Tim’s Take: San Bernardino Attack

They also started using computers to collect data on crime and to direct their officers’ efforts more efficiently. We hadn’t realized that our kid had been sleeping and playing in a death trap. More guns. More mass shootings.

One was in Savannah, Georgia, and led to three injuries, one death and, so far, no clear motive. But it did reveal that gun owners are slightly more likely to be Republicans than the average American (28 percent of gun owners are Republicans, compared with 22 percent of all voters) and that people without guns in the house are slightly more likely to be Democrats (32 percent of all Americans are Democrats, but 39 percent of people who live in gunless households are). It should satisfy even Second Amendment purists. “Guns, guns, guns, I don’t like them guns”. The framers of the constitution weren’t gods, meaning that their words aren’t-and shouldn’t be-sacrosanct. It’s not just a constitutionally guaranteed freedom. A single-shot law would not impinge on an individual’s right to bear arms.

Guns don’t kill people, people do, someone will say.

Behind closed doors, makers and sellers of firearms in the US have told investors and Wall Street analysts that mass shootings are opportunities to make lots of money. Criminals get their guns though a shadow network or through theft. When a gun is used to injure or kill, it’s being used as intended. The “fear and uncertainty that there might be increased gun control”, Debney said, “drove many new people to buy firearms for the first time”.

On Friday, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county, released a video reiterating a call he had made earlier in the week for “all armed citizens to take action in the event of mass violence or terrorism until law enforcement can arrive”. People in committed relationships usually go into them with fidelity in mind, yet infidelity is common and, often, unexpected.

“It’s mostly an activity engaged in by older white males, and that’s just becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the country as a whole”. We can screen the “mentally ill” all we want, but the ill aren’t necessarily anymore susceptible to stupidity, anger, or crime than “normal” people.

It wasn’t just that police departments hired more people. In a letter published Wednesday by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, Dickey wrote, “Doing nothing is no longer an acceptable solution”. What they haven’t done is galvanize Americans to find a way to try to make them stop happening, or at least make them less frequent.

Hours before a deadly mass shooting unfolded in San Bernardino, doctors delivered a petition to Congress, calling on lawmakers to lift a funding ban on gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We should, that is, seek to “control” access to them and their use.

“Our thoughts and prayers are not even close to enough”, he said. We should get rid of them, that is, ban them.

Spitzer says the details that emerged about the suspects who were killed, that they were Muslim and Islamic, throws into the mix the suggestion of other political issues at play, and whether or not it was a political act. Democrats have persuaded the American mainstream on the merit of their ideas, but the second half of the battle is more complicated: making the transition from passive agreement to genuine passion for constructive change. It turns out that people who don’t own guns but who are demographically similar to gun owners are more comfortable with guns than those who aren’t (women and nonwhites).

“The NRA hates me ’cause I don’t like guns”. Without a continually expanding and revolving supply of licit guns and ammunition immediately at hand, the hope is the gradual depletion of their circulation and utility.

Every piece of new information – the arsenal, the black tactical gear, reports that Malik pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook during the attack – suggests that this was not a case of angry-man gun violence or workplace-related violence but a planned terrorist attack. Not something ancillary or secondary to the immutable fact of the guns themselves. “It’s time to ban guns”. And, yet, they are a statistically insignificant part of the overall homicide numbers. That would be a good thing, for the “good guys” and the “bad guys”. In 2012, Congress passed a bill that also blocked the National Institutes of Health from supporting firearms research and other funders began shying away too.