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Another Day, Another U.S. Mass Shooting
"Turn down the music. You know uncle Stephen goes berserk when one disturbs his sleep." /snark
One Stephen Paddock rented a room on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel. Over three days, he brought some ten guns into it. The room was chosen to overlook the space of on upcoming open air concert.
Last night Paddock waited for the concert to start and then fired his automatic weapons into the crowd. At least fifty-eight people died and some 400 were wounded. The murderer later killed himself.
Paddock is portrait as a reclusive, well-off retiree and is thought to be a professional gambler. There is no hint yet of the mans motive. He is white and has a Christian name. Thus, according to U.S. standards, his killing spree was not terrorism.
The state of Nevada allows about anyone to buy and own automatic rifles. With one pull of the trigger one can fire off a full 30 round magazine within a few seconds. The use of such machine guns leave the victims in an attack like this no time to escape. With a bit of training, a change of magazines takes less than five seconds. The man must have had more than a thousand rounds to cause such a number of casualties.
The statistics paint a horrible picture of gun violence in the U.S. There is now one mass shooting, with more than four victims, per day:
First 9 months of 2017:
-11,572 gun deaths
-23,365 gun injuries
-271 mass shootings
-1,508 unintentional shootings
-2,971 kids/teens shot
The Onion headlined: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens . It was the fifths time in the last three years that the Onion used the same headline and story. They only switched the photo, the name of the city and the body count.
The gun lobby will again say, "Let's not politicize this tragedy by talking gun control."
Sure, let's wait a few months, at which time there will be another mass shooting.
Every gun massacre is an advertisement for guns. The stocks of gun manufacturers soared today, casino stocks fell.
>> Ben @ 21
“well regulated militia”
But others studiously ignore the meaning of the words “the people.” Constitutional scholars know that when the founders drafted the Constitution, they were careful to assure that a word or phrase in one part of the document meant exactly the same thing in all other parts of the document. So, if the “the people,” as used in the second amendment, really meant “the militia,” then we would have to read other sections of the Constitution like this:
“We the militia of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union . . .”
“The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the militia of the several States . . .”
“. . .the right of the militia peaceably to assemble . . .”
“. . . the right of the militia to keep and bear Arms . . .”
“. . .The right of the militia to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects . . .”
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the militia.”
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the militia.”
“The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the militia thereof . . .”
“. . . the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the militia fill the vacancies by election . . .”
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James Madison, Federalist #46 (extract):
“Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger.
“The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.
“It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.
“Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.” [i](et seq)[/i]
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed46.asp
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“We have found no historical evidence that the Second Amendment was intended to convey militia power to the states, limit the federal government’s power to maintain a standing army, or applies only to members of a select militia while on active duty. All of the evidence indicates that the Second Amendment, like other parts of the Bill of Rights, applies to and protects individual Americans.” U.S. v. Emerson, 5th court of Appeals decision, November 2, 2001, No. 99-10331
and from the same decision — “The plain meaning of the right of the people to keep arms is that it is an individual, rather than a collective, right and is not limited to keeping arms while engaged in active military service or as a member of a select militia such as the National Guard …”
Posted by: AntiSpin | Oct 2 2017 19:56 utc | 47
Can we just put this “militia” nonsense to bed once and for all? An actual armed force capable of taking on any modern state-supplied military would require, well, basically the list of arms that the CIA poured into Syria and put in the hands of ISIS and Al Qaeda – fully automatic weapons, sniper rifles, gazillions of rounds of ammunition, anti-tank rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, etc. And even then, such “militia forces” can be wiped out by airstrikes and disruption of their supply lines, can’t they? If you want a picture of what a militia force capable of withstanding a large-scale assault by a modern military, well, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon didn’t do to badly against the 2006 Israeli incursion – but it was full-on war:
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, it achieved none of its military objectives, took heavy casualties, and left Hezbollah emboldened and admired across the Arab world for forcing an Israeli retreat for a second time in less than a decade. But the Israeli military killed more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians, wounded over 4,400, and displaced around 1 million people in a country with a total population of only 4 million at the time.
Does anyone really want to arm “domestic militias” like that, for some fantasy about “defense of the state?” What it all comes down to is a bunch of idiots with gun fetishes getting drunk and firing off rounds somewhere. Okay, have your fun, whatever – but understand, it’s just a total fantasy.
. . . And maybe that’s it, maybe America’s infatuation with militarism is because the last large-scale conflict on American soil was in the 1860s Civil War, and nobody outside the military has any idea what that really looks like? Imagine a major American city looking like Baghdad in 2005, for example – suddenly, the thrill is gone. Water and electricity shut off, mass chaos, everyone you know running for their lives? A single mortar shell into a crowd of people in a big marketplace can kill and injure as many as the Las Vegas shooting did.
As far as this latest shooting, well, it was from 400 meters away and elevated and into a compressed crowd of people, and the shooter had a large arsenal of semiautomatic rifles, modified for automatic rates of fire, as far as anyone knows now. Could have fired all of them, wait to check the casings. Older white male, fairly wealthy with no criminal record. Could have been the suicidal-homicidal type. Other than banning the ownership of semi-automatic rifles by civilians, which is about as likely as not at all, similar attacks cannot be prevented. As far as overall U.S. gun death rate, that’s mostly handguns. Lots of suicides by gun, too. . . Is it the Prozac? The video games? The movies and televison shows? Ease of access to guns and ammo? Roid rage? Poverty? Racial tensions? Something in the water? I hate this debate. . . It’s like talking about abortion. Nobody’s going to change their mind, that’s basically guaranteed.
But it’s just another day in Syria, Libya, Yemen. . . Which get much less media coverage.
Posted by: nonsense factory | Oct 2 2017 22:58 utc | 78
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