Houston ‘Active Shooter, Active Shootee’ Incident

Some of you may have seen this incident on your local news; if not, you'll surely see it on your national news.

It's one thing to read/view a story about an active shooter incident in a somewhat upscale residential and commercial neighborhood, the shooting focused first on a very nice condo, then on a tidy strip center with nice stores and a post office. It's another thing altogether to have a direct association with the place, though not with the incident.

I once considered it as a place to live, but the prices were beyond my means. Nonetheless, Stella and I have a pair of PO boxes at the post office in the aforementioned strip center, both boxes left over from our respective independent-contractor days. Stella headed out to work this morning with our rent checks to mail. But her car refused to start: we had to call AAA and buy a new battery.

The delay may have saved Stella's life.

A lawyer whose firm was failing financially filled his Porsche with a lot of guns (yes, he owned and carried them all legally), parked outside the very nice condo which apparently contained his home, took a position behind a large tree, unpacked several guns (handguns and rifles including, it is believed, a semiautomatic) and plenty of ammo and clips... and started shooting. At anyone. People he didn't know. People who just happened to be on the street before sunrise, on the way to work, or taking their kids to school. People driving cars: the shooter pointed straight at their windshields, and once those were shattered, directly in the faces of their drivers and/or passengers. Several neighbors risked their lives, not merely to call 911 but to inform their neighbors face-to-face... yes, the shooter was firing through the windows of his neighbors' condos... that they needed to GET DOWN within their homes, below window level, immediately.

Police and firefighters were quick to respond, literally dozens of cars full of them, equipped with robots on the chance that the crazy was distributing bombs. The neighborhood was basically cordoned off as a crime scene; traffic is still being routed around the area, and residents are observing an obligatory shelter-in-place.

Amazingly, as of the time I began writing this post, none of the victims had died, though one was in critical condition and another in serious condition. It's a good thing Houston has a lot of fine hospitals, which in turn have personnel well-trained in emergency response.

Both of us are safe and well, not even as shaken as people who were actually in the middle of the incident.

I read this week in The Guardian that "half of all guns in the US are owned by 3% of Americans." IMNSHO this is more than a mere statistic; it's a substantive fact regarding gun ownership: no one really needs 17 guns (that's the average among the 3% of gun owners who own half of all individually owned guns) for any legal, sane, societally nondestructive purpose. My farmer Granddad owned two shotguns and two rifles; he and my Dad and I had plenty of guns to go hunting together (I hated that activity), with one to spare if Mom, should she choose to participate. (Do not mock my mother's skills with a firearm! She might return from the grave to haunt you!)

Is it too much to ask that the 3% who own half the guns come in once a year and re-qualify in the use of those weapons? Is it too much to ask that every few years they come in for a psychological screening to show that they still understand the social limitations on the uses of such firepower? Is it too much to restrict automatic and rapid-fire weapons to use by military personnel and police? The 2nd Amendment assures you the right to "keep and bear" arms as part of "[a] well-regulated militia," but I still haven't seen the clause that permits you to use them to shoot your fellow citizens dead because you had a bad day at the office.

Remember: the 2nd Amendment was intended to protect the freedom and personal safety of the citizenry. Modern firearms, used as they are being used in real life in America today, are not contributing at all to that goal.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Get this. The name of the street full of condos is... Law. Oh, the irony!

GOP Adviser Resurrects 2008 ‘Lock-And-Load’ Meme

Josh Marshall voices his concern over the Trump campaign's winking at staffers' and other RWNJs' threats to murder Hillary Clinton. His specific example is the ranting of New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro, an adviser to the Trump campaign on veterans' affairs, who, speaking recently on a RWNJ talk show, said of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, "[Clinton] should be put in the firing line and shot for treason" for her actions regarding Benghazi.

Marshall's primary concern is that Trump and company are "wink-winking" at campaign staffers and spokespeople who make such threats, thus implicitly advocating the assassination of his opponent. One spokesperson for the campaign (see first article linked above) said, "We’re incredibly grateful for [Baldasaro's] support, but we don’t agree with his comments." Wink-wink, indeed; I fully agree with Marshall's assessment of the intended message, and of its direly unacceptable nature.

