8 People shot in Houston but it didn't fit the narrative
It happened on Veterans day in Houston. Did you hear about it?
Over 200 rounds were fired and the murderer shot 7 people, killing 1. The shooting went on for over an hour, the killer hit a police helicopter 5 times and was himself killed by a police sharp shooter.
The killer was a good guy, shooting at people on a day meant to honor him. He was a veteran.
So we have a bad guy with a gun and, being Texas, we have a good guy (concealed carry permit holder) with a gun too. The good guy with the gun was shot three times by the bad guy (who was a good guy) with a gun.
Good guys don't go on shooting and killing rampages, but this one did.
An armed citizenry is our defense against random killers and criminals. Or maybe not. Certainly not in this case.
Did you hear about this shooting?
If no, why do you think you didn't?
FWIW, I'm a gun owning Texas who believes that handguns and magazines that hold more than 3 rounds should be illegal. Both only exist to kill people and I don't see a public interest in helping people kill each other.
Comments
Is there a link to this story
you could provide?
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
Sure, here's a couple
http://abc13.com/news/gunman-in-west-houston-mass-shooting-ided/1362286/
http://www.khou.com/news/crime/motive-in-deadly-w-houston-shooting-remai...
Dig within. There lies the wellspring of all good. Ever dig and it will ever flow
Marcus Aurelius
This involves placing trust in the government.
I'm not going to do that, so no. Limiting access and rounds for citizens to that extreme is extremely reactionary.
We're seeing a rigged election process. There is no accountability in government. The democratic party has drifted so far right they have become the moderate Republicans and given 'the third way' that drift will continue.
Patriot Act
Non prosecution of those who lied us into Iraq and 'the war on terror'.
Non Prosecution of those who caused the financial collapse.
They hold themselves above being accountable for their actions, yet we're supposed to trust the government to take away some rights to make things safer?
How can anyone who recognizes that out own government does not have the best interest of the citizens any longer, is not to be trusted when it comes to giving away/giving up rights?
It's as we're supposed to be cognitively dissonant. We can;t trust the government for this, or that, and these other things, but totally trust the government when it comes to taking away some of our rights in exchange for perceived safety which can not be guaranteed.
Those who say they are fed up and want to ban all the guns or want extreme limits on what those guns can do, effectively saying they are fine if the government cuts the bill of rights down by one. How about two? How about three? More?
- forgetting that the government already cut it with surveillance (4th amendment)
and that the government is actually doing what it can to erode other rights of citizens as well. (Patriot Act)
Before we give up rights.
Before we use the opening "If the founding fathers only knew…"
Before emotional reactions to the situation overtake reasonable thought…
And before someone says 'well it's like X in this other country'
...we need to be very careful before asking the government to take away our rights to do X.
One day, it might be safer if we all didn't enjoy the right to free speech. because speech can be dangerous, and incite people to do things, and hurt people's feelings, and if the founding fathers only knew what kind of capability we'd have today to speak to one another, so easily, with multiple methods and devices, those founding fathers would have never, ever, been so willing to let the people have free speech given the inherent dangers of it all.
Those extremists and anti second amendment people sometimes forget that the rationalizations they use for giving up one right, can be used to take others.
Vigilance is the price of freedom. People are mistaken if they believe that vigilance will no longer be necessary if we give up those freedoms. Give the government an excuses to take rights away it is not already eroding, and they won't stop at the ones with which people agree.
But no, we are where we are and if we (commoners) decide we want to do something about it, the nobles tell us to check their privilege. And the nobles will laugh behind closed doors, and later to our faces, when we have traded our rights for safety they can not guarantee, because we were outraged at having to live in the real world.
Maybe other people can 'trust the government' in taking away rights because it will make them feel safer. I can't support that, and I won't.
There's really nothing a gun will do
against an AC-130 delivering a rain of fire if it wanted to. The safety you want is a false sense of safety. Meanwhile, people die because of lax gun laws.
I respectfully disagree
Maintaining that a force of arms by an angry and aroused citizenry against the government of the United States of America will succeed in preserving and protecting rights or anything else is fatally delusional. Emphasis on fatally. Ask those who participated in Shay's Rebellion, John Brown, Timothy McVey, the Bundy clan, or any of the "patriots" and villains with similar delusions if you want another opinion. Of course you can't ask most of them because they failed to survive their delusions. None of them found success. None. Well, unless death or extended prison time was the real purpose. That's a horrible track record.
Using a delusion to justify doing nothing to prevent the continuing epidemic of the slaughter of your fellow citizens, good guys and bad, is at best dishonest and certainly self serving. That's right, self serving. Imagine saying out loud that it is OK if someone else, or many someones, loses everything they have or everything they would have had so that you can maintain a fantasy, your own convenience, or your selfish personal preference. Get a soap box to stand on some corner and point at people telling them it's OK with you if they die so you get to maintain a fantasy. I dare you.
