Kind of obvious, but it should be noted.

I don't get the whole argument. The one thing the gun-control people claim is that they're not gun grabbers, and they don't want to literally ban every gun in the US.

But... banning every gun in the US is the only possible gun-control measure that could plausibly achieve the results they seek. If there are any guns in the country, at all, presumably criminals will ignore laws against possessing them (as they currently ignore such laws) and also ignore laws against, well, shooting people with guns (several statutes cover this, pretty exhaustively, and yet they still ignore it).

So all gun control laws are aimed, essentially, at the one class of persons who have already demonstrated their intent to ignore gun laws. The laws are aimed at the very people who don't obey them, but it is taken as an article of faith that if you just disarm the people who aren't breaking the law, for some reason the criminally-minded will follow their lead.

Well, that's absurd, obviously. The only way that a criminal who is determined to get a gun and use it for a criminal purpose will not have a gun is if there are literally no guns to be had-- no guns to be stolen, no guns to be bought off Craigslist, no guns, period.

In that regime, I can see the argument that the 100% gun ban would greatly reduce gun violence. Although, of course, there are still lots of shootings in England, and lots of knifings, and in gun-control Germany there was an atrocious school-shooting a couple of years ago... but let's say that such a regime at least greatly reduces gun crimes.

Trouble is, that regime is precisely what gun-control people say they're not angling for.

I assume they're lying. But if we're going to "discuss" gun control, as the liberal party now insists, then let's discuss it honestly. If you want to greatly reduce gun crime, down to European levels (where they still have gun crime, and knife crime, too), you're going to have to outlaw almost all guns.

So is that your proposal? Put it on the table, straight and honest, and we'll kick it around.

But I'm really tired of this endless call for "discussions" about a problem where the moving parties are too cowardly and dishonest to state what they actually want to do, besides "discussing" things.

I like discussing things. I'm discussing things now.

What is the actual action sought? Only discussion? Obviously discussion alone accomplishes nothing.

So what do you want? Stop hiding behind the "discussions" euphemism. Let's talk about the action you actually seek.

Posted by: Ace at 04:09 PM | Comments (173)
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Let's keep it light for a bit, eh?

Cracked says these are 5 videos that will brighten your day. I can't vouch for that but it's worth a try.

Posted by: DrewM at 03:24 PM | Comments (243)
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Please note it for your records.

Incidentally, the gun-rights people "politicizing" this are doing so pre-emptively, because they've seen this play six hundred times before and they know what happens in the Second Act.

I mean, it's not like we're as stupid as you claim. We are able to remember things that happened more than a week ago.

This is also why we now immediately search for a gunman's political affiliation-- because we know that's the first thing you do.

Adam Lansa Was Autistic, Had Asperger's, and Had a Personality Disorder: So says his surviving brother.

4:52 p.m: Ryan Lanza, 24, brother of gunman Adam Lanza, 20, tells authorities that his younger brother is autistic, or has Asperger syndrome and a “personality disorder.” Neighbors described the younger man to ABC as “odd” and displaying characteristics associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Which, of course, will hopefully not demean other people with autism or Asperger's.

This is a very sticky question for any society. What we have here, it seems, was a Strange Young Man.

What do you do about Strange Young Men? The state can attempt an intervention, but that's a nice, euphemistic way to say "interfere with their lives for no better reason than the fact that they act oddly." Most people who act oddly or are socially inept are perfectly nice and law-abiding. (I'm one of them.)

On the other hand, you can strictly observe their freedom to be odd ducks, and suffer the occasional calamity when it turns out that this particular odd duck was the one you should have checked on.

Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (746)
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I am so lost with the corrections that I don't even want to mention the current information, which is probably also wrong, but: They now say the killer was not 24 year old Ryan Lanza, who was arrested, but may be innocent of everything; now they say the killer was his 20 year old younger brother Adam.

I suppose, then, Ryan was either an accomplice (which I figure is much less likely) or an intended target of his brother.

"Beach," citing a forensic psychologist he heard on Sun News, called the killer a "family annihilator" -- unfortunately, this is so common it has a well-known shorthand. The Family Annihilator, I guess, is such a vicious malignant narcissist, so hateful of himself (and yet also so egotistical) that his idea of suicide is to attempt to erase any trace of himself, by killing everyone related to him by blood or affection. We see despondent husbands do this a fair amount, killing wife, children and self; we see women do it too.

