by Jack
I cringed as I heard the news about a shooting rampage at a Navy base in D.C. As the body count started to come in I felt sick. What a senseless tragedy! I was watching TV news at the time and they reported this may be the work of more than one gunman and they had unconfirmed reports coming in that police have one in custody and are searching for a second suspect, possibly in camo’s and armed with a military style assault weapon. This raised the possibility of another terrorist attack.
An hour later, I’m flipping through the dial, er, clicker, and now it’s being reported on all the major networks that just like at Sandy Hook and Aurora, the gunman was once again armed with the deadly AR-15 with a high capacity magazine! As the day progressed various gun experts appeared on camera to testify that the AR-15 is not a hunting rifle and has no legitimate purpose in civilian hands. It’s a powerful military assault weapon designed to kill people. The experts eagerly explained to us too stupid to understand our Constitutional rights that this is not what the 2nd Amendment intended. As one ex-police chief said, the 2nd amendment was basically crafted for hunting rifles. (That came as news to me – the 2nd Amendment is for hunters eh?) Even Congress got into the act as democrat lawmakers took to the pulpit to talk about the deperate need for more gun laws and the evils of this particular rifle which should be banned. The one-sided talk was really lined up against the venerable AR-15 that has been with us for over 50 years. They rattle off so much information it was almost as if they were scripted in advance, just waiting for another tragedy like this to make their political points.
One problem… An AR-15 was not used. What was used was Joe Biden’s gun of choice, the shotgun. However, you can’t un-ring the bell and the damage was done to the millions of law abiding AR15 owners who like this weapon for home defense, target practice and small game hunting. I said small game because it’s a .223 caliber, that would be a bullet about the size of a .22 bullet…if you still don’t get it, it’s really, really small.
If there is something to be learned from this tragedy, it’s once again not about the gun, but about the person. Mentally ill people should not be allowed access to firearms (or weapons of any sort). All the warning signs were there in the DC shooting, but nobody took the initiative to do one $%#@ thing about it!
The shooter had a secret clearance and when the police reports started coming in to his employer, warning of his mental instability they did nothing and the Navy did nothing! Can you believe they issued a Secret Clearance to the shooter after he had several gun violations? How does this happen on a tightly controlled military installation?
You can bet there will be lawsuits filed at least against the government sub-contractor and hopefully others who may have been negligent. This was a very preventable tragedy if only the police and the Navy had used the law in time or if the sub-contractor had refused the shooter employment because of the prior gun charges and red flags about anger issues that came up in his background.
This is another example of how bloated government still can’t accomplish anything. We have a Department of Homeland Security that spies on Americans but does nothing. This guy has a paper trail a mile long that should have prevented this but even with all of our government agencies and departments and federal employees he wasn’t even a blip on a radar screen. The VA is not serving our veterans. Instead of a DHS that spies on us and takes away our civil liberties, how about using that billion dollar NSA spy complex in Utah for the Veterans Administration and give them that budget so we can serve the people who served their country?
Princess I’m with you. Although I realize the clear danger we still face and the need for effective security measures, given their track record all of that spy money would be better spent if simply transferred to the VA for healthcare and assistance for our vets.
Otherwise, the questions has to be asked…and not rhetorically…why did this man get this security clearance job?
Is his skill set so scarce, and demand for it so high, that no one else was available in this high unemployment environment? Doubtful.
Did no one else apply for this work? Also Doubtful.
Or was it his race? In this age of Eric Holder is the employer who hired him and the vetting agency who did the security check fearful of prosecution and severe consequences for failure to hire a black man who applies no matter his record? Unfortunately this is within the realm of possibilities.
Guns, once again, are not the problem. This is the second case where a security clearance appears to have been given when it should not have been given…Snowden being the other possibility.
It represents numerous cases where mental health issues were a factor.
Democrats…never let a crisis go to waste.
I don’t think the people are dancing to that tune much anymore.
Just as a point of information: After WWII small caliber fully automatic battle rifles were developed because a several studies showed that combat skirmishes were being won by whomever was firing the most rounds. Hence the AR-15 and other similar platforms were developed so that soldiers could carry lighter arms, lighter ammunition, and more rounds.
The AR-15 civilian platform now includes many calibers from .22LR to .308 Winchester (~= 7.62×51mm NATO). These rugged semi-automatic loading carbines and rifles make for some excellent shooting from plinking, to match target, to big game. They do very well for hunting in adverse weather conditions and in heavy cover. I hope to someday hunt boar with a .300 Blackout or .308 on the AR-15 platform.
