Since I live in NOLA, this stood out to me, though it happened in Opelousas, LA. A man was found in his car this morning dead, having been shot three times. The words “Slow Down” were scratched into the back window.
What’s the matter with people, and how much more of this crap will we put up with?
Oh I dunno how long we’ll tolerate our violent society. Probably until we run out of things to blame other then ourselves.
http://www.kob.com/article/stories/S2877668.shtml?cat=500
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2012/12/auburn-made-stabbed-to-death-early-this-morning/
http://www.koaa.com/news/man-killed-during-fight-near-durango/
I can keep going..
So what’s the answer?
Confiscate every gun in the country? Well, that’s not going to happen, and it would also happen to violate at least two Amendments to the Constitution other than the 2nd Amendment.
Yesterday, a man in New York state who had beat his grandmother to death in 1981 and, thanks to a plea deal, was only sentenced to manslaughter, which carried at the time an 8 1/3 to 25 year sentence, set a fire to lure first responders and murdered two firefighters before killing himself. Today we learned that he had also killed his sister. Under both Federal and NY law, he was legally forbidden from owning any weapon at all, so blaming a lack of gun control on what happened is absolute nonsense.
There are evil people in the world who will find ways to commit their evil regardless of what the law says.
@Doug Mataconis: Doug, you’ve got a very fatalistic view of this. How come other countries have murder rates far lower than ours? They have less tolerance for guns.
There are socio-economic differences that come into play when you start comparing other countries…for example, if you go aaaaaall the way back to 1919, before the U.K. passed their first major gun control law (so when gun laws were roughly comparable between the U.S. and U.K.), the murder rate per 100,000 people had still roughly the same disparity as it does today (it was actually slightly greater then as opposed to now). Call me a murder fetishist or whatever other slur you want to throw at gun owners, but trying to trace this all back to the neat and tidy solution of “guns are the one and only problem” is just dishonest.
@Doug Mataconis: Doug has a point. Some people are that evil.
But many of these incidences can be attributed to a “sure fire” way of dealing with disturbances.
I will re-iterate, angry enough, I’d do it myself. I exercise a tremendous lot of self-control in general.
And I should add that the disparity was greater then as opposed to today because in the interim the U.K.’s murder rate has increased somewhat while the U.S.’s has decreased a fair amount (after a large increase in the ’60s and ’70s). Now, if I was using your logic, I would take that to mean that more gun control results in greater murders while less gun control results in fewer murders…but I’m not going to do that because things like murder rates are a complex socio-economic problem that you can’t just pin down to one root cause. And really any effort to try and assign definitive blame to any one or two things is going to run into some serious confounding variable problems due to the complexity of the issue.
@Doug Mataconis: why does liberty have to include buying powerful weapons? The right is established. Now it’s just a matter of setting limits that minimize public safety problems.
@rudderpedals: I don’t know, but given that the shots were through the front windshield, I would say after.
@Robert Prather: Would you care to explain why other countries have murder rates higher than the US? Would you care to explain why, with more people owning more guns in teh US, why our violent crime rate has gone down continuously for the last, oh 70 years or so? Would you care to explain why the most dangerous cities in the US are those cities that have the most stringent gun control laws? And don’t say its because guns are not as restricted in nearby locales, because if that were so, those locales’ murder and crime rates would be as high or higher than the murder rates in cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York City, etc. I suppose you will try to claim that with Mexico’s draconian gun laws, that Juarez is much safer than El Paso, just the other side of the river?
Robert, you want to blame guns, but guns are not inherently evil. The are inanimate objects that can be used for good or for ill. In fact, Robert, if you care to examine the FBI’s data honestly, with an open mind, you’ll find that guns are used by law abiding citizens in this country more than 2 million times a year to prevent crime, many times without a shot being fired.
@Robert Prather: Was a particularly powerful weapon required here? Or just a firearm? This strikes me as a very important distinction.
