Mass casualty shooting in Texas

[villakram]

30 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

It just shows how he's either;

Fully racist (hence the vitriol when someone who isn't white does these things)

or

He's so backed by gun corps that speaking about any form of gun control would led to him being dumped.

He's stuck in an impossible situation where he can't say one thing without looking like the other, so he's currently both. 

Moron.

I've said before, he'll be leaving the White House in a 6ft long wooden box. (this is not a threat!)   

Trump is 6'2"... what exactly are you allegedly planning on allegedly doing?

[mjmooney]

Biggest mass shooting in the history of Texas, apparently. 

Tell that to the Comanches. 

[Keyblade]

2 of the 5 worst mass shootings in US history have taken place in the last 35 days.

[NurembergVillan]

24 minutes ago, Keyblade said:

2 of the 5 worst mass shootings in US history have taken place in the last 35 days.

There were no shootings until the immigrants turned up.

[Keyblade]

Also for a bit of perspective. Columbine has been knocked off the top 10. 

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

59 minutes ago, villakram said:

Trump is 6'2"... what exactly are you allegedly planning on allegedly doing?

His hair will relax 2 " at least.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

5 hours ago, villa89 said:

What I don't understand is that apparently there was a 'good guy with a gun' nearby who chased and shot the "mental health" affected citizen. I thought that's how you stop mass shootings, has the NRA been lying to me?  

Just wait a few days and they will say that the good guy with the gun saved 300 + lives.  

 

[coda]

Sounding like a domestic incident.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

10 hours ago, Rodders said:

"mental health" behind this one apparently. Don't recall seeing that being said about the Uzbek chap in NYC...

He had a big beard,  it didn't need to be said.

[Xela]

Where did the KKK angle come from? 

[snowychap]

3 hours ago, lapal_fan said:

I've said before, he'll be leaving the White House in a 6ft long wooden box. (this is not a threat!)   

[villakram]

It turns out that this guy should not have been able to purchase his gun, but I suspect due to NRA etc., obstruction of record keeping/database creation and sharing laws, that he was able to purchase his gun.

What a country...

Speaking of. So tomorrow, it is local election time here in Michigan (county/city elections) and one of my work colleagues is staying at home to mind his kids. You see, they have the ballots in local schools and libraries, but somehow it is legal to "carry" into the election venue. Hence, the school quite sensibly decided to shut for the day. Bonkers!

[LondonLax]

8 minutes ago, villakram said:

It turns out that this guy should not have been able to purchase his gun, but I suspect due to NRA etc., obstruction of record keeping/database creation and sharing laws, that he was able to purchase his gun.

What a country...

Speaking of. So tomorrow, it is local election time here in Michigan (county/city elections) and one of my work colleagues is staying at home to mind his kids. You see, they have the ballots in local schools and libraries, but somehow it is legal to "carry" into the election venue. Hence, the school quite sensibly decided to shut for the day. Bonkers!

How do we know when he purchased the gun? Perhaps he bought it before the discharge?

[villakram]

2 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

How do we know when he purchased the gun? Perhaps he bought it before the discharge?

Not sure to be fair. But, available records should have led to him surrendering it, were that so.

Things are so screwed here that the FBI can't even compile federal gun stats correctly.

[Rugeley Villa]

For how tragic it is, I must admit my brain is now in autopilot over these attacks whether it be some nut in the states, or Islamic groups. It's just became the norm and it's like "oh right, another attack" it's weird how you just get used to stuff. 

[Tegis]

2 hours ago, Xela said:

Where did the KKK angle come from? 

It was in the initial reports, no sign of that anymore. So, error!

[Davkaus]

1 hour ago, villakram said:

Not sure to be fair. But, available records should have led to him surrendering it, were that so.

Things are so screwed here that the FBI can't even compile federal gun stats correctly.

I've posted this before, but it's a fascinating read, and really makes you realise how absurd the US mentality around guns is.

 

https://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns

 

I haven't copied the entire article because it's massive, but I think it's well worth reading the whole thing

 

 

Quote

 

Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns

 

There's no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible.

