Today's Tweext

NRA membership is shrinking, last year they raised about half the money they usually do, and now their victims are finally getting a chance to sue them into oblivion.

BOOM - The Mexican government wins their appeal in U.S. court and is able to proceed with the lawsuit against U.S. gun companies for supplying weapons to cartels that fuels the bloodshed south of the border.

An important legal step, but more court battles to come. pic.twitter.com/mib4GErS8f

— Ioan Grillo (@ioangrillo) January 22, 2024

Today's Beau

"The grifter culture of Conservative inc."

NRA civil trial threatens to shake up gun rights organization even with leader’s resignation

Wayne LaPierre, two other current and former NRA leaders and the organization itself are facing a lawsuit that alleges they violated nonprofit laws and misused NRA funds to finance their lavish lifestyles.

Wayne LaPierre’s civil trial, slated to begin Monday in New York, still threatens to unravel the National Rifle Association despite his resignation from the powerful and prominent gun rights group.

LaPierre, 74, had led the NRA for more than 30 years as the organization’s executive vice president. He announced his departure Friday as jury selection neared an end.

He, along with two other current and former NRA leaders and the organization as a whole are fending off a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2020 that alleges they violated nonprofit laws and misused millions of dollars of NRA funds to finance lavish lifestyles for themselves.

The jury will spend the next six weeks in a Manhattan courtroom hearing testimony from roughly 120 witnesses.

If the jurors find the individual defendants liable, they will recommend the amount of money that each defendant would have to repay the NRA.

They would have also been tasked with recommending whether LaPierre should be ousted from the helm of the group, which is now moot.

But the trial outcome may still have important ramifications, according to Shannon Watts, who founded the gun safety group Moms Demand Action in 2012 in part to challenge the gun lobby.

State Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen, who has the final say over monetary damages and remedies, could determine whether the defendants should be permanently barred from serving on the board of any charity in New York and whether an independent monitor should oversee the NRA’s finances.

“It was never just about Wayne LaPierre,” Watts said, adding that the organization “needs to be taken down at the studs.”

In his announcement, LaPierre said he has been a “card-carrying member” of the NRA for most of his adult life and that he would “never stop supporting the NRA and its fight to defend Second Amendment freedom.”

“My passion for our cause burns as deeply as ever,” LaPierre said. He cited health reasons for his exit, which will take effect Jan. 31.

James touted LaPierre’s resignation as “an important victory.”

“LaPierre’s resignation validates our claims against him, but it will not insulate him from accountability,” she said in a statement. “We look forward to presenting our case in court.”

A ‘personal piggy bank’

The lawsuit alleges that LaPierre diverted millions of dollars away from the group’s charitable mission for his personal use of private jets, expensive meals, travel consultants, private security and trips to the Bahamas for him and his family.

The attorney general claims LaPierre spent more than $500,000 of the NRA’s assets to fly himself and his family members to the Bahamas. From May 2015 to April 2019, the NRA incurred over $1 million in expenses for private flights on which LaPierre was not a passenger, according to the lawsuit.

LaPierre received more than $1.2 million in expense reimbursements from 2013 to 2017, the lawsuit alleges.

The other defendants are also accused of violating nonprofit laws and internal policies as they enriched themselves, the suit says, contributing to the NRA’s loss of more than $64 million in three years.

They are Wilson “Woody” Phillips, a former NRA treasurer and chief financial officer, and John Frazer, the corporate secretary and general counsel.

Joshua Powell, a former chief of staff and executive director of general operations, was also a defendant. But he told NBC News on Friday evening that he had officially settled the case against him. The attorney general’s office confirmed the settlement in a statement Saturday.

At a news conference announcing the lawsuit in 2020, James, a Democrat, accused the four defendants of using the NRA as a “personal piggy bank.”

None of the defendants has been criminally charged as part of James’ lawsuit.

Potential key moments

The defendants have collectively named 86 witnesses, a court filing shows. The plaintiffs named 36 witnesses, including former NRA higher-ups.

One of them is Oliver North, a former NRA president who was in a heated battle with LaPierre when he left the group in 2019. North had reportedly attempted to remove LaPierre from NRA leadership after he began investigating possible financial improprieties.

