VA-ALERT: VCDL Update 11/14/15
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Not yet a Virginia Citizens Defense League member? Join VCDL at: http://www.vcdl.org/join
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VCDL's meeting schedule: http://www.vcdl.org/meetings
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Abbreviations used in VA-ALERT: http://www.vcdl.org/help/abbr.html
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VA-ALERT archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/727/=now
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1. IMPORTANT NOTE: Change of location for VCDL membership meeting on Nov. 19th
2. Lobby Day is only two months away!
3. Should the Virginia Senate have a new Majority Leader?
4. Dangers of Universal Background Checks - Dave Kopel [VIDEO]
5. The blueprint for confiscation
6. Hmmm. Australia sees spike in gun crime despite gun ban
7. “I’d rather be shot by a ‘smart gun’ than sell a smart gun”
8. Rasmussen poll - Americans not seeing need for more gun control
9. Jim Crow - a proud part of gun control’s history
10. Thoughts on distributing VA-ALERT updates for recruiting purposes
11. Cartoon: “This is the disease, this is the symptom”
12. David Codrea on Virginia elections
13. Articles on the elections, VCDL quoted
14. Amherst Board of Supervisor member behind proposed shooting restrictions lost election
15. Mass stabbing at California university - call for knife control? Nah.
16. Fact checking President Obama on gun control, violence
17. Is Obama correct that mass killings don't happen in other countries? Nope.
18. 'States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths’ Two Pinocchios for Obama [VIDEO]
19. To curb gun violence, Hillary Clinton has a plan
20. Trump: Armed teachers could have stopped massacre [VIDEO]
21. Napolitano: The right to shoot tyrants, not deer
22. Rush Limbaugh: Concealed carry is peace
23. The best kind of mass shooting
24. Guide to gun control
25. [OR] Pastor's daughter thought she would die
26. Mark Kelly can't name a single gun law that would stop shooting
27. [OR] Family has message about gun control and the 2nd amendment
28. Gun-free zones 'lead lambs to the slaughter'
29. Gun control is killing us: Opposing view
30. Dear 'Gun Free Zone' campus wizards
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1. IMPORTANT NOTE: Change of location for VCDL membership meeting on Nov. 19th
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SW Virginia's monthly supper meeting on Thursday, November 19, at 6:30 PM has a LOCATION CHANGE.
The meeting will now be held at
Dynasty Chinese Restaurant
1941 W Main St
Salem Va.
Fellowship starts at 6:30 pm and it is a buffet meal.
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2. Lobby Day is only two months away!
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Be sure to get Monday, January 18th off so you can be part of VCDL’s Lobby Day in Richmond. Lobby Day runs from 8:30 AM through Noon, with a rally starting at 11 AM. More details will be forthcoming. For now, please plan on attending this important event.
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3. Should the Virginia Senate have a new Majority Leader?
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Senator Tommy Norment is the current Majority Leader in the Senate. Senator Norment has done things to support gun owners: most recently he got a bill passed this year that protects a gun owner who unknowingly carries onto K-12 school property. But he has also had more than his share of bad votes, voting with the anti-gun Democrats on the Courts of Justice committee.
The Majority Leader is a very, very important position and needs to be somebody who can be trusted to reliably protect our right to keep and bear arms.
The issue is also that Norment is slated to become chairman of the finance committee, another extremely powerful position.
Senator Tom Garrett is very concerned that having both positions in the hands of one person gives them way too much power.
Make no bones about it, Senator Tom Garrett is brave to take on the issue. Not many would have the guts to do so and he seems to be a lone voice in the woods right now.
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Thanks to EM Hal Macklin for the link:
http://www.newsadvance.com/news/local/g ... 3d445.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/pugcbha
Sen. Garrett calls for shakeup in Senate leadership
Alex Rohr
Posted: Monday, November 9, 2015 5:44 pm
Sen. Garrett calls for shakeup in Senate leadership newsadvance.com
State Sen. Thomas A. Garrett Jr. called for a shakeup in Senate leadership while speaking on a conservative talk radio show Monday morning.
He called Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr. the “heir apparent” to the Finance Committee chair and said he should not hold that position and stay majority leader.
Garrett said “I hope so” when asked whether he wanted to see a change in Senate Republican leadership after the GOP maintained its 21-19 majority in last Tuesday’s elections, during which the entire General Assembly was up for reelection.
“I do hope if he chooses to pursue that finance chairmanship that he will step aside and let somebody else take that majority leader position,” Garrett said speaking on the John Fredericks Show.
Norment could not be reached for comment Monday.
Finance Committee co-chairs Sen. Walter A. Stosch, R-Henrico, and Sen. Charles J. Colgan, D-Prince William, retire at the end of this term, leaving Norment, R-James City County, as the longest-tenured committee member.
Garrett, R-Buckingham, said holding both positions would be too much power for one individual.
“This is a democracy, or a republic. There’s a reason we have separation of powers. There’s a reason we have checks and balances, and this is that in micro,” Garrett’s 22nd District includes about half of Lynchburg as well as Amherst and Appomattox counties.
There is precedent for one person holding both powerful positions — former Sen. Hunter B. Andrews, D-Hampton, a legislative titan whom many describe as a political model for Norment.
“The historical precedent didn’t end well,” Garrett said, referencing a significant income tax increase passed in 1992.
During the interview, Garrett referenced a statement Sen. John Watkins, R-Powhatan, made to The Richmond Times-Dispatch last week.
“I don’t think that can happen again,” Watkins had said.
Norment is the senior member of the committee. Next in line would be Sen. Emmett W. Hanger Jr., R-Augusta, a Shenandoah Valley moderate who ran afoul of party conservatives by supporting expansion of health coverage for uninsured Virginians but defeated two opponents in a GOP primary with 60 percent of the vote.
After Hanger, the next in line would be Sen. Stephen D. Newman, R-Lynchburg; Sen. Frank M. Ruff Jr., R-Mecklenburg; Sen. Frank W. Wagner, R-Virginia Beach; and Sen. Ryan T. McDougle, R-Hanover, who is chairman of the Senate Republican Caucus.
Newman could not be reached for comment Monday.
“I think Emmett and Tommy are the most qualified for it,” said Watkins, who called the committee chairmanship “an extraordinarily complex job.”
Hanger, who heads the Health and Human Resources Subcommittee, said Friday it would be “premature for me to forecast where we’re going. It depends on the will of the caucus and also of Senator Norment’s goals as far as leadership.”
The Senate Republican Caucus will convene privately in Portsmouth during the Finance Committee retreat next week.
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4. Dangers of Universal Background Checks - Dave Kopel [VIDEO]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRqwaNKkiKA
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5. The blueprint for confiscation
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https://www.gunsamerica.com/blog/how-th ... fiscation/
or
http://tinyurl.com/pstq58w
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6. Hmmm. Australia sees spike in gun crime despite gun ban
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Age old formula. Ban something and watch the black market take off.
http://freebeacon.com/issues/australia- ... right-ban/
or
http://tinyurl.com/oc5hehx
Australia Sees Spike in Gun Crime Despite Outright Ban
Stephen Gutowski
Firearms black market in the island nation bigger than previously thought
November 11, 2015 4:21 pm
Australia has seen a rise in gun crime over the past decade despite imposing an outright ban on many firearms in the late 1990s.
Charges for crimes involving firearms have increased dramatically across the island nation’s localities in the past decade according to an analysis of government statistics conducted by The New Daily. It found that gun crimes have spiked dramatically in the Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania. In Victoria, pistol-related offenses doubled over the last decade. In New South Wales, they tripled. The other states saw smaller but still significant increases.
Experts said that the country’s 1996 ban on most semi-automatic firearms has actually driven criminals to those guns. “The ban on semi-automatics created demand by criminals for other types of guns,” professor Philip Alpers of the University of Sydney told The New Daily. “The criminal’s gun of choice today is the semi-automatic pistol.”
