"Welcome to a regular Tuesday at school in America"
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Dec 17, 2024
Dec 16, 2024
Told Ya
Name a country under an authoritarian strongman's government where the citizens are encouraged to - or even allowed to - walk around with guns.
Here's a new guy I'm checkin' out:
Dec 7, 2024
Kinda Shitty - But
... it's pretty much peak Rich Guy Privilege for CEOs to be suddenly all paranoid about the probability of getting shot down in the street.
You know - like school kids, and shoppers at Walmart, and folks at a country music concert, or just regular people watching the local 4th of July parade - or any random black guy driving the wrong car at the wrong time thru the wrong neighborhood.
These corporate pricks are so worried, that security firms are being inundated by phone calls from the bigger corporations, begging for protection.
Got some news for ya, fellas:
This is America. We have lots of guns, and a bunch of us are carrying a heavy dose of grievance, and we're constantly being encouraged to think about solving our problems with gun violence.
Do you get it now?
Are you thinking maybe the seal has been broken? ie: people see what they take as a little righteous retribution, so now there's a fair probability that some of us will assume it's open season on rich pukes like Brian Thompson?
Can we reasonably anticipate that certain attitudes of certain power-holders will undergo a sudden rapid shift?
I dunno. I'm just asking questions.
Dec 5, 2024
Followup
Here's a weird-ish little something that tags along after that healthcare CEO got popped in NYC.
People will only be pushed so far.
Sep 19, 2024
Here's The Deal
When you start doing something
to keep school kids safe
from gun violence,
then I'll start to give a fuck
about some low-rent self-important
dingleberry playing with himself
on his own private golf course.
Sep 11, 2024
Worth A Try
OK, ammosexuals, let's make a deal. We'll say OK to all the shitty things you ignore about what women have to go thru to get an abortion, if you'll agree to a few changes in what it takes for a man to get a gun.
Jul 21, 2024
The Shooters
They did a study of attempted assassinations between 1949 and 1996, and found there's no good solid profile for people who end up going after a president or other public figure / politician.
In broad terms:
A 20-year-old’s perplexing place in the catalogue of American gunmen
Thomas Matthew Crooks, who used a gun purchased by his father after the Sandy Hook massacre, evokes the profile of a mass shooter. Instead he fired at a former president.
In the months after an isolated, deeply troubled 20-year-old took his mother’s AR-style rifle and opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, gun sales in America exploded, partly fueled by the threat of a fresh ban on the assault weapons that would become the firearm of choice for some of the country’s most infamous killers.
Millions of Americans rushed to stock up, and among 2013’s gun buyers, investigators would later learn, was a man in western Pennsylvania whose son was also in elementary school. He purchased an AR-style rifle that fired 5.56mm rounds.
A decade later, his son — also isolated, troubled and 20 years old — shouldered that same rifle atop a sloped roof in Butler, Pa., and, according to authorities, fired it eight times in an apparent attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, shot and killed seconds later, remains enigmatic. A registered Republican who’d once given a $15 donation to a progressive group, he was, according to people who knew him, not overtly political or ideological. He did well in school, drew little attention in his middle-class, Bethel Park neighborhood. He didn’t leave behind a significant online presence or manifesto spelling out his motivation. Why he pulled the trigger, investigators still don’t know or, at least, have yet to say publicly.
Where he fits into the ever-expanding catalogue of notorious American gunmen could take years to understand, according to experts and historians. He’s hard to categorize, in part because his still-evolving portrait evokes the profile of a mass shooter, at least one of whom he researched. But Crooks wasn’t a mass shooter, instead becoming what some historians believe to be the youngest person to make an attempt on the life of a current or past president.
It’s important for investigators to understand what leads to any killing, but it’s essential in this case, at this moment, when some fear the country’s political fissures could lead to more bloodshed, said Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
“If this is an individual who was like a school shooter, disturbed and angry, and found this as a way to lash out, that’s a terrible, terrible social problem we need to deal with, but it’s not a question of our democracy,” Engel said. “It’s important that we know whether or not we need to worry about political violence, more than any other violence.”
Three decades ago, the U.S. Secret Service set out to analyze 83 actual or would-be assassins who had acted between 1949 and 1996, eventually publishing a report intended to help law enforcement better understand, and thwart, these attacks.
By study’s end, the researchers had come to a stark conclusion: “There are no accurate — or useful — descriptive, demographic, or psychological ‘profiles’ of American assassins, attackers, and near-lethal approachers.”
Crooks conforms with some of the report’s broader trends: 86 percent were men, 77 percent White; more than half were single, and three in five had no children; most attempts were on presidents, members of Congress or other public figures being protected by the Secret Service.
In other ways, Crooks was anomalous. He was younger than the vast majority, few of whom were students at the time. Just 30 percent used rifles or shotguns, and only one in four traveled elsewhere in their state, or one beside it, in pursuit of their target. There’s little evidence, so far, that Crooks had a “history of resentments or grievances against others,” as 97 percent of those studied did.
And then there are the mass killers Crooks conjures. At a briefing with lawmakers, law enforcement officials shared that Crooks had researched Oxford High shooter Ethan Crumbley as well as his mother and father. Earlier this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents of a mass shooter ever convicted of homicide. In a rampage that ended the lives of four schoolmates in 2021, Crumbley, like Crooks, used a firearm that had been purchased by his father.
Crooks parallels the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter, Adam Lanza, in several obvious ways. Besides their ages, both were gaunt and withdrawn, with limited social circles. Both grew up in homes stocked with firearms and had a clear interest in them: Lanza, who aspired to become a Marine, studied guns and fired them with his mother at a shooting range; Crooks, who, investigators and reporters have learned, belonged to a shooting club and died in a T-shirt adorned with the logo of a popular YouTube channel dedicated to guns, had tried out for his high school rifle team but did not make it because he was a poor marksman. Both 20-year-olds showed signs of rising distress — Crooks researched major depressive disorder on his phone, lawmakers were told — before their violent acts. And Lanza, too, committed his assault with a parent’s semiautomatic rifle.