Another key witness for the plaintiffs is Chris Cox, the NRA’s longtime top lobbyist before he was pushed out of the group in 2019 amid leadership turmoil.

The testimonies from the two former NRA insiders, who have not yet spoken publicly, could reveal details that may be especially eye-opening to current NRA members, according to Justin Wagner, senior director of investigations with Everytown for Gun Safety, a national gun violence prevention nonprofit.

“This is a monumental moment in the organization’s history,” said Wagner, who is also a former prosecutor in the New York attorney general’s office.

“The main witnesses to the NRA’s mismanagement are adamant gun rights supporters,” he added. “I think those firsthand accounts will really be impactful at trial.”

The plaintiffs have asked for two hours to deliver their opening statements Monday, a court filing shows. The remarks come after failed attempts by the defendants to dismiss the lawsuit, change the court venue and countersue. The NRA also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

James initially set out to dissolve the NRA as part of her suit. However, Cohen dismissed that effort in 2022, saying her complaint “does not allege the type of public harm that is the legal linchpin for imposing the ‘corporate death penalty.’”

The lawsuit also targets the NRA as a whole. The organization has operated as a nonprofit charitable corporation in New York since 1871. Its assets are required by law to be used in a way that serves the interests of its membership and advances its charitable mission.

In the last few years, the NRA has been considerably weaker, with less influence in the political sphere and fewer members, Watts and Wagner said.

Membership fell to 4.2 million from nearly 6 million five years ago, The New York Times reported. Membership dues dropped by $14 million from 2021 to 2022, according to an audit filed as part of the lawsuit.

The NRA did not respond to a request for comment about the trial. In 2020, the group said in a statement that the lawsuit was a “baseless, premeditated attack” on the NRA and on Second Amendment freedoms.

LaPierre previously called the investigation an “unconstitutional, premeditated attack aiming to dismantle and destroy the NRA.”

In a statement Friday, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said they “look forward to proving our case and ensuring all charities in New York adhere to the rule of law.”

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.

The NRA Lies

It doesn't take a good guy with a gun. It just takes a good guy.

At least twice now, we've had mass shootings that were ended by unarmed people who acted heroically to take down the asshole with the gun.

A Coder Wrested a Pistol From the Gunman’s Hands, Preventing Greater Tragedy

Brandon Tsay, 26, is being credited with preventing further violence by subduing the gunman before he could kill more people.

SAN MARINO, Calif. — Saturday night was winding down at the Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio, with less than a half-hour to go until closing. There were three people left on the spacious dance floor.

Brandon Tsay, the third-generation operator of the family-run dance hall in Alhambra, was in the office off the lobby, watching the ballroom, when he heard the front doors swing closed and a strange clang that sounded like metallic objects hitting one another.

He turned around to see a semiautomatic assault pistol pointed at him.

“He was looking at me and looking around, not hiding that he was trying to do harm. His eyes were menacing,” recalled Mr. Tsay, 26, at his family’s San Marino home Sunday, less than 24 hours after he stared down a gunman who, unbeknown to him, had opened fire at another nearby ballroom, killing 10 people and injuring several others in one of California’s worst mass shootings.

About 20 minutes after that massacre, the gunman, who authorities identified as Huu Can Tran, 72, arrived at Lai Lai, just about two miles to the north, officials said.

Mr. Tsay struggled with the gunman and eventually disarmed him, saving countless lives and averting another tragedy. It was an act that officials roundly praised as heroic. Mr. Tran was found dead Sunday afternoon of a self-inflicted gunshot in a van about 30 miles away, according to law enforcement officials.

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Mr. Tsay said the weapon the gunman was carrying signaled he intended to inflict maximum damage.

“How it was built and customized, I knew it wasn’t for robbing money,” Mr. Tsay said of the weapon. “From his body language, his facial expression, his eyes, he was looking for people.”

Sheriff Robert Luna of Los Angeles County said in a news briefing Sunday afternoon that “two community members” had disarmed the gunman at the Alhambra ballroom. “This could have been much worse,” he said.

