Showing posts with label schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label schools. Show all posts

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Why the Dickens Does Stacey Campfield Want Tennessee Kids to Play Hunger Games? ~ UPDATE 2: Calls Child a "Prop" - UpDATE: Bill Withdrawn!

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This is Stacey Campfield's brilliant idea - to withhold welfare for poor families unless their kids make good grades. In effect, he wants to punish the entire family from babies to Grandma if just one of the kids is failing school, no matter what the reason. Can he spell I-D-I-O-T?

. . . if your kid is failing every single class because who knows what reason — unless you are a special needs child or something like that — we’re going to stop or cut back on the amount of straight cash payments you’re going to get.
Listen, I’m not expecting these kids to write the Magna Carta.
ABCs, 1-2-3s — I think any parent can just about do that.
We have classes for parents. We have after-school problems if kids are having problems. We have tutoring programs up the wazoo, we have everything you’d ever ask for except for parents that are engaged and involved.
~ Stacey Campfield on Fox News in January 2012

Personally, I want to see Stacey Campfield's Report Cards because I'm not sure he's qualified to participate in state government. Also he has no heart.

We’ve learned that on Monday a group of Nashville Reverends, Preachers, and Priests came to the office of each member of the Tennessee General Assembly to protest Sen. Campfield’s anti-poor agenda and the state's rejection of Obamacare. They dropped off two loafs of bread and 5 paper fish. Each fish had a different bible verse calling on the members to help the poor and fund health care. Nice work!
~ From a Facebook called "Recall TN State Senator Stacey Campfield"

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UpDATE 2 ~ Campfield withdrew his bill, thank God, but not before this happened:

"I love when people use children as Props." ~ Stacey Campfield while running from and 8-year-old girl, Aamira Fetuga, then calling a man with the child a "Union Thug"

From Think Progress
As Campfield walked to the Senate chambers, he was presented with a petition of more than 2500 signatures collected by Clergy for Justice to protest the bill. The deliverer of the petition was an 8-year-old girl, Aamira Fetuga, whose mother, Rasheedat Fetuga, is the founder of a local child advocacy group.
As Aamira prepared to explain to Campfield why she was worried about his bill, Campfield dismissed her as a “prop” and hurried away, repeating over and over again, “Using children as props is shameful” as Aamira and her mother tried to talk to him.

Watch it [courtesy of Eric Patton and Clergy For Justice]:





UPDATE: Stacey Campfield has Withdrawn his Bill!!!
State Sen. Stacey Campfield dropped his bill to tie welfare benefits to grades for the year after meeting resistance from fellow Republicans on the Senate floor.

Campfield asked for his bill to be sent to a summer study committee before a vote could be held on the measure, which would have reduced welfare payments to families whose children are failing school. The move came after it appeared that the bill would fall short of passing.

The decision ended debate on one of the most controversial pieces of legislation before the Tennessee legislature.

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A single mother with two children receives $185 dollars a month in TANF cash payments. That’s roughly $46 dollars a week, less than $7 a day. Your 30% reduction would cut that payment to just under $130 a month.
. . . Your legislation also ignores the very real educational impediments for students coming from impoverished households–like food and housing insecurity or financial and health care instability. And the truth is that poor people don’t hold the monopoly on bad parenting.
. . . And gentlemen–it’s your job as elected officials to encourage their achievement with policy that supports instead of shames.
~ Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC

"Study or Starve"
~ Martin Bashir on MSNBC



Let me see if I get this theory straight:
Little Billy is poor, and he’s not doing very well in school. I have an idea. What if we made him poorer and told his family it was his fault?
‘Last semester my grades were bad because I was hungry and cold, but this semester I am hungrier and colder and my family isn’t talking to me, so bring on the long division.’
Is Stacey Campfield a state senator senator or a villain from a Dickens novel?
But I gues when the State of Tennessee is handin' people up to 900000 bucks a month, they have some say.
(Fox News Reporter) "Right now the current average assistance is $189 a month."
Because $190 would spoil them.
Who is this Stacey Campfield who wants to turn Tennessee education into actual Hunger Games?
~ John Stewart on Comedy Central


White guys telling the poor and disadvantaged that it's all their fault and they're going to be punished. That's today's GOP.
~ Americans for Truth on Mediaite

