THE BRAIN FREES: Lone Gunmen

Here are a bunch of gun-related observations and whatnot. I think there’s going to be only one more gun post after this. I can’t handle debating paranoid, delusional people much longer. I prefer the real world.

Enjoy…

Four days after the last shooting that happened two days after the previous shooting…

Addicting Info: BREAKING: Three People Shot Dead In Colorado Murder-Suicide

Obviously, the problem in this country is not enough guns and too many restrictive “Liberal” laws.

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Did the Second Amendment always mean what gun nuts say it means? No. Far right-wing extremists took over the Republican party in the 70’s and re-interpreted their “unchangeable” right.

What? Who just said ‘fascists?’ Oh, that was me. Sorry.

The New Yorker: So You Think You Know the Second Amendment?

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Here’s a story about a law-abiding citizen with a concealed carry permit who doesn’t like loud music.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Oh, Soledad, thank you again for calling out bullshit like a real reporter should.

I could go into how inaccurate all of this douchebag’s fake statistics are, but I’ll just point out this one and you can extrapolate. He claims that the Bushmaster rifle shouldn’t be illegal because it’s the same kind of gun that small game hunters use to hunt squirrel.

Small game hunters typically use .22 ammo. They don’t want to disintegrate the target. The Bushmaster rifle used in the mass murder uses a .223 round. Similar, ay?

.22 .223

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Gun people keep saying that we have to arm everybody because killers always target gun-free zones. This, of course, is absurd.

They give examples. ‘Shooters never target police stations.’ (Except when they do.) Even barring the few instances when they do, it’s pretty obvious why they wouldn’t – unless the targets were police officers.

‘Shooters never target gun stores.’ Well, of course. That would be too stupid.

‘Shooters target schools because there are no guns there.’ Shooters don’t target schools because they know there aren’t any guns there. They target them because they have specific targets they want to kill.

‘The Aurora, Colorado shooter passed several theaters that allow guns just to target the one that bans guns.’ This one is a good one. It does sound logical, right? First, the killer never said he targeted that theater for its banning of guns. Gun people are just making an unsubstantiated supposition to support their predetermined argument. Second, and I don’t know the answer to this, but did any of the theaters he passed by also have an opening midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises full of people? I’m thinking he targeted this theater because it was night and it had a packed house full of victims and no other theaters had any people in them.

Shooters have targets they go after. They don't think to find places that have no guns. Banks have guards with guns - that must be why no one ever targets those.

I’m getting fucking sick and tired of hearing that more guns will make us more safe.

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Quote from Roger Ebert:

"Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy."

Chicago Sun-Times: Roger Ebert: Elephant

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I’ve seen this posted by a few anti-gun control people as some sort of an equalizing example of these tragic events happening in other countries:

Al Jazeera: 22 Children and 1 adult stabbed in attack at Chinese school

Question: How many children were killed due to this mass stabbing in severely limited private gun owning China?

Answer: Fucking none.

Fucking facts. In fucking context. Fucking please. For fucking once. Godfuckingdamnit.

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Malcolm Turnbull is an Australian politician.

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Food for thought:

Right-wingers who claim teachers are incompetent now want them armed and in gun battles.

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Ben Stein said another ridiculously idiotic thing on August 19 of this year:

"Let's start with a few facts about guns and shootings and deaths.

Lately, there have been far too many shootings of innocent people by crazy people. We can go back to Virginia Tech or Tucson, Ariz., or look just recently to Aurora, Colo., and to Wisconsin and the Sikh Temple.

Too many crazy, homicidal people have lethal weapons. And you might say there should be very strict gun control - and for crazy people, there should be.

On the other hand, you might look at this little set of facts.

In Sandpoint, North Idaho, where I live for most of the summer, it's extremely easy to buy a gun. You can buy them at stores and at gun shows, or just at yard sales. Yet there are almost no gun deaths in Bonner County, Idaho.

The last ones of note in North Idaho were done by the FBI at Ruby Ridge, and that's a different story.

On the other hand, in my beloved Los Angeles, where I live most of the year, there's extremely strict gun control. It's a real project to buy a gun.

Here, we have gang shootings and death by guns on a terrifying scale. In my native city of Washington, D.C., the same goes: Strict gun control and lots of shootings.

The same goes for Chicago. Strict gun control and a lot of killing.

Obviously, Sandpoint, Idaho, is a very much calmer place than Chicago, and I'm not saying that people in Chicago should be allowed to just tote guns in their cars the way many can, and do, in North Idaho.

But my point is that there is nothing easy or simple about the relationship between gun control and crime. If a man had started shooting in a crowd in North Idaho, probably several men in the crowd would have shot him down immediately. Maybe a woman, too.

I'm not for vigilante law enforcement. But I am also not for government disarming everyone but criminals.

I have never understood the flaw in the argument that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. And, of course, there are already laws against murder.

The whole problem of guns and killings is complex, and saying "gun control," or being angry at the NRA simply does not get us very far.

I wish I had a better solution, but I don't, and as far as I know neither does anyone else."

CBS News: Ben Stein: Stricter gun laws won't cut shootings

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As an opener, Ben Stein says, “…let’s start with a few facts.” And that’s exactly what he did: started with only a few facts, not all of them. Yes, what he said is correct, however, it is intentionally taken out of context, which renders the outcome false.

First, he narrowed down his “almost no gun deaths” to one sparsely populated podunk North Idaho county. Then, he compared it to three densely populated major cities – Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

If he compared whole states with tight gun regulation to whole states with loose gun regulation, a complete statistic of America, he would find, for a fact, less gun regulation results in more gun death. Did I mention that was a fact? But if you cherry-pick specific places that fit your narrative, you’re either lying or a fucking moron. Which are you, Ben?