The only thing Marshall omits (as far as I can tell) is that THIS IS NOT NEW BEHAVIOR FOR THE GOP IN A PRESIDENTIAL RACE. Surely other Democrats remember Sarah Palin's repeated exhortations to "[l]ock and load," delivered to audiences full of gun-toting Republicans more concerned with their personal right to carry than anyone else's right to stay alive.

This is a trend. This is the second consecutive presidential election in which a candidate or his/her surrogates has urged a Republican audience to exercise their Second Amendment right by threatening (at least) to shoot an opposing candidate, or opposing voters, or anyone they don't like the looks of. THE GOP HAS BECOME THE PARTY OF VIOLENCE DIRECTED AGAINST ITS POLITICAL OPPONENTS. I cannot put an end to the threats, but I damned surely can voice my objection to them. America is in theory a representative democracy; WE DO NOT SETTLE DISPUTES ABOUT LEADERSHIP BY MURDERING POLITICAL OPPONENTS. PERIOD!

I am somewhat relieved to see that the Secret Service is investigating Rep. Baldasaro about his naked threat against Secy. Clinton... not that I really expect them to do anything about it, but at least they are making some noises that they will take an "appropriate" action. It's not much, and it won't save Mrs. Clinton from a Glock-toting RWNJ, but it's better than nothing.

NYT Editors: ‘End The Gun Epidemic’

‘End the Gun Epidemic in America,’ they write, in the strongest terms an editorial board can get away with in today's gun-crazed America. I agree, unreservedly. Please read what they wrote. The subhed will do as a sample:

It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.

Indeed. You need a hunting rifle, or even two of them? fine. You need a couple dozen military-style assault weapons and extra-large clips? I don't think so. My thanks to the NYT editorial board for saying so.

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NOTE 12/6/2015 9:14PM CT: Some sort of problem afflicted Blogger for at least an hour that I know about. The service itself and comments appear to be restarting now; viewing is intermittent. Patience, please, and apologies for any trouble you experience(d).

Tom DeLay Wants To Impeach Obama Over Gun Regs. Tom DeLay, F'Chrissake...

Tom DeLay,
not that many years ago

Here's the story; Tom the Crook doesn't like enhanced background checks (which even a lot of conservative gun owners are inclined to accept), and wants to impeach the prez for moving to implement them. And here's part of the wiki on DeLay, as context for any support you may be inclined to give him on any issue.

Some muthafuckas don't deserve your support, ever...

Gun Control: Why We Can't Get There From Here

We all know the list:

• Guns do in fact kill people; autos also often kill people... indeed, most of any day's local evening news in Houston is about who was killed by a gun that day and who was killed by an auto. But we regulate autos and drivers through a fairly dense web of laws, while we regulate guns and shooters very little if at all: there's not even a reasonable effort to address the problem of people killed by guns.
• We have whole departments of motor vehicles to enforce state auto laws; but for firearms, we have overworked bureaucracies that may or may not effectively carry out the scant legally mandated regulations but in no case, it seems, prevent people who shouldn't have access to guns... violent convicted felons, young children, demonstrably emotionally disturbed people, etc. ... from obtaining them. 
• Guns are everywhere until you look for them in the hands of dangerous people; when you do see them there, those people are already busy wreaking havoc in the form of massacres and mass murders. And more massacres. And more mass murders...
• The gun lobby has a sufficiently full treasure chest of arguably indispensable campaign cash and hence a sufficiently large stable of tame members of Congress to prevent the passage of gun laws which the American people, progressive or conservative, R or D, young or old, of either sex, residing in any state, want passed, according to survey after survey.

Everybody wants a change. (Well, almost everyone.) So why can't we get there from here? The Editors at The Nation do a respectable job of explaining why. Read and see if you concur. Gun nuts may as well save the time it takes to read the editorial; I mean, what if they actually ended up learning something...

