Another Fucking Mass Shooting At US School

[TomC]

It doesn't matter what the Ingram County authorities did or didn't do. Blaming this on Carol Sieman is ridiculous.

There may be no causal relationshp between her decision not to charge the felony and this guy getting a gun. But it simply highlights that prosecutors are not pursuing one the basic way to reduce gun crime.

What makes you think she made the decision?
I don't see it.
Tom

 

[robnisch]

So, Buffalo shooter gets like a 1000 years.

 

[Oleg]

So, Buffalo shooter gets like a 1000 years.

Good. If only NY had the death penalty.

 

[robnisch]

So, Buffalo shooter gets like a 1000 years.

Good. If only NY had the death penalty.

Never understood that attitude. Life without parole seems worse to me. Death is escape.

 

[Shadowy Man]

It doesn't matter what the Ingram County authorities did or didn't do. Blaming this on Carol Sieman is ridiculous.

There may be no causal relationshp between her decision not to charge the felony and this guy getting a gun. But it simply highlights that prosecutors are not pursuing one the basic way to reduce gun crime.

I thought the argument was that a criminal will find a gun anyway. So even if he had been convicted and banned it wouldn’t have mattered.

 

[Oleg]

So, Buffalo shooter gets like a 1000 years.

Good. If only NY had the death penalty.

Never understood that attitude. Life without parole seems worse to me. Death is escape.

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Oleg]

It doesn't matter what the Ingram County authorities did or didn't do. Blaming this on Carol Sieman is ridiculous.

There may be no causal relationshp between her decision not to charge the felony and this guy getting a gun. But it simply highlights that prosecutors are not pursuing one the basic way to reduce gun crime.

I thought the argument was that a criminal will find a gun anyway. So even if he had been convicted and banned it wouldn’t have mattered.

A determined criminal will get a gun, anyway. But a felony conviction makes it harder.

 

[TomC]

I thought the argument was that a criminal will find a gun anyway. So even if he had been convicted and banned it wouldn’t have mattered.

Another point was this.
@Oleg keeps referring to the ruling as

her decision

I doubt that she did any more than rubber stamp a plea deal on her desk, along with several others, before she got on with doing her real job.
Tom

 

[Elixir]

A determined criminal will get a gun, anyway. But a felony conviction makes it harder.

So does banning guns.

 

[TomC]

A determined criminal will get a gun, anyway. But a felony conviction makes it harder.

How much harder? Around here it isn't much. The stolen weapons market is large. Lansing is a couple hours drive from Indiana, an extremely gun friendly state.

If you want to keep illegal weapons out of the hands of criminals take a chunk out of the stolen weapons market. One sensible way to do that is requiring serious security for the weapons owned by law abiding citizens. Make a gun safe a requirement for weapons licenses.

I believe your response to suggestions like that was "why punish the compliant?"
It might not have been you, or those exact words. But the bottom line remains. We could seriously restrict the illegal weapons market by requiring gun owners to have more secure storage. That would reduce the number of weapons available to people who should not have access to one.
Tom

 

[ZiprHead]

I thought the argument was that a criminal will find a gun anyway. So even if he had been convicted and banned it wouldn’t have mattered.

Another point was this.
@Oleg keeps referring to the ruling as

her decision

I doubt that she did any more than rubber stamp a plea deal on her desk, along with several others, before she got on with doing her real job.
Tom

I think Oleg expects prosecutors and judges to be prescient precogs.

 

[TomC]

It's illegal for a felon to own a gun. By being soft, the prosecutor let him avoid the felony. Not sure how this guy got his gun, but if the law had been enforced he couldn't have got it legally. Bad policy decisions have consequences.

Didn't the "soft on criminals" part happen in 2019?
Ya know, when Trump was President?

Why didn't he step in and save McRae's victims?

Here's a Wikipedia quote concerning Michigan governor in 2019.
"Richard Dale Snyder is an American business executive, venture capitalist, attorney, accountant, and politician who served as the 48th governor of Michigan from 2011 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, Snyder previously served as the chairman of the board of Gateway from 2005 to 2007."

What was he doing that was more important than preventing McRae from buying a gun legally?
Tom

 

[TomC]

So, Buffalo shooter gets like a 1000 years.

Good. If only NY had the death penalty.

Never understood that attitude. Life without parole seems worse to me. Death is escape.

There's definitely that.

There's also the "Killing is wrong! So let's kill someone!" aspect.

