Father Of Parkland Survivor Accuses CNN Of Pushing Gun Control Narrative

[ChrisL]

We the people are digging in our heels and saying NO to you spoiled little brats.

 

[JoeB131]

Yeah, I'll get the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had all kinds of guns.

They thought they could take on the Wehrmacht, so they must have thought they had enough.

Probably more guns than Billy-Bob the Redneck has when he wants to fights the government over that still he has in the back woods.

 

[JoeB131]

We the people are digging in our heels and saying NO to you spoiled little brats.

Actually, if we put it to a vote, we'd win.

More Voters Than Ever Support Stricter Gun Laws, Poll Finds

Those in favor of stricter gun legislation outnumber those opposed by a measure of more than two-to-one, according to the poll. Sixty-six percent of respondents said they would support more stringent laws, while just 31% said they would not. That’s the highest favorable percentage ever recorded by a Quinnipiac University National Poll, and a considerable increase from the 47% to 50% split measured in late 2015, according to an announcement from the school released Tuesday.

Just stop trying to demonize American citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Crazy school shooters have nothing to do with us. That is a failure of the person's family, friends, and the mental health system.

No, it's because you gun nuts have made it easy for people like him to get guns that were designed for the military.

They are always going to exist. If we don't have them, then only criminals and cops will have them, one being just as bad as the other according to liberal rhetoric.

You are conflating two problems, Crazy Cat Lady.

yes, our cops are much too trigger happy. American cops shoot 1200 Americans a year compared to British Cops who shoot maybe two people per year.

Of course, our cops wouldn't be so trigger happy if they weren't terrified every speeder they pulled over might be packing.

 

[ChrisL]

We the people are digging in our heels and saying NO to you spoiled little brats.

Actually, if we put it to a vote, we'd win.

More Voters Than Ever Support Stricter Gun Laws, Poll Finds

Those in favor of stricter gun legislation outnumber those opposed by a measure of more than two-to-one, according to the poll. Sixty-six percent of respondents said they would support more stringent laws, while just 31% said they would not. That’s the highest favorable percentage ever recorded by a Quinnipiac University National Poll, and a considerable increase from the 47% to 50% split measured in late 2015, according to an announcement from the school released Tuesday.

Just stop trying to demonize American citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Crazy school shooters have nothing to do with us. That is a failure of the person's family, friends, and the mental health system.

No, it's because you gun nuts have made it easy for people like him to get guns that were designed for the military.

They are always going to exist. If we don't have them, then only criminals and cops will have them, one being just as bad as the other according to liberal rhetoric.

You are conflating two problems, Crazy Cat Lady.

yes, our cops are much too trigger happy. American cops shoot 1200 Americans a year compared to British Cops who shoot maybe two people per year.

Of course, our cops wouldn't be so trigger happy if they weren't terrified every speeder they pulled over might be packing.

I'm sorry that you are so stupid and have no common sense. Really I am. You don't even realize that you will be eventually making these kinds of problems even worse. Just like what happened with drugs. Not that you have ever won any battles, but this is one you will never win. Seriously though, I find it very hard to believe that you people can be this stupid to actually believe that gun laws disarm criminals. It is a ridiculous concept and you are a thoroughly brainwashed sheeple.

Gun Restrictions Have Always Bred Defiance, Black Markets

There are downsides to owning guns illegally. The big one, from my perspective, was that I couldn’t go shooting at a range. The folks at the Westside Rifle and Pistol Range probably had as dim a view of permits and registration as I do, but they weren’t about to risk their own freedom just to let me put a few holes in paper targets.

So I applied for a permit to purchase a .45-caliber Model 1911 and keep it at home.

The sales clerk at the gun shop was helpful—he should have been. I paid a premium to have my paperwork submitted to the proper city paper-pushers by experts retained by the store. Although the term was never used, I assumed that meant the store made use of New York City’s peculiar breed of middlemen known as “expediters” to get the permit processed. Eternally controversial, expediters are known for their detailed knowledge of the city’s byzantine regulatory procedures, their working relationships with bureaucrats, and their willingness to grease palms to make sure clients are given favorable consideration.

