's just nuts", because random violence is less predictable and thus less preventable and more frightening than predictable violence.
Early reports say he first walked up to there, unarmed asking "Hey, are these republicans or democrats?"...
Apparently once he found out they were republicans, he came back armed and shooting.
What's the deal with this? It seems as if there is a Left Leaning Fascist group growing out there...using all methods including violence to shut down and shout down anyone that isn't in perfect lockstep with their groupthink of what the world has to be.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
We could just cut out the middleman and declare murder illegal. I'm shocked it hasn't been suggested before now actually.
Indeed. Having to own this is sad, but yes he was a hate filled Bernie Supporter. Now that I have apologized for that, will the GOP all of the violent acts committed by their party?
Place something witty here
This is what you get when you engage in hate campaigns. Is it what you wanted? If not, then find something to believe in besides hating people. Find something to talk about besides how much you hate [whomever] and how much your hate is justified because [reasons].
Why is that awkward?
Like many, he supports the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Like many, he does not support the right of your random person to go out and shoot people they don't like.
Supporting the first, does not mean support of the second.
Which one of those confuses you?
Exactly. A Left-Wing wacko purposely hunts down Republicans and the answer is "abolish guns."
I used to decry the statement "leftism is a mental disorder" but you know what? Maybe there is something there.
A person hunts down people who disagrees with (whether it's Republicans or Democrats, Christians or Muslims, Gays or Straights, Men or Women) your outrage ought to be at the person and those who promote such cause (Trump being killed and beheaded) as opposed to the availability of an inanimate object.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Sadly, there's a contingent of people that are absolutely certain that every single white male in America is a Nazi, along with white females (who have been declared the enemy of feminism) and a lot of others of other races simply for not supporting their intersectional identity politics (or simply being on the wrong side of the line whenever a new "intersection" is drawn. I hear that there's a movement to declare that married gay people are "privileged" and therefore the enemy now too).
Having decided that these people are Nazis, they think they're entitled to attack and/or kill them because gold tassels on the flag means world war 2 never ended or some bullshit like that.
"Libtard"? Hey kid, do your parents know you're on the Internet?
I don't respond to AC's.
Thoughts and prayers? So nothing, really. You're doing nothing. Bravo.
"Anybody who's planning to commit mass murder will surely stop when he finds out gun ownership is illegal."
Murder is illegal. Though it does not stop all murders. By your argument, we should make it perfectly legal. After all, murders are still happening at an alarming rate. If making murder illegal is not stopping murders, then what is the point?
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.
Early reports are wrong. It was not the shooter who asked if the players were Republican or Democrats.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
The thing is...this isn't just an isolated nut job here and there acting alone. Just look at the large, violent mobs in past year or so at college universities trying to extinguish any speakers or thoughts that are not in lockstep with their hive mind....mobs of people beating people, destroying property, shouting down any opinions differing from theirs and suppression anyone they see as different.
You saw this for days in the streets after Trump won...
Peaceful protest is one thing, I'm all for it..but this is mob rule violence and destruction trying to intimidate and suppress thought.
It sounds vaguely familiar to groups doing the same things just before WW2.
It just now is left instead of right, and the uniforms have changed.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Only if every auto accident is an argument to ban automobiles...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Not a thing of the left, gun ownership is a right wing cause.
Tell that to Gabrielle Giford, of Jo Cox in the UK, both shot by right wing nutjobs.
Then there is multiple killer Anders Breshvik, another far right nut job.
Luckily, civillised countries control guns properly, and dont end up with 5 year old girls killing their insructors with machine guns. At least it thins the herd.
What we do know though... is that a couple of good guys with a gun, stopped a bad guy with a gun.
No, police stopped a bad guy with a gun. There's a difference. If there stronger gun control, the bad guy might not have had a gun but those police still would have. Of course, it will be spun exactly as you did in order to fight gun control. And I say this as a person who owns multiple firearms, including one that would be classified as an "assault weapon". We do need more gun control, even if it is nothing more than a mandatory, government funded and provided class before you can get a permit that covers gun safety, gun laws, and basic handling/marksmanship.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
What violent acts by the GOP in any form of recent history?
Even the Tea Party high levels of activity, were quite peaceful at rallies....
I seem to remember a recently elected Congressman from the Midwest pleading guilty to bodyslamming a reporter. Or by "recent" do you mean only within the last few days?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
When I read and post on these forums, I am disparaged for being conservative. I am called ignorant, racist, and violent...because I disagree with the Bay Area take on tax policy and the way to achieve human dignity. But yet again, here we are with yet another news story where someone from the left is using violence to silence others.