But the similarities end there, said Peter Langman, a psychologist and the author of “Warning Signs: Identifying School Shooters Before They Strike.” With crude explosive devices packed into his car, Crooks traveled to a rally an hour from his home and took aim at a 78-year-old former president, grazing him, killing firefighter Corey Comperatore and gravely wounding two other spectators. In Newtown, Conn., Lanza killed his mother before returning to a school he’d once attended and gunning down six staff members and 20 first-graders.
Their personal lives diverge as well. When Langman assesses young shooters, he consistently finds that they faltered in key “life domains”: education, employment, intimacy, family and social network.
“If you look at Lanza,” Langman said, “he was failing in, essentially, all five of those domains.”
Lanza, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, struggled to function in classes, instead attending home school through much of his teens. He suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and was especially sensitive to light and sound. He stopped speaking to his father two years before the shooting and communicated with his mother, with whom he lived, through email. He was obsessed with death, compiling a detailed spreadsheet of 400 people who’d committed various acts of violence.
Crooks, Langman said, appeared to have been succeeding in several of those life domains.
He worked at a nursing home and, after graduating from community college with an associate’s degree in engineering science, planned to attend Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh this fall. It’s unclear whether he dated or what his relationship was with his parents — both licensed professional counselors — but he still lived with them. Those who knew him said that, at least in high school, he maintained a small but consistent group of friends.
“This is not a case of someone who’s failed in everything and feels like he’s a loser, a nobody, and the only thing he can do with his life is go out in a blaze of glory,” Langman said.
Still, he cautioned, it’s early in the investigation. Langman recalled the case of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at Pulse nightclub in Florida. A cursory look at Mateen would have suggested that he also led a relatively successful life. He had a wife and child and worked as a security guard.
“People in those situations are not supposed to throw it all away, because it’s too much to live for, but he did,” Langman said. “When you see that, then you have to really look inside the man. Not look at the externals, but look at the internals.”
That look, Langman said, revealed a psychopath.
Mateen beat his wife, she later alleged, and while he did hold a job, he failed in his aspiration to make a career in law enforcement, at least in part because of his preoccupation with violence.
Who Crooks really was has yet to be revealed, but that doesn’t mean it never will. After the Sandy Hook shooting, many people concluded that Lanza had left behind no online footprint.
“It turned out not to be true at all,” Langman said. “He covered his tracks very well.”
So well, in fact, that six hours of audio Lanza recorded wasn’t discovered on YouTube until 2021 — nine years after his death.
And yet, what drove him to such horrific violence remains unknown.
Despite public perception, assassins’ motives can be equally difficult to flesh out.
“When the first crack of the bullet is heard, aimed at a political figure, it’s natural for us to presume, logical even, that this is politically motivated,” said Engel, the presidential historian.
That, he added, is often not the case.
In 1881, President James Garfield’s killer, Charles J. Guiteau, who was delusional, felt slighted over a job he didn’t get. Nearly a century later, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot President Gerald Ford, at least in part to win the approval of cult leader Charles Manson.
Video from March 30, 1981 shows an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan and highlights former press secretary James Brady, who was shot in the head. (Video: Reuters)
“I’m still not sure that we have a great grasp of what was motivating Lee Harvey Oswald,” Engel said of President John F. Kennedy’s killer. “And of course, most famously, John Hinckley, who shot at Ronald Reagan, did it basically to impress a girl” — the actress Jodie Foster.
Crooks, it appears, wasn’t only interested in Trump. On his phone, investigators found images of President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and a member of the British royal family. Along with the rally in Butler, Crooks had looked up information on August’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Those disparate inquiries, experts say, suggest that Crooks may have largely been driven by a desire for attention and chose his target out of convenience.
“This is a person likely trying to make headlines, going out in a final act,” said Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project. “This is the thing that they’re going to be seen for.”
Perhaps no school shooter motivated by a quest for fame received more of it than 18-year-old Eric Harris, who, along with a friend, Dylan Klebold, killed 13 people at Columbine High in Colorado in 1999.
“I want to leave a lasting impression on the world,” Harris once wrote. Propelled by intense media coverage of his image, backstory and demented world view, Harris’s persona has inspired dozens of gunmen in the 25 years since, including Lanza.
Over the past decade, public mass shooters have won far less notoriety as their numbers have multiplied. Even some of the deadliest killers — the ones at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex., and the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, for example — are not household names.
In a single week, Crooks’s name has appeared in thousands of headlines as his image spread across the globe. Peterson fears that other disillusioned fame-seekers who once would have turned to a different sort of violence may now be emboldened to attempt this kind.
“It has changed the course of the political conversation. It’s having ripple effects. It’s actually changing politics, and potentially the election in some way,” she said. “So, if one 20-year-old kid with an AR-15 can pull that off, that is something that’s scary.”
Peterson also noted there is only one commonality among all isolated, troubled young men who eventually become shooters, and America has struggled to address it since long before Crooks’s father bought that rifle 11 years ago: their access to a gun.
- 86% were men
- 77% were white
- More than half were single
- 60% had no kids
Thomas Matthew Crooks, who used a gun purchased by his father after the Sandy Hook massacre, evokes the profile of a mass shooter. Instead he fired at a former president.
In the months after an isolated, deeply troubled 20-year-old took his mother’s AR-style rifle and opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, gun sales in America exploded, partly fueled by the threat of a fresh ban on the assault weapons that would become the firearm of choice for some of the country’s most infamous killers.
Millions of Americans rushed to stock up, and among 2013’s gun buyers, investigators would later learn, was a man in western Pennsylvania whose son was also in elementary school. He purchased an AR-style rifle that fired 5.56mm rounds.
A decade later, his son — also isolated, troubled and 20 years old — shouldered that same rifle atop a sloped roof in Butler, Pa., and, according to authorities, fired it eight times in an apparent attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, shot and killed seconds later, remains enigmatic. A registered Republican who’d once given a $15 donation to a progressive group, he was, according to people who knew him, not overtly political or ideological. He did well in school, drew little attention in his middle-class, Bethel Park neighborhood. He didn’t leave behind a significant online presence or manifesto spelling out his motivation. Why he pulled the trigger, investigators still don’t know or, at least, have yet to say publicly.
Where he fits into the ever-expanding catalogue of notorious American gunmen could take years to understand, according to experts and historians. He’s hard to categorize, in part because his still-evolving portrait evokes the profile of a mass shooter, at least one of whom he researched. But Crooks wasn’t a mass shooter, instead becoming what some historians believe to be the youngest person to make an attempt on the life of a current or past president.
