Mass shootings and gun violence are happening way too often

[GrumpyGran]

Remember, we can thank the companies who boycott them with letters and by putting our business there. I don't believe there is actually a spike in NRA membership. Who is actually proving that? Them? Oh, right, I would believe them?

The screaming and ill-advised statements the Devil and his mistress made in the last few days prove that they are off-balance.

They can't vilify everyone. Push will come to shove here because they are starting to insult law enforcement. I don't think that will go well for them.

[CaricatureQualities]

Cameron Kasky :

"To those following our message, please remember the difference between the NRA as an organization and the members of the NRA. The vast majority of NRA members are decent people. Patriots. Our issue is not with them individually." #NeverAgain #MarchForOurLives

10:41 AM - 23 Feb 2018

A tweet from Parkland student Cameron Kasky (bold mine) in response to Trump's tweet reminding everyone that the NRA are patriots. I really feel like this junior in high school could do a better job as president right now.  These teenagers (esp Kasky and Emma Gonzalez) are the voices of reason I hear pressing on in the media right now and they are putting adult politicians to shame, constantly and eloquently reminding them and us that this issue should not be a debate or an attack on anyone but a discussion that everyone needs to be involved in right now. 

If the NRA is so great then why aren't they supporting these kids in getting more regulations on accessories that make semi automatic weapons fully automatic?  Fully automatic weapons are banned as far as I understand but you can still get accessories to make legal guns illegal and fully automatic. Instead of seeing this as an attack on the NRA...why doesn't the NRA see this as an opportunity to step up or a call to action to educate and bring on the regulations that people are actually calling for?

 

[47of74]

More companies have told the NRA to get lost.

Quote

Another round of companies on Friday announced plans to sever ties with the National Rifle Associates, following the shooting massacre last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida that left 17 staff and students dead.

One of the first companies that said it would cut ties with the lobbying group was First National Bank of Omaha, which announced Thursday that it would not renew a co-branded Visa credit card with the NRA.

A slew of other companies -- including Met Life Inc., Hertz Corp., and Best Western -- followed suit, and announced plans to terminate special discounts and benefits for NRA members.

And as petitions circulate online urging companies to #BoycottNRA, the pressure to disassociate from the NRA is growing. #BoycottNRA has already trended on Twitter.

Awaiting the cries of how persecuted the poor put upon NRA is from the reich wing and getting the popcorn all ready. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Parkland Survivor To Melania Trump: Stop Donald Trump Jr. From Cyberbullying Me"

Spoiler

A 14-year-old survivor of the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has pleaded with first lady Melania Trump to stop her stepson Donald Trump Jr. from bullying her and her family online.

“You say that your mission as first lady is to stop cyber bullying,” tweeted Lauren Hogg. “Don’t you think it would have been smart to have a convo with your stepson @DonaldJTrumpJr before he liked a post about a false conspiracy theory which ... put a target on my back?”

“I’ve been getting all these horrible messages from Nazis and white supremacists and I woke up this morning and remembered that Melania Trump’s mission was to fight cyberbullying,” Hogg told Huffpost on Friday. “That’s what’s happening to me: cyberbullying. I thought she could do something about Donald Trump Jr.”

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump’s eldest son “liked” two tweets promoting a conspiracy theory about Lauren’s 17-year-old brother, David Hogg, another shooting survivor. The cooked-up conspiracy claimed he had been coached to speak out against guns by his former FBI agent father to “cover” for the agency’s failure to prevent the shooting. The ruse was backed up by the “deep state media,” claimed one of the posts.

The fake theories circulating about the Hoggs have resulted in death threats against the family, the siblings’ mom, Rebecca Boldrick, told The Washington Post.

A “like” by Donald Trump Jr. can have a tremendous effect because he has 2.6 million followers.

Melania Trump vowed shortly before her husband was elected president that if she became first lady, one of her key missions would be to combat online bullying. “Our culture has gotten too mean and too rough, especially to children and teenagers,” she explained in a speech in Philadelphia.

Lauren Hogg told the first lady in her tweet that the conspiracy theories are “re-victimizing” her family. “I’m 14 I should never have had to deal with any of this ... I thought it couldn’t get worse [but] it has because of your family.”

The Hogg siblings are now dealing with an onslaught of social media hate after a gunman killed 17 people at their school.