But Mr. Tsay and his family, who reviewed the security camera footage from the lobby of the ballroom, said it was he alone who fought the gunman over control of the weapon and wrested it from him. The doors to the ballroom were closed and no one else was involved, they said.

“It was just my son. He could have died,” said his father, Tom Tsay, who said he was proud of his son for the bravery he showed. “He’s lucky, someone was watching over him.”

His older sister, Brenda, who currently runs the business, said the video showed a prolonged, fierce struggle between the two men all over the lobby.


“He kept coming at him, he really wanted the gun back,” she said of the gunman.

The younger Mr. Tsay, a computer coder who mans the ticket office a few days a week at the ballroom started by his grandparents, said it was around 10:35 p.m. Saturday that he turned to face the gunman, whom he didn’t recognize. He had never seen a real gun before, but could tell that it was a deadly weapon, he said.

“My heart sank, I knew I was going to die,” he said.

The next moment, he lunged and grabbed the weapon by its barrel and began wrestling with the gunman for control of it.

“That moment, it was primal instinct,” he said. “Something happened there. I don’t know what came over me.”

They fought over control of the gun for about a minute and a half, and it felt like they were similarly matched in strength, Mr. Tsay said. At one point, the gunman looked down at the weapon and took one hand off it, as if to manipulate the gun to begin shooting. Mr. Tsay said he seized the moment and pried the pistol away from the man.

He pointed the weapon back at him and yelled: “Go, get the hell out of here,” he recalled.

Mr. Tsay, who stayed up all night assisting police with their investigation, said he felt traumatized and hadn’t quite been able to process what he had been through. He particularly felt heartbroken for the community of Monterey Park and surrounding areas where his family and their ballroom had become established as a beloved haven over three decades, he said.

“Lai Lai,” a name his grandmother chose, means “come, come,” in Chinese, his sister said. The assailant, dressed in black, looked like he could easily be one of their regulars, he said.

“We have such a tight-knit community of dancers,” he said. “It feels so terrible something like this happened, to have one of our individuals try to harm others.”

Continuing Sadness

Dear POTUS -

I appreciate your leadership and calm resolve in the face of deep and difficult problems.

And I think your empathy, and your generous heart, and your faith in our shared humanity are genuine and essential to a proper leader of a world power.

But what I need to see from you right now is a clenched fist. I need to see you stomping some NRA ass - and your hands around the throats of their Republican accomplices.

This shit can't go on.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Gunman was bullied as a child, grew increasingly violent, friends say

Relatives, classmates describe fraught relationship with mother and a troubling pattern of acting out

The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said.

Using weapons purchased this month, days after his 18th birthday, authorities said, Salvador Rolando Ramos shot and critically wounded his grandmother. He then went on a shooting rampage at Robb Elementary School near his home in Uvalde, Tex., killing at least 19 children and two adults and injuring others.

Ramos also was fatally shot, apparently by police. The Texas Department of Public Safety said he was wearing body armor and armed with a rifle.

Santos Valdez Jr., 18, said he has known Ramos since early elementary school. They were friends, he said, until Ramos’s behavior started to deteriorate.

They used to play video games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty. But then Ramos changed. Once, Valdez said, Ramos pulled up to a park where they often played basketball and had cuts all over his face. He first said a cat had scratched his face.

“Then he told me the truth, that he’d cut up his face with knives over and over and over,” Valdez said. “I was like, ‘You’re crazy, bro, why would you do that?’”

Ramos said he did it for fun, Valdez recalled.

In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said.

Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school. “He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” Garcia said. “Over social media, over gaming, over everything.”

“He was the nicest kid, the most shyest kid. He just needed to break out of his shell.”

One time, he posted a photo of himself wearing black eyeliner, Garcia said, which brought on a slew of comments using a derogatory term for a gay person.

Garcia said he tried to stand up for him. But when Garcia and his mother relocated to another part of Texas for her job, “he just started being a different person,” Garcia said. “He kept getting worse and worse, and I don’t even know.”

When Garcia left, Ramos dropped out of school. He started wearing all black, Garcia said, and large military boots. He grew his hair out long.

