Now is not the time to talk about gun control (2 Viewers)

MT15 said:

Tragedy averted. He had RPGs???

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Wow, that's crazy. A whole family of crazies, glad the father was arrested too.

How hard is it to get an RPG? That can't be legally sold, right?

coldseat said:

Wow, that's crazy. A whole family of crazies, glad the father was arrested too.

How hard is it to get an RPG? That can't be legally sold, right?

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Yeah, I don’t know. I would hope not, anyway.

coldseat said:

Wow, that's crazy. A whole family of crazies, glad the father was arrested too.

How hard is it to get an RPG? That can't be legally sold, right?

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MT15 said:

Yeah, I don’t know. I would hope not, anyway.

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Even if they had gotten special legal clearance, my question is were did they get the money for all of that? That's expensive stuff.

If I were investigators, I would bring in the forensic accounting team to figure out where the money to buy the weapons cache came from.

I looked it up. There’s no federal ban on owning an RPG. States vary, though, from outright bans to needing a license. Ugh.

Evidently, in Indiana a state rep came across a group of middle school girls and their chaperone who had come to the Statehouse to talk about better gun safety laws. He thought it would be a good idea to ask them to step off the elevator with him so he could set them straight.

The convo involved him telling them that police weren’t there to protect them so they will have to protect themselves (I’m sure that schools think the police are there to protect the students, or else why are they there?). He personally engaged the chaperone with talk of what would she do if approached by 3-4 men after dark on the way to her car who were laughing about raping and killing her (presumably this is again in front of the students, and oddly specific). Then he decided to flash the gun he was currently carrying to show them all he had a gun on him at that moment. When they still pushed back about gun violence he angrily walked away.

These are young girls who are already worried about gun violence. They were made pretty uncomfortable by his conversation. He was pretty arrogant, IMO, and intended to make them uncomfortable. What a Peice of work.

A bill that would allow teachers and other staff in schools to be armed in the hopes of deterring school shootings drew dozens of people and some emotional testimony to the Nebraska Legislature’s Education Committee on Tuesday.

State Sen. Tom Brewer's bill is among the latest in GOP-led state legislatures across the country embracing bills expanding gun rights.

The Nebraska bill is made up of three parts. It would give local school boards the ability to allow off-duty law enforcement to carry guns onto school property and create detailed maps of schools' buildings and grounds to give to local law enforcement and first responders to use in the event of a school shooting.

It would also allow for teachers or other school staff to be armed, as long as they undertook gun handling and safety training.

The bill is needed in Nebraska's rural districts, Brewer said, where schools can be many miles away from the nearest law enforcement and rarely have access to resource officers that are prevalent in cities like Omaha and Lincoln.

At least 32 states have laws allowing teachers or other school staff to be armed during school hours, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. That includes all of Nebraska's neighboring states, including Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota.

“We are an island that has decided not to protect our children,” he said.

Most of those testifying in favor of the bill focused on its school mapping provision. Even opponents of the bill said they supported its school mapping.

But the sanctioning of armed school staff drew some emotional testimony, including from one teacher who was present for a deadly school shooting in Omaha 13 years ago.

Tim Royers, president of the Millard Education Association, told the committee he was in his school's lunchroom overseeing students on Jan. 5, 2011, when someone announced over the school's speakers, “Code Red.”

Royers and other teachers scrambled to gather as many students as possible and search for a room in which to hide.

“I will never forget the looks on those students’ faces,” he said.

Authorities later said that a 17-year-old student — the son of an Omaha police detective — had been suspended from Millard South High School, but he returned that same day with his father's service revolver. He fatally shot the assistant principal and wounded the school's principal before fatally shooting himself.

In the years since, he has never heard any educators express a desire to be armed, Royer said.

“But I've had plenty of them tell me that a provision like this would drive them out of the profession,” he said to the committee.............

After a teenage gunman killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School in 2018, Texas lawmakers mandated that all school police officers receive training to better prepare them for the possibility of confronting a mass shooter. The law, which required that such training occur only once, didn’t apply to thousands of state and local law enforcement officers who did not work in schools.

Four years later, officers who descended on Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, a vast majority of whom were not school police, repeatedly acted in ways that ran contrary to what active shooter training teaches, waiting 77 minutes to engage the gunman. An investigation published in December by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE revealed that about 30% of the 116 state and local officers who responded in May 2022 did not get active shooter training after graduating from police academies. Of those who had, many received such instruction only once in their careers, which at least eight police training experts say is not enough.

As part of the investigation, the news organizations conducted a nationwide analysis to examine active shooter training requirements and found critical gaps in preparedness between children and law enforcement. While at least 37 states require active shooter-related drills in schools, typically on a yearly basis, no states mandate such training for officers annually.