At some point, don't you guys have to look in the mirror and notice there is something wrong with you? ALL these shootings, all violent political protest are coming from your ideology. How quickly you forget shootings like Senator Gabby Giffords came from a leftist. You claim tolerance, but in actuality practice none. Do you not think that those "cute" photos showing the beheading of Trump have an effect on society? Do you not see how all this talk of people who disagree with you as evil, inhuman, and beneath contempt doesn't translate to this?
In these forums, the stench of this ignorance runs rampant. If you post any hate few spew about the president, a republican, or a conservative, it will be modded up. The more dehumanizing, the higher the mod. None of these posts are ever backed with links, or logical arguments. It is enough to hate.
And when the hate is expressed in the inevitable outcome of murder, you will pretend you had nothing to do with it. Instead of preaching calm or making reasoned arguments, you will conveniently forget how you fed the hate machine. The blood of these killings in partly on your hands, and my guess is that most of you are too chicken shit to look in the mirror and ask why is my so called ideology of peace and tolerance producing so much violence?
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Thoughts and prayers? So nothing, really. You're doing nothing. Bravo.
No, I'm also changing my facebook picture....
He had a high powered semi-auto long gun (likely either an AR or AK)...he put out approx 50 rounds or more and he only wounded 4 people or so??
Sheesh..this guy couldn't shoot worth shit...
I'd dare say if it it comes down to a fight between the libs and the conservatives, the libs will lose that battle.
Fortunately, this guy couldn't shoot very well...but wow...with an AR, you could start off with a drum and have like 72 shots, and then quickly can change to 2 other 30 round magazines that would be easy to carry in your jeans pockets....and he didn't manage to do that much damage.
Again..thankfully....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It just now is left instead of right, and the uniforms have changed.
Right, the National Socialist Worker's Party that instituted free education, free healthcare, massive public works projects, nationalized entire industries, that was totally right-wing. All you have to do is take Bernie Sanders' screeds and replace "the 1%" with "the Jews" and he sounds just like Hitler. It's still the same shit: you've got stuff, we want it, and we're going to bust your heads open in the street to get it.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
but we push for an $500M+ underground gov only baseball field with lot's of armed guards
Frazier Glenn Miller Jr.
Robert Lewis Dear
Anders Behring Breivik
Scott Roeder
Wade Michael Page
Just a few names, and hardly exhaustive, I didn't list all of the people who have committed violence against mosques, synagogues and other places in the name of Christ.
While I don't enjoy envoking godwin, promoting gun control only for your political opponents feels a lot like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Here's my counter proposal:
1) Let's respect the 2nd amendment for all of our law-abiding citizens.
2) Let's avoid demonizing political opponents based on the actions of a single individual.
3) Let's try to understand the motivations of the killer.
4) Let's try to think rationally about our policy as a country rather than having knee-jerk reactions based on fear.
Last week in London, a person much like yourself, decided he can't tolerate any difference of opinion. He drove a car into a crowd of people killing several. Like you, he could not tolerate someone having a difference of opinion, and advocated violence against those who disagree.
The thing is, my stupid friend, is that he did not need a gun to silence others. The problem is not guns, but terrible people like yourself who think it is cool, or funny, or righteous to murder those with different opinions.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
http://www.newsweek.com/homegr...
https://www.adl.org/news/press...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I bet he was shooting it sideways like in the movies.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Early reports say he first walked up to there, unarmed asking "Hey, are these republicans or democrats?"...
That quote is waay to politically charged to go uncited. So here it is: Rep. Ron DeSantis said he was asked, “Are those Republicans or Democrats out there practicing?”
gun violence is down and has been going down for decades now.....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Because THATS worked so well for the starving, homeless, indigent, etc in the world. Don't push your religion on me.
You, sir, actually made my lips twitch, briefly, while wading through the morass of shit from the extreme sides of the aisle above (both of them). I momentarily regretted not having mod points. Then my customary level of doom, despair, and depression reasserted itself leaving me ready to close the browser window and return to normal life outside of the /. polirantfest, one where indeed it would be simply lovely to declare murder illegal and decriminalize suicide.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
look into berkeley riots for one
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I don't know of any people going out trying to kill a mass of people in the name of Christ...please, enumerate them.
For a start.... And rather recently this event.
