Tag: firearms

Human beings can be frightened…little animals…

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At The Outdoorsman of Santa Fe, which bills itself as Northern New Mexico’s largest firearm retailer, shotguns and ammunition were flying off the shelves.

“That rack is usually full of basic pump-action shotguns — all gone,” salesman Jay Winton said last week as he pointed to an empty rack in the store at DeVargas Center. “People … want to defend their home from the ravening hordes that they’re convinced are coming, so we’re selling lots of ammunition, lots of firearms.”

Winton said a couple came into the store about a week ago specifically talking about the coronavirus.

“They wanted to have a shotgun in the house for when the infrastructure collapses,” he said. “Human beings can be frightened, dirty little animals when they get scared, and that’s kind of what we’re seeing right now.”

Winton is no expert, but the professionals agree.

Two things:

1. This is excerpted from a long article about EVERYTHING associated with the confusion over COVID-19. This segment is just at the end.

2. You may as well understand I’m neither anti-gun nor anti-gun ownership. Before I moved West I lived in an area reknowned as the Arsenal of America. I grew up with firearms, My extended family always had someone working in gun manufacturing. Because of that history, I grew up handling guns, understanding use and abuse of firearms, respecting the need for required regulation of manufacture and ownership by consumers. That last bit is unfortunately missing in portions of the United States.

I’m still a gun owner. Used to love handgun target shooting. Haven’t hunted in decades; but, I still own a few guns including a very nice 12-gauge shotgun. And people who buy firearms in a panic…governed by fear…scare the crap out of me!

Taking aim

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❝ Rebecca Cunningham of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor became acquainted with guns at a tender age: When she was 5 years old, her mother kicked out her violent husband, who had beaten her and threatened to kill her. And she bought a gun.

❝ Today, Cunningham, who once watched her mother tuck that pistol in her purse as she headed to the shooting range, is directing the largest gun research grant that the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded in at least 30 years. With $4.9 million from NIH’s child health institute and a team of 27 researchers at 12 institutions, she is on a mission to jump-start gun injury research on a population as vulnerable as she once was: U.S. children and teenagers, for whom guns are the second-leading cause of death.

As a hunter [in younger years] and gun owner with ethical concerns, I have to endorse this sort of research. The cynic in me still says cowardly politicians have no interest in the popular will of Americans vis-a-vis guns and gun control – but, it’s always worth extending our knowledge and continuing the fight.

Mental Issues, Eh?

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Our Fake President says the Texas killer had “mental issues”. This from the dolt who signed into law the right for anyone judged mentally ill to purchase firearms.

Thanks, gocomics.org

Think about comparing terrorist attacks to mass shootings in America

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#1: More guns don’t make you safer

#2: Shootings are more frequent

#3: Restricting sales works

#4: Background checks work

❝ In most restrictive background checks performed in developed countries, citizens are required to train for gun handling, obtain a license for hunting or provide proof of membership to a shooting range.

Individuals must prove that they do not belong to any “prohibited group,” such as the mentally ill, criminals, children or those at high risk of committing violent crime, such as individuals with a police record of threatening the life of another.

❝ Here’s the bottom line. With these provisions, most U.S. active shooters would have been denied the purchase of a firearm.

Please, RTFA for all the points examined by Frederic Lemieux. At a minimum, you may learn a few new facts about the reality of American background checks.

#5: Not all mass shootings are terrorism

#6: Historical comparisons may be flawed

Guns don’t kill kids – kids kill kids. Makes sense to the NRA!

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Click to enlarge

The cover of the recent Children’s Defense Fund report (pdf) on gun violence in the United States carries a single statistic:

The number of children and teens killed by guns in one year would fill 134 classrooms of 20 students each.

That’s just a more dramatic way of stating an already staggering figure – 2,694 in 2010. Most of the report’s 73 following pages are devoted to restating it…

Other times, the same set of statistics (all from the Centers for Disease Control) is used to drive home the magnitude of the tragedy, relating it to the kinds of violence we think we understand:

Nearly three times more children and teens were injured by guns in 2010 than the number of US soldiers wounded in action that year in the war in Afghanistan; 82 children under five died from guns in 2010, compared to 55 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.