He missed long periods of high school, classmates said, and was not on track to graduate with them this year.

Ramos’s cousin Mia said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together. He’d brush it off in the moment, Mia said, then complain later to his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school.

“He wasn’t very much of a social person after being bullied for the stutter,” said Mia, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used because her family does not want to be associated with the massacre. “I think he just didn’t feel comfortable anymore at school.”

Valdez said Ramos drove around with another friend at night sometimes and shot at random people with a BB gun. He also egged people’s cars, Valdez said.

About a year ago, Ramos posted on social media photos of automatic rifles that “he would have on his wish list,” Valdez said. Four days ago, he posted images of two rifles he referred to as “my gun pics.”

A person briefed on the investigation’s early findings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said Ramos bought the weapon used in the attack immediately after his 18th birthday, which was in mid-May.

Two months ago, he posted an Instagram story in which he screamed at his mother, who he said was trying to kick him out of their home, said Nadia Reyes, a high school classmate.

“He posted videos on his Instagram where the cops were there and he’d call his mom a b---- and say she wanted to kick him out,” Reyes said. “He’d be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.”

Ruben Flores, 41, said he lived next door to the family on Hood Street and tried to be a kind of father figure to Ramos, who had “a pretty rough life with his mom.”

He and his wife, Becky Flores, would invite Ramos to barbecues at their house and for sleepovers with their son, who was a few years younger. Ramos went by the nickname “pelon,” Spanish for bald, because his hair was often cut so short when he was younger, Flores said.

As he grew older, problems at home became more acute and more apparent to neighbors, Flores said. He described seeing police at the house and witnessing blowups between Ramos and his mother.

Multiple people familiar with the family, including Flores, said Ramos’s mother used drugs, which contributed to the upheaval in the home. Ramos’s mother could not be reached for comment.

Ramos moved from the Hood Street home to his grandmother’s home across town a few months ago, Flores said. He said he last saw the grandmother on Sunday, when she stopped by the Hood Street property, which she also owned. The grandmother told him she was in the process of evicting Ramos’s mother because of her drug problems, Flores said.

Reyes said she could recall about five times that Ramos had fistfights with peers in middle school and junior high. His friendships were short-lived, she said. Once, Ramos commented to a friend while playing basketball that the friend only wanted to join the Marines one day so he could kill people, Reyes said. The other boy, she added, ended the friendship on the spot.

“He would take things too far, say something that shouldn’t be said, and then he would go into defense mode about it,” Reyes said.

She and her Uvalde High School school classmates had visited Robb Elementary School just a day before the massacre, wearing their graduation robes and high-fiving the grade-schoolers, who lined up in the hallways — a community tradition.

“Those kids were so excited to see us in our cap and gown,” Reyes said. “They’re looking at us like, ‘I’m gonna be there one day.’ It’s surreal, like we’re in a movie. It’s horrible.”

Valdez said his last interaction with Ramos was about two hours before the shooting, when they messaged on Instagram’s Stories feature. Valdez had re-shared a meme that said “WHY TF IS SCHOOL STILL OPEN.”

According to a screenshot of their exchange, Ramos responded: “Facts” and “That’s good tho right?” Then Valdez replied: “Idek [I don’t even know] I don’t even go to school lmao.”

Ramos never responded to or opened that text message, Valdez said.

Just a month or two ago, Garcia said, he called Ramos to check in on him.

But Ramos said he was going hunting with his uncle and didn’t have time to talk. He hung up. Garcia later saw the photos of large guns that Ramos had posted online and wondered whether that was what they were for — going hunting, or to the shooting range with his uncle.

On Tuesday, Garcia was in algebra class in San Antonio when he started receiving a slew of texts with the news of what had happened in Uvalde. He didn’t believe it at first. He opened his phone’s browser and Googled the shooting and saw Ramos’s name.

“I couldn’t even think, I couldn’t even talk to anyone. I just walked out of class, really upset, you know, bawling my eyes out,” Garcia said. “Because I never expected him to hurt people.”

“I think he needed mental help. And more closure with his family. And love.”

Today's Eternal Sadness

Christina-Taylor Green was born September 11, 2001.

