Comments

  1. chigau (違う) says

    Because of the license plate, I googled “wheelchair gun holster”.
    Guess what?

  2. sonofrojblake says

    One tiny good thing came out of Dallas – that whole “good guys with guns” argument was violently debunked. Dozens, maybe hundreds of “good guys” with guns stayed safely behind cover while a good robot with a bomb dealt with the bad guy.
    “Only good robots with bombs stop bad guys with guns” isn’t quite as catchy, though, is it? Also – where can I buy my bomb robot, and will I need to have a background check?

  3. says

    chigau@#1:
    Well, I guess we don’t want to be ableist.

    I don’t know if the “P D” text around the wheelchair symbol indicates a police officer (Police Department)

  4. says

    sonofrojblake@#2:
    Ow, don’t go there. Next thing you know there will be constitutional interpretations that the founding fathers foresaw metallic militia and that was why the 2ndA was framed the way it was.

  5. Lofty says

    PS – I still don’t understand why they didn’t just isolate and wait the attacker out.

    Gotta show you can use those toys you were given or they might get taken away again.

  6. says

    Holms:

    Cops typically don’t take cop killers alive.

    That’s not true. It’s dependent on the situation, of course, but plenty of cop killers have been taken alive. That’s why there’s a good number of them sitting in prison right now. There was zero reason for the cops to blow up Micah Johnson. He couldn’t go anywhere, and he couldn’t hurt anyone from his position. All they had to do was wait.

  7. Kevin Terrell says

    @2
    “…that whole “good guys with guns” argument was violently debunked. Dozens, maybe hundreds of “good guys” with guns stayed safely behind cover while a good robot with a bomb dealt with the bad guys.”

    Remember , the good guys WITHOUT guns RAN AWAY!

    The genie of guns is out of the bottle and will never be returned.

  8. Broken Things says

    “Maybe try not giving the bad guys guns in the first place.”

    There is no longer any point, at least in the US, of trying to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys. There are now so many guns in the US that distribution can no longer be controlled. The arms industry and their mouthpiece, the NRA, don’t give a big rat’s ass whether bad guys get guns or not. In fact, the more (presumed bad) guys with guns, the more that the arms industry can use fear to sell more guns to the (presumed good) guys. As PZ pointed out, the NRA and the arms industry are at the root of this problem. Every violent crime, every police shooting, every apocryphal tale of a good guy stopping a bad guy simply fuels their sales and profit. Their legislative clout prevents them from being examined for information to create real solutions.

    Total ban. It’s unlikely, but it is the only solution.

  9. Bruce says

    BUT the horrible Dallas shooter WAS a “good guy with a gun”, right up to the minute before he started killing. What are the criteria? He was a U.S. military veteran with no known offenses. The NRA would say that keeping the Dallas shooter “well-armed” is what America is all about! If he is suddenly somehow NOT a good guy, then maybe this whole good guys idea is wrong somehow? That’s the big question. Should people like the Dallas shooter be able to buy lots of the guns and bullets that he did? I don’t hear the NRA changing their mind. So they still support arming cop-killers, because the corporations that make money from gun sales are going to make more money from more sales from more fear about guns.
    A pure capitalist would say that it is the duty of all publicly traded gun makers to use all legal means to promote fear that sells their product, even when it makes innocent police more likely to be murdered.
    Corporations are sociopathic people, my friends, as Romney said without the important adjective.

  10. Kevin Terrell says

    A total ban legislatively, which actually results in a total ban socially, is an impossibility.
    Ever heard of Prohibition or the War on Drugs?

    I don’t fear the person who tells me I have a right to own a gun to defend myself.

    I fear the person who tells me I don’t.
    They’re usually fellow travellers with Mao,Pol Pot,Lenin and other luminaries of the Left.
    Spooky people.

  11. says

    Kevin Terrell@#15:
    Ever heard of Prohibition or the War on Drugs?

    Nope! Never heard of them! What are they?

    That reminds me, when I do my series of posting on dialectical brick-breaking, I’ve got to discuss the “vapid pseudo-rhetorical question”

  12. Kevin Terrell says

    Hey Marcus.
    Why do you assume the question is rhetorical?
    If anyone actually believes a legislative ban = social ban,then there is a possibility they’ve never read of or heard of either Prohibition or WOD.
    Of course to a person unable to discern analogies, the question might seem rhetorical.

  13. Broken Things says

    They’re usually fellow travellers with Mao,Pol Pot,Lenin and other luminaries of the Left.
    Spooky people.

    No, just ordinary people hoping not to get shot by good people such as yourself when you are having a bad day. Also, Mao (“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” ) has more in common with you than with me.

    Ever heard of Prohibition or the War on Drugs?

    Gun addiction? Firing guns makes you feel good and high? Owning guns does?

    I suppose your point is that drugs, alcohol and guns can all be classed as commodities. The difference is you can kill yourself with the first two, you can kill everybody else with the latter. At what point will you decide that an object resides in a special category that requires it not be allowed to be treated as a commodity? Plastic explosives? Biological weapons? Tactical nukes? Where’s the line Kevin? How bad does something have to get before you think that society should look for a legal remedy?