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


Destiny

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1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

The point I was trying to make, and which you also make in your post, is that due to his mental illness, the shooter should never have been able to have access to guns in the first place. Because he was mentally ill, and because he had access to guns, he had the means to become the shooter of innocent victims. But, precisely because of his mental illness I cannot in all conscience put the stamp of 'the bad guy' on him. To my mind, he too is a victim here. Not an entirely innocent one, but a victim nonetheless. His death, and those of his innocent victims, were preventable. None of them had to die. Nor should anybody have had to become the killer of a mentally ill person.

The real bad guys here, in my opinion, are those idiots who made it lawful for the shooter to have access to guns (and who, in all probability, also made it impossible for him to get the psychological help that he needed). They, together with the NRA who paid the idiots to do it, are the real perpetrators here. In a meta-sense, they are the ones that have the blood of those innocent victims on their hands. And the blood of the shooter too. And even (but I'm speculating here) the ptsd of the 'good guy's' who stopped the shooter, and all those that were witness to it.

@fraurosena, I belong to a small group of survivors.  Something I occasionally reflect upon is the fact, Timothy McVeigh was captured due to a weapons violation, if we had our current Oklahoma gun laws, McVeigh would have been cited for a routine violation (missing tag), and went along his way.  One would think that my state, of all states, would see the value of stringent gun laws. That former law captured the USA's #1 domestic terrorist.

@fraurosena, you summed up the dilemma perfectly in your post, thank you. 

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Fucking lowlife branch trumpvidians at it again

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The Maryland newspaper where five people were killed by a gunman last week said it received death threats and emails celebrating the shooting following the attack. The Capital Gazette said in a Sunday editorial that it would not forget being called "an enemy of the people."

The Capital Gazette said people also called for the paper to fire a reporter who cursed on national television after seeing her friends shot.

The paper also thanked the community for its support following the shooting and said more than 800 people subscribed to its digital edition.

 

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"‘Tormented and traumatized’: Rage toward women fuels mass shooters"

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The alleged mass shooter’s rage began — as it has so often before — with a woman.

Years before Jarrod Ramos sued the Capital Gazette for defamation, before he targeted a specific columnist at the Capital with hateful emails and online threats, before he was charged with killing five people in the small Annapolis newspaper’s office last week, one person was living that nightmare every day.

She spoke for the first time Monday, giving an interview to the “Today” show about the harassment she endured.

“I was afraid he could show up at any point, any place . . . and kill me,” she said. “I have been tormented and traumatized and terrorized for so long that it has, I think, changed the fiber of my being.”

She didn’t want her full name used; NBC identified her only as Lori and obscured her features.

The threats she detailed in court years ago forced her to move out of her hometown, to leave everyone behind, for her own safety.

If you dig deep enough, this is the root of a number of mass shootings. Whether it’s domestic violence or a failed marriage or a guy who got turned down in high school, a twisted, misogynistic streak helps fuel the violence.

The examples abound:

James Huberty, who killed 21 people in a San Ysidro, Calif., McDonald’s in 1984, had attacked his wife and shot his family’s German shepherd in the head.

Virginia Tech killer Seung Hui Cho was involved in at least three stalking incidents targeting women before he murdered 32 people and injured 17 in 2007.

Before allegedly killing three people and wounding nine in 2015 at a Colorado clinic that provides abortions, Robert Dear was accused of physical abuse by at least two of his three ex-wives.

Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016, physically abused his wife for years, beating her for things like not finishing the laundry.

Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old arrested in the Parkland, Fla., shooting, was reportedly despondent after a breakup in a turbulent relationship, and one school official told the New York Times that he was obsessed with another girl “to the point of stalking her.”

And who can forget Elliot Rodger, who left a manifesto explaining in sickening detail why his 2014 rampage that left six people dead in Isla Vista, Calif., was punishment for all the women who rejected him.

Within five hours of those first shots that shattered the newsroom’s glass doors, we were reading the details of the column and lawsuit that launched Ramos’s vendetta with the Capital.

