The only shooting range owner I’ve seen interviewed (he owned an indoor range in Riverside) said that just the man came in. This was a couple of weeks before the killings. I haven’t seen any reports on shooting range people seeing her at the range in a hijab. I think if that happened someone, a member of the public, would have reported it.
This said “shooters” http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/07/dry-run-san-bernardino-shooter-practiced-at-gun-range-days-before-attack/
and later in the article it says:
Reported what? How? To whom?
Going to a shooting range while wearing a hijab is not illegal.
If you saw this happen, and you thought it was worth reporting, how would you go about it?
And couldn’t a Muslim family reasonably say that they too were arming themselves for protection?
Just saw this tweet in response to a call to ban all Muslims from entering the US:
If only…
Exactly, since that is a common practice.
But maybe those here in the US on immigrant visas shouldn’t be afforded full Second Amendment rights? Just an idea.
“But maybe those here in the US on immigrant visas shouldn’t be afforded full Second Amendment rights? Just an idea.”
She was a permanent resident; with a handful of exceptions, they are treated just like US citizens… because they are presumed to be on the path for citizenship. Until the SCOTUS says no guns for any non-citizens… 'cause those 9 folks are the ones who have the final say in what the law is.
Even WA with its prohibition on possession of guns by non-citizens has an exception for permanent residents and those who apply for a special license (how do I know - a friend wanted to join a biathlon team but decided that it was not worth the trouble):
If Americans have to own guns, isn’t a shooting range a perfectly legitimate place to use them? I’d rather people play with guns at a shooting range than in their backyard. I just don’t see how going to a shooting range could be considered suspicious, other than in cases like this where it’s only suspicious after the fact.
Here’s something I haven’t seen in all the coverage – what tip did the cops get to suspect these two? They shoot up the party, go home, are home for several hours, then the cops show up as they are leaving the home and then the shoot out that kills them occurs. Who suggested Syed was the shooter and why?
He was a colleague of the people at the party. Unless he was wearing a mask, wouldn’t some of the survivors have recognized his face?
Wasn’t he also the one who got into an argument with another county employee? So if his face was covered up, they would know his build/voice/perhaps eyes, etc.
I think the news reported that he was wearing a ski mask when he and his wife burst though the door and began shooting. I am guessing that either he was still wearing it or it was in the car when he was shot. Just hypothesizing. The news was pretty quick to report their identities, IIRC.
they were wearing masks, but colleagues still recognized the voices (according to local news…)
I agree. And if Congress hadn’t, under pressure from the NRA and related groups, banned funding for any such studies years ago (which effectively keeps really solid ones from ever happening), then we might actually have some to work with.
Am guessing she was covered by her niqab or burka or whatever covering she wore. He likely had the ski mask. Funny, I’ve not seen anyone on the ski slopes with those masks in a very, very long time. Maybe construction workers or others who work outdoors wear them. Lets start banning ski masks while we’re at it.
JK
The problem with discussions about gun control and violence in general is that we immediately see things related but different thrown into the mix. With mass shootings like this, their immediately is the call for gun control, and the pro gun types calling for looser gun regulations so “people can protect themselves” and also calling for 'studies of why people act out violently". There is probably validity to both sides, but the way it is being framed, it is either/or, and there also is this attempt to lump them together. Pro gun people are correct that guns don’t kill, that people do it, but that leaves out of course that guns, especially high capacity/rapid fire, are very efficient at killing and that while gun control or whatnot won’t get rid of violence, controlling access may help keep down the carnage, make it a lot rarer. The idea that something is wrong , that these things are being generated by something wrong in our society, is not incorrect, but the two don’t directly depend on each other. The reality is, both need to be studied, and done so seperately with controlled studies:
1)What is at the root of killings like this, why in a time when the overall murder rate is down, are mass shootings like this increasing? Is it a lack of good mental health care? Is it other factors, like violence becoming casual, is it terrorism, is it anger at increasing economic instability, what is it? (all off the above have been suggested as causes, hence my mentioning them)
2)What is the impact of people having easy access to rapid fire/large capacity weapons like AR15’s and the like? If those guns are restricted, do incidents like this decline? What role do lax gun laws have in feeding the black market?
