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    Creating an atmosphere where the children in elementary s chools don't have to be anxious about being shot while trying to learn is probably a good idea if you are concerned about self-steem and releated issues.

    Adam Lanza, the man behind the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., possessed a National Rifle Association certificate in his name, new reports say.

    Reuters reported that according to documents released on Thursday, police discovered NRA certificates in the name of Lanza and his mother, Nancy Lanza — whom he killed before starting the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

    http://www.politico.com/story/2013/0...#ixzz2OwlKmDO1

    Guns legally obtained by a person who could pass background investigation. Check. Gun safe present in house where she could have locked them up and prohibited access by her troubled son. Check. Both mother and son trained by NRA in "proper" gun usage and safety. Check.

    What am I missing here? Gun lovers will claim the mentally ill should be kep away from guns but how do they suggest we make sure that happen in a case like this?

    Remember WE DON'T HAVE THE MONEY TO PUT PEOPLE LIKE ADAM LANZA AWAY EVEN WHEN IT IS APPROPRIATE AND A CASE COULD BE MADE TO DO SO UNDER LAW.

    Comment


      Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
      Creating an atmosphere where the children in elementary s chools don't have to be anxious about being shot while trying to learn is probably a good idea if you are concerned about self-steem and releated issues.




      Guns legally obtained by a person who could pass background investigation. Check. Gun safe present in house where she could have locked them up and prohibited access by her troubled son. Check. Both mother and son trained by NRA in "proper" gun usage and safety. Check.

      What am I missing here? Gun lovers will claim the mentally ill should be kep away from guns but how do they suggest we make sure that happen in a case like this?

      Remember WE DON'T HAVE THE MONEY TO PUT PEOPLE LIKE ADAM LANZA AWAY EVEN WHEN IT IS APPROPRIATE AND A CASE COULD BE MADE TO DO SO UNDER LAW.

      So, lets take away everyone's right to own a firearm legally and the violence will stop? Yeah, right. Wake up, what is being proposed as gun legislation does not solve the problem it only limits and eventually takes away freedom.

      Comment


        Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
        So, lets take away everyone's right to own a firearm legally and the violence will stop? Yeah, right. Wake up, what is being proposed as gun legislation does not solve the problem it only limits and eventually takes away freedom.
        No, no no..let's not take away all firearms....just the ones that allow you to fire several hundreds of rounds inside of 5 minutes.

        An NRA lobbyist just had his thermal sighted assault weapon stolen from his car where he irresponsibly left it in plain site.

        IF NRA officials cannot secure their assault weapons safely then who can?

        Do you have any statistics on how many people could have saved themselves if they had an assault weapon rather than a conventional firearm during all those years we had an assault weapon ban?

        Of course you don't.


        I want to take away the firearms that seemingly cannot be controlled by "responsible" gun owners like Nancy Lanza and Clark Aposhian (go ahead and google) that then fall easily into the hands of those who kill dozens inside of 5 minutes by blowing their faces and limbs off at close range like those children and teachers in Newtown.

        If you do not have a plan for how we could make sure Nancy Lanzas and Clark Aposhians of the world to secure their battlefield guns the way we are told "responsible gun owners" should then we should take those weapons away. Nothings perfect....there will still be deaths...but maybe police will stop some deaths when they can respond before someone fires more than a couple dozen shots.

        Six kids ran to safety when he fumbled changing a clip. If he changed more of them more would be alive.

        Sometimes I wonder..it it because Newtown was in the NE, CT, a blue state...sometimes I think thee conservative gun nuts are just happy to see children from blue states die.

        There hasn't been a serious proposal from the gun nuts on how to stop this. Why? They revel in this kind of violence I think.

        Comment


          "Police in Cottonwood Heights are searching for an assault rifle that was stolen Wednesday from the vehicle of a top Utah gun lobbyist, who called for more guns in schools after the shooting deaths of 20 children in Connecticut last year.

          Utah Shooting Sports Council Chairman Clark Aposhian told KSTU that he was cleaning out his garage and placed the firearm in the back of his Dodge Magnum station wagon. He said the AR-15 military-style assault rifle was in a locked case and equipped with a thermal scope for night vision. Aposhian insisted the gun was not loaded at the time. "


          I guess he is doing his part here to see that there might be more assault weapons in school by making his available to whatever criminal wanted to break into his car to steal it...a small matter.