This is sort of like the Rutgers Basketball Coach philosophy. belittle, threaten, belittle, threaten, belittle, incarcerate.
~ Jman on Crooks and Liars

Knowledgeable fetuses in Tennessee will just skirt this law by refusing to leave the womb.
~ MeSoHornish on The New Civil Rights Movement

This is child slavery.
~ traqair on Huff Post

Remember, Mr. "Christian" Senator, the words............"Bless the beasts and the children. For in this world they have no voice ---- they have no choice". This is a new low ----- and given many Republican remarks as of late, that's saying something!
~ Ann L. on Huff Post

So if you get good grades, we'll give you something to eat. Are these kids lab rats?
~ SOFOROBAMA on Huff Post

I think he's stupid! Can we take money away from his parents?
~ AmberWave on Huff Post

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Friday, January 11, 2013

NRA Against the World

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Let me be clear. Freedom is not a handgun on the hip of every teacher, and security should not mean a guard posted outside every classroom. That is not who we are in Connecticut, and it is not who we will allow ourselves to become.
~ Governor Dannel Malloy of Connecticut

I know that the issue of gun control is hard. I know it's political. I know it's controversial. ... I say to you: Forget the extremists. It's simple, no one hunts with an assault rifle. No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer and too many innocent people have died already. End the madness, now!
~ NY Governor Andrew Cuomo in his State of the State Address

(The NRA) lost seven out of eight Senate races where they put more than $100,000 dollars in. They got clobbered in the Presidential race. Their campaign slogan was "All In." They were going "All In" because they were telling people that President Obama literally was going to destroy all freedom in America. Well, no one responded to that message. No one cared. So if on one hand they want to claim that they single-handedly supposedly won the 1994 and 2000 election, well, you gotta own up to getting shellacked in this one.
~ Ladd Everitt, Director of Communications for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show

I think they're being disingenuous. I think that they see this as an opportunity to go after the Second Amendment, which they've wanted to do for years, if not decades, and I think they're going to do everything they can to strip Americans of their right to keep and bear arms.
~ NRA President David Keene, the day before a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden

There will come a time when the gun owners of America, the law-abiding gun owners of America, will be the Rosa Parks and we will sit down on the front seat of the bus, case closed
. . . If you were attempting to write an offensive script to a new ‘Planet of the Apes’ movie, I couldn’t come up with a dumber and [more] unbelievable insanity than our government and our media is perpetrating on the American public,
~ Rocker Gun Nut Ted Nugent on World Net Daily


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Gun Groups Meet With Joe Biden

There’s a real, very tight window to do this. I committed to him I’d have these recommendations to (Obama) by Tuesday, and it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the discussion, but the public wants us to act.
. . . There is nothing that has pricked the consciousness of the American people, there is nothing that has gone to the heart of the matter more than the visual image people have of little 6-year-old kids riddled — not shot with a stray bullet — riddled, riddled with bullet holes in their classroom. And the public demands we speak to it.
~ Vice President Joe Biden at Meeting with Gun Groups on January 10, 2013



Breaking News: School Shooting in Taft, California During NRA Meeting:







Taft Union High School in Taft, Calif., normally has an armed guard on campus to help officials with problems that go "beyond the scope" of the administration.
But on Thursday morning, as a student showed up with a shotgun and fired two to four shots at a teacher and a classmate, the officer was nowhere to be found.
"He couldn't get there because he was snowed in," Sheriff Donny Youngblood of the Kern County Sheriff’s Department said in a press conference Thursday afternoon.
~ Sam Stein reporting for Huffington Post