I could be off-base here, if a regular firearm would not have worked in this instance. But it sort of reminds me of how the Javon Belcher was a call for “a sane gun policy” when I’m not sure what prevents a murder-suicide of that type except confiscation or throwing up some very significant barriers to basic firearm ownership.
“Powerful weapon” is a meaningless term. Uneducated people treat firearms like it’s a videogame or RPG or something where you can just buy power points and your gun magically works better in all situations, kind of like how someone in another thread said uneducated people believe slapping a spoiler and a fart can on your Honda will make it go faster. What your intended purpose is determines which type of firearm would be most effective, and some types of firearms have multiple purposes at which they are effective. People make it sound like MILITARY STYLE MURDER WEAPONS WITH LOUGHNER STYLE ASSAULT CLIPS are these magical death dealing tools that are capable of killing everyone within a 2 mile radius just by looking at them while “good” hunting rifles are completely incapable of harming anyone, ever, but guns don’t work like that.
In this case, pretty much any firearm shooting a caliber powerful enough to penetrate the windshield (so basically anything other than rimfire .22lr) could’ve been used, in theory. Since there were no witnesses and it’s not like there has been any sort of timeframe established, it could’ve been someone with a death dealing military style murder assault loughner clip weapon, or it could’ve been a single shot rifle. Either would be perfectly capable given the facts we know at this time.
Upon further thought, .25 ACP and 7.65mm Browning/.32 ACP probably would’ve had trouble penetrating a windshield and fatally injuring someone behind it, and .380 ACP would be theoretically technically capable of it but wouldn’t do it reliably, so we’re probably looking at 9x19mm for a minimum cartridge given the barrier penetration bit.
Would you care to explain why other countries have murder rates higher than the US?
Umm, those would be countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (psst, War on Drugs)…
Would you care to explain why the most dangerous cities in the US are those cities that have the most stringent gun control laws?
Once again, the War on Drugs…
The are inanimate objects that can be used for good or for ill.
Nuclear devices and chemical weapons are inanimate objects…hmm, why aren’t people allowed to have those…
@Mike: What kind of gun control measure would be required to ban guns that could accomplish this task?
“he was legally forbidden from owning any weapon at all, so blaming a lack of gun control on what happened is absolute nonsense.”
No, this is nonsense. Prohibiting felons from owning guns isn’t what people usually think of when they think of “gun control.’ Nice try, though.
@Trumwill:
Ban all (non-rimfire) guns, also confiscate all (non-rimfire) guns and smelt them down, and since most non law abiding citizens/criminals (for example, the person who committed this…what’s the word….oh, right, crime) aren’t going to turn in their (non-rimfire) guns voluntarily, door to door raids to ensure all (non-rimfire) guns are confiscated.
I’m honestly not being snarky, that’s the truthful answer to your question. Shooting one person through a car windshield isn’t this super crazy feat that takes this super awesome gun that only the most trusted military members should have, it’s really not all that technically challenging. If a single shot firearm (the lowest capacity/slowest to reload/etc) type of gun is capable of accomplishing something, then your only option for actual effective gun control to prevent that type of gun from accomplishing that thing is to ban all guns.
@Herb:
Except he was legally forbidden from purchasing or possessing that gun. Simply by possessing the gun he was committing a federal felony punishable by a considerable prison sentence. So how would passing more laws (short of door to door confiscation) have prevented it from occurring? That’s Doug’s point.
I don’t think this is about law so much as propaganda. The fact is there are too many members of the gun cult. They are irrational, in fact they are borderline hysterical. Insecure men who can’t separate gun from penis and begin to experience feelings of panic whenever they contemplate a world where they experience. . . shrinkage. White men living out hero fantasies where they defend their women from the hordes of brown people.
So, we have to deal with that reality. We have to reduce their numbers. We have to make a generational break, isolate this cult in time. We need to send the gun ownership curve steeply downward. The way to do that is with education, with social pressure, with ostracism. This needs to be a think old white guys do. Old, rural, uncool, uneducated white guys.
Reduce the overall numbers, make gun ownership a sort of generational illness, and let society evolve going forward.