Gun control advocates in the country insist that the problem is too little regulation. They said, while most modern firearms are illegal and all legal firearms owners must obtain licenses from the government, ammunition is not controlled tightly enough.
“There is very little regulation of ammunition purchase,” Samantha Lee, a spokesperson for Gun Control Australia, told the publication. “In most jurisdictions you can purchase ammunition because you have a firearm licence and there is no restriction on the type you can purchase – so if you own a rifle you can still purchase ammunition for a handgun.”
“Gun enthusiasts are quite right when they say guns don’t kill–it’s the bullets that kill,” Professor Alpers added. “For many years we just focused on the guns and ignored the ammunition that was lying around–now people are starting to realise that ammunition control is just as important.”
Law enforcement said the rising gun crime was in relation to increased efforts to crack down on guns, especially those used in the drug trade.
“In recent years police have been more proactive in their targeting of illegal weapons, particularly in relation to known or suspected criminals,” New South Wales Detective Superintendent Mick Plotecki told the paper. “We often find a link between firearms offences and mid-level drug crime.”
Regardless of the reasons for the jump in gun crime, the numbers reveal the true size of Australia’s illegal gun market. “Taken together, the data suggests that despite our tough anti-gun laws, thousands of weapons are either being stolen or entering the country illegally,” The New Daily said. “The fourfold rise in handgun-related charges in NSW in the past decade points to the existence of a big illegal market for concealable firearms that seems to have been underestimated in the past.”
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7. “I’d rather be shot by a ‘smart gun’ than sell a smart gun”
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There’s also a report out that one of the “smart gun” models has serious reliability issues. More on this in a future Update.
Thanks to member Ray Rathmann for the link:
http://blog.cheaperthandirt.com/id-shot ... yasmartgun
or
http://tinyurl.com/pwlwq4d
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8. Rasmussen poll - Americans not seeing need for more gun control
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Thanks to Bill Rogers for the link:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... ber_7_2015
or
http://tinyurl.com/nk79fwf
What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls - Week Ending November 7, 2015
Saturday, November 07, 2015
No matter what some elected officials tell them, Americans just aren’t buying the need for a lot more gun control.
It doesn’t help that 77% of voters believe most politicians raise gun issues just to get elected rather than to address real problems. Democrats are just as dubious of these politicians as Republicans are.
Voters are also more supportive these days of their constitutional right to own a gun.
By a 48% to 43% margin, voters see no need for stricter gun control. Far more (61%) believe the United States needs stricter enforcement of the gun control laws that are already on the books.
Support for the current federal system of background checks on gun purchasers remains high, even though voters question their effectiveness in reducing crime.
Most voters have said in surveys since the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, nearly three years ago that the best way to prevent incidents like this is to focus more on the mentally ill rather than on increased gun control.
A big problem for supporters of more gun control is that 62% of Americans don't trust the federal government to fairly enforce gun control laws.
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9. Jim Crow - a proud part of gun control’s history
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Member Tom Biggar sent me the item below. Let’s be clear: there are Democrat gun owners who fight hard to protect the right to keep and bear arms. VCDL has such members. That said, the Democrat PARTY as a whole has sadly become the Party of Gun Control. Just look at the Democrat leadership in the Virginia House and Senate, in Congress, and running for President.
Tom’s comments are aimed at those Democrats who are trying to disarm us.
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Watch out for James Crow.
After the civil war, Democrats in the South were faced with a problem. A group of people (blacks) were doing something the Democrats didn't like (voting).
Unfortunately, (for the Democrats) that activity was protected by the Constitution (14th and 15th Amendments). The Democrats decided that, since they couldn't ban the activity, they would make it complicated and expensive. Jim Crow used poll taxes, literacy tests, and the like to make voting expensive and time consuming so that blacks would be discouraged.
Jim Crow was one of the most reprehensible actions in the Republic's history. But to be clear, while black Americans were it's victims, Jim Crow was reprehensible because it was an attack on the freedom of American citizens to enjoy their rights freely and without interference from the government - a government that should have been protecting those rights, not impeding them.
Today, Democrats are faced with a problem. A group of people (gun owners) are doing something the Democrats don't like (owning guns). Unfortunately, (for the Democrats) that activity is protected by the Constitution (2nd Amendment). The Democrats have decided that, since they can't (yet) ban the activity, they will make it too complicated and expensive - ammo taxes, licensing restrictions, etc.
Welcome to Jim Crow II.
Like Jim Crow I, the people doing it don't believe in the Constitution or freedom. Reviving Jim Crow shows the moral bankruptcy of the Democrat party.
When a Democrat asks me why I don't support 'reasonable' gun control, I ask them to explain why they are walking in the tracks of Jim Crow.
I don't get any good answers, but maybe I start some people thinking. Either way, we can't let ourselves be Jim Crowed into silence or submission.
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10. Thoughts on distributing VA-ALERT updates for recruiting purposes
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Member Marcus White has a suggestion on promoting VCDL and VA-ALERT:
I have an idea that I think would bring in many new members and is inexpensive.
One of the best tools available is to print the first page of a VA-ALERT for distribution.
When a person sees all of the articles, links etc. they will surely find several (if not many) that will draw their interest.
They are told they can get this mountain of information for free by just signing up. They are also told that VCDL DOESN'T keep digging / begging for money - and BAM - they are caught! If after a year or so they (like me) realize that VCDL is the absolute best at keeping gun rights information at their fingertips, they are likely to become dues paying members.
I have been using this idea with good results and will use it as a recruiting tool at gun shows, at work, at church.
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11. Cartoon: “This is the disease, this is the symptom”
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http://www.roanoke.com/opinion/commenta ... 70bc9.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/pwhpdlk
Posted: Friday, November 6, 2015 2:00 am
Dana Jacobs Jacobs is a retired scientist who lives in Blue Ridge.
By Dana Jacobs
I’m guessing that it was only coincidence that placed Rick McKee’s insightful cartoon opposite Vicki Gardner’s thoughtful op-ed (“Let’s have less violence as entertainment”) in the Oct. 7 editorial pages.
The cartoon distinguishes the “disease” from the “symptom”, and Gardner’s comments on “social leniency” again opens a door to discuss the role of portrayed violence in entertainment as one among several factors related to violence in our society.
SNIP
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12. David Codrea on Virginia elections
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http://www.ammoland.com/2015/11/bloombe ... z3qefpvGFo
or
http://tinyurl.com/nfrf69q
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13. Articles on the elections, VCDL quoted
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http://freebeacon.com/politics/republic ... red-group/
or
http://tinyurl.com/q5zzbqh
—
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/di ... story.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/pulofsa
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14. Amherst Board of Supervisor member behind proposed shooting restrictions lost election
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Donald W. Kidd, who is the Amherst Board of Supervisor member who was pushing a countywide restriction on firearm discharge, lost his election to Kenneth M. Campbell.
Hopefully that issue will not raise its ugly head again.
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15. Mass stabbing at California university - call for knife control? Nah.
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Note that this happened just after California banned CHP holders from carrying on University property on October 10th.
Another (newly made) "gun-free zone" leaves victims helpless in the face of a violent attack. Well done, California! <eye roll>
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/04/us/univer ... index.html
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16. Fact checking President Obama on gun control, violence
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VCDL VP Jim Snyder was interviewed for this story.
Member Walter Jackson emailed me this:
http://wjla.com/news/local/fact-checkin ... n-violence
or
http://tinyurl.com/qznrvko
Fact checking President Obama on gun control and gun violence
by Chris Papst, ABC 7 NEWS
October 2, 2015
WASHINGTON (WJLA) — Thursday morning's mass shooting at a community college in Oregon shocked and saddened America. It also frustrated President Barack Obama.