The difference between this shooting and the shooting at Newtown and the shooting at the theater in Aurora and many of the other mass shootings is the difference between a shotgun and an assault weapon.
~ comment by Martha R. on Huff Post

~~~~~~~~~~~~

After the Meeting, the NRA Released this statement:
Fairfax, Va. – The National Rifle Association of America is made up of over 4 million moms and dads, daughters and sons, who are involved in the national conversation about how to prevent a tragedy like Newtown from ever happening again. We attended today's White House meeting to discuss how to keep our children safe and were prepared to have a meaningful conversation about school safety, mental health issues, the marketing of violence to our kids and the collapse of federal prosecutions of violent criminals.
We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment. While claiming that no policy proposals would be “prejudged,” this Task Force spent most of its time on proposed restrictions on lawful firearms owners - honest, taxpaying, hardworking Americans. It is unfortunate that this Administration continues to insist on pushing failed solutions to our nation's most pressing problems. We will not allow law-abiding gun owners to be blamed for the acts of criminals and madmen. Instead, we will now take our commitment and meaningful contributions to members of congress of both parties who are interested in having an honest conversation about what works - and what does not.

NRA vows to fight everything on Biden's gun agenda
. . . The NRA says it knows after the Newtown shooting, they're facing a gun control debate unlike any in its history. They may be more politically isolated than they were in 1994 when the assault weapons ban was first pushed tenaciously through Congress by then-Sen. Joe Biden.
~ CBS News



The Gun Lobby, the NRA, at least, in some ways is a victim of their own success. Their MO is to prevent anyone from even bringing up gun control legislation, to make it seem politically impossible to even broach the subject. And so they're not used to having to debate their side of the argument with powerful, motivated, organized proponents of the opposite view. In other words, they have been so successful in shutting down any possible debate over gun control in this country that they now seem legitimately surprised that there might be a debate in this country over gun control.
Their reaction today to their meeting with Vice President Joe Biden in Washington was that they said they were 'disappointed.' That was their word 'disappointed' that one of the subjects being discussed was reforming gun laws. Yeah, what did you think you were there to talk about?
~ Rachel Maddow on MSNBC

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy




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Monday, December 24, 2012

American Gun Nuts Shoot Out a Petition to Deport Piers Morgan of CNN

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White House Petition to Deport Piers Morgan





From Sky News
Thousands of Americans have signed a petition calling for British CNN host Piers Morgan to be deported over his criticism of the country's gun laws.
Just two days after it was posted on the White House website, it had already garnered more than 30,000 signatures by late on Sunday, surpassing the 25,000 required to get a response from the White House.
. . . a Texas journalist posted a petition on the White House website alleging Morgan "is engaged in a hostile attack against the US Constitution by targeting the Second Amendment".
"We demand that Mr Morgan be deported immediately for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens," the petition says.

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Piers Morgan on CNN, Transcript December 18, 2012
PIERS MORGAN: The AR-15, as we've now seen from the last three mass shootings in America, Aurora, the shopping mall in Oregon, and now at Sandy Hook school, is the preferred choice of weapon for disturbed young men who want to commit mass atrocity, can fire hundreds of bullets at rapid speed, if you have the right magazines.

The president of the United States has indicated he wants to ban assault weapons like this. What is your view?

LARRY PRATT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA: I think we need to ban gun control laws that keep people from being able to protect themselves. The problem is not going to go away if we ban this or that gun. We've tried that. That doesn't work. Doesn't even work in England. You have mass murders there all over Europe. There have been mass murderers.

MORGAN: You're talking complete and utter -- you are talking complete and utter nonsense.

PRATT: The solution is for people to be able to defend themselves at the point of the crime and not wait for 20 minutes for the police come after everybody is dead.

MORGAN: What you've just said, Mr. Pratt, was an absolute lie. The gun murder rate in countries like Britain or Germany or Australia, we've all suffered massacres many years ago, similar nature, have -- there are 35 people killed a year. Your country has 12,000.

PRATT: Your murder rate has -- your murder rate is lower than ours, that is true. Your violent --

MORGAN: Lower? It's 75 against 12,000 in Australia.

PRATT: Your violent crime rate --

MORGAN: They had a massacre. And they got rid of the assault weapons.

PRATT: Your violent crime rate is higher than ours as is the violent crime rate in Australia. America is not the Wild West that you are depicting. We only have the problems in our cities, and unhappily, in our schools where people like you have been able to get laws put on the books that keep people from being able to defend themselves.

