Early morning, July 20 - shot rings out in Aurora Colorado

[BoMac]

Not sure where I should put this, so I posted it here:

U.S. tourist’s desire for gun in Calgary park sparks Twitter storm - thestar.com

[deep]

that's enough to make me want to stand my ground
and unload.

[Vincent Vega]

The question didn't get answered: Has he been to the stampede together with his wife?

Reads like pure satire. I hope Kalamazoo police has some psychologists for their police force he could consult with. "20-year old veteran" is an interesting phrase. I always understood veteran as meaning you have been an officer or soldier.

[HBK-79]

This is certainly interesting...

The Truth About Guns

John C. Goodman
Townhall.com
Augst 4, 2012


The tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, has led to a lot of unfortunate misinformation about firearms. Let's try to add some facts to the justified emotion.

Are Some Guns More Dangerous than Others?

The shooter in Aurora had three firearms when he entered the theater: a pump action shotgun, a semiautomatic rifle and a semiautomatic handgun.

In a closed, crowded setting like a movie theater, the shotgun was probably the most lethal of the three. Every shotgun shell can spray a half-dozen or more pellets, each capable of killing or maiming a person. Twelve-gauge shotguns often fire five shells, and sometimes more, before needing to be reloaded. And unlike semiautomatics, they don't typically jam.

Yet in most American cities, just about anybody can buy a shotgun at the drop of a hat. Antigun activists and politicians almost never propose banning them.

Instead, the focus these days is on so-called "assault weapons."

Should We Be Especially Worried About Assault Weapons?

Assault weapons are not usually the weapon of choice. Neither of the two worst shooting sprees in U.S. history involved assault weapons. James Huberty, who killed 20 people at a McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, California, in 1984, used a shotgun, a pistol and a hunting rifle. George Hennard, who killed 22 people at a Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, in 1991, used two ordinary pistols.

Still, gun opponents seem obsessed about them. So what exactly is an "assault weapon"?

What Are Assault Weapons?

You would think that the definition would hinge on a weapon's fire power or its capacity to maim or kill. Not so. Assault weapons are mainly defined by their appearance. As Steve Chapman explained the other day:

Basically, what disqualified a weapon when the short-lived assault weapons ban was in effect was looking like a military weapon. The offensive features included plastic stocks, extended ammunition clips, collapsible butt-stocks, and other decorative devices that made them look like, but not operate as, a fully functional assault rifle.

Contrary to the claims that military-looking weapons are only designed to kill human beings, they are, in fact, the fastest growing segment of the hunting rifle market!

What About Machine Guns?

Most TV commentators who decry assault weapons imply that they are automatic — that you just pull the trigger and bullets start flying. Not so. It has been illegal to buy a machine gun on the open market in the United States for more than 80 years. However, you can obtain one under special permit and there are about 250,000 in private hands.

Now here is something interesting: despite all those guns in private hands, there appears not to be a single instance of a legally owned machine gun being used to commit a crime throughout the entire 80 year period. This illustrates two things: (1) the bumper stickers have it right: guns don't kill, people do; and (2) we can have reasonable restrictions on access to guns without banning them altogether.

That brings us to another obsession: the insistence that guns are useless as tools of self-defense.

Are Guns Useful for Self-Defense?

As it turns out, they are. According to research by renowned Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, guns are used between 800,000 and 2.5 million times every year in self-defense.

Do More Guns Cause More Crime?

In the typical Western movie, everyone has a gun. When they go into a bar, they start drinking. Then, they start insulting each other. Before long, they start shooting each other. It may be good theater, but it's lousy history. Turns out, 19th century Dodge City was more peacful than most American cities are today! Robert Heinlein explained why: "An armed society is a polite society," he wrote.

Overall, some of the most heavily-armed states have very low violent crime rates and vice versa. Also, it appears that when the good guys are armed there is less gun violence. Research by John Lott shows that allowing citizens the right to carry concealed handguns reduces violent crime. In those states that passed right-to-carry concealed handgun laws, the average murder rate dropped from 6.3 per 100,000 to 5.2 per 100,000 nine to 10 years later — about a 1.7% drop in the murder rate per year for 10 years.

In states that enacted right-to-carry laws between 1977 and 1999, the overall occurrence of multiple-victim shootings dropped by a remarkable 67% with deaths and injuries from such shootings plummeting by 75% and 81%, respectively. And since 1997, two of eight school shootings were both stopped by citizens with guns (before police even arrived at the scene).

What Does the International Evidence Show?

Switzerland actually requires young males to keep weapons in their homes, as part of the country's militia. Yet no one has ever accused Switzerland of being a host to Wild West shootouts. Finland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world. Yet it too has a very low rate of violent crime.

The Truth About Guns - John C. Goodman - [page]

[BVS]

Some of what he said is very true...

What Are Assault Weapons?

