Liberal Pundits Full of Talk, Short on Gun Violence Solutions
What we really need are more solutions
Tragic deaths seem to dredge up the worst kind of discourse from liberal punditry.
The national conversation, particularly in regards to calls for increased gun control tends to go something like this:
“Someone broke a law.”
“WE MUST MAKE MORE LAWS. WE MUST DO SOMETHING.”
“Yes, but these individuals didn’t follow the law to begin with.”
“WE MUST MAKE MORE LAWS. WE MUST DO SOMETHING.”
“Because criminals will follow a new law when they’re already ignoring all the others?”
“WE MUST MAKE MORE LAWS. MOAR LAWS. ALL THE LAWS. SOMETHING. GUNS. SOMETHING. YARRRRGHH.”
“We must do SOMETHING,” is tired mantra and one beginning to show signs of wear and tear.
Friday morning, National Review’s Charles Cooke joined Morning Joe to discuss the horrific Oregon community college shooting. Cooke writes extensively about second amendment liberties.
Cooke began:
“This is not a competition to see who is vexed, this is a public policy debate. Joe Biden doesn’t know how to fix this problem, I don’t know how to fix this problem, I think it’s fair to say you don’t know how to fix this problem. It’s a very complex question in a country with 300 – 350 million guns on the street. The way they talk is if they have the answer and there are just these recalcitrant forces in the country that say “no,” even though somewhere deep down they know their legislation will work. That’s simply not the case, it’s far more complicated than that.”
Morning Joe host, Joe Scarborough, mentioned that the laws passed by the state of Connecticut post-Sandy Hook shooting would not have prevented the shooting to begin with. “We seem to keep chasing our tail here, and sometimes there are no pad answers for these very difficult problems,” said Scarborough.
Halperin began by saying he wanted to, “engage Cooke in a civil way.” The then went on to talk about the media should be passionately trying to come up with solutions. “I completely agree with the president. People need to find solutions to this and not talk about what won’t work and that’s it’s so complicated. We can’t be the only country in the world that’s like this,” Halperin said.
“With respect, what’s your plan?” asked Cooke.
And that’s when Halperin stepped in it. Halperin had no ideas, no solutions, no plan, though that didn’t seem to deter him from preaching at Cooke that the real solution lies in our ability to… have more solutions? Halperin only slightly walked it back by declaring himself “not an expert in the field.”
“We need solutions” is hardly a remedy for mass shootings, nor will it prevent the next tragedy. Unfortunately, those tedious realities won’t stop the liberal pundit class from babbling on about vague reform, action, and solutions.
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Comments
Want solutions?
Get rid of gun-free zones.
Stop turning our kids, our citizens, into sitting ducks.
Stop making it easy for the monsters.
Don’t make the monsters famous afterwards!
Start by getting the gang bangers off the streets. Thousands of lives will be saved.
The monsters always, always, always choose easy targets.
Always.
Notice they don’t like to mention Mexico…. it’s a very strict gun free zone where the mere unknowing possession of a few shotgun shells can result in several years in prison with no considerations.
From 2008 – 2012 over 10,000 people were murdered in the city of Juarez alone…. that doesn’t include the rest of the country.
Criminals dump truckloads of headless bodies in the middle of the street, over there in Mexico.
That’s how well it’s working out for them.
But, but, but… all the guns in Mexico come across the border from the U.S…. or something like that.
Well… a bunch of them came from Obama and Holder…
Yea, but they have virtually no mentally deranged young white men committing mass murder. See, they solved the problem. /s
As I recall, Mexico has one gun store in the entire country. It’s in Mexico City, housed inside a miltary base.
Of course the gun runners obama and holder didn’t let that bother them.
And the liberals are so full of shit.
Are they serious?
Are they?
Really?
Just yesterday 4 girls and 1 boy, as young as nine, carried out suicide bombings in Nigeria.
And we are the ones with a problem?
Am I allowed to curse? Because honestly, my tolerance to stupid has run dry.
What we get are stupid, simplistic platitudes…or worse…from people like JJ(sad)trombone, advising that we need to screen out people with mental problems in our background check procedures.
