Tag: Gun Control

Letter from the Governor of New York about Gun Violence

On By Norbert HauptIn Guns1 Comment

Fellow New Yorker,

We are all sadly aware that last week, seventeen community members at the Stoneman Douglas High School were gunned down in one of the deadliest school shootings in our nation’s history.

In the wake of this tragedy, Washington has responded with the same appalling complacency and inaction that it always responds with. Plenty of thoughts and prayers. No action.

In New York, we are doing the opposite. Following the Sandy Hook shooting, we passed the SAFE Act — which banned assault rifles like the AR-15 and made it harder for people deemed to be dangerously mentally ill to purchase guns. Firearm deaths have fallen and our state is safer for it.

But our work isn’t done. I have proposed new legislation to remove all firearms from those who commit domestic violence crimes. And today, I joined the Governors of New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Connecticut in launching States for Gun Safety – a multi-state coalition to take action against gun violence in the face of failed leadership at the federal level.

This time, things can be different. The young survivors of the Parkland shooting are speaking out, demanding more from the adults in power — and their awe-inspiring efforts bring me hope.

The American people have waited far too long — but with your help, we can say once and for all that while this was not the first school shooting in America, it will be the last.

Ever Upward,

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo

Assault Rifles, our Congress, and Prayers

On By Norbert HauptIn Guns2 Comments

One child chokes on a toy inside a German chocolate egg, and all chocolate eggs are banned from the United States. In this post I suggested that we make the eggs big enough to hide assault rifles so children, and I, could enjoy them.

On December 22, 2001, one crazy guy set a shoe on fire in an airliner. Since then, 1.73 million people take their shoes off at US airports every day. That’s about 10 billion pairs of shoes taken off at airports security lines since 2001.

In both of those cases, laws and regulations were passed quickly to stem the problem.

Yet, when we have a guy who buys an assault rifle and kills 50 people in a sweep and injures that many more, all Congress can offer is prayers?

Nobody on the street, other than law enforcement or the military, should have access to weapons of mass destruction. It’s pretty simple. And the second amendment – read all about it here – says nothing about weapons of mass destruction.

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed…

Prayers?

Seriously?

Controversy Over Mass Shooting Statistics for 2015

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Political, Privacy2 Comments

Recently there were headlines that there were more mass shootings in 2015 than days in the year. Senator Chris Murphy is one of the most outspoken politicians against gun violence, and I found this vilifying post in a website called Truth and Action, which basically claims that there were not 372 mass shootings in 2015, as “the liberals” claim, but really only four – yes – four!

When I read this article I could not help seeing some of the comments below:

Comments about Mass Shootings

Marlin W White needs some lessons in sentence structure and punctuation, but I get his point. He is a Trump supporter: “This dem is really stupid do your research before making claims vote Trump.” This really speaks volumes to me.

Mary Crum says that Obama did those shootings to give a basis for his gun grab? What gun has Obama grabbed yet?

Raymond Bramhall argued that a murder suicide is not a mass shooting. Ok. Let’s take out all the murder suicides, and we’re left with four? Really?

Joe Vasquez asks if liberals are narcissistic morons. There is narcissism, meaning loving oneself. What does that have to do with liberalism? Morons are supposed to be stupid. What does that have to do with narcissism? Joe Vasquez’ comment makes absolutely no sense to me.

Do you have to be liberal to be concerned about this amount of people shooting others – or themselves? Can you not be conservative like I am – in many regards – and still not like this amount of shooting?

Clearly, most of these comments are emotional outcries and most don’t make sense. To me, these sentiments are batshit scary.

To get some real data, not Facebook meme hype, I did a little searching and came up with this website that collects data about mass shootings. This may be an evil liberal site that is self serving, but in the end, it shows by date, by incident, by state, by city, by exact address, how many people were killed and how many wounded. You can call it what you want, but in the end, more than one person got killed or wounded at every one of these incidents, and some of them were probably murder suicides.

I tallied them up and there were 330 incidents, with 367 people killed and 1317 wounded. That seems like a lot. Definitely more than four, as the Truth and Action site states.

