Shooting at Florida high school

An uncomfortably large proportion of the people who shop at Target may be racist, that doesn't make Target a racist store.

You seem to think that blacks can only be tokens or distractions on the right. It is absolutely not so. I took a serious look at Carson before the 2016 election and--though he was far from my ideal candidate--would've voted for him if he had become the nominee. And many, many, many others on the right would say the same thing.

I'm not really familiar with them--I may have heard of them once--so I can't say. But I'll say this: if a Democrat calls attention to their support within a community, it seems like it's unquestioned. If a Republican does, it's pandering or tokenism. Unless you think some groups--blacks, especially--are genetically Democrat, you have to allow for the possibility that some of them might lean to the right politically.

Here is a post which is probably going to piss a lot of people off on both the left and the right. I am for universal background checks before anyone is allowed to buy a gun. This is basic stuff which the NRA has opposed for decades because the NRA is owned by gun manufacturers who don't want to see any decreases in gun sales. That means I am with ~80% of Americans and almost 70% of NRA members who support universal background checks. It needs to be universal, it needs to cover every state and jurisdiction, including second hand sales.

Here is where liberals will get pissed off: We need to make sure all offenses get into the data base used to make those background checks. The Obama administration wanted to divert people from what he called "the schools to prison pipeline" by decriminalizing or not reporting when young people commit crimes like bringing guns to school. In fact the Florida shooter in Parkland actually did this and got expelled but that gun offense never made it into any data base because of the Obama administration's policies so the future shooter was able to later go buy an AR-15 legally and pass a background check because his previous run ins with the law didn't go on his record.

So let's do universal background checks but lets also stop the liberal idea of not officially recording crimes in the name of social justice. We need the background checks and we need them to be good so lets make both of these things happen. What do you folks think?

I've been for it for a while now. When did yo come around?

I've always been for universal background checks. Wrt to Obama's attempts to break the supposed "school to prison pipeline"... That I learned recently about on NPR and it basically boils down to let's not report crimes or pretend some crimes do not matter. That is not an acceptable approach and never should have been allowed.

awesome post dinner. We have had here in Augusta (and no doubt in many places) situations where schools were not sharing or even archiving blatantly disturbing & dangerous behavior and it has come close to biting them in the ass. I totally get that these days when young people do "dumb shit" it can fuck them for life, and prisons need to fill seats. But when that "dumb shit" goes well beyond typical "dumb shit" and moves into "holy shit that kid is mentally unstable and has demonstrated his intent to cause mass carnage" then we need to use some FUCKING COMMON SENSE. Fuck political correctness, fuck party pandering, get your priorities straight and take a fucking stand. Accept that YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM when you deliberately sit on information that endangers ALL STUDENTS AND STAFF and deny that unstable child the right to be effectively diagnosed. It's so much easier to say "gunzrbad!" when guns are not the entire problem. Grabbing that low-hanging political fruit must surely be getting played out by now. But it does distract from the (in my opinion) equally important part of this equation which is:

SEE SOMETHING
SAY SOMETHING
DO SOMETHING!

Just wanted to thank @Scott Hamilton Robert E Ron Paul Lee of the NRA and the YMCA for warning us about the dangers of living in West Tennessee. I don't think I'd have the energy to fight off roving gangs of home invaders all the time.

No you haven't. You used to say they didn't go far enough and we needed a full on gun registration.

Considering all the lives ruined by having pot as a kid and mandatory sentencing laws in some states, I get why it was done.

Still, people have been reporting this guy well since he turned 18. They should have caught him well before this.

Dinner was also a liberal back then when he said that.

I don't get the call for registration - there is a sales record of your purchase. Granted you should safeguard your copy of the receipt of course in case the store drops the ball. I don't see what registration would bring to the table.

same here - I heard the "school to prison" thing on NPR a few days ago. I had forgotten all about it. It's kind of the opposite of "zero tolerance" in that nobody gets anything in their permanent record versus everyone. I also heard about it from a local radio talk show because we just had a kid going ape-shit who had been transfered from a different school for going ape-shit yet everyone tried to sweep it under the rug. And this is significant because his violent disturbing behavior is escalating. What's scary is there are thousands of schools where this could be happening.

That's just it. Currently all purchases are recorded except person to person sales. If you have a Universal Background Check, that would mean that ALL purchases and transfers would be recorded. No need for a registration.

But a universal background check would abrogate the Second Amendment and cause the downfall of the United States of America.

^How did I know FF would that post? Sarcasm is lost on that boy...

It mitigates property loss according to that study. Didn't study whether or not the offender was more likely to be apprehended.

In any other situation, the recommended approach would be to tell men to not to shoot women, rather than taking away the woman's X. But since X is a gun, let's take it away.

I'm shocked, shocked to hear that a domestic abuser might steal a gun. Implement GVROs, sell your own if you're living with one (also maybe move out or kick him out?).