You would think that the definition would hinge on a weapon's fire power or its capacity to maim or kill. Not so. Assault weapons are mainly defined by their appearance. As Steve Chapman explained the other day:


Quote:
Assault weapons are functionally indistinguishable from ordinary semiautomatic hunting rifles. They don't fire more rapidly, they don't deliver more lethal rounds, and they don't spray bullets. They only look like military arms.

The features that disqualified a gun under the federal ban were ones that didn't affect destructiveness, such as pistol grips and bayonet mounts. If accused [Aurora] killer James Holmes had been prevented from buying this gun, he could have found plenty of others that would have served his purpose just as well.

Basically, what disqualified a weapon when the short-lived assault weapons ban was in effect was looking like a military weapon. The offensive features included plastic stocks, extended ammunition clips, collapsible butt-stocks, and other decorative devices that made them look like, but not operate as, a fully functional assault rifle.

Contrary to the claims that military-looking weapons are only designed to kill human beings, they are, in fact, the fastest growing segment of the hunting rifle market!

But this is very false.

Federal Assault Weapons Ban - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Flash suppressors, detachable clips, pistol grips on shotguns, folding stocks, etc are much more than just cosmetic and aesthetic features they are designed to conceal, be easier to shoot from the hip, and fire MORE rounds quicker and easier.

Now who needs any of these for hunting animals?

I couldn't read after that section, the author is flat out lying.

[MrsSpringsteen]

Just more sadness on top of sadness. She had a five year old son. She was from county Meath in Ireland and came to the US for nursing school

Nurse who aided shooting victims in Aurora, Colo., theater attack drowns - U.S. News

[yolland]

New York Times, Aug. 26

The text message, sent to another graduate student in early July, was cryptic and worrisome. Had she heard of “dysphoric mania,” James Eagan Holmes wanted to know? The psychiatric condition, a form of bipolar disorder, combines the frenetic energy of mania with the agitation, dark thoughts and in some cases paranoid delusions of major depression.

She messaged back, asking him if dysphoric mania could be managed with treatment. Mr. Holmes replied: “It was,” but added that she should stay away from him “because I am bad news.”

It was the last she heard from him. About two weeks later, minutes into a special midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” on July 20, Mr. Holmes, encased in armor, his hair tinted orange, a gas mask obscuring his face, stepped through the emergency exit of a sold-out movie theater here and opened fire. By the time it was over, there were 12 dead and 58 wounded.

Sometime in the spring, he stopped smiling and no longer made jokes during class presentations, his behavior shifting, though the meaning of the changes remained unclear. Packages began arriving at his apartment and at the school, containing thousands of rounds of ammunition bought online, the police say.

Prosecutors said in court filings released last week that Mr. Holmes told a fellow student in March that he wanted to kill people “when his life was over.” In May, he showed another student a Glock semiautomatic pistol, saying he had bought it “for protection.” At one point, his psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, grew concerned enough that she alerted at least one member of the university’s threat assessment team that he might be dangerous, an official with knowledge of the investigation said, and asked the campus police to find out if he had a criminal record. He did not. But the official said that nothing Mr. Holmes disclosed to Dr. Fenton rose to the threshold set by Colorado law to hospitalize someone involuntarily.

He volunteered little information about himself, his interests or what he dreamed of doing with his degree, said one graduate student who, touched by Mr. Holmes’s shyness, tried repeatedly to draw him out. Attempts to engage him in small talk were met with an easy smile and a polite reply—if only a soft-spoken “yo”—but little more. “He would basically communicate with me in one-word sentences,” one member of the neuroscience program said. “He always seemed to be off in his own world, which did not involve other people, as far as I could tell.” In classes, Mr. Holmes arrived early to grab a good seat, his lanky 5-foot-11 frame in jeans and sometimes a “Star Wars” T-shirt. He hardly ever took notes, often staring into the distance as if daydreaming. Uncomfortable when called on by professors, he almost always began his responses with a weary-sounding “Uhhhhhhh.”

But there was little doubt about his intellect. In a grant-writing class, where students were required to grade each other’s proposals, Mr. Holmes wrote thoughtful and detailed comments, one student recalled, giving each paper he was assigned to review a generous grade. “This was the only time I saw an assignment of James’s,” the student said. “Frankly, I was very impressed. I thought his comments were much better than anyone else’s.” In the spring, just months before the shooting, Mr. Holmes turned in a midterm essay that a professor said was “spectacular,” written almost at the level of a professional in the field. The essay was “beautifully written,” the professor said, and “more than I would have expected from a first-year student.”

A longstanding tendency to "communicate...in one-word sentences" has nothing in particular to do with bipolar disorder, AFAIK. It almost comes across as if they mean to pathologize that trait too, and perhaps there's something to that, but if so I'm inadequate to speculate as to why.