rigorousintuition.ca

Introduction

Gun control in the United States is based on a long history of discrimination which continues to this day. While blacks were the first targets of gun control measures, different racial and ethnic minorities have been targeted over time, and today the poor now face economic discrimination in many gun control laws. Gun control may be portrayed as a measure to reduce crime,1 but even in its earliest forms firearms regulation has been used as a means to control specific societal groups by keeping them from possessing weapons. The first selectively restrictive gun control legislation was enacted in the pre-Revolution South and primarily aimed at keeping free blacks from owning firearms and maintaining a white monopoly on power. Many different forms of gun control laws were implemented before and after the Revolution to keep firearms out of African-American hands. Even after the Civil War, Black Codes were enacted which ensured that supposedly freed blacks would not have effective means to defend themselves, and would remain an unarmed and subordinate group in society, unable to defend themselves or fight for their legal and constitutional rights........

............ pattern of "pre-judging" gun control issues based on false beliefs or without knowing the real facts and circumstances of gun violence. In its earliest forms, gun control existed to keep firearms out of the hands of African-Americans, especially free blacks, who were a perceived threat to white supremacy. As wide spread immigration into the United States began, people in established positions of power started to feel threatened by these new groups and took measures to keep firearms out of the hands of immigrants. The blatantly discriminatory laws used in the South would have been politically impossible to legislate after 1900, so gun control efforts shifted to discretionary permitting that allowed police or licensing boards to keep “undesirable” people from legally accessing firearms.


Intentionally or not, the poor eventually became the primary targets of gun control discrimination. Laws were instituted to drive up the minimum price of firearms in the name of consumer safety and crime reduction. Authorities also barred people who lived in public housing from keeping firearms in their homes. These recent measures were taken in the name of public safety, but they have a disproportional impact on those of a lower socioeconomic background with almost no persuasive, certainly not definitive, evidence suggesting that these laws will reduce crime. In some instances gun bans are even accompanied by an increase in gun violence. To implement further unproven measures that are inherently biased toward certain people would be irresponsible. Many attempts to control guns result in a disproportionate burden on the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society with no proven benefit to the surrounding community.

(CNN)Larry Hyatt had never seen such a frenzy.
The lines at Hyatt Guns, his shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, snaked out the door. The deep, green-walled warehouse bills itself as the largest gun shop in America, but even then Hyatt had to stretch to meet the demand.
At one point, he dispatched 37 salespeople to man the cash registers. He put up velvet ropes and hired a police officer. He even put a hot dog stand outside.
It was just after the Sandy Hook massacre -- and customers were lined up to buy AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, like the one the shooter Adam Lanza used.

The AR-15's journey into the hands of gun enthusiasts and mass murderers alike started in the jungles of Vietnam. It was the 1960s, and the landscape of warfare had changed. In Vietnam, rather than clear-cut enemy lines, combatants were fighting in close combat in city streets and dense forests. Viet Cong guerillas and North Vietnamese soldiers carried AK-47s. The US Army needed its own answer.
Enter the AR-15, developed for military use by Armalite, an arms company from which the gun takes its name ("AR" stands for "Armalite Rifle").
The rifle combined rapid fire with a lighter weight. It replaced higher-caliber bullets with lighter ammunition that made up in speed what it lacked in size.

Colt suspends production of AR-15 for civilian market
WEST HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Gunmaker Colt says it is suspending its production of rifles for the civilian market including the popular AR-15.

Colt’s chief executive officer, Dennis Veilleux, says it is not permanently ending production but believes there is already an adequate supply of sporting rifles on the market. He said in a statement Thursday the company will concentrate on fulfilling military and law enforcement contracts with its rifle manufacturing.

The West Hartford, Connecticut-based company has received some criticism from gun rights advocates for moving away from the civilian market.

Veilleux said in the statement the company remains committed to the Second Amendment and is adapting to consumer demand.