I honestly don't understand why you would rather have people be victims of a crime than be able to defend themselves. It's incomprehensible.

MORGAN: You're an unbelievably stupid man, aren't you?

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Sunday, December 23, 2012

Blaming God, Society or Obama for Newtown Massacre - Not Gun Owners

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God is a Gentleman and Wouldn't Enter a Public School to Help Little Kids
Bryan Fisher of American Family Association via TruthOut
The question is going to come up, where was God?,” Fischer said. “I thought God cared about the little children. God protects the little children. Where was God when all this went down. Here's the bottom line, God is not going to go where he is not wanted.
“Now we have spent since 1962 -- we're 50 years into this now--we have spent 50 years telling God to get lost, telling God we do not want you in our schools, we don't want to pray to you in our schools, we do not want to pray to your before football games, we don't want to pray to you at graduations, we don't want anybody talking about you in a graduation speech...
“In 1962 we kicked prayer out of the schools. In 1963 we kicked God's word out of ours schools. In 1980 we kicked the Ten Commandments out of our schools. We've kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, 'Hey, I'll be glad to protect your children, but you've got to invite me back into your world first. I'm not going to go where I'm not wanted. I am a gentlemen.”

Because Obama Aborted So Many Babies
Victoria Jackson on Facebook, via Digital Spy
"Obama dramatically wiped a tear as he said, 'The majority of those who died today were children - beautiful little kids... They had their entire lives ahead of them - birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own...'

"YEAH OBAMA. SAME AS THE MILLION BABIES YOU HAD ABORTED THIS YEAR. ARE YOU CRYING FOR THEM?"

Jackson suggested to The Huffington Post earlier in the week that her remarks were justified.

"I don't regret anything I have said," she insisted. "I meant that the grieving I feel for the Newtown children and parents is the same grieving I feel for aborted fetuses."

She continued: "Obama is milking this for political reasons. We need no more gun laws but should rather enforce the ones we have."

The War on Manger Scenes, The Gays, Smartphones and Heterosexual Divorce
Radio Talk Show Host, Mike Huckabee
“It’s the fact that people sue a city so we aren’t confronted with a manger scene or Christmas carol … Churches and Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills.”
. . . We dismiss the notion of natural law and the notion that there are moral absolutes and seemed amazed when some kids make it their own morality to kill innocent children. We diminish and even hold in contempt the natural family of a father and mother creating and then responsibly raising the next generation and then express dismay that kids feel no real connection to their families or even the concept of a family.” He also railed about how “our kids would rather have ear buds dangling from their ears, fingers attaching to a smartphone, and face attached to a computer screen” and “we teach that God was not involved in our origins, that our very lives are biological happenstances.”


Moral Decay, and Everything Else (except Guns and Rock & Roll, of course)
Ted Nugent in Washington Times
...The heart of the matter is that our Humpty Dumpty culture has taken a great fall.

Like an iceberg, we only periodically see the psychotic manifestation, the tip of our shattered culture, but what lies just beneath the surface is a gigantic cultural cancer that is rotting America from within.

The ugly and dangerous truth is that we live in an embarrassing, politically correct culture that exalts and rejoices in the bizarre; aggressively promotes an “anything goes” value system; and vilifies, condemns and mocks traditional societal values and customs at every opportunity.

We’ve embraced a culture of contempt that attacks the very institutions that make for a healthy and strong society, and then we’re shocked when it spirals out of control. The only thing I’m shocked about is that anybody is shocked.

More laws and more restrictions won’t fix our culture. The problem we face is much deeper and more insidious. What ails us is a spiritual bankruptcy of cultural values that actually matter. More laws and restrictions can’t cure that.

. . . Meanwhile, somewhere in America, another bug-eyed young man is planning the next massacre.

It Was God's Loving Judgment:
Pastor Bill Eliff of Summit Church in Arkansas, via Right Wing Watch
We look at what has happened recently here in the school shooting and the so many things that have happened in the past few years. If we put all of those in biblical context and surround it with the Scripture we would come to different conclusions about what was happening. I was thinking the other day that God has instituted pain in our body, you know when you get a rusty nail that goes up to the sole of your foot that’s a real good thing that you feel pain because it causes you to make an adjustment. God’s judgment is like that. It’s a loving God saying to us when judgment comes to a nation it is God saying, wake up, you have walked away from me and I have loved you and I have so much desire to protect you but when you walk away you forfeit that.

There is No Meaning, except for King Herod and the Pennsylvania Indians, who were Just as Bad as the Media
Mark Steyn on National Review