Moronic? Narcissistic? Stupid? Lie? Hidden Agenda? — Really? I see 367 dead and 1317 wounded in shootings where more than one was hurt at a time. Pretty basic.

I then checked how many of those shootings were by Muslim terrorists, and found two. Yes – two.

We have focused on those two in the national spotlight more than we have on the other 328 combined. Yes, 16 of the deaths and 19 of the wounded were in San Bernardino alone. It was the largest in 2015. The second largest was the biker shootout in Waco, Texas on May 17, 2015.

Our focus on the Muslim jihad crime far outweighs the attention on all the other crimes listed. We’re willing to give up our freedom and liberties to try to stop some of those jihadist crimes. But we’re not willing to seriously deal with the source of the 328 others.

Furthermore, the famed iPhone of the killer has recently drawn national attention by actions of the FBI against Apple. The government wants to force Apple to adulterate its operating system, opening it up to backdoor access, and making all 700 million iPhones worldwide vulnerable to hackers – all because there “might be” intelligence information about jihadists in the United States on that phone – all after the FBI botched the one chance it had to recover the data before it called Apple for help.

I also find it very interesting that one Muslim hate shooting has our government hold nothing back, going after the largest tech company in the world, willing to go to the Supreme Court – just to modify and regulate the iPhone, a computer. This all happened within just a couple of months of the incident.

On the other side, millions of concerned Americans have been trying to go after the killing devices (the guns) themselves for decades, yet the government does not even take action. Is this backwards?

Everyone seems to be all focused on the Founding Fathers’ intention when they crafted the Second Amendment. It states this:

  1. a practical purpose, to protect people from thieves, bandits, Native Americans, and slave uprisings
  2. a political purpose, to remind the rest of the world that the United States is well-armed

I think both bases are well covered. The second one is no longer important. I don’t think we’ll have any more British or Spanish gunships pulling into New York or Boston harbor. The first one is well covered. There haven’t been any slaves in some time, Native American’s haven’t been scalping too many of us, and I am not worried about thieves and bandits when I travel the highways – unless I go through Waco, Texas.

After all this, I am not about to call to “trample on the Constitution.”

I am proposing a 28th Amendment: to make it illegal for government to strongarm technology companies into adulterating their products by disallowing strong encryption or by dictating backdoors into computers. We really need the 28th Amendment.

Enough trampling for a day.

 

Do Guns Protect Women?

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries1 Comment

Myth: Guns protect women and make them safer.

Fact: Six times more women were shot by husbands and partners than were shot by strangers. The number of women killed by abusers increased 10 times if the abuser had a gun.

Solution: Let’s have armed guards in every house with an abuser so the good guy with a gun can defend against the bad guy with a gun.

The Right to Bear Arms

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries2 Comments

When the Second Amendment was ratified, the United States was an agrarian nation with 3,929,214 people, according to the 1790 census, of which 694,280 were slaves. The Second Amendment stated the following:

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed…

At the time when it was ratified, the Second Amendment was intended to have at least two security purposes other than a well-regulated militia:

  1. a practical purpose, to protect people from thieves, bandits, Native Americans, and slave uprisings
  2. a political purpose, to remind the rest of the world that the United States is well-armed

If it weren’t for the Second Amendment, how would we have had all the great gunfights in the west? American culture would have a huge gap, and Western movies might not exist.

It it a huge stretch to state that the right to bear arms may have a different meaning in 2013 in an industrialized and urbanized nation that is 100 times larger with a population of 308,745,538 according to the 2010 census?

Let’s turn the clock forward. Twenty years from now it may be possible to create a briefcase sized nuclear weapon.

Will my right to bear arms then entitle me to have one of those, just in case I am attacked in my house by thieves, bandits, Native Americans or slaves? Of course!

Don’t you dare take my nuclear briefcase away, you evil government!

NRA Wants to Arm Our Schools

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries1 Comment

The NRA finally has released a statement. Here is an excerpt:

We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers. Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!

The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?

The essence is, we are leaving our children open to attack to insane shooters. None of this would happen if school campuses were guarded by armed officers. So the answer is: More guns. Put guns into schools! Brilliant idea.

The next insane killer isn’t going to spray bullets because there is an armed security guard in the school.

Insanity.