A national gun control debate has focused on access to AR-15s and other assault-style rifles because of their use in mass shootings.
https://apnews.com/fbdf5e5f6d654332bbedfaffe3663154

How the NRA Sold Out America
A new report details the limits of the gun lobby's patriotism when there's Russian moolah on the line.

Casey MichelOctober 2, 2019
Last Friday, the Senate Finance Committee dropped what would have been—in any other timeline—a bombshell that might have dominated headlines and talking heads for days: A 77-page report, issued by Senator Ron Wyden, detailing the means and machinations with which a number of Russian figures cozied up to the National Rifle Association (NRA) since 2014. The top-line findings are there in the title of the report: “The NRA and Russia: How a Tax-Exempt Organization Became a Foreign Asset.”

The report is the most detailed examination to date of one of the primary aspects of Russia’s broader 2016 interference and influence efforts. Text messages and timelines, meeting rosters and discreet communiques, feasts and fêtes and flights back and forth from Moscow: Everything you ever wanted to know about how the NRA became an all-too-willing prong of the Kremlin’s 2016 schemes is there, in garish, unsparing detail. This volume reveals how cheap the NRA’s claims to patriotism, to American pride, to security for person and nation alike really are. The NRA sold out its legacy for a quick, craven buck—in a way that eerily paralleled the Trump campaign’s own interactions with Russia in 2016.

Many of the details of the Russians’ operations in the compendium have been reported elsewhere, including the key players who greased the skids. Alexander Torshin—a former Russian Central Bank official, now sanctioned by the U.S. government—makes an obligatory appearance in the report, wining and dining former NRA presidents David Keene and Pete Brownell. Maria Butina—now a convicted foreign agent, awaiting a deportation back to Russia once her prison sentence ends this month—joins the mise-en-scène as well, sidling up to the NRA’s brass to convince them that she was simply an innocent young woman, interested solely in the kinds of arms peddled by the NRA and its backers, and maybe in re-building bridges between Moscow and Washington along the way. The Torshin-Butina tandem used their NRA connections to launch themselves to meetings with GOP officials, interactions with Donald Trump’s family, and events where they could lob questions at then-candidate Trump himself.

But the report fills in one of the largest gaps remaining within the entire, sordid saga: Why did the NRA leadership play along so willingly? Why did they lap up Butina’s and Torshin’s spin, their profession of mutual interests in Glocks and Kalashnikovs and AR-15s, so readily? Why were they so cheerfully duped?

Who needs patriotism when you can have profits?
The answer is money. Specifically, the kind of gob-smacking lucre the NRA thought they could make in building up an arms market in Russia. It didn’t matter who their partners were, nor did it concern the organization that they would be yukking it up with Russian officials specifically sanctioned by Washington—that is, men specifically cited by the U.S. government for their role in upending the post-Cold War order. Those who the NRA palled around with were the authors of invasion, war, and thousands of deaths in Ukraine, and those chiefly responsible for expanding the kleptocratic networks which have consistently undermined American interests. Who needs patriotism when you can have profits?

Brownell, as the report lays out, is a perfect case study in just how easily the NRA leadership could be bought off by those aiming to corrode American power—and how shallow the NRA’s supposed patriotism truly was. As Butina and Torshin worked to put together the NRA’s infamous December 2015 trip to Moscow, Brownell was an obvious name to add to the itinerary. Brownell, however, had one stipulation. As the report notes, “Brownell made clear that he would not have participated in the trip but for the opportunity to advance his personal business interests.” Brownell didn’t even bother to cloak his efforts; as he phrased it in one of the emails attached, “I am not interested in attending if just an [NRA] trip,” adding later that he wouldn’t make the trip if there was no “import or export opportunity” in it for him.


Must-reads.
5 days a week.

Butina was all too eager to play up this line for her marks. Meetings with Russian arms manufacturers—and sanctioned Russian officials—soon followed. With promises of riches flowing, Brownell and his colleagues were steered directly into the arms of an operation whose real aim was to create a backchannel to the GOP, and eventually lift the sanctions that had been placed on the folks hobnobbing with NRA leadership.