          Whether it was loaded or not, easy to buy ammo. No background check required for that. The only thing that keeps the new owner of that gun from blowing away a school full of children is the money to buy the ammo or the ability to steal that too.

          How can we possibly stop things like this? Hard to steal weapons that are not legal to possess?

          Comment


            The TRUE SOURCE of RANDOM & MASS SHOOTINGS and VIOLENCE .

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=UhO0Pul_FcE

            Comment


              Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
              No, no no..let's not take away all firearms....just the ones that allow you to fire several hundreds of rounds inside of 5 minutes.

              An NRA lobbyist just had his thermal sighted assault weapon stolen from his car where he irresponsibly left it in plain site.

              IF NRA officials cannot secure their assault weapons safely then who can?

              Do you have any statistics on how many people could have saved themselves if they had an assault weapon rather than a conventional firearm during all those years we had an assault weapon ban?

              Of course you don't.


              I want to take away the firearms that seemingly cannot be controlled by "responsible" gun owners like Nancy Lanza and Clark Aposhian (go ahead and google) that then fall easily into the hands of those who kill dozens inside of 5 minutes by blowing their faces and limbs off at close range like those children and teachers in Newtown.

              If you do not have a plan for how we could make sure Nancy Lanzas and Clark Aposhians of the world to secure their battlefield guns the way we are told "responsible gun owners" should then we should take those weapons away. Nothings perfect....there will still be deaths...but maybe police will stop some deaths when they can respond before someone fires more than a couple dozen shots.

              Six kids ran to safety when he fumbled changing a clip. If he changed more of them more would be alive.

              Sometimes I wonder..it it because Newtown was in the NE, CT, a blue state...sometimes I think thee conservative gun nuts are just happy to see children from blue states die.

              There hasn't been a serious proposal from the gun nuts on how to stop this. Why? They revel in this kind of violence I think.
              Hey Dufus, more people are killed by handguns then assault rifles. Most of these murders occur in the inner city and are related to either gang violence or the drug trade. How about we truly fight the war on drugs. Also, our government allowed tons of guns to go to Mexico so drug lords can kill border control agents. Sounds like the same sort of people I want making decisions about eliminating the second amendment. Wake up Moron. Their proposals are not going to change anything, other than taking guns away from legal gun owners, who aren't committing these crimes.

              If the penalties associated with the crime of murder, doesn't deter you, what will? Oh, yeah, they'll stop because they are afraid of the penalty for possessing a high capacity magazine. Think again.

              Comment


                Bet Mr. Liberal wished he had a gun the past 24 hours.

                Comment


                  Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
                  Bet Mr. Liberal wished he had a gun the past 24 hours.
                  Of course - the six, well armed cops who had the brothers surrounded were able to stop them so easily, so I can only image that having a gun would have kept me safe too.

                  Comment


                    MSNBC’s Harris-Perry: Hey, The Boston Bombers Being Muslim Is Not Relevant

                    Yes, the same lady who thinks your kids aren’t yours, and should be fully handed over to The State


                    (Mediaite) Making the point that the Tsarnaev brothers’ Muslim faith at the moment bears little relevance to the investigation into the brothers’ decision to attack the Boston Marathon last week, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry observed that Tsarnaev’s faith is about as relevant to the investigation right now as are Ben Affleck movies about violent events in Boston. Her panel guests agreed and added that Americans have to “otherize” violent actors in order to absolve themselves from responsibility for or connection to their violence.



                    But Progressives were extremely hot to trot to paint all Conservatives with a broad brush when the bombings first happened, just like they’ve done time and time again, blaming the whole for the actions of a few or one (even when we eventually learn that the perpetrator had little to nothing to do with Conservatism, and often more to do with Left side politics). Progressives mostly seem incapable of realizing that there is a set who practice Islam that are radicalized, that are violent, that want to destroy Western culture, especially Israel, Britain, and The United States. That intentionally target civilians. They want to spread the hard-core version of Islam. This is not “Islamophobia”, it’s a plain truth. Had the two brothers been, say, Romney voters or members of the NRA or the TEA Party, we would be hearing non-stop from people like Harris-Perry about how evil Conservatives as a whole are. Perhaps we could term this “Conservaphobia”.

                    Now, do we know what motivated the two? Not fully. But we can certainly take some educated guesses based on the material available, which points at the two being radicalized Muslims, which those who discuss this issue refer to as “Islamists”, in order to separate them from those Muslims who aren’t raging nutjobs practicing the hard-core version. Right now there have been over 20,700 deadly terrorist attacks by these Islamists since 9/11/2001.

