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Gun Violence Part 2: Thoughts and Prayers STILL Don't Work


Destiny

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An asshole brought guns to confront people at a child's birthday party. He shot three people and killed their dog, who tried to save the family. "A family rescued a dog from certain death. Years later, he died saving their lives in a shooting."

Spoiler

They say the first life Zero saved was his own.

He was a month old and alone on the side of a Texas highway. The abandoned Great Pyrenees puppy limped on a broken ankle. His shaggy, distinctive pelt was lost to mange. That’s how Laura Martinez and her family found their dog, nearly three years ago.

The vet told them Zero didn’t have a chance and advised the family to put him down immediately. But they couldn’t do it. Martinez’s children were already attached — plus, they all thought they spotted something special in the young animal. Today, Martinez says that decision is the reason she’s alive.

“We were meant to find him,” she said in an interview. “And what he did was what he was meant to do. That’s the only thought making it any better.”

Of course, she didn’t know any of that when they brought Zero to his new home, well before a gunman opened fire at a child’s birthday party and forever changed their family. All they knew back then was that their new pet needed their help.

The kids named him Zero, after Jack Skellington’s spooky ghost dog in Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” So sick in his young age, he was spectral — yet fiercely loyal. But later, after Zero clawed his way back to health, more at peace with the world of the living than that of the dead, the family began calling him something else: “Zero the hero.”

It’s Martinez who likes to say that Zero saved his own life. But really, it was her — and her large family — that rescued him when he needed it most. A few years later, Zero did the same for them.

On March 10, Martinez’s daughter was celebrating her 12th birthday. Their house was full of youngsters, more than a dozen, ages 5 to 15, and the mood was jovial. Out front, Martinez was grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, Zero lounging at her feet, and her stepdaughter and two sons mingled beside her. Yet, when a longtime family friend pulled up to her driveway, she expected trouble.

Martinez had confronted the young man, 17-year-old Javian Castaneda, the day before, telling him she suspected that he had broken into her house and stolen cash and some jewelry. Police said Castaneda and the family started arguing in the driveway. Martinez asked him to leave, but he lunged at her and hit her in the face, she said. One of her sons started to fight back, but Castaneda pulled out a gun.

“None of us knew he had a gun,” Martinez said, recounting the years Castaneda played on her sons’ football teams and slept over at her house.

By Martinez’s count, Castaneda fired at least nine times. His first shot hit the garage door. At the crack, Zero sprung at Castaneda. Martinez, momentarily stunned, watched her dog jump.

“How did you know to do that?” she remembered thinking at the time.

Then, Martinez said, Castaneda shot Zero in the chest. He kept firing, hitting one of Martinez’s sons in the foot. Zero got back up and leaped at Castaneda again, biting at his arm.

“Zero just did it instinctively,” Martinez said. “I guess he just knew that when that thing hit him, it hurt.”

Castaneda shot Zero in the ear, she said, then hit her stepdaughter twice in the back. Zero pounced a final time before taking another bullet in the stomach. Martinez ran toward her dog and Castaneda shot her in the leg and fled.

“I can honestly tell you there’s no way we would be here without Zero,” Martinez said. “The reason why all our wounds are below the waist is because every time Zero jumped up … it kept him from being able to aim.”

Days later, the Harris County Sheriff’s Department arrested Castaneda and charged him with three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He is in jail with a $90,000 bond. Martinez, her stepdaughter, and her son are all home recovering from their wounds.

After the shooting, another of Martinez’s sons and a neighbor took Zero, who then appeared paralyzed, to the vet. Martinez said she wanted to accompany them but had to be rushed to the hospital for treatment of her own injuries.

This time, the family had no choice. They put him down that day.

Now, two weeks later, Martinez is tallying the costs. Hospital bills, future surgeries, time she’ll miss at work driving for Lyft. She’s raising money to try to cover the damage. And her family is reeling from Hurricane Harvey, which flooded their home a year and a half ago. The kitchen cabinets still need replacing.

But the biggest loss, she said, will always be Zero — who won’t be lying under her feet, or snuggling next to her in bed, or waiting for her to get out of the shower.