Guns... Guns... Guns... Guns...Guns... Guns... Guns... Guns...

It must be the Club of Crooks, Cops and Commandos marching along, 'cause it surely isn't the Mickey Mouse Club armed to the teeth...

First, a quote from Michael Moore that has been around the 'net for a while:

Well, I do what I can do in the voting booth, but in Texas, that isn't very damned much.

Leslie Salzillo at Kos provides us with the full quote, originally from Moore's Facebook page in 2014:

With due respect to those who are asking me to comment on last night's tragic mass shooting at UCSB in Isla Vista, CA -- I no longer have anything to say about what is now part of normal American life. Everything I have to say about this, I said it 12 years ago:

We are a people easily manipulated by fear which causes us to arm ourselves with a quarter BILLION guns in our homes that are often easily accessible to young people, burglars, the mentally ill and anyone who momentarily snaps. We are a nation founded in violence, grew our borders through violence, and allow men in power to use violence around the world to further our so-called American (corporate) "interests." The gun, not the eagle, is our true national symbol.

While other countries have more violent pasts (Germany, Japan), more guns per capita in their homes (Canada [mostly hunting guns), and the kids in most other countries watch the same violent movies and play the same violent video games that our kids play, no one even comes close to killing as many of its own citizens on a daily basis as we do -- and yet we don't seem to want to ask ourselves this simple question: "Why us? What is it about US?"

Nearly all of our mass shootings are by angry or disturbed white males. None of them are committed by the majority gender, women. Hmmm, why is that?

Even when 90% of the American public calls for stronger gun laws, Congress refuses -- and then we the people refuse to remove them from office.

So the onus is on us, all of us. We won't pass the necessary laws, but more importantly we won't consider why this happens here all the time. When the NRA says, "Guns don't kill people -- people kill people," they've got it half-right. Except I would amend it to this: "Guns don't kill people -- Americans kill people." Enjoy the rest of your day, and rest assured this will all happen again very soon.

And so it has, several times. It seems that if anything, such horrific incidents are more frequent every year.

Our nation's founders did not guarantee a right to bear arms with the purpose of watching our fellow citizens kill each other off at an ever-increasing rate; neither did they anticipate that an organization of gun nuts would emerge who are hellbent on, and have the support of the Roberts Supreme Court in, ignoring the whole stated purpose of the Second Amendment as made explicit in its first clause.

If we insist on not taking the founders at their word regarding what the Second Amendment means, our nation may not survive another century. We have handed the bears the raw meat and asked them to distribute it fairly, and you can see as well as I can what we've gotten for our troubles.

Meanwhile, some gun store owners view the massacres with enthusiasm because they bring more business from frightened customers. What is wrong with this picture?

Democratic blogger and magazine editor Ed Kilgore points out that Hillary Clinton has outlined a plan of gun control legislation, concluding his post with the disturbing thought, "But it’s important to understand that according to the Cult of the Second Amendment, opponents of gun measures have every right to fire back, literally." Again, it's hard to dispute what Kilgore says.

And The Nation's National Affairs Correspondent Joan Walsh points out that Sen. Bernie Sanders has made no similar statement to date offering any plan for dealing with the increase in gun violence, making guns the one issue on which Clinton is running a more progressive race than Sanders. (Being from a small state of small towns is bound to make a difference in Sanders's outlook. I'm just sayin'... but it's still an imperfection in an otherwise nearly ideal presidential candidate. Sigh!)

Most of my posts on guns deal with specific incidents or specific reactions to them, and many of the posts contain a photo of the model of firearm involved. This one doesn't work that way because it encompasses a plethora of incidents in the past few years. Unfortunately, Moore will be right before he is wrong: we will have a lot more of them to add to our casebook before the matter is resolved, and we can only hope and pray our loved ones and our own selves are not among the victims.

One last thought: the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence offers a possibly useful resource, a listing of current federal gun laws and comparative lists of state and local gun laws. I hope you don't have any use for it, ever.

Will The Incidents Of Mass Gun Violence Never End?

