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Hey you! Reader! Want to be a part of the GREATEST COMIC BOOK AND GEEK COMMUNITY on the web?! Well, they're not accepting new members, but we'll take anyone here, so why not sign up for a free acount? It's fast and it's easy, like your mom! Sign up today! Membership spots are limited!*
*Membership spots not really limited!
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... witterfeed |
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his weekend, I saw an ABC-7 Chicago news report about Shirley Chambers, an African American woman who lives on Chicago's Near North Side, near the site of the now-leveled Cabrini-Green housing project. She, like many African American mothers in Chicago, recently lost her son to gun violence. Shirley Chambers' son, Ronnie, who was killed Saturday, was the fourth child she lost to gun violence. She was the mother to Carlos, LaToya, Jerome, and Ronnie Chambers. They are all gone. Carlos was killed in 1995 by another young man with whom he'd had an argument. LaToya was killed in April of 2000 by a 13-year-old boy who was arguing with her boyfriend. Jerome was killed in July of 2000 when he was shot from someone in van while standing at a payphone. Ronnie was killed this weekend when someone opened fire on a van in which he was a passenger. They are all gone. The Chambers family should be national news. We should also be listening to Shirley Chambers when she says, "We need tougher gun laws," and when she cries, "I can't take it anymore." I can't take it anymore. Those who resist meaningful gun reform, which necessarily must include higher barriers to handgun ownership, demanded of Shirley Chambers the sacrifice of all four of her children, in service to their right to own weapons designed to kill people. The gun lobby and its fervent supporters would vehemently deny what they would certainly regard as my cruel mischaracterization of their position. But that is the effective result of an obdurate resistance to meaningful gun reform: People will die. All the soundbites about how it isn't guns who kill people, and all the victim-blaming that has been and will be heaped on Shirley Chambers and her children, and all the rationalizations about people with mental illness, and all the othering of poor black people who live in cities, and all the sanctimonious hand-wringing about "cultural degradation," and all the excuses and justifications and cynical rhetorical flourishes in the world will not change this fact: Shirley Chambers' children are dead. All of her children are dead. We are expected to regard that fact as an acceptable by-product of the virtually unlimited right to own guns. Four lives lost, and a mother's life torn to pieces. Collateral damage so the most fearful people in the country — people whose privilege disproportionately insulates them from the very real threats Chambers and her family have faced — can stockpile deadly firearms, and the makers of those deadly firearms can pocket enormous profits. |
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Oh man I remember those. |
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This speech wasn't delivered in an alternate universe. The date was May 1st, 1999, at the NRA's national convention in Denver. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's rampage at Columbine High School in nearby Littleton, Colorado, had just killed 13 students and teachers, shocking the conscience of the nation. Wayne vs. Wayne: When the NRA Chief Endorsed Gun Control in Schools The disconnect between the NRA chief's conciliatory address on that day 14 years ago and his combative press conference in the aftermath of the slaughter of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, could hardly be more jarring. In his now-infamous December 21st tirade, LaPierre ripped the gun-free zones he once championed as an invitation to the "monsters and predators of this world," advertising to "every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk." LaPierre then offered what he called a "proven" solution to school gun violence – one that would open a lucrative new market for the gun industry while tidily expanding the power of the NRA itself. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," LaPierre insisted, before proposing that armed, NRA-trained vigilantes should patrol each of the nation's nearly 100,000 public schools. The shift in LaPierre's rhetoric underscores a radical transformation within the NRA. Billing itself as the nation's "oldest civil rights organization," the NRA still claims to represent the interests of marksmen, hunters and responsible gun owners. But over the past decade and a half, the NRA has morphed into a front group for the firearms industry, whose profits are increasingly dependent on the sale of military-bred weapons like the assault rifles used in the massacres at Newtown and Aurora, Colorado. "When I was at the NRA, we said very specifically, 'We do not represent the fi rearm industry,'" says Richard Feldman, a longtime gun lobbyist who left the NRA in 1991. "We represent gun owners. End of story." But in the association's more recent history, he says, "They have really gone after the gun industry." Today's