It’s important for investigators to understand what leads to any killing, but it’s essential in this case, at this moment, when some fear the country’s political fissures could lead to more bloodshed, said Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
“If this is an individual who was like a school shooter, disturbed and angry, and found this as a way to lash out, that’s a terrible, terrible social problem we need to deal with, but it’s not a question of our democracy,” Engel said. “It’s important that we know whether or not we need to worry about political violence, more than any other violence.”
Three decades ago, the U.S. Secret Service set out to analyze 83 actual or would-be assassins who had acted between 1949 and 1996, eventually publishing a report intended to help law enforcement better understand, and thwart, these attacks.
By study’s end, the researchers had come to a stark conclusion: “There are no accurate — or useful — descriptive, demographic, or psychological ‘profiles’ of American assassins, attackers, and near-lethal approachers.”
Crooks conforms with some of the report’s broader trends: 86 percent were men, 77 percent White; more than half were single, and three in five had no children; most attempts were on presidents, members of Congress or other public figures being protected by the Secret Service.
In other ways, Crooks was anomalous. He was younger than the vast majority, few of whom were students at the time. Just 30 percent used rifles or shotguns, and only one in four traveled elsewhere in their state, or one beside it, in pursuit of their target. There’s little evidence, so far, that Crooks had a “history of resentments or grievances against others,” as 97 percent of those studied did.
And then there are the mass killers Crooks conjures. At a briefing with lawmakers, law enforcement officials shared that Crooks had researched Oxford High shooter Ethan Crumbley as well as his mother and father. Earlier this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents of a mass shooter ever convicted of homicide. In a rampage that ended the lives of four schoolmates in 2021, Crumbley, like Crooks, used a firearm that had been purchased by his father.
Crooks parallels the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter, Adam Lanza, in several obvious ways. Besides their ages, both were gaunt and withdrawn, with limited social circles. Both grew up in homes stocked with firearms and had a clear interest in them: Lanza, who aspired to become a Marine, studied guns and fired them with his mother at a shooting range; Crooks, who, investigators and reporters have learned, belonged to a shooting club and died in a T-shirt adorned with the logo of a popular YouTube channel dedicated to guns, had tried out for his high school rifle team but did not make it because he was a poor marksman. Both 20-year-olds showed signs of rising distress — Crooks researched major depressive disorder on his phone, lawmakers were told — before their violent acts. And Lanza, too, committed his assault with a parent’s semiautomatic rifle.
But the similarities end there, said Peter Langman, a psychologist and the author of “Warning Signs: Identifying School Shooters Before They Strike.” With crude explosive devices packed into his car, Crooks traveled to a rally an hour from his home and took aim at a 78-year-old former president, grazing him, killing firefighter Corey Comperatore and gravely wounding two other spectators. In Newtown, Conn., Lanza killed his mother before returning to a school he’d once attended and gunning down six staff members and 20 first-graders.
Their personal lives diverge as well. When Langman assesses young shooters, he consistently finds that they faltered in key “life domains”: education, employment, intimacy, family and social network.
“If you look at Lanza,” Langman said, “he was failing in, essentially, all five of those domains.”
Lanza, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, struggled to function in classes, instead attending home school through much of his teens. He suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and was especially sensitive to light and sound. He stopped speaking to his father two years before the shooting and communicated with his mother, with whom he lived, through email. He was obsessed with death, compiling a detailed spreadsheet of 400 people who’d committed various acts of violence.
Crooks, Langman said, appeared to have been succeeding in several of those life domains.
He worked at a nursing home and, after graduating from community college with an associate’s degree in engineering science, planned to attend Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh this fall. It’s unclear whether he dated or what his relationship was with his parents — both licensed professional counselors — but he still lived with them. Those who knew him said that, at least in high school, he maintained a small but consistent group of friends.
“This is not a case of someone who’s failed in everything and feels like he’s a loser, a nobody, and the only thing he can do with his life is go out in a blaze of glory,” Langman said.
Still, he cautioned, it’s early in the investigation. Langman recalled the case of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at Pulse nightclub in Florida. A cursory look at Mateen would have suggested that he also led a relatively successful life. He had a wife and child and worked as a security guard.
“People in those situations are not supposed to throw it all away, because it’s too much to live for, but he did,” Langman said. “When you see that, then you have to really look inside the man. Not look at the externals, but look at the internals.”
That look, Langman said, revealed a psychopath.
Mateen beat his wife, she later alleged, and while he did hold a job, he failed in his aspiration to make a career in law enforcement, at least in part because of his preoccupation with violence.
Who Crooks really was has yet to be revealed, but that doesn’t mean it never will. After the Sandy Hook shooting, many people concluded that Lanza had left behind no online footprint.
“It turned out not to be true at all,” Langman said. “He covered his tracks very well.”
So well, in fact, that six hours of audio Lanza recorded wasn’t discovered on YouTube until 2021 — nine years after his death.
And yet, what drove him to such horrific violence remains unknown.
Despite public perception, assassins’ motives can be equally difficult to flesh out.
“When the first crack of the bullet is heard, aimed at a political figure, it’s natural for us to presume, logical even, that this is politically motivated,” said Engel, the presidential historian.
That, he added, is often not the case.
In 1881, President James Garfield’s killer, Charles J. Guiteau, who was delusional, felt slighted over a job he didn’t get. Nearly a century later, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot President Gerald Ford, at least in part to win the approval of cult leader Charles Manson.
Video from March 30, 1981 shows an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan and highlights former press secretary James Brady, who was shot in the head. (Video: Reuters)
“I’m still not sure that we have a great grasp of what was motivating Lee Harvey Oswald,” Engel said of President John F. Kennedy’s killer. “And of course, most famously, John Hinckley, who shot at Ronald Reagan, did it basically to impress a girl” — the actress Jodie Foster.
Crooks, it appears, wasn’t only interested in Trump. On his phone, investigators found images of President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and a member of the British royal family. Along with the rally in Butler, Crooks had looked up information on August’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Those disparate inquiries, experts say, suggest that Crooks may have largely been driven by a desire for attention and chose his target out of convenience.