She died January 8, 2011 - shot to death, along with 5 others, at a campaign rally for Gabby Giffords in Tucson.

Fuck the NRA and their coin-operated politicians.

Today's Today

A year ago, some sick kid with an AR15 murdered 14 of his peers and 3 teachers at MS Douglas High School in Parkland FL.

I'm posting this on 25-Feb-2018, hoping something will change in a year's time other than the date of the latest idiotic profit-driven blood sacrifice.

It's The Money, Stupid

Because it's always the money.

Here's another little "Holy Fuck Moment" for today.

"Unrelated" to the Mueller probe, a Russian citizen inside the US has been arrested and charged under a criminal indictment.

That's kind of a big fuckin' deal, kids.

Again - it's not simple. There are no 10-word bumper stickers that explain it all. But if you want the basics, then just assume everything is being driven by one scheme or another to launder (mostly Russian) money, and usually thru the Trump organization in some way.

The Maria Butina issue shows a wrinkle that uses American naïveté regarding our willingness to accept bizarre contortions like:

"Money is speech, so huge campaign contributions are protected under the 1st amendment, and the 2nd amendment is what makes the 1st amendment possible"

Also again, there are no simple solutions, but a good place to start is to get serious about Campaign Finance.

Fuck Citizens United.

Dark Money

There is such a thing as a Reasonable Republican - honest there is. I know it's a little jarring these days to think those two words could be contained in the same thought without causing real damage to your brain, but some Repubs really are pretty reasonable.

Or rather they were pretty reasonable until they started to realize how fucked they're going to be as we find out that a good bit of the blood money they've collected as campaign contributions over the last several years has been coming from Russian oligarchs and laundered thru the NRA.

Vanity Fair:

The F.B.I. and special counsel Robert Mueller are investigating meetings between N.R.A. officials and powerful Russian operatives, trying to determine if those contacts had anything to do with the gun group spending $30 million to help elect Donald Trump—triple what it invested on behalf of Mitt Romney in 2012. The use of foreign money in American political campaigns is illegal. One encounter of particular interest to investigators is between Donald Trump Jr.and a Russian banker at an N.R.A. dinner.

The Russian wooing of N.R.A. executives goes back to at least 2011, when that same banker and politician, Alexander Torshin, befriended David Keene,who was then president of the gun-rights organization. Torshin soon became a “life member,” attending the N.R.A.’s annual conventions and introducing comrades to other gun-group officials. In 2015, Torshin welcomed an N.R.A. delegation to Moscow that included Keene and Joe Gregory, then head of the “Ring of Freedom” program, which is reserved for top donors to the N.R.A. 

Among the other hosts were Dmitry Rogozin, who until last month was the deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s defense industry, and Sergei Rudov,head of the Saint Basil the Great Charitable Foundation, one of Russia’s wealthiest philanthropies.

It’s possible that the men were merely bonding over a shared love of firearms. Mike Carpenter, a Russian specialist who worked in the Pentagon during the Obama administration, laughs at the notion. “The Russian state is run by a K.G.B. elite that wants nothing less than to have an armed citizenry,” Carpenter says. “Rogozin is a heavyweight in Russian politics. . . . Torshin has a direct line to Putin . . . and also has possible ties to organized crime. Rudov is the right-hand man of Konstantin Malofeev, who is sort of a paleo-conservative, ultra-nationalist figure who bankrolls a lot of projects involving mercenaries in Ukraine.” Carpenter sees how a dark money trail could connect the Kremlin to the gun lobby. “Those three would only meet with N.R.A. officials if there were some concerted effort by senior members of the Russian government to try and co-opt the N.R.A. politically,” he continues. “And they are all money men. They can throw tens of millions around.” (Efforts to reach Torshin, Rogozin, Rudov, and Malofeev were unsuccessful. Malofeev has denied aiding the invasion of Ukraine.)

There are some very nervous politicians in Washington.

If there was ever a time to get serious about turning Citizens United upside down, this is it.

Buzz

Buzz Burbank's wrap-up from last Thursday:

It takes a while to sort through all the shit - sometimes I have to listen to this kind of thing 2 or 3 times because there's so much to grok, my brain overheats and shorts out.