3)Does easy access to guns and ability to carry cut down on crime? Is their a definite correlation between the 2? In places where gun ownership and specifically the ability to carry guns has been implemented, does this increase incidents of friendly fire, where someone innocent is shot by someone thinking they are the bad guy? And are such results done over the long term? For example, I read a study at one point that reported that after Florida changed its gun laws to allow easier carry, that crime decreased significantly…but the study if I remember only covered like 6 months, and other studies done later showed that there was a decline after the law was passed, but then over time crime figures returned pretty much to where they were before…I am not arguing that this proves guns don’t work, I am simply saying that without long term studies it is hard to see if in fact it worked, short term blips can often be noise, or indication of a 'hawthorn" effect, where causility tends to be for different reasons.
The point is that without real, further studies to give answers to questions like these, knee jerk claims like gun control will solve the problem, or that more people owning guns will solve the problem, or slogans like guns kill people, will fail as policy without backing. Sadly, even if there are studies that do answer these questions, there will be people so hardened in their positions they will discredit the studies or say that proves nothing, so even with that I am dubious anything will happen. [My own take is that getting rapid fire guns with large magazines out of being legal (I don’t give a snot what a gun looks like, rather that there be limits on the refire rate and how quickly you can change a magazine and the size of them), Australia banned such weapons and they saw these kinds of mass shootings dwindle. Yes, criminals would still be able to get these guns, but with the flow from legal sales diminished, would be more expensive and difficult to get, and the two not ready for prime time players in this case likely would’t have them]. In any event, there is a chicken and egg thing here, the very people claiming all kinds of things of the cause of this violence don’t want it studied. It is kind of funny when someone cited a CDC study about people with legal guns deterring crime, for 20 years the government is not allowed to fund or study that, so I don’t know where that came from.
Gun disarmament will solve the death by guns issue.
Of course, that may be a tough sell and very hard to implement.
awc is referring to the Kleck and Lott gun studies, favorites of gun advocates.
In 1992 Gary Kleck did a random phone survey asking respondents if they had used a gun to defend themselves against crime in the last year. If they said they had, he elicited details. From the results, he extrapolated national numbers of defensive gun use (DGU). This was a serious, carefully done study. However, it fails on both methodological and sanity-test grounds.
As a matter of methodology, using survey data to extrapolate rare events does not produce reliable answers. When the true rate of the event is rare, then the number of people who lie or confabulate can overwhelm the number of people who truly experienced the event.
Under any scenario, including the one Kleck claims is true, only a tiny percentage of respondents could truthfully say that they had used gun in the last year to prevent a crime. The vast majority of respondents would not have used a gun to prevent a crime, because they didn’t own a gun, or because they were lucky enough not to be in the vicinity of a crime attempt, or because they happened not to have their gun when in the presence of a crime attempt, or because they tried to use their gun but failed. In fact, as expected, the number of respondents who said they’d used their gun to thwart a crime was tiny.
We can reasonably expect that some small percentage of the respondents would lie or confabulate. They would falsely report that they had used a gun to thwart a crime. So the tiny number of positives, the people who reported a DGU, would consist of the true positives who actually had a DGU, plus the false positives who were delusional, misremembering or making up a heroic story. We can’t know how many of the positives were true positives. It could be that most of the positives were false positives.
But we can do a sanity check, and sadly Kleck’s numbers fail it. His extrapolations produce large number of criminals shot by stalwart gun users. But these wounded and dead criminals somehow don’t show up at the hospitals and morgues. Kleck’s gun users say they reported their DGUs to the police, but these police records cannot be found in the numbers Kleck claims. Kleck’s numbers say that gun owners have stopped a lot of burglary attempts. In fact, gun owners have stopped more than all burglary attempts; they have stopped more burglary attempts than there were burglary attempts. They’ve stopped every single burglary, and some burglaries that were never even attempted! Yeah. Sanity check fail.
Awc is going to say that Kleck’s study has been replicated. Irrelevant if true: repeating a flawed experiment is going to get flawed data again. If the methodology is flawed, repeating it doesn’t fix the flaws.
I’ll give you a Lott takedown later in the day.
Oh no, I thought there were multiple serious CDC studies.
(I just wish I could mark @musicprnt’s post a couple items upthread as “helpful” a hundred or so times.)
Agree.
This gun control ad makes the point brilliantly:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/the-best-gun-control-commercial-ever-produced#.huKvrJldx