NRA stands astride some of the ugliest currents of our politics, combining the "astroturf" activism of the Tea Party, the unlimited and undisclosed "dark money" of groups like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, and the sham legislating conducted on behalf of the industry through groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council. "This is not your father's NRA," says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a top gun-industry watchdog. Feldman is more succinct, calling his former employer a "cynical, mercenary political cult." The NRA's alignment with an $11.7 billion industry has fed tens of millions of dollars into the association's coffers, helping it string together victories that would have seemed fantastic just 15 years ago. The NRA has hogtied federal regulators, censored government data about gun crime and blocked renewal of the ban on assault weaponry and high-capacity magazines, which expired in 2004. The NRA secured its "number-one legislative priority" in 2005, a law blocking liability lawsuits that once threatened to bankrupt gunmakers and expose the industry's darkest business practices. Across the country, the NRA has opened new markets for firearms dealers by pushing for state laws granting citizens the right to carry hidden weapons in public and to allow those who kill in the name of self-defense to get off scot-free. Gabby Giffords Speaks on Gun Control: 'The Time Is Now' The NRA's unbending opposition to better gun-control measures does not actually reflect the views of the nation's gun owners or, for that matter, its claimed 4 million members. A May 2012 poll conducted by Republican pollster Frank Luntz revealed surprising moderation on behalf of NRA members: Three out of four believed that background checks should be completed before every gun purchase. Nearly two-thirds supported a requirement that gun owners alert police when their firearms are lost or stolen. "Their members are much more rational than the management of the NRA," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, tells Rolling Stone. "They're out of touch." That's by design. Today's NRA is a completely top-down organization. It has been led since 1991 by LaPierre, its chief executive, who serves at the pleasure of a 76-member board that is all but self-perpetuating. Only one-third of the board's membership is up for re-election in any given year. Voting is limited to the NRA's honored "lifetime" members and to dues-payers with at least five consecutive years of being in good standing. Write-in candidates occasionally pepper the ballot, but in practice, the tiny slice of eligible members who bother to vote rubber-stamp a slate of candidates dictated by the NRA's 10-member nominating committee – one of whose members is George Kollitides II, CEO of Freedom Group, which manufactures the Bushmaster semiautomatic that Adam Lanza used to slaughter children in Newtown. Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... s-america- Well...... That's the best article I've read in a while. |
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I was just asked to sign a petition against one of these raffles. |
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I don't get how this happened? Surely a gun range full of responsible, trained gun owners would be one of the safest places on Earth...right? |
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Sounds like straight up murder/theft to me. Hab |
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here is a snippet of the article, but the whole article contains nice details of kyle's life:
this is sad. chris kyle sounds like a great guy who was giving back to vets when he died. kyle takes groups of vets out to shooting ranges as a way of helping them feel more comfortable rotating back into civilian life, creating some of the camaraderie they miss from military life. one of these vets, eddie ray routh, shot kyle and a second victim on one of these trips. routh served in iraq and afghanistan and the times mentions he suffered from mental illness. i'm guessing routh has ptsd. |
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Hey we're not all damaged. You only put the ones in there that can pass a psych evaluation. Clearly this guy couldn't. |
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You need the ones that have been out for 5 to 10 years. You just need to get a level headed one that doesnt have PTSD. I dont think anyone is talking about putting a weapon in the hands of a vet that just walked out of the sandbox. You treat them the same way you would treat a cop. Constant mental health checks and certification. |
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Well, obviously my point is that isn't what happened here. What the guy was doing, it's a recipe for...what has apparently happened. I don't see that he had ANY training in handling psych issues either. And if someone's been out for 5-10 years, they've already made the transition we're talking about if they don't have mental issues precluding it. If that report is true, the person evaluating the vets on that trip fucked up about as bad as you can fuck something up. |
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