Tag Archives: mass shootings

Roy Blunt and the NRA: Married on the way to the bank

15 Thursday Feb 2018

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According to The New York Times Roy Blunt is one of the top ten “career”recipients of NRA largess in the congress. His take: $4,551,146. That’s right. Our boy got himself over four million of those NRA dollars. And I don’t think anyone would disagree that he’s done himself proud when it comes to earning his fee.

All of which prompts one to ask what he has to say about the latest mass shooting event at a school, a spree that took 17 lives and wounded at least 12 other children. The Sedalia Democrat offers the following quote:

In an interview, Blunt said that “I don’t think we have enough information yet to know that a change in any law would have impacted what happened in Florida.” But, referring to reports that the FBI had been warned by threats that the killer had made on social media, Blunt added: “Whether it is bizarre anti-social behavior or terrorist activity, when people see something they should say something.”You have got a guy parading around in a gas mask with weapons making threats and putting that on social media; that needs to be reported,” Blunt, R-Mo., said. “And the people that is [sic] reported to need to respond to that report.”

Blunt echoed the president in his imputation that the correct way to protect against mass school shootings would be for the “normal” folks to report aberrant behavior on the part of troubled individuals. Happened here, didn’t work, not going to work, just stigmatizes folks with emotional problems.

In the past Blunt has resorted overtly to the tack taken by Donald Trump today which is that it is mental illness that kills people, not guns – in spite of the fact that those suffering mental illness have been shown to more often suffer violence than they are to commit violent acts,  that when they do act out violently, they themselves have frequently been previously victimized, and they are more likely to do so within institutional settings rather than in public.

All of this is just a way to frame the simple-minded NRA bumper sticker that says in one variant or another that “people kill people, not guns.” If Kim Jong-un, who may or may not be mentally unstable, doesn’t realize that he’s dealing with a possible mental case in the White House, push comes to shove, and hundreds of folks, possibly in the U.S. as well as North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia are killed, will Republicans excuse the holocaust with a similar slogan: Crazy people kill people, not bombs? Funny that. Or not.

Of course, the real thrust of Blunt’s response was that he just doesn’t have enough facts to say anything substantive. While I know he’s unlikely to read this screed, I’d sill like to supply him with a few hard and fast facts:

  1. A disturbed young man, who, incidentally, had been reported and investigated by the authorities, was able to legally buy a military-grade weapon.
  2. President Trump, in his haste to destroy any remnants of Obama-style common-sense regulation, stopped a rule that would have made it more difficult for the mentally-ill to buy firearms.
  3. Republicans like Blunt have consistently refused to vote for legislation that regulated civilian acquisition of military-grade weapons in spite of the fact that they seem to be the weapon of choice for mass shooters.
  4. A conservative analysis by The Washington Post tells us that “more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.”
  5. In the first 45 days of this year there have been six school shootings that have injured students.
  6. States are skint. They aren’t willing or able to pay to supply the school security officers that schools are requesting. Florida schools, scene of the most recent shooting, are among those that have experienced growing enrollments but have received less money to pay for necessities like increased security for which they have requested funding.
  7. A spate of studies report that states – and developed countries – with more guns have more homicide deaths and suicides. States and countries with better regulated gun ownership have fewer.

There are lots more facts like these. And I’m willing to bet that Blunt knows a few of them already. He just doesn’t care.

Nor, as Blunt’s GOP pals like to claim, do these facts suggest that gun ownership should be illegal; nobody’s 2nd amendment rights should be violated. But we have to be clear that the Supreme Court ruling, District of Columbia v. Heller, authored by conservative, gun-loving Judge Antonin Scalia, specifies that that the right to own firearms is subject to regulation, specifically in the case of “prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons’.”

So what’s keeping the pot boiling for a dangerously out of control NRA, an organization that wants to persuade us that even talking dirty about guns is not only a violation of a poorly understood 2nd amendment, but an invitation to “jack-booted government thugs” to steal our liberties? Look no further than Senator Roy Blunt and an NRA-whipped GOP.