“It’s unbelievable to me that these people are even saying this,” David Hogg told CNN. He called Donald Trump Jr.’s support for the conspiracies “disgusting.”

The 17-year-old has become a key target for conspiracy theories swirling around Parkland’s student activists. One conspiracy video that presented him as a paid “crisis actor” — not a student — hit No. 1 on YouTube’s trending page before the company took it down earlier this week.

Melania Trump got caught in another Twitter storm last week after she encouraged people to “test the power of kindness” on Random Acts of Kindness Day. “It’s an opportunity to teach our children the importance of taking care of one another,” she wrote. 

A huge number of responses urged her to encourage her husband to be kind — or resign.

The first lady had not yet responded to Lauren Hogg’s tweets as of Friday evening.

 

[candygirl200413]

And of course:

 

[GrumpyGran]

10 minutes ago, candygirl200413 said:

And of course:

 

Just when you think they can't go any lower. This is disgusting. The hospital should file a complaint against him for violating privacy restrictions. Good God, making money off a child who is the victim of a shooting. I guess Wayne has his hand way up Dumpy ass now.

[mamallama]

My guess is this family are trumpsters.  It would be too embarrassing if the people pictured complained.

[onekidanddone]

Because

 

[47of74]

4 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

Just when you think they can't go any lower. This is disgusting. The hospital should file a complaint against him for violating privacy restrictions. Good God, making money off a child who is the victim of a shooting. I guess Wayne has his hand way up Dumpy ass now.

Yeah I would call whoever thought this mail a sick fuck but that would be insulting to sick fucks.  Anyone uses a picture of me like that in a hospital better be ready to write out checks with lots and lots of zeros on it because it would be lawyer time. 

[CaricatureQualities]

Here is an article from The Atlantic titled "What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns"  by Heather Sher, a radiologist. She talkes about her findings looking at the CT scans from the Parkland victems.

Lots of good points here and really informative for anyone wanting to know what an AR15 style weapon with a high capacity magazine does compared to a 9mm semiautomatic handgun.   Spoiler, people have a chance of surviving typical gunshot wounds....they don't from AR15 wounds.*  Bullets from high velocity weapons like this don't have to hit an organ to be fatal...the sheer speed at which they rip through a body is fatal. Exit wounds are as big as an orange.  Really great information in this article, link below:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/

 

*Obviously there are survivors of attacks who sustain injuries from these weapons, but the chances of survival is much less and the damage inflicted much much more.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The NRA is using Trump’s playbook to attack the news media. It must be getting desperate."

Spoiler

One of the more outrageous assertions in a week overrun with them was Dana Loesch’s outright lie that journalists relish massacres of children.

“Many in legacy media love mass shootings,” the National Rifle Association’s fanatical spokeswoman charged. “Crying white mothers are ratings gold.”

Wayne LaPierre, the group’s chief executive, joined right in, smearing journalists and gun-control advocates alike.

“They don’t care about our schoolchildren,” he told a fired-up crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, meeting at National Harbor, outside Washington. “They want to make all of us less free.”

They’re wrong, of course. Ridiculously so.

This charge is about as valid as President Trump’s depiction of the media as the enemy of the people, which he repeated Friday.

On the contrary, every journalist I know is sickened, sometimes literally, by the need to cover one mass shooting after another.

“There’s nothing more horrific, crushing, draining & painful than covering mass shootings,” Matt Ferner, a national reporter for HuffPost, tweeted.

He added: “I vomited while covering the San Bernardino attack I was so overwhelmed. I often can’t sleep for days after going to shooting sites.”

And after spending more than three decades in newsrooms ranging in size from the Niagara Falls Gazette to the New York Times, I’ve never heard a hint of glee about such atrocities — not from reporters or editors, and not from circulation directors or those who track digital engagement.

The NRA is wrong, disgustingly wrong, about this.

They’re even more wrong about the news media as their adversary — a claim that’s certainly not new but now blasted out at higher volume.

Remember, although it bills itself as a defender of Constitutional rights, the NRA is a lobbying group whose fundamental role is to protect the business interests of gun manufacturers.

Should a lobbying group be given as much credence in the national conversation as the NRA has been awarded over the past week — presented, all too often, as a legitimate purveyor of policy ideas?

“I am so outraged that the NRA is being given a seat at the table, whether it’s by the media or by the president,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, an advocacy group seeking gun-control changes, according to The Washington Post.