“This is a person likely trying to make headlines, going out in a final act,” said Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project. “This is the thing that they’re going to be seen for.”
Perhaps no school shooter motivated by a quest for fame received more of it than 18-year-old Eric Harris, who, along with a friend, Dylan Klebold, killed 13 people at Columbine High in Colorado in 1999.
“I want to leave a lasting impression on the world,” Harris once wrote. Propelled by intense media coverage of his image, backstory and demented world view, Harris’s persona has inspired dozens of gunmen in the 25 years since, including Lanza.
Over the past decade, public mass shooters have won far less notoriety as their numbers have multiplied. Even some of the deadliest killers — the ones at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex., and the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, for example — are not household names.
In a single week, Crooks’s name has appeared in thousands of headlines as his image spread across the globe. Peterson fears that other disillusioned fame-seekers who once would have turned to a different sort of violence may now be emboldened to attempt this kind.
“It has changed the course of the political conversation. It’s having ripple effects. It’s actually changing politics, and potentially the election in some way,” she said. “So, if one 20-year-old kid with an AR-15 can pull that off, that is something that’s scary.”
Peterson also noted there is only one commonality among all isolated, troubled young men who eventually become shooters, and America has struggled to address it since long before Crooks’s father bought that rifle 11 years ago: their access to a gun.
A crime can happen only when these three criteria are met:
- Motive
- Opportunity
- Means
Take a away any one of those, and there is no crime.
Guns are the Means in the commission of gun crimes. And part of me can't believe that even has to be said. But this is America - so, yeah.
Jul 16, 2024
I Remember
... when the "conservative" gun freaks (aka: MAGA precursors) were all running around losing their shit, worried about how somebody might keep a "national registry" - a database of gun owners.
Well, guess what.
Crazy story on the shooter’s family…and then it gets even crazier because republicans have a database of millions of gun owners https://t.co/N9V5zl9Vq2 pic.twitter.com/FGKJ9ERfqb
— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) July 16, 2024
These people are just too fuckin' stoopid for words.
Jul 9, 2024
Guns
Gun crime has something to do with gun proliferation.
Gun proliferation has everything to do with coin-operated Republicans.
Jun 17, 2024
Solution
Solve the problem of enforcing gun laws by having Joe Biden adopt everybody in the country.
May 2, 2024
Guns Today
There's some likelihood that this is just more performative GOP bullshit, but we're talking about people with guns, so we have to see it as a face-value proposition.
Start the countdown for "Stressed out teacher kills 20 kids and herself in Tennessee classroom"
Fake lord have mercy on America's stupid fucked up souls.
Feb 18, 2024
The Rubes Are Getting Restless
Seems the MAGA elitists are getting a little bored and beginning to lose interest.
Maybe they know the game is almost up, and they won't be able to tag along, picking up the perks they've been getting from associating with a guy who was never a winner in the first place, but who could snooker enough rubes to create opportunities for the hangers-on to make a few bucks.
The fever has to break sometime, in some way, and maybe we're seeing it come down now so we won't run quite the risk of bloodshed that has seemed so inevitable.
Feb 17, 2024
Today's Brando
If I lose you as a friend because of this issue, then adios, pendejo - I don't want you around me and mine anyway. You're poison. Fuck all the way off.
Feb 1, 2024
Jan 26, 2024
On Guns And Politics
One of the mainstays of Daddy State politics is playing the Opposites Game - a slight variation on 'Every accusation is a confession'.
Just a thought.
It's very useful to make sure your audience is distracted and fooled so they don't see the impossible contradiction inherent in the propaganda.
Case in point: Guns.
"We need our guns in case it becomes necessary to fight an oppressive government!"
What if the oppressive government is actually made up of the people who are telling you to fight? What if they're co-opting you into fighting on behalf of the oppressive government they intend to install once you've killed enough of your neighbors to impose their will on all of us?
Just a thought.
Jan 22, 2024
Today's Tweet
Thoughts on this? pic.twitter.com/W57DpNy2W5
— Crime Net (@TRIGGERHAPPYV1) January 21, 2024
I'll say it again:
Jan 9, 2024
Jan 5, 2024
Runnin' Like A Scalded Dog
Speculate away, good people. Here's mine:
I think the prick is finally being booted - not because he's been livin' large and gettin' fat on the company dime, but because he's attracted too much of the wrong kind of attention, and the organization may be facing some pretty bad shit - like charges of laundering Russian mob money, and then maybe funneling some of it into American politics.
Dunno - but there's been something wrong with the way that bunch does business for a long time.
NRA chief Wayne LaPierre announces resignation
Longtime National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre, facing a lawsuit in New York that sought to remove him from his post, announced his resignation from the organization Friday.
LaPierre is named as one of four defendants in a lawsuit over alleged fraud filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Last week a state appeals court ruled the suit could move forward, denying a request from the NRA to end the probe.
LaPierre cited health reasons in his decision, which was accepted by the NRA board of directors at a Friday meeting, according to a news release from the organization. In the statement, LaPierre said he would “never stop supporting the NRA.”
Andrew Arulanandam, the organization’s head of general operations, will become the interim chief executive and executive vice president, the news release said.
Dec 11, 2023
Numbers Don't Lie
... but an awful lot of politicians - mostly Republicans nowadays - lie with numbers.
- The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020.
- Over this 21-year span, this Red State murder gap has steadily widened from a low of 9% more per capita red state murders in 2003 and 2004 to 44% more per capita red state murders in 2019, before settling back to 43% in 2020.
- Altogether, the per capita Red State murder rate was 23% higher than the Blue State murder rate when all 21 years were combined.
- If Blue State murder rates were as high as Red State murder rates, Biden-voting states would have suffered over 45,000 more murders between 2000 and 2020.
- Even when murders in the largest cities in red states are removed, overall murder rates in Trump-voting states were 12% higher than Biden-voting states across this 21-year period and were higher in 18 of the 21 years observed.
75% of murders here in
USAmerica Inc
are committed with a gun.
Nov 16, 2023
So Let's Talk, Dammit
Every few days, there's a mass shooting here in USAmerica Inc, and every time there's a big one (ie: more than 6 or 7 dead) we get the same bullshit arguments.