President Obama spoke on the tragedy yesterday in Roseburg, Oregon:



Clearly he was exasperated at having to make this speech one... more... time, one of hundreds of incidents in America this year alone, incidents which simply do not happen in great quantities in any other free and democratic society in the world... including some in which law-abiding citizens' access to guns is, in practice, no more restricted than it is in the US. We have guns; they have guns— we have rampages, episodes of mass killings using guns which American criminals seem always able to get their hands on; they do not.  (Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee criticized Obama for making this obligatory speech, which Fuckabee called political. Then again, the Guv is known for shooting... shooting off his mouth, that is.)

How many hundreds of episodes of mass homicide by firearm must we endure every year before Americans awaken to the fact that ready availability of guns, moment to moment, legally or illegally but in any case not "well-regulated," is a primary cause of these events?

Yes, I know the drill: an armed society is a polite society; if a household always has guns at hand, it can always protect itself; etc. etc. ad nauseam. The problem with all such statements is that the statistics do not bear them out: the person likeliest to be shot with a personal handgun is the gun's owner or his/her family member, and America is the only free and democratic nation that experiences hundreds of incidents of gun-inflicted mass violence every year.

And yes, I know there is a national organization that makes its bucks by scaring people into implementing the 2^nd Amendment in a manner that almost guarantees repeated, frequent, terrifying incidents of mass gun violence. The problem with that org is that... do I really need to explain this one? Let me know if President Obama takes away your guns— if he actually does, maybe I'll modify my position, but I'm not holding my breath.

Chris Harper Mercer's source of guns?
At gun shows, shot happens, you know...

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A personal aside: in 1990, my mother died of Alzheimer's disease. The last year before she had to be institutionalized, Mom, being a country girl by birth, started begging Dad to buy a shotgun, ostensibly because Mom was hearing prowlers around their mobile home, itself quite a way out in the country.

Now there's improved safety for you: one aged and diagnosed demented member of a household hears people who aren't there, and demands a shotgun to protect herself from those nonexistent people. Oh, yeah; having a loaded gun handy was really going to heighten the safety of everyone living in or visiting that household. Uh-huh. Right.

Dad actually handled the situation very well: given that Mom's requests for a gun were ceaseless as long as she had no gun she could see and, theoretically, put her hands on, Dad bought the gun, and a small amount of ammunition, placed the unloaded gun in plain sight in a closet at home, and hid the ammo where only he could get to it. I wasn't present for the event, but I think Dad test-fired the gun once, again in plain sight so Mom could take comfort in the fact that the gun worked. The ammo? well, that disappeared until I found it when I cleaned out the mobile home after both of them had passed away.

Upon Dad's death, I gave the gun to his next-door neighbor, who already had three hunting rifles in his house. Three guns; four guns— it was IMO unlikely he'd do more damage with four than with three.

Michigan Court: Gun Owners With Permits To Open-Carry May Do So Even In Elementary Schools

Andrew Bradford at Crooks and Liars sources a post from Jameson Parker at Addicting Info, in turn from Gary Ridley at MLive. Here's Ridley:

CLIO, MI – A judge has ruled that a Clio-area father can legally open carry his pistol inside of his daughter's elementary school despite a legal challenge from the school district.

Genesee Circuit Judge Archie Hayman on Monday, Aug. 10, ruled in favor of Kenneth Herman, who filed the lawsuit March 5 in Genesee County Circuit Court against the Clio Area School District after he was denied access to Edgerton Elementary multiple times while attempting to pick up his daughter because he was open-carrying a pistol.

...

School officials and district attorney, Timothy Mullins, could not be reached for comment on the decision.

...

As several levels of reporters said, what could go wrong?

So... when the first child DIES killed using a gun wielded by someone licensed for open carry, whose fault is it?

My answer: The guy who open-carries the gun (who happens also to be the plaintiff in this absurd lawsuit). The legislators who wrote the law so sloppily (craftily?) that it allows open carry around very young children. The state judge who contrived this crack‑brained ruling.

The State of Michigan's answer: NOBODY. It's OK with the great State of Michigan if that kid dies.

Morning Misc.

• Charles Davis at The Intercept: UNDER THE BRIDGE: The Crime of Living Without a Home in Los Angeles
• Ian Reifowitz at Kos: STUNNER from Pope: Church Should Stop Being "Obsessed" with Abortion, Gay marriage and Contraception
• Leslie Salzillo at Kos: New Study Ranks 50 States By Gun Sense And Gun Deaths -- Gun Extremists Arrive in 5-4-3-2-1
• Violence Policy Center (VPC): State Firearm Death Rates, Ranked by Rate, 2011 [NOTE: no, Texas is not even in the top half among states. Put that in your pipe and... uh... dump it out of your pipe; please don't smoke it! - SB]

And one for fellow Texans...

• Texas Secretary of State: Important 2015 Election Dates

ADDENDUM: "We have to find a new balance," the Pope is quoted as saying. I am sorry to hear the Pope has lost one of his athletic shoes... <grin_duck_run />

Your Cheery Sunday Morning: FBI Director Says Gun Laws Failed In Charleston Massacre

In an ironic twist in the tragic and exasperating Charleston-Roof case, the background check laws aimed at preventing gun sales to convicted felons just plain failed, allowing convicted felon Dylann Roof to buy a powerful handgun more suited to use as a law enforcement officer's sidearm. So says FBI Director James Comey, and surely we can always believe him, right? [/sarcasm] (Everytown for Gun Safety says in a broadcast email that it was "because of an NRA-backed loophole in the law" but we all know the NRA would never do anything that would result in harm to anyone, ever, right? right?? [/extreme‑sarcasm])

Glock 41

Nine people died because Dylann Roof, a convicted felon, was able to buy a powerful handgun (reportedly a Glock 41 semiautomatic) in South Carolina back in April, which he used two months later to murder nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, NC... just because they were Black. Roof even had the unmitigated nerve to attend their Bible study for an hour before he slaughtered them; apparently, though, the message "love one another" didn't take hold in him.

People generally had one reaction, no matter their political or religious outlook: horror, sorrow, a deep sense of loss. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, on the other hand, saw the event as an opportunity to proselytize for the gun lobby and for keeping the gun laws just the way they are now:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement: "It's disastrous that this bureaucratic mistake prevented existing laws from working and blocking an illegal gun sale. The facts undercut attempts to use the tragedy to enact unnecessary gun laws. The American people, and especially the victims' families, deserve better."

Yeah, Chuck, it sure as hell is "disastrous." Far be it from me to point any fingers of blame, of course; we're all at fault because a doubtless perfect law did not function perfectly when it was needed most. There is of course no need... never any need... to improve the law. Right, Chuck?

I shall not live to see these terrible tragedies— rather, this one huge ongoing tragedy— come to an end. And that's true even if I don't encounter a convicted felon packing heat who was able to purchase his piece illegally. [/sigh] This is the 21^st century, not the 18^th; surely there is some way the 2^nd Amendment can be interpreted that does not result in widespread criminal ownership and use of firearms. There's gotta be a way.

Damn You, Sen. Graham...

... this is in the poorest possible taste, and that's the least unkind thing I can say about it:

Sen. Lindsey Graham Pretend-Shoots Sen. Bernie Sanders with Shotgun
By EricLewis0 [at Kos]

A partial transcript of an MSNBC segment in which Sen. Lindsey Graham teaches Kasie Hunt how to skeet shoot:

GRAHAM: "I'm gonna get you motivated to want to kill the clay pigeon..."

Photo: ericlewis0

...

GRAHAM: "Alright, do a Bernie Sanders."

SKEET OPERATOR: "Alright."

GRAHAM: "Pull!"

(SOUND OF GUNSHOT)

GRAHAM: "Sorry about that, Bernie!"

(LAUGHTER)

...

Of course, from this point forward, I can't win: if I object to the deplorable "humor" of one US senator's false threat to "kill" another senator, I'll be damned as "having no sense of humor." If I don't say anything, then by default, I condone Graham's attempt at a quip... which I emphatically do not. I'm damned if I laugh, and I'm doubly damned if I don't laugh.