And then, there’s the shameful comparison to other countries:

US children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from a gun than their peers in 25 other high-income countries combined…

The report wallops us over the head with statistics because its authors can’t reach through the pages and throttle us. The frustration is as understandable as it is evident, for as gruesome as the statistics about violence are, the recounting of what legislation has and has not passed is even more dispiriting. Over and over, the public’s willingness (even eagerness) to tighten gun laws has been outmatched by the cowardice of politicians in mysterious thrall to the National Rifle Association…

The news gets worse as we get closer to home, where state legislatures reacted to Sandy Hook primarily by widening access to firearms and weakening regulation. You read that right: more states passed pro-gun legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook than there were states that passed stricter gun control. Maryland, Connecticut and New York and New Jersey all tightened gun laws; Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kansas all somehow relaxed their gun laws – by extending the number of places one can carry a concealed weapon, by allowing guns in schools, by instituting “stand your ground” laws, or adding the right to own a firearm to the state constitution.

Great article by Ana Marie Cox. Read it and weep for a nation that has progressed steadily from ignorant to stupid.

Politicians haven’t changed. They’re as gutless as ever. The two Colorado politicians defeated in an NRA-sponsored recall this past week received little aid or fightback from their state Democrat Party. Even less from national so-called leaders of that spineless party. While citizens turned out in dismal numbers leaving the decision to the idjit vote.

The transition from ignorant to stupid seems to be a solid part of our nation’s retrograde religion.

Hitchhiker writing a book on the “Kindness of America” — injured in random drive-by shooting

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Welcome

A man hitchhiking across the US while writing a memoir called ‘The Kindness of America’ has been hurt in a random drive-by shooting.

Ray Dolin was sitting by US Highway 2 in Montana waiting for a ride on Saturday evening when a man drove up, rolled down his window, shot him in the arm and drove off, Valley County Sheriff Glen Meier said.

Mr Dolin had approached the truck thinking the driver was offering him a ride, the sheriff said.

Mr Dolin flagged down a passer-by and was taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries. A nurse said Monday he was not taking calls or accepting messages.

The suspected shooter, 52-year-old Charles Lloyd Danielson III, was arrested about four hours later. Authorities said he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Sheriff Meier said there appears to be no connection between the men…”He was sitting down to have a little lunch, and this guy drives up. He thought he was going to give him a ride, and as he approached the vehicle, the guy pulls out his weapon and shoots him. It’s as simple as that,” Sheriff Meier said.

An average day in an average life – in the greatest nation in the world. How do I know this last quality is true? Our politicians, pundits and priests tell me so.

8 NYC coppers among 12 charged in criminal conspiracy

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Preet Bharara and Ray Kelly
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Five active and three retired officers of the New York Police Department are among 12 people charged Tuesday with conspiring to transport and distribute firearms and stolen goods…

“A group of crime fighters took to moonlighting as criminals,” Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference.

The defendants are charged in an alleged conspiracy to transport and distribute untraceable firearms across state lines. and conspiracy to transport supposedly stolen and counterfeit goods including cigarettes from Virginia and slot machines from Atlantic City, New Jersey…

The current or former NYPD officers charged are William Masso, Eddie Goris, Ali Oklu, Gary Oritz, and John Mahony, all active-duty officers in Brooklyn; Joseph Trischitta and Marco Venezia, who were active-duty NYPD officers at the time of the alleged crimes but are now retired; and Richard Melnik, a retired NYPD officer. Also charged, federal authorities said, are Anthony Santiago, a New York City Department of Sanitation police officer; David Kanwisher, a New Jersey corrections officer; and Michael Gee and Eric Gomer, who court documents list as “associates” of Santiago…

Prosecutors said that while the defendants all believed the items they transported were stolen; they had in fact been provided by the FBI. The firearms were never a danger to the public, authorities said, as they had been rendered inoperable.

“These crimes are without question, reprehensible — particularly conspiring to import untraceable guns and assault rifles into New York,” said Janice K. Fedarcyk, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York division. “The public trusts the police not only to enforce the law, but to obey it. These crimes, as alleged in the complaint, do nothing but undermine public trust and confidence in law enforcement.”

You got that right.