Even so, I waited. And I waited. And I finally blew my stack.

As the saying goes, I knew a guy who knew a guy. It took an email, a phone call, and a friendly meeting, and for less than 300 bucks, I was the proud owner of a semi-automatic variant of an AK-47—the famed assault rifle of the old Soviet bloc and of guerrilla fighters everywhere. It was legal in much of the United States, but strictly verboten in New York City.

And it cost me about a third of the ultimate price of that legal pistol.

As it turned out, the illicit rifle was not only cheaper and easier to obtain than the legal pistol, but the seller was much more pleasant to deal with than the cops administering the official process. The police officers at New York City’s One Police Plaza, once I actually got into the place, were flat-out rude. They weren’t abusive as much as surly in a special bureaucratic way, backed up by the implied threat that they could punish back-talk with a simple nudge of your papers into the trash can. I bit my tongue, but everybody has their own limit. A “customer” at an adjoining desk in the cramped warren stood up, announced loudly that rather than put up with this treatment he’d buy his gun on the street, then stalked from the room.

Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. I’ll never know if that guy went to the black market. But plenty of New Yorkers have chosen to own guns outside the official system. In a city that, as I write, has roughly 37,000 licensed handgun owners and about 21,000 rifle and shotgun licenses, the running guesstimate of illegal firearms stands at two million, give or take a bit. That’s the number the U.S. Department of Justice has used in its official publications in recent years.

Basically, far more guns are owned illegally within the boundaries of New York City than are held legally. Government officials wanted tight restrictions on firearms, and they got them—but that doesn’t seem to have deterred many people from owning the things.

New York City officials blame states with looser laws for the flow of illicit guns. Mayor Bloomberg has famously waged a campaign of “straw-man” purchases against gun shops in states such as South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia to which firearms found in New York City have been traced. The mayor’s proxies purchased guns in their own names, illegally intended for transfer to other people. Lawsuits followed against the stores where the purchases were permitted. That raises interesting questions about why mere citizens who make such purchases get sent to prison, while government agents acting far outside their jurisdiction get a free pass.

But if guns are currently coming from legal dealers in more permissive jurisdictions, there’s nothing to say that’s the only possible source, or that imposing tighter laws elsewhere will cut off the flow. After all, cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and other drugs find their way to New York City in generous quantities in the absence of any legal source within the United States—or outside it, for that matter.

In fact, New York City’s situation with guns is mirrored in Europe, where countries with tight restrictions also find themselves awash in illegal firearms without any clear parallels for the relatively liberal laws of Virginia or South Carolina to blame. According to the Small Arms Survey (PDF) at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland:

Contrary to widely-accepted national myths, public gun ownership is commonplace in most European states. It may appear to some outside observers—especially Americans—that Europeans have blindly surrendered their gun rights (Heston, 2002). The reality is that the citizens of most European countries are better armed than they realize. ...

Regulations tightly control gun ownership in only a few European countries like the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom. In much of the rest of the continent, public officials readily admit that unlicensed owners and unregistered guns greatly outnumber legal ones. ...

"Greatly outnumber?” Just how greatly?

Well, says the Small Arms Survey, a research outfit established by the Swiss government, the United Kingdom, with just shy of 1.8 million legal firearms, has about four million illegal guns. Belgium, with about 458,000 legal firearms, has roughly two million illegal guns. In Germany, the number is 7.2 million legal guns and between 17 and 20 million off-the-books examples of things that go “bang” (a figure with which the German Police Union very publicly agrees). France, says the Survey, has 15-17 million unlawful firearms in a nation where 2.8 million weapons are held in compliance with the law.