As mass shootings multiplied, the horrific human cost was concealed
States reeling from gun violence made graphic imagery confidential — part of a charged debate over privacy and public awareness
After a burst of gun violence claimed 13 lives at Columbine High School in 1999, a difficult question confronted a Colorado judge: whether to order the release of autopsies sought by local media under the state’s public records law.
The judge, Jose D.L. Márquez, decided to keep the graphic reports hidden, ruling that the rampage was an “extraordinary event” that lawmakers could not have anticipated when they wrote the law. As evidence, he cited the “unique factor” of the community’s trauma, illustrated by an outpouring of grief and a presidential visit.
A quarter-century after Columbine, then the deadliest mass shooting ever visited on a high school, the reactions highlighted by the judge — including public memorials and visits from politicians — are no longer signs of an extraordinary event. They’re routine grief rites.
But as gun violence has grown more common, state lawmakers have increasingly restricted access to government records documenting its destructive impact, such as photos and videos showing mutilated bodies and audio recordings capturing children’s cries.
Some states have crafted new exemptions to public records laws specifically shielding depictions of victims. In Connecticut and Florida, bipartisan majorities curtailed access to government records after school shootings in Newtown in 2012 and Parkland in 2018, respectively. Other states, including Colorado, have wielded existing exemptions, for privacy or law enforcement activity, to withhold similar records.
Lawmakers behind the restrictions point to myriad reasons for cloaking crime scene evidence, above all sensitivity to survivors and the families of victims. There’s also concern about interfering with law enforcement investigations or court proceedings and inspiring copycat killers. In the balancing act between privacy and public access, the rise of social media has weighed heavily against access, say people involved in the debates, because of the permanence of digital platforms and their possible manipulation by bad actors.
Even when gruesome images may be available, news organizations have often declined to seek or publish them out of deference to families and fear of public backlash. That approach differs from the media’s handling of casualties overseas — a contrast on display in recent weeks, as explicit footage of violence in Israel and Gaza has appeared in news broadcasts and other media.
In the United States, some family members of victims of mass shootings have become outspoken opponents of publishing images that include bodies.
“I wish her pictures alive moved people as much as people think her picture dead would.”
Nelba Márquez-Greene, whose 6-year-old daughter, Ana Grace, was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, said asking families to disclose pictures of slain children puts an unfair burden on people who are already carrying the enormous weight of grief — particularly, she added, when she sees little evidence that such pictures change people’s minds.
“Why is that my job? We don’t ask rape victims to do this,” said Márquez-Greene, who recently took on a new position as activist in residence at the Yale School of Public Health focused on designing programs to help survivors of gun violence. “I wish her pictures alive moved people as much as people think her picture dead would.”
But the recurring nightmare of mass shootings has prompted others to advocate for releasing and publicizing photographs and autopsy information. They argue that withholding such material has deprived the public of an accurate understanding of the destructive force of weapons including the AR-15, a firearm originally designed for combat that’s now the weapon of choice for many mass killers. Concealing records that depict victims also makes off-limits a whole range of other visuals, including scenes of chaos and unrest left by the gunfire.
Patricia Oliver, whose 17-year-old son, Joaquin Oliver, was killed outside his creative writing class at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said mere descriptions of that terror have failed to mobilize enough people or focus the public debate on the astonishing power of the gun used to kill her son. She said more graphic material could help.
“Sometimes human beings don’t understand with words,” she said. “If what’s necessary is to show people pieces of Joaquin’s skull everywhere, I’m willing to do that.”
The dilemmas of depicting mass shootings
For media outlets making sense of the spate of mass shootings since Columbine, impassioned appeals for privacy by some families have carried weight.
When the Denver Post mobilized to cover the 2012 massacre at a midnight showing of the superhero movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” the newspaper elected not to seek wide-ranging public records from the crime scene in suburban Aurora. Gregory Moore, the editor at the time of the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage, said his staff’s approach was informed by past tragedies: “We were probably overly sensitized to victims and their grief here having gone through Columbine.”
“It’s part of our DNA not to traumatize victims and families in this community,” he said.
But the “landscape has changed” in the decade since Aurora, Moore said, and he now believes news organization must do more to “help people understand how out of control this situation is and what the devastation is from having these weapons of war on the streets.”
As part of The Washington Post’s reporting on the AR-15’s role in American life, Post journalists sought crime scene photographs, autopsy reports and court records in an effort to understand how the weapon transforms ordinary scenes — such as classrooms, concerts, shopping centers — and how it maims the human body.
In some cases, authorities released imagery from crime scenes, such as photos of guns, gloves and a gas mask; in others, they denied requests for such records. Government agencies that refused to provide documents most often cited exemptions to public records laws that allow them to withhold information related to law enforcement investigations. Agencies also invoked exemptions covering personal privacy.
After Texas authorities refused records requests related to the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Post journalists independently obtained a trove of evidence compiled by state and federal police, including extremely graphic photos and videos taken moments after police entered the classrooms where 19 students and two teachers had been killed.
Brett Cross and Nikki Cross, guardians of Uvalde shooting victim Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, embrace this past July outside the Texas Capitol as they view footage of children lost to gun violence as part of the Parkland High School Bus Tour. (Austin American-Statesman/AP)
The families of some Uvalde victims have pushed for disclosure of such evidence. Brett Cross, the legal guardian of murdered 10-year-old Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, said the reason is that families like his were left in the dark by law enforcement, whose response to the shooting quickly came under criticism.
Cross said crime scene footage is urgent evidence that belongs to the public. Still, he said, parents are entitled to their qualms. “The world needs to see the terrible things these weapons do, but at the end of the day, these are still our babies,” he said.
Two groups that regularly see gunshot victims up close, law enforcement officers and health-care professionals, aren’t in lockstep about public disclosure. Law enforcement is often against it. But the medical community is of a mixed mind, said Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins who serves as board chair and chief medical officer for the nonprofit group Brady, which advocates for gun control.
Some who tend to the bodies of shooting victims see the potential for what Sakran called “an Emmett Till moment,” referring to the way in which the public funeral for the 14-year-old Black boy lynched in 1955 — and his mother’s insistence on an open casket — created moral outrage that helped propel the civil rights movement.
“My personal belief is that images could be profound and could make a difference in swaying public understanding of the crisis we’re facing and perhaps even lead to demonstrable change,” Sakran said. But no doctor, he added, would force that on a family.
Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who has studied the effects of visual imagery on human behavior, said graphic images can change attitudes, but only in particular circumstances. He drew a parallel to the 2015 photo of a Syrian child lying facedown on a Turkish beach, which brought attention to the war in Syria and caused a surge in humanitarian donations.
“An image, if it catches attention, creates a window of opportunity where people are alert to a problem,” Slovic said. “But if images are repeated over and over again, we become numb to them.”
After shootings, lawmakers restrict access to public records
In communities that have experienced some of the nation’s most traumatic mass shootings, governments have responded by adopting new restrictions on access to public records.
Six months after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012, the legislature amended the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act to exempt from disclosure photos and videos “depicting the victim of a homicide” if the records “could reasonably be expected” to infringe on personal privacy.
Momentum for the legislation built after publication of a blog post by Michael Moore, the filmmaker who created the 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” predicting that someone in Newtown would leak crime scene photos to awaken public outrage. Moore wrote that “when the American people see what bullets from an assault rifle fired at close range do to a little child’s body … every sane American will demand action.”
The prediction set off alarm among families of victims — and an aggressive response by lawmakers “who were shocked and appalled by this suggestion that sensitive images would be disseminated,” said Colleen M. Murphy, executive director of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission, a state agency that enforces public records rules.
Murphy, who opposed the changes, was among those tapped for a task force set up by the 2013 legislation to make recommendations about the balance between “victim privacy” and “the public’s right to know.”
At the task force’s request, the General Assembly conducted a 50-state survey of public records laws and found that eight other states had rules specifically restricting the release of crime scene photos: California, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas. A law in Texas, written by a Democrat and passed around the same time as the Connecticut measure, restricted photos of victims “in a state of dismemberment, decapitation, or similar mutilation or that depicts the deceased person’s genitalia.”
The review also found that 26 states specifically limited the release of autopsy reports and 16 limited the release of 911 tapes.
A Post analysis of state records laws found that all 50 states and D.C. allow police departments to withhold materials they consider part of ongoing investigations. Many also have broad carve-outs for personal privacy.
A year after the Newtown shooting, reports released by the Connecticut State Police included about 1,500 photos taken by a crime scene investigator. Most were redacted in accordance with the new law, obscured by large black rectangles. Those that weren’t redacted showed firearms, door handles and caution tape. None showed humans.
Connecticut State Police completely redacted this Sandy Hook Elementary School crime scene photograph before it was released publicly and also redacted a caption that describes its contents. The portion of the caption that is not redacted shows it is a photograph of a bathroom where bodies of children were found huddled together.
The full images have never been publicly released, even as conspiracy theorists seized on the shooting with claims that the murders had been faked, turning Newtown into a grim landmark in America’s break with reality.
Some argue that photographic evidence of victims would undercut such claims, while others say that gruesome images would only encourage extremists.
Jeff Covello, the Connecticut State Police sergeant who supervised the Newtown crime scene, brought then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to the scene and showed him the unredacted images. He said he believes only some people should see such visuals.
“Who exactly is on that list is not for me to decide,” he said. “Families should have some say — exactly how much I don’t know.”
Deciding what to conceal in the ‘Sunshine State’
Ever since Fred Guttenberg’s 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018, he has been a gun-control advocate — stumping for political candidates, yelling out in protest during the 2020 State of the Union and petitioning the government to investigate a firearms manufacturer.
He used to think depictions of the damage from powerful rifles could change minds. When he met with Sen. Ted Cruz in the fall of 2019, Guttenberg said, he showed the Texas Republican photos of his daughter’s lifeless body. “It didn’t change a thing,” he said.
Cruz, after the meeting, said it was “productive and respectful.” The senator’s spokesman didn’t respond to a question about Guttenberg’s account.
Now, Guttenberg opposes disseminating such images. “There’s this notion that what we need to do is convince Americans what this looks like, but Americans are already convinced,” he said, citing surveys that show huge majorities favor new gun laws. “In my mind we don’t need to flood television screens and newspapers with images of bodies like my daughter’s.”
The same year as Guttenberg’s meeting with Cruz, the Florida legislature amended the state’s Sunshine Law to shield photographs, videos and audio of the “killing of a victim of mass violence” from public release.
Community members in Parkland, Fla., gather in February 2018 for a candlelight vigil in honor of the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, one of multiple rampages that inspired lawmakers to tighten public records rules to prevent release of images and other evidence depicting victims. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Barbara Petersen, the former longtime president of the state’s First Amendment Foundation, fought the bill, arguing that the exemption makes citizens and media trying to understand mass violence “dependent on what law enforcement tells us.”
“We need to see it for ourselves, as awful as it may be,” she said.
Lauren Book, a Democratic state senator in Florida, was among the members of a public safety commission who saw extensive footage of Parkland’s carnage to prepare a 2019 report on the shooting. In 2019, she voted to make confidential the very sort of crime scene evidence that she had viewed.
“It’s horrific to see a child in a classroom look like a piece of hamburger meat,” she said. “I don’t think anyone needs to see that.”
Few have. Most Americans haven’t seen the mangled human remains left by dozens of mass shootings since Parkland. So while images of her son, Joaquin, are awful, said Patricia Oliver, they reflect a reality that the country must face.
“When will people understand the damage these guns cause?” Oliver asked.
- It's the guns
- It's not the guns, it's the mental health
- It's guns in the hands of people who aren't mentally healthy
- Think of the families - they need our thoughts and prayers
- Fuck your thoughts and prayers - we need sensible laws
- It's too soon - don't politicize it
- and on and on and on
But then the next one comes along, and we forget about the last one and start the Never-Ending Cycle Of Bullshit all over again.
Every day, 327 people are shot in the United States. Among those:
- 117 people are shot and killed
- 210 survive gunshot injuries
- 90 are intentionally shot by someone else and survive
- 46 are murdered
- 67 die from gun suicide
- 10 survive an attempted gun suicide
- 1 is killed unintentionally
- 90 are shot unintentionally and survive
- 2 are killed by legal intervention*
- 4 are shot by legal intervention and survive
- 1 died but the intent was unknown
- 12 are shot and survive but the intent was unknown
327 x 365 = 119,355 gunshot casualties per year.