Stephan
Jared Laughner shot a democratic congresswoman in the face. There have been numerous shootings and bombings at abortion clinics, at least 5 major incidents. Some of these are attributed to the Army of God, which also bombed some gay night clubs. The bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics was carried out by Eric Rudolph who wanted to fight against abortion and the "homosexual agenda." There's the Phineas Priesthood responsible for plotting and sometimes succeeding in blowing up gay night clubs, FBI buildings, abortion clinics, etc. Let's not forget the unabomber's reign of terror. Let's not forget the Oklahoma City bombing. Or the Charleston Church shooting. Or the Sihk temple shooting.
Of course I understand that a few nutcases with right leaning ideology doesn't mean all of those with right leaning ideology are unable to differentiate right from wrong. Surely you know that not everybody on the left is about to start taking pot shots at those on the right, don't you?
And then he tried to shoot himself to finish it off, but missed.
But according to what I've read, firearm murders by Democrats outnumber those from Republicans 2 to 1.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A quick google leads me to calculations based on the race of murderers and statistical racial party affiliation, this seems dubious at best. I seriously doubt there are reliable statistics of party affiliation among murderers (unless possibly if the murder is hate crime related).
2. Was a skinhead, tied to KKK group. KKK founded by Democrats to destroy Republican reconstruction efforts in the south. KKK = Democrats. 3. Dylan Roof prop of choice was Confederate flag. History lesson: Confederate flag = Democrats. Northern states (the Union) led by Republicans.
Mid 1800s Democrats=modern day Republicans in terms of political leanings. Your argument is disingenuous at best.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
By definition, this is not a mass shooting. A mass shooting, by government definition, is 4 or more killed.
So if the people shot end up dying from the wounds then it is a mass shooting, but if they survive it's not?
That sounds a flakey definition. Surely a mass shooting should be based on how many people get hit, not how many people get killed.
If 100 people get shot but only one died it wouldn't be a mass shooting by that definition.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It's not what people complain about. It's whether his policies were left or right wing.
And the police that returned fire shot at least twice that.
Two things. Moving targets are hard to hit, and unless you practical regularly by running and gunning at moving targets you have no idea how much a high heart rate messes up your aim.
Put a boat in a creek that moves at walking pace. Sprint to a spot 100 feet ahead of it and try to hit it repeatedly. You might be surprised at how hard it is to hit. For additional fun let it get ahead of you and then run and gun along the shoreline trying to keep up.
95% of shooters will have a stupidly low hit count/per rounds fired. Army police train for it. Everyone else tries to train themselves to be slow and methodical and keep the heart rate steady.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Not only has gun violence dropped sharply in the US over the last 20-30 years, it has dropped disproportionately more than in other countries, countries that often have introduced strict gun control during the same time.
Feel free to believe whatever you want. Preferably stay away too.
Almost every place in the world has seen gun violence go down in the last 20-30 years. Almost... the USA is the exception as usual
Allow me to inject a little reality using a source you doubtless regard as truth incarnate: Washington Post, 2015: We’ve had a Massive Decline in gun violence in the United States. Here’s why
This decline in gun violence is part of an overall decline in violent crime. According to the FBI's data, the national rate of violent crime has decreased 49 percent since its apex in 1991. Even as a certain type of mass shooting is apparently becoming more frequent, America has become a much less violent place.
You're worldview is fictional. You've been inculcated with fictional nonsense about the US and you're regurgitating it all over the interwebs.
You'll note that wapo at no point credited gun control for the "massive decline." You'll then dismiss that as it fails to align with the fictions you prefer to indulge. The massive decline corresponds to a period in which firearm ownership and concealed carry in the US have both grown at phenomenal rates. There is no correlation between the growth of firearms and gun violence; exactly the opposite. Another reality you'll need to subsume under your preferred bullshit narrative.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
"Individual ownership of firearms has only been a constitutional right since 2008"
According to the SCOTUS, it has been an individual Constitutional Right since 1791. Nothing changed. The decision in DC v. Heller was merely the affirmation of a Right which was elaborated in The Second Amendment. The Supreme Court had never been asked to weigh in on the issue previously because it was close to 200 years before government tried to deprive The People of their individual Right. The court doesn't strike down laws which don't exist.
There's zero chance of a Constitutional Amendment to enact gun control. Now that Gorsuch is on the court, it will be decades before there's any chance of a case overturning Heller or McDonald. And hopefully the court agrees to hear Peruta v. California and strikes down another anti-gun law.
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
Because THATS worked so well for the starving, homeless, indigent, etc in the world. Don't push your religion on me.