On a completely unrelated note, here is an article that exposes the love that left wing drunkards, coke heads, pot heads, and general fools have had for Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. And to think I once loved the novel “The Sun Also Rises”. Very sad and very very evil. The left as they truly are. The left who wish to disarm us. Hemingway did us all a favor by blowing his damn brains out. If only some others would follow suit. Read it and weep.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/04/author-hemingway-watched-ches-firing-squad-massacres-while-sipping-daiquiris/
Pie, I like shooting my .22 cal AR15 at the range. It has the weight and feel of the .223, but it’s so incredibly cheap to shoot! Lot’s of fun too. But, if the dems have their way this is going on banned weapons list too. I wish we could ban them instead!
The Moron Stream Media just keep shooting themselves in the mouth.
Getting so nobody believes them anymore.
J Soden, it’s pretty irresponsible of them. Even Fox News was fooled for a time, but corrected the story immediately and they didn’t try to get any extra mileage out of making a mistake, they admitted it, were embarassed and said so.
Ar 15. easy recoil on the shooter is a main reason they became popular as well. If you do a lot of target practice, you’ll appreciate the way your arm feels at the end of a box of ammo. Pie points out an interesting fact about the lighter loads and carrying more ammo, but there was another point about the M4s&M16s (military version of a civilian NON AUTOMATIC AR) the lighter loads were intended to wound more so that kill the enemy, solely to slow down the enemy with more causalities. A point no one in Anti Gun and “second admonishment” DC or Sacramento talks about. But facts that don’t serve their agendas are always left out, so they erroneously and deliberately call it high powered rifle of destruction, and pedal that load of crap to the low informed, who take it in faster than welfare checks. If they can’t even get that right, with all the correct Information available, what makes you think they will correctly accomplish something, anything as complicated as health care or other issues. The AR15 is a great rifle to train marksmanship with, from young adults, the gals and us guys who don’t relish recoil from REAL high power rifles, I being one of them 🙂
Harold this is so true, the AR-15 is not a powerful rifle as you know. The low recoil is what I like too. I’m glad you weighed in on this one, I think the disinformation coming from democrats is going to get the old AR 15 banned if we don’t stand up to them.
For me, having worn the uniform, the tragic shootings at Ft. Hood and the D.C. Navy Yard are both signs of the same thing. The PC chickens are coming home to roost. Our military serves at the pleasure of elected civilian authority, which is as it should be. The PC movement that started in our colleges and universities has for decades worked its way down from our society and infested our entire military. With rare exception, senior military officers are not leaders, they are PC managers climbing the corporate ladder. How do they do this? By being “yes” men. Just follow the script, don’t make any waves, and for damn sure, don’t make a decision. The merest hint of PC impropriety will instantly end a career. And so, our people in uniform are sacrificed on the alter of Political Correctness.
Yup…
In no way do I want to minimize or trivialize any of the mass shootings we have watched take place in recent years. However the Liberal media deliberately has been dumbing down the causes of these tragedies to just the tool that was used “a gun”
The liberal media’s withering attack on gun rights; in support of their Liberal political agenda they use on these attacks as their “ammunition,” so I think it time a response is necessary to combat the bias misinformation. We are a nation of over three hundred million people, with an estimate 270 million legal guns that are spread out among us. However, gun violence in America among legal gun owners is statistically insignificant in numbers; in fact, the vast majority of gun crime is committed by criminals who carry their weapons illegally. Also void in the media is a statistic that in America, a gun is 7 times more likely to stop a crime than to commit one.
Of late the most infamous instances of mass shootings in the news took place in areas described as “gun free” zones. From a movie theater in Aurora, CO, the school in Newtown, CT, the military base in Fort Hood, TX, and the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. All of these places were “gun free zones” where the shooters took advantage of the guaranteed weakened state of their victims. In fact, other infamous mass shootings from “gun free zones” prove this common thread. However, the media has championed the liberal’s idea of just blaming all gun ownership, and leaving out the fact that “gun free zones” are the common thread amongst all these shootings. The media consistently avoids mentioning the common thread of “gun free zones” in support of political discourse. (And attacks anyone who considers eliminating these “gun free zones” by labeling them extremists) A Google search of gun free zone returns stories of mass killing and liberal attempts to deflect blame from gun free zones. The gun free zone is one of the liberals’ “hills to die on”; even though it’s other people who are facing death because of misguided thinking. A main cause of these shootings is the opportunity to do so without any concern of people defending themselves, let eliminate that advantage, and put the concern of reprisal back in the mind of the evil doer
Harold, well said. Gun free zones are a joke, but I wonder how long will it take liberals to realize that criminals don’t really care about their laws?