Tuesday Reads
Posted: March 23, 2021 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Assault rifles, Boston, Boulder CO mass shooting, Kim Janey, mass murder 16 Comments
Frederick Carl Frieseke
Good Morning!!
Before I get to the depressing news, here’s something positive: Boston suddenly has a Black woman as acting mayor.
WBUR: Kim Janey Becomes First Black Woman To Lead Boston.
Kim Janey shattered two historic barriers when she became acting mayor of Boston Monday evening: She is both the first woman and the first person of color to lead the city.
Janey, a Black woman, was elevated from city council president to acting mayor immediately after Marty Walsh resigned as mayor to take the job of U.S. labor secretary. His resignation came swiftly following the U.S. Senate’s confirmation of his nomination.
“It’s hard to overstate the significance of inaugurating a woman of color as acting mayor of Boston,” said Amanda Hunter, executive director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which advocates for women in politics. “We have exclusively had white, male mayors leading this city for nearly 200 years,” despite Boston becoming increasingly more diverse. For at least two decades, most residents have been non-white or Hispanic. Women also outnumber men in Boston, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Many area residents are celebrating Janey’s elevation and its significance, including Deanna Cook, who met Janey when she had a problem at her high school in 2017. Cook and her twin sister kept getting detention for wearing hair extensions, which are popular among Black girls but violated a dress code set by predominantly white administrators.
“It’s hard to overstate the significance of inaugurating a woman of color as acting mayor of Boston,” said Amanda Hunter, executive director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which advocates for women in politics. “We have exclusively had white, male mayors leading this city for nearly 200 years,” despite Boston becoming increasingly more diverse. For at least two decades, most residents have been non-white or Hispanic. Women also outnumber men in Boston, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Lucy May Stanton
Many area residents are celebrating Janey’s elevation and its significance, including Deanna Cook, who met Janey when she had a problem at her high school in 2017. Cook and her twin sister kept getting detention for wearing hair extensions, which are popular among Black girls but violated a dress code set by predominantly white administrators.
“We had basically no representation,” Cook said. “We had such difficulty getting the policy turned over, mainly because the people who were in charge didn’t understand and also didn’t care.”
At the time, Janey worked at the nonprofit Massachusetts Advocates for Children. In that role, she argued the ban on hair extensions was discriminatory and helped the Cook sisters change the dress code at the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in Malden.
A few months later, Janey won a seat on the Boston City Council.
Now for the depressing news: It’s happened again. Yesterday, a man walked into a Boulder, CO supermarket and mowed down 10 people with an AR15-type assault rifle. When will Americans wake up and see the need to control access to these powerful weapons?
NBC News: 10 people dead, including police officer, after shooting at Colorado grocery store.
Ten people died, including a police officer, after a gunman walked into a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, Monday and began randomly shooting shoppers. The governor of Colorado, a state that has endured multiple mass shootings, called it an “unspeakable tragedy.”
The officer, Eric Talley, 51, an 11-year veteran of the Boulder police force, was the first officer to arrive at the King Soopers grocery store Monday afternoon, Police Chief Maris Herold said. He had been dispatched after gunfire was reported, she said.
Herold provided no details about the other victims. She said a suspect who was injured in the shooting is in custody. She didn’t provide details about a potential motive.
Earlier, a police commander, Eric Yamaguchi, said there was no ongoing threat. He said it was unclear whether the person had a connection to King Soopers.
Live video from outside the King Soopers showed SWAT vehicles and dozens of police officers, many in tactical gear and camouflage, around the store. Some of its front windows appeared to have been shattered.
A man with his hands behind his back could be seen leaving the store with authorities. It wasn’t clear whether the man, who was wearing no shirt or pants and had blood streaming down his leg, was the person of interest.
https://twitter.com/XNewsAlerts/status/1374119540402044929?s=20
The Guardian: ‘I couldn’t help anybody’: Colorado witnesses describe terror as shots rang out.
Sarah Moonshadow, 42, a customer and resident of Boulder, was in the store with her son, Nicholas, on Monday and recounted scenes of pandemonium as gunfire rang out.
“We were at the checkout, and shots just started going off,” Moonshadow told Reuters. “And I said, ‘Nicholas get down.’ And Nicholas ducked. And we just started listening and there, just repetitive shots … and I just said, ‘Nicholas, run.’”
Moonshadow said she tried to help a victim she saw lying on the pavement just outside the store, but her son pulled her away, telling her, “We have to go.” She broke down as she said: “I couldn’t help anybody.” [….]
Quiet, James Jacques Tissot
The bloodshed came less than a week after gun violence last Tuesