Another US Shooting

[Jairzinho]

Build a fucking wall.

[Fugitive]

Build a fucking wall.

I agree, time to make sure these lunatics are bricked in.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

We need a complete and total shutdown of Trump supporters entering the UK until we can figure out what's going on.

[Numero Veinticinco]

Did anyone see that NRA commentator woman on BBC news just then? Wow

No... let us in on it?

[General Dryness]

No... let us in on it?

She thinks everyone should just stop being silly and throw their guns in the bin because there's no logical use for owning an assault rifle if you're not in an actual war.

[Ranxerox]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-latest-schoolhouse-slaughter-shows-we-have-been-defeated/2018/02/15/a94dd816-1269-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html?utm_term=.d6b59680098f

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-second-amendment-is-being-turned-into-a-suicide-pact/2018/02/15/632f702c-128e-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.b281853dc401

 

 

Grim reading

[Ranxerox]

We need a complete and total shutdown of Trump supporters entering the UK until we can figure out what's going on.

Wife and I decided we're no longer going to visit the US. The border is only 2.5 hrs drive and we've typically gone across 2-3 times a year. But even in Maine things are different. Crossing the border used to be a casual "how ya doin" process" but for the last couple of years it's been an increasingly tense "just what exactly are you up to" one. Last summer my daughter's club BB team was decidedly unwelcome in Springfield Mass as the only foreign representative. Several parents vowed it was now time to end the long standing tradition of going there.

 

I've followed US politics closely since University (part of my studies) and their at first slow but now accelerating descent into something that is very toxic has been at times disturbing, baffling, and depressing. The news is so bad now I've had to more or less restrict myself to a glance at the headlines.

[General Dryness]

Maine is a fucking minefield of the evil and the bizarre if you believe those travelogs that that Steven King fella writes. Stay the fuck out of Derry, especially.

[Section_31]

Wife and I decided we're no longer going to visit the US. The border is only 2.5 hrs drive and we've typically gone across 2-3 times a year. But even in Maine things are different. Crossing the border used to be a casual "how ya doin" process" but for the last couple of years it's been an increasingly tense "just what exactly are you up to" one. Last summer my daughter's club BB team was decidedly unwelcome in Springfield Mass as the only foreign representative. Several parents vowed it was now time to end the long standing tradition of going there.

 

I've followed US politics closely since University (part of my studies) and their at first slow but now accelerating descent into something that is very toxic has been at times disturbing, baffling, and depressing. The news is so bad now I've had to more or less restrict myself to a glance at the headlines.

I've always found their border people a disgrace. I've always genuinely dreaded the US airport experience. They tend to be borderline retarded but some bright spark saw fit to give them a badge and a shotgun.

 

I knew one guy who got bollocked for wearing a Che Guevara T shirt because he was an 'evil guy', and read another story about a journo being asked if they were going there to 'write lies about our president'.

 

Let's be honest here though, I've met plenty of yanks but they've all been fucking weird.

[Sputnik1]

 

 

Build a fucking wall.

 

I think it might have been Frankie Boyle that suggested we build four walls, north, south, east and west. 100ft high and then fill it with water. 

 

I'm not saying I totally agree with that, I think 100ft might not be high enough. 

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/americas-failure-to-protect-its-children-from-school-shootings-is-a-national-disgrace-parkland-florida

 

America’s Failure to Protect Its Children from School Shootings Is a National Disgrace

 

By John Cassidy

 

February 15, 2018

 

An event like the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, is no longer considered an aberration in the United States.

 

Photograph by Joel Auerbach / AP

 

Early on Wednesday afternoon, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, had a fire drill, an eleventh-grader named Gabriella Figueroa told MSNBC’s Brian Williams. “Then we heard gunshots,” Figueroa said. “Then it went to code red. And then it was crazy.”

 

An individual with deadly intent was in the school building, holding an assault weapon that was designed for fighting wars. As Figueroa’s use of the term “code red” indicated, such an event is no longer considered an aberration. All across the country, school boards drill their teachers and students in how to respond to such an emergency. Code yellow: turn cell phones to silent, return to the classroom, and follow the teacher’s instructions. Code red: find a secure area immediately, lock the door, close the blinds, turn off the lights, do not move.

 

This lockdown wasn’t a drill, of course. By the time it was over, seventeen people had been shot dead, and more than a dozen had been wounded. “Bodies were lying in the hallway,” another eyewitness told Fox News. “People were killed in the hallway.” Police later identified the suspected killer as Nikolas Cruz, a nineteen-year-old former student who had been expelled for discipline problems.

 

After Cruz fled the scene—he was arrested shortly after the shooting, in neighboring Coral Springs—news helicopters captured footage of students walking and running from the school, some of them carrying flowers and cards. It was Valentine’s Day, after all. By that point, the authorities had secured the area around the school. There were heavily armed cops, police cars, bomb-squad trucks, and F.B.I. vehicles. The mayor of Parkland, a former teacher named Beam Furr, told CNN, “It’s all being fairly well coördinated, and everyone is doing everything they can.”

