There's been a mass shooting in California -- eleven people dead, plus the asshole that did it. Just in time for Nancy Pelksi's re-ascension to the Speaskership, in the state the Gifford Law Center To Prevent A Civil Right rates literally A1 for its efforts to keep the wrong sort of people from laying hands on the wrong kind of gun.
As I write, TV networks are gleefully dancing in the blood, reporting with puzzlement that despite law-enforcement efforts to locate an "assault rifle," all they've turned up is a handgun -- possibly with "illegal high-capacity magazines," since California banned the sale of new, normal-capacity magazines some time back and only allows magazines that hold not more ten rounds.*
Me, I'm disgusted. There will be mainstream-media punditry pointing an accusing finger at "lax gun laws," and (mostly non-mainstream) counter-punditry pointing out that the strict gun laws of the California Republic pretty much insured no one was equipped to stop the killer shortly after he began shooting. None of them -- not one! -- will ask what it is that we as a society are doing that makes shooting large numbers of innocents so attractive to the crazed and desperate. The United States has had crazy people since before there was a United States; we've owned large numbers of personal firearms for that long, too: compared to most other countries, the United States of America has always been "awash in guns" and has always been a welcoming environment for people whose grip on reality was a little bit askew -- and yet the high-profile mass shooting is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Interestingly, so is 24-hour cable and online news, hungry for sensation and doling out gobbets of cheap, low-grade fame on an hourly basis. Correlation isn't inevitably causation but maybe this one rates a closer look...at least until the next spin of the news cycle pushes this mass shooting out of the spotlight.
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* It's more complicated than that. Proposition 63, passed in November 2016, would have banned the sale or transfer of any magazine holding over ten rounds and made it a misdemeanor to own one. In 2017, a judge blocked enforcement of the latter, and allowed Californians to keep their "grandfathered" pre-2001 normal-capacity magazines. Oh, if only the state were more like Manzanar! I'm sure they'll manage that, by and by.
It was a bar and think a national law that carrying firearms into a location serving alcohol is verboten. But I may be mistaken about that. A damn shame so many people were there and no one was allowed to protect their own lives.
ReplyDeleteI'm waiting to see if this was a A) crazy person, B) person of *ahem* hue, C) Radical Muslim or C) foreign borne. I know it makes no difference, but if the person was white (automatic Nazi - White Supremacist flag), they'd have his picture along with his home splashed on TV by now.
He is Caucasian. That came out early.
ReplyDeleteThere are no national-level laws of the sort to which you refer.
Data point. Twelve people were killed before the shooter apparently shot himself. Eleven people in the bar (the news reported as unconfirmed rumor that one of them was the bar's security guard) and one of the two LEOs who got there first.
ReplyDeleteIt makes no difference how many rounds a magazine holds when you've got plenty of them and yours is the only gun in the bar.
ReplyDeleteI can hardly wait to see what proposed legislation Our Betters come up with this time. I'm sure it will again assume that someone bent on felony murder will magically obey a misdemeanor weapons violation law.
And about the "Gunnzz in Barrzz" thing: Yes it's handled at the local and state level and runs the gamut from "Sure, no problem" to "Never never never".
I read that he was using a .45ACP pistol. If it was a 1911, the 'high capacity' magazine might have held 10 rounds. I have a 15 round 1911 mag, and it sticks out real far, and isn't reliable.
ReplyDeleteGlock.
ReplyDeleteYup. Glock 21.
ReplyDelete