I will save my own personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else’s, until after Christmas — except to note that the media’s stampede for meaning in massacre this last week overlooks the obvious: that the central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. Herod and the Pennsylvania Indians murdered children in pursuit of crude political goals; the infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow act of public suicide. Like most mass shootings, his was an exercise in hyper-narcissism — 19th-century technology in the service of a very contemporary sensibility.



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Friday, December 21, 2012

NRA Wants Armed Guards in All Schools

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National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre at a press conference on the Newtown massacre, held Friday Dec. 21, 2012
Full Text Here
. . . As brave, heroic and self-sacrificing as those teachers were in those classrooms, and as prompt, professional and well-trained as those police were when they responded, they were unable — through no fault of their own — to stop it.

. . . You know, five years ago, after the Virginia Tech tragedy, when I said we should put armed security in every school, the media called me crazy. But what if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he had been confronted by qualified, armed security?

Will you at least admit it’s possible that 26 innocent lives might have been spared? Is that so abhorrent to you that you would rather continue to risk the alternative?

Is the press and political class here in Washington so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and America’s gun owners that you’re willing to accept a world where real resistance to evil monsters is a lone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life to shield the children in her care? No one — regardless of personal political prejudice — has the right to impose that sacrifice.

. . . Our training programs are the most advanced in the world. That expertise must be brought to bear to protect our schools and our children now. We did it for the nation’s defense industries and military installations during World War II, and we’ll do it for our schools today.

The NRA is going to bring all of its knowledge, dedication and resources to develop a model National School Shield Emergency Response Program for every school that wants it. From armed security to building design and access control to information technology to student and teacher training, this multi-faceted program will be developed by the very best experts in their fields.

Former Congressman Asa Hutchinson will lead this effort as National Director of the National School Shield Program, with a budget provided by the NRA of whatever scope the task requires. His experience as a U.S. Attorney, Director of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security will give him the knowledge and expertise to hire the most knowledgeable and credentialed experts available anywhere, to get this program up and running from the first day forward.

If we truly cherish our kids more than our money or our celebrities, we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained — armed — good guy.

Under Asa’s leadership, our team of security experts will make this the best program in the world for protecting our children at school, and we will make that program available to every school in America free of charge.

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No one seriously believed the N.R.A. when it said it would contribute something “meaningful” to the discussion about gun violence. The organization’s very existence is predicated on the nation being torn in half over guns. Still, we were stunned by Mr. LaPierre’s mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.
~ New York Times Editorial

Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country. Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe.
~ Mayor Bloomberg of NYC

Did the NRA just help "seal" the message that we really need to talk about this more than we ever did before? Because if their meaningful contribution is that all of us have a target on our back and all of us need to carry a gun, then we have big problems.
~ MSNBC Thomas Roberts to Michael Steele

I don’t even know where to begin. As a supporter of the Second Amendment and a supporter of the NRA (even though I'm not a member of the NRA), I just found it very haunting and very disturbing that we are country talking about arming our teachers and principals in classrooms. What does that say about us? I do not believe that’s where the American people want to go. I do not believe that is the response that should be coming out of the tragedy in Newtown.
I just think that this was a missed opportunity to create another conversation at a higher level where the American people are right now. This incident cut to the bone. This is unlike anything that’s come before it because it did involve such precious young people and it really starkly called us to think about our society, those issues, not just gun control laws but mental health and a whole bunch of other things I think the NRA could have brought to the table, the idea that the message, the top line message out of this press conference is let’s put a gun in the hands of teachers in our classroom and I do not think that’s where rank-and-file NRA members expected this to go to.
~ Ex-RNC Chairman Michael Steele on MSNBC













Their solution to resolve the issue around guns is to put more guns in the equation? If anything it would be less safe for kids. You would be putting them in the midst of potentially more gunfire.
~ Hank Grishman, Superintendent of Jericho, NY, schools

This is not an Old West shootout. We're talking about an elementary school.