Or maybe this is as close to Vengeance Against God for having even been born as these lunatics can get-- by murdering anyone who is somehow related to his existence, the killer gets payback for his own misbegotten birth?

Unfortunately, the death toll reports are generally accurate.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (258)
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Last night was the peak but you can still try to catch the Geminid Meteor Shower. SMOD is such a tease. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 06:15 PM | Comments (814)
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Parents first.

He then went to Connecticut to kill a woman he was involved with somehow -- whether wife or ex-girlfriend -- and also to kill all the children near her.

I think we were just talking a few weeks ago about a certain form of intensely narcissistic psychopathy that spurs people to kill everyone close to them rather than just taking the gentleman's way out of suicide. (I don't mean to give a nod towards suicide but if the difference is between killing yourself and murdering your whole family for your failures and inadequacies, let's put in a good word for suicide.)

I've said this before but I think the media can help reduce these things from occurring. These nutters see themselves heroically, sort of as bigger-than-life agents of mayhem and evil. Now that may sound like a bad thing to you, but it doesn't sound bad to them: They've embraced it.

And what Evil is usually described as, in popular mythology, which these guys are not, is potent and capable. Yes, Evil is horrible, but these guys are embracing it for the Power of it. Because they are failures and hopelessly inadequate in their own lives, they contrive a fantasy in which they become Dark Heroes -- larger than life and big as death -- by murdering a lot of people.

Obviously we have a debased value system here. But it does seem to me that that one thing they value and cherish is their self-conception of the Big Scary Man, who you should Take Serious Notice Of because he's Scary and Capable of Anything.

And a lot of media coverage tends to play this angle up. And I don't mean to knock the press too badly on this -- evil sells, and these people are evil.

However, I think it would do at least something to dissuade the next potential mass murderer to know, for example, that coverage on him will not focus on the Evil Menace part of him (which is a self-conception he finds flattering), but the Sad, Lonely Pathetic Guy Who Has a Small Dick and Couldn't Keep a Woman or a Job and Just Couldn't Hack It part of him. The part that's actually much more relevant to his crime -- masterful men do not have to kill people to let the world know "I exist" -- and the party that he's actually afraid of other people knowing about.

If I were the media, I'd allow myself to get very personal in publishing accounts of these guys. Personal, and nasty.

And not only is this a bit of a public service, but, as I said, this is much more relevant to the actual reasons for his crime than this puffed-up faux-heroic claimed motivations. The maniac in Colorado did not shoot up a theater because of Batman, and to even say that credits his self-conception as true and puffs up his fantasy connection to Batman.

No, the maniac in Colorado shot up the theater because he was a pathetic weakling unloved by women and incapable of satisfying them and so retreated into a twisted babydick world of power fantasy.

Same thing with this guy.

I'm going to go against my political team, here-- although conservatives often say "Label evil as what it is, Evil, and leave therapy and psychology out of it," I'm going to say No, not in these instances. Because Evil (notice the capital letter E) is powerful in these sad losers' imaginations, and they want to be called the Big Scary Man, the Shadow That Menaces At Midnight.

For an impotent, weak, ineffectual man, that is an attractive fantasy.

What they do not want and could not abide is an accurate assessment of their psychology, their physical stature and shortcomings, their ability to succeed in work or school, their loser history with women, and so on.

To the average people, the idea of being called Evil is bracing and restraining. Not to these fellers. All of these bizarre murders are motivated, at root, by the psychology of utter failure. These are flop-sweat murders, sexual panic murders, too weak to carry on murders. Reporting them as such would not only provide at least as small disincentive to the Power Fantasy losers who commit them, but would actually be much, much closer to the truth than "Heavy Metal poisoned his mind."

No, being the runt who no one loved all his life poisoned his mind. Heavy Metal was just his escape from that. Or Batman, or video games, or Jared Laugher's Conspiracy By Manipulation of Grammar, etc. Promoting the Batman/Heavy Metal angle takes the lunatic's diagnosis of himself as credible.

It's not.

There's a Pink Floyd song that mentions a sentence of being exposed before your peers. Let's strip the Mystery away from these guys. The Mystery angle is both complimentary (in the only way it matters-- as they assess a compliment) and false. The thoughts of a loser gone lunatic are not particularly mysterious, and not very interesting; they're all basically the same, as FBI profilers can tell you.

