Church shooting 20-24 dead in Texas...............

Amen to both of these points.

Once again, I hang my head in shame. Shame for not doing more to stop the slaughter of innocent people. Shame for living in the most violent developed country.

The youngest victim in Texas was 18 months old. The shooter had 3 guns: Ruger-AR556 rifle, 9mm Glock handgun & Ruger 22 handgun. By the NRA's logic, the shooter was killed by a good guy with a gun ergo we need to bear more arms. But where does this arms race end? Do we want to live in a society where civilians are armed to the teeth and walk around in a state of hair-trigger alert?

I don't want to live in a country where an 18-month-old is collateral damage of our interpretation of our Constitution. No 18 month old should be blown to bits by a military weapon in a church. Do we want snipers and SWAT teams on every corner poised to protect us? I don't want to live in a heavily armed fortress to feel safe. We should all feel safe walking around in public places. Law enforcement officers should not operate as if they were in a war zone.

But no. Instead, we get to hear about good guys with guns and prayer. There is no prayer or good guy with a gun that will give life back to that 18-month-old. So instead I hang my head in shame and try to think of what I might do to make a difference so that no more lambs go to the senseless slaughter of madmen with assault weapons.

Thank you!  I felt horrible that I couldn’t remember it.

I don't understand how the "good guy with a gun" narrative is served in this situation at all. 

The bystander with a gun who engaged Kelley didn't do so until *after* he had exited the church and the shooting had stopped. 

We know shots were exchanged with the bystander but we don't know if Kelley was injured by any of them.

Kelley then fled in his car and was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. We don't yet know if there were additional injuries (including shots from the bystander) that could have caused his death or if the self-inflicted shot was lethal. 

I am imagining that perhaps you're reading anyway...unless you really did just dump and run.

What do you think about people who do not, cannot, believe in your god, or who believe in a different god? Maybe you think it's our own fault for not believing. I am (as Spongemom Scrappants calls it) apatheist. I don't believe in your god, I don't believe in any god nor do I want to.  Sin is not a problem for me because I don't believe in it in the way you do. God does not control everything as far as I'm concerned so saying that we should leave it all to him is just a non starter and I imagine it's the same for millions of people in your country who are atheist/agnostic or who worship different gods. How can you think your god has control over everyone and everything despite knowing that not everyone believes in him?

I don't think anyone's been trashed for feeling prayer is useful or helpful BUT it isn't enough on it's own. That's what gets people irate.

They're even more likely to kill themselves. No one can know for sure either way, but based on behavior of prior mass shooters, the final outcome would most likely have been the same whether or not the bystander intervened. 

No one is saying prayer alone is all that is needed. People pray for the victims and their families, because for this moment right in the aftermath, that is all they can do. They can't pass laws in the minutes and hours after a tragedy and even if they could that isn't going to bring dead people back to life anymore than prayers will. So they offer emotional support in the form of prayer to a God they believe in, to the families of the victims and the entire country who are devastated by these tragedies. 

The "good guy with a gun" narrative is magical thinking.

1) Has every single person with a gun undergone intensive training to practice using their gun such situations?  No, of course not. And these situations are often measured in tens of seconds. I don't think it's realistic to think the average gun owner would be able to react quickly enough, correctly identify the target, and take him down without injuring others. 

2) In a shooting situation, what happens when law enforcement arrives to find multiple people with guns out? It makes their job harder and also puts the good guy at risk of being shot as well.

I'm not discounting that there isn't a possible situation where an armed citizen could step in (and I'm thinking of off-duty police officer or somebody else with proper training), but I think it's an outlier and is absolutely not a solution to our problems (sure, more guns!). And if all it took was more "good guys" with guns, then how so we account for the number of police officers killed by guns each year?

It's deflection and distraction. I wish people would say what seems to be true - they don't give a shit about human lives lost as long as it is a gun free for all.

Pro-gun group in Texas re-enacts Charlie Hebdo attacks with paintball rounds


www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/15/texas-gun-group-charlie-hebdo-paintball


These guys knew what was going to happen and STILL couldn't save people.


Over the course of several simulations, volunteers playing the armed civilian managed to hit a gunman in only two cases; no one “took out” both shooters in any iteration of the exercise. Of the 12 volunteers who participated as civilians, only one survived – by fleeing the scene at the sound of shots. The Kouachi brothers murdered 12 people on 7 January, including two armed policemen.

Repeating because I can't like this enough.

I believe prayer has infinite value, but so does hand-on action. And yes, "thoughts and prayers" are hypocritical when they aren't followed up by whatever action is possible. But way too many of these folks aren't even trying.

We're going to blame this all on mental health? Then let's see what we're going to do for mental health, I'm all on board. Oh, wait, nothing again.

Because these poor people happened to go to a church where this shooter's mother-in-law sometimes went, their lives are gone.

www.cnn.com/2017/11/06/us/texas-church-shooting/index.html

Because we can't ban assault rifles. We can't increase BY BILLIONS the funding for mental health services. We can't do anything but think and pray. And hope we don't attend church (or school, or movies, or stores) w/a relative of a person intent on fixing all their problems through the barrel of an assault rifle.

I don't understand it either. We live in one of the safest towns in this part of Texas and a significant percentage of people here are absolutely terrified of crime, and armed to the teeth. Also, the local police department is not overburdened, and response times are very short if you need help. Every other house has high tech alarm and video surveillance systems too. Even though crime is not in any way a real threat here.

But they're not afraid of the giant petroleum refinery on the edge of town that had an equipment failure and explosion a couple of weeks ago. And if you show concern over the explosions, giant flare burnoffs, and chemical smells coming from the plant, they make fun of you for being a scaredy cat.

I don't understand.

They're absolutely panic stricken by the non-existent crime threat, but completely blow off the very real industrial threat.

There's some kind of cognitive dissonance going on. Because all of the people I know who own a bunch of guns for personal protection and live in constant fear of crime, live in safe low-crime areas.

The bottom line in all of this is that America as a country has let the whole gun matter get out of control over many many years and now, as a country, you have no idea how to get it sorted. You have no idea how many guns are out there, you have no idea who owns them, you have no idea where they get them from. you have no idea how to put a stop to all this killing. As someone mentioned earlier, what is the point of having stringent gun controls in somewhere like Chicago when you can drive over an open border from another state that have lax controls.

It's like going into a hoarders house and standing at the door and saying to yourself " where the heck do I start" but the gun problem is on a much larger scale than looking at some trash and wondering how to get rid of it. Would people have accepted that nothing needed to be done to protect your safety and everyone else's safety in the air after 9/11 - doing nothing would have been unthinkable and yet your government accepts the fact that far more people are killed every year with a gun and that isn't counting the suicides recorded,yet they choose to do nothing.

This timeline of deadliest US shootings between 1984 and October this year published in the LAtimes  is unbelievable and yet less than a month later we're reading and hearing about more incidents to add to the list.


LINK