Small Arms Survey

Even those numbers may understate the case. While the 2003 Small Arms Survey report put the number of legal guns in Greece at 805,000 and illegal guns at 350,000, just two years later, the Greek government itself nudged those figures up, just a tad, to one million legal guns and 1.5 million illegal ones.

So New Yorkers aren’t alone in being armed to the teeth outside the law.

It’s not that governments haven’t tried to grab those guns. One government after another has implemented schemes for registration, licensing, and even confiscation. But those programs have met with … less than universal respect.

In a white paper on the results of gun control efforts around the world, Gun Control and the Reduction of the Number of Arms, Franz Csaszar, a professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, Austria, wrote, “non-compliance with harsher gun laws is a common event.”

Dr. Csaszar estimates compliance with Australia’s 1996 ban on self-loading rifles and pump-action shotguns at 20 percent.

And even that underwhelming estimate gives the authorities the benefit of the doubt. Three years after Australia’s controversial ban was implemented, when 643,000 weapons had been surrendered, Inspector John McCoomb, the head of the state of Queensland’s Weapons Licensing Branch, told The Sunday Mail, "About 800,000 (semi-automatic and automatic) SKK and SKS weapons came in from China back in the 1980s as part of a trade deal between the Australian and Chinese governments. And it was estimated that there were 1.2 million semi-automatic Ruger 10/22s in the country. That's about 2 million firearms of just two types in the country."

Do the math. Two million illegal firearms of just two types, and only 643,000 guns of all types were surrendered …

The Australian Shooters Journal did its own math in a 1997 article on the “gun buyback.” Researchers for the publication pointed out that the Australian government’s own low-ball, pre-ban estimate of the number of prohibited weapons in the country yielded a compliance rate of 19 percent.

But maybe success is in the eye of the beholder. After the expected mountains of surrendered weapons failed to manifest themselves, then-Australian Attorney General Darryl Williams’s office revised its estimate of total firearms in the country to a number lower than its pre-ban estimate of prohibited firearms, and declared victory.

Inspector McCoomb, like the Australian Shooters Journal, concluded the ban “has failed.”

The situation in other countries was much the same. Canada pulled a similar numerical sleight of hand when the government responded to widespread resistance to a new firearms registration law by dropping its estimate of the number of gun owners from 3.3 million in 1998 to 2.4 million in 2001. Gary Mauser, a firearms policy expert affiliated with the Fraser Institute, an independent research organization with offices in Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, countered with his own estimate that the actual number of gun owners stood at 4.5 million through those years. They weren’t disappearing from the Great White North; they just weren’t complying with the registration law.

Again and again, governments have encountered massive resistance to their efforts to identify gun owners and track gun ownership.

Csaszar points out that, after Austria prohibited pump-action shotguns in 1995, only 10,557 of the estimated 60,000 such guns in private hands were surrendered or registered.

And when Germany imposed gun registration in 1972, he says, owners complied by filing the appropriate paperwork on 3.2 million firearms. This was a bit awkward, since estimates of civilian stocks were in the 17-20 million range.

The low level of compliance with registration laws gives a good idea of where many of the world’s illegal guns come from, but it isn’t the whole story. If people are keeping firearms in defiance of their governments’ wishes, they obviously want to own guns no matter what the powers-that-be intend. And as has proven true in so many cases, demand usually provides its own supply.

Small Arms Survey reports that, for Europe, illegal guns tend to flow from East to West. In need of the hard cash that black market dealings can provide, and suspicious of state power after decades of heavy-handed rule, Eastern Europe has become a major source for manufacturing and distributing illegal weapons—and of overall defiance of gun restrictions.

In central and eastern Europe, quiet resistance to over 40 years of socialist rule created a pervasive culture of non-cooperation with public authorities. When communism collapsed, leaving power to be inherited by weak and disorganized democratic regimes, innumerable opportunities arose for people to acquire and hide personal guns. It is no wonder that in much of the region registered guns appear to be the exception.