Buzz helps me connect some of the dots and keep it more or less organized.

Two really big ones:

• The Kennedy retirement
• NRA laundering Russian money for 45* and the GOP

Good Guy Punished

Houston Chronicle, Jay Jordan:

Police in Amarillo shot an innocent man who helped foil a possible church shooting.

The shooting happened shortly after 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Faith City Mission, a faith-based outreach organization. Police said Joshua Len Jones, 35, of Amarillo, barged into a church building at Faith City Mission, pulled out a gun and was holding about 100 congregants and church staff hostage.

In the time between when police were dispatched and when officers arrived, a handful of churchgoers wrestled Jones to the ground. One of the congregants was able to grab Jones' gun.

Officers entered the building and saw the churchgoer holding the gun and opened fire, according to the Amarillo Police Department. The churchgoer was hospitalized in stable condition.

The victim, who spoke to ABC 7 Amarillo, has since been released and told the station he would do it all over again despite being shot by police.

"There were other people there," Tony Garces said. "I just took the gun away from him. I got shot. I got the bad part. It's life."

The weird part (which isn't weird at all): He started out as a good guy without a gun, but by the time the cops got there, he was the good guy with a gun, and the cops shot him because he was the guy with the gun.

Weird part #2 (which also isn't weird at all): I'm wondering if this is going to make NRA-TV.

At first I tho't they wouldn't wanna be anywhere near this one. But those guys are pretty remarkably good at selling, so I think we can fully expect a Turnaround. 

"If Mr Garces had been appropriately armed, then the would-be shooter is the only one to have been shot."

But it still comes down to this: Gun violence in this case was thwarted by unarmed people - and we don't know that the perp really intended to shoot anybody in the first place.

Yeesh

Parkland survivor Cameron Kasky has been speaking out, expressing his opinion on how we need to get something done - maybe something as radical as gun safety laws - to prevent mass shootings.

Cameron Kasky has been getting death threats from NRA supporters.

Think Progress:

Kasky isn’t the only teenager getting death threats for their activism against the NRA. David Hogg, also 17, has fiercely advocated on television for improved gun control laws in the wake of the mass shooting which left seventeen of his classmates and teachers dead. Over the last week, he has been a central target for conspiracy theorists believing that he is in fact not a student but a “crisis actor”. One video claiming Hogg was an actor got more than 200,000 views and was the top trending video on YouTube before it was taken down.
Let all that soak in for a minute.

Just fuckin' yeesh.

Today's Face Palm

45* says Gun-Free Zones are dumb things and only poopy-head libruls think they're OK.

ABC News:
Donald Trump spoke in favor of gun rights at the National Rifle Association convention today, but security and staff at several of his prized hotels and golf courses told ABC News that guests are not allowed to carry guns there.

The Trump Organization, meanwhile, claims that’s not true.

“We strongly believe in the 2nd Amendmentand are against gun free zones. While laws vary substantially from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, we allow security personnel and other licensed individuals the ability to carry a firearm in an effort to protect themselves, our guests, associates and the general public,” a spokesperson told ABC News by email.

A few Trump properties where guests are not allowed guns:

Trump National Doral = (305) 592-2000
Trump National Jupiter GC = (561) 691-8700
Trump International GC = (561) 682-0700
Trump International hotel - Las Vegas = (702) 982-0000
Trump Mar-a-Lago = 561-832-2600.

Imagine That

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, a staunch advocate for gun rights, vowed that he would get rid of “gun-free zones” at an annual meeting for the National Rifle Association held this spring in Louisville, Kentucky. The convention center he spoke at for the annual meeting for the NRA as well as all of Trump’s hotels are gun-free zones.

In case you missed it - the RNC convention is a gun-free zone.

In case you missed it 2: Steve Loomis (President of Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association) loudly claimed Tamir Rice was threatening the Cleveland cops, and more recently has said Obama has blood on his hands for both Dallas and Baton Rouge, and most recently made a desperate plea to Ohio Gov John Kasich, asking the governor to issue an Executive Order suspending the Open Carry laws in Ohio for the duration of the GOP convention.