"Each time we see one of these shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough," said the President, just hours after the shooting. "It cannot be this easy for someone who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun."
The President then said this. "We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths."
But is that true? The I-Team learned it depends on how you analyze the data. In our area, D.C. and Maryland have stricter gun laws than Virginia. But 2014 FBI crime statistics show Virginia has the lowest rate of gun murders at 2.7 per 100,000 residents. Maryland and D.C., despite tougher gun laws, have higher gun murder rates - 3.5 and 11.1 respectively.
But when analyzing President Obama's preferred metric of gun deaths, which includes suicide and accidents, Virginia has the highest rate. According to 2013 data from the Centers for Disease Control, Virginia's gun death rate stands at 10.2 per 100,000, Maryland and DC are lower at 9.7 and 8.9 respectively.
"Instead of focusing on the tool the bad person uses to commit an atrocity, we should be focusing on the individual," said Jim Snyder of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
President Obama was right.
States with stricter gun laws tend to have lower rates of gun deaths. But they also tend to have higher rates of gun murders.
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17. Is Obama correct that mass killings don't happen in other countries? Nope.
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http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... appen-oth/
or
http://tinyurl.com/qez45rx
Is Barack Obama correct that mass killings don't happen in other countries?
By Keely Herring, Louis Jacobson
June 22nd, 2015
After a gunman shot and killed nine worshippers in a historic African-American church in Charleston, S.C., President Barack Obama took to the White House podium the next day to "express our deep sorrow over the senseless murders."
In his June 18, 2015, remarks from the White House, Obama said, "Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it."
A flurry of PolitiFact readers -- some of them prompted by articles objecting to Obama’s claim -- wrote to us to ask us to check it, so we did.
An important point to make right off the bat is that many of the critics have pointed to the first part of Obama’s claim -- that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries." As we’ll explain, the critics have a point here -- mass violence, including mass shootings, happen in a wide variety of countries.
However, the critics have truncated the quotation, leaving off the next sentence -- that "it doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency." That’s also not fully correct, but it’s not quite as wrong as the first claim.
The White House argues that Obama's second sentence qualifies the first, and added that PunditFact rated Mostly True the claim that "Americans are 20 times as likely to die from gun violence as citizens of other civilized countries." However, that claim refers to gun violence generally, not mass killings specifically, the topic of Obama's comment.
For a look at the statistics, we checked with two researchers, Jaclyn Schildkraut of the State University of New York in Oswego and H. Jaymi Elsass of Texas State University. They have been collecting and analyzing mass-shooting incidents in 11 countries, covering the period from 2000 to 2014. Aside from the United States, the countries they studied are Australia, Canada, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland. (They also looked at less-developed countries, but we will exclude those since Obama specifically mentioned "advanced" countries.)
Schildkraut and Elsass shared the summary information from their database with PolitiFact. Here’s their table:
The chart does show that the United States has more mass shootings -- and more people cumulatively killed or injured -- than the other 10 nations combined, partly because it has a much bigger population than all but China.
Still, using this data, it’s easy to dispense with the first claim Obama made -- that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries."
Over the decade and a half studied, the researchers found 23 incidents of mass shootings in the other 10 countries, resulting in 200 dead and 231 wounded. In the United States over the same period, there were 133 incidents that left 487 dead and 505 wounded.
Here are a just a few examples of mass shootings in other countries:
• On July 22, 2011, a total of 80 people were killed in Norway when Anders Behring Breivik, a political extremist, bombed a government building in Oslo and then went on a shooting rampage on the island of Utoya, just outside the city.
• On March 11, 2009, in Winnenden, Germany, a teenage gunman killed 15 people. The majority of the victims were children and teachers killed when the shooter opened fire in three classrooms in a local secondary school. The gunman shot two other people before killing himself after being cornered by the local police.
• On Sept. 23, 2008, in Kuahajoki, Finland, a gunman shot 10 people to death after opening fire on a classroom in the Kuahajoki School of Hospitality. After killing the students, the shooter burned the victims’ bodies.
In sum, then, Obama is wrong to say that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries." Clearly it does happen elsewhere, and not in trivial numbers. Seven of the countries saw double-digit numbers of people killed in mass shootings during that period.
By contrast, the second part of Obama’s claim -- that "it doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency" -- isn’t entirely off-base.
We compared mass shooting incidents across countries is to calculate the number of victims per capita -- that is, adjusted for the country’s total population size.
Calculating it this way shows the United States in the upper half of the list of 11 countries, ranking higher than Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Germany and Mexico.
Still, the U.S. doesn’t rank No. 1. At 0.15 mass shooting fatalities per 100,000 people, the U.S. had a lower rate than Norway (1.3 per 100,000), Finland (0.34 per 100,000) and Switzerland (1.7 per 100,000).
We’ll note that all of these countries had one or two particularly big attacks and have relatively small populations, which have pushed up their per-capita rates. In Norway, that single attack in 2011 left 67 dead by gunfire (plus additional bomb casualties). Finland had two attacks, one that killed eight and one that killed 10. And Switzerland had one incident that killed 14.
Still, while the United States did rank in the top one-third of the list, the fact that three other countries exceeded the United States using this method of comparison does weaken Obama’s claim that "it doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency." In at least three countries, the data shows, it does.
Elsass warned PolitiFact of a few caveats about the data. While they believe their database "to be among the most exhaustive compilations available," Elsass noted that it may not include every instance of mass shootings. It also doesn’t include every example of mass killings -- just those committed by firearms, even though mass stabbings are not uncommon in such places as China. Finally, their database doesn’t include acts generally considered to be terrorism, such as the attack in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
"If these were included, we are likely to see something much different statistically as there have been a number of very high-profile terrorist attacks in Europe, some including the use of firearms, that are excluded from the current analysis," she said. But in all likelihood, this would only make the case against Obama’s claim stronger.
The bottom line is that it’s unwise to take these numbers as gospel -- but the figures from this database are clear enough to cast significant doubt on the accuracy of the specific claim Obama made.
Our ruling
Obama said after the church shootings in Charleston that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency."
The data shows that it clearly happens in other countries, and in at least three of them, there’s evidence that the rate of killings in mass-shooting events occurred at a higher per-capita rate than in the United States between 2000 and 2014. The only partial support for Obama’s claim is that the per-capita gun-incident fatality rate in the United States does rank in the top one-third of the list of 11 countries studied. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly False.
EDITOR’S NOTE, June 22, 2015: We heard from several of you regarding Obama's use of the word "frequency," and that frequency could refer to the incidents of mass shootings, not deaths as we examined. Looking at Obama's claim by incident, the United States has a higher rate of incidents than Finland, Norway and Switzerland. We agree that there is no preferred comparison and each is valid, and we've changed some language in this article to reflect that. We also agree that China has a larger population than the United States, a fact we weren't initially clear about but have since fixed. That said, we are sticking with our rating of Mostly False, in large measure because of Obama's claim that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries." That is incorrect. We know some of you will disagree, and we'll be sure to air out some of your objections in our next reader mailbag.
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18. 'States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths’ Two Pinocchios for Obama [VIDEO]
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fac ... un-deaths/
or
http://tinyurl.com/p86ojup
Obama’s claim that ‘states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths’
By Glenn Kessler
October 5, 2015
“We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence.”
—President Obama, remarks on Shootings at Umpqua Community College, Oct. 1, 2015
Many readers requested a fact check of this statement, believing it to be untrue.
It certainly is a sweeping comment, and it depends in part on which gun laws to count and how to evaluate them. The president is also referring to the rate of gun deaths, not an absolute total (as the biggest states are almost always going to have the most number of gun deaths).
