A Status Report

 Gun Deaths in 2024  

Japan:             10
UK:                50
Switzerland:       47
Canada:           611
Israel:           105
Sweden:            41
USAmerica Inc: 40,886

Our esteemed leaders are happy to point out that Brazil posted the highest number at 49,436 - but still insist that gun violence has nothing to do with guns.

Out of the top 50 places with the highest Gun Death Rates worldwide, 34 of them are US states.

God bless America.

Colorado Guns

Colorado is kind of a weird place politically. We're generally a blue state, but there's a very strong and very red MAGA - or MAGA-adjacent - faction that leans hard libertarian.

The basic zeitgeist of the Denver-Boulder-Ft Collins triangle (where most of the humans live) is: "Welcome - please take a number and the governor will issue you a rescue dog and a Subaru as soon as possible". But the rest of the joint is strictly Yellowstone meets Atlas Shrugged, with bold notes of the American Taliban - guns, god, Gadsden flags, and elk sausage all around.

So it seems odd that we'd be fixin' to outlaw practically anything having anything to do with firearms. It's possible, mind ya, but as much as I'd love to see it, I'm not holding my breath.

Sale, manufacture of semiautomatic guns that accept detachable magazines would be banned in Colorado under bill

Senate Bill 3 would also outlaw rapid-fire trigger activators and bump stocks, which can make a semiautomatic firearm fire at a rate similar to that of an automatic weapon

The purchase, sale and manufacture of semiautomatic guns that accept detachable ammunition magazines would be banned in Colorado under a bill introduced Wednesday by Democrats on the first day of the state legislature’s 2025 lawmaking term.

Senate Bill 3 would affect many pistols and rifles, whose manufacturers don’t appear to make versions of the weapons without removable magazines.

The legislation also would outlaw rapid-fire trigger activators and bump stocks, which can make a semiautomatic firearm fire at a rate similar to that of an automatic weapon.

The measure would have an effect similar to — or even greater than — legislation that failed at the Capitol in recent years that would have banned the purchase, sale and manufacture of a broad swath of firearms, defined in those bills as assault weapons.

But Senate Bill 3 appears to have a better chance of reaching the governor’s desk given that it has the support of state Sen. Tom Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat whose son was murdered in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, and given the number of cosponsors it was introduced with.

The bill has 18 original cosponsors in the Senate, including all but five Democrats in the chamber. It needs 18 votes to pass the Senate.

If the bill passes the Senate, the legislature’s more politically moderate chamber, it will almost certainly be approved by the House, where it has 24 original cosponsors, and make it to the governor’s desk.

Whether Gov. Jared Polis would sign the bill if it makes it to his desk, however, remains unclear. He has expressed skepticism of measures seeking to ban certain firearms.

In a written statement Wednesday, Polis’ office didn’t take a position on the legislation.

‘With session just beginning and state of the state tomorrow, the governor and his team are just beginning the process of reviewing particular legislation in its introduced form,” Shelby Wieman, a spokeswoman for the governor, said in a written statement.

Republicans are expected to be uniformly opposed to the bill, but they are in big minorities in the House and Senate. The GOP can try to slow the advance of the measure, but they are mostly powerless to stop it.

Gun rights groups are likely to sue to invalidate the measure should it pass.

The ban would go into effect Sept. 1. First-time violations would constitute a Class 2 misdemeanor offense, punishable by jail time and a fine, while a subsequent offense would constitute a Class 6 felony also punishable by prison.

A gun dealer who violates the law would have their license revoked. Violating the law would also prompt the state to bar a person from purchasing a firearm for five years, unless they were convicted of the felony offense, in which case they would be permanently prohibited from possessing a gun.

Most semiautomatic guns — pistols and rifles — accept detachable magazines.

That means weapons that would fall under the ban would include the AR-15 and its variants, as well as AK-47s, TEC-9s, Beretta Cx4 Storms, Sig Sauer SG550s, MAC-10s, and Derya MK-12s.

Other weapons that may be affected include the popular Smith & Wesson M&P 5.7 and Walther CCP, which are pistols. The measure specifically bans the sale, purchase and manufacture of gas-operated semiautomatic handguns.

The bill would give the attorney general the power to list which firearms would be prohibited under the measure. That appears to be an attempt to prevent manufacturers from finding loopholes in the law.

The measure would have exceptions for bolt-, pump-, lever- and slide-action guns, as well as weapons purchased by law enforcement or the military.

Senate Bill 3, should it pass the legislature and be signed into law, would not outlaw possession of the firearms covered by the bill. That means people who have the weapons before the measure goes into effect wouldn’t be affected.

The lead sponsor of the bill is Sullivan. Other main sponsors include Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, and Democratic Reps. Meg Froelich of Arapahoe County and Andrew Boesenecker of Fort Collins.

Democrats in the legislature are pitching Senate Bill 3 as a way to enforce Colorado’s 2013 law banning ammunition magazines with a capacity greater than 15 rounds. Violations of the law have been widely documented, and magazines with a capacity larger than 15 rounds have been used in at least two mass shootings in Colorado since 2013.

“It’s a high capacity magazine enforcement bill,” Sullivan said. “We passed that legislation in 2013. We’ve had 11 years since then. We haven’t gotten buy-in from the industry — they continue to ship high capacity magazines into the state. We haven’t gotten the buy-in from retailers, hobbyists. This is the next step to the enforcement.”

But the reality is gun manufacturers don’t appear to produce versions of the weapons that would be banned under the bill that don’t use or accept detachable magazines, meaning the effect would go far beyond enforcement of the 2013 law.

Sullivan said manufacturers could produce versions of their weapons that have a permanently attached, or “fixed,” 15-round magazine to adhere to the bill, if it passes.

“They will if they want to continue to sell here within the state of Colorado,” he said. “This is a big market.”

Fixed magazines cannot be removed from a gun without tools. Weapons with fixed magazines are often loaded one bullet at a time and thus are must slower to reload than a detachable-magazine firearm.

The bills banning a wide swath of semiautomatic weapons that were brought in 2023 and 2024 died in the House the first year and the Senate in the second after the measures’ sponsors failed to secure enough Democratic votes to advance them.

But the interpersonal and political dynamics at the Capitol have changed since then, and Sullivan’s lead sponsorship of Senate Bill 3 gives the measure a big boost. Sullivan opposed the 2023 and 2024 measures, saying a ban on so-called assault weapons should only be done on the federal level.

Senate Bill 3 was assigned to the Senate State Military and Veterans Affairs Committee. It hasn’t been scheduled for its first hearing yet.

via Hawk

"Welcome to a regular Tuesday at school in America"

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• 86% were men
• 77% were white
• More than half were single
• 60% had no kids

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.

A crime can happen only when these three criteria are met:

1. Motive
2. Opportunity
3. 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.

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.

Guns

Gun crime has something to do with gun proliferation.

Gun proliferation has everything to do with coin-operated Republicans.

Solution

Solve the problem of enforcing gun laws by having Joe Biden adopt everybody in the country.

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.

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.

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.

Today's Tweext

This one wins the internet today.

pic.twitter.com/ZvlVIgWgWu

— KOJAMF🤘  🤘 (@jimstep260853) January 31, 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'.

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.

Today's Tweet

Thoughts on this? pic.twitter.com/W57DpNy2W5

— Crime Net (@TRIGGERHAPPYV1) January 21, 2024

I'll say it again:

Today's Near Darwin Event

It’s the guns. pic.twitter.com/HPaPiWT6sv

— Sahara Stevens ❤️🇺🇸 (@Sahara_Stevens) January 8, 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.