Gunman Assassinates U.S. Congresswoman

[Caligastia]

Palin:



Rush:




Beck:



Even the DHS is concerned:

http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf

Seriously? That's the best you can come up with? You're holding Palin responsible for what a random audience member shouts out? The Rush quote refers purely to the electoral process. And somehow Beck is responsible for the actions of some nutjob?

[Tupac Shakur]

As usual, Chris Rock explained this to all ya'll white folk years ago...



Whatever happened to crazy?

[Asher]

It's funny because it's so true.

Young Crackers

[Tupac Shakur]

Chris also points out that **** like this wouldn't happen if a bullet cost $5000. Failing that sensible reform, however, we could always just ban all people under 30 from buying guns.

[Asher]

Or just the white folk under 25.

[Tupac Shakur]

Nah. Black kids, while less crazy, don't need guns anymore than white kids.

[KrazyHorse]

I like the thought of being able to shoot at kids without them being able to shoot back. That would put them in their place.

[Tupac Shakur]

Damn straight.

[DaShi]

Seriously? That's the best you can come up with? You're holding Palin responsible for what a random audience member shouts out? The Rush quote refers purely to the electoral process. And somehow Beck is responsible for the actions of some nutjob?

Wow, you are incredibly stupid. You ask for comments that incite violence. I give you the comments and the actions that followed them (except in the case of Rush), and you're too stupid to either recognize them or come up with a clever retort. Go back to panda****ers where you all pat eachother on the back about how ignorant you are about climate change.

[Aeson]

DaShi is trying to get pandas killed with his hateful rhetoric. I myself just killed a family of pandas and have the urge to go piss on their corpses even still

[DaShi]

I'm not saying that I support violence against pandas. In fact, I'm against it. But if some pandas were to suddenly explode, I think that might just send a message to...yeah.

[Aeson]

If only I had a graphic that could easily point me to the location of pandas with little explosion graphics...

[Asher]

Poor DinoDoc

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/television/john-doyle/fox-news-and-the-poisoning-of-american-political-debate/article1864663/

Fox News and the poisoning of American political debate
JOHN DOYLE

Almost lost in the cacophony of voices over the last few days was U.S. president Barack Obama’s call for a moment of silence: “I call on Americans to observe a moment of silence to honour the innocent victims of the senseless tragedy in Tucson, Arizona, including those still fighting for their lives.”

Now there’s an idea – silence. It’s one of those times when blunt meaning can be extrapolated from a politician’s bland statement. In this case, maybe, it’s “Everybody just shut up.”

The disinclination of American politicians, pundits and all the wannabe politicians and pundits to actually shut up is, of course, the core issue in the wake of the horrific mass shooting in Arizona. The world is now awash in talk about “a climate of hate” and “inflammatory right-wing rhetoric” being either tangentially or directly responsible for the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the deaths of six others at a public political event in Tucson. All that talk is about the danger of talk. Much of it is nonsense, but some if it has the sting of rightful blame.

For some time now, the very core of the U.S. culture has been located at that place where politics and media meet. And where they meet is the all-news cable TV channel. As the news of the shootings sank in on Saturday, there was a numbness to the TV coverage – the reporting of the plain facts of what happened. Then the story evolved into something else. That happened as soon MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann took to the air to allege that Sarah Palin played a significant role in raising the volume of vitriol in the U.S. and to blame Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck of Fox News for the level of extremism in partisan political argument. As a result, this story is about television and its impact.

It’s easy to suggest that the current situation – all that incessant hate and inflammatory finger-pointing – is what the Fox News Channel has wrought. It is easy because it is true. The fact that it is easily done doesn’t make it any less true. What Fox News has sown is now being reaped.

The Fox New Channel arrived in the U.S. in 1996 and instantly ramped up the vitriol. It accused almost all other media of left-wing bias and presented its own clearly partisan coverage and punditry as “fair and balanced.” It was mocked by liberals, but it succeeded in changing the media landscape in the U.S. All the other all-news channels reacted to the presence and ratings success of Fox.