But this is also an issue about scope. Most gun deaths — more than 60 percent in 2013 — are actually suicides. The president made his remarks in the aftermath of the tragic shooting rampage at an Oregon community college, and so it’s a judgment call as to whether counting suicides is appropriate. After all, Obama wants to thwart mass shootings by enacting universal background checks aimed at people with criminal histories.
Some might argue that it is wrong to exclude suicides from the data, as less access to guns might result in fewer suicides. The data on that is mixed. Gun-related suicides might decline, but studies have shown little connection between suicides and access to guns. A 2004 report published by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.”
Japan, for instance, has among the world’s most-restrictive gun-control regimes — and yet also has among the world’s highest suicide rates, almost double the U.S. suicide rate.
As we will show below, the numbers change, sometimes dramatically, when suicides are not counted.
The Facts
The president’s statement was based on a chart published by National Journal in August, officials say, with a title even more emphatic than the president’s statement: “The States With The Most Gun Laws See The Fewest Gun-Related Deaths.”
The data used in this chart calculates the the number of gun-related deaths per 100,000 people by including all gun deaths, including homicides, suicides, accidental gun deaths and legal intervention involving firearms. The states at the top of the chart — Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey — are listed as having tough restrictions, based on seven kinds of criteria. The states at the bottom — Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Wyoming — have virtually none of these restrictions.
But even in this chart, there are some outliers. New Hampshire and Vermont, for instance, have few gun restrictions but also have relatively low rates of gun deaths.
Gun rights advocates have disputed some of National Journal’s criteria as arbitrary and haphazard. John R. Lott Jr., a gun rights analyst, noted that California, Illinois and Washington are coded by National Journal as states without “stand your ground” laws — which permit the use of deadly force in self-defense in public. A footnote says that court decisions in those states have in effect permitted “stand your ground” actions with no requirement to retreat. Lott asks: “Who cares whether you have ‘stand your ground’ provisions because of a law or court precedents?”
In any case, we were curious to see what would happen if suicides were removed from the totals. After all, rural areas (which may have less-restrictive gun laws) have a lot of suicides of older single men who become lonely. So we ran the numbers — and in some cases, it made a huge difference.
Alaska, ranked 50th on the National Journal list, moved up to 25th place. Utah, 31st on the list, jumped to 8th place. Hawaii remains in 1st place, but the top six now include Vermont, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Iowa and Maine. Indeed, half of the 10 states with the lowest gun-death rates turn out to be states with less-restrictive gun laws.
Meanwhile, Maryland — a more urban state — fell from 15th place to 45th, even though it has very tough gun laws. Illinois dropped from 11th place to 38th, and New York fell from 3rd to 15th.
Here’s a chart showing the results of our research. We highlighted the 25 states deemed to have the least-restrictive gun laws, based on criteria from a 2013 paper looking at gun-death data between 2007 and 2010 assembled by a team headed by Eric W. Fleegler, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital. (The paper’s criteria, which assigned each state a score based on gun purchasing and ownership requirements during the period studied, is also disputed by gun rights advocates such as Lott, but this seemed the easiest way to distinguish the states.)
State gun death rates, minus suicides
Clearly, most of the states at the bottom appear to have less-restrictive gun laws. But the results are much more jumbled than the National Journal approach of counting every gun death.
Fleegler, however, argues that the results, as shown in his paper, still support the case that more gun laws result in lower death rates. He likened the results to an antibiotic that would work for 80 percent of the people who take it. “Some people do not have the same response, just as not every states has the same response to gun laws,” he said.
He said that in particular the results for rural states change when suicides are removed because they have lower a population density and, therefore, less opportunities for conflict.
By contrast, Lott says that it is wrong to assume correlation equals causation. Fleeger’s paper acknowledged that it “could not determine cause-and-effect relationship.”
“States such as Hawaii have had low firearm homicide rates as far back as we have data, long before they have the gun laws that are on the books,” Lott said. “The issue here should really be whether gun control laws caused crime rates to fall relative to other states after they have been implemented.” He says his own research suggests there is little difference.
The Pinocchio Test
Obama first stated his claim as a fact — “we know” — but mitigated it with “tend to have.” But then he followed up the statement with a very definite claim: “So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence.”
This is a classic situation in which a politician bases a statement on a study, but then exaggerated the conclusions to justify a policy. It also lacks context because the results change, sometimes dramatically, when suicides are removed from the gun deaths. (Alaska moving from 50th to 25th, Utah going from 31st to 8th and Maryland falling from 15th to 45th are rather dramatic swings.)
While gun suicides are certainly a serious issue — and account for more than 60 percent of gun deaths — the evidence is mixed on whether restricting gun purchases would affect the overall suicide rate. In any case, the president’s policy proposals are aimed at mass shootings, not suicides.
Moreover, the counting of gun laws is certainly open to interpretation, so that also affects the outcome. It’s not enough to count laws to figure out the reasons why gun deaths are lower in one state than another. One would need to specifically determine whether certain laws had an effect, over time, on the gun-death rate in a state.
We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, but in the end settled on Two. Most of the states at the bottom appear to have less-restrictive gun laws even when calculated without suicides. So that’s an interesting data point. But the evidence is not as clear cut as the president claims.
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19. To curb gun violence, Hillary Clinton has a plan
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/us/to ... ction.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/nv9jnze
To Curb Gun Violence, Hillary Clinton Has a Plan for Possible Executive Action
By Maggie Haberman
October 5, 2015
On the heels of the nation’s latest mass shooting, Hillary Rodham Clinton will issue proposals on Monday to curb gun violence, including holding out the potential of using executive actions.
Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat, will announce the new proposals in separate town-hall-style events in New Hampshire, a state with a Democratic senator who has voted for some gun-control measures but where there is a thriving gun and hunting culture.
The proposals will come just days after Mrs. Clinton said she wanted to lead a “national movement” to counter the National Rifle Association, after another mass shooting, this time at a college in Oregon, left nine people dead. Mrs. Clinton has made gun control a constant in her campaign speeches since the Charleston, S.C., shootings in which nine black congregants were killed.
The proposal most likely to generate controversy is using executive action to close the so-called gun show loophole, if efforts to pass new measures in Congress do not succeed, according to a campaign aide to Mrs. Clinton, who asked for anonymity to lay out the plans before the candidate does.
Most of the ideas would face a steep battle with the Republican-led Congress, and efforts to pass new gun restrictions in the wake of the murders of 20 schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012 failed in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Since then, there have been a number of mass shootings, including the most recent, at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., last week. But her proposals are in sharp contrast to the Republican presidential hopefuls, and she is making them as her main rival in the primary polls, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has gained ground against her, but has also come under scrutiny among Democrats for some gun control policies he has opposed in the past.
A central issue in Mrs. Clinton’s proposals are the background checks on prospective gun buyers, which are required for retailers at stores. But under federal law, they are not required at gun shows or over the Internet with private sellers.
Under Mrs. Clinton’s plan, she would use administrative powers to make anyone selling a substantial number of guns declared “in the business” of firearms dealing, and subject to the same rules as retailers, if Congress does not act, according to the campaign aide.
It was not immediately clear what the bar for being declared “in the business” would be. And use of executive action in connection with guns is certain to face criticism from staunch supporters of the Second Amendment. It is also likely to be applauded by Democrats who have grown weary of gridlock in Congress.
Earlier in the evening, another Democratic candidate, Martin O’Malley, urged Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders to embrace policies he supports, including a reinstatement of the lapsed federal assault weapons ban. That does not appear to be among those she will suggest.
Mrs. Clinton will suggest urging Congress to end another loophole, by which people with felony records who should be barred from obtaining a gun can get one if their background check is not completed within three days. That loophole was how Dylann Roof, the accused killer in Charleston, obtained his weapon despite a felony conviction for a drug arrest.