The benefits of these arrangements didn’t just flow to those with official positions in the NRA. As the report outlines, some of the mega-donors bankrolling the NRA wanted in on the action, as well. Joe Gregory—a burly Tennessee multi-millionaire who served as the face of the NRA’s ultra-elite “Ring of Freedom” donor program—decided that the NRA’s 2015 trip to Moscow would be the perfect occasion to make his first trip to Russia, and to schmooze with those sanctioned by the U.S. An appreciative Gregory returned the favor in 2016 by bringing Butina to the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast, where she mingled with the upper crust of America’s Christian conservative community. Butina’s preferred method of transportation to the National Prayer Breakfast, according to the report? Gregory’s private plane.

It’s difficult to overstate just how blinded Brownell, Keene and their colleagues were when it came to Butina’s and Torshin’s real designs. All they had to do was, say, visit Butina’s YouTube page, where they would have seen—and where you can still watch—Butina exhort an audience to back the Russian-supported separatists tearing apart eastern Ukraine. Minimal vetting of Butina’s social media presence would have revealed her boasting of visiting Crimea in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s illegal annexation, calling to arm separatists, and, as Mother Jones reported, “pledging support to a leader of a militia group that violently seized a Crimean news outlet it deemed ‘pro-American.’” Had they wanted to, they could have dropped the FBI a line to see if they had any information on Torshin—and they likely would have received details of Torshin’s alleged central role in a Russian organized crime ring in Spain, where one of the gangsters referred to Torshin as “the godfather.”

Lulled by the promise of fresh boodle, they were instead gulled by the Butina-Torshin duo. As Keene’s wife wrote in one of the emails contained in last week’s report, “David and I consider Maria and Alexander dear friends, so we will remain in touch. What have I missed?”

That the NRA has turned out to be only as patriotic as their bank accounts allow is a hallmark of the Trump era.
The answer to that question seems to be “any semblance of ethical bearings.” Nevertheless, that the NRA has turned out to be only as patriotic as their bank accounts allow is a hallmark of the Trump era. The same greed-driven calculus has seeped into every cranny of a Trump administration that prefers to mine illicit connections for personal profit rather than do what’s best for the U.S. The entire Giuliani-Ukraine affair is only the latest example of a White House apparatchik who’s willing to sell out his country’s interests for an electoral advantage necessary to sustain the grift.

That these arrangements presented a mile-wide opening for Russian actors to upend the 2016 election is not surprising. It’s why Trump and his campaign were more than willing to hear out prospective offers on a Trump Tower in Moscow, delivered alongside dirt on Hillary Clinton. It’s why a number of far-right Christian fundamentalist organizations continue to snuggle up to sanctioned Russian oligarchs and their minions. And it’s why former national security adviser Michael Flynn, one of the first members Trump appointed to his Cabinet, decided to attend a 2015 gala for the Russian propaganda arm RT, pocketing tens of thousands of dollars along the way—and touching down in Moscow at the same time as a greedy cohort from the NRA. With open arms and open checkbooks, all of these malefactors were welcomed. Now, they’ve been thrillingly exposed as well.
https://newrepublic.com/article/155224/nra-sold-america

Dick's Sporting Goods destroyed $5 million worth of assault weapons: CEO
Dick's Sporting Goods has destroyed more than $5 million worth of assault weapons.

CEO Ed Stack made the announcement during an interview with CBS News. He said the company turned the weapons into scrap metal.

The move comes after Dick's made the decision last year to stop carrying the rifles following the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead.

The company sold the shooter a shotgun.

Even though it wasn't the weapon used in the shooting, it largely impacted the company's actions.

Dick's also said it would stop selling high-capacity magazines and raised its gun-purchasing age to 21 from 18.

Stack said in the CBS interview that the changes cost the company nearly a quarter-billion dollars in sales.

Other stores are also grappling with gun sales following mass shootings across the country.

Walmart announced last month that it would reduce its gun and ammunition sales.