I can see a tiny slice of convicted perps that should get offed, to protect the people that they can destroy or kill while in prison. But it's a really tiny percentage of the tiny percentage of people who commit murder.
Tom

 

[Shadowy Man]

It doesn't matter what the Ingram County authorities did or didn't do. Blaming this on Carol Sieman is ridiculous.

There may be no causal relationshp between her decision not to charge the felony and this guy getting a gun. But it simply highlights that prosecutors are not pursuing one the basic way to reduce gun crime.

I thought the argument was that a criminal will find a gun anyway. So even if he had been convicted and banned it wouldn’t have mattered.

A determined criminal will get a gun, anyway. But a felony conviction makes it harder.

So, you agree that making it harder to get guns may impact the occurrence and/or severity of mass shootings?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A determined criminal will get a gun, anyway. But a felony conviction makes it harder.

How much harder? Around here it isn't much. The stolen weapons market is large. Lansing is a couple hours drive from Indiana, an extremely gun friendly state.

Exactly. It's about fortifying the front door when there's an unprotected window nearby. You don't measure how well you plug a hole, you measure what the weakest point is.

If you want to keep illegal weapons out of the hands of criminals take a chunk out of the stolen weapons market. One sensible way to do that is requiring serious security for the weapons owned by law abiding citizens. Make a gun safe a requirement for weapons licenses.

I believe your response to suggestions like that was "why punish the compliant?"
It might not have been you, or those exact words. But the bottom line remains. We could seriously restrict the illegal weapons market by requiring gun owners to have more secure storage. That would reduce the number of weapons available to people who should not have access to one.
Tom

I don't like gun safe requirements--that precludes anyone who doesn't live on a solid floor from owning guns at all.

I would like to see it be a crime for a gun to not be locked up when it's not in somebody's possession, excluding situations that preclude that. (Say, you put some sort of finish on it and need to let that dry before you lock it up.) Making it require tools to get a gun keeps them from being casually scooped up by burglars.

Once again, it's a situation where the best you can do is make another path more desirable--the reality is there are a huge number of guns out there, there's no way you're going to make it impossible for a criminal to get a gun. If nothing else, we can't stop drugs from coming in, guns could also be smuggled by similar means.

 

[bilby]

the reality is there are a huge number of guns out there, there's no way you're going to make it impossible for a criminal to get a gun

It's not even difficult for criminals who want a gun to obtain on in the UK. Illegal guns are cheaper than legal ones, and a sizeable criminal market exists for them.

But almost no criminal in the UK routinely goes armed. When guns are used in crime, they are typically obtained for the specific crime, and discarded quickly once it has been committed. And even that is rare - most criminals prefer never to handle guns at all.

That's because simply possessing a gun without both a license, and a legitimate reason why it's not currently secured in an approved safe, is an invitation to arrest, and to severe penalties.

The system doesn't work by making it impossible for criminals to obtain guns; It works by making it undesirable for criminals to obtain guns.

And it does work.

When your entire approach to the problem is predicated on the false (and demonstrably stupid) premise that you can only stop gun crime by making illegal guns impossible to obtain, it becomes easy to prove that any given measure will be ineffective.

But when you look at actual and genuinely effective ways to reduce gun crime, you will discover that many of those measures are extremely effective, but are promoting a class of solutions that you haven't even considered.

When you tell legitimate gun owners that their weapons must be secured when not in use, you achieve two useful things that are unrelated to the diversion of firearms to the illicit market via theft: Firstly you eliminate a vast majority of accidental shootings, particularly by children; And secondly, you make it possible for any person found with a gun to be penalised simply for carrying it about without an immediate legitimate purpose.

Ultimately, this boils down to the central question around gun control: Do citizens have the right to own guns for their own protection against other citizens; Or is gun ownership a privilege reserved for responsible people, who have legitimate uses for these weapons that do not ever entail their use against humans?

As long as you pick the former over the latter, lots of people will die needlessly every single year.

Every developed nation in the world has picked the latter, except one; There's zero evidence to suggest that that one outlier has more liberty, less crime, or better public safety than the others - so empirically, that was a stupid mistake for that nation to make.

Basically, your nation has decided to kill large numbers of innocent people, in defence of a hypothetical benefit that cannot be demonstrated to exist at all. But lots of people both believe strongly in this hypothetical benefit, and care naught for the dead and wounded, so that's OK then.

The rest of the debate is just noise, intended to sweeten the bitter pill of realising that you have deliberately chosen an ideological position of pure faith that kills people, over the harmless and completely reasonable restrictions imposed in other countries to protect the public.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Ultimately, this boils down to the central question around gun control: Do citizens have the right to own guns for their own protection against other citizens; Or is gun ownership a privilege reserved for responsible people, who have legitimate uses for these weapons that do not ever entail their use against humans?

