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Virginia Tech's Shooting Sparks New Interest in Gun Control

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posted on Apr, 21 2007 @ 11:08 AM
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I have been trying to keep a close eye on H.R. 1022, the assault weapons ban that was re-introduced Feb. 13 2007. In light of Monday's VT shootings, there have been 4 new co-sponsors to this legislation, making a total of 38 now.

Rep Crowley, Joseph [NY-7] - 3/7/2007
Rep Fattah, Chaka [PA-2] - 3/7/2007
Rep Filner, Bob [CA-51] - 3/7/2007
Rep Frank, Barney [MA-4] - 3/7/2007
Rep Jackson-Lee, Sheila [TX-18] - 3/7/2007
Rep Maloney, Carolyn B. [NY-14] - 3/7/2007
Rep Meehan, Martin T. [MA-5] - 3/7/2007
Rep Moran, James P. [VA-8] - 3/7/2007
Rep Ackerman, Gary L. [NY-5] - 3/7/2007
Rep Schakowsky, Janice D. [IL-9] - 3/7/2007
Rep Schiff, Adam B. [CA-29] - 3/7/2007
Rep Van Hollen, Chris [MD-8] - 3/7/2007
Rep Capps, Lois [CA-23] - 3/9/2007
Rep Clay, Wm. Lacy [MO-1] - 3/9/2007
Rep Eshoo, Anna G. [CA-14] - 3/9/2007
Rep Grijalva, Raul M. [AZ-7] - 3/9/2007
Rep Miller, Brad [NC-13] - 3/9/2007
Rep Wexler, Robert [FL-19] - 3/9/2007
Rep Berman, Howard L. [CA-28] - 3/13/2007
Rep Delahunt, William D. [MA-10] - 3/13/2007
Rep Hirono, Mazie K. [HI-2] - 3/13/2007
Rep McGovern, James P. [MA-3] - 3/13/2007
Rep Markey, Edward J. [MA-7] - 3/13/2007
Rep Pascrell, Bill, Jr. [NJ-8] - 3/13/2007
Rep Slaughter, Louise McIntosh [NY-28] - 3/13/2007
Rep DeGette, Diana [CO-1] - 3/13/2007
Rep Lofgren, Zoe [CA-16] - 3/15/2007
Rep Lowey, Nita M. [NY-18] - 3/15/2007
Rep Sherman, Brad [CA-27] - 3/15/2007
Rep Tauscher, Ellen O. [CA-10] - 3/15/2007
Rep Kennedy, Patrick J. [RI-1] - 3/22/2007
Rep Pastor, Ed [AZ-4] - 3/22/2007
Rep Wasserman Schultz, Debbie [FL-20] - 3/22/2007
Rep Abercrombie, Neil [HI-1] - 4/16/2007
Rep Farr, Sam [CA-17] - 4/16/2007
Rep Waxman, Henry A. [CA-30] - 4/16/2007
Rep Harman, Jane [CA-36] - 4/19/2007
Rep Holt, Rush D. [NJ-12] - 4/19/2007


I strongly encourage everyone to write their Representatives and/or Senators and implore them to vote against this bill. We do not need to take away the last form of defense of the American populous, against a tyrannical Government.

[edit on 4/21/2007 by Infoholic]



posted on Apr, 21 2007 @ 02:42 PM
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It is frequently offered that the Dems support of the renewal of the assault weapons ban in 1994 gave Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America the impetus to carry the GOP into control of Congress which continued until 2006. Although most GOP Members of Congress follow the NRA line to the letter, the NRA showed the Dems (and American people) who is in charge in W-DC.

I would not expect Speaker Pelosi would risk the Dems chance of capturing a few more seats in 2008 for 32 dead students at Blackburg. As another person pointed out, 60 people die by firearms every day in America on average. And no one really gives a dam.

You did not hear B43 say a word about that did you when he made his pro forma appearacne at Va Tech. For him a Photo Op. He was out hustling as many votes as he could before the funerals. As some old sage said, “This too will pass away.”