 

But were they? On Twitter, President Donald Trump offered his “prayers and condolences to the families of the victims,” adding that “no child, teacher, or anyone else should ever feel unsafe in an American school.” Fox News interviewed Marco Rubio, Florida’s junior senator, who has an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association. “I hope people reserve judgment.... The facts of this are important,” Rubio said. As soon as the facts are clear, Rubio went on, “we can have a deeper conversation about why these things happen.” The forty-six-year-old Republican added, “It’s a terrible situation. It’s amazing the amount of carnage that one individual can carry out in such a short period of time.”

 

Yet some pertinent facts are already known. According to local police, Cruz was armed with an AR-15 assault-style rifle—the same type of gun that Adam Lanza used to kill twenty-six pupils and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in December, 2012. Evidently, Rubio still isn’t aware of the power of such weapons, which fire bullets that can penetrate a steel helmet from a distance of five hundred yards. When fired from close range at civilians who aren’t wearing body armor, the bullets from an AR-15 don’t merely penetrate the human body—they tear it apart. It “looks like a grenade went off in there,” Peter Rhee, a trauma surgeon at the University of Arizona, told Wired.

 

To spare the families of the victims—and the public at large—additional anguish, these sorts of details are often glossed over in the aftermath of mass shootings. But it’s surely long past time that we acknowledged these facts, and that we begin to more fully discuss the complicity of N.R.A.-backed politicians like Rubio, and Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, in maintaining the environment that allows these tragedies to happen again and again and again.

 

One of the first duties of any government is to protect its citizens, through collective action, from violent threats they’d otherwise have to fend off themselves. Even most libertarians accept this principle. But when it comes to mass shootings, the Republican Party falls back on constitutional arguments that have no proper basis in history, and it refuses to budge from this stance. Nothing can shift it—not Sandy Hook, not the Orlando night-club shooting, not the Las Vegas massacre, not weekly shootings in schools. (According to the Guardian, Wednesday’s attack in Parkland was the eighth school shooting this year that has resulted in death or injury.) Nothing.

 

Further Reading

 

New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.

 

The Democrats aren’t entirely blameless, either. In 2009 and 2010, when they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, they failed to take some steps that were obviously necessary, such as closing the gun-show loophole for background checks and reinstating the Clinton Administration’s ban on assault weapons, which the Bush Administration allowed to expire.

 

The Republicans bear the primary responsibility, though. Ever since Sandy Hook, it is their craven subservience to the gun lobby that has prevented meaningful action, even as the carnage that Rubio referred to has continued. “Turn on your televisions right now and you are going to see scenes of children running for their lives,” Chris Murphy, the junior Democratic senator for Connecticut, said on the Senate floor on Wednesday afternoon. “Let me just note once again for my colleagues: this happens nowhere else other than the United States of America. This epidemic of mass slaughter, this scourge of school shooting after school shooting, it only happens here. Not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction. We are responsible for a level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else.”

 

The key concept in that excellent peroration was responsibility. Even with the blood of defenseless children flowing along the corridors of schoolhouses, the U.S. government has abdicated its duty to protect. And that, it bears repeating ad nauseum, is a national disgrace.

 

John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also writes acolumn about politics, economics, and morefor newyorker.com.

[Mook]

I've always found their border people a disgrace. I've always genuinely dreaded the US airport experience. They tend to be borderline retarded but some bright spark saw fit to give them a badge and a shotgun.

 

I knew one guy who got bollocked for wearing a Che Guevara T shirt because he was an 'evil guy', and read another story about a journo being asked if they were going there to 'write lies about our president'.

 

Let's be honest here though, I've met plenty of yanks but they've all been fucking weird.

Wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt through US Customs is unbelievably stupid.

 

Did he save his hammer & sickle one for his trip to The Alamo?

[Jairzinho]

I'd rather live in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

[G Richards]

Wife and I decided we're no longer going to visit the US. The border is only 2.5 hrs drive and we've typically gone across 2-3 times a year. But even in Maine things are different. Crossing the border used to be a casual "how ya doin" process" but for the last couple of years it's been an increasingly tense "just what exactly are you up to" one. Last summer my daughter's club BB team was decidedly unwelcome in Springfield Mass as the only foreign representative. Several parents vowed it was now time to end the long standing tradition of going there.

I've followed US politics closely since University (part of my studies) and their at first slow but now accelerating descent into something that is very toxic has been at times disturbing, baffling, and depressing. The news is so bad now I've had to more or less restrict myself to a glance at the headlines.

But what about those delicious lobster shacks along the coast? And the clam chowder? And the leaves in the autumn?

 

I see a massive divide in America, and not just the usual divide between people. I see a divide between the beauty of the actual country itself and many of the nutjobs who live here. One of the best things I ever did happened a few years ago, and we took a few weeks to drive around the whole country. Went all the way out to the Pacific Coast highway and did that, and along the way Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, San Fransico, Denver, Rockies, Arches, Badlands, Mt Rushmore, etc. It’s an amazing place.