As long as you pick the former over the latter, lots of people will die needlessly every single year.

Every developed nation in the world has picked the latter, except one; There's zero evidence to suggest that that one outlier has more liberty, less crime, or better public safety than the others - so empirically, that was a stupid mistake for that nation to make.

Basically, your nation has decided to kill large numbers of innocent people, in defence of a hypothetical benefit that cannot be demonstrated to exist at all. But lots of people both believe strongly in this hypothetical benefit, and care naught for the dead and wounded, so that's OK then.

The rest of the debate is just noise, intended to sweeten the bitter pill of realising that you have deliberately chosen an ideological position of pure faith that kills people, over the harmless and completely reasonable restrictions imposed in other countries to protect the public.

Why do you assume we have large numbers of innocent deaths? Most murders are criminal on criminal.

 

[laughing dog]

Why do you assume we have large numbers of innocent deaths? Most murders are criminal on criminal.

Why do you assume most murders are criminal on criminal?

 

[bilby]

Ultimately, this boils down to the central question around gun control: Do citizens have the right to own guns for their own protection against other citizens; Or is gun ownership a privilege reserved for responsible people, who have legitimate uses for these weapons that do not ever entail their use against humans?

As long as you pick the former over the latter, lots of people will die needlessly every single year.

Every developed nation in the world has picked the latter, except one; There's zero evidence to suggest that that one outlier has more liberty, less crime, or better public safety than the others - so empirically, that was a stupid mistake for that nation to make.

Basically, your nation has decided to kill large numbers of innocent people, in defence of a hypothetical benefit that cannot be demonstrated to exist at all. But lots of people both believe strongly in this hypothetical benefit, and care naught for the dead and wounded, so that's OK then.

The rest of the debate is just noise, intended to sweeten the bitter pill of realising that you have deliberately chosen an ideological position of pure faith that kills people, over the harmless and completely reasonable restrictions imposed in other countries to protect the public.

Why do you assume we have large numbers of innocent deaths? Most murders are criminal on criminal.

Because most (IMO all) criminals don't merit capital punishment.

Fuck you're callous. Every dead criminal is also a dead son or daughter. Many are dead brothers or sisters. Many are dead fathers and mothers. If you think that the poor decision to commit a crime is sufficient to cancel all that out; To render a person's "bad" side so dominant over any "good" that they deserve death, then you are a monster.

I don't think you actually are such a vile monster though. I suspect that you're just (like so many people) prepared to accept almost any level of abstract moral depravity, in defence of a belief that you have held for so long that you aren't even aware that it is a belief, and not a fact about reality.

You believe that people can be divided into two categories - "good guys" and "bad guys". But they cannot. Everyone - me and you included - falls into BOTH camps. And it's therefore no more acceptable that some small time drug dealer should die young than it is that you, or your wife, or any of your friends, should die young.

Even if we accept that capital punishment is, under some circumstances, an acceptable treatment for the worst of criminals, it doesn't follow that the extrajudicial death of a person who has committed crimes isn't the death of an innocent. Everyone is innocent, until proven guilty in a court of law.

Every time a criminal dies, without first having been sentenced to death by a court, that is an innocent death.

But fuck it - lets assume that not one criminal who dies is innocent. Even so, your nation has, by its attitude towards guns, killed large numbers of innocent people - people who are less criminal than you. That it also kills a big bunch of folks you don't care a whit about, doesn't justify their deaths.

You're wrong here on every possible level. Because you're not thinking about the issue; You are thinking of justifications and rationalisations for your morally bankrupt beliefs. You should instead just discard them - even though that feels like destroying a part of your very self. It's a part you don't need.

 

[ZiprHead]

9 children, including 5-year-old, shot outside Ga. gas station

The victims range in age from 5 to 17.

www.wsbtv.com

COLUMBUS, Ga. — Nine children are recovering in the hospital after being shot outside of a gas station on Friday night.

Columbus police officers were called to a Shell gas station just after 10 p.m. in reference to a shooting.



When they got there, they found a large group of people that included nine juveniles who had suffered gunshot wounds.


The victims included:

• Male, 5
• Male, 12
• Female, 13
• Female, 13
• Male, 13
• Male, 14
• Male, 15
• Male, 15
• Male, 17

The victims’ names have not been released because they are juveniles.

All nine were taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.