Ramos, now 38, was a federal employee when he pursued an old classmate online. He thanked her for being the only one who was kind to him in the cruel ecosystem of high school. She didn’t remember him, but was nice and responded.

Quickly, the online conversation became cruel and threatening when she didn’t respond the way he wanted her to.

“But when it seemed to me that it was turning into something that gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, that he seems to think there’s some sort of relationship here that does not exist . . . I tried to slowly back away from it, and he just started getting angry and vulgar to the point I had to tell him to stop,” the woman told the judge, according to the column that ran about the case in a 2011 edition of the Capital.

“And he was not OK with that. He would send me things and basically tell me, ‘You’re going to need restraining order now.’ ‘You can’t make me stop. I know all these things about you.’ ‘I’m going to tell everyone about your life.’ ”

Ramos turned his white-hot anger on the author of that column, Eric Thomas Hartley, and the newspaper. Ramos lost the defamation suit he filed.

There’s the pattern: abuse, denial, embarrassment, rage.

It’s exactly what happened in Santa Fe, Tex., just six weeks ago, said Sadie Rodriguez, whose daughter was one of the 10 people killed in another school massacre. I know you’re losing track of them. This is the one that happened in May.

Her daughter, Shana Fisher, had been the third wheel. Remember those arrangements? When a BFF gets a BAE, and the two become three, and it’s awkward sometimes?

According to the mom, who told me through fresh, Sunday-morning tears, Dimitrios Pagourtzis made a move on his girlfriend’s BFF, her daughter.

“Four months prior to the shooting, he had forced himself on Shana, he tried to kiss her,” she said. “She is extremely shy, when you talk to her, she’d look at the floor and smile. Her ears would turn red, she was so shy.” Shana rejected Dimitrios, grossed out that her best friend’s boyfriend tried that.

That rejection, Rodriguez said, turned into four months of harassment. Sometimes it was so bad that she’d call her mom just before art class — the class she shared with the boy — pretending to be sick so she could get picked up and not face him.

Finally, she stood up for herself in class one day and loudly told him to leave her alone. It was humiliating for him, she said. The shooting followed. It was in the art room.

“My daughter is the only one that got shot twice. Once in the side, then point-blank in the head. That’s hate. He hated her,” Rodriguez said.

The case is still being investigated, and police said Dimitrios can’t remember anything from the day of the shooting. His father said he was the one being bullied at school, and investigators haven’t confirmed that Dimitrios targeted Shana. But it was enough for Rodriguez to hear his name often.

“I’m struggling myself,” she said. “Listen to your kids. You think that’s not going to happen, then it does. Listen, listen.”

It’s what Mildred Muhammad says to herself every time another shooting happens.

“No one wants to listen when it’s time to listen,” she told me last year, on the 15th anniversary of her ex-husband’s reign of terror in the region as the D.C. sniper.

Muhammad and I spoke last fall as another shooting unfolded, this time in California, where authorities said a man identified as Kevin J. Neal shot people along the way to the local elementary school, killing five and injuring 10.

“Just wait for it,” Mildred said. “The connection.”

And, sure enough, it was there. Neal, police said, had killed his wife and hid her body in the floorboards before the rampage.

 

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The Davenport, Iowa school district got permission from the state of Iowa to spend more money to hire security guards even though they're cutting spending for other areas.

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Davenport's plan comes as schools across Iowa are working to comply with a new law requiring security plans developed in coordination with law enforcement and emergency management officials. Iowa Department of Education director Ryan Wise says Iowa schools are safer than they were five years ago, but more can be done.

Instead of dealing with the fornicating elephant in the room and keeping firearms away from people who should not even have access to scissors we have this.  Of course with people like Kimmy and Shannon "All Life Is Sacred" Lundgren running the show here in Iowa I don't see that fornicating elephant getting dealt with anytime soon.

 

And we have this out of Arizona now where a 92 year old woman shot and killed her son over his plans to move her to assisted living.

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Anna Mae Blessing told investigators that she shot her 72-year-old son at a condo just west of the Fountain Park.

