wt
Lionel Schriver - Author of We Need To Talk About Kevin will be on Newsnight shortly
Bloke on now has very weird eyebrows.
There was a good discussion on this on the Pat Kenny radio show this morning.
About what?
The darts.
I am surprised it took this long but now they are saying this guy was obsessed with call of duty. Every time something like this happens computer games always get blamed either call of duty or grand theft auto. Why canât they just accept these fuckers are just fucked up and whether they played computer games or fucking tiddly winks they would still go out and do this? Not forgetting the availability of guns to these fuckers.
I read he was a vegan. Surely its time to round up the rest of them before they do something similar.
If this happened in Iran would there be as much of a reaction? 10 school girls were killed today in Afghanistan fetching for fire wood. It barely made the news, and certainly no thread on here about it. We live in a society which is increasingly influenced by the US way of living. Sickening.
If it happened in Iran it would be used as a pretext for Israel to go and bomb the shit out of them.
How much press has yer man who stabbed 22 or 28 people in China got?
Very interesting interview with this guy on the Moncrieff programme on Newstalk on Monday on how the pro-gun lobby has deliberately misinterpreted the US constitution for their own ends.
http://consortiumnewâŚd-killing-kids/
The 2nd Amendment and Killing Kids
December 15, 2012
Exclusive: As Americans reel in shock over the slaughter of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, defenders of âgun rightsâ insist, in effect, that such deaths are part of the price of âlibertyâ enshrined by the Framers in the Second Amendment. But this was not what James Madison had in mind, argues Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The American Right is fond of putting itself inside the minds of Americaâs Founders and intuiting what was their âoriginal intentâ in writing the U.S. Constitution and its early additions, like the Second Amendmentâs âright to bear arms.â But, surely, James Madison and the others werenât envisioning people with modern weapons mowing down children in a movie theater or a shopping mall or now a kindergarten.
Indeed, when the Second Amendment was passed in the First Congress as part of the Bill of Rights, firearms were single-shot mechanisms that took time to load and reload. It was also clear that Madison and the others viewed the âright to bear armsâ in the context of âa well-regulated militiaâ to defend communities from massacres, not as a means to enable such massacres.[center]
The Second Amendment reads: âA well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.â Thus, the point of the Second Amendment is to ensure âsecurity,â not undermine it.
The massacre of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday, which followed other gun massacres in towns and cities across the country, represents the opposite of âsecurity.â And it is time that Americans of all political persuasions recognize that protecting this kind of mass killing was not what the Founders had in mind.
However, over the past several decades, self-interested right-wing âscholarshipâ has sought to reinvent the Framers as free-market, government-hating ideologues, though the key authors of the U.S. Constitution â people like James Madison and George Washington â could best be described as pragmatic nationalists who favored effective governance.
In 1787, led by Madison and Washington, the Constitutional Convention scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which had enshrined the states as âsovereignâ and had made the federal government a âleague of friendshipâ with few powers.
What happened behind closed doors in Philadelphia was a reversal of the system that governed the United States from 1777 to 1787. The laws of the federal government were made supreme and its powers were dramatically strengthened, so much so that a movement of Anti-Federalists fought bitterly to block ratification.
In the political maneuvering to assure approval of the new system, Madison and other Federalists agreed to add a Bill of Rights to ease some of the fears about what Anti-Federalists regarded as the unbridled powers of the central government. [For details, see Robert Parryâs [i]Americaâs Stolen Narrative[/i].]
Madison had considered a Bill of Rights unnecessary because the Constitution, like all constitutions, set limits on the governmentâs power and it contained no provisions allowing the government to infringe on basic liberties of the people. But he assented to spell out those rights in the first 10 amendments, which were passed by the First Congress and ratified in 1791.
The intent of the Second Amendment was clarified during the Second Congress when the U.S. government enacted the Militia Acts, which mandated that all white males of military age obtain a musket, shot and other equipment for service in militias.
The idea was to enable the young country to resist aggression from European powers, to confront Native American tribes on the frontier and to put down internal rebellions, including slave revolts. There was nothing particularly idealistic in this provision; the goal was the âsecurityâ of the young nation.