Instead, he’s memorialized in their front yard, with signs that remind the family and the world of a dog who has earned his nickname more than once: “Zero our hero.”

 

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I can't even imagine what it must be like to be a kid going to school in America nowadays.

 

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Sweet Cloven-Hoofed Rufus Reindeer, I know this could not have transpired without your sweet intervention: Oliver North and Wayne LaPierre, two of the scummiest, sleaziest humaoids on planet earth, are flinging poo, sniping, and pissing in each other's lemonade and there could be cannibalism and the death of the NRA before it's all over.  For now it looks like Ollie, who was trying to unseat Wayne LaPierre, got a big boot square in his ass.  Lettuce prey: 

and this 

Anyway, this insane deliciousness is erupting in full view at the NRA convention: 

Infighting erupts at NRA convention, threatening leadership

It would be great if the entire thing spontaneously combusted. It would make our country a better place. 

When going through items kept by an elderly relative after he passed, I found my grandfather's NRA membership card from way back in the 1930s.  The NRA was originally founded as a club to promote gun safety and marksmanship skills, and those were his interests. 

 The NRA is apparently doing some soul searching about it roots and original mission vs. it's current hyper political stance.  

They should be doing a group soul search about laundering Russian rubles from frenemy Putin on behalf of Donald Trump et al..

Edited by Howl
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Re: LaPierre vs Ollie North feud at NRA convention.  Again, twitter, this is why I love you so hard: 

LaPierre is still in place for now; nobody is quite sure what the future holds. 

Edited by Howl
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/30/university-north-carolina-charlotte-shooting-dead-injured/3633635002/

shooting this evening at UNC Charlotte campus - 2 dead and four injured. They have a suspect in custody and it sounds like it was stopped quickly, partly because it was the last day of classes and a free concert was to be held later so there was extra security and police presence. The campus was on lockdown for several hours and the light rail stopped running to the on campus station from uptown.

im sure the students, parents, university staff, etc will appreciate all the thoughts and prayers, but something really needs to be done. 

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Letitia James, New York state Attorney General, was on Rachel Maddow last night.  The NRA is in deep legal shit and it's not completely apparent that it will ultimately survive as an organization.  Go AG James! 

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I love Ted Lieu's response to the revelation about Wayne:

 

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Confronting, isn't it? This is what American school children all must learn. 

 

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Of course Mulvaney started with the "let's not get ahead of ourselves" crap following the mass shooting in Virginia Beach: "Mulvaney: 'Let's not get too deep into politics too soon' after shooting"

Spoiler

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney cautioned against focusing too heavily on politics "too soon" after a gunman on Friday killed 12 people at a city government building in Virginia Beach, Va.

"We have too many of these shootings, and every time the first thing we talk about is politics," Mulvaney said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"The mourning period hasn't even stopped yet, let alone the healing process," he added. "So, let's not get too deep into politics too soon. Let's think about the families."

Police Chief James Cervera said on ABC on Sunday the shooter, who was killed during a firefight with police, was a municipal employee who worked in the building and had purchased the firearms legally.

Mulvaney said there are things the federal government can do to address gun violence and pointed to moves the Trump administration has already made, including banning bump stocks and offering legislation on background checks.

"But we're never going to protect everybody against everybody who is deranged and insane," he said. "You're never going to make everything perfectly safe, but we are doing a lot better on enforcement."

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said Sunday the investigation into Friday's shooting is proceeding with the help of the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

"We want to do the best we can to support communities to get out in front of these kind of issues, to identify anything we can see to prevent this kind of violence up front," he said on CNN.

When asked by CNN host Jake Tapper whether the Department of Homeland Security should look at gun violence differently than it does now, McAleenan said DHS is "focused on the violence, regardless of the ideology or motivation and regardless of the means to carry it out."

I truly despise him.

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I hadn't even heard of that shooting. The numbers of dead required for it to hit the media here is increasing, which is incredibly worrying.

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Well, it looks like the NRA is severing ties with that nasty piece of work, Dana Loesch AND they're discontinuing the stupid NRA-TV:

 

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2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Well, it looks like the NRA is severing ties with that nasty piece of work, Dana Loesch AND they're discontinuing the stupid NRA-TV:

 

Yay! This is another symptom of the slow but sure downfall of the NRA.

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You couldn't make this up:

 

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I know some people who were working in a booth at the Garlic Festival and luckily escaped unharmed. Such a sad world we live in.

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"‘How the hell is this not inciting violence?’ Gun store erects billboard with minority lawmakers’ faces"

Spoiler

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The sign warns of the “4 Horsemen” — typically a reference to biblical imagery symbolizing the end of the earth: conquest, war, famine and death.

But the North Carolina billboard that went up over the weekend does not depict horsemen. It shows photos of the freshman congresswomen also known as “the Squad”: Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The billboard calls the progressive Democratic members of Congress “idiots” and is signed by “the Deplorables.”

Cherokee Guns, a Murphy, N.C., gun shop about a mile away from the sign, took responsibility for the billboard. An image shared to the shop’s Facebook page Sunday went viral this week and drew a sharp rebuke from the women pictured, as well as anti-gun-violence advocates. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence on Monday called the billboard “violent rhetoric.”

“Threats against members of Congress, particularly minority members are [trending upward] and it is driven by the president’s racial rhetoric,” the group wrote. “This is dangerous!!!”

For the congresswomen, the menacing billboard is just another high-profile threat — one of many they say they have faced since they took office in 2018.

“How the hell is this not inciting violence?” Tlaib asked in a Wednesday evening tweet.

In her own tweet, Pressley called out Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), whose district, she noted, houses the shop. She implored Meadows to “do the right thing.”

In April, a New York man was arrested and charged with threatening to kill Omar in a phone call to her Washington office. “Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood?” authorities say the man asked the staffer who answered the phone. “Why are you working for her, she’s a [expletive] terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her [expletive] skull.”

Days later, President Trump tweeted a video juxtaposing Omar with footage of the twin towers falling on 9/11, a post that triggered a flood of threatening messages so severe that Democratic leaders increased the congresswoman’s security, and an independent cybersecurity executive took it upon himself to flag them for the social network’s monitors.

Last week, two Louisiana police officers were fired for a Facebook post that suggested Ocasio-Cortez should be shot. At the time, the congresswoman blamed Trump’s rhetoric for the deluge of threats she and her colleagues had received. “This is Trump’s goal when he uses targeted language & threatens elected officials who don’t agree w/ his political agenda,” she wrote on Twitter. “It’s authoritarian behavior. The President is sowing violence. He’s creating an environment where people can get hurt & he claims plausible deniability.”

As people flocked to Cherokee Guns’ Facebook page Monday, the store put out a statement indicating it had received “OVERWHELMING demand” for apparel with the billboard’s image.

“Alright my fellow Infidels for Trump . . . due to OVERWHELMING demand . . . you may come by the shop (next week) and get your very own FOUR HORSEMEN COMETH STICKER . . . simple . . . eat a piece of bacon . . . tell us you’re voting for Trump in 2020 . . . then get your limited edition bumper sticker! (While supplies last!) Snowflakes and Liberals are not eligible . . . sorry...”

Cherokee Guns has a rich history of controversial billboards, especially ones that are overtly Islamophobic. In 2017, the store posted a picture of a different sign with “a great message.” “INFIDEL ARMAMENT” it read in block letters above Arabic script and a rifle. Two years before that, the Asheville Citizen-Times wrote, the shop put up a billboard that said, “Give me your tired, your poor . . . Keep your Syrian refugees.”

This week, the Citizen-Times reported that it spoke to the store’s owner, Doc Wacholz, who downplayed his billboard’s implications and sought to justify its message.

“They’re socialists, from my point of view,” he told the local paper, before adding, “I also feel a couple of them, being Muslim, have ties to actual terrorists groups."

”I’m not inciting any violence or being racist,” he added. “It’s a statement. It’s an opinion.”

 

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