But hey! Four million dollars is one heckava payout. And Blunt wasn’t even number one on the list.

The sufferings of Ann Wagner

17 Saturday Jun 2017

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There’s nothing like making hay while the sun shines. And for some Republicans, Missouri’s Ann Wagner (R-2) for instance, an angry shooter with frustrated liberal inclinations who went after Republicans a couple of days ago seems to have brought out the haymaking sunshine. She’s been taking heat for her adamant refusal to meet with constituents in a public forum. Now she’ll have an excuse – it’s just too risky.

Reading a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article where Wagner gives her account of the suffering she and the “twenty-nothing-year-olds” (??) on her staff have had to endure from maddened progressives made me wonder what it is with Republicans and the cult of victimhood. As far as I’m concerned the only victims in this instance are the folks mowed down on the playing field last week – and the issues behind the shooting go far beyond a progressive sympathizer’s attack on retrograde GOP politicians.

Wagner reports that she has received death threats. But, as one of her colleagues, Joe Barton (R-TX), observed, it goes with the territory: ” I am an adult” he remarked “and I made a conscious decision to run for Congress,” adding, somewhat ironically under the circumstances, that “nobody puts a gun to our head and says we have to run.”

Of course, Wagner makes it clear that she’s not  worried for herself. She’s just too selfless and caring. But she does unctuouslly emote about the travails of her staff of near children – those twenty-nothing-year-olds – and her neighbors, none of  whom I believe have reported any death threats, although I am very sure that her staff members are having to field some pretty angry calls. But again, it goes with the territory.

Wagner whines that protestors are “vandalizing my home, showing up with masks and gravestones, and laying down on my driveway and drawing chalk outlines of dead bodies. Picketing my church at 8 and 10 o’clock Mass.” A comment on the Post-Dispatch Website offered a different perspective, however:

…I think her descriptions of these events are largely overblown. The small group of people at her church held signs with biblical quotes about caring for the sick and poor. The chalk drawings on her street were not death threats, they were symbols of people who will die under the health care plan for which she cheered on national television. Police were present in her neighborhood and will tell you the protesters obeyed all of their directions. If there was threatening behavior I’m sure they would have known or stepped in. The town hall meeting she called “radical” was a group of well-behaved old folks at a community center talking about why they didn’t support that health care plan or her other decisions. …

While I’m not sure I’m totally happy to be characterized as part of a group of “old folks,” I have to accept the description as apt, as least in regard to me, and the “well-behaved” part is an equally apt description of the group as a whole. The account above fits better with what I know about the growing opposition to Rep. Wagner than her own rather obviously self-serving efforts to “go public” about the persecution she wants us to think she endures. It’s more than likely that the protestors pose less threat to Wagner’s well-being than she poses to their freedom of speech – a value Republicans seemingly espouse only when it comes in the form of a big check.

I’m sure that outlines of dead bodies in one’s driveway are distressing – but not as distressing as the prospect of real death for those of us who will be left with no access to healthcare if Wagner  has her way. The images are harsh, but the truth behind them is equally harsh and should fall heavily on Wagner’s shoulders. She needs to learn that very few individuals will kiss her feet for doing yeoman’s duty with the GOP wrecking crew.

Wagner’s histrionics aside, it is indeed a sad fact that politicians, like entertainment figures, make easy targets for the detritus of emotionally unmoored individuals inhabiting our increasingly gun-ridden and violent society. Ask Gabby Giffords. No sane person condones violence, but given the failure of Republicans such as Wagner to address the thriving gun-culture and their encouragement of the angry paranoia that feeds it, she ought to be one of the last to complain.