Let's wait and see what the GOP and NRA want to do about it. Death by firearms is pretty much their game.

[edit on 4/21/2007 by donwhite]



posted on Apr, 21 2007 @ 10:23 PM
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On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman went to the top of a 27-story tower on the UT-Austin campus and began picking people off. Since then, over 100 Americans have gone on shooting sprees.

All through the years, the same question has been asked: What is it about today’s America that provokes such random violence? Many academics blame guns, at least in part. In seven of the eight deadliest mass public shootings in the past 25 years it was in part due to the easy availability of lethal firepower.

Australia had a spate of mass shootings in the 1980s and 1990s. The straw that broke the camels back was in 1996 when Martin Bryant opened fire at the Port Arthur Historical Site in Tasmania with an AR-15 (M16) assault rifle and killed 35 people.

Within two weeks the Australian parliament had enacted strict gun control laws that included a ban on semiautomatic rifles. There has not been a mass shooting in Australia since 1996. It sees certain types of crimes gain cultural resonance in certain periods. There is no NRA in Australia.

So many post office employees were gunned down by a disgruntled co-worker during the 1980s and early 1990s that they spawned a neologism. To "go postal" according to the Webster's New World College Dictionary is "to become deranged or to go berserk." The most recent postal shooting was in January 2006 when Jennifer Marco, a former employee who had been fired a few years earlier because of her worsening mental state, walked into a letter sorting facility in Gillette, CA, and killed six postal workers with a handgun.

Even the small-town America of yesteryear wasn't completely immune. On March 6, 1915, businessman Monroe Phillips who had lived in Brunswick, GA for 12 years, killed six people and wounded 32 before being shot dead by a local attorney. Phillips' weapon: an automatic shotgun.

We ought to send a delegation to Canberra to see how they did it.

[edit on 4/21/2007 by donwhite]



posted on Apr, 22 2007 @ 04:10 PM
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Headline: Man kills a busload of children and 4 student passengers with truck.

Solution: Ban trucks? Ban big trucks? Ban fast trucks? Ban busses? Ban students?

Hey, here's an idea... ban people using trucks to kill people. Blame the driver of the truck!

This actually happened about a year ago in Northern Florida. A truck collided with the rear of a stopped school bus, after picking up a car in it's attempt to stop. And the driver of that truck will be seeing bars for a very very long time.

When I first heard about the VA Tech shootings Monday afternoon, my first response was "oh, great, here come the gun bans". True enough, now whether to ban or not to ban seems to be the big question.

It was not a gun that killed 33 people in Blacksburg. It was a man. A man who deliberately pulled the trigger almost a hundred times (estimated, most victims were reported to have been shot 3 times). A man who cared absolutely nothing about the 32 lives he ended or the hundreds left to deal with this senseless tragedy.

In the latest edition of Time, at the back of the magazine, someone finally got it right. It was Cho's narcissistic tendencies, his compulsion with his own desires over all else, that was the real cause here. He shared that casual disregard for everyone around him with a few other notable characters, such as Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, the BTK killer, and those guys who shot up Washington DC a while back.

Ban the guns? Sure. Can we ban the black market as well? Oh, wait, that is already banned, bt it somehow continues to exist. Cho was able to obtain the guns he used very easily, perhaps too easily for a non-citizen, but if he couldn't have gotten them legally would he have simply shrugged his shoulders and thought "Darn! I guess I can't kill anyone today"? No, he would have in all likelihood(sp?) have gotten them through an illegal source. Would it have taken longer? Sure. Would it hedneckave cost him more? Probably. But the outcome would have been the same, possibly delayed a few days or weeks.

How about if someone had paid attention to the loner who signed into a class with a '?'? How about if someone had noticed the kid who spent his time alone, never returned a simple "hello", yet complained about being alone? A little intervention could have prevented this tragedy. A ban on guns would not.

Oh, and someone correct me if I am wrong... aren't guns ALREADY banned in a school environment?