Since the Charleston shooting, Mrs. Clinton has frequently talked about gun control, but her comments have grown stronger. On Friday, a day after the shootings in Oregon, Mrs. Clinton said she wanted to lead a “national movement” that would counter the National Rifle Association.
“Here’s what the other side counts on,” Mrs. Clinton said. “They count on really having an intense, dedicated group that scare politicians and say, ‘We will vote against you.’ ”
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20. Trump: Armed teachers could have stopped massacre [VIDEO]
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Member Jim Dacey emailed me this:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/03/politics/ ... index.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/ozohrfc
Trump: Armed teachers could have stopped Oregon massacre
By Eugene Scott, CNN
October 4, 2015
Washington (CNN)Donald Trump said Saturday that had teachers been armed at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, the deadly shooting there this week would not have been as tragic.
Trump has previously cited mental health issues, not guns, as the biggest cause of shootings in the U.S. But his comments on Saturday are his most extensive and emotionally charged about firearms since he launched his campaign in June, as he spoke about his personal gun ownership and elicited his biggest applause of the afternoon in discussing gun rights.
"By the way, it was a gun-free zone," he said at a campaign event in Franklin, Tennessee. "Let me tell you, if you had a couple teachers with guns in that room, you would have been a hell of a lot better off."
Trump went on to say he has a license to carry a gun in New York, and if someone attacks him, he will respond.
"In fact, I have a license to carry in New York, can you believe that? Nobody knows that," he said.
"Can you imagine? Somebody says, 'There's Trump, he's easy pickings.' What'd you'd say?" Trump said, mimicking holding a gun with his hand.
Nine people were killed and nine others were injured in Thursday's shooting. Law enforcement officials on Saturday said Chris Harper-Mercer, the shooter behind the deadly rampage, killed himself after exchanging gunfire with authorities.
Trump's suggestion for an armed presence on school grounds isn't new. In the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting in 2012, National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre called for armed security at schools across America.
A strong gun-rights advocate
Trump came out as a strong gun-rights supporter in a position paper he released last month.
"The Second Amendment to our Constitution is clear. The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon. Period," he said.
Trump then recommended expanding the right to carry.
"The right of self-defense doesn't stop at the end of your driveway. That's why I have a concealed carry permit and why tens of millions of Americans do too. That permit should be valid in all 50 states," he wrote.
In July, Trump also called for an end to gun-free zones in the wake of the shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that left four Marines and one sailor dead.
But the day after Thursday's massacre, Trump said if he became president, he doesn't expect to halt all mass shootings because there will always be people that society can't stop.
"You're going to have these things happen and it's a horrible thing to behold, horrible," Trump said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"It's not politically correct to say that, but you're going to have difficulty and that will be for the next million years, there's going to be difficulty and people are going to slip through the cracks," Trump added. "What are you going to do, institutionalize everybody?"
Those comments echo ones he made shortly after two journalists were shot to death on live television in August, when he said he was in favor of addressing mental health issues to prevent future tragedies.
"This isn't a gun problem, this is a mental problem," Trump told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day." "It's not a question of the laws, it's really the people.”
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21. Napolitano: The right to shoot tyrants, not deer
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Executive Member Dave Vann emailed me this:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... -not-deer/
or
http://tinyurl.com/b8gx358
NAPOLITANO: The right to shoot tyrants, not deer
The Second Amendment is the guarantee of freedom
By Andrew P. Napolitano
January 10, 2013
The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. Yet the progressives in both political parties stand ready to use the coercive power of the government to interfere with the exercise of that right by law-abiding persons because of the gross abuse of that right by some crazies in our midst.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, he was marrying the nation at its birth to the ancient principles of the natural law that have animated the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. Those principles have operated as a brake on all governments that recognize them by enunciating the concept of natural rights.
As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the Father, we are perfectly free just as He is. Thus, the natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government. As our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. A natural right is an area of individual human behavior — like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy — immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.
The essence of humanity is freedom. Government — whether voted in peacefully or thrust upon us by force — is essentially the negation of freedom. Throughout the history of the world, people have achieved freedom when those in power have begrudgingly given it up. From the assassination of Julius Caesar to King John’s forced signing of the Magna Carta, from the English Civil War to the triumph of the allies at the end of World War II, from the fall of communism to the Arab Spring, governments have permitted so-called nobles and everyday folk to exercise more personal freedom as a result of their demands for it and their fighting for it. This constitutes power permitting liberty.
The American experience was the opposite. Here, each human being is sovereign, as the colonists were after the Revolution. Here, the delegation to the government of some sovereignty — the personal dominion over self — by each American permitted the government to have limited power in order to safeguard the liberties we retained. Stated differently, Americans gave up some limited personal freedom to the new government so it could have the authority and resources to protect the freedoms we retained. Individuals are sovereign in America, not the government. This constitutes liberty permitting power.
Yet we did not give up any natural rights; rather, we retained them. It is the choice of every individual whether to give them up. Neither our neighbors nor the government can make those choices for us, because we are all without the moral or legal authority to interfere with anyone else’s natural rights. Since the government derives all of its powers from the consent of the governed, and since we each lack the power to interfere with the natural rights of another, how could the government lawfully have that power? It doesn’t. Were this not so, our rights would not be natural; they would be subject to the government’s whims.
To assure that no government would infringe the natural rights of anyone here, the Founders incorporated Jefferson’s thesis underlying the Declaration into the Constitution and, with respect to self-defense, into the Second Amendment. As recently as two years ago, the Supreme Court recognized this when it held that the right to keep and bear arms in one’s home is a pre-political individual right that only sovereign Americans can surrender and that the government cannot take from us, absent our individual waiver.
There have been practical historical reasons for the near universal historical acceptance of the individual possession of this right. The dictators and monsters of the 20th century — from Stalin to Hitler, from Castro to Pol Pot, from Mao to Assad — have disarmed their people. Only because some of those people resisted the disarming were all eventually enabled to fight the dictators for freedom. Sometimes they lost. Sometimes they won.
The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.
We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense. (Imagine the howls of protest if permission were required as a precondition to exercising the freedom of speech.) Today, the limitations on the power and precision of the guns we can lawfully own not only violate our natural right to self-defense and our personal sovereignties, they assure that a tyrant can more easily disarm and overcome us.
The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.
Most people in government reject natural rights and personal sovereignty. Most people in government believe that the exercise of everyone’s rights is subject to the will of those in the government. Most people in government believe that they can write any law and regulate any behavior, not subject to the natural law, not subject to the sovereignty of individuals, not cognizant of history’s tyrants, but subject only to what they can get away with.
Did you empower the government to impair the freedom of us all because of the mania and terror of a few?
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22. Rush Limbaugh: Concealed carry is peace
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Member Clayton Rhoades emailed me this:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... ual-level/
or
http://tinyurl.com/on95624
RUSH LIMBAUGH: CONCEALED CARRY IS PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH ON INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
by AWR Hawkins
October 5, 2015
On October 5 Rush Limbaugh described concealed carry as a “deterrent” and an example of peace through strength on the individual level.
He segued into these comments by pointing to the ease with which Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump talks about having a concealed carry permit from New York.
Limbaugh said:
A concealed carry permit, if you think one’s necessary — and by the way, they’re not easy to get. I know a lot of people in New York who have them, and it’s quite an involved process. But once you have one, one of the values in it is having people know that you do because that, in itself, is its own deterrent. What does that say, by the way? The fact that you have a concealed carry permit and you don’t mind if people know? That’s the deterrent.
Limbaugh then explained the deterring factor of having a permit to carry a gun on one’s person–and especially the deterrent of bad guys knowing you might be carrying one–by juxtaposing it with having superior military strength to ensure peace. He focused on debates surrounding the military’s purchase of a fleet of B-2 bombers–the last time such a purchase was made–and he talked of how liberals would call into his show and argue that the purchase of the bombers was a waste of money because we would never have to use them. Limbaugh said he shocked one such caller by telling him he was was exactly right; that we would never have to use our military if we amassed one sufficient in power to assure our enemies that they could not survive challenging it.
He said the same thing happened with the Stealth Bomber. Limbaugh said he asked one “liberal caller” if he knew why we were building the Stealth Bomber, and the caller said, “Why?” at which point Limbaugh responded by saying, “So, we hope, we never have to use it.”
This is peace through strength, the approach to military power best exemplified by Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan–the approach that says we will build a military so great and powerful that our enemies will dare not trifle with it. Limbaugh says that concealed carry is the same philosophy at work on an individual basis. It is Donald Trump moving in and about New York City without hiding the fact that he might be armed. And it is the farmer in Kansas, the miner in West Virginia, the rancher in West Texas, and the liquor store clerk in Louisville, Kentucky— not hiding the fact that they might be armed and prepared to use their Second Amendment rights to defend their lives and the lives of their families should a dire threat show itself.
It is no irony that our Founding Fathers were explicit in saying the rights protected by the Second Amendment are “necessary to the security of a free State.”
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23. The best kind of mass shooting
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http://americanvision.org/12546/the-bes ... -shooting/
or
http://tinyurl.com/othobxx
The best kind of mass shooting
by Dr. Joel McDurmon
October 5, 2015
This is a story about the best kind of mass shooting. . . .
. . . the kind that was prevented by an armed citizen before it could even take place.
That’s right. This is the kind of story that doesn’t make national news, and even when it does, the anti-gun mediaites refuse even to mention the role of the concealed-carrying citizen. Sickeningly dishonest.
A disgruntled man was demanding a church help him because his children had recently been taken away from him. When the church could do nothing, the guy took it personally, informed the pastor to call a TV station, then left.
The church suspected something was up. The man returned during church service. The pastor’s grandson witnessed him pulling a shotgun from his trunk. They immediately locked the church doors. The man persisted. He eventually kicked his way through. It was an almost certain tragedy. Except.
Except, the grandson was also carrying a concealed handgun. When the offender burst through the door, he was immediately met by the business end of a defensive handgun and told to stop.
Startled, he froze. That’s when a half dozen men, including the 71-year old pastor, jumped on him and took the shotgun away. He was held until the sheriff arrived, and then the perpetrator was hauled off.
Every time a shooting occurs like the recent one at Umpqua Community College, liberal politicians and pundits start blaming the guns and calling for laws to restrict gun ownership and carry. It’s about the dumbest correlation that could be made. Guns don’t kill people. Hateful, vengeful, envious, and deranged people kill people. It situations where a deranged individual intends harm, he or she will do it no matter what laws are on the books. In these situations, guns are not the problem, they are the best solution to the problem. They are the best prevention.
The simple fact is this: guns save lives, and they do so frequently. And since guns save lives, Christians should consider gun ownership, skill, and carry as pro-life issues. Anyone who wishes to take away or limit guns is anti-life.
In addition to this, consider a few facts:
First, the gunman at this church brandished a shotgun—not a handgun or the legendary “assault rifle.” No amount of the kind of gun restrictions liberals continually propose would have touched this case or prevented the potential tragedy. On the contrary, it was a handgun that prevented the danger.
Lesson: guns prevent crimes. Guns save lives.
Second, the gunman here was already a convicted felon, and thus was already legally forbidden to own or carry a gun.
Lesson: gun laws don’t stop criminals from getting guns. Gun laws prevent innocent people from arming themselves against criminals, and thus gun laws are pro-crime and anti-life.
Every time a shooting like Umpqua occurs, conservatives rightly point these things out. Liberals retort with dismissive skepticism: when has concealed carry ever stopped a mass shooting, they demand. On this they are willfully ignorant.
The story outlined above is just one of several mass shootings that were (very likely) prevented. Eugene Volokh lists several more here. He also rightly notes that mass shooting incidents make up less than one percent of the homicide rate. Guns can also help prevent much of the other 99 percent as well, not to mention other violent crimes.
Now, liberals and other misanthropes may argue that we don’t know for certain that in such cases a mass shooting was prevented. Since the gunman in the church, for example, did not actually follow through with any actions, we cannot accurately say it would have been a mass killing, and thus it is wrong to say that a mass shooting was in fact prevented. Well, it is admittedly impossible to tell exactly what would have happened, but the setting makes it pretty well likely, doesn’t it? And arguments like this make our point for us anyway: whatever was going to happen, it didn’t happen. It was prevented. When handguns and defensive weapons are in place, mass shootings can be prevented.
And thus this is the best type of mass shooting: the ones that never happen to begin with. And the ones that never happen to begin with will only not happen when there is lethal defensive force in position to stop it when it does.
Christians who are concerned with tragedies like this need to take gun ownership, training, and concealed carry seriously. It is an investment of time and money, but it is one that saves lives. One could argue that for the capable, and certainly for those who have souls in their care, it is a duty.
Concealed carry is a pro-life issue. Christians need to treat it as such.
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24. Guide to gun control
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VCDL Vice President Jim Snyder emailed me this:
http://www.mngopac.org/guide_to_gun_control
or
http://tinyurl.com/o2bbewb
Guide to Gun Control
by Bryan Strawser
October 02, 2015
Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of the victims of today's shooting in Oregon.
In the wake of tragedies, we would always prefer that the victims and loved ones be able to mourn, heal, and console in peace, free from opportunists trying to capitalize on a tragedy.
Unfortunately, just moments after the shooting, before any facts of the incident had come to light, the anti-rights crowds were celebrating an opportunity to push their agenda.
The fact remains that none of their solutions would have prevented this incident, or any of the other incidents they have taken advantage of call for restrictions of your rights.
Blaming the tool is the easy way out.
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25. [OR] Pastor's daughter thought she would die
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The horror of being in a gun-free zone when a murderer has a gun.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/10 ... n-rampage/
or
http://tinyurl.com/o3erzmt
Pastor’s Daughter, Face Down and Frozen on Floor as Dying Classmate Bled on Her Clothes, Thought She Would Die as Oregon Gunman Went on Rampage
by Dave Urbanski
October 4, 2015
ROSEBURG, Ore. (AP) — The gunman had already shot several students at close range when he stood inches from Lacey Scroggins and demanded she stand up.
It was only the fourth day of community college for the 18-year-old aspiring surgeon. She was face down, her head tucked between her outstretched arms, among dead and dying classmates.
Scroggins could hear someone gurgling. She felt the weight of mortally wounded Treven Anspach against her, the 20-year-old’s blood flowing onto her clothing.
She prayed and played dead, frozen to the floor. The killer stepped over her and shot someone else.
In a rampage lasting about 10 minutes, Christopher Harper-Mercer took nine lives Thursday morning in chilling fashion before killing himself as officers closed in, placing the small town of Roseburg among settings that have become infamous for inexplicable violence.
In addition to slain English professor Lawrence Levine, the dead and nine wounded were students young and old — some high school aged, others just beginning college and some starting over after a broken marriage, drug abuse or in hopes of a new career.
The rural Umpqua Community College on nearly 100 acres of pastureland along the North Umpqua River has about 3,200 students in this southwestern Oregon community, where the struggling timber industry is no longer seen as a path to the future. Its website said it offered “a peaceful, safe atmosphere.”
The school term had just begun and Levine’s 10 a.m. introductory composition class was underway when Mercer-Harper arrived on campus not with books, but with a small arsenal of weapons that included five handguns, a semi-automatic rifle, five magazines of ammunition and a flak jacket.
The young man was described as an awkward loner who had flunked out of Army basic training and lived with his mother. His social media profile suggested he was frustrated with organized religion and had studied mass shootings.