Instead, decisions about active shooter training are often left to individual school districts and law enforcement departments, creating a patchwork approach in which some proactively provide such instruction and others do not.

The month after the news organizations’ investigation was published, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s office released a scathing report that detailed a slew of failures during the Robb Elementary response. While visiting Uvalde, he told reporters that law enforcement agencies should immediately prioritize active shooter training.

The federal report recommended that officers receive eight hours of such instruction annually. Only Texas, however, comes close to meeting the Department of Justice’s suggested standards, according to the newsrooms’ nationwide analysis. Last year, the state mandated that all officers, not just school police, take 16 hours of active shooter training every two years.

About a dozen states also increased training requirements after the Uvalde shooting, but many continue to fall short of what police training experts say is needed.

The gaps in training requirements begin before officers’ first day on the job.

While police academies in nearly every state require some form of active shooter training, five states — California, Georgia, Ohio, Washington and Vermont — do not require it for all recruits. A spokesperson for the police standards agency in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for the Vermont police standards agency said the police academy curriculum is being reviewed but she could not comment on whether it will expand active shooter training to all officers. Officials with police standards agencies in the other three states said they are considering adding active shooter training to their police academy curriculum.

Once officers graduate from police academies, the lack of training requirements becomes more pronounced.

Only two states — Texas and Michigan — have laws that require active shooter training for all officers once on the job. While Texas requires recurring instruction, training in Michigan is given once after officers graduate from police academies. Some states mandate active shooter training one time in a particular year, leaving out officers who were not employed at the time. Other states require training only for school police, as Texas did before the Uvalde shooting, and only two of them — Illinois and Mississippi — require it more than once................

Hawaii’s Supreme Court refused to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedent on gun rights in an opinion released on Wednesday, declaring that “the spirit of Aloha clashes” with the Second Amendment, which guarantees Americans an individual right to bear arms.

The declaration was made in a decision ruling that a man charged with carrying a firearm without a permit in the state back in 2017 could still be held criminally for that infraction despite a recent Supreme Court decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, that ruled that New York’s concealed-carry application system was unconstitutional.

Its decision was based on the Court’s interpretation of Article I, Section 17 of Hawaii’s constitution, which “mirrors the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

“We read those words differently than the current United States Supreme Court. We hold that in Hawai’i there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public,” began the Court at the top of its opinion before going on to assert that “the spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities.”

They continued:

The history of the Hawaiian Islands does not include a society where armed people move about the community to possibly combat the deadly aims of others.
The Government’s interest in reducing firearms violence through reasonable weapons regulations has preserved peace and tranquility in Hawai’i. A free-wheeling right to carry guns in public degrades other other constitutional rights.
The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, encompasses a right to freely and safely move in peace and tranquility. Laws regulating firearms in public preserve ordered liberty and advance these rights.
There is no individual right to keep and bear arms under Article I, Section 17. So there is no constitutional right to carry a firearm in public for possible self-defense.

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It is unclear to what legal principle the Court’s reference to the “spirit of Aloha” appeals to..............

MT15 said:

Evidently, in Indiana a state rep came across a group of middle school girls and their chaperone who had come to the Statehouse to talk about better gun safety laws. He thought it would be a good idea to ask them to step off the elevator with him so he could set them straight.

The convo involved him telling them that police weren’t there to protect them so they will have to protect themselves (I’m sure that schools think the police are there to protect the students, or else why are they there?). He personally engaged the chaperone with talk of what would she do if approached by 3-4 men after dark on the way to her car who were laughing about raping and killing her (presumably this is again in front of the students, and oddly specific). Then he decided to flash the gun he was currently carrying to show them all he had a gun on him at that moment. When they still pushed back about gun violence he angrily walked away.

These are young girls who are already worried about gun violence. They were made pretty uncomfortable by his conversation. He was pretty arrogant, IMO, and intended to make them uncomfortable. What a Peice of work.

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I had heard about the incident but I thought that he approached them and asked " hey little girls, do you want to see my piece?"

This state is a mess. For governor this year we have our choice of five Republicans and one "democrat" who was a Republican during the last general election.

Eeyore said:

I had heard about the incident but I thought that he approached them and asked " hey little girls, do you want to see my piece?"

This state is a mess. For governor this year we have our choice of five Republicans and one "democrat" who was a Republican during the last general election.

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My sympathies for your state. Of course, Ohio isn’t much better if at all. We put a complete idiot known as J.D.Vance into the senate after he attached himself to Trump’s azz.