~ Helen Gym, Philadelphia Community Activist

CodePink-AntiNRA

From Alternet
. . . the National Rifle Association today broke its silence with an extraordinary press event in which Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre blamed everybody and everything but the gun culture it has fostered for the deaths of 20 children and seven adults last week at the hands of Adam Lanza.
. . . Twice during his speech, LaPierre was interrupted by protesters from CODE PINK, each of whom stood at the front of the room, before the velvet-draped barrier, some four feet high, that appeared designed to protect the NRA speakers from the press. The podium was set back some 10 or 15 feet from the barrier, evoking the sense of paranoia that drives America's gun culture.
The first sign, held up by a male protester, was a pink banner that read: "NRA KILLING OUR KIDS." After unfurling it, he was escorted out of the room by security. About 10 minutes later, CODE PINK founder Medea Benjamin stepped with her own banner, which I could not read from my vantage point. Receiving the same treatment as the previous protester, Benjamin shouted: "Ban assault weapons now!"






Everyone was to blame. The media and their corporate owners. The political class in Washington. Video games. Violent movies. The mentally ill. But at no point did he point his finger back at the NRA, the one institution that has made it difficult, if not impossible, to bring about common-sense firearms legislation in the country.
~ Jonathan Capehart on Washington Post







. . . Columbine High School had a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the school who engaged the shooters almost immediately in 1999 and wasn’t able to stop the massacre. At Virginia Tech, there was an entire armed police force on campus that was unable to stop the worst school shooting in US history.
As we chronicled last week, there were sixteen mass shootings in the US this year alone—they occurred at shopping malls, spas, movie theatres, and coffee shops. Does LaPierre want armed guards there, and everywhere?
~ George Zornick on The Nation











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Monday, December 17, 2012

Who Needs Assault Weapons? (Updated)

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On Dec. 14, the day an armed citizen killed 26 unarmed women and children at a Connecticut elementary school, the NRA's Twitter account went silent. It has not tweeted since. Meanwhile, its Facebook page has disappeared, along with those 1.7 million "likes." Navigating to www.facebook.com/nationalrifleassociation now redirects to the Facebook homepage.
~ Slate



I wish to God she had an M-4 in her office locked up so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids.
~ Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-TX, on Fox News

If school teachers are now to be armed, wouldn’t the teachers have to carry around their assault rifles at all time since they would not know when an attack would occur? Indeed, given the low likelihood of such an attack, should they also be equipped with ebola-medical kits, rabies treatment packs, floatation devices, and other equipment for more likely threats. The average soldier, after all, carries as much as 135 pounds depending on their unit. Should our teachers carry less to protect our children?
~ Law Professor Jonathan Turley

. . . teachers are not soldiers, nor do the vast majority of us want to be soldiers. Could we ever train teachers and other school personnel as well as we would need to? Realistically, can we create an armed line of defense between these peculiar Rambos who want to kill us for reasons none of us truly understand? I don’t think so.
However, the ethical and moral question is: do we want to give over every safe space we have — even our homes, churches and schools — to violence? Do we want to make every caretaker — every parent, minister, teacher, coach, nurse, Scout leader — into a potential soldier? I say no. And it’s time to tell the NRA, the multi-billion dollar arms business and the government that we refuse the escalation of violence.
Teachers: we are not soldiers.
~ Claire B. Potter, Professor of History at The New School for Public Engagement, New York,

Who needs an assault rifle to go hunting? You can't even use the prey that you kill with an assault rifle if you indeed do it. No one needs an assault rifle to go out and shoot a deer. No one needs an assault rifle that's capable of shooting 10, 20, 30 rounds off at the same time to shoot a duck or to shoot quail. It does not make sense.
~ Don Lemon on CNN


In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.
Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?
Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?
. . . We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.
~ President Obama speaking at the Newtown, CT, Prayer Vigil

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After mass shootings, it’s always said we must improve our mental-health system and the treatment of those who may be prone to violence. Of course we should. But this noble sentiment is too often part of a strategy to evade any action on guns themselves.
Not this time. Americans are not the only people in the world who confront mental-health problems. We are the only country that regularly experiences horrors of this sort. The difference, as the writer Garry Wills has said, is that the United States treats the gun as a secular god, immune to rational analysis and human intervention.
We must depose the false deity. We must act now to curb gun violence, or we never will.
~ E.J. Dionne on National Memo

It's time to move beyond rhetoric. We need to sit down and have a common-sense discussion and move in a reasonable way.