No, don't. I don't want you to get shot which is probably why you wouldn't do it in the first place.
I apologize for not being gentle. There are many ideas that might make a difference without infringing on rights that could be discussed but aren't. The absolutists on both sides won't allow any reasoned discussion. The result is more dead people.
I'll offer a much better reasoned and written argument here. It is #12 in the series. The list of the rest of the series is at the bottom of the page. Get a cold drink, maybe a snack, and sit down to read through all of them in order. You won't find any absolute talk except the firm conviction that this shit has to stop right now.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
Your wall of words is full of its own delusions.
Giving up rights for perceived safety is reactionary, and remarkably naive.
A fool and his rights are also soon parted.
Just trust the government even though it is untrustworthy and corrupt. No. Absolutely not.
You can rationalize all you like, but your rationalizations are not going to convince me that citizens sacrificing their rights is a good thing.
But if and/or when citizens do get the government to attempt to take away gun rights, at least I know there is an extreme reactionary crazy party I can communicate with regarding opposition to the anti-gun crowd. Sadly, that means Republicans are good for something now.
Well argued.
Thank you for making my point.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
Yeah, I am all for gun control.
But that is all. I don't want to be shot, but I also don't want to trust a very corrupt government. Also, I think any laws must protect the rights of the hunters.
FWIW, I do not own a gun, as I think they are too dangerous.
Peace out, tmp.
Giving up rights for ACTUAL safety is the fundamental
principle of all society.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I have no reason to trust this government to deliver.
Let alone, I have no reason to believe anything the representatives tell us given who most of them actually choose to represent.
There is no case anyone can make that will convince me that our government is worthy of trust.
If people choose to live in fantasy land, that's their business. I'm not changing their minds. They definitely are not changing mine.
yet you defer to this government on an essentially
infinite number of other "rights" that your forebears sacrificed on your behalf, starting about 2 or 3 thousand years ago.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
OK, whatever you say Fonzie.
Go wax your water skis.
Tell me it's the current year too while you're at it. Whatever.
I must
respectfully disagree.
If that were so, then we should be supporting the Patriot Act full bore. After all, it does deliver sometimes and, does that not increase the ACTUAL safety for our society?
Using your logic, cars, aircraft, alcohol, children's toys - all of these should be banned, because they all result in ACTUAL deaths, and quite a few of them. Far more than die by guns.
Hells, we should thank the government for bypassing those pesky warrants and 4th Amendment bullshit. Does that not get bad guys off the streets? Is that not proving ACTUAL safety?
Better outlaw skydiving, mountain climbing, roller skating, and swimming, while we're at it. That would certainly help provide ACTUAL safety, wouldn't it?
Society and its government walk a fine line, balancing individual rights against what's "best" for the society as a whole. You are very naive to think taking guns away will make everything all better (I know, you never said that. But it's kinda implied). We humans are nasty motherfuckers at heart. When there is a crisis, the reptile brain wins every time.
And as for defending ourselves against a government gone nuts, take a look at Afganistan during the Soviet occupation. The Mujahideen were kicking ass with AKs even before we started giving them missile launchers. Do not ever underestimate a human fighting for its life and for what it believes in.
The more people I meet, the more I love my cats.
That's a very big leap
from a statement favoring gun control to taking away guns. Please read through all of the comments and show me where anyone has suggested banning guns. I'd be stunned if you didn't think that there are some people who should never have access to guns. That is a form of gun control with respect to the absolute right to own any imaginable gun/weapon professed at the fringe limits of the 2nd Amendment movement. There is probably common ground for us on this point. I suspect there is more common ground on what type of weapon should be available to the general public although I suspect there are also differences of opinion. The biggest problem is we never have this discussion. We never actually listen to each other like you hearing too many people saying he wanted to ban guns when he said no such thing. There will never be a solution if we are not willing to discuss and negotiate in good faith to define the problem, find a range of acceptable solutions, and find the will to make it happen.
You sound like someone who could have that talk although I'm a bit confused by how any sane person could maintain the fantasy that small arms, military or sporting arms, will ever protect you from your government. Your example of a guerilla war in Afghanistan is entirely different from an insurrection in America. There is nothing you can obtain, trained people or weapons, in sufficient quantity to do fuck all against the US Army. Trust me on that one. Red Dawn was a movie, a fantasy, and complete, utter bullshit. It didn't work in Washington's day and it won't work today or tomorrow. Give it a rest. Please.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
Well, if you're going to disagree, respectfully or otherwise,
I'd ask that you begin by not making an inaccurate generalization about what I said.