Those who knew him said they never expected what would happen next.
Scroggins heard a pop and noticed a hole in a classroom window, according to a detailed account provided by her father, Pastor Randy Scroggins.
Harper-Mercer, 26, who was enrolled in the class but had showed no signs of anger two days before, entered, fired several rounds from a handgun and told everyone to get on the floor.
Natalie Robbins was in another writing class nearby in Snyder Hall when she heard the first muffled gunshot that sounded more like a table had been overturned.
“We heard this first BOOM,” Robbins said. “About 45 seconds later we hear boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Six shots. In the middle of that is when my instructor said, ‘We have to get the hell out of here.’”
She and other classmates bolted out of the room toward the campus center.
The first 911 call was made at 10:38 a.m., but those on campus were not immediately alerted.
Biology professor Ken Carloni was sitting in his office in the science building next door when a colleague entered with a startled groundskeeper who said there was a shooting.
They locked the building, gathered about 40 students from the surrounding classrooms and huddled with them in a small hallway with no outside-facing windows.
Back in Snyder Hall, Lacey Scroggins didn’t see her teacher fall, but Anastasia Boylan did.
The first-year student told her family from the hospital that Levine was shot at point-blank range.
“She was crying and saying, ‘Grandma, he killed my teacher! He killed my teacher! I saw it!” Janet Willis said, in recounting her granddaughter’s story.
In the chaos that followed, Boylan found herself on the classroom floor, bleeding next to a friend who had also been shot.
Harper-Mercer began singling them out for slaughter, telling them to stand and state their religion.
Both Boylan and Scroggins said the gunman shot Christians in the head and wounded others, though there was at least one account that said he treated all religions with the same cold response.
“She hears the shooter in front say, ‘You, in that orange shirt, stand up!’” Randy Scoggins said. “‘What religion are you? Are you a Christian?’ He says ‘Yes.’ She hears another pop, and she hears a thud as he drops to the ground.”
Rand McGowan, who was shot in the hand, told his mother it didn’t seem the shooter was deliberately targeting Christians.
“It was more so saying, ‘You’re going to be meeting your maker,’ ” Stephanie Salas said.
Boylan, 18, was in terrible pain when Harper-Mercer told her to stand. She had been shot through the spine and a bullet was lodged in her back.
“Hey blonde girl,” he said, according to her grandmother. “Get up! I want to talk to you!”
Like Scroggins, she played dead and Mercer left her there.
He showed little mercy to others.
At one point, Chris Mintz, an Army veteran and student who helped evacuate his classroom nearby, sounded a fire alarm in another building and ran back to help. He was shot as he came through the classroom door.
Mintz asked the gunman to stop, saying it was his son’s birthday. The gunman opened fire again, shooting Mintz but somehow missing vital organs. Mintz lived.
The gunman told a woman to beg for her life, Randy Scroggins said. She did and he shot her anyway.
One woman tried to show sympathy for the shooter, saying she was sorry for whatever happened to him.
“He said, ‘I bet you are, but it’s not enough.’ And with that, he shot her,” Randy Scroggins said as he began to cry.
Harper-Mercer herded people to the center of the room and shot them as they were lying down.
Perhaps in a reference to the afterlife, he announced: “Don’t anybody worry. We will all be together in just a moment,” Scroggins said.
McGowan, 18, managed to stay alive by staying as still as possible and avoiding eye contact with the shooter, his mother recounted.
Then his phone began to vibrate in his pocket. His older brother was calling.
“Rand was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’ and said ‘Thank you Lord! My phone was on vibrate,’” his mother, Salas, said. “If it had rang, he would have been picked out.”
Harper-Mercer singled out a “lucky one” that he wouldn’t kill and directed him to stand in the corner of the classroom to deliver something to law enforcement, according to Bonnie Schaan, the mother of Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, 16, who was seriously wounded and had a kidney removed.
Police said he left behind a manifesto. That may offer some insight into what propelled him, but at this point they have not released details of what it said.
Roseburg police officers arrived within six minutes of the first call for help. Two minutes later, they were in a shootout with Harper-Mercer.
Lacey Scroggins said she heard a burst of gunfire and then the shooter said one last thing.
“You got me. I’ve had enough. I quit,” her father recounted.
And then it was silent.
Lacey Scroggins had thought it was her day to die, she told her father. But she was not hurt.
She got up and began tending the wounded, fashioning her scarf as a tourniquet on the limb of a bleeding woman.
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26. Mark Kelly can't name a single gun law that would stop shooting
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No surprises here.
Member Walter Jackson emailed me this:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/10/ ... -shooting/
or
http://tinyurl.com/pq2y8wb
MARK KELLY CAN’T NAME A SINGLE GUN LAW THAT WOULD HAVE STOPPED OREGON SHOOTING
by Trent Baker
October 4, 2015
Mark Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was injured in a mass shooting, is the founder of Americans for Responsible Solutions, a group in favor of tighter firearm restrictions and appeared on Sunday’s “State of the Union” on CNN.
In reaction to the Oregon shooting, Kelly told host Jake Tapper that the United States has “loopholes” that make it “easy” for the mentally ill and felons to get their hands on guns.
When Tapper asked him what gun laws would have prevented the Oregon shooting or the other recent mass shootings, Kelly explained that there “isn’t a specific law,” but a combination of “some really common sense things that Americans support,” like requiring background checks or identifying the mentally ill.
“You know, with individual events, sometimes there isn’t a specific law that you can point to that would prevent a tragedy like this from happening, but with a combination of some really common sense things that most Americans support, you know, stuff like let’s require a background check before anyone gets a gun and let’s try to get people identified as mentally ill if they are dangerously mentally ill, then let’s get that information to the National Criminal Background Check system, which is managed by the FBI. Often in the case of these mass shootings, if there were a couple components, if we did things better, some of these tragedies could be prevented.”
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27. [OR] Family has message about gun control and the 2nd amendment
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/10 ... our-minds/
or
http://tinyurl.com/qhu2qx4
Family of Oregon Shooting Victim Has a Message About Gun Control and the Second Amendment: ‘None of Us Have Changed Our Minds’
by Billy Hallowell
October 5, 2015
The family of a teenager who was seriously injured during the Umpqua College shooting on Thursday said that, despite what she went through, they still oppose additional gun control measures and remain “pro-Second Amendment.”
“We’re pro-Second Amendment, pro guns,” Jesse Fitzgerald, brother of attack victim Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, told the Daily Mail. “My sister, my mother, my whole family are all in favor. We were talking about it in the hospital and none of us have changed our minds.”
Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, 16, lost one of her kidneys following Thursday’s attack and remains hospitalized. He said that, in the wake of the tragic rampage, his sister’s views have also not changed on the issue, the outlet reported.
“We should have teachers trained in non-lethal ways to take people down. There is surely a way to defend kids at school,” said Jesse Fitzgerald. “Armed guards on campuses maybe.”
As for his sister, who has a tough recovery ahead, he called for prayers and noted that his family setup a GoFundMe account to help raise $10,000 for her medical care; the account had already brought in $13,000 as of early Monday morning.
As the Daily Mail reported, the Fitzgeralds aren’t the ones to come out against additional gun control measures, as the family of Quinn Cooper, 18, who was killed during the attack at Umpqua College, also spoke out against using the incident to advance gun control.
“We need to be able to protect ourselves as a community and as a nation,” the Cooper family said in a statement released after the shooting. “Please don’t let this horrible act of insanity become about who should or shouldn’t have a gun.”
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28. Gun-free zones 'lead lambs to the slaughter'
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Member Walter Jackson emailed me this:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/10/ ... slaughter/
or
http://tinyurl.com/njlh8zv
CNN’S HOUCK: GUN-FREE ZONES ‘LEAD LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER’
by Pam Key
October 5, 2015
Monday on “CNN Newsroom,” law enforcement analyst Harry Houck said that he has a “big problem” with “gun-free zones” like the Oregon college location of last week’s tragic shooting.