If you consider hunting acceptable use of firearms, then you are for allowing firearms that are powerful enough to commit this terrible act, Robert. Trumwill has really been on the ball the last couple of threads on points like this, and the general commentary doesn’t seem to be changing. There is room for conversation about guns that goes beyond “guns bad oh god ban something I don’t care if it helps” vs. paranoid delusional confiscation fantasies. The conversation demands understanding what you specifically want to outlaw and the goal of outlawing certain weapons/accessories, as well as the feasibility of the plan. This is the second post in a row that comes off as an impulsive post where you enter with a preformed position and expose that you don’t know about the issue and don’t particularly care. I guess this is the part where I get called an NRA lovin’ lunatic for caring if a law accomplishes it’s intended goal because, damnit, think of the children.
@Dave A: No, michael reynolds showed up, we’re cultists with small penises. Also racists. And I suppose the “like murdering children” is implied.
@Mike:
“So how would passing more laws (short of door to door confiscation) have prevented it from occurring?”
Door to door confiscation? When has that ever occurred on anything? Lead paint? Asbestos? Incandescent lightbulbs? Door to door confiscation…….not going to happen in any scenario.
That’s not to say that if a voluntary buy back program was implemented that the specter of “door to door confiscation” won’t be raised, but then again……hyperbole is deployed by true believers daily.
I’m not sure what’s the best approach legally is here, but I’m fairly certain it will require a multi-layered approach which will be resisted at every turn by the pro-gun side. It’s not enough to say “He would have acquired these weapons anyway” when the preference is that these weapons are easy to acquire.
It’s easier to get a gun in America than it is to get a job. We can get urine samples from every job applicant, but we can only do background checks on some gun buyers? Only in America….
Why punish law abiding citizens in order to make life harder for criminals? Why have progressives sudden become pro-police state, pro-law enforcement, and anti-criminal. Maybe since gun laws will allow progressives to expand the scope and power of the government, progressives want more gun laws.
Instead of repeating the same old arguments, can we find anything we can agree on? For example, should every single person on Earth be allowed access to a nuclear weapon? (Yes, I know there are a few gun nuts that would actually answer yes to that, but I’ll assume there’s nobody that stupid here.) Then let’s work our way back to something reasonable.
To me, I can’t help coming back to a question my brother asked one day, which was basically: should any one person have the ability to quickly and easily kill several people? Again, I don’t want to repeat old arguments or hear about the 2nd amendment, I’m purely talking about what level of weapon is reasonable for one non-sanctioned person to have access to.
Looks like it was suicide, not road rage.
http://www.katc.com/news/cause-of-death-determined-in-opelousas-suspicious-death/
@Scott O: Weirder and weirder. Somewhere there’s a Lincoln Town Car with a crushed front end and some answers.
@Doug Mataconis: @Doug Mataconis:
There are evil people in the world who will find ways to commit their evil regardless of what the law says.
So that means we should make it easier for them? Why ban any weapons at all in that case? Grenades and IED’s would be fun additions to the local hardware store.
They also have less tolerance for liberty.
Having lived in both Canada and the US, I haven’t seen any evidence of that. And actually, if liberty is the issue, how in the world was the Patriot Act passed? Or the war on drugs?
The notion that privately held guns secure our liberty is so fwcking stupid I can’t believe anyone sane enough to legally buy a gun still advances it.
Are we freer than the Netherlands? France? Sweden? No, in fact we are less free in some ways. We are not the freest nation on earth. We lost that status a long time ago. Obviously widespread gun ownership did nothing to stop the national security surveillance state. Rather, the fact that our society is buried in guns helps to strengthen the national security state. We need ever more police, ever more surveillance, ever more infringement on personal liberties because we are armed.
It’s because we are armed that our cops are militarized. It’s because we are armed that we have no-knock searches. It’s because we have to fear armed radical groups that we have widespread FBI surveillance.
This is a fantasy. It’s a dangerous and destructive fantasy.