Nobody was proselytizing to you. Just because you have a chip on your shoulder, doesn't mean the rest of us have to pay any attention to your childishness.
Just another day in Paradise
OK, so there was a shooting. Bad bad. One person was killed (the shooter) and several more injured (two of them pretty seriously. All bad. This has created the usual firestorm of people asserting that gun control would have prevented this and others asserting that if all of the victims were armed it would have prevented this.
Either way it is useful to remember that -- if nobody else dies -- this constitutes 1.2% of the deaths from shootings that will happen (on average) today. If you've actually read any substantial fraction of this (mostly silly) thread, more people died from being shot while you were reading than were killed in this incident (so far). It's also worth remembering that it is better than even odds that one of those two to three deaths wasn't murder, it wasn't self defense, it wasn't even accident, it was somebody using a gun to kill themselves (almost 2/3 of all gun deaths are suicide).
If you've wasted an hour on the article and thread, 1 person and a fraction on average was shot and killed by others as homicide, two killed themselves, and a tiny fraction accidentally shot a friend or their kid or something (or were shot by their child under age six, in one out of 12 cases). A similarly tiny fraction of ordinary citizens actually used a gun to kill somebody "legitimately", that is in self defense.
Don't get me wrong -- I love guns, shot myself accidentally at age 10, defend the right to own guns etc. But the numbers are the numbers. This case is utterly ignorable, except for the small possibility that it was politically motivated instead of motivated by any of the OTHER reasons people use guns to murder people. Politically motivated shootings are, paradoxically enough, more what our founding fathers had in mind when they wrote in our right to bear arms (in a well-regulated militia, which I suppose MIGHT describe a typical drug gang or the Mafia or your local skinhead group). But probably not like this.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I understand why arrested people are called "suspected ____" as they are considered innocent until proven guilty but this grammar is so odd to me logically.
There's never media reports of a "suspected shooter" on the loose... nobody at the field considered him a "suspect" and he was caught red handed, then immediately when caught it became LESS definitive that he shot anyone.
I guess the scenario defines the terminology.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Of course it won't completely solve the problem. But reasonable gun control would solve enough of the problem to be worth it.
1: No it fucking wouldn't.
2: There's no such thing as "reasonable gun control" without amending the constitution. Every "gun control" law is unconstitutional.
No, police stopped a bad guy with a gun. There's a difference
So, you're not really for "gun control", you're for disarming the populace in favor of armed state, which is pretty much the reason the 2nd Amendment was enshrined in the first place.
OR let me ask a question this way, would you support a law that requires permitting for exercise of free speech?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
*Now* that leftists are using firearms to deal with political opponents we they finally stop trying to outlaw guns?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Only if every auto accident is an argument to ban automobiles...
You're comparing an accident with a transportation device with an attempted homicide with a purpose built weapon. Automobiles have plenty of uses besides killing something. Firearms are purpose built weapons. Comparing the two is a false equivalency.
"You saw this for days in the streets after Trump won..."
You also saw a LOT of news about Trump supporters attacking, beating, vandalizing or intimidating people of various ethnicities or ideologies. Of course, they either couldn't be verified or turned out to be out-right fakes by folks on the "other side" who felt they needed to lie or stage fake hate because... TRUMP. Not out of any rational fear based on reality -- just irrational fear of living in their own echo-chambers for so long.
I understand your reasons for posting something like this anonymously. Really, you're no different than the Antifa twats running around in masks and perpetrating violence on people with whom they disagree. The average conservative sees the progressive liberal as nutty, in need of help and a drain on resources but rarely do they wish death upon you. I see progressives wishing death and violence on conservatives daily. The violence has been breaking out in gun free zones and liberal enclaves. It's going to be different when you start dipping your toes into areas where we still have 2nd amendment rights. I promise you that I will never initiate violence against any American who isn't a direct threat to me or my family. The moment you become a direct threat, you will be ended. Do you understand?
I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but not even people that support gun control are advocating that the police shouldn't have guns. Virginia is an open carry state and no private citizen heroes helped take him down.
Hmm...last time I tried this exercise...the boat passengers got REALLY pissed at me....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
gifford was shot by a left wing nutjob, NOT a right wing one, stop trying to spin the story
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
95% of shooters will have a stupidly low hit count/per rounds fired. Army police train for it. Everyone else tries to train themselves to be slow and methodical and keep the heart rate steady
This is true within the Military as well. When the DoD was looking to replace the M14, they did a pretty extensive study on the best way to cause damage to the enemy. The result of the study found that the largest effect was not the calibre of the bullets going down range, but instead related to simply the number of rounds going downrange. As such, they switched from 7.62mm to 5.56, as it allowed the soldiers/marines to carry more rounds for the same weight, and the (potentially) lower recoil reduced fatigue and allowed more rounds to go down range.
