See also, Left Wing Cracker: And here we go again.

Good over view of the situation.

The way the U.S. Constitution is written, gun regulation has to occur at the federal, state and local level to work. It also is dependent upon the general agreement and co-operation of our citizens.

God help us all.

What have we become?

Making the conversation about guns plays into the hands of the people who think the answer to gun violence is more gun violence. Until we, as a society, take on a true reverence for innocent lives we are going to get very far with this. We have a national military policy that allows drones and bombing of innocent civilians without recourse, police shootings of unarmed civilians in response to imaginary threats, pollution laws that allow the sickening and killing of people hundreds of miles from the pollution source, and so on and so on.

I don't disagree with "treating the symptoms" and making the patient comfortable, but we're not going to get very far until there is put in place a societal more against the killing of innocents in response to any personal enmity toward someone else.

Perhaps what we need before the dialogue is to look at the number of shootings in our country, and compare that with the number of shootings in other civilized/industrialized countries.

I'm not talking about just mass murders, but gun murders. Gregg Levine wrote (and reposted yesterday -- this was written just after the Virginia Tech massacre):

Gun violence is more than an everyday occurrence in this country, it is an hourly one. Correction: it is a quarter-hourly one. There are, roughly, 12,000 gun murders a year in the United States (if you are looking for contrasts, contrast that with the average 350 gun murders that occur annually in Canada, Great Britain, and Australia combined). If you watch the local TV news in the US, then you likely bear some sort of witness to numerous individual gun murders every week.

But it is only when six or twelve or twenty-two or thirty-three are shot that most of us even look up, take pause, or stop to think at all about what guns do.

And what guns do is kill people.

For the record, I do not own a gun, I do not use a gun, nor do I care to. I find the wild-wild-west mentality of (some) gun-rights activists to be in opposition to a growing thriving society. But, that's me. So, the question becomes how to incorporate gun ownership and living responsibly within a society.

After the Virginia Tech massacre, The Scotsman published this:

The actor Donald Sutherland once pointed out it is almost as easy to buy a gun in Canada, where he comes from, as in the US, yet the incidence of gun-related deaths there is dramatically lower.

He argued that both countries have a frontier spirit, but the iconic figure of the Canadian West is the Mountie - a law officer - while the iconic figure of the American West is the outlaw.

Why are there so many gun deaths per year in the US compared to other industrialized countries? What separates them from us?

According to statistics out last week, there are over 320 million firearms in circulation in this country and 4 million made and sold each year. 32 Americans die each day in this country from being shot.
Gun laws are NOT being enforced due to the loopholes like gun show sales, selling to individuals or at swap meets, or via the internet. Guns found or used in crimes are NOT destroyed but re-sold at auctions. The laws enacted after the Reagan shooting have now lapsed like the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban.
Here in TN as in other States, the NRA/gun makers' ALEC 'guns everywhere laws' will continue to sail through our TEA/Koch brothers Legislature, and the Governor will not even comment. He didn't even have the guts to veto the 'Monkey Bill' which dumbs down our public school children.
And good ole Ron Ramsey is the chief shill for the NRA...he is going to get his 'guns in parking lots at work' bill through as soon as the New Session commences.
And the NRA continues to lie..."Obama is planning to take away ALL your guns". Or "This is a 2nd Amendment issue".
And my question is this:

Since there are so many 'responsible gun owners' in the NRA, why the heck don't they stand up and say it is time to stop the killing, the deaths, accidental, or intentional, or crazed ? Are they really proud to be in an organization that promotes home grown terrorism and the killing of our nation's children?

Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behavior in the Laboratory and in Life

Two studies examined violent video game effects on aggression-related variables. Study 1 found that real-life violent video game play was positively related to aggressive behavior and delinquency. The relation was stronger for individuals who are characteristically aggressive and for men. Academic achievement was negatively related to overall amount of time spent playing video games. In Study 2, laboratory exposure to a graphically violent video game increased aggressive thoughts and behavior. In both studies, men had a more hostile view of the world than did women. The results from both studies are consistent with the General Affective Aggression Model, which predicts that exposure to violent video games will increase aggressive behavior in both the short term (e.g., laboratory aggression) and the long term (e.g., delinquency).