The whole point of oversight is made in spades. This is why we have an SEC to keep an eye on Wall Street. And they failed us the last decade. This is why we have federal attorney-generals and they pretty much failed us during the 8 useless years of Bush/Cheney.

We’re fortunate to have someone like Preet Bharara operating in New York, nowadays. Seems like I get to note his name in a crime-busting case every couple of months.

U.S. busts 17 for gun running to Mexico

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U.S. police arrested 17 people and broke up a gun running network that sought to funnel more than 700 firearms including high-powered Kalashnikov rifles to Mexico drug cartels.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, said police arrested 17 suspects in a multi-agency operation across the Phoenix valley on Tuesday. Three other suspects remained at large.

The operation…dismantled a network buying weapons for Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel, investigators said. “We strongly believe we took down the entire organization from top to bottom that operated out of the Phoenix area,” said William Newell, special agent in charge of the ATF’s Phoenix field division…

Arizona straddles a lucrative and heavily trafficked smuggling corridor. Organized criminal networks haul drugs and illegal immigrants north, and spirit guns and cash profits south to Mexico.

The 53-count indictment alleged that from September 2009 to December last year the defendants conspired to purchase hundreds of guns, including Kalashnikov rifles, a weapon of choice for cartel enforcers in Mexico.

It’s the weapon of choice for military-style operations worldwide.

Criminal indictments handed down in the case charged defendants with crimes including conspiracy to obtain a firearm for drug trafficking offense, and making false statements in connection with the acquisition of firearms.

A conviction for conspiracy carries a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison, while making a false statement, five years…

The gun bust comes a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa in Mexico, and restated the United States’ support for Calderon’s drive to crush the cartels.

Clinton acknowledged the role the vast U.S. demand for illegal drugs and the flow of U.S. weapons south across the border to drug smugglers were major contributors to the violence.

Acknowledged, eh? Well, that accomplishes a lot doesn’t it.

Not busting your chops, Hillary; but, the ease of acquiring firearms in the United States places us in world leadership among outlaws. As a gun owner, sometimes hunter, someone who firmly believes in the right to own firearms to protect my family, home and property – I see nothing wrong with regulating access to and purchase of firearms.

Paranoid nutballs and their NRA allies may whine all the way to the next Tuscon-style crime scene; but, the traffic in weapons needs to be as thoroughly regulated as public safety demands. It doesn’t matter if the motivation is sport or safety – though the number of murdered spouses is daunting – fear of what follows is why we get to vote. Someone writes a lousy regulation, throw the bum out.

Feds link Arizona, New Mexico buyers to drug cartels’ guns

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In a sweeping operation aimed at uncovering “straw buyers” blamed for funneling high-powered guns to Mexican drug cartels, federal agents have arrested dozens of Arizonans and seized a large amount of weapons.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says its successful investigation is just the beginning of ramped-up efforts to stop the illegal export of American weapons and is aimed at nailing the middle men who buy weapons on behalf of others for use in major crimes.

Arizona’s status as a guns-and-drug hub for the rest of the country has created an industry that brings tons of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine into the United States and sends cash and guns back to Mexico, according to federal agents…

“We have a huge problem here,” said Dennis Burke, U.S. attorney for Arizona, “We have now become the gun locker of the Mexican drug cartels…”

Agents worked the newest operation in Arizona and New Mexico from May until early August as part of the ATF’s Gun Runner Impact Team. It seized about 1,300 weapons and more than 71,000 rounds of ammunition.

Although the effort was deemed a success, agents admit there is no reliable way to track the number of weapons from the U.S. being used in Mexico’s ongoing drug war…

The dozens of arrests that agents made in the course of the operation will likely not do much to cut off those supply routes…

The operation required the cooperation of Mexican authorities, who supplied ATF agents with information on firearms seized at crime scenes there.

Court records indicate the guns purchased in Arizona came from federally licensed firearms dealers throughout the state, including some who sell them at the Arizona State Fair.

RTFA.

Most of the straw buyers for the guns play like it’s some kind of a game: “Us” against the Feds, getting paid to cop a few guns for over the border where gun control is more stringent. Or tries to be.

When you know you’re fronting for murderers, you are no different. Ignorance is a pretty flimsy alibi in this day and age.