You’re welcome. I’d like to think we can get together to enact common sense reforms.
It’s getting crazy. The snake is eating its own tail. Now the lawyers for the family have floated the Alex Jones “false flag” theory. Words fail . . . :-w
"It’s getting crazy. The snake is eating its own tail. Now the lawyers for the family have floated the Alex Jones “false flag” theory. Words fail . "
@saintfan, explain, please! I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I want to know.
“You’re welcome. I’d like to think we can get together to enact common sense reforms”
But unfortunately, nobody is listening to those like us. 
Who are the gun loving wusses? All the people who want to stop Syrian refugees from coming here and also support building a wall around the country.
Before the Marshall Plan, we beat 2 countries into the ground and 2 of the most horrible weapons ever known to man. Before the former enemy was built up, they were completely demolished.
I agree. What should be done? And in your vision, does Israel get to stay?
Nuclear energy is available, but many people are not interested. It is the only currently available clean technology capable of powering a society.
It’s this kind of dialogue that has me turning to CC for thoughtful opinions.
The “false flag” idea is that the government perpetrates these attacks in order to compel congress and the president to restrict 2nd amendment rights. There are prominent radio hosts who go WAY out on a limb with these claiming that Sandy Hook and other shootings were either completely faked using actors or just done by our government. That theory was also put forth RE San Bernardino. The attorneys for the family latched on to that and alluded to those other conspiracy theories and posited that this somehow may not really have happened as investigators say that it did. In essence, the shooters were somehow set up to look as if they did this . . . and it just goes downhill from there.
I understand that people have different ideas about what “well regulated militia” means or what kind of arms are appropriate for private citizens. I don’t agree necessarily, but I get that there are differing views along a spectrum. The false flag stuff to me is completely wackadoodle, though, and I am shocked at how many people believe it.
This is where free speech becomes a problem. Like those books that claim the Holocaust never happened - they can be published here (but not in Canada) and we assume that false information isn’t that awful because most people are too sensible to believe it.
But you say it often enough… and other people just hint that it might be true… and it could be Trump and his fictional celebrating NJ Muslims, or the faux Planned Parenthood video, or conspiracy theories about 9/11, or the damned Loch Ness Monster… and there are far too many idiots out there believing it. If it fits their preconceived wacko ideas about the world, they’ll believe it very easily.
“Who are the gun loving wusses? All the people who want to stop Syrian refugees from coming here and also support building a wall around the country”
That’s such a ridiculous generalization that I don’t think I want to even bother listing the ways. One would have to be a complete political hack to generalize so many different people.
I was sitting in the nail salon today when this story came up on my FB feed. I sat there with my mouth hanging open (not an attractive look for me), and they all started asking me what I was looking at. I showed it/read it to them and every person in there was disgusted. They kept thinking I’d made it up or found it as a joke.
“I understand that people have different ideas about what “well regulated militia” means or what kind of arms are appropriate for private citizens. I don’t agree necessarily, but I get that there are differing views along a spectrum. The false flag stuff to me is completely wackadoodle, though, and I am shocked at how many people believe it.”
Thanks for the explanations, sainfan!
It blows me away how many people think 9/11 was an inside job by the government, too. Crazy.
Then again, my son who went to Carnegie Mellon had a professor (Red Whittaker) who is working on putting rovers on Mars and the moon. His neighbors (Amish) think he’s hilarious, he thinks he’s going to send things to the moon. Hysterical! Then again, I guess if you lived without electricity, you might be a little behind the times, too.
Really, I don’t normally talk this much to people in the nail salon, but this topic came up, too, after I read the story about the Nevada official. One customer said she had a good friend who has an adult son that’s severely mentally ill. She described what filthy conditions he lives in, how anti-social he is, how he hears voices that tell him to do dumb stuff. The mother even told her friend (the customer at the salon) that she fully believes he will be one of those people some day whose name is in the headlines for committing such an atrocity, and there’s not a damned thing she can do about it, short of moving in with him and monitoring his every move. While it’s more likely that people like this are usually more interested in harming themselves, she expects he will crack some day and shoot up a bunch of people. He refuses to seek psychiatric care, and until someone actually hears him saying he’s about to harm himself or others, there’s nothing anyone can do. I really sort of wanted to ask, to see if this guy lives around our immediate area, but figured that would be insensitive (not that it would do me any good anyway, because even if he didn’t, I’m sure there’s someone else to take his place in our vicinity)!
teriwtt, it’s unbelievable that there is no mechanism for someone to report this and have it investigated, and potentially have him institutionalized, forced to take medication, or at least have his weapons removed (if he has any). I have a family member with a paranoid schizophrenic ex-husband, with tons of weapons, that are totally legal. This is a problem, and everybody knows it.
The guy who shot up the movie theater in Lafayette, LA should never have been able to buy a gun. He once tried to hire someone to commit arson. His wife (and I think daughter)had taken out protective orders. He booby trapped a house he was evicted from, including tampering with the gas line. Oh, and he was placed on an involuntary psych hold once. i think the psych hold was in Georgia and he bought the gun in Alabama, or maybe it was the other way around. Either way it was never reported to the federal database because apparently there aren’t chest guidelines for that, or consequences for failing to report.
No, we will never stop everything. But w should farm well be able to keep guys line that from waltzing into a gun shop and buying weapons.
Oh, one more thing in my list of reforms: gun use while under the influence of alcohol. I’d put penalties on carrying a gun while drunk, and BIG penalties on even waving a gun while drunk, let alone firing it. Too drunk to drive = too drunk to be holding or carrying a gun.
And domestic abusers should have their guns taken away, and they shouldn’t be able to buy guns or ammunition.
I have noticed that we have a lot of laws named for a victim or incident. There is Amber’s Law and Becca’s Law and Megan’s Law and on and on. With regulations around fire arms no one thing is going to stop all shootings so we get paralyzed in this circular argument of which intervention might have impacted the massacre of the week. Of course that keeps changing and moves faster than the glacial pace of legislation. Politically we don’t take the long view towards changing things for the better over time. Then, of course, anything that seemed common sense to the majority of Americans last week suddenly seems reactionary and misplaced relative to the crisis of the day.
Earlier this year, in a nearby town, a middle-aged man with a diagnosed mental illness beheaded his mother with a sword. He lived with a roommate in the community. He had recently stopped taking his medication.
I would guess that some of the gun buying has related to privacy laws and mental illness. If parents, therapists, etc. are not reporting concerns, it is tough. Nobody wants to think their child could be capable of murdering people. And even when mental illness is not involved, it is very confusing for those left behind. The family members in this most recent incident seem clearly upset that members of their family could do such a thing. I can’t even imagine.