Which is, of course, one of the thorniest possible questions facing society today; how do you identify, equitably, people who should not have firearms? Should they be allowed to drive? Work in a chemical plant? And etc.
It involves the confluence of law, education, law enforcement, and the mental health professions, and to date has proved baffling. We are nowhere even close to the answers we need.
This would NOT, of course, have affected the Sandy Hook killer, who killed to steal the weapons he used.
Such acts – entering a school and shooting students for no sane reason – are so horrific they reveal mental illness by definition. The percentage of killers who have a history of mental illness is very high, an obvious place to start. Even if denied a legal weapon, stealing a gun is not difficult for the mentally ill – virtually everyone knows friends or family members with guns they could steal. Since you cannot marshal the weapons, you have to address the motivations to use it, the cause agents, for such insane acts. If you cannot keep the trigger from the mentally ill, you work on his motivation to pull it.
We don’t need government to solve this via mental illness treatment. The clinics already exist and most mass killers have a treatment history, many in treatment at the time of their crime. Involuntary commitments have been made more difficult over respect for individual rights, but folks get committed every day. We’d do well to revisit the required criteria for involuntary commitments. There is such a thing as an outpatient involuntary commitment, wherein a patient can be picked up and taken for eval if they miss apoointments, refuse meds, etc., but they have not worked well at all in my practice experience (which is limited to NC from the mid-1980s on). Finding them to enforce what is essentially a bench warrant was difficult because the ‘frequent flyer’ patients habitually in and out of MH treatment get hip to the system, just like criminal probationers and parolees do. In our area, serving such commitment pick-up orders was not a high priority among the LEO agencies I worked with, the Raleigh PD and the Wake County Sheriffs Department. Therapists all have patients meeting certain criteria: history of delusions and/or hallucinations, history of violent threats and/or acts, history of suicide/homicide attempts, history of non-compliance with recommended treatment and/or medications, religious or political perserevation, etc. – symptoms that point to something bad likely to happen. Once identified, these patients could be moved to therapists with special training for this population of fragile, potentially dangerous patients. I’m no lawyer, and the personal rights issue worries me, but maybe these specialist therapists could be given certain authorities, become sort of probation officers for the mentally ill. But compliance is the key, therefore enforcement of treatment compliance might need to be looked at.
Many’s the time the MH/SA emergency room I worked at got real nervous about people we had to release because of the high bar set for involuntary commitment, people we felt were dangerous, if not in the immediate future as is required, but within a predictable window of time. I did this for over a decade and quite often someone who was released from commitment went on to suicide or something crazy within day/weeks/months. Weren’t nuthin’ we could do.
“Stuff happens.” Hahahaha.
Parents in denial are also problem. I read a long piece about the Sandy Hook shooter. From the guarded language of some of the experts he had seen it seemed his mother in particular wanted an easy diagnosis and wasn’t interested in hearing her favorite son was going to have life long issues.
I’m not worried about the rights issues here. It is nearly impossible to get a truly dangerous individual committed for more than a few months in my state. It doesn’t matter than only a controlled environment with enforced medication can keep him from maiming other people, it doesn’t matter he has a history of so many victims of assault that you could fill an emergency room with one years’ worth. All that matters is the bed space and his civil rights.
I see it all the time. I used to work in social services and in law enforcement. Guys that should never in a million years be on the street with serious delusional problems are never institutionalized. We have deconstructed our institutions and left nothing in their place.
The plain fact is that some percentage of the population is both mentally ill and dangerous. We even know who many of them are. Why should an officer go pick up a guy that at best will be out as soon as the paperwork is run through? At worst, he’ll be assaulted by the guy or have the back of his car filled with feces or have to chase him across half the town or all three. Then the guy gets let out in a couple days or weeks. Sometimes the same day. It’s a revolving door with no end and no end goal.
I watched every year as the state would change the classification system of criminals to game the system so that more dangerous criminals could be released. Evaluators were urged to use the least dangerous classifications and ignore behavior and past crimes.
The system is beyond broken but the only solutions would be stopped in their tracks by the left.
“We must do something”
Yep, that’s true. We must get more people with concealed carry permits, more training for them, more of them carrying concealed and open, and we need to eliminate all gun-free zones except those places where alcohol or other intoxicants are consumed.
