The mass shooting today.

GoSlugs said:

ml1 said:

I'm not sure there's a fix at all. It's not as if there really are such things as "red" or "blue" states. Warren, Sussex, Monmouth, Ocean, and a host of other counties in NJ look very much like rural counties in other states -- MAGA land. Similarly, if you're in Austin, Birmingham or Boise, it's a lot more like Essex County than it's like rural America.

The divide in this country isn't red state/blue state. It's rural/urban&suburban. How is that fixable?

Austin metro has twice as many people as Wyoming and a much larger economy.  It should be its own state, if we insist on moving forward with a state based system.  I wonder whether the idea of treating urban areas and rural areas as if they are the same thing isn't outdated in and of itself. 

Wouldn't some sort of parliamentary system make more sense.  That way, people in a really red or really blue state would be able to make their voices heard.


So the Senate has a bipartisan plan, at long last. It’s a beginning, clearly designed to show ‘we’ve listened to everyone marching’ yet also protecting the gun lobbyists. Are we happy with this compromise position? Do we think it will actually pass and be enacted?

I’m wondering why there’s no cap on the number of guns a person can own; why people feel they need to own 50+ (of each style) hand guns, long guns, military-style weapons? It’s not just ‘to defend myself/my family’: you can’t quickly reach and arm all of them, let alone accurately aim and fire, in an emergency. There’s something twisted in their logic… 

Did you see John Oliver’s bit, interviewing John Howard on how/why we changed our culture? That we bought back the guns from their owners? And we have Olympic champion shooters here, so we’re not wusses. Just sensible. 
(there was a domestic violence/gun hostage situation 10 mins drive away from here last week. Police shut down 4 suburbs for 4-6 hours; sadly, the man died [suicide by cop], I don’t think anyone else was hurt. Scary enough. We don’t need more.)


My June 6 comment was on the uselessness of our very comfortable gerontocracy leadership

https://maplewood.worldwebs.com/forums/discussion/the-mass-shooting-today?page=next&limit=120#discussion-replies-3582949

Jamelle Bouie just wrote an article about this very issue

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/opinion/beware-the-ruinous-optimism-of-democratic-leaders.html

“Some things take longer than others, and you can only do what you can do at a given time,” she said in an interview with Rebecca Traister of New York magazine. “That does not mean you can’t do it at another time,” she continued, “and so one of the things you develop is a certain kind of memory for progress: when you can do something in terms of legislation and have a chance of getting it through, and when the odds are against it, meaning the votes and that kind of thing.” (Dianne Feinstein)
“So,” Feinstein concluded, “I’m very optimistic about the future of our country.”
This entire comment was, in Traister’s analysis, a damning example of the sanguine complacency that seems to mark much of the gerontocratic leadership of the Democratic Party.
Earlier this year at the National Prayer Breakfast, to give another example, President Biden praised Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, as a “man of your word” and a “man of honor.”
“Thank you for being my friend,” Biden said to a man who is almost singularly responsible for the destruction of the Senate as a functional lawmaking body and whose chief accomplishment in public life is the creation of a far-right Supreme Court majority that is now poised to roll American jurisprudence back to the 19th century.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is similarly enamored of this rhetoric of bipartisan comity in the face of a Republican Party whose members are caught in the grip of a cult of personality marked by conspiratorial thinking and an open contempt for electoral democracy.

“It might come as a surprise to some of you that the president I quote most often is President Reagan,” Pelosi said at the ribbon-cutting for the Washington branch of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. “The good humor of our president was really a tonic for the nation, the gentleman that he was.”

And last month, she told an audience in Miami that she wants a “strong Republican Party” that can return to where it was when it “cared about a woman’s right to choose” and “cared about the environment.” Of course, the ideologically moderate Republican Party that Pelosi seems to want resurrected was largely dead by the time she entered national politics in the late 1970s, bludgeoned into submission with the notable help of Ronald Reagan, among other figures.

Its easy to not worry, to take your time, when you're a very comfortable millionaire politician whose every need is catered and met.


tjohn said:

GoSlugs said:

ml1 said:

I'm not sure there's a fix at all. It's not as if there really are such things as "red" or "blue" states. Warren, Sussex, Monmouth, Ocean, and a host of other counties in NJ look very much like rural counties in other states -- MAGA land. Similarly, if you're in Austin, Birmingham or Boise, it's a lot more like Essex County than it's like rural America.

The divide in this country isn't red state/blue state. It's rural/urban&suburban. How is that fixable?

Austin metro has twice as many people as Wyoming and a much larger economy.  It should be its own state, if we insist on moving forward with a state based system.  I wonder whether the idea of treating urban areas and rural areas as if they are the same thing isn't outdated in and of itself. 

Wouldn't some sort of parliamentary system make more sense.  That way, people in a really red or really blue state would be able to make their voices heard.

I'd never really thought about this (even though I now live in a country with a parliamentary system) but, on the surface, it makes a lot of sense.

Does anyone know why the Founders, who had grown up in a parliamentary system, rejected it in 1789? I'm guessing the executive would have been too powerful for their taste but I've never read the Federalist Papers  from cover to cover.


GoSlugs said:

Does anyone know why the Founders, who had grown up in a parliamentary system, rejected it in 1789? I'm guessing the executive would have been too powerful for their taste but I've never read the Federalist Papers  from cover to cover.