“We’re acting as though lobbyists have a right to have a say, or to help us write our nation’s gun policies. They don’t.”

It’s an important point. And while it’s hard to deny that the NRA is a major part of this story, because so many lawmakers toe their line, journalists would do well to remind their readers and audiences what the organization actually is, and what motivates them: Money.

Now those interests have a formidable new adversary: the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, where 17 teenagers and school staff were killed this month with an assault weapon legally purchased by a deranged teenager.

Their voices are powerful and persuasive. By Friday, major companies were cutting financial ties with the gun lobby. The hashtag “VoteThemOut” was targeting lawmakers with NRA affiliations who oppose meaningful gun-law reform. And Douglas students were vowing to push on.

“Anyone got a list of the biggest private donors to the NRA?” one student activist, David Hogg, asked on Twitter.

No wonder the lobby is borrowing Trump’s moves, learned at the knee of Roy Cohn, his ruthless mentor and legal adviser: Always punch back harder than you got hit.

But the NRA is hamstrung. It can’t punch back with impunity at students who’ve lost their friends or are terrified to go to school.

So the news media will have to suffice.

At CPAC, attendees cheered the media attacks as if they were at a Trump campaign rally.

And the president jumped on board Friday morning, ripping what he called made-up sources, faulty public-opinion polls and dishonest reporting by the mainstream media.

He’s wrong.

Granted, the reality-based media makes mistakes. It’s a flawed institution, run by fallible human beings.

It’s also a necessary foundation of American democracy, one that has been performing quite well under tremendous pressure.

Think of where we’d be, 13 months into the Trump presidency, without news organizations such as The Washington Post, the New York Times, and yes, that favorite target, CNN, among many others.

These rabid attacks won’t end — not by the president, not by the right-wing media, and not by the NRA.

But keep this in mind: The louder and nastier they get, the more you can bet the attackers are feeling the heat.

 

[CaricatureQualities]

I've been trying to learn about guns and gun terminology and what people are talking about when they talk about conversion accessories and semi to fully automatic. Here is an advertisement  for such an accessory:

Spoiler

"New Trigger Makes AR-15s Nearly Full Auto

A NEW DROP-IN TRIGGER PROMISES TO TURN YOUR BASIC AR INTO A (NEARLY) FULL-AUTO RIFLE WITH NO NEED FOR THE ONEROUS NFA LICENSING PROCESS."

Spoiler

https://www.grandviewoutdoors.com/guns/new-trigger-makes-ar-15s-nearly-full-auto/

Wow. Hey, just buy this dooflicky and you too can have an almost full-auto rifle in your hands without having to register with that pesky National Firearms Act! 

 

[Destiny]

Ghostguns.com.

Click and lose all faith in humanity. :/

[GrumpyGran]

10 hours ago, Destiny said:

Ghostguns.com.

Click and lose all faith in humanity. :/

I'm going to pass because it's 10:30 on a Sunday morning and I am already depressed by the things I've read on the internet this morning. And scared. I'll try to put this link here:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article201938144.html

WTF. Where did these monsters come from? Where are they now? It's getting harder and harder to know what's real and who's real. I tell myself that most of the horrible comments I read are actually bot-generated but it doesn't stop those comments from encouraging some dangerous people. It's no wonder we can't have a sane conversation in this country anymore. Heaven help us.

[fraurosena]

Truth.

 

[GrumpyGran]

40 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Truth.

 

Yeah, their paranoia isn't a sign of "mental issues", is it? That aside, there is an argument in that thread that highlights one of the issues here. Why not just go to the range and use a semi-automatic assault rifle they keep there if you want to target-practice with one or shoot(WTF?) one? The answer was I want to own one. Think about that. It's not the joy of shooting it so much as having it for identity points. This moron claimed that his is locked up at home but how often do you think he takes it out and shows it to visitors, to impress or intimidate them?

[VixenToast]

48 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Truth.

 

I've started to remind people who bring up that argument that if the US Gov wanted to kill people, it totally could, andyour damn guns won't stop them. What are you gonna do, shoot at a tank til it stops? They could kill individual people with drones, not to mention other classified techs we know nothing about.

but yeah, by all means, all the guns in your walk-in gun safe will totally stop tyranny. Maybe if tyranny was riding in on horseback.....

[fraurosena]

46 minutes ago, VixenToast said:

Maybe if tyranny was riding in on horseback.....

.... without a head.