This jagoff is an active duty Police Detective - who seems to know practically nothing about how the law actually works.  Which may explain why he's a Trump supporter(?)

The fact that these guys apparently think "a great leader" gets to make law and then suspend the law on whatever whimsy strikes him as expedient - is exactly the kind of authoritarian crap the founders told us to watch out for; exactly why Donald (Law-n-Order) Trump needs to be stomped in November, along with all the other Proto-Nazi assholes we come across. 

Ever Mindful Of Poe's Law

I can't wait to hear some knucklehead try to make the argument that we can't allow refugees into USAmerica Inc because it's too easy for them to get guns and start killing us.

Some guys have their heads so far up their asses they can't even see their own shit anymore - and no matter what anybody like me is apt to make up outa nuthin', it'll sound like something one of these mushbrains would say.

Poe's Law (in case ya fergot) is an Internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers for sincere expressions of the parodied views. 

--update

And then up jumped the devil, via Think Progress:

A Texas state legislator wants the U.S. to stop allowing Syrian refugees into the country. His reasoning: They might be able to buy guns in his state.

Rep. Tony Dale (R) made this argument in a television interview on Monday and in letters to Texas’ U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz (R) and U.S. Reps. Michael McCaul and John Carter (R).

“While the Paris attackers used suicide vests and grenades,” Dale wrote, “it is clear that firearms also killed a large number of innocent victims. Can you imagine a scenario were [sic] a refugees [sic] is admitted to the United States, is provided with federal cash payments and other assistance, obtains a drivers license and purchases a weapon and executes an attack?” He urged the lawmakers to “do whatever you can to stop the [Syrian refugee] program.”

Today's Grim Statistics

We get told a lot that guns make us safe, and that more guns make us safer, and that if only we could truly understand and embrace this peculiar point of view we could make USAmerica Inc great again.

While I'm on about this, I think my all-time favorite NRA bromide is that an armed society is a polite society - which BTW, was one of Meyer Lansky's favorite things to say.  So yeah - go ahead and build your sales campaign around that guy's moral framework.  It is altogether fitting and proper for you to do that.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Today's Eternal Sadness

Another day, another 1.64 dead children.

CLEVELAND (AP) — A 3-year-old boy picked up an unattended gun inside a home and it went off, shooting a 1-year-old boy in the head and killing him Sunday afternoon, police said.

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said investigators are trying to determine where the gun came from.

Emergency workers said the 1-year-old was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

Full details about the shooting on the city's east side weren't released, but Williams said at least one adult was home when it happened.

"It's a sad day for Cleveland," he told reporters outside the home. "This fascination that we have with handguns, not just in this city but in this country, has to stop. This is a senseless loss of life."

Cleveland.com (http://bit.ly/1I5oHQ6) reports that the boy's mother could be heard screaming on the back porch after learning her son had died.Neighbors told the news website the mother lived in the house with at least three small children.

"They were really nice," next-door neighbor Larry Simpson said of the family. "It's a shame this had to happen."

It was absolutely not something that "had to happen", Mr Simpson.  And statements like that are a good indication of the kind of unconsciously malicious and deliberately ignorant viewpoint that makes these "accidents" inevitable.

Where's The Outrage?

From Deseret News, via HuffPo:

A Utah high school student nearly launched a shooting rampage but a classmate saw his loaded gun and prevented a tragedy on Monday, according to police.

The student who saw the gun told a school resource officer who apprehended the allegedly armed teenager, thwarting a potential shooting at Fremont High School in Plain City, Utah, according to Fox Salt Lake City. The school was evacuated.

The 16-year-old suspect was arrested and taken to a juvenile detention facility, according to Desert News.

He allegedly admitted to police that he wanted to shoot a girl with whom he'd had a relationship and then open fire on others, according to the New York Daily News.

"We do not think that there were any additional students who were armed," Weber County Sheriff's Lt. Lane Findlay told KUTV. "It appears to be a lone student."

The teen, who has not been identified because he is a minor, faces charges of possession of a weapon with intent to assault, possession of a firearm in a restricted area and possession of a firearm by a minor.