Every
Fucking
Year
I think I get the need to be sympathetic to people who don't want pictures of their dead babies splashed all over the media.
And I think it's important to consider the numbing effect that repeated exposure to horrifically graphic images can have on us. But I can't stop thinking that we have to have some Emmett Till moments (mentioned in the WaPo piece below).
Changing the law is an OK start, but the one thing the ammosexuals are right about is that we have to make changes in a culture that propagates gun violence. We're in the middle of this mess because too many people don't think new laws are necessary, and so new laws will be discounted, or ignored altogether.
The relatives of the slaughtered need to start insisting that the world actually bear witness to what happens as a result of venal politicians and their stupidly gullible voters refusing to do one goddamned thing to stop the madness.
Cuz this is 9 kinds of fucked up right here.
States reeling from gun violence made graphic imagery confidential — part of a charged debate over privacy and public awareness
After a burst of gun violence claimed 13 lives at Columbine High School in 1999, a difficult question confronted a Colorado judge: whether to order the release of autopsies sought by local media under the state’s public records law.
The judge, Jose D.L. Márquez, decided to keep the graphic reports hidden, ruling that the rampage was an “extraordinary event” that lawmakers could not have anticipated when they wrote the law. As evidence, he cited the “unique factor” of the community’s trauma, illustrated by an outpouring of grief and a presidential visit.
A quarter-century after Columbine, then the deadliest mass shooting ever visited on a high school, the reactions highlighted by the judge — including public memorials and visits from politicians — are no longer signs of an extraordinary event. They’re routine grief rites.
But as gun violence has grown more common, state lawmakers have increasingly restricted access to government records documenting its destructive impact, such as photos and videos showing mutilated bodies and audio recordings capturing children’s cries.
Some states have crafted new exemptions to public records laws specifically shielding depictions of victims. In Connecticut and Florida, bipartisan majorities curtailed access to government records after school shootings in Newtown in 2012 and Parkland in 2018, respectively. Other states, including Colorado, have wielded existing exemptions, for privacy or law enforcement activity, to withhold similar records.
Lawmakers behind the restrictions point to myriad reasons for cloaking crime scene evidence, above all sensitivity to survivors and the families of victims. There’s also concern about interfering with law enforcement investigations or court proceedings and inspiring copycat killers. In the balancing act between privacy and public access, the rise of social media has weighed heavily against access, say people involved in the debates, because of the permanence of digital platforms and their possible manipulation by bad actors.
Even when gruesome images may be available, news organizations have often declined to seek or publish them out of deference to families and fear of public backlash. That approach differs from the media’s handling of casualties overseas — a contrast on display in recent weeks, as explicit footage of violence in Israel and Gaza has appeared in news broadcasts and other media.
In the United States, some family members of victims of mass shootings have become outspoken opponents of publishing images that include bodies.
“I wish her pictures alive moved people as much as people think her picture dead would.”
Nelba Márquez-Greene, whose 6-year-old daughter, Ana Grace, was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, said asking families to disclose pictures of slain children puts an unfair burden on people who are already carrying the enormous weight of grief — particularly, she added, when she sees little evidence that such pictures change people’s minds.
“Why is that my job? We don’t ask rape victims to do this,” said Márquez-Greene, who recently took on a new position as activist in residence at the Yale School of Public Health focused on designing programs to help survivors of gun violence. “I wish her pictures alive moved people as much as people think her picture dead would.”
But the recurring nightmare of mass shootings has prompted others to advocate for releasing and publicizing photographs and autopsy information. They argue that withholding such material has deprived the public of an accurate understanding of the destructive force of weapons including the AR-15, a firearm originally designed for combat that’s now the weapon of choice for many mass killers. Concealing records that depict victims also makes off-limits a whole range of other visuals, including scenes of chaos and unrest left by the gunfire.
Patricia Oliver, whose 17-year-old son, Joaquin Oliver, was killed outside his creative writing class at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said mere descriptions of that terror have failed to mobilize enough people or focus the public debate on the astonishing power of the gun used to kill her son. She said more graphic material could help.
“Sometimes human beings don’t understand with words,” she said. “If what’s necessary is to show people pieces of Joaquin’s skull everywhere, I’m willing to do that.”
The dilemmas of depicting mass shootings
For media outlets making sense of the spate of mass shootings since Columbine, impassioned appeals for privacy by some families have carried weight.
When the Denver Post mobilized to cover the 2012 massacre at a midnight showing of the superhero movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” the newspaper elected not to seek wide-ranging public records from the crime scene in suburban Aurora. Gregory Moore, the editor at the time of the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage, said his staff’s approach was informed by past tragedies: “We were probably overly sensitized to victims and their grief here having gone through Columbine.”
“It’s part of our DNA not to traumatize victims and families in this community,” he said.
But the “landscape has changed” in the decade since Aurora, Moore said, and he now believes news organization must do more to “help people understand how out of control this situation is and what the devastation is from having these weapons of war on the streets.”
As part of The Washington Post’s reporting on the AR-15’s role in American life, Post journalists sought crime scene photographs, autopsy reports and court records in an effort to understand how the weapon transforms ordinary scenes — such as classrooms, concerts, shopping centers — and how it maims the human body.
In some cases, authorities released imagery from crime scenes, such as photos of guns, gloves and a gas mask; in others, they denied requests for such records. Government agencies that refused to provide documents most often cited exemptions to public records laws that allow them to withhold information related to law enforcement investigations. Agencies also invoked exemptions covering personal privacy.
After Texas authorities refused records requests related to the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Post journalists independently obtained a trove of evidence compiled by state and federal police, including extremely graphic photos and videos taken moments after police entered the classrooms where 19 students and two teachers had been killed.
Brett Cross and Nikki Cross, guardians of Uvalde shooting victim Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, embrace this past July outside the Texas Capitol as they view footage of children lost to gun violence as part of the Parkland High School Bus Tour. (Austin American-Statesman/AP)
The families of some Uvalde victims have pushed for disclosure of such evidence. Brett Cross, the legal guardian of murdered 10-year-old Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, said the reason is that families like his were left in the dark by law enforcement, whose response to the shooting quickly came under criticism.
Cross said crime scene footage is urgent evidence that belongs to the public. Still, he said, parents are entitled to their qualms. “The world needs to see the terrible things these weapons do, but at the end of the day, these are still our babies,” he said.