. . . Everything has to be on the table.
~ Senator Joe Manchin D-WV, and member of the NRA

We cannot simply accept this as a routine product of modern American life. If now is not the time to have a serious discussion about gun control and the epidemic of gun violence plaguing our society, I don’t know when is. How many more Columbines and Newtowns must we live through? I am challenging President Obama, the Congress, and the American public to act on our outrage and, finally, do something about this.
~ Congressman Gerald Nadler, D-NY

Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe, via Blue Virginia
You know me. I am a conservative Republican who received the NRA's highest rating over four terms in Congress...There's no easy ideological way forward...I come to you this morning with a heavy heart and no easy answers. Still, I've spent the past few days grasping for solutions and struggling for answers, while daring to question my own long-held belief on these subjects. I've always taken the libertarian's approach to Hollywood's 1st amendment rights and gun collector's 2nd amendment rights, and I stood by those libertarian beliefs after Columbine, after Aurora, and after Arizona..."
I knew the ending of this story because we've all seen it too often. I knew that day that the ideologies of my past career were no longer relevant to the future that I want, that I demand for my children. Friday changed everything, it must change everything, we all must begin anew and demand that Washington's old way of doing business is no longer acceptable.
...our Bill of Rights does not guarantee gun manufacturers the absolute right to sell military-styled, high-caliber, semiautomatic, combat assault rifles with high-capacity magazines to whoever the hell they want. It is time for Congress to put children before deadly dogmas...
We've already given up too much ground across America. We've already ceded too many schoolyards, too many shopping malls, too many movie theaters, and too many college campuses. We must give no more ground.
For the sake of my four children, and yours, I choose life and I choose change. It's time to turn over the tables inside the temple, and for the sake of our children, we must do what's right. And for the sake of this great nation that we love, let's pray to god that we do.


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Sunday, December 16, 2012

The Newtown Massacre

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Previous Post:
Snark Amendment: Now is the Time for Gun Control
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We are living in an era of slaughter. I admit to having thrown up my own hands against the NRA, arguing that they have too much power and it wasn't worth the risk to take them on. I'm done with that. We're living in a f***ing abbatoir, now drenched in the blood of little children. We have to do something.
~ Michael Tomasky on Daily Beast

The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.
All of that is a truth, plain and simple, and recognized throughout the world. At some point, this truth may become so bloody obvious that we will know it, too. Meanwhile, congratulate yourself on living in the child-gun-massacre capital of the known universe.
~ Adam Gopnik on The New Yorker

America has a gun problem . It's time for action. I, and my siblings,(born in the mid-sixties) grew up without bicycle helmets, and graduated sizes of car seats. Our parents used mercury thermometers, to check for fever, and we played on asphalt playgrounds. Everyone I know survived. Yet, there were accidents; So our government legislated safety guidelines. Yes, it makes sense. Cribs that collapse, cars with faulty breaks, contaminated food get recalled. Why? Because they're dangerous. However, the most dangerous, man-made instrument, whose sole purpose is to destroy; is ever evasive of thoughtful, logical legislation. There is an unbelievable disconnect here. How many more innocent Americans, need to die unnecessarily, by gunfire, before something is done? The Bradys' worked very hard to make intelligent change. We need to reinstate the assault weapon ban, close the gun show loop-holes, and hold gun manufacturers accountable. If this government can legislate benign objects; Why can't it legislate deadly weapons?
~ comment by SeaSprite23 on The New Yorker


Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?
The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns.
. . . We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don’t have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys. What do we make of the contrast between heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and craven, feckless politicians who won’t stand up to the N.R.A.?
As one of my Facebook followers wrote after I posted about the shooting, “It is more difficult to adopt a pet than it is to buy a gun.”
~ Nicholas D. Kristoff






We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?
~ Mike Huckabee on Fox News

Walk-Back:
Yesterday, I was on Neil Cavuto. He asked me, you know, where was God? I said, you know, we've systematically removed him from our culture, from our schools. Well, I've been barraged by people who have said that I said, well, if we just have prayer in schools, this wouldn't happen. That's not my point.
~ Mike Huckabee Walking Back his Previous Statement on Fox and Friends Saturday