If skepticism toward the wisdom of disarming at the request of the current pack of politicians drives the supply side of the equation in the East, it may also explain demand in the West. After all, within living memory, most of Europe has been under the control of one nasty regime or another, whether home-grown or imposed from outside. Communist governments were the last to fall, but as recently as the early 1970s, Greece, Portugal and Spain suffered under dictatorships.



Whether or not that's the explanation for mass resistance to gun laws in Europe, there’s no doubt that the black market is thriving. Drawing from Hungarian media reports, World Press Review reported in July 2001 that the Odessa mafia had shipped 13,000 tons of guns to Croatia and Bosnia. That impressive shipment included 30,000 Kalashnikovs, 400 remote-controlled ground missiles, 50 launching stands, and 10,000 antitank missiles.

A black market that can supply embargoed armies with missiles has no difficulty feeding the civilian appetite for pistols and rifles.

Underground suppliers aren’t always so large-scale, of course. The BBC reported in 2007 on the conviction of two British soldiers in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment for smuggling guns out of Iraq for sale in Europe. Their operation was apparently sufficiently sophisticated that the smugglers prepared a catalog that included photos and descriptions of available wares.

In an example of the convergence of underground markets, one of the soldiers admitted during his court martial to accepting cocaine as payment for the guns. He then sold the drugs for additional profit.

Such connections can be found elsewhere in the world, too. Flush with money made satisfying Americans’ appetite for intoxicants out of favor with U.S. government officials, Mexico’s drug gangs have eagerly armed themselves, the better to squabble with one another—and to battle the police and even the army. While popular mythology blames the flow of guns to Mexico on purchases in America’s legal weapons markets (Mexico has tight restrictions on private firearms ownership, including outright bans on guns in calibers used by the military), the gangs have increasingly fielded grenades, rockets and machine guns—firepower unavailable in the average Texas gun shop.

 

[JoeB131]

I'm sorry that you are so stupid and have no common sense. Really I am. You don't even realize that you will be eventually making these kinds of problems even worse. Just like what happened with drugs. Not that you have ever won any battles, but this is one you will never win. Seriously though, I find it very hard to believe that you people can be this stupid to actually believe that gun laws disarm criminals. It is a ridiculous concept and you are a thoroughly brainwashed sheeple.

It's not the "criminals" I worry about. Of course, this would depend on how you define "Criminal". I define a criminal as someone who has chosen crime as a lifestyle.

I don't define him as the guy who responded to being fired by coming in and shooting his boss and six of his co-workers. He was just someone who snapped and had access to weapons he didn't have.

But the fact is, of the 32,000 gun deaths, most of them aren't "Criminals", they are regular people who just went nuts one day, inflicting death on themselves or others.

Obviously, NO Law is going to prevent crime, but they can deter crime by detering behavior and making it less easy to do crime.

Again- THE REST OF THE WORLD HAS FIGURED THIS OUT.

One more time, because you are a little slow, Crazy Cat Lady.

 

[ChrisL]

I'm sorry that you are so stupid and have no common sense. Really I am. You don't even realize that you will be eventually making these kinds of problems even worse. Just like what happened with drugs. Not that you have ever won any battles, but this is one you will never win. Seriously though, I find it very hard to believe that you people can be this stupid to actually believe that gun laws disarm criminals. It is a ridiculous concept and you are a thoroughly brainwashed sheeple.

It's not the "criminals" I worry about. Of course, this would depend on how you define "Criminal". I define a criminal as someone who has chosen crime as a lifestyle.

I don't define him as the guy who responded to being fired by coming in and shooting his boss and six of his co-workers. He was just someone who snapped and had access to weapons he didn't have.

But the fact is, of the 32,000 gun deaths, most of them aren't "Criminals", they are regular people who just went nuts one day, inflicting death on themselves or others.

Obviously, NO Law is going to prevent crime, but they can deter crime by detering behavior and making it less easy to do crime.