Say there's a murder. Blood everywhere, a dead guy on the floor. The cops come in with their yellow tape, chalk line, the little booties, cameras, swabs, the fingerprint dust. One of them finds a gun on the floor. The gun! He lifts it with his pinkie, examines it, takes note of the serial number. Back at the station, they run a trace on the gun. A name pops up. It's the wife! Or: It's the business partner! It's somebody's gun, and this is so exciting because now they know who did it.

Except—no. You are watching too much TV. It doesn't work like that.

“Think,” says Charlie Houser, a federal agent with the ATF. We're in his office, a corner, and he's got a whiteboard behind him where he's splashed diagrams, charts, numbers.

The cops run a trace on a gun? What does that even mean? A name pops up? From where? There's some master list somewhere? Like, for all the guns all over the world, there's a master list that started with the No. 1 (when? World War I? Civil War? Russian Revolution? when?), and in the year 2016 we are now up to No. 14 gazillion whatever, and every single one of those serial numbers has a gun owner's name attached to it on some giant list somewhere (where?), which, thank God, a big computer is keeping track of?

“People don't think,” Charlie tells me. He's a trim guy, 51, full lips and a thin goatee, and he likes to wear three-piece suits. They fit loose, so the overall effect is awkward innocence, like an eighth grader headed to his first formal. “ I get e-mails even from police saying, ‘Can you type in the serial number and tell me who the gun is registered to?’ Every week. They think it's like a VIN number on a car. Even police. Police from everywhere. ‘Hey, can you guys hurry up and type that number in?’ ”

“It's a shoestring budget. It's a bunch of friggin' boxes. All half-ass records.”

So here's a news flash, from Charlie: “We ain't got a registration system. Ain't nobody registering no damn guns.”

There is no national database of guns. We have no centralized record of who owns all the firearms we so vigorously debate, no hard data regarding how many people own them, how many of them are bought or sold, or how many even exist.

What we have instead is Charlie.

“Can I go smoke a cigarette while we discuss it?”

Anytime a cop in any jurisdiction in America wants to connect a gun to its owner, the request for help ends up here, at the National Tracing Center, in a low, flat, boring building that belies its past as an IRS facility, just off state highway 9 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the eastern panhandle of the state, a town of some 17,000 people, a Walmart, a JCPenney, and various dollar stores sucking the life out of a quaint redbrick downtown. On any given day, agents here are running about 1,500 traces; they do about 370,000 a year.

“It's a shoestring budget,” says Charlie, who runs the center. “It's not 10,000 agents and a big sophisticated place. It's a bunch of friggin' boxes. All half-ass records. We have about 50 ATF employees. And all the rest are basically the ladies. The ladies that live in West Virginia—and they got a job. There's a huge amount of labor being put into looking through microfilm.”

I want to ask about the microfilm—microfilm?—but it's hard to get a word in. He's already gone three rounds on the whiteboard, scribbling, erasing, illustrating some of the finer points of gun tracing, of which there are many, in large part due to the limitations imposed upon this place. For example, no computer. The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data.

“That's the big no-no,” says Charlie.

That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.

“Okay?” Charlie's tapping a box of Winston Reds. His smile is impish, like he's daring you to say what needs to be said: This is a **** nightmare.

“You want to see the loading dock?” We head down a corridor lined with boxes. Every corridor in the whole place is lined with boxes, boxes up to the eyeballs. In the loading dock, there's a forklift beeping, bringing in more boxes. “You go, ‘Whoa!’ ” he says. “Okay? Yeah, but a million a month?” Almost 2 million new gun records every month he has to figure out what to do with. Almost 2 million slips of paper that record the sale of a gun—who bought it and where—like a glorified receipt. If you take pictures of the gun records, you can save space. “Two million images! You know, it's 2 million photo shots. I've got to have at least seven machines running 16 hours a day, or otherwise, right? I fall behind. And to fall behind means that instead of 5,000 boxes in process, there's maybe 5,500 tomorrow, you know?

 

 

[Chindie]

I also posted that a while ago.

It's insane.

[TrentVilla]

5 hours ago, NurembergVillan said:

There were no shootings until the immigrants turned up.

Well no, they used bow and arrows before the immigrants turned up.

 

[NurembergVillan]

38 minutes ago, TrentVilla said:

Well no, they used bow and arrows before the immigrants turned up.