For my money Tom Sullivan of Hullabaloo got it right when he wrote today that;

… People like James Hodgkinson don’t buy guns to attack politicians. They attack politicians with guns because they feel helpless, adrift in the world described above. Guns make them feel powerful again. Al Qaida? ISIS? Similar reasons, one suspects. […] Violence towards family members, politicians, and society at large is an outgrowth of an economic system that relentlessly transfers not only wealth upward, but democratic and personal power. …

In the next few days, until the event is safely forgotten, we’ll hear lots happy talk about “coming together,” a “return to civility,” and, of course, there will be the folks like Wagner, looking to escape responsibility for what they’ve done by falsely assuming the aura of victim. What we won’t hear is an intelligent discussion about the root causes of the anomie that animates the shooters.

What’s that about reaping what you sow?

13 Monday Jun 2016

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Saturday night a man killed 50 people and injured 53 more in a shooting spree in a gay club in Orlando Florida. The shooter claimed allegiance to ISIS, but also, according to his father, he was “angered a couple months ago when he saw two men kissing in Miami” and “that it may be related to the shooting.” It was, as President Obama remarked, “an act of terror and an act of hate.”

It didn’t take Republicans long to hit the social media trail with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) quickly tweeting that, as it says in the bible, man “reaps what he sows.” A staff member quickly tried to back off the callous triumphalism, claiming that Patrick wasn’t referring to the shooting of LGBT people in Orlando, and had posted the message before he knew about the massacre.

But why else did Patrick tweet this message bright and early on that particular Sunday morning? Since his spokesperson asserts that he didn’t know abut the shooting, it couldn’t have referred to the havoc we sow when we make military assault weapons easily available to all and sundry, including suspected terrorists – a privilege specifically guaranteed to those on terrorism watch lists at the insistence of Republican in congress.

Perhaps he was tweeting about the the selection of the crass and racist Donald Trump as the Republican Party presidential nominee. GOP pols who have spent the last 30-40 years broadcasting racist dog-whistles cannot be surprised at the potentially destructiveTrumpian harvest they are now reaping. In a piece aptly titled, The party of Lincoln is dying, conservative WaPo columnist Michael Gerson noted that, “since Trump now owns them [i.e., Republicans], they now own his prejudice […] .

And, make no mistake, the list of Republicans stumbling and staggering into the Trump camp grows daily. All four Missouri GOP gubernatorial candidates are all in for Trump – with more or less enthusiasm. Republican Senator Roy Blunt may have declared his intention to do no more than support the party nominee in the early days of the GOP Trump surge, but he’s finally shuffled into position for Trump. It doesn’t matter if any of them are racists in private when, by supporting Trump, they freely choose to present a racist face in public.

As for Trump, his response to the Orlando shooting tells us all we need to know about today’s GOP. Upon learning about the shooting, the narcissistic Islamophobe tweeted:

Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!

Using a mass murder as an occasion to gloat! But hey, it’s all about Trump, isn’t it? He followed up this morning with another tweet calling once again for a ban on admitting Muslims to the U.S. (not a word about homophobes or limiting access to assault weapons):

What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the ban. Must be tough

Just goes to show, lie down with dogs and get up with fleas – or, how about putting it like this, GOP – you’ll soon reap the bitter harvest you’ve sown.

Fun and games with the NRA

27 Friday Feb 2015

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Big event in Missouri, one of the NRA’s prime fiefdoms:

TYRONE, Mo. – A door-to-door killing spree that left eight people dead in a rural Missouri community may have been triggered by the alleged gunman finding his mother dead in her home, the county coroner said Friday. The woman apparently died of natural causes.

The 36-year-old suspect was later found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in his pickup in an adjoining county.

Texas County sheriff’s deputies found bodies in five separate residences in the Tyrone area of south-central Missouri after responding to a 911 call around 10:15 p.m. Thursday regarding a disturbance.

But, of course, guns don’t kill people, other people do. Most often other people with guns, but still…

What the hell, I hear you saying, it’s just more of the same ol’, same ol’. Like the nine month old accidentally killed by his five year old brother last month. Or the business as usual shootings in St. Louis and Kansas City. We’re used to it now. We read about it every day, shrug and go about our business. Nothing we can do about crime and human nature. Especially armed human nature.