But this is not funny: rather, it reveals a fundamental paradox which gun nuts allow themselves regarding their deadly toys. We should not tolerate the "I was only kidding" defense from them... ever. Real guns, loaded and ready to fire, are serious business and should always be taken seriously, under all circumstances. Period!

Heaven Help Us All To Survive In This Violence‑Plagued Age

I still cannot fathom the kind of mental disorder that leads someone to mass murder (9 people dead when BBC wrote the story), but I do know that ready availability of guns of types that are of no use for hunting, self-defense, etc. has enabled such disturbed people to perpetrate such crimes:

Charleston church shooting: Police hunt suspected killer

US police are hunting for a man they suspect of shooting dead nine people at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Officials released CCTV images of a man they said was white, in his early 20s, and sat in on a bible study meeting for an hour before opening fire.

...

This killer got away, and is being sought. Surveillance video footage shows a suspect from the side and a vehicle from the front (see above linked BBC article); unfortunately, SC does not believe in front license plates.

I may not be a great fan of religion, but when we have reached the point at which a church meeting is not a safe place to be, our society is badly deteriorated. My prayers and condolences to the families of those killed.

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UPDATE Thu 6/18 about 12:45 CT: a suspect has been captured. From the description, it sounds as if the 21-year-old man is an extreme racist nut-job. See what you think.

Guns Don't Kill People...

... "delicate flowers" kill people! [Link to cartoon by Tom Tomorrow. Hey, I told you the political stuff was returning soon...] Or perhaps you prefer this reusable generic template...

(H/T ellroon.)

Miscellany: Police Behavior, Riots, Race, Nutjob GOPers And Their Guns

This post may not be particularly coherent, but I need to clean the accumulation of tabs in the browser...

• Bryan at Why Now? points us to CBC for a less ruthlessly "edited" view of police behavior in the news: Baltimore shows police killings America's real state of emergency
• Jon Sopel at BBC News explores What a riot does achieve
• Paul J. Weber at AP via TPM notes that TX Gov Orders State Guard to Monitor Possible Military Takeover of Texas, and similarly, Rand [Paul]: I'll Look Into Whether The Military Is Planning To Takeover The Southwest; together, these tend to prove that the Texas GOP is full-blown batshit fucking nuts
• Josh Marshall at TPM thinks we're crossing that Bridgegate exactly when we come to it
• Aniza Garcia at TPM reports that a Child Finds A Loaded Gun In John Boehner's Capitol Bathroom
• antifa at Kos poses and firmly answers ignorant white Americans' too-frequent question, "Why do they burn down their own neighborhood?"

Maybe next time I'll have something original to write. (Maybe not...)

Easter Churchgoer Accidentally Shoots Self With Own Gun

UU Chalice

When I was about 25 years old, a fellow student (actually a woman) at a music workshop, on learning in a lunchtime chat that I am a Unitarian Universalist, accused me of being "dangerous." Really? More dangerous than this guy?

From a TV news transcript at that link:

...

Catholic
Cross

Police say a gun went off at about 11 p.m. Saturday at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament...

...

Jason Wagler was sitting with his fiancee at Mass and heard the gunshot.

...

Interdenominational
Pistol

"We were standing for a few minutes and just before the final procession started, the gunshot went off," Wagler said.

Wagler said at first no one seemed to know what had happened. Some people thought a speaker blew. But then he saw smoke.  Wagler took several photos with his phone shortly after the incident happened.

"I immediately took a step back and was about to take cover. You never know if you're safe anymore in this world. It's a shame to know you can't go into church without having something like this happen," Wagler said.

Police say a man had a gun in his pocket and it discharged when he stood up. The bullet grazed the man's hand.

... newspaper reported the trigger caught on the man's pants and the gun's safety was not on.

"I noticed the gun was handed to another gentleman. He immediately concealed it in a white program, so I took pictures of the gun inside this program," Wagler said.