The superstore also asked customers to stop carrying weapons openly in its stores, even in open-carry states.
https://abc7ny.com/5602866/?ex_cid=TA_W ... ce=twitter

Banning guns as a way to prevent shootings seems to me to be the equivalent of hiding the booze because you live with an alcoholic. The issue isnt easy access to booze but the fact that there's a serious problem and that's that the person has an overwhelming and irresistable urge to drink self destructively.

What's so fucked up is that there are so many people who want to slaughter so many of their fellow men and women. We need to address this; all the chatter about guns is just another distraction, another divide-and-conquer ploy, another fear-mongering technique.

Iamwhomiam » 05 Mar 2020 21:12 wrote:Seems a bit ludicrous, a man who owns guns complaining his rights to gun ownership are somehow being infringed. Aside a foolish stunt when a juvenile, and a bar fight, the 26 year old man who murdered six, including my son, and wounded two before eating his shotgun, and had legally possessed his weapons, could have said the same thing as the guy in the video right up to the minute he fired his first shot. That's a big part of the problem: nobody legally owning a gun is a bad guy with a gun until they decide to become a bad guy with a gun.

FourthBase wrote:

Iamwhomiam » 05 Mar 2020 21:12 wrote:Seems a bit ludicrous, a man who owns guns complaining his rights to gun ownership are somehow being infringed. Aside a foolish stunt when a juvenile, and a bar fight, the 26 year old man who murdered six, including my son, and wounded two before eating his shotgun, and had legally possessed his weapons, could have said the same thing as the guy in the video right up to the minute he fired his first shot. That's a big part of the problem: nobody legally owning a gun is a bad guy with a gun until they decide to become a bad guy with a gun.

Would you feel less pain if your son had been stabbed to death with a sword? No. Explain the difference, if there's one. More deaths in shorter timespan, less possibility of defense? That's precisely the point of the weapon. Just like a sword is X times better than a rock. Is the point then to ban weapons that are too powerful? And that decision, to enact such a ban, what gets banned, is made by whom? A plebiscite? No. Because, woops, the Second Amendment is there for a reason. Not hunting. Not just self-defense, although that's part of it, or actually the wider issue. The particular sub-issue, though, is: If we somehow managed to let ourselves be ruled by evil motherfuckers, what most on this board would consider (only, more or less) to be fascists, then how the fuck can we fight back and regain our rights? And that's the only issue that matters. That's the issue which could trigger the right wing into launching a civil war. Again, if it was the 4th Amendment or ESPECIALLY the 13th Amendment being undone, you would absolutely be preparing to go to war yourselves. With what, though? The right wing has all the guns, or 90% of them, or some absurdly lopsided amount. And, they know how to use them better. Why? Because the military and law enforcement agencies which train people to USE those guns, are largely conservative institutions. Which you all will lament, often. But in the very next breath, you will also count on that same military and those same law enforcement agencies to defend you when the shit hits the fan, rubber meets road, when "the revolution" (ha!) comes. Because you don't understand that they only follow LAWFUL orders, it's ingrained in them during their extensive training. You FOOLS. You pitiful, sad-sack-of-shit-for-brains fools. STOP! You will LOSE. Do you freaks WANT to lose or something?

Would you feel less pain if your son had been stabbed to death with a sword? No. Explain the difference, if there's one.

You FOOLS. You pitiful, sad-sack-of-shit-for-brains fools. STOP! You will LOSE. Do you freaks WANT to lose or something?

That's a big part of the problem: nobody legally owning a gun is a bad guy with a gun until they decide to become a bad guy with a gun.

FourthBase » Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:01 pm wrote: Would you feel less pain if your son had been stabbed to death with a sword? No. Explain the difference, if there's one.

