Blasphemous Rumours

Current affairs for a change - feel free to ignore if you're not in the mood:

[disclaimer: I'm not an American and am viewing  and commentin on American politics as a spectator only]

Daily Post #3

I am relived that the gun man who killed 12 people at the Navy Yard yesterday turned out to an ex-navy reservist of American descent - this way there is some hope that the tragic events will rekindle debate about gun control rather than to fuel further antagonism towards Muslims or military action in the Middle/Far East. Although I am afraid that there still will be some people arguing that the fact that he was playing Resident Evil and a Thai speaking Buddhist were bigger contributing factors to cause him to act violently  than the fact that he was carrying a gun wherever he went and - by all accounts - felt disenfranchised and persecuted. And that's not even delving in the issue of accessibilty to mental health care and he had two previous gun offences which contributed to his discharge from the army but did not prevent him from legally buying and carrying a weapon.

Have this little nugget:

The point is, AR-15 rifles do not even account for 2.5% of recorded murders per the FBI, yet anti-Second Amendment advocates want to ban them even though they are perhaps the best self-defense choice for shooters sensitive to recoil.

As the mainstream media continues to cover the navy yard shooting throughout the day, pay particular attention to the wording and tone that they will use to try and condition you into believing that there is a surging wave of mass murders and AR-15s are to blame.

This isn’t the case at all. [....}

But like clockwork, talking heads on the cable news networks will ignore these statistics which do not conform to their agenda to disarm and enslave Americans.

I vastly prefer the point made by Robert Schlesinger at www.usnews.com:

National Journal's Matthew Cooper makes a great point this morning about the Navy Yard shooting: Yesterday's tragedy puts the lie to the National Rifle Association's assertion that the way to deal with shootings like that in Newtown, Conn., is by putting armed guards in all of our schools. Cooper notes that the Navy Yard facility:

...was at least as heavily armed as we can expect any elementary school could ever be under the [NRA's "shield" proposal]. And yet, carnage.

...

By the NRA's own logic, unless virtually every teacher in a school, or person in an office, is packing heat and is trained to use their weapon, a determined shooter can sow havoc before their weapons are silenced.