Did you know that no Americans were killed on the Moon? There are even less gun restrictions there than in America, but there isn’t a gun problem there at all. Why is that? Obviously, there’s no need for gun restrictions.

Then, he jumps directly to the right-wing fear-mongering lie that the government wants to “disarm everyone but criminals.” Just fuck you, Ben Stein.

And “being angry at the NRA” will get us far. The NRA leadership is fully responsible for buying and threatening politicians to get what they want. Which is not even what their membership wants.

“I wish I had a better solution, but I don’t, and as far as I know neither does anyone else.” A better solution? Aside from the fact that he hasn’t presented any solution at all, other than continuing to completely ignore the problem, also ignoring the logical ideas that others have presented does not mean that none were presented.

As we know, Republicans ignore what they disagree with.

And no, Ben, nothing is easy about the relationship between gun control and crime. But for decades, you and other assholes like you have insisted that we should do nothing about it except give more guns and more ammo to more people. That’s your solution. Let people who shouldn’t have guns continue to get them because their rights are greater than those who wish to not die from them. You enjoying the highest gun death rates in the industrialized world, Benny?

Or, is it just about protecting the gun industry’s corporate profits?

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Here is a fine, upstanding, law-abiding, responsible citizen with a concealed carry permit.

US News: Man drops gun in movie theater, shooting self in buttocks

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Sean Faircloth, Dir. of Strategy & Policy, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science --

Is opposition to gun control a religion? Read TEN arguments (based on reason and evidence?) offered against gun control since yesterday's mass slaughter:

1) Prohibition of alcohol didn't work -- avoiding the fact, based on strong evidence, that restricting guns DOES work in country after country.

2) Cars (used for transportation) are dangerous -- therefore there should be unlimited access to machines, the only purpose of which is killing. (This is like saying, since car transport is dangerous, we should allow cigarettes in closed spaces. Huh?)

3) The Oklahoma City bombers didn't use guns. In other words, "Because handfuls of people sometimes commit terrorist acts, acts that take long-term planning, we want to make sure it's legal to shower America with guns so that spontaneous acts of violence are common and the killing can be done with great efficiency on the spur of the moment."

4) "A well-regulated militia" means making sure any random person can get semi-automatic weapons.

5) A nut in China injured school children with a knife, therefore in America we want to make sure a similar person can kill -- not injure -- kill -- and kill easily and, if they choose, kill in large numbers, on the spur of the moment, whenever someone flies into a jealous rage or psychotic state.

6) It's about insanity not guns -- this argument is apparently based on the hypothesis that Americans are a lot more insane than the British, Australians, French and the people of many other developed countries where guns are restricted and far fewer people die from guns.

7) Teachers and (some have actually said this!) children should have guns in school -- despite the fact that the Connecticut killer's mother owned the semi-automatics that the killer used to kill his own mother and so many children.

8) Dictators from an earlier time used gun control, therefore the success of gun control in modern democracies should be ignored.

9) Mike Huckabee says it's because we don't have prayer in school which is as intellectually strong as arguments 1 through 8. [I would like to add that prayer is in Churches and God didn’t prevent priests from raping thousands of boys over the years.]

10) Finally the classic: it is disrespectful to the children who died to discuss methods of preventing similar killings. (Huh?) Where are the arguments based on logic and reason that address the success of gun laws in major democracies like Germany, France, Spain and Australia? Or is religious gun worship enough until the next time a mass murder occurs. Meanwhile, every week, individuals are killed in some jealous rage in far greater numbers than in other industrialized societies -- with the use of machines designed for the efficient and spontaneous killing of humans. If there are non-religious arguments, evidence-based arguments, against gun control, please offer the evidence. That is fair game, but emotional rants and straw men are not reason and science.

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Addicting Info: Mass Killings In The U.S. Actually Occur Very Frequently

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The only people politicizing mass murders are the ones saying we can never talk about gun control. It’s the right-wing form of Politically Correct silencing.

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Mother Jones: More Guns, More Mass Shootings—Coincidence?

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Mother Jones: A Guide to Mass Shootings in America

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The Washington Post: 10 Deadliest US Mass Murders

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It’s true. Now is not the time to talk of gun control.

Because that time has long since passed.

Why do gun lovers, who incessantly cite the Second Amendment as their reason that everyone should have guns no matter what without any restrictions, never seem to recall the part about that right being “well regulated?”

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

I caught this poster on Facebook the day after I wrote this:

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This is a collage of topics post, but there’s a large section on gun control in it. I originally posted it in July after the Aurora, Colorado mass murder.

The Brain Frees: Stupid Fucking Asshole Edition

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Sean Faircloth, Dir. of Strategy & Policy, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science --

Consider the following views from three of America's most prominent Christians:

1) Dr. James Dobson said God "has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on." Dobson associated the mass murder of children with God's reaction to support for gay marriage, women's choice, and secularism.

2) Mike Huckabee (who later modified his statement -- after bad press) said we've "removed god from our schools" so "should we be so surprised that our schools become a place of carnage?"

3) Newt Gingrich: "When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary, seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum."

Perhaps reason, compassion and action -- action to help prevent similar horrors in the future -- is a better approach than that of these ostentatiously Christian men. We should be thankful that many Christians find the views of these men utterly contemptible. Let us hope reason and compassionate action prevails. When Dobson said fall upon "us", it seems that Dobson's form of judgment fell on little children and brave teachers more than it fell on James Dobson.