JackRiddler » 06 Mar 2020 09:27 wrote:

FourthBase » Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:01 pm wrote: Would you feel less pain if your son had been stabbed to death with a sword? No. Explain the difference, if there's one.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Iamwhomiam » 06 Mar 2020 01:48 wrote:

FourthBase wrote:

Iamwhomiam » 05 Mar 2020 21:12 wrote:Seems a bit ludicrous, a man who owns guns complaining his rights to gun ownership are somehow being infringed. Aside a foolish stunt when a juvenile, and a bar fight, the 26 year old man who murdered six, including my son, and wounded two before eating his shotgun, and had legally possessed his weapons, could have said the same thing as the guy in the video right up to the minute he fired his first shot. That's a big part of the problem: nobody legally owning a gun is a bad guy with a gun until they decide to become a bad guy with a gun.

Would you feel less pain if your son had been stabbed to death with a sword? No. Explain the difference, if there's one. More deaths in shorter timespan, less possibility of defense? That's precisely the point of the weapon. Just like a sword is X times better than a rock. Is the point then to ban weapons that are too powerful? And that decision, to enact such a ban, what gets banned, is made by whom? A plebiscite? No. Because, woops, the Second Amendment is there for a reason. Not hunting. Not just self-defense, although that's part of it, or actually the wider issue. The particular sub-issue, though, is: If we somehow managed to let ourselves be ruled by evil motherfuckers, what most on this board would consider (only, more or less) to be fascists, then how the fuck can we fight back and regain our rights? And that's the only issue that matters. That's the issue which could trigger the right wing into launching a civil war. Again, if it was the 4th Amendment or ESPECIALLY the 13th Amendment being undone, you would absolutely be preparing to go to war yourselves. With what, though? The right wing has all the guns, or 90% of them, or some absurdly lopsided amount. And, they know how to use them better. Why? Because the military and law enforcement agencies which train people to USE those guns, are largely conservative institutions. Which you all will lament, often. But in the very next breath, you will also count on that same military and those same law enforcement agencies to defend you when the shit hits the fan, rubber meets road, when "the revolution" (ha!) comes. Because you don't understand that they only follow LAWFUL orders, it's ingrained in them during their extensive training. You FOOLS. You pitiful, sad-sack-of-shit-for-brains fools. STOP! You will LOSE. Do you freaks WANT to lose or something?

Let's look at your opening and closing sentences, 4thB:

Would you feel less pain if your son had been stabbed to death with a sword? No. Explain the difference, if there's one.

You FOOLS. You pitiful, sad-sack-of-shit-for-brains fools. STOP! You will LOSE. Do you freaks WANT to lose or something?

Your opening evoked some raw emotions prompting me to want to toss out a loud fu and be done with you, but I composed myself, realizing their could be no benefit to either of us if I did and would probably earn me a suspension to boot. Your opening sentence is incredibly offensive and I'm a bit shocked you of all people here would ask me such a question. (You know damn well why.) I suppose I'm more offended though, by your distraction away from anything my words conveyed and on into your own detached and unrelated rant.

Please point out for us anything I wrote that is untrue. Please point out for us where I offered my opinion on the ban, or on any of our constitution's amendments, because I sure don't remember sharing them anywhere in my comment. Are you actually attempting to argue the legal gun owner who decides to murder is not part of the problem?

That's a big part of the problem: nobody legally owning a gun is a bad guy with a gun until they decide to become a bad guy with a gun.

If you're only now getting warmed up to our eroded constitution, you've been asleep, as its been ongoing for a very long time. Keep focusing on the 2nd while three others blow away - and nary a cry is heard from the NRA. Frankly, 4thB, I really don't give a good god damned bit about whether you own a gun or not. My LL has an arsenal and 20 acres - we'll be fine, until he decides to kill me. You, in beantown - Zombieland!

I'm dying, dude. I don't give a flying F what you guys do to each other. A man who legally owned his firearms killed my son, ending my line. My son extended his kindness and in return was executed. Please tell someone else legal gun owners are not part of the problem. Seems you forgot all about Robinson's NRA TV vignettes, too. I wonder why the NRA has no angry gun toting black tv stars with Islamic names?

Sounder » 06 Mar 2020 03:19 wrote:Who here believes that alcoholism can be cured by hiding the bottle?