Yes, a 7.62mm has a hell of a lot more stopping/penetration power, but that doesn't matter if the round just impacts the dirt or a tree, or whatever.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
The shooter didn't vocalize his complaints, so we resort to "left-wing wacko". What if he wasn't?
Well, maybe not vocalize, but here's a picture of one of his complaints.
He was a member of several anti-GOP Facebook groups, including "Terminate the Republican Party" and "The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans."
And here's one of his facebook postings
Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co.,
He also volunteered for the Sander's campaign. It seems pretty clear he steers a little toward the left on the political spectrum, but judge for yourself...
Would we have the same reaction if he was an average guy that thought he had no other options?
Maybe, maybe not, but I don't engage in hypotheticals..
Also, a violent leftist just shot up a bunch of conservatives. Yes, that totally makes me, a conservative, want to give up my guns now.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
He learned it from the President.
Learned WHAT from the president? How to send people to rallies to start fights? Oh, right, that's liberals. How to stage plays and public relations stunts with corporate sponsorship that depict the murder of political opponents? Oh, right, that's liberals. Encouraging the writing of editorials that cheer on things like Berkeley liberals literally beating people bloody for the sin of not being in perfect groupthink sync? Oh, right, that's liberals. Egging on multiple media networks to spend 24x7 on utterly unhinged phony narratives to distract from a growing series of election losses, rather than face why they lost? Oh, right - liberals!
The only fascists here are on the left. They're the ones using and - as a large, organized movement, praising the use of violence to suppress free speech and to try to undo election results. It doesn't GET any more brownshirty than the way progressive activists conduct themselves. The wannabe tyrants - the ones who say the First Amendment is dangerous, and that their political opponents should be silenced with systematic violence and oppression - are on the left. They're proud of it. They LIKE violence when it's their own pet thugs doing it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Exactly. Now all I'm thinking about is which do I want more a Remington 870 or a Mossberg 500?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
0 change in efficacy, over 0 influence, so undefined...
I agree with you wholeheartedly. The US has seen a massive decline in violent crime in general, along with a decline in teen pregnancies. There is no correlation between increased gun-ownership, increased conceal-and-carry, and increased violent crime.
While it's only a theory and correlation does not strictly imply causation, I cautiously subscribe to the lead-crime hypothesis:
"Second, this correlation holds true with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Within the United States, you can see the data at the state level. Where lead concentrations declined quickly, crime declined quickly. Where it declined slowly, crime declined slowly. The data even holds true at the neighborhood level - high lead concentrations correlate so well that you can overlay maps of crime rates over maps of lead concentrations and get an almost perfect fit.
Third, and probably most important, the data goes beyond just these models. As Drum himself points out, "if econometric studies were all there were to the story of lead, you'd be justified in remaining skeptical no matter how good the statistics look." But the chemistry and neuroscience of lead gives us good reason to believe the connection. Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person's ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for "emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
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.
The difference between guns and cars is that a car is designed to efficiently move people around while most guns are specifically designed to kill people. The vast majority of guns have no other usefull purpose to society.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
"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.
There are a lot more direct, believable explanations for the reduced crime. Better policing, reduced drug use, increased access to birth control and safe abortions (the abortions thing is very politically charged, sorry!), improved education, increased surveillance, reduced poverty, better mental health care, and loads more. The lead connection is very indirect. The lead theory is compelling because it is a red herring - it was unexpected, almost like there is some secret underground reason that we've all been missing. It makes for a cool story, but we will never really know how much, if any, impact it has.
So a left wing organization says 'there's a growing threat of right wing extremist terrorism!' and that is the same as ACTUAL terrorism that the left is doing? Really? On what planet do you live? That of George Orwell? As for these folks: Seventy-four percent of these murders came at the hands of right-wing extremists such as white supremacists, sovereign citizens and militia adherents. 1. If this is true why wasn't it reported in national news? Is it because...it didn't happen? 2. I cannot imagine a more diverse group of people that dislike each other, other than white supremecists, sovereign citizens, and militia adherants. Now, the left wingers that hate everyone who isn't twisted just like themselves, yeah, those I can see doing just about anything.