                    The Powerline guys wonder why evil makes liberals stupid, and end with


                    When asserting the obvious is not a respectable option, asserting gibberish becomes the option of choice for people of ordinary intellect who wish to opine. And these days, the market for such gibberish is booming.

                    A big question revolves around whether liberals are stupid or become stupid. Are they espousing these views because they are dogmatic idiots or because they intentionally act stupid? We saw, in the immediate aftermath, liberals talking about last Monday being tax day and Patriot’s Day, trying to make connections to people on the political Right in a manner to blame all on the Right. When it became clear that they were Muslims, and apparently the Islamist version, that there were links to other jihadis, and all the other information, liberals started forming ways to avoid linking them to Islam, and more specifically Islamists.

                    excellent thoughts and right on the money!!

                    http://www.stoptheaclu.com/

                    Comment


                      Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
                      Of course - the six, well armed cops who had the brothers surrounded were able to stop them so easily, so I can only image that having a gun would have kept me safe too.
                      If those guys had come knocking at your door, a gun would have certainly given you a chance, wouldn't it Mr Liberal? Never mind given your loved ones half a chance to escape. But then you probably would have been running out the back door screaming like a little girl long before the rest of your family.

                      Comment


                        An unconfirmed report by the New York Times stated that the terrorists were in possession of 2 handguns and an “M4 carbine.”


                        Looking at the laws on the books and how hard it is for law abiding citizens to legally obtain firearms one would think that Massachusetts must be among the safest places in the country, right?

                        One major flaw in the rhetoric of the “keeping guns off the streets” crowd; criminals don’t care what laws they write, pass, or enforce.



                        Fact 1. Neither of the Tsarnaev brothers was legally able to be in possession of the firearms used during the shootouts and following attempted escape. Dzhokhar at 19 years old is ineligible to apply for the license required to legally possess any of the firearms listed by the NYT. His older brother Tamerlan at 26 years of age met that qualification but would also have been disqualified because of his 2009 assault arrest.
                        To reiterate, neither of the brothers were legally in possession of the firearms nor were they eligible to apply to be.

                        Fact 2. The “M4 carbine” that they were allegedly in possession of is illegal to possess in Massachusetts.

                        Fact 3. Just as it was illegal for them to be in possession of the M4 carbine, it was illegal for them to be in possession of any type of handgun. Possession of a handgun in MA requires the same LTC license in good standing as issued by the state. Once again neither of the Tsarnaev brothers was eligible nor met the state’s requirements to be issued an LTC.

                        Fact 4: The MGL’s of the state of MA were completely disregarded by the Tsarnaev brothers. On every level and at every step the laws on our books did nothing to deter their criminal actions.

                        Let’s look at the other side of the coin here.

                        During Friday’s manhunt there were tens of thousands of law abiding citizens living in fear inside their homes, on lockdown, waiting for one of 3 things to happen:

                        1.A knock on the door from the police, who were searching for Dzhokhar.
                        2.(This is the one people most feared) a knock on the door (or not) from Dzhokhar who would do who knows what while seeking shelter from the manhunt.
                        3. An “all clear” signal from law enforcement.
                        How many of the law abiding citizens locked down in their homes with a dangerous terrorist on the loose in their neighborhoods were completely disarmed and unable to defend their loved ones? How many of them were wishing they were armed with a gun?

                        One thing is for certain, they all knew the terrorist was armed.



                        http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/23/bo...#ixzz2ROTEr2i3

                        Comment


                          From the Boston Globe, no less.

                          http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2...kEM/story.html

                          IN 1998, Massachusetts passed what was hailed as the toughest gun-control legislation in the country.

                          The 1998 legislation did cut down, quite sharply, on the legal use of guns in Massachusetts. Within four years, the number of active gun licenses in the state had plummeted. “There were nearly 1.5 million active gun licenses in Massachusetts in 1998,” the AP reported. “In June [2002], that number was down to just 200,000.”

                          Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, the Globe reported this month — “a striking increase from the 65 in 1998.” Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent.

                          Don’t hold your breath waiting for gun-control activists to admit they were wrong. The treatment they prescribed may have yielded the opposite of the results they promised, but they’re quite sure the prescription wasn’t to blame. Crime didn’t rise in Massachusetts because the state made it harder for honest citizens to lawfully carry a gun; it rose because other states didn’t do the same thing.