TheRedneck (not a member of the GOP or NRA)

"Your will is your weapon, your gun is your tool"



posted on Apr, 24 2007 @ 11:33 AM
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All Reported Accidents Outcomes in 2001 from the CDC

Death, 157,078, 0.56%
Hospitalized, 1,624,532, 5.6%
Treated and Release, 27,993,603, 94.1%

Although anti gun control proponents sometimes call cars or trucks into question because ironically, motor vehicles and firearms kill close to the same number of Americans each year, the banning of cars is not equal to banning of guns. CDC statistics show fewer than 1/10th of 1% of people injured in motor vehicle accidents die, whereas 28%-30% of people who are injured by gunshot, die.

Lethality. Guns are more lethal than cars. One pertinent and more potent argument is this: motor vehicles are not designed or intended to KILL, whereas that is the purpose and design of GUNS.

The Lethality of firearms compared to other agencies of self-inflicted injury are shown in the following statistics.
Cut or stab oneself, 1.5%
Fall, 2.1%
Gunshot, 55.1%
Poisoning, 17%
Suffocation, 20.2%
Other causes, 3.5%
Undetermined or unspecified, 0.5%
From CDC, 2001


Other notable stats:

Federal Civil Employment by %

National Security and Foreign Affairs, excluding uniformed members of the Armed Forces, 35%
USPS, 25%
Transportation and Natural Resources, 8%
Veterans Affairs, 7%
Benefits Payments and Assistance to States, 7%
General Government Operations and Tax Collection, 6%
Research, Development and Information Services, 6%
Department of Justice including Courts and Bureau of Prisons, 3%
Regulatory bodies, 3%
From CBO, 2001.

Note: The 16 Intel Agencies are not included.

More Stats:

The World’s Major Arms Exporters, all in USD (2001)

RF, Russian Federation, $4,979 b.
USA, $4,562 b.
France, $1,288 b.
UK, $1,125 b.
Germany, $675 b.
All other, $3,602 b. including China and India
From BBC.

[edit on 4/24/2007 by donwhite]



posted on Apr, 24 2007 @ 12:13 PM
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Wheew ! i didn't see any names from S.C. on the list.

but a focus on 'assault weapons' is heading in the wrong direction !!

the problem arising out of the VT horrific massacre was more the
loophole in reporting pertinent information concerning & about the
gun purchaser....
the 'background check' did not include the information that the applicant
'Cho' for short, (aka; ? aka; Ismail) had a history of being judged a danger
to himself or others by a Court Judge...
which by all rights, Should Have, denied him the weapons purchase.

They're all barking ip the wrong tree!!!
But - They - are all getting name association, and a little press, to their
reelection aspirations, call me cynical, but you know i'm correct

wake me up when the legislators start dealing with correcting the
'background check' loophole, and reporting ALL the relevent data
on the character of the gun purchaser before a sale is allowed



posted on Apr, 24 2007 @ 12:18 PM
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Every time that something like the VA tech tragedy happen in America the anti gun crowd comes running to push their agendas.


But as anything in America that has to do with constitutional rights, the right to bear arms is stronger than the zealots ideologies of a free gun nation.

So this will die as anything that has to do when it comes to challenging constitutional rights.:Lil:

Nobody wants laws to restrict the right to bear the arms of your choice.



posted on Apr, 24 2007 @ 07:26 PM
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My question to gun control advocates is very simple, and not ONE has been able to provide me with a direct, sensible, and feasible answer.

How to you propose to control ALL firearms? How will you stop illegal importing and the sale thereafter?

If even one criminal has a firearm, when the good people of America are denied the right to protect themselves, it is too many.



posted on Apr, 28 2007 @ 11:28 AM
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Just checked on H.R. 1022, again, and found three more cosponsors for the bill added just this week.

Rep Emanuel, Rahm [IL-5] - 4/26/2007
Rep Watson, Diane E. [CA-33] - 4/26/2007
Rep Woolsey, Lynn C. [CA-6] - 4/26/2007
source

That makes 41 cosponsors.



posted on Apr, 28 2007 @ 03:01 PM
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It seems to me that if there were more interest in relaxing gun control, then you'd be hearing stories about armed aggression that read more like this.



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