Bill O’Reilly became its star pundit and the most influential fear-monger in the U.S. His blithe disregard for facts and casual use of insults set the standard. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact that when O’Reilly can reduce the most complex of political issue to what he calls a matter of “pinheads and patriots,” as he does almost daily, the template for political coverage is set. And there are consequences. O'Reilly and his pinheads and patriots sloganeering style of TV news empowers every mildly mad, seriously mad or merely inarticulate, bitter American to spew unthinking rage in the most caustic terms. And thus, this is where the political debate and culture in the U.S. is now.

Here, by the way, is the opening of O’Reilly’s recent book, called Pinheads and Patriots: “Hey, you! You, the American! You who believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This book is about you. No spin. In this age of Obama, all that you take for granted is changing, yet many Americans have no clue.”

At the same time as blame can be laid at the door of Fox News, it is essential to recognize that the style of Fox News is a hit. The channel easily beats CNN and MSNBC in the ratings. So many American TV viewers get exactly what they want and enjoy on Fox News. So while blaming Fox we have to admit that the Fox News channel’s success is rooted in Fox’s intuitive recognition of the inherent aggressiveness of the American political culture, an aggressiveness that is itself anchored in a public that’s fearful of change and hostile to opposing viewpoints.

A few years ago, when I wrote mockingly about Fox News and O’Reilly, I felt the full, Fox-style backlash. O’Reilly called me names on the air, several times, and referred to The Globe and Mail as a “far-left” newspaper. In a matter of days I received thousands of abusive e-mails from Fox News viewers. The language of insult was extraordinarily intense. This being Canada, and Fox News being unavailable here, nobody outside my readership was paying much attention. But The New York Times was, and it lavished a feature story on the battle. What I remember, apart from the white-hot hatred expressed by Fox viewers, was a New York Times editor telling me how important this story was – because it suggested that the Fox News viewers represented America itself to the world outside the U.S. It was just that, in this case, the world outside was me.

It has come to pass: Fox News does indeed define the U.S. political culture and the manner of debate inside that culture. It is to blame, but blame must be tempered by our understanding that Fox News is America and America is Fox News. There will be neither silence nor a change of tone until the Fox News Channel changes, or shuts up. That’s not going to happen. Look at the ratings. The ratings don’t lie.

[Asher]

Poor Arizona. Poor America.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/arizona-shooting/tucson-shooter-was-able-to-buy-gun-with-ease/article1864871/

Tucson shooter was able to buy gun with ease

Jared Lee Loughner broke no laws when he walked into the Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson on Nov. 30 and walked out a few minutes later with a powerful, semi-automatic Glock 19 handgun, along with a couple of extra-long magazines each capable of holding more than 30 bullets.

Total cost, about $500. A cursory background check was required but, in Arizona, no permit is needed to carry it around, concealed and loaded.

At the hulking green and grey warehouse, a quick check – usually less than five minutes on the telephone, even less using the online database maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation – confirmed Mr. Loughner was neither a serious convict, deemed mentally defective nor committed to a psychiatric institution. Among those proud to have fought against any curbs on the rights of all Americans to “bear arms” was Gabrielle Giffords, who once boasted to constituents that she helped defeat the nation’s toughest handgun law that outlawed weapons such as the Glock in the nation’s capital.

“As a gun owner, I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. In February, I was proud to sign the amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller asking the Supreme Court to uphold the lower-court ruling that overturned the long standing D.C. gun ban,” Ms. Giffords, a Democrat, said in her hard-fought re-election campaign in mostly Republican Arizona.

Until he actually opened fire, shooting Ms. Giffords through the head, killing six and wounding 13 others, Mr. Loughner was what the National Rifle Association calls a “law-abiding citizen” who had done nothing illegal by carrying a concealed and loaded Glock with enough ammunition to kill dozens to a public place. Even the extra-long magazines once outlawed under the assault-gun ban have been legal since it expired in 2004.