The man was taken to the hospital. Police haven't released his name.

It's unclear why he brought a gun into church. At this point, no charges have been filed.

(NOTE: I believe that in this church the proper term for "program" is "disorder of service." But what do I know... like most UU's, I am not Christian... see the video linked above for a shot (ahem) of the paper in which the gun was hidden. - SB)

So... this happened in Houston, TX, right? Ummm... try Altoona, PA, about 100 miles east of Pittsburgh. Oh, and surely it happened in a "dangerous" Unitarian Universalist church, right? Ahhhh... no. Catholic.

I no longer attend church, but during the dozen or so years I did, I didn't know a single congregant of First UU Church Houston (apart from the occasional law enforcement officer) who entered a church service there carrying a firearm... let alone careless enough to have the safety off. Of course, YMMV...

(H/T Brendan James at TPM.)

Lethal Booby Trap

Police: Michigan GOP Official Fatally Shot Herself While Adjusting Bra Holster. Contrary to what you might think from TPM's headline (or mine), she did not shoot herself in the breast; the accidental shot went into her eye. Also contrary to at least my intuition, the official was a Navy veteran, so she surely had had adequate training in firearms handling at some point in her life.

We have two choices. We could conclude that this is one of those senseless, avoidable tragedies that life hands out to the most unlikely and undeserving people. Or we could instead contemplate the fact that the woman obviously joined the GOP voluntarily, and wonder if doing so had a stupefying effect on an otherwise bright person...

Dem TX State Rep. Supports Open Carry In Principle, But Won't Vote For Bill Because He Was Confronted-Threatened In His Office

Kudos to Texas State Rep. Poncho Nevarez (D-Dist. 74) for refusing to be threatened in his office by a group of gun‑toting gun nuts very demonstrative open‑carry supporters into voting for their proposed open‑carry bill, which allegedly would mandate the death penalty for an official who restricted a citizen's open‑carry "right".

The head nut OC supporter published (on Facebook and YouTube), then retracted by claiming a copyright dispute, a video in which he ranted about the Constitution and the need for the death penalty. (I have not seen the video, which was apparently up for only about a half hour; I'm depending for my facts on the TPM article by Ahiza Garcia.)

I'm sorry, but passionate support for open-carry legislation may NOT be legally (or even sanely) conveyed to legislators by filling their offices with men carrying presumably loaded guns. That's not how it's done in a democracy: a roomful of tin-pot dictators is no better than a single tin-pot dictator.

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An open-carry group demonstrates
in sight of TX state capital in Austin.
(Not sure, but this is apparently NOT the same
OCT group that threatened Rep. Nevarez.)

UPDATE: Richard Rowe, in an article cross-posted at Crooks and Liars, managed to capture and post the video of the encounter in Rep. Nevarez's office. According to Rowe, this particular group within Open Carry Texas is so extreme that other OCT groups really don't want to be associated with them. I don't blame them; neither would I if I were in their shoes. Click the link, go over to C&L, read Lowe and watch the video, shudder, then have a good stiff drink... presuming you're not packin' at the moment...

Guns For Self-Protection: What Else Is A Toddler To Do?

AP via TPM:

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A 3-year-old boy found a handgun in his mother's purse and fired just one shot that wounded both his parents at an Albuquerque motel on Saturday, police said.

According to investigators, the toddler apparently reached for an iPod but found the loaded weapon. Police believe the shooting to be accidental.

The bullet first struck his father in the buttock and then hit the right shoulder of his mother, who is eight months pregnant, police said. His 2-year-old sister was present but unhurt.

...

An N​R​A official who spontaneously materialized in an Albuquerque newspaper office milliseconds after police secured the scene of the incident was NOT reported to have asked, "If the mother's handgun had not been accessible, loaded and unlocked, how would the child have protected himself against not one but both parents?"