All states should be open carry with requirement of passing gun safety course (just like they require for hunting licenses); and concealed carry should be another layer of training. The big change I’d like to see with regard to training requirements is listing the types of weapons you’re qualified to carry and use – meaning you must pass these courses with the weapon you intend to carry (or one equivalent in design). You should demonstrate knowledge, proficiency and safety with a weapon in order to carry it. I feel the same about driving and that we should require more from people to hold a drivers license.
Anyone see one of these lunatics that want to be famous come up with a plan to walk into a Hells Angels chapter and tell everyone of them to stand up and state their religion before executing them? Of course not. There’s a reason for that. These nimrods are deterred by the prospect of confronting others with weapons and willing to use them. That’s why they keep walking into these gun-free zones.
Obama wants to talk about screening or keeping guns out of the hands of crazy people etc yet he opens the border to murderers, rapists, thieves, drug peddlers, and all sorts of violent offenders, not to mention asylum he grants like candy. From one side of his mouth he talks about keeping those with a propensity for violence away from the capability to commit violence, and from the other side of his mouth he gives unchecked latitude to those that have already demonstrated they will resort to violence and murder for nothing more than a whim. It’s flatly amazing he is not called on to answer for such discrepancies.
There is something that we can do right now that is both sane, rational and probably could easily fall within the President’s Executive Order privilege. We should permit retired military, Reserve and National Guard personnel to conceal carry in “gun free” zones. Off duty and former Law Enforcement Officers have this privilege. Many of these military personnel have more skill and training than police SWAT. Not only are these individuals trained in the use of firearms but they are VETTED. If you cannot trust these people armed with your child, how can you justify giving these individuals access to or possession of nuclear weapons?
40 years ago, big government decided that seriously ill mental patients could be managed in the “community” and sent most of ’em home. Take your pills and go to the day treatment center, everything will be fine.
Add in the advocacy groups and protectors of the seriously mentally ill, who made it virtually impossible to commit people, and you have our current environment. Whether someone uses a hatchet, mows folks down with their car or commits ‘suicide by police’, seriously mentally ill people out in the ‘community’ with the skimpy Obamacare mental health benefits available is a recipe for disaster.
So, we will continue to see disasters. Fix the mental health treatment system, reopen mental hospitals that keep you for ‘as long as it takes’ and these incidents will go down.
They don’t want solutions.
They want control.
Yes. The founders of this country understood totalitarians.
The media needs to look in the mirror. The last two shooters have clearly been losers who wanted to be famous. The first wanted to be a famous newscaster. The most recent was obsessed with the military. Neither had the talent or the personality to succeed at their wishes, so they each turned to the sure fire way to become famous in modern American celebrity culture where merit, objective achievement and fame are no longer related: They killed people.
There seems to be little reason either story rated saturation news coverage outside the local market exceptthat it played into the gun violence leftist agenda and to a lesser extent, the anti-male leftist agenda.
There also most certainly is no reason to put the full names of these losers in the headlines and the lead paragraph of the stories. Some journalists may be queasy about not using their names at all and only a generic description such as 38 year old disgruntled former emplyoyee. Fine, the media can do what they already do these days with all the information that doesn’t fit their narrative: bury the shooter’s name in the last paragraph that most people don’t read.
It was a gun-free zone.
For a gun to have been in there, that means that someone made a decision not to enforce it. Who was that, and can they be charged with anything?
Why can’t the survivors sue the college for wrongful death? They established a ‘guns-free’ policy that effectively took the students’ option of defending themselves off the table but didn’t provide replacement protection. H3ll, even their campus cop was unarmed!
The school had no duty to protect anyone, any more than you have such a duty in your home. Some crazy person coming in and shooting people is not a reasonably forseeable risk that a property owner has to prepare for.
BTW, sorry about the down tick. I hit it by mistake trying for the ‘reply’ button.
That makes no sense at all. No, nobody made any such decision. There’s no reason at all for you to have supposed that anyone made such a decision.
And no, if someone had made such a decision there would be nothing to charge them with, because adopting a policy does not create an obligation to enforce it.