Causality must be established for this to be any sort of useful. Did she buy a gun because she was afraid of violence, or did the violence happen because she bought the gun? The linked article does not AFAICT, settle this question.

Once again, one has to establish the direction of causality there; this sentence line does no such thing, nor does the linked article.

If background checks and the current laws are doing their jobs, no there is not. And if they aren't, I refuse to believe that a blanket ban on firearms is the only way to prevent it.

I am shocked, shocked to hear that rapists with guns are bad news.

I'll be honest with you. I grant that no civilian needs a fully-automatic rifle. Whether or not someone should be able to own one is another post. That said, I've got zero problem with civilians being allowed to buy, possess, and yes, carry the same tools that civilian law enforcement uses. Convince every law enforcement organization in the United States to do away with their semi-automatics or at least limit themselves to ten rounds per magazine (or less) and we'll talk. I'm not willing to budge on that sentiment at all.

Oh, and that's coming from someone who doesn't even own a semi-automatic handguns that is capable of holding more than 9 rounds (8+1).

Hey gun buddies, looks like Trump is backing down on that whole raising the age to buy firearms thing!

I woNdeR whAt changed his mind.

But at least he hasn't backed down from the "Take Action Now, Due Process Later" thing. I guess the NRA meeting took longer than expected so the ACLU meeting had to be bumped.

I do not understand why a registration requirement would have to cut into gun sales anyway? It's just some paperwork.

I'm not sure that cutting into gun sales is the point of a registration.

That is an additional step which I would like to see but as far as universal background checks including second sales goes... Yep, I've always supported that. I'd also like to see a lengthy test showing owners know the laws wrt guns and gun safety. While we are at it taxing guns on a yearly basis and requiring owners to have insurance where they lose their guns if they fail to pay their insurance are also good ideas.

About that whole arming teachers thing?


Utah teacher accidentally shoots herself in leg on school grounds

Teargas in every pantry and a SWAT tank in every driveway.

But no turkeys in every pot, because Sessions confiscated all the pot and shot the owners.

Okay, he said he's leaving it up to individual states. That's not a horrible idea on paper. However, and someone can correct me if I'm wrong, don't some states already do this?

I still am on most issues: universal health care, gun control, voting rights, greater education funding (free college), actual equality before the lae, etc... On economic issues I have always leaned more to the right: Germany did great for a long time without a minimum wage, eliminating unnecissary regulations and streamling regulations (though these are hard to find sometimes), reforming immigration so that we get the best and brightest but don't flood the labor market so the bottom 50% can actually see real wages grow, etc...

In short, stuff is complicated and always has been.

I guess I would be a mixture of liberal/conservative myself. This is why I HATE putting things into "either/or" defined categories.

1) universal health care? For it. Hell if we can waste tax-payer money on patching up criminals who shoot & stab each other 24/7 (at an average of something like 100,000 dollars per incident) we can take care of the law abiding too. And forget "educating" people on healthy living. Most of these motherfuckers (all races/ethnicities) where I live don't give a shit about nutrition or exercise so all we can do is hope they die young and not be too big a drain on the system.
2) gun control? I used to think it would be simpler to have only federal gun laws versus each state put their spin on it. But if an individual state fucks it up, the rest of the states can point & laugh and not make the same mistake they did. If we fuck up on a 50 state level, we might be screwed. So if we want to experiment on what works and what doesn't, keep things as they are I guess and defer to "states rights." Sorry Forbin and anyone else not living in Georgia!
3) voting rights? everyone in this country has the right to vote and the ability (even if using a minimal amount of effort) to vote. If they do not, I guarantee that if they can prove they were denied the right or ability to vote there is a lawyer willing to take their case. Lawyer billboards are all along the freeway - you can't miss them.
4) free college? hell yes! But if you fuck it up by getting arrested on a regular basis and are a general liability to society, too fucking bad. You snooze, you lose.
5) equality before the law? I totally agree "you get what you pay for" should not be how justice works.
6) economic issues? no skin in the game. I make a shit-ton of money and because I have a security clearance & highly specialized experience no immigrant can perform my job & it cannot be outsourced.

Mom, @oldfella1962 is being reasonable, tell him to stop it.

I've always been reasonable. I think we should use what "works" and discard what "doesn't work" for the US - not for the rest of the world. Bounce foreign ideas against our own culture and evaluate what is likely to work within that framework. Call a spade a spade and cut the dumb shit. Give everyone an equal opportunity (with no guarantee or expectation of an equal outcome). Manage our land better - stop urban sprawl. "That's the way things have been done for 50 years" isn't going to cut it much longer. This kind of ties into "discard what doesn't work." Urban sprawl doesn't work in the long run.

One big problem with the idea of arming teachers: Insurance companies won't play along