Showing posts with label gun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gun. Show all posts

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Parkland School Shooting Demands We Ask the Right Questions of Police, FBI

Following the Parkland school mass shooting, people seem very comfortable with the idea of a world where the only people entrusted with the right to use firearms are police officers. Everyone else would be disarmed and largely defenseless. It's an idea
worth exploring. Remember that many of these police officers are the same people who


If everyone is to be unarmed in this world except the police, then are these really the people we want to entrust with firearms? And, btw, the police aren't even legally responsible to protect anyone from anything per these court cases.

Then who is legally responsible for protecting our families? We are. Statistics suggest it's folly to think protection is at the other end of a 9-1-1 call. The average response time is 10 minutes (one hour in several cities). That's just enough time for the burglars to kill everyone, load up the truck with the new flatscreen, have a beer and get away unnoticed and unharmed. In other incidents, police officers responding to 9-1-1 calls arrived on the scene only to shoot the innocent people who called 9-1-1 in the first place.

We all have a natural right to protect ourselves in nearly any way we deem necessary along with a Constitutional right to own firearms. If the idea of a gun-free world relies on the police for safety and protection, and the seemingly incompetent FBI to catch the crooks after the fact, then I'll keep my right to bear arms, thank you.

From a review of a number of police interactions with ordinary American citizens, it's clear that many of today's police officers operate as hostile aggressors as standard procedure. In fact, police officers murder about 1,000 people in America per year with their firearms, and they shoot another 3,000 or so more people per year who survive the shooting. Then there are the growing number of cases where police officers rape women at ordinary traffic stops.

And these police officers are largely unaccountable. Of cases where police officers were charged with a crime, nearly every one of them has been acquitted. It's easy to demand that people with mental illness need to be barred from owning firearms but maybe we need to ask if it's really the police officers who need to be disarmed. In exploring a world where police officers are to be given a legalized monopoly on firearms when they already enjoy nearly 100% immunity from the law, what mechanism would check their increasingly brutal abuse against ordinary Americans from becoming standard procedure?

Monday, December 17, 2012

Is there more to the Newtown story than gun control and mental illness?


ABC, CBS, Fox and the Connecticut Post reported that witnesses to the Newtown school shooting stated there were thought to be two shooters, the second being taken from the woods by police. Yet soon after these reports, all media outlets concluded it was a lone gunman and ceased mentioning the conflicting accounts. It isn't easy to detach oneself from the emotion of such horror but it's my job to study the news media so I couldn't help but notice the Newtown shooting news coverage seemed too eerily similar to the Aurora, Colorado Dark Knight shooting coverage to ignore.

In Aurora, multiple witnesses stated there was more than one shooter, that a man in the front row answered his phone then opened the side door (to signal the shooter?). See witness video here (note: Examiner now AXS and video since removed). Yet soon after these eye witness accounts from people who were actually in the theater were reported, all media outlets buried them and reported only the official police report that it was a lone gunman. Seems it's always a lone gunman. Also strange how so many FBI agents were instantly on the scene to apprehend Holmes. Try calling the FBI from your local movie theater and see how long it takes for more than 50 agents to arrive on the scene - more than two minutes, I'd wager.


Emotional: A tearful President Obama said on TV: ¿We¿re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this
President Obama cries for Newtown, CT victims...yet he keeps a list in his desk drawer of people he plans to kill without any due process of law - including American citizens - and rains hellfire missiles on civilians worldwide.
While Michael Bloomberg and the rest of the national media demand it's time we address gun control, few are addressing the merits of the gun control treaty President Obama wants to sign per this Yahoo article (page removed) and this Town Hall article, which offers more analysis. Also odd we've stopped hearing about the Benghazi, Libya hearings...defenseless Americans were killed there, too. How quickly we forget whatever isn't leading the news on TV.
 
That parents today were delighted to see armed police officers and other security personnel guarding their schools saddened me beyond words, though I thought these from Huxley appropriate: “There will be... a method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”- from Brave New World
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