Again- THE REST OF THE WORLD HAS FIGURED THIS OUT.

One more time, because you are a little slow, Crazy Cat Lady.

I don't care about what you define anything as. The facts that I posted stand. My post proves all of your claims WRONG, and so do the statistics.

 

[ChrisL]

I'm sorry that you are so stupid and have no common sense. Really I am. You don't even realize that you will be eventually making these kinds of problems even worse. Just like what happened with drugs. Not that you have ever won any battles, but this is one you will never win. Seriously though, I find it very hard to believe that you people can be this stupid to actually believe that gun laws disarm criminals. It is a ridiculous concept and you are a thoroughly brainwashed sheeple.

It's not the "criminals" I worry about. Of course, this would depend on how you define "Criminal". I define a criminal as someone who has chosen crime as a lifestyle.

I don't define him as the guy who responded to being fired by coming in and shooting his boss and six of his co-workers. He was just someone who snapped and had access to weapons he didn't have.

But the fact is, of the 32,000 gun deaths, most of them aren't "Criminals", they are regular people who just went nuts one day, inflicting death on themselves or others.

Obviously, NO Law is going to prevent crime, but they can deter crime by detering behavior and making it less easy to do crime.

Again- THE REST OF THE WORLD HAS FIGURED THIS OUT.

One more time, because you are a little slow, Crazy Cat Lady.

To reiterate . . .

A black market that can supply embargoed armies with missiles has no difficulty feeding the civilian appetite for pistols and rifles.

 

[Camp]

Just stop trying to demonize American citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Crazy school shooters have nothing to do with us. That is a failure of the person's family, friends, and the mental health system. If there were no guns, this kid would have probably put a bomb together or used a different weapon. Guns are here. They are not going anywhere. They are always going to exist. If we don't have them, then only criminals and cops will have them, one being just as bad as the other according to liberal rhetoric.

You will NOT be having it both ways, losers.

You are one of the brainwashed citizens who has been programmed into believing the left or liberals or Democrats are trying to confiscate all guns from everyone. It is the ploy promoted by the NRA for gun manufacturers and the gun sales industry. particularly the manufacturers and salespersons of high caliber semi-automatic rifles commonly referred to as assault rifles.
Reasonable and moderate rules and regulations on who is permitted to own these kinds of weapons is not confiscation.
.

 

[ChrisL]

How about this little stat? Hmm. Quite interesting, wouldn't you say?

Even those numbers may understate the case. While the 2003 Small Arms Survey report put the number of legal guns in Greece at 805,000 and illegal guns at 350,000, just two years later, the Greek government itself nudged those figures up, just a tad, to one million legal guns and 1.5 million illegal ones.

 

[JoeB131]

I

To reiterate . . .

A black market that can supply embargoed armies with missiles has no difficulty feeding the civilian appetite for pistols and rifles.

I'm sure it can. And if someone wants to pay $40,000 to have an illegal AK, there's probably not much we can do about that.

Well,actually, we can. We can offer rewards for his neighbors to rat him out and then send the ATFE to go have a discussion with him.

The rest of the world has figured this out. They don't have this problem. We do.

 

[ChrisL]

I

To reiterate . . .

A black market that can supply embargoed armies with missiles has no difficulty feeding the civilian appetite for pistols and rifles.

I'm sure it can. And if someone wants to pay $40,000 to have an illegal AK, there's probably not much we can do about that.

Well,actually, we can. We can offer rewards for his neighbors to rat him out and then send the ATFE to go have a discussion with him.

The rest of the world has figured this out. They don't have this problem. We do.

Wrong yet AGAIN.

As the saying goes, I knew a guy who knew a guy. It took an email, a phone call, and a friendly meeting, and for less than 300 bucks, I was the proud owner of a semi-automatic variant of an AK-47—the famed assault rifle of the old Soviet bloc and of guerrilla fighters everywhere. It was legal in much of the United States, but strictly verboten in New York City.