In any case, the campus is not a gun-free zone. Carrying guns is against school policy, so students who do so risk expulsion, and staff risk firing; but this fellow was neither student nor staff, so school policy was irrelevant to him.
There will never be a reasoned debate about this. The desideratum of the Left is the end of the 2nd Amendment and the complete disarming of America or criminalization for being armed. Period. Anything they say is an attempt to advance toward that goal, or just temporizing filler.
The left doesn’t give a damn about those murdered.
There only thought is not to let a good crisis go to waste.
A crisis involving a gun is used to get us closer to all guns being confiscated. The gov does not want guns in the hands of citizens that might fight back against gov oppression. It is for this reason the founders created the 2nd.
How come I see the errors only after I post… their.
The preview button stopped working for me a while back. 🙁 I used to use it all the time, really, I did.
Doesn’t work for me. Couple months or more…
It’s odd though, while typing, or shortly after, I do not see my errors. A minute later when I read I see it quickly…
Realistically, the entire debate is pointless… One side wants freedom, the other side (at least the true believers) operates from a position of logic that is so severely flawed that it is impossible to reason with them because they are incapable of reason… There is no other way to explain the disconnect.
The flawed logic that they are basing their entire point of view on is the idea that someone who does not care about breaking our society’s most severely punished law(s), those against murder and attempted murder, will somehow care about a much less harshly punished law.
It really is that simple… The point of view is so disconnected from reality and sound logic that it is impossible to counter… No amount of facts will satiate their belief, no amount of reasoning will sway them, they are willing to die on the hill of their belief.
Which of course is exactly what will happen if they get their way… There are more firearms in private hands in the US than there are cars, more legal, adult gun owners than non-gun owners and quite possibly more ammunition in private hands in the US than in the entire stockpiles of the US military… The number of licensed hunters in MI, NY, PA, TX and WI each year exceeds the number of active military forces of ANY country in the world with the numbers in PA alone exceeding every military except for the Chinese PLA. The total number of legal, adult gun owners in the US is somewhere above 150,000,000 people…
What this all means is that even if the gun-control crowd were to get their every wish, and have a total ban on firearms in the US, they could not enforce it… If it even cost only $1000 per firearm to confiscate and destroy them (it would certainly cost much, much more), the total cost would be more than 10% of the federal budget.
Of course there is another cost that cannot be discounted either, the cost of such a plan in terms of human lives. If even 1% of gun owners stood up and said “Screw you, I will shoot you if you come to take my guns”, a percentage that I suspect is extremely low, then there are not enough law enforcement personnel in the entire country to enforce the law. One percent, 1.5 million people, would exceed the number of sworn law enforcement officers in the nation by about 700,000 people. And that assumes that the rest of the 148.5 million stays out of it after bodies start piling up…
Let some kids get “accidentally” shot by a SWAT team a couple of times while they are serving warrants on 75 year old neighbors to confiscate 30 round magazines and pretty soon entire neighborhoods will become no-go zones for police trying to enforce such laws.
NY is already partially facing such sentiment with their SAFE act. Estimates are as much as 95% of gun owners have flat out refused to comply… And the state cant do anything about it. The governor and legislature is faced with the question, what if you pass a law that no one obeys? CT, CO and other states have seen similar refusals.
So they can try… And they may get small victories in some states… But that is the only ground they will gain.
Here is a novel idea. How about enforcing the laws already on the books! And while we are at it let’s do the same thing for immigration. Everyone is screaming for immigration reform but the last “reform” crafted between Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill(remember them when adults were in control in Washington) has never been enforced fully. The problem is not in the legislative branch but in the executive branch. Nuff said.
Something must be done! Right now!
To a progressive what the something is they don’t care as long as “something is done. Then they can “feel” better that something was done.
It does not matter that the something will not solve the issue.
But dam we sure feel better. We did something!
High five…. We did something!
Here’s something: Ban publication of the shooters’ names. Yeah, there’s a little problem with the first amendment, but so what? “Progressives” don’t care about the Bill of Rights, right? The constitution is, like, a hundred years old, right? So why not do this one thing? Will it help? Damfino, but it’s got at least as much chance as anything else that’s been proposed. And if it saves just one life, just one life…
Trading liberty for security. How very liberal of you.