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Also for your edification, take a look at the state of Georgia's open-carry law, less than a year old now:

Text: Firearms dealers no longer regulated by GA. Dept. of Public Safety / Elimination of fingerprinting for renewing weapons carry licenses — Non-security personnel permitted to carry guns in K-12 schools / Allows silencers for hunting, putting bystanders & other hunters at risk — Allows firearms in public housing / Regulation of firearms and other weapons by General Assembly only, no more local control

You think maybe Georgia has taken things a bit too far?

(Regular readers know I'm neither a gun nut nor an anti-gun nut; I just hate to see avoidable violence within a family. Unsecured guns and very young children don't mix well at all, no matter which parties end up getting hurt. If you can't take the post in a rational spirit and comment accordingly, don't bother commenting at all, or I'll just have to delete your comment.)

Texas GOP State Legislator: The Solution To Guns In Schools Is More Guns In Schools, And Teachers Shooting Students Bearing Guns

That tumbling noise you just heard was my late father, a secondary school educator and former Navy gunnery officer in W.W. II, rolling over in his grave. The provocation for his spinning was probably this bill introduced in the Texas Lege, probably by legislators like this one. From Catherine Thompson at TPM:

Texas Aggie pistol

Legislation filed last week in Texas would allow teachers to use deadly force in order to protect school property, the Houston Chronicle reported.

State Rep. Dan Flynn (R), who's previously fought to roll back concealed handgun license requirements, filed the Teacher's Protection Act authorizing educators to use deadly force to protect themselves or another person on school grounds.

The bill would also authorize the use of deadly force to protect school property and shield any teacher who uses deadly force from prosecution should they cause injury or death.

Texas law already offers immunity from discipline to teachers who use "reasonable" force against a student, according to the Chronicle. State law also allows any adult to carry a firearm in a school with the principal's permission.

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My father knew firsthand the most likely result of introducing guns into the school environment: once, using his Navy training, he disarmed a mentally disturbed girl who brought a loaded gun to school with the intention to shoot (at least) the principal. She got as far as the administrative offices before my father spotted the outline of her gun in a coat pocket.

Lest you make some invalid assumptions about him, Dad was not shy about guns. In his old age, he owned a rifle for hunting and a shotgun to display in the presence of the occasional burglar who sought entry to his trailer. The weapons with which he had the greatest familiarity 40 years or so earlier were mounted on a W.W. II troop landing ship on which he was the fire control officer; some of those guns were large enough that a man could theoretically crawl inside. (A woman could as well, but no woman would be that much of a damned fool.)

With all that background, training and experience, Dad was utterly determined to keep guns out of the public schools in Texas. I don't know if he testified about such matters to the Texas Lege, but he appeared before legislative committees quite a few times about other matters, so I assume he spoke to them about concealed-carry guns as well. If Dad were alive now, his views on guns would be very unpopular in his home state.

It is already hard enough to capture the attention of intelligent, well-prepared, recently graduated schoolteachers who might want to work in what anyone smarter than a fish would understand is a difficult and sometimes dangerous position at any wage, let alone poverty wages. Compelling teachers to be responsible for firearms in their classrooms, for preventing felony theft, for using deadly force against students, is too damned idiotic even to contemplate in the Texas Lege chambers, let alone in real life in actual schoolrooms full of hormone-saturated pre-adults. But I've often said that Republicans are too dumb for words...

Merry Xmas, Kids, Here's Your Assault Rifle...

Once again, Florida outdoes Texas... c'mon, Rick and Greg, you're falling behind!

Via Kos, from Daily Mail:

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Machine Gun America's management claim it is an attraction, not a firing range, and customers cannot bring their own weapons to shoot. Guests must be 13 years old and no alcohol will be sold.

How looow can they goooo?
(Not from Machine Gun America...
from somebody's FB page.)

Wes Doss, Machine Gun America's safety and training officer, said it was unlike any other experience in the country.

'The live shooting experiences will include themed packages featuring some of the most famous firearms from around the world.'

General Manager Bruce Nierenberg also defended accusations the attraction was unsuitable for children.

'No one ever shoots by themselves, and no guest is ever in control of the weapon without a range safety officer next to them and participating with them,' he told WTSP.

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Oh. Well. That makes me feel better. Um, actually, not...