Another shooter carrying an AR15:

Houston Megachurch Shooter Had an AR-15 and Brought Her 7-Year-Old Son

Officials said a 36-year-old woman who opened fire at Lakewood Church, which is led by the televangelist Joel Osteen, had a documented history of arrests and mental illness. She was killed by off-duty officers.

www.nytimes.com

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BullSheetBuddha said:

Another shooter carrying an AR15:

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Let’s see…

1) Tots and pears
2) Harrumph about mental illness
3) Cut spending for mental healthcare
4) Take Russian money laundered via the NRA
5) Wash, rinse, repeat.

First time hearing about this
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The Justice Department released a 575-page report last month detailing law-enforcement failures that exacerbated the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The document identifies groups that were first to respond to the shooting, with one glaring omission: a citizen militia called Patriots for America.

Shortly after the gunman was killed on May 24, 2022, members of the Texas-based militia posted footage approximately 40 feet from the shooter's truck - revealing a loaded semi-automatic rifle that investigators had not yet recovered - and 50 feet from an incident command center. Newly verified footage shows that militia volunteers spent at least eight minutes beyond the established police line, recording videos and spreading conspiracy theories from the scene, unimpeded by law enforcement.

Far-right responses to mass shootings create personal safety risks and advance harmful conspiracy theories. When extremists frame themselves as humanitarian or "neighborhood watch" groups, they sow distrust in government agencies and make it easier for sympathizers to mobilize. Previously, emboldened militias and neo-Nazis cosplaying as humanitarians have targeted public officials, threatened unarmed civilians at gunpoint, and even been convicted of murder.

Extremist mobilization to mass casualty events appears to be an emerging pattern; in October 2023, armed neo-Nazis responded to shootings in Lewiston, Maine, and gained access to the gunman's address after officials claimed a secure perimeter was established.

Founded in 2015, Patriots for America (PFA) is a right-wing militia that operates along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Texas-based group claims to defend the border while "working together with law enforcement to rescue minors and children from sex trafficking." The militia was active in neighboring Zavala County when, according to PFA volunteer Natly Denise, its members responded to reports of an incident in nearby Uvalde.

The militia has released footage that shows heavily armed PFA volunteers intercepting migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border as far back as 2021. These videos typically feature camo-clad volunteers, armed with long guns, hiking through remote swathes of southern Texas. In footage of one patrol attributed to PFA's leader, Samuel Hall, and shared by the Western States Center, five migrants are instructed to empty their pockets and unlace their shoes - a harsh tactic employed by immigration enforcement agents to prevent detainees from traversing rough terrain, according to former senior Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd.


Patriots for America volunteers regularly espouse QAnon conspiracy theories online, according to the Tech Transparency Project. This rhetoric often targets migrants and promotes false narratives regarding secret child-exploitation rings. PFA leader Hall even traveled to Juárez, Mexico, to investigate baseless claims that a Christian charity was involved in an international child sex trafficking scheme.

In 2023, Hall sued the McKinney Independent School District in Texas after being banned from its campus for railing against the "distribution of child pornography" in a school board meeting - part of a national campaign by conservatives to ban literature they deem inappropriate.

Hall declined to comment for this story.

This predilection for far-right conspiracies and distrust of federal officials was blatant among the PFA volunteers who responded to the 2022 shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.


In footage uploaded to Instagram at 3:34 p.m. Central time, PFA volunteer Natly Denise and a man identified as independent right-wing journalist Taylor Cramer can be seen driving north on Farm to Market Road 1436 in La Pryor, Texas, toward Uvalde. Denise claimed that Cramer received a "news notification," prompting them to investigate further. By this time, the gunman had killed 19 fourth-grade students and two teachers, and injured 17 others inside Robb Elementary School, according to the Justice Department's report.

In a statement to Rolling Stone, Cramer denied any association between himself and PFA.

"There's some stuff happening with … with all of this." Denise told her Instagram audience of nearly 53,000 followers. "I'm putting it all together, but … we're going to be there very soon."

Less than 26 minutes later, Denise restarts her livestream - this time, from a sidewalk near Uvalde's Robb Elementary School. As she narrates, Denise pans across the scene to reveal PFA associates dressed in camouflage and body armor, and a low roofline appears over her right shoulder. Rolling Stone has verified that the structure is the northwest face of Robb Elementary School................

What in hell are you doing, MO?

bird said:

Let’s see…

1) Tots and pears
2) Harrumph about mental illness
3) Cut spending for mental healthcare
4) Take Russian money laundered via the NRA
5) Wash, rinse, repeat.

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You skipped over some nonsense about her being trans.

FullMonte said:

You skipped over some nonsense about her being trans.

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just wait till they try to ban lgbtq people from owning guns.

Again, what the hell MO?