[CaricatureQualities]

"The NRA has been successful because it can mobilize single-issue voters who are passionate about this one item. The march offers the opportunity to show that people who differ on all sorts of issues (taxes, gay rights, the environment, abortion, legalizing pot, etc.) can agree to prioritize this issue (e.g., ‘pro-life’ means surviving to graduation)."

Quoted from a Washington Post opinion article offering suggestions as to how to make the march most effective , link below.  

Spoiler

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/02/23/five-suggestions-for-the-march-for-our-lives-organizers/?utm_term=.be7cb408d6f5

 

[onekidanddone]

The movement is spreading. These kids will not be silenced 

 

[fraurosena]

A mere three weeks ago no one would have believed this headline was possible. Let alone that it was possible because of a couple of outraged, eloquent teenagers.

NRA in total meltdown as corporate America cuts ties with its fatal agenda

Quote

Corporate America is abandoning the NRA, and the extremist organization is lashing out in truly repulsive fashion.

The organization has become increasingly toxic as it leads the opposition to gun reform after the latest school shooting.

As a result, in just 24 hours, six companies quickly ended association with the organization. And after the continuing grassroots campaign, at least 17 major corporations have cut ties.

MetLife insurance and Symantec both said they will no longer work with the organization. Delta and United Airlines both announced the end of their NRA discount programs. And car rental companies Hertz, Enterprise, and Budget ended their affiliations, as well. Notably, First National Bank of Omaha, which issued “the official credit card of the NRA,” announced it would not renew its contract.

The NRA is not happy that the free market is working against them. In a vituperative statement, the NRA whined that companies abandoning it are engaged in a “shameful display of political and civic cowardice. In time, these brands will be replaced by others who recognize that patriotism and determined commitment to Constitutional freedoms are characteristics of a marketplace they very much want to serve,” the statement read.

But the harsh reality of the real world stood in direct contrast to the positive reception CEO Wayne LaPierre received at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

In an unhinged diatribe, LaPierre reacted to the groundswell of support for gun reform as evidence of a campaign to enact a “socialist agenda.” And he crudely described teenage survivors of the massacre who are speaking out for their dead classmates as “opportunists” who want to “exploit tragedy for political gain.”

NRA national spokesperson Dana Loesch also complained about the harsh reception the organization has received. And she bizarrely yet typically insisted that the media “loves mass shootings.”

“The louder and nastier they get, the more you can bet the attackers are feeling the heat,” Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan noted about LaPierre and Loesch.

Americans are standing their ground against the NRA’s decision to enable mass murderers. They are letting corporate America know the NRA is toxic. And corporations don’t want to be associated with the NRA’s bile.

That’s why the group is lashing out angrily at everyone. But petulant complaints and threats will not win out over the safety and well-being of children.

Speaking of those teenagers...

They will truly make America a better place...

... for all Americans, not just the privileged white ones.

[fraurosena]

Ted Lieu is also in on the action.

I absolutely love that last sentence: "Outrage without action is no better than thoughts and prayers."

[GreyhoundFan]

@fraurosena -- I've complained to Amazon, but they are resistant to such requests. They tuned out all the requests to stop advertising on breitbart.

[Alisamer]

21 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Truth.

 

They are clinging to a muskets and horses era amendment in a tanks and F35 time, while voting for the party most likely to send in the military to take control of resistance, also while denigrating the people who ARE resisting government attempts to revoke protections of basic human rights for all people. 

Because... IDK. Do they think the congress that can't agree on anything at all is going to suddenly turn and send in paratroopers to raid their homes and take their gun stash? Do they think that Democrats will take control of the government again and THEN send battalions around the country to confiscate everyone's guns? Upon which they will somehow shoot down the helicopters and blow up the tanks (manned by their children, most likely, as the demographic owning guns are also the demographic with most military involvement I believe). Do they think that their AR-15s are necessary to take down government bombers, or that if enough of them get together they can manage to shoot down a North Korean nuclear missile?

I suspect some of the people clinging hard to their semi-automatic weapons are actually deep-down hoping to someday have a chance to use them "defending their home" or "standing their ground" and show what a badass they are. 

I wish they'd all just take up airsoft or paintball - they could live out their fantasies of being Rambo without putting other people at risk.

[fraurosena]

As with a lot (maybe even most) RWNJ's, she's oblivious to the fact that the internet is forever and intelligent people know how to do a simple search.