Houck said, “One big problem I have here is that this is a gun-free zone, all right, and the fact that, that maybe if security officers were there that were armed, they could have been able to engage this guy with their weapons, and maybe we could have prevented some of this carnage. But what we’ve learned and a lot of people have known throughout the years, is that gun-free zones, all they do is lead lambs to the slaughter. And that’s what happened here.”
He continued, “If I was a parent, and my kid went to that school, I’d be talking to that administration and say, ‘What is the problem here? Is this just your hatred for guns, is why there’s no guns here at this school? Or is it something else?’ And I want to know why, and I want the school’s responsibility.”
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29. Gun control is killing us: Opposing view
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2 ... /73344272/
or
http://tinyurl.com/ozoxvqe
Gun control is killing us: Opposing view
by Erich Pratt
October 4, 2015
Gun-free zones are the problem.
Our hearts go out to the victims and the families of the Umpqua Community College shooting. Last week’s events were very tragic, and all Americans are mourning with the residents of Oregon.
But most Americans find it very offensive to hear the president use a tragedy like this and instantly turn it into a political opportunity.
The White House is calling for “common sense” gun control, which is insane, given that the criminally minded don’t obey the law.
Every public mass shooting since 1950, except for two, has occurred in a gun-free zone. This shooting is no different.
The Umpqua Community College is a gun-free zone, as are the locations of many recent shootings: the Lafayette, La., theater; the Charleston, S.C., church; the military recruiting center in Tennessee.
Guns were outlawed at all these locations, and yet the killers ignored the bans. Plus, the shooters passed background checks — as did the Oregon shooter, who passed several background checks in purchasing his firearms.
Albert Einstein defined “insanity” as doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Clearly, the call for more gun control is insane — it doesn’t work.
And that is why Gun Owners of America agrees with the 86% of police who say these types of incidents would be prevented if the potential victims were not disarmed.
Consider just a partial list of the locations where armed citizens have stopped bad guys in their tracks over the past year: in a bar in Youngstown, Ohio; on a street corner in Chicago; at a barber shop in Philadelphia; in a church in Florida; at a food processing plant in Oklahoma; and at a hospital in Darby, Pa.
And then, there was the attempted mass shooting in 2012 at the Clackamas mall in Oregon. When a gunman began killing people in the mall, Nick Meli drew his concealed firearm and pointed it at the gunman, thus spooking him into taking his own life.
Nick Meli was breaking the “no guns policy” at the mall, but there are many survivors who are glad he did.
Gun-free zones are the problem. Let’s repeal them.
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30. Dear 'Gun Free Zone' campus wizards
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Member Clayton Rhoades emailed me this:
http://townhall.com/columnists/douggile ... y-n2060873
or
http://tinyurl.com/nzo6d7e
Dear 'Gun Free Zone' Campus Wizards: Nine Kids Died Because Of Your Stupid Policy
byDoug Giles
October 04, 2015
Last Friday night I was at my favorite cigar bar watching the news of the Umpqua Community College massacre. Like you, my buddies and I were pissed off, sad and sick to our stomachs. Three things, in particular, were ticking us off regarding this senseless slaughter.
They were ...
1. Another “Gun Free Zone” Epic Fail.
2. Christians Were Targeted.
3. Apparently Only One Dude Out Of A Couple Of Dozen Fought Back.
Here's my thoughts regarding the foul aforementioned.
GUN FREE ZONES.
I know this will be too difficult for your typical abecedarian leftist to grasp but ... If there had been a good guy with a gun on campus, who was trained, licensed and allowed to carry, he could have sent that murderous spawn of Satan to an early hell where he could slow roast for all eternity. Boom. Problem solved.
Unfortunately, there was no concealed weapon in the possession of a concerned citizen to stop this demonic dipstick because guns are disallowed on that campus. How cute. How PC of UCC. I bet Obama really loves you.
Oh, by the way, your “gun free zone” rule was obviously a bad idea. Like in: "a very bad idea." Like in: "Nine Christian kids were shot in the head", bad idea.
Did you get that, Umpqua? Nine dead. As in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine ... dead. All because you don't value self-defense, the Second Amendment or the lives of the kids whose parents pay your bills.
If I were one of the parents who had my child senselessly slaughtered on your campus, I'd sue your politically correct butt off. I think places like yours should no longer be left off the litigious hook. You're culpable because you could have prevented and yet … you didn't. You chose stupidity over common sense and you should pay ... heavily. I think a precedent should be set. Why not start with you, UCC?
Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. You did do all you could do. Silly me. You had one Barney Fife security cop with pepper spray and a plastic badge to protect 3000 students when a mass-murderer, with multiple weapons, strode onto your campus ready to kill. Speaking of your security guard, where the heck was he when the crap was hitting the fan? Do tell.
This is simple: Gun Free Zones are target rich environments. That's why I do not frequent them and I'd advise all those reading to do the same.
CHRISTIANS WERE TARGETED.
Dear Christian: Next time a killer asks you, “Are you a Christian?”, please kill that SOB for us all. If you're unable to put him down and you're around other Christians that he intends to slaughter, then have a pre-arranged pact that one of the brethren will grab the shooter and the other saints will beat and choke the Be-Jesus out of him. In Christian love, of course.
For those who think I'm being un-Christlike with that advice, I don't believe that Jesus would have passively allowed for such a slaughter without opening up a giant, Big Gulp sized can of holy whup ass on the perp. And if for some weird reason the real Jesus would be against my advice, then he's going to just have to forgive me because I don't believe in letting a murderous ass-monkey rule and ruin innocent kids' lives. Can I get a witness?!
Oh, and by the way, Obama didn't seem to make too big of a deal over Christians being picked out and slaughtered, did he? Can you imagine his response if it were Muslim kids that were targeted?
ONLY ONE HERO FOUGHT BACK.
What has happened to our culture that one, lone Army vet, namely, Chris Mitz, fought back heroically trying to save other students. Sure he got shot, but there is no telling how many lives he saved grappling with the gun- wielding goon. What has happened to our culture is we have been systematically pussified. And that needs to change, STAT.
Parents, pastors and mentors please … for the love of God ... teach your charges that there is this thing called “sacrifice” and that it is a virtue, especially when utilized in the saving of another precious life.
With that said, I think as long as schools and businesses are going to live with their heads up their backsides in “Gun Free Zones”, there should be “Mass-Murder Drills” mandated in all schools too daft to allow for concealed weapons.
I mean ... why not? In my day, we had them for fire and tornadoes. Mass-murderers are killing way more than fire and twisters are so ... why not have a plan for when a whiny dillweed disgraces your campus with ill-intent? One shooter cannot take on a classroom of thirty who won't put up with his crap.
I know the above is not pretty or pleasant, but when foul zombies can walk into a classroom and kill innocent college students, as far as I’m concerned, the gloves have officially come off. My advice to students, professors and school administrators is to forego the pep rallies for a while and, instead, have a “Stomp the Sh*t Out Of The Next Perp Prep Rally.” You’ve got to unite. Develop a strategy.
Lastly, I can't wait 'til the headlines read: “Killer walks into class to kill Christians and the Christians killed him instead.” Call me simple. Call me a redneck. Call me whatever the heck you wanna call me—but until we allow credible and licensed, proven and protective profs and students to carry a weapon on campus, we will see this murderous madness occur again and again and again.
Long live the right to keep and bear arms.
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(VCDL). VCDL is an all-volunteer, non-partisan grassroots organization
dedicated to defending the human rights of all Virginians. The Right to
Keep and Bear Arms is a fundamental human right.
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VA-ALERT: VCDL Update 11/14/15
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OakRidgeStars
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