However, the modern American Right and todayâs arms industry have devoted enormous resources to twisting the Framers into extremist ideologues who put âlibertiesâ like individual gun ownership ahead of all practical concerns about âsecurity.â
This propaganda has proved so successful that many politicians who favor common-sense gun control are deemed violators of the Framersâ original intent, as essentially un-American, and face defeat in elections. The current right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has even overturned longstanding precedents and reinterpreted the Second Amendment as granting rights of individual gun ownership.
But does anyone really believe that Madison and like-minded Framers would have stood by and let deranged killers mow down civilians, including children, by using guns vastly more lethal than any that existed in the Revolutionary era? If someone had wielded a single-shot musket or pistol in 1791, the person might get off one volley but would then have to reload. No one had repeat-firing revolvers, let alone assault rifles with large magazines of bullets.
Any serious scholarship on the Framers would conclude that they were, first and foremost, pragmatists determined to protect the hard-won independence of the United States. When the statesâ-rights Articles of Confederation wasnât doing the job, they scrapped it. When compromises were needed â even on the vile practice of slavery â the Framers cut the deals.
While the Framers cared about liberty (at least for white men), they focused in the Constitution on practicality, creating a flexible system that would advance the âgeneral Welfareâ of âWe the People.â
It is madness to think that the Framers would have mutely accepted the slaughter of kindergarteners and grade-school kids (or the thousands of other American victims of gun violence). Such bloody insecurity was definitely not their âoriginal intent.â
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, Americaâs Stolen Narrative, either in [b]print here[/b][/url] [b]or as an e-book (from [/b][url=âhttp://www.amazon.com/Americas-Stolen-Narrative-Washington-ebook/dp/B009RXXOIG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350755575&sr=8-1&keywords=americas+stolen+narrativeâ][b]Amazon[/b][/url] [b]and[/b] [url=âhttp://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/americas-stolen-narrative?keyword=americas+stolen+narrative&store=ebook&iehack=%E2%98%A0â][b]barnesandnoble.com[/b]).
[/center]
Because in the effective absence of a police force and an army in what was a very sparsely populated country, the idea of the second amendment was to provide a means of security for the country. The right to bear arms was only legislated for as part of membership of âmilitiasâ, a situation which is in no way relevant to today where the US has a very well armed police force and Army.
In the early 1790s, the Congress passed the âmilitia actâ, which stated that all white men of military age were required to obtain a musket and other equipment.so they could take part in militias. The aim was to protect their communities on the frontier - there were struggles with native Americans, there was a potential slave revolt in the South, there were disorders among poor whites too.
The idea was to use the militias as security, it wasnât to allow people to walk around with the kinds of weapons that exist today - in the 1780s and 90s people used muskets which had to be individually loaded and reloaded - they didnât have magazines with 100 bullets in them, they didnât have assault rifles which use high velocity bullets which can comfortably breach brick walls, which can comfortably take a manâs head off from a mile away. You donât even need ID to buy this stuff. You can go to a gun show or buy one online. Even a baby can get them in a liberal state like Illinois: http://news.bbc.co.uâŚcas/6662213.stm
So you had a situation which is completely different to today. Many people who are actually pro-gun ownership agree with this and in favour of the banning of these types of weapons. The Clinton government banned them in the 90s but Bush refused to renew this. Iâd go much further but the chances of European-style laws ever being brought in are non-existent.
The gun lobby, ridiculously, cling to a situation that existed in the 1780s and 1790s and apply it completely rigidly to today. The propagandising comes from the arms industry and the so called grass roots Tea Party, founded by the Koch brothers who have tens of billions to spend and whose family made its money from trading with the Nazis, and the media and the well funded right wing shill academics who exist across other fields like economics and science and spread the bullshit about deregulation and climate change denial.
The fact that the US Supreme Court has a conservative majority means that any gun control legislation is likely to be shot down, bang bang x 100.
All this bullshit about statesâ rights is exactly that - the founders of the US wanted a strong federal government as has been shown above in that article. Thatâs why the original Articles of Confederation were torn up in favour of a federalised constitution and the goal of strong central government - because they were completely unworkable. The failed Articles of Confederation are what the Tea Party effectively want to bring back with their bullshit about states seceding from the US.
So what youâre saying is Sid is that you hate freedom yes?
:lol: 
I always liked the word âmilitiaâ
Pity youâre not in charge of the prison system - there would be no such thing as rehabilitation.
The facts are this was a human being who committed a heinous act. It is important to know what drove a 20 year old to shoot dead 20 children and 6 adults so that such an act is not again repeated.