She said she had been thinking about his plans to move her to an assisted living facility for several days.

An MCSO release said Blessing put two pistols in the pockets of her robe and confronted her son in his bedroom. She shot multiple times, killing him.

Blessing then turned the gun on his girlfriend and struggled with her over the weapon. She tried to grab the second gun, but the girlfriend knocked it out of her hands and called MCSO.

 

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Something positive following the shooting at the newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland: "Journalists from across the country line up to help the Capital Gazette after newsroom massacre"

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Journalism is a competitive field. Getting the story first and right is gold. Spouses and friends who work for competing news outlets have been known to use sharp elbows with each other.

But after the horrific shooting at the Capital Gazette, in which five staffers were killed on June 28 in the newsroom near Annapolis, Md., journalists from across the country — the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, the Boston Globe and others — have been lining up to help the community newspaper.

Dozens of journalists emailed the paper and asked what they could do, and others simply showed up and said, “Put me to work.”

“I’ve gotten offers from all over the country,” said Baltimore Sun editorial page editor Andrew A. Green, who is coordinating the volunteer effort. “They are coming and saying, ‘No amount of work is too much, no shift is too heinous, use me however you need to.’ ”

Green is coordinating because the 31-person Capital newsroom lost five employees, and those who survived are committed to the paper and working hard, but traumatized. The Capital and the Sun are sister publications owned by the Baltimore Sun Media Group, a subsidiary of Chicago-based Tronc. The papers have shared resources in the past, and more so since the shooting.

It happened around 2:30 in the afternoon, when police said alleged gunman Jarrod Ramos shot through the glass doors of the newsroom and then turned his gun on newspaper staff, killing veteran and beloved journalists, as well as a new employee. The surviving journalists reported on their friends’ deaths and put out a paper hours after the bloodshed. Social media showed photos of staff working on laptops from a pickup truck in a garage near the newsroom. They wanted to be sure the paper published.

Reporter Chase Cook tweeted the day of the shooting: “I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.”

And every day after that.

To help in that effort, journalists from across the country have been setting their own lives and jobs on hold for several days or several weeks and stepping into new volunteer roles at the Sun and the Capital. The volunteer journalists have gotten permission from their news organizations, which are paying them regular salaries while they help out.

“I feel it was a privilege to come up here,” said Carl Fincke, an editor at the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, who is on his second week working in the Baltimore Sun newsroom editing stories for both the Sun and the Capital.

The Sun has assigned a handful of its reporters to the Capital newsroom temporarily, and both newsrooms are accepting journalists as they come.

Fincke didn’t know the people who were killed at the Capital but volunteered to come out of a sense of deep sadness and solidarity. He said almost everyone at the Pilot, also owned by Tronc, raised their hands to come help.

Fincke said the mood in the Sun newsroom is “very subdued but very professional.”

“It is a very humbling experience for me to be able to sit with them and work with them,” Fincke said. “I am overwhelmed by the gratitude and appreciation they’ve shown. I’m reading a lot of copy and hopefully doing some good.”

He said he is doing it to support his colleagues, and also in memory of the Capital staffers who lost their lives: editorial page editor Gerald Fischman, 61; veteran columnist Rob Hiaasen, 59; sportswriter John McNamara, 56; sales assistant Rebecca Smith, 34; and editor and community reporter Wendi Winters, 65.

Alleged shooter Ramos, 38, is a Maryland man who had long-simmering anger toward the paper for its coverage of a crime he committed stalking a woman. He has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder in the attack.

In the Capital newsroom, the plan is to mobilize an army of volunteer journalists at least through the summer to allow staffers to regain some footing and give them some support as they work through the first stages of grief and trauma, Green said.

“It’s evolving because a lot of people have reached out to us,” Green said, mentioning the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and many others. “There are so many offers to help across the board from fellow journalists.”

Former Sun editor Laura Smitherman, who is scheduled to work out of the Baltimore newsroom this week, left the Sun last year after working there for more than a decade. Smitherman, now deputy national editor for NPR, said she didn’t think twice about coming back to help because the newsroom is like a family.