 

However, the political scene is a train wreck, and there are some glaring problems that are just not being addressed, including the gun madness.

 

It’s a beautiful place. But also a savage place. And that’s such a shame.

[Hades]

America has always seemed less like a country and more like a social experiment where Europe sends their wackiest elements. It's entirely appropriate that their president is a reality TV star because their entire country is like that.

[G Richards]

PS - wasn't meaning to sound trite in the above post. Border crossings are a nightmare in America, and whenever I have had family members come to visit from England it's always embarrassing, or at least there's a knowing-but-heavy glance exchanged about the ordeal of it all. 

 

As for the gun thing, I think it needs a leader like a Wilberforce or someone like that. There is an obvious and massive wrong that is going on, but no-one seems to be able to tackle it. Nothing happens politically, and on the rare occasion that it does, it's usually some tangental thing that doesn't really make any difference. 

 

It needs a moral person, someone with gravitas, who is calm, dignified but also fierce - in the best way. It needs someone who will not back down, someone who is willing to spend the best part of his/her life fighting this one until change happens. They will be ridiculed. They will feel the might of Fox News and the NRA coming against them. It is possible they would also receive death threats or even be killed by some loon who thinks they are being patriotic and protecting freedom. But until such a person emerges, I don't expect anything to change. Like I said above, it's a beautiful country, but it's a savage one too. 

[Jockey]

America has always seemed less like a country and more like a social experiment where Europe sends their wackiest elements. It's entirely appropriate that their president is a reality TV star because their entire country is like that.

 

By Europe you mean Mexico, China, Africa and Southern America - which make up the majority of the current population? And by 'wackiest elements' you mean poorest? Because they were! 

 

The terrifying thing to me is that the US is either 30 years behind, or 10 years ahead of the rest of the developed world! 

[Anny Road]

Slightly off subject but talking of US immigration. We are thinking of a Florida trip with extended family.

One of our family has a previous drink driving ban. I’ve heard mixed opinions on rights of entry. Anyone any experience of this?

[moof]

Slightly off subject but talking of US immigration. We are thinking of a Florida trip with extended family.

One of our family has a previous drink driving ban. I’ve heard mixed opinions on rights of entry. Anyone any experience of this?

As long as he isn’t brown you should be ok

[Anny Road]

As long as he isn’t brown you should be ok

From memory I’ve had my stuff gone though a few times at US customs and everytime it was a big black female. Who couldn’t fold shit.

[SasaS]

At a risk of sounding like a NRA supporter, isn't the availability of guns only part of the problem, and this is almost always all people talk about after such events. The US is clearly a country with an overall problem with violence and attitude towards violence which may have been caused by numerous factors, historical and societal.

 

I seem to remember being told that Switzerland had a huge reservist army where everyone had  an assault rifle and live ammunition at home and it was almost never used in murders and I don't remember any mass shootings, not to mention regional conflicts in Eastern Europe, where you had terrible crimes committed during wars, and afterwards enough weapons to put any American survivalist group to shame, with about half of the total population suffering from PTSD, terrible inter-community grudges, and yet relatively few mass shootings.

[Rico1304]

The ‘well regulated ‘ bit of the 2nd amendment should mean they can force all gun owners to have a huge amount of training and achieve a level of competence before owning a gun.

[Jockey]

At a risk of sounding like a NRA supporter, isn't the availability of guns only part of the problem, and this is almost always all people talk about after such events. The US is clearly a country with an overall problem with violence and attitude towards violence which may have been caused by numerous factors, historical and societal.

 

I seem to remember being told that Switzerland had a huge reservist army where everyone had  an assault rifle and live ammunition at home and it was almost never used in murders and I don't remember any mass shootings, not to mention regional conflicts in Eastern Europe, where you had terrible crimes committed during wars, and afterwards enough weapons to put any American survivalist group to shame, with about half of the total population suffering from PTSD, terrible inter-community grudges, and yet relatively few mass shootings.

 

And yet they have access to guns! 

[Numero Veinticinco]

The ‘well regulated ‘ bit of the 2nd amendment should mean they can force all gun owners to have a huge amount of training and achieve a level of competence before owning a gun.

The 'militia' part should force them into... you know... being a militia.

[SasaS]

And yet they have access to guns! 

 

 

But access to guns is what they always had, it is one of the elements that make up that particular individualistic society. Even if they introduce all the gun controls lobbyists are resisting they would still have reasonably easy access to guns and these controls would not remove willingness to use violence. Yes, any lunatic would not be able to go to the nearest department store and buy an assault rifle (I'm assuming you can do it now, I'm not so up to speed with their regulations) but people would still be deciding on a weekly basis that going to your school and shoot it up is a way to send a message or solve your issues. Or going to your place of work or anywhere else.