But wait just a durn minute - the kid with the gun hadn't done anything but exercise his god-given right to keep and bear arms. Why is the "hero student who stopped a potential shooting incident" getting away with this blatant and unwarranted imposition of Nanny State tyranny?

How did anybody know for sure - before anything happened - that the kid with the gun was intending to do anything other than making sure he could defend himself and his schoolmates against somebody else?

Where's the NRA when you really need 'em?

It's A Wonderment

We can always count on the NRA to come up with something clever to say every time some dipwad kills somebody with a gun.

So I'm wondering why they've said nothing about how the folks in Ferguson wouldn't be having all these problems if they were all properly armed.

And since we're seeing some actual repression of people by an over-amped militarized local police force - as opposed (eg) to the phony crap that went down at the Bundy place in Nevada - where are all those valiant defenders of freedom?  Where is the Tea Party Militia?  Where are the Oath Keepers?

I'm really disappointed that the True Patriots haven't showed up yet - if for no other reason than to show the Murican Public once and for all that they aren't really the gun-sucking, whiny-butt-pussy, racist assholes we all know them to be.

Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg went to the NRA website:

What I was looking for, of course, was outrage over "jack-booted thugs" terrorizing the populace. After fundraising and paranoia, outrage is the NRA's chief product. Whether it's President Barack Obama conspiring to subvert the constitution and strip citizens of self-defense, or former President Bill Clinton deliberately fomenting violent crime as a predicate to gun control, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre has always been extra vigilant about government's potential to abuse its police powers.

"If you have a badge" under the freedom-hating Clinton administration, he said in 1995, "you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens."

I wonder: Has the shooting death of the Missouri teen traumatized LaPierre into silence?

Today's Eternal Sadness

Not a day goes by.  The big story over the weekend, of course, was the shooting spree in Santa Monica.  That's what got all the coverage because of the requisite body-count; and since the shooter was dark-skinned with a Muslim-sounding name, we can get our TerrorPorn with a double shot of Anti-Immigration Adrenaline jolt for the day.

We're also required now to jump into the speculation that the shooter "suffered from emotional and psychological problems" because that's become the over-arching theme of the NRA's campaign to keep us comfortably numb.  If we're not properly distracted and/or sedated, we might start to notice a few connectable dots:

PRESCOTT VALLEY, Ariz. (AP) — Police aren't expected to seek charges in the death of an Arizona man who was accidentally shot by his 4-year-old son, authorities said.

Justin Stanfield Thomas, 35, was fatally shot Friday after he and his son traveled from Phoenix to a friend's home 90 miles away in the northern Arizona community of Prescott Valley for a surprise visit.

The boy found the loaded gun in the home within minutes of arrival, asked a question about it and pulled the trigger, Prescott Valley Police spokesman Brandon Bonney said.

Thomas later died at a hospital.

The child has been with his mother since the day the shooting occurred.
Bonney said the gun should have been locked away, but that Thomas' friend, whose identity hasn't been released, was caught off guard by the unannounced visit. No children lived in the house.

"They're processing everything to see where they stand with the interviews and the crime scene investigation and see if everything is matching up," Bonney told The Prescott Daily Courier.

The paper described Thomas as an Army special forces veteran who served in Iraq.

I can imagine that kid growing up with some pretty heavy issues that he'll have to deal with at some point. (btw: can we have any reasonable expectation that he won't "deal with his hangups" by shooting up a school with an AR-15, or do we have to settle for blind hope on that one?)

So I have to wonder about Wayne Lapierre's recent conversion to the gospel of Mental Health in America.  Why do I get the feeling that it's just a good way for the gun makers to abdicate any and all responsibility?  Why is it I think they're trying to get the taxpayers to pick up the tab for their shit?  Why am I thinking "Hey, I know - the Libruls love gettin' all squishy about their feelings and crap, so let's give 'em a nice rag to chew on and maybe they'll leave us alone for a while."

It's a great way for the NRA to deflect criticism by getting us talking about any-damn-thing other than the simple fact that in a very obvious and important way the guns themselves are the fucking problem.