But there is a reason that St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson is joining forces with the folks who are taking the Guns “R” Us constitutional amendment that voters approved last August to the state’s Supreme Court – and it’s not just because the ballot language was misleading. The irony is, I’m willing to bet, that lots of the folks who’ve been cavorting in that NRA bed are also the folks who have been the loudest about defending the police from the demands of anti-brutality protesters. Nothing like doing what you can to make working police less safe while posing four-square behind your friendly local policeman.  

Another helping of ugly and crazy served up by the self-righteous right wing

06 Monday Aug 2012

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In Milwaukee a veteran with allegedly white supremacist ties went on a shooting spree in a Sikh temple killing seven people. The report that the shooter had a 9/11 tattoo suggests an anti-Muslim motivation. Of course, we don’t know for sure, and Sikhs aren’t Muslims – although I suspect that bigots who open fire on unarmed people may not be too aware of such distinctions, if they even care.

On the evening of the same day, a Joplin, Missouri Mosque, previously attacked by arsonists, was burned to the ground. There’s no statement about whether or not the latest fire was also arson, but it’s hard not to want to jump to that conclusion.

The first act was been termed “domestic-terrorism.” If the Mosque-fire proves to be the act of arsonist, it is probable that the label will fit it as well.

Today I read in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that a member of the Missouri National Guard has admitted conspiring with white supremacists who are training for “racial” war.  Earlier this year, another guardsman was dismissed for attempting to recruit new Neo-nazi group members from within the guard.

Recruiting extremists from among the members of the military? Violent acts from home-grown “domestic” terrorists? Am I the only one who remembers the 2009 Homeland Security Report that warned:

Rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat.”

I’m sure that some of you also remember the conservative squawking that greeted this report, an example of which can be found in this diatribe from blogger Michelle Malkin. Evidently, the report’s definition of what constitutes a right-wing extremist hit a little too close to home for some of the sensitive souls on the right.

We also had a Missouri version of the same ruckus. A report issued by the Missouri Highway Patrol, Right-Wing  Group Characteristics and Ideology, identified right wing groups that should be monitored for potential violent activities. The report’s rather common-sense contents led to such an explosion of conservative wrath that controversy adverse Missouri officials withdrew it.

Remember the old song, “Who’s Crying Now”? Sadly I’m sure that no one on the right has the honesty – or, more likely, even the intellectual wherewithal – to understand why I bring it up. Things will have to get a lot worse before we get any practical reactions from reality-adverse wingers.  

What we actually do get from our our friends on the right is (mostly Republican) opportunistic and/or just plain stupid politicians trying to fan the flames of xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and, particularly, anti-Muslim sentiment – and other marginally sane GOPers unwilling to condemn the racist rhetoric and run the risk of angering the “base.” For example, while a few principled GOPers were willing to speak out about Michele Bachmann’s most recent efforts to pander to the anti-Muslim brigade, most influential party members either refused, like Mitt Romney, to condemn her antics, or, like House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor (R-VA), defended them.

We’ve also  got the National Rifle Association scaring the not-so-bright crazies even sillier than they normally are so that they stockpile up guns on top of guns – including rapid-fire assault weapons meant for battlefields. We’ve actually got public figures who will claim that it’s the obligation of citizens in our supposedly civilized country to arm and defend themselves from the other citizens who’re packing heat. The results are predictable. And I’m not just talking about the spectacular events like Aurora or yesterday’s Milwaukee mass shooting. Just today, I read in the Post-Dispatch’s “Law and Order” segment about another incident where a man was shot during a traffic dispute. The paper regarded this as such a routine matter that it merited only a brief 2-3 sentences.

But God forbid we talk about the boundaries between extremist paranoia and legitimate political beliefs or do anything to keep those suffering from the former from amassing the means to act on their insane and ugly fears.