Two groups that regularly see gunshot victims up close, law enforcement officers and health-care professionals, aren’t in lockstep about public disclosure. Law enforcement is often against it. But the medical community is of a mixed mind, said Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins who serves as board chair and chief medical officer for the nonprofit group Brady, which advocates for gun control.
Some who tend to the bodies of shooting victims see the potential for what Sakran called “an Emmett Till moment,” referring to the way in which the public funeral for the 14-year-old Black boy lynched in 1955 — and his mother’s insistence on an open casket — created moral outrage that helped propel the civil rights movement.
“My personal belief is that images could be profound and could make a difference in swaying public understanding of the crisis we’re facing and perhaps even lead to demonstrable change,” Sakran said. But no doctor, he added, would force that on a family.
Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who has studied the effects of visual imagery on human behavior, said graphic images can change attitudes, but only in particular circumstances. He drew a parallel to the 2015 photo of a Syrian child lying facedown on a Turkish beach, which brought attention to the war in Syria and caused a surge in humanitarian donations.
“An image, if it catches attention, creates a window of opportunity where people are alert to a problem,” Slovic said. “But if images are repeated over and over again, we become numb to them.”
After shootings, lawmakers restrict access to public records
In communities that have experienced some of the nation’s most traumatic mass shootings, governments have responded by adopting new restrictions on access to public records.
Six months after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012, the legislature amended the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act to exempt from disclosure photos and videos “depicting the victim of a homicide” if the records “could reasonably be expected” to infringe on personal privacy.
Momentum for the legislation built after publication of a blog post by Michael Moore, the filmmaker who created the 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” predicting that someone in Newtown would leak crime scene photos to awaken public outrage. Moore wrote that “when the American people see what bullets from an assault rifle fired at close range do to a little child’s body … every sane American will demand action.”
The prediction set off alarm among families of victims — and an aggressive response by lawmakers “who were shocked and appalled by this suggestion that sensitive images would be disseminated,” said Colleen M. Murphy, executive director of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission, a state agency that enforces public records rules.
Murphy, who opposed the changes, was among those tapped for a task force set up by the 2013 legislation to make recommendations about the balance between “victim privacy” and “the public’s right to know.”
At the task force’s request, the General Assembly conducted a 50-state survey of public records laws and found that eight other states had rules specifically restricting the release of crime scene photos: California, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas. A law in Texas, written by a Democrat and passed around the same time as the Connecticut measure, restricted photos of victims “in a state of dismemberment, decapitation, or similar mutilation or that depicts the deceased person’s genitalia.”
The review also found that 26 states specifically limited the release of autopsy reports and 16 limited the release of 911 tapes.
A Post analysis of state records laws found that all 50 states and D.C. allow police departments to withhold materials they consider part of ongoing investigations. Many also have broad carve-outs for personal privacy.
A year after the Newtown shooting, reports released by the Connecticut State Police included about 1,500 photos taken by a crime scene investigator. Most were redacted in accordance with the new law, obscured by large black rectangles. Those that weren’t redacted showed firearms, door handles and caution tape. None showed humans.
Connecticut State Police completely redacted this Sandy Hook Elementary School crime scene photograph before it was released publicly and also redacted a caption that describes its contents. The portion of the caption that is not redacted shows it is a photograph of a bathroom where bodies of children were found huddled together.
The full images have never been publicly released, even as conspiracy theorists seized on the shooting with claims that the murders had been faked, turning Newtown into a grim landmark in America’s break with reality.
Some argue that photographic evidence of victims would undercut such claims, while others say that gruesome images would only encourage extremists.
Jeff Covello, the Connecticut State Police sergeant who supervised the Newtown crime scene, brought then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to the scene and showed him the unredacted images. He said he believes only some people should see such visuals.
“Who exactly is on that list is not for me to decide,” he said. “Families should have some say — exactly how much I don’t know.”
Deciding what to conceal in the ‘Sunshine State’
Ever since Fred Guttenberg’s 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018, he has been a gun-control advocate — stumping for political candidates, yelling out in protest during the 2020 State of the Union and petitioning the government to investigate a firearms manufacturer.
He used to think depictions of the damage from powerful rifles could change minds. When he met with Sen. Ted Cruz in the fall of 2019, Guttenberg said, he showed the Texas Republican photos of his daughter’s lifeless body. “It didn’t change a thing,” he said.
Cruz, after the meeting, said it was “productive and respectful.” The senator’s spokesman didn’t respond to a question about Guttenberg’s account.
Now, Guttenberg opposes disseminating such images. “There’s this notion that what we need to do is convince Americans what this looks like, but Americans are already convinced,” he said, citing surveys that show huge majorities favor new gun laws. “In my mind we don’t need to flood television screens and newspapers with images of bodies like my daughter’s.”
The same year as Guttenberg’s meeting with Cruz, the Florida legislature amended the state’s Sunshine Law to shield photographs, videos and audio of the “killing of a victim of mass violence” from public release.
Community members in Parkland, Fla., gather in February 2018 for a candlelight vigil in honor of the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, one of multiple rampages that inspired lawmakers to tighten public records rules to prevent release of images and other evidence depicting victims. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Barbara Petersen, the former longtime president of the state’s First Amendment Foundation, fought the bill, arguing that the exemption makes citizens and media trying to understand mass violence “dependent on what law enforcement tells us.”
“We need to see it for ourselves, as awful as it may be,” she said.
Lauren Book, a Democratic state senator in Florida, was among the members of a public safety commission who saw extensive footage of Parkland’s carnage to prepare a 2019 report on the shooting. In 2019, she voted to make confidential the very sort of crime scene evidence that she had viewed.
“It’s horrific to see a child in a classroom look like a piece of hamburger meat,” she said. “I don’t think anyone needs to see that.”
Few have. Most Americans haven’t seen the mangled human remains left by dozens of mass shootings since Parkland. So while images of her son, Joaquin, are awful, said Patricia Oliver, they reflect a reality that the country must face.
“When will people understand the damage these guns cause?” Oliver asked.
GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE
GUN NUTS KILL PEOPLE
WITH GUNS
BECAUSE THEY'RE FUNKIN' NUTS
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