“I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing. I’m going to help out,” Smitherman said. “I’ll be giving lots of hugs. And editing, I’m sure.”

She said the staff of the Capital are heroes for putting out the paper the night of the tragedy and each day after.

“The world is keenly aware of how important journalism is, how important local journalism is,” Smitherman said. “They are the papers of record for these areas. It’s important that we help them continue with their mission.”

Another former Sun staffer, Boston Globe White House reporter Annie Linskey, is scheduled to lend a hand in the Baltimore newsroom for a few days in the coming weeks.

She said she and her editors were motivated to help in part because they know how overwhelming it was for their staff to cover the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

“From the Globe’s perspective, we were so inundated after the Boston Marathon bombing,” Linskey said. “I remember our newsroom. If I can help out now, I’d like to.”

As for Fincke, the Virginian-Pilot editor, he noted that in his absence, his colleagues in Norfolk are picking up his workload. And even with the extra help, journalists at the Sun are still stretched thin.

“At the Sun, people are doing a lot of jobs they weren’t doing a week ago,” said Fincke, who arrived in the Sun newsroom the morning after the shooting. “There’s a lot of spreading this new workload around. It’s got a lot of ripples.”

Fincke said there are grief counselors, therapy dogs, and lots of food and coffee in the newsroom.

“I’ve seen some tears, but I haven’t earned the right to shed them,” he said. “As an outsider, over time you learn who knew the people who died really well. It’s a constant reminder of why you’re up here.”

 

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https://cnycentral.com/news/local/investigators-say-suspect-in-deadly-waterloo-shooting-has-extensive-criminal-history

This happened in the town next to mine(where I was born).  Although it hasn't been officially confirmed, the rumor is that target of the two prior incidents was the same woman who was killed. :my_sad:

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Forget background checks, homicidal gun nuts will just print their murder weapons now 

 

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This is what the printed gun will look like. This is really scary. 

 

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19 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Murderer gets away with it 

 

I find the Stand Your Ground laws utterly bizarre. Not to mention unworkable. 

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For those that didn't know, there was a hostage situation at a Trader Joes' in LA. It followed the same exact pattern but the killing was minimized to only 2 people I believe? 

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Deer Rufus, please let this be true! :pray:

NRA In Financial Jeopardy, May Soon Be ‘Unable To Exist’

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The National Rifle Association may soon be “unable to exist” or “pursue its advocacy mission” because the gun rights group is in profound financial jeopardy, according to a legal complaint obtained by Rolling Stone.

According to the complaint, an ongoing lawsuit against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York state financial regulators has bled the NRA dry and the not-for-profit is facing “irrecoverable loss and irreparable harm.”

In recent months, New York took action to ban the sale of “Carry Guard,” an NRA-branded insurance for NRA members that was designed to help cover the legal fees after a member fired a legal gun. The state ruled in May that the liability insurance was illegal and the NRA’s insurance companies stopped selling it, according to Rolling Stone.

In the court document filed in July, the NRA claims that the state of New York lobbied to get several other financial service providers — like insurance companies and banks — to break with the gun rights group, which has made it difficult to operate. The group alleges in the complaint that the NRA will soon have to dissolve its media operation, which it can’t continue without insurance.

The suit asks the court to keep state regulators from “interfering with, terminating, or diminishing any of the NRA’s contracts and/or business relationships with any organizations.”

“The NRA will suffer irrecoverable loss and irreparable harm if it is unable to acquire insurance or other banking services due to Defendants’ actions.”

Read the filing [embedded in the article]

 

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Ha, the first rat to leave the sinking ship. 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Crap. :pb_sad:

 

It is too soon to say ‘crap’. I’ll lend you ‘thoughts and prayers’ But I will need them back for the next shooting

Edited by onekidanddone
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Fuck. This is really bad... 

Later reports state one suspect killed at the scene.

 

 

 

 

 

More info:

 

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