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It’s a fact that there is only one policy that has been shown to reduce the incidence of multiple shootings. There’s always going to be crazy people in a country of 300 million people. Only one policy has reduced these mass shootings and the number of casualties, and that is concealed carry permits. If you want to reduce the number of dead, and the number of times this is going to happen in an area, you sort of sense this, because although it’s been a long time since a school shooting, post offices, places that are gun free zones.
~ Ann Coulter on Sean Hannity








The right wing fairy tale that more concealed carry permits will reduce mass shootings is based on several flawed assumptions. The right assumed that the person who is carrying is at the ready. They assume that the individual with the gun won’t be targeted first. They also assume that the rampage shooter will have no element of surprise. They assume that those who find themselves in a mass shooting situation will be in a position to retaliate.
The idea that adding more guns to a school shooting would somehow reduce the violence defies common sense, but it is also symptomatic of where the discussion has quickly gone after the Newtown shooting.
~ Jason Easley on PoliticusUSA

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CNN Piers Morgan Transcript Dec. 14, 2012

JOHN R. LOTT, JR, AUTHOR, "MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME": I'm telling you, people can go and look up the statistics themselves. What you find is that for decades the murder rate was falling in Australia. It basically stopped falling. If you just compare the average over two decades where it's falling to what it was afterwards, it makes it look like the average before is higher than average afterwards. But if you look on a year by year basis, there wasn't that fall.

MORGAN: Why does Adam Lanza's mother, who sadly as killed by him today -- why did she need to have these three weapons?

LOTT: Can I follow-through on the Australia thing?

MORGAN: No, I want you to answer this. Why does she need to have these three weapons, legally purchased, including this semiautomatic Bushmaster. Why would a woman teacher at a kindergarten need these weapons in her home? Allowing, therefore, a clearly deranged son to take them and commit this atrocity?

LOTT: Whatever that gun looks like, it's a semiautomatic rifle. Any hunting rifle, just about, is a semiautomatic rifle. Just because it looks different on the outside doesn't mean it functions differently.

MORGAN: He fired over 100 rounds in several minutes with this apparently harmless rifle.

LOTT: Nobody said guns were harmless. Guns make it easy.

MORGAN: You just tried to make out, it's just an average old gun. He fired over 100 rounds and he killed 20 children. Twenty Children between five and 10. At what point do you gun lobby guys say, we get it? It's time for change?

LOTT: Right, it is time.

MORGAN: Time to do what?

LOTT: To get rid of some of these gun laws that cause --

MORGAN: To get rid of the gun laws?

LOTT: Look at what has happened, all these attacks this year have occurred where guns are banned. Look at the Aurora movie theater shooting.

MORGAN: What the hell has that got to do with it? Seriously? What has that got to do with it?

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Saturday, December 15, 2012

Now is the Time for Gun Control

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Immediate response from National Rifle Association: 
NO COMMENT


STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT ON SCHOOL SHOOTING IN NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
3:15 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: This afternoon, I spoke with Governor Malloy and FBI Director Mueller. I offered Governor Malloy my condolences on behalf of the nation, and made it clear he will have every single resource that he needs to investigate this heinous crime, care for the victims, counsel their families.

We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. And each time I learn the news I react not as a President, but as anybody else would — as a parent. And that was especially true today. I know there’s not a parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.

The majority of those who died today were children — beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. They had their entire lives ahead of them — birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own. Among the fallen were also teachers — men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children fulfill their dreams.

So our hearts are broken today — for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost. Our hearts are broken for the parents of the survivors as well, for as blessed as they are to have their children home tonight, they know that their children’s innocence has been torn away from them too early, and there are no words that will ease their pain.

As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago — these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.

 This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter and we’ll tell them that we love them, and we’ll remind each other how deeply we love one another. But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight. And they need all of us right now. In the hard days to come, that community needs us to be at our best as Americans. And I will do everything in my power as President to help.

Because while nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one, all of us can extend a hand to those in need — to remind them that we are there for them, that we are praying for them, that the love they felt for those they lost endures not just in their memories but also in ours.

May God bless the memory of the victims and, in the words of Scripture, heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds.

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