A complicating layer to the Newtown story appeared in the NY Times today: It appears the guns used by the shooter to kill all those little kids were actually owned by his mother, the teacher (or assistant) whom he also killed. Which reminds me of the gun nuts who say we should arm the teachers, which in turn reminds me of this teacher who kept a piece in his desk drawer.

Regarding mental health issues...

No, she's not Adam Lanza's mother.

Unless she bought a cabinet full of semi-automatic weapons and kept them where he could get them.

Should we be concerned about all the folks that have been stockpiling weapons and ammunition in anticipation of the world's demise this upcoming Friday?

This became a topic of conversation this morning because a family friend has been doing just that. I'm concerned that there may be a network of these folks planning, who knows what, for Friday.

I'm just wondering if there's any obvious signs to look for that indicate,"Duck!"

I met one of those nutters at a friend's garage sale yesterday, wearing a Glock in a holster, no less, on his pair of cammies. He was bragging about being a survival instructor and that he always gave each of his students this wonderful little flint gadget that would allow one to start a fire one-handed 'in case one hand were blown off'.

He bragged about being a former Marine Corps sniper. I have a cousin who was and that's something he says most of them are pretty quiet about. I expected the anti-Obama spiel but it never came, just that the world was going to hell in a hand basket and only the strong would survive. He is apparently expecting us to last past the 21st, though, because he bought a dozen pint jars (complete with the rings) to put up his supposedly infamous Habanero jelly.

I stood there thinking this silly bastard probably couldn't even install a rebuild kit in a Delta faucet.

I googled "Nancy Lanza survivalist" and came up with a horrifying link to a heavily-trafficked survivalist site whose habitués have concluded that this whole incident was set up by the government to take people's guns away. A psy ops operation....

how this person was able to stockpile 47 guns?

Cedar Lake police were called to the home of 60-year-old Von I. Meyer early Friday after he allegedly threatened to set his wife on fire. A police statement says Meyer also said he would enter Jane Ball Elementary School and "kill as many people as he could."

Authorities found 47 guns and ammunition worth over $100,000.

Seriously? Why would anyone need 47 guns? There should be a limit on how many guns one can legally own! [that's my opinion, you don't have to share it, but I'm allowed to have it]

Meanwhile, in China, where guns are verboten, no one died in this attack. Note in the picture how police are capturing the knife-wielding attacker.

edited to correct spelling

I do think we need to have a conversation about guns. Bloomberg is correct, the NRA is not as powerful as some would think. There doesn't have to be a plan to take away everyones guns, just some restrictions. I've been around guns all of my life. I will never understand why people feel the need to own these types of guns. They want to play a real life video game? They want to defend themselves from the U.S. Army? All in the name of gun rights?

My take on gun nutters is that their retreat to "tactical weapons" is an escape from modernity's burden of having to live in and build a pluralistic society. It's an escape from freedom. And, it's delusional at just about every level. The whole paramilitarism of the gun nutter, it's macho authoritarianism and faux patriotism reeks of stunted emotional development for people who never learned how to live with others and deal with difference.

This ABC News clip is pretty compelling on the whole self conception of the gun toting savior:

(link...)

Often the institutional memory is at odds with the modern conventional wisdom, which is in this case a child of the 1970s NRA, not the 1770s founders. For 200 years, the militia clause trumped the individual rights clause. Columbia v. Heller for example was no "Triumph of Originalism" and goes out of its way to mention that "modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right." Scalia also notes that your individual rights under the operative clause are not unlimited.
You could only carry a handgun in five states before 1980. You can't pose for an Instagram in a Thomas Jefferson shirt and tricorn hat with your AR-15 and pretend your current right to do so does not come from recent RE-interpretations of the Second amendment. You furthermore can not reference the Second Amendment without referencing Article 6 that it amends, both giving zero rights to the unregulated and undisciplined.
That being said, what Senator Feinstein is accomplishing most of all, at least in the short term, is to increase already abnormally high sales of assault rifles and large magazines to the nuttier and nuttier. Republicans already have a "quality of the inmates" problem. Proceed with caution. It would be best to proceed not with another assault rifle ban, but by doing some math. How much mental health funding could be restored by not building a new F-35 engine in John Boehner's district? The C27-J in Steve Austria's district? The Pentagon doesn't want it. The Air Force wants to stop buying the Global Hawk Block 30 surveillance drone. Congressmen keep paying for it. How about funding instead some counseling programs for out-of-work NRA and defense contractor lobbyists?