Whether you agree or not, the first function and absolute requirement of all human societies is to mediate the waiving of individuals' "natural rights" for improvements in both individual and collective security. That doesn't mean we "should" be up for trading any arbitrary set of rights for any arbitrarily marginal payback in security, which is what you fallaciously assert is my logic. I didn't say that, and the idea doesn't even make any sense. It's as if I said, "The purpose of a toothbrush is to clean one's teeth," and you responded, "By your logic, we should brush our teeth until our gums are hamburger and the bristles fall out our toothbrush."
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
How about your wall of words?
Have you noticed Iraq? Or Syria? There's lots of people running around with lots of guns and there ain't no freakin' safety for anybody. And the governments are still in power in both countries.
Oh yeah, let's drag in the problems of other countries
as straw man examples of why things should or shouldn't be a certain way here.
Next, someone is going to tell me that 'it's the current year' blah f-n blah.
If people want to play blind man, they can go walk with the Shepherd. My eyes are wide open.
Anyone telling me I need to sacrifice my rights for safety needs to realize they are not going to change my mind. I'm under no illusions of changing anyone else's mind either. If someone wants to live in candy land, that's their business.
We are wasting our time with this person
There are no words, no policies, or no suggestions however reasonable that can persuade some people to so much as consider a position other than their own with respect to guns. There are some this hard over on the anti-gun side but the vast majority are the pro-gun and fuck you if you disagree types. The preach their rights, many assumed like a non-existent right to automatic weapons or high capacity magazines, are superior to anything including another person's right to life or living in safety. Somalia and Yemen are perfect examples of places such folks could have whatever weapon they could buy or steal and keep from being taken from them. It is the law of the jungle. Your rights extend to whatever you can obtain and keep. Anarchy and chaos reign. I prefer a different kind of life, one that can be called a civilization.
He/she makes the point of my post perfectly. There is no reasoning with an absolute position founded on supposed/imagined absolute rights. Nothing can persuade anyone who is totally unwilling to consider a different viewpoint or idea. Welcome to America 2016.
I'd also like to note that I have never heard a single one of these people ever talk about responsibility unless they are piously telling others their responsibilities. Personal responsibility is for you not them. Forget the notion of shared responsibility or the idea of one's responsibility to community. The focus is entirely selfish. I'm glad I don't have to live with that kind of crazy banging against the walls of my skull.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
Not sure how you equate my desire with placing trust in gov't
But if you think a modern government can be taken down by citizens with guns, I think you may be delusional. Hopefully, you're just being argumentative.
Quiz: What's the 3rd word in the 2nd Amendment?
There's a book and a movie by a Nobel prize winner on how to take down modern governments. His process has worked. He has consulted with people who brought down their governments. I believe I watched the video on NetFlix
Here's a little about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Start_a_Revolution
Dig within. There lies the wellspring of all good. Ever dig and it will ever flow
Marcus Aurelius
Funny how the conclusion jumps to 'taking down...
…the government.'
Giving up rights is not a good idea. People can yak about some rights have to be sacrificed, but that's merely equivocation on the subject of maintaing citizens rights vs. fooling people into giving up rights in exchange for nothing. Perceived safety? I'll live with the danger and enjoy the freedom of the rights I have rather than be further limited.
Just imagine how safe we'd be without some other rights…now lets go work on getting rid of them too. No thanks.
What right do I give up
...if I agree I don't need the ability to kill a lot of people quickly?
Dig within. There lies the wellspring of all good. Ever dig and it will ever flow
Marcus Aurelius
If and when democracy becomes
If and when democracy becomes tyranny
those who have rifles will still get to vote.
Rivers are horses - and kayaks are their saddles
So if one can't outright give rights away, rationalize them
away.
I choose to keep the rights I have.
^Rationalization was Rationalized^.
There's really nothing free speech will do if they shut down the internet, and cut off the electricity and ensure that we have limited ways in which to speak out and to each other. The speech you enjoy is a false sense of personal control.
Meanwhile some people are dying somewhere because of lax freedom of speech laws. If only governments had acted sooner to keep those people from speaking out, and hearing their opinions, maybe those people would not have died.
Free speech is obviously over rated too. So may as well give it up now because it's just an illusion as well. Then we can be even safer when we're sure people don;t say things which might offend or provoke others!
Rationalize all you like. Giving up rights is not a path to safety or freedom or a 'better world'. No one is going to convince me otherwise.
the wrongness of your attempted analogy is very wrongy
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Actually, what's sad is people not being able to see
one set of rights as being next in line after the give up others freely.
People like to pretend free speech, such as it is, is not dangerous. It can be far more dangerous than a gun, but we're still allowed to wield it.
But yeah, whatever, I'm the backwards one for preferring to maintain rights instead of just blindly agreeing with others that we should just give them up and hope it all works out ok in the end.