The Tucson mass killing and the deliberate assassination attempt have re-ignited the gun-control debate in America. Arizona, like Vermont and Alaska, has the least-restrictive gun laws in the country.

“Arizona, as it turns out, has almost no gun laws, and scored just two points out of 100 last year on the Brady State Scorecard,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, named after Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, who was shot in the head by the deranged assassin who tried to kill the president in 1981.

“The 22-year-old shooter in Tucson was not allowed to enlist in the military, was asked to leave school and was considered ‘very disturbed’ … but that’s not enough to keep someone from legally buying as many guns as they want in America,” Mr. Helmke added.

Gun-rights advocates dismiss claims that tougher rules would have prevented last weekend’s killing, or the mass slaughter at Virginia Tech in 2007, or any of the thousands of gunshot injuries and deaths every year in America.

“Weapons don’t kill people, it’s the individual that kills people,” Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky, said in the wake of the Tucson massacre. That’s a view voiced by many, including Ms. Giffords.

Even in states with the toughest gun laws on the Brady scale – such as California and New Jersey – Mr. Loughner might have got his gun, although some gun-control advocates think the tighter rules would have caught him.

“I’m pretty confident that if he tried to buy a gun in New Jersey, he would have failed,” said Josh Horowitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Waiting periods, extensive background checks, limits on firearms purchases, permit requirements, checks with state and local police and limits on large magazines would all have increased the chances that Mr. Loughner would have been rejected for gun ownership.

Even then, a quick trip to a neighbouring state with slacker rules would have solved the problem, even without resorting to the vast number of weapons easily available – albeit illegally – in any big American city.

Canadian guns laws much stricter

In Canada, the Tucson shooter would have faced a much, much tougher time arming himself with a Glock, or any other semi-automatic handgun capable of killing and maiming two dozen people in a few seconds. Canadian gun laws – while not at tough as many in Europe – make America’s seem inconsequential.

To own a Glock in Canada requires two levels of permits – one for a firearm and another, much more stringent, for a handgun. Extensive background checks by police can take between three and six months. Once approved for a licence, the prospective gun owner can then purchase and keep the weapon but only from screened and approved arms dealers. The owner must belong to a gun club. The gun can only be transported between designated places – usually the owner’s home, the gun club and a designated border point for competitions in the United States. No handgun can ever be transported or carried loaded, except by law-enforcement agents.

Would it have made a difference in Tucson? Perhaps. U.S. gun-control advocates point to Canada as a shining example. But north of the border, not everyone is so sure.

“There’s no level of regulation that will prevent a tragedy like this from happening,” said Blair Hagan, executive vice-president of the National Firearms Association of Canada. In 2006, Canadian Kimveer Gill used a Glock pistol almost identical to the one used in Tucson along with two other guns to shoot 20 people at Dawson College in Montreal. Mr. Gill was legally in possession of all three firearms and had passed all the tests and backgrounds checks, save that he hadn’t bothered to get a transport permit before heading out on his murderous rampage.

“Canadian laws are designed to be so stringent to prevent that sort of thing,” Mr. Hagan said, adding it doesn’t work, because the “criminal element will always be able to get guns.”

[Aeson]

Poor Canada

“There’s no level of regulation that will prevent a tragedy like this from happening,” said Blair Hagan, executive vice-president of the National Firearms Association of Canada. In 2006, Canadian Kimveer Gill used a Glock pistol almost identical to the one used in Tucson along with two other guns to shoot 20 people at Dawson College in Montreal. Mr. Gill was legally in possession of all three firearms and had passed all the tests and backgrounds checks, save that he hadn’t bothered to get a transport permit before heading out on his murderous rampage.

“Canadian laws are designed to be so stringent to prevent that sort of thing,” Mr. Hagan said, adding it doesn’t work, because the “criminal element will always be able to get guns.”