I doubt that it was out of concern over executive power.  When the Constitution was written, smaller states had great concerns about being overwhelmed by more populous states.  (In 1790, Virginia accounted for almost 1/5 of the U.S. population.)  So that, I think, is why the system of fixed representation was selected.


tjohn said:

I doubt that it was out of concern over executive power.  When the Constitution was written, smaller states had great concerns about being overwhelmed by more populous states.  (In 1790, Virginia accounted for almost 1/5 of the U.S. population.)  So that, I think, is why the system of fixed representation was selected.

Yeah, that makes sense.  Another, perhaps less radical; solution would be to consolidate small states.  Do we really need two Dakotas?


GoSlugs said:

I'd never really thought about this (even though I now live in a country with a parliamentary system) but, on the surface, it makes a lot of sense.

Does anyone know why the Founders, who had grown up in a parliamentary system, rejected it in 1789? I'm guessing the executive would have been too powerful for their taste but I've never read the Federalist Papers  from cover to cover.

Are you asking about the federal structure or the state structures? At the federal level, the context was still very much that the states were independent states. Hence the original federal structure of the Articles of Confederation. When that proved unworkable and the new constitution was proposed as a successor, there was still that general sense, though whether the founders really thought of the federation as a union of independent states or whether that was more a bit of polite fiction to ease the transition was of course a live topic, not fully settled until Appomattox in 1865. And even now, that legal structure still remains even though de facto the states aren't all that independent (especially in comparison to what you see in places like, say, Spain or Italy, where some provinces have a much greater amount of autonomy than any American state does).

As for why each individual state kept roughly the same structure, I'm not sure. I don't think there's anything in the constitution that would prevent, say, NJ from running its own state government as a parliamentary system, and IIUC there's even a fair bit of legal latitude for setting our federal congressional districts (eg we could have multi-member districts), but I'm not 100% sure on that.


Though thinking some more, I guess that doesn't really answer the question as to why the US House is the way it is.


Another Church shooting in Alabama today… this is just too frequent to accept as normal life. I just don’t get it. Chris Mann has a new video clip parodying the issue; in a way it should be compulsory viewing. 
i don’t understand why you can’t make your highest politicians more accountable over these mounting deaths. 

(And yet, I do. Your political culture is so different, change can be so slow. And as we’re seeing, even when it seems cemented in, apparently it’s not, being overturned on a pseudo-legal whim)


After the Supreme Court struck down the laws establishing racially segregated schools, government officials in southern states engaged in "massive resistance".  

What should Hochul and Adams and Murphy do?


STANV said:

After the Supreme Court struck down the laws establishing racially segregated schools, government officials in southern states engaged in "massive resistance".  

What should Hochul and Adams and Murphy do?

But it's not just guns.  It's abortion, prayer in school, loyalty oaths, voting rights, on and on and on.

When we reach the point that the US bears no resemblance to the country we grew up in, what then?


GoSlugs said:

But it's not just guns.  It's abortion, prayer in school, loyalty oaths, voting rights, on and on and on.

When we reach the point that the US bears no resemblance to the country we grew up in, what then?

go north young man….


Jaytee said:

go north young man….

grin


Probably more, of course, the mass shooting in Illinois is just topping the news stream. 

: (


Yeah, at least 6 so far. Town officials doing a presser right now.


I really was in no mood to celebrate yesterday…


this is pretty amazing

and disheartening

and scary

and...

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/07/it-takes-at-least-377-good-men-with-guns

==================================================================

A report from the Texas House of Representatives may be the most complete yet on the Uvalde shooting. The police showed up – 376 of them, with all sorts of equipment. And then they stood around picking their teeth.

In total, 376 law enforcement officers — a force larger than the garrison that defended the Alamo — descended upon the school in a chaotic, uncoordinated scene that lasted for more than an hour. The group was devoid of clear leadership, basic communications and sufficient urgency to take down the gunman, the report says.

The report also reveals for the first time that the overwhelming majority of responders were federal and state law enforcement: 149 were U.S. Border Patrol, and 91 were state police — whose responsibilities include responding to “mass attacks in public places.” There were 25 Uvalde police officers and 16 sheriff’s deputies. Arredondo’s school police force accounted for five of the officers on the scene. The rest of the force was made up of neighboring county law enforcement, U.S. Marshals, and federal Drug Enforcement Agency officers.

“In this crisis, no responder seized the initiative to establish an incident command post,” the committee wrote. “Despite an obvious atmosphere of chaos, the ranking officers of other responding agencies did not approach the Uvalde CISD chief of police or anyone else perceived to be in command to point out the lack of and need for a command post, or to offer that specific assistance.”

There’s more about locked doors and the shooter’s background.


https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/gunman-opens-fire-school-russias-izhevsk-russian-media-cites-local-police-2022-09-26/

MOSCOW, Sept 26 (Reuters) - A gunman with a swastika on his teeshirt killed 15 people, including 11 children, and wounded 24 at a school in Russia on Monday before committing suicide, investigators said.



Sad news from Thailand today. 


Maybe this thread title should be changed to "The Mass Shootings Today" or "Today's Mass Shootings". 


Keeping this thread up to date would be a full time job.

NYT:6 People Killed in Shooting at Virginia Walmart


It sure has been a busy time lately for evil.


OMG

(read the thread. more interview excerpts there.)


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