No. Not gonna happen.
soldier, you've sat meekly and passively while you have
been stripped of several rights of far more significance than the hyperextended 2nd-amendment right upon which you've set your standard. if your arms were to have been of any use in defending your liberties, the time for their application was about 15 years ago. now, they are just shiny metal totems of your impotence -- and i don't mean that as a psycho-sexual dig, i mean that quite literally.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Oh please.
Erosion of rights has been going on since well before that. It accelerated heavily with the events of 2001. Given the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other programs 'free trade' for one - We've been regularly stripped of our rights for a very long time in the financial arena. Income inequality was obviously more of a plan than an oops by those in power.
So don't 'soldier me' about fund and pretend that anyone who thinks we should not give up certain rights is not being reasonable. Giving up rights to the government and expecting certain problems to just go away is actually what is unreasonable.
What's really funny is that you assume I own guns currently. I opt to have the choice to own them if I wish. It's not a right and a choice I'm willing to just give away like some people.
Blah blah, rights are already gone that we had - so hell, we should give more away by choice because that'll give us freedom and safety DERP. Seriously!? That's some frakin amazing rationalization.
The untrustworthy government has already taken rights, and people acknowledge this - but hey, lets give them this one and this entire group of problems will go away because of magical gumdrops and four leaf clovers in fantasy land. That's idiocy.
So before you go making assumptions about the importance I place on those shiny metal totems you describe, maybe quit assuming who I am based on this preconceived image of who you think people who believe in gun rights are. But then again, maybe I'm giving you too much credit to think you could stop making those assumptions.
I'm not changing your mind.
You're not changing mine either.
erosion of rights, as i've already noted, has been going
on since the moment the first two humans each agreed to limit their own behavior for mutually beneficial purposes. less abstractly, the current array of "natural rights" without which you go about your daily existence never missing can be seen to have accumulated fairly steadily along a path dating from the Hellenes, perhaps 2500 years ago (with perhaps a bit of retrograde motion here and there over the past 328 years). that you sullenly sat by as your government rather dramatically upped the ante in September 2001 tells the full and complete story that is the fairy tale of the second amendment. your right to firearms will, in all likelihood, be the very last that the elites bother to take from you, for the simple reason that it causes them no discomfort, yet gives you the erroneous sense that there is some limit to how far they will go; inaccurately imagining that you have, in reserve, a violent power with which to resist their encroachments, you oil your guns and count your ammunition, while all of the meaningful liberties -- whose defense is the only actual purpose of your arsenal and your right to have it -- are stolen from you, one after another.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I hope you feel better. I shared your little tirade
and it got some laughs. Was asked to provide a Well done from several, and even an 'atta boy'. You win the internets!!
Someone had a differing opinion on something on the internet and you showed them! Woo Hoo! …dome o hope you feel better now.
Keep working on that fiction writing though. You show imagination, but it's pretty boring and tired and needs something to really kick it up to interesting.
but you get Aces and a gold star for the accidental comedy.
I might be mortified at being the source of mirth for you
and your gunfolk pals, but as someone once observed:
I recognize, of course, that it's easier to laugh dismissively than to rebut or refute, but whatever floats your boat.
Beyond that, I only say that your comment is a somewhat bizarre perambulation down a private path through your personal garden of misgiven intertubal grievance. As far as I know, the only thing I showed anybody is that I indeed have a differing opinion, which you ironically celebrate as if you imagine it's an unusual experience for me.
Years ago, I had a similar encounter with an oddball on dKos, who felt a weird compulsion to dash off to his best friend and his rackpiece and consult them on each comment I made. He was obsessed with the idea of putting our miscellaneous competing assertions to the test by betting on them. It was very strange. For myself, I've never felt any inclination to share with anybody an extended narrative -- nothing but the odd one-off anecdote -- of any of my online dialogues.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Your questions were rhetorical
but obviously the story doesn't fit the narrative or it's just another day in "'Murica! Fuck yeah!"
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
We are not hearing about it because
Then they would have to explain the whys. They do not want to talk about that. They do not want to talk about what it does to a person who is deployed over and over and over. They don't want to talk about The fact they are really doing next to nothing to help them short of feeding them handfuls of pills.
Here's a news flash. The rural west is full of folks like this some of them have been like that since Vietnam. Now you have a whole new generation. Welcome to the real world where actions have consequences and this is the consequence of endless war.
But we need to have a fit about the gun when a fertilizer bomb is far more effective as are a dozen others that can be made of common ingerediants. They know how to do all that and then some.
You want to know what you should be worried about? That the ranks of the western militias are swelling with folks just like this guy. Those that have tipped far enough over that war is all they are comfortable with. You going to take their gun? Good luck with that.