@Doug Mataconis: As long as we allow, even encourage, everybody to be armed to the teeth, it will be impossible to keep “evil” people from being armed to the teeth. In this case “evil” is just another version of the standard conservative excuse for everything – that’s just the way it is, nothing can be done.
I do not equate liberty with the legal ability to own a pretend assault rifle. The fact is that if we did an honest cost/benefit analysis on private ownership of handguns, or of semi-auto long guns, we’d probably outlaw the things next week and start a massive buyback campaign, SCOTUS be damned.
Nor am I convinced the 2nd Amendment says we have to accept this situation. Garry Wills is not a constitutional lawyer, and I certainly am not, but when I first read this years ago I found it way more convincing than our current absolutist attitude that anyone can own anything short of a machine gun, and we’ll get to that soon. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/sep/21/to-keep-and-bear-arms/?pagination=false
@Dave A: No one is talking about confiscation; that’s just in the brains / fever swamps of the gun cultists.
@Robert Prather:
I agree, that’s why I called them paranoid and delusional. You aren’t really responding to the content of my posts here or in your previous thread that specifically addresses you. That may be my fault, I am commenting from a phone. In the last couple of threads you seem to (correctly in my opinion) be pushing back against the loons who say “guns for everyone and any legislation oriented towards firearms sets the US on a path towards fascism”. However your response is to say that you don’t care what is done as long as something is done. A couple of people have pointed out how “assault weapon” refers mainly to cosmetic features of certain firearms, and earlier in this thread I pointed out that your anger at the idea that people owning weapons powerful enough to commit the crime being referenced in this thread means nothing if you aren’t willing to restrict deer hunting or rifles commonly used for deer hunting. It’s hard have any sort of conversation in these threads when you imply (or, as in your prior thread outright declare) that you don’t know or don’t care to know whether the potential legislation being discussed will accomplish anything or is even possible.
@Robert Prather: I believe you to be a good-faith broker in this conversation, even though we ideologically cover different ground. Take this for what it’s worth:
(a) When, after a tragedy, a tragedy is utilized to justify gun control with an open-ended prescription about “doing something” about guns, it lends one with the impression that confiscation may be sought. Especially when nothing short of confiscation is likely to have a measurable impact.
(b) Comparing homicide or gun crime rates in other nations with fewer guns to ours lends itself to concern that confiscation may be on the table. Because, to get to where those other countries are on a guns-per-capita basis, it’s going to take more than limiting future purchases to get there or close to there.
(c) Openly ridiculing those who disagree with you as “gun cultists” also poisons the well. Another source of concern for “gun cultists” is the degree of contempt that a lot of people have with those people who like their guns. This mentality does not lend itself to moderate solutions except insofar as political reality forces it.
(d) Both Supreme Court rulings were determined on a 5-4 basis and the 5-4 balance of the court may be switching directions some time in the next four years.
(e) Mass gun confiscation (or forced buybacks or whatever) of all guns in the near or moderate-term future is exceedingly unlikely. However, accepting the mentality that something must be done about guns in light of the results of the ubiquity of firearms, and given the unlikelihood of intermediate steps to have sufficiently mitigating results, we simply don’t know at what point supporters of gun control will draw the line and accept a certain number of deaths to prevent confiscation.
I am not targeting you specifically with the above (I can’t recall if you’ve made the comparison with other nations or not and it doesn’t matter enough for me to go back and check, and you backed off the term “gun cultist”), but if you want to know why even otherwise even-keeled people look at the prospect of confiscation with something other than outright dismissal… these are some of the reasons why.
@Trumwill: In other words, if anyone anywhere in the country even thinks about gun control, it automatically and quite reasonably makes gun lovers believe their guns are about to be confiscated, which makes them fight back against any hint of gun control. So the only way for those who are concerned about guns to pass any kind of regulation is to do it without talking about or even thinking about guns.
Yeah, I can see why it’s so terrible to call you guys nuts. You’re clearly nothing but reasonable on the subject.
