"It's too easy to get guns that make murder easier:

Open Letter To Mike Lupicia, contributor to the NY Daily News:

I would have addressed these comments to you personally, were it possible. But you don't have any link to your personal address here, and the NYDN doesn't have a convenient link for personal comments. So I do apologize in advance for this IM-personal "Blogger" approach.

I do understand your pain in reaction these egregious murders. Partly because of the "Impersonal" tone of the murderer's testimony, and even more because of the random nature of the attack, I am as appalled as you are. I know you won't believe it, because I am a Conservative Constitionalist who believes in the value of the Second Amendment. I'm one who thinks that the Second Amendment .. which recognizes my right to 'keep and bear arms' ... is equivalent to you belief in the First Amendment ... which recognizes your right to express yourself in public.

The First Amendment allows both of us to say how we feel, what we think. We don't necessarily agree, however, on validity of the Second Amendment as fervently as we agree on the validity of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

You think that the 2nd Amendment allows too much freedom to American Citizens.  You think  that there are some people who just shouldn't be allowed to own and carry firearms.

It may surprise you to learn that I agree with you.

(A small note about my personal background:  I teach a class in firearms safety for people who wish to participate in competition.  Some of the people who show up at my classes have no business having a firearm.  Still, they have the right, so I show them how to do so safely , to the best of my capability .. which includes 30 years of experience in competition, and over 50 years of experience bearing arms.)

---

In my opinion, this young man ... this CREEP .. should never have been allowed near a firearm!

But that is hind-sight.  If you had known him a week before, would you have made the same judgement?

I'm not sure I would; and  honestly, would YOU have been able to discern that he was capable of murder?

I don't think I would, but it's impossible to be sure.  Would you have?  Again .. impossible to be sure.  Neither of us are likely to have been willing to make the judgement against his culpability, until he had proven himself unworthy of our mutual approbation.

In hindsight, and seeing the videos of his final days .. I wouldn't have allowed him near my daughters, my grand-daughters, or anyone I know.

Do we agree that he's a Creep?  I think so.

No wonder he couldn't get a date! It's not a "Woman" thing.  It's just judgement .. in his case, faulty at best.  But who had seen his video statements before, except his family, and the police to whom they had reported his aberrant behavior?

You?  You, who are so critical about the current laws, but have no alternatives to suggest except perhaps that NOBODY should be allowed to possess a gun?  Do you think that Criminals would obey that law, while there are 200+ million guns in this country for them to steal?

If you mandate the confiscation of all guns, how many do you think would be submitted meekly to the mandage of the government?

Three?

(Assuming that you and your two friends own three guns between you.)

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It's true.  The process is flawed.  How would you change it?

Would you make all firearms forbidden to all Americans?  There are 190 millions of Americans who own firearms, and have never been a danger to their friends, family and neighbors.    Would you deprive them of their rights?

How would you do that?  Would you confiscate their legally owned firearms, even though they have never shown any signs of aberrant behavior?  That would be on a par with not allowing their to own knives, with which to cook their food; or to own an automobile, with which the commute to work every day.

Yet this ... person .. used a knife to kill three people, and his automobile to attack several other people.

Extended to their logical absurdity, you might make the case that knives and cars are necessary to the normal requirements of every day living, even though they are demonstrably "weapons of Mass Destruction".

If you would, let's talk about ...

RHETORIC:

If I suggested that "If Guns Were Outlawed, Only Outlaws Would Own Guns!"

I'm reasonably certain that you would dismiss this statement as "Sheer Rhetoric!"

"When seconds count, the police are only minutes away"?

 "Balderdash!  The job of the police is to protect us."

"The right of The People shall not be infringed?"

 "That was about flintlocks, not Assault Rifles!"

"A man's home is his castle?"

"I know where you're going, and that's just more NRA justifications for putting guns in the hands of madmen!"

"If you  were attacked by this E, Rodger creep, and if you had a gun, you could defend yourself?

I know you cannot respond to this; you cannot even read the question.

But if you could, I would ask you .. what if you were one of the people who were attacked?  Would you feel comfortable knowing that guns are always available to people who had no respect for the law .. who would in fact disobey the law joyfully because it only added to the joy of killing you or someone you loved .. and yet you had the option of picking up a gun and fighting this person to defend yourself or your family ........

What if he attacked not you, but someone whose health, peace and well-being was more dear to you than your own life?


Which would you choose?

To go quietly into that good night?
Or would you rage, rage against the night?

You can say that this would never happen.  But we have just seen that it COULD happen.  Without cause, without any justification.  Randomly against the most vulnerable among us.

What would you do?

What would you have ME do, under the same circumstances?

Would you deny me my right to defend my children?  My grand-children?


Because .. that's what you are saying.





Lupica: Santa Barbara rampage shows it's too easy to get guns that make mass murder easier - NY Daily News:

There are no sure safeguards against madness, but it does not change the fact that it's too simple for sick people to get guns — legally or illegally — especially the kinds of semiautomatic weapons that Elliot Rodger used in his shooting rampage in Isla Vista, Calif.

 NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, May 26, 2014, 2:30 AM


(H/T: Weerd World)

So this is Memorial Day in 2014, when we are supposed to remember and honor those who died serving this country and end up mourning the latest to die at the hands of a madman with guns in America, this time in Isla Vista, Calif., near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Once again, the only true gun control in America is when the shooter finally puts one of his guns to his own head and blows his own brains out.

Wayne LaPierre, the gun nut who runs the National Rifle Association and is so often the face and voice of that association, likes to say that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, as if the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the late Dawn Hochsprung, could have saved herself and those children if she’d just been packing.

But the reality of a country that gets lousier with its own stupid gun culture by the day is that too often we have to wait, after more killing, for the bad guy with the gun to stop himself.

That is what finally happened with Elliot Rodger, 22, after six more innocent people were slaughtered, the last four — including the shooter, who had to kill some people because he couldn’t get a date — with semiautomatic weapons that always make the killing good and fast.

You are already hearing that the background checks for which gun control advocates practically have to beg for in America really don’t work, because Rodger passed background checks and purchased his SIG Sauers and Glock 34 legally. You are hearing that it’s a waste of time to put limits on magazines and ammunition, because here was this horny college kid with 41 10-round magazines in his possession; and that the killing started for Rodger with him knifing three people to death.

It makes you think all over again that those who preach sanity on this subject are doing nothing but shouting at the ocean, or just trying to be heard over the sound of more gunfire.

It happens at UCSB this time. The vigil for the dead this time is held in Isla Vista at Anisq‘Oyo’ Park. This is what the school’s chancellor, Henry Yang, says on Memorial Day weekend, 2014, now that gun violence finally finds its way to his school, his town, as it tours the country like the old Ice Capades:

“We are here to share our sorrow, shock and pain.”

ELIZA HALLABECK/APSandy Hook Elementary School Principal Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the Newtown massacre.

But there is no longer any shock when it happens again. How can there be? It is the last week of May in Isla Vista. It was the first week of April in Fort Hood, when Ivan Lopez started shooting. It was supposed to be about Lopez being turned down for leave. Elliot Rodger finally snapped after being turned down for dates. Adam Lanza slaughtered elementary school children in Newtown and not college kids the way Rodger did. Lanza’s psychotic break had occurred long before he walked through the doors of Sandy Hook with his Bushmaster rifle, another real good gun for real fast killing.

Obviously there are no sure safeguards against madness, especially if the shooter uses this kind of rampage as a form of suicide, willing to go out guns blazing, sick little Facebook posts and videos sometimes left behind. But it does not change the fact that it is far too easy for these people to get guns, legally or illegally, especially the kinds of guns that Elliot Rodger used to kill the people he killed and wound 13 others.

Mother Jones, which has done such fine work and told the truth about guns for a long time, reports that since 1982 in this country, there have been more than 70 mass shootings, across 30 states, and that nearly three dozen have occurred since 2006. They occur in malls and movie theaters and at Army bases and the Washington Navy Yard and Sikh temples and elementary schools and college campuses.

The numbers say that so many of these guns used on innocent people, dead because they went to work or went to school, were purchased legally. It means that the real insanity in the greatest country in the world, the one for which my father and all those like him fought, is this:

That we are somehow sane on the subject of guns.

We think we can police the rest of the world while the rest of the world looks at us like the Wild West; while those here who say this is all a way of protecting the Second Amendment are the ones making a mockery of its original intent, and ideals.

This is Memorial Day 2014 then. We mourn more dead college kids along with those who laid down their lives for our freedoms, mourn more innocents gunned down on the real modern battlefield:

The streets of the United States of America.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/lupica-santa-barbara-rampage-latest-failure-gun-control-article-1.1805369#ixzz32t8GJ2zs
Open Letter To Mike Lupicia, contributor to the NY Daily News:

I would have addressed these comments to you personally, were it possible.  But you don't  have any link to your personal address here, and the NYDN doesn't have a convenient link for personal comments.   So I do apologize in advance for this IM-personal "Blogger" approach.

I do understand your pain in reaction these egregious murders.  Partly because of the "Impersonal" tone of the murderer's testimony, and even more because of the random nature of the attack, I am as appalled as you are.  I know you won't believe it, because I am a Conservative Constitionalist who believes in the value of the Second Amendment.  I'm one who thinks that the Second Amendment .. which recognizes my right to 'keep and bear arms'  ... is equivalent to you belief in the First Amendment ... which recognizes your right to express yourself in public.

The First Amendment allows both of us to say how we feel, what we think.  We don't necessarily agree, however on validity of the Second Amendment as fervently as we agree on the validity of the First Amendment to the Constitution.


You have made the entirely valid statement that:  " that the background checks for which gun control advocates practically have to beg for in America really don’t work, because Rodger passed background checks and purchased his SIG Sauers and Glock 34 legally. ".