And it cost me about a third of the ultimate price of that legal pistol.

As it turned out, the illicit rifle was not only cheaper and easier to obtain than the legal pistol, but the seller was much more pleasant to deal with than the cops administering the official process.

 

[JoeB131]

Wrong yet AGAIN.

Honey, I didn't read your stupid article.

You ban the sales of ALL AK-47s, not j ust AK's to one set of people in one state.

and you go after the people who still try to get them with a vengence.

How do you think the IRS gets us all to fill out our 1040's every year? They make the consequences for not doing so terrifying.

Same deal here. You go after the owners, you go after the sellers.

 

[ChrisL]

Me thinks the "sky is falling" tactic is backfiring BIGLY.

 

[ChrisL]

Wrong yet AGAIN.

Honey, I didn't read your stupid article.

You ban the sales of ALL AK-47s, not j ust AK's to one set of people in one state.

and you go after the people who still try to get them with a vengence.

How do you think the IRS gets us all to fill out our 1040's every year? They make the consequences for not doing so terrifying.

Same deal here. You go after the owners, you go after the sellers.

No wonder why you are so stupid. Maybe you should educate yourself then.

 

[ChrisL]

Anyways liberals, YOU have created an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion of the law and the authorities. YOU did that.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Just stop trying to demonize American citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Crazy school shooters have nothing to do with us. That is a failure of the person's family, friends, and the mental health system. If there were no guns, this kid would have probably put a bomb together or used a different weapon. Guns are here. They are not going anywhere. They are always going to exist. If we don't have them, then only criminals and cops will have them, one being just as bad as the other according to liberal rhetoric.

You will NOT be having it both ways, losers.

You are one of the brainwashed citizens who has been programmed into believing the left or liberals or Democrats are trying to confiscate all guns from everyone. It is the ploy promoted by the NRA for gun manufacturers and the gun sales industry. particularly the manufacturers and salespersons of high caliber semi-automatic rifles commonly referred to as assault rifles.
Reasonable and moderate rules and regulations on who is permitted to own these kinds of weapons is not confiscation.
.

That doesn't require "programming", Chuckles. That pretty much just requires eyes and ears and an attention span of more than five minutes.

 

[JoeB131]

No wonder why you are so stupid. Maybe you should educate yourself then.

I don't read stupid gun nut articles. I've really got a view that the NRA's record is so loud I can't hear a word they are saying.

Anyways liberals, YOU have created an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion of the law and the authorities. YOU did that.

We're not the ones arguing that crazy people should have guns to fight the government. That's you guys. We are just saying, "Hey, maybe you should fire Jason Van Dyke when he dislocates someone's arm before he shoots someone".

Oh, wait. He did shoot someone. 16 times. When he was lying on the ground.

 

[ChrisL]

No wonder why you are so stupid. Maybe you should educate yourself then.

I don't read stupid gun nut articles. I've really got a view that the NRA's record is so loud I can't hear a word they are saying.

Anyways liberals, YOU have created an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion of the law and the authorities. YOU did that.

We're not the ones arguing that crazy people should have guns to fight the government. That's you guys. We are just saying, "Hey, maybe you should fire Jason Van Dyke when he dislocates someone's arm before he shoots someone".

Oh, wait. He did shoot someone. 16 times. When he was lying on the ground.

You created an atmosphere of distrust towards the police and the law.

 

[JoeB131]

You created an atmosphere of distrust towards the police and the law.

Um, no, that would be shit like this...



and this



and this



This is why people in certain communities don't trust the police.

 

[ChrisL]

You created an atmosphere of distrust towards the police and the law.

Um, no, that would be shit like this...



and this



and this



This is why people in certain communities don't trust the police.

Oh, but you want them to trust the police! Lol. Too funny. I mean seriously, you have to be a troll. You are too ridiculous to be real.