                          This has become a popular argument in gun-control circles. It may even be convincing to someone emotionally committed to the belief that ever-stricter gun control is a plausible path to safety. But it doesn’t hold water.

                          For starters, why didn’t the gun-control lobby warn legislators in 1998 that adopting the toughest gun law in America would do Massachusetts no good unless every surrounding state did the same thing? Far from explaining why the new law would do nothing to curb violent crime, they were positive it would make Massachusetts even safer. It was gun-rights advocates, such as state Senator Richard Moore, who correctly predicted the future. “Much of what has been said in support of this bill will not come to pass,” said Moore during the 1998 debate. “The amount of crime we have now will at least continue.”

                          But crime in Massachusetts didn’t just continue, it began climbing. As in the rest of the country, violent crime had been declining in Massachusetts since the early 1990s. Beginning in 1998, that decline reversed — unlike in the rest of the country. For example, the state’s murder rate (murders per 100,000 inhabitants) bottomed out at 1.9 in 1997 and had risen to 2.8 by 2011. The national murder rate, on the other hand, kept falling; it reached a new low of 4.7 in 2011. Guns-across-borders might have explained homicide levels in Massachusetts continuing unchanged. But how can other states’ policies be responsible for an increase in Massachusetts homicides?

                          Relative to the rest of the country, or to just the states on its borders, Massachusetts since 1998 has become a more dangerous state. Economist John Lott, using FBI crime data since 1980, shows how dramatic the contrast has been. In 1998, Massachusetts’s murder rate equaled about 70 percent of the rate for Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. Now it equals 125 percent of that rate.

                          Clearly something bad happened to Massachusetts 15 years ago. Blaming the neighbors may be ideologically comforting. But those aren’t the states whose crime rates are up.

                          Comment


                            Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
                            Not soccer related, but certainly plenty of evidence of what the author is speaking to in this forum. I can hardly wait to read those who will defend the status quo.

                            http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/op...unity-gap.html

                            (Harvard political scientist Robert) Putnam's group looked at inequality of opportunities among children. They help us understand what the country will look like in the decades ahead. The quick answer? More divided than ever.

                            Putnam’s data verifies what many of us have seen anecdotally, that the children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities

                            .......Affluent parents also invest more money in their children. Over the last 40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their kids’ enrichment activities, like tutoring and extra curriculars, by $5,300 a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been able to increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation.

                            As a result, behavior gaps are opening up. In 1972, kids from the bottom quartile of earners participated in roughly the same number of activities as kids from the top quartile. Today, it’s a chasm.

                            Richer kids are roughly twice as likely to play after-school sports. They are more than twice as likely to be the captains of their sports teams. They are much more likely to do nonsporting activities, like theater, yearbook and scouting. They are much more likely to attend religious services.

                            It’s not only that richer kids have become more active. Poorer kids have become more pessimistic and detached.
                            Some interesting stats related to the OP.

                            "The “Harvard Crimson” reports that 45.6 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from families with annual incomes exceeding $200,000, the top 3.8 percent of the American income distribution. Less than 18 percent of Harvard students have family incomes in the bottom 60 percent of the American income distribution.

                            Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose analyzed family background data regarding students who attended the top 146 colleges in the United States. Seventy-four percent of students come from the top quartile of family socioeconomic status. Only 10 percent came from the bottom half of the distribution. A mountain of evidence indicates that the top 1 percent enjoy many large advantages in gaining entry to the most selective institutions of higher education. Legacy admissions are only the most obvious non-meritocratic edge enjoyed by the most advantaged.

                            And that’s merely the inequality among kids with strong academic skills. Many youths I encounter in violence prevention and public health work face learning disabilities, ADHD, substance abuse and mental health concerns. Lucrative industries of costly test prep services, tutoring, psychological supports, attorneys, learning consultants and treatment programs exist to support affluent children who face such difficulties. Exclusive school districts such as Bethesda, Md., acquire reputations for excellent resources, too. Many youths greatly benefit from such services and resources. Some attend colleges such as Landmark that cater to the learning-disabilities market. Landmark’s annual tuition is $49,500.

                            The median annual family income in the United States is $62,272. Not many people with this typical level of resources can access such costly forms of help. Some kids will thrive anyway or will find wonderful people to help. Many will quietly fail along the way."

                            - Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross professor at the School of Social Service Administration and co-director of the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago

                            Comment

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