So less of that.

These guys are Romanticizing murder and conceiving it as some sort of Blaze of Glory heroic Act III. Everything we do and say should refuse that romanticization. Where they seek to seem big, we should make them small (which, again, is actually on the mark as far as accurately). Where they wish to seem Potent -- capable of inflicting their will on the world -- we should strip them down to what they actually are, impotent in virtually all ways. A little finger pulling a gun they didn't build is the one sad skill they've had any success with.

Let them know that murder will not be an escape from that pitiful truth, but rather a life sentence of being confronted with it.

"Theater:" A commenter "beach" cites an expert diagnosing this sort of crime.

A key word is "theater" -- the psychopath chooses this sort of senseless, large-scale murder for the theatrical element. Obviously there is no "motive" as it is usually understood -- murdering a bunch of kids does not advance his cause (the way murdering a man for his car would get you, temporarily, a car).

He wants to be discussed; he's giving a performance; he wants to move the audience.

The audience shouldn't indulge him by considering him in the terms her prefers.

Posted by: Ace at 10:56 AM | Comments (737)
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I don't really consider this a victory because in a perfect world Rush wouldn't have gotten fired for saying something someone else didn't like. And I don't think this idiot should be fired, just because he's stupid. That's certainly never been a bar for appearing on ESPN in the past.

However, because the liberal media and liberal establishment (as in academy) is determined to use ThoughtCrime tactics selectively, only against the right, we must compel them to live by their own rulebook -- otherwise they will gleefully just keep using these Orwellian tactics against us.

By the way, they'll let this guy back in a couple of months when no one's looking.

Posted by: Ace at 10:22 AM | Comments (162)
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It's very odd timing that this story shows up now-- and I don't mean to suggest a conspiracy theory, or suggest it's a false story, or anything like that.

It's just that the timing is in fact odd. (It's strange that no one can say anything without a series of jam-packed implications automatically flowing from it any more.)

BEIJING (Reuters) - A knife-wielding man slashed 22 children and an adult at an elementary school in central China on Friday, state media reported, the latest in a series of attacks on schoolchildren in the country.

...

There have been a series of attacks on schools and schoolchildren around China in recent years, some by people who have lost their jobs or felt left out of the country's economic boom.

The story comes almost as if to make the point: Liberals talk about banning guns as if it's the same as banning murder and banning evil. That's why they are so dogmatic and emotional on the point: How can you be in favor of murder? How can you oppose banning evil?

But guns are not the same as murder, and murder is not the same as guns. Here, in China, a man showed up with murderous intent and armed himself with just a knife. True, he didn't kill as many people as the gun-wielding maniac (or maniacs) in Connecticut did. I suppose that will be the lesson the left draws from this.

Note, by the way, that such attacks have escalated in China due to job dislocations and poor economic circumstances (at least for some). One can find a lot of Hidden Causes, and some additional Villains Behind It All, if one likes.

Posted by: Ace at 09:28 AM | Comments (231)
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CBS is confirming: 27 dead, including 14 children killed.

@tsrblke confirms he saw this on their on-air report. NBC and Fox haven't confirmed the numbers yet.

Also, the report is "at least" that many. I saw another claim that the "14 children" is for victims, which may mean some are wounded, rather than dead. But that seems overly optimistic. This may be one of the worst massacres in our history.

Second Shooter In Custody: At least that's what one reporter says.

John Miller of CBS News: Second person in custody believed to be a second shooter.

It's so much more unnerving that there's two. One lone psychopath, we understand that. If anything, we're grateful that there are relatively few psychopaths.

But when it's two, it's worrisome and strange. Now it's not just one demented individual stewing in his own bad brain chemicals; now it's a society of lunatics. Lunatics who found each other, and talked about all of this, and planned it together, and agreed mutually that it was a good idea.

Posted by: Ace at 08:44 AM | Comments (637)
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Maybe today will just be Things That Are Transparently False Day.

This POLITICO post as well as the Fox & Friends comment is so out of context I honestly donÂ’t know how to respond to it. It ignores my reporting on all of the political ramifications as well as the sources I cite. I categorically reject Dylan Byers conclusion that over a 40-year career I am associated with any point of view and stand on my reputation.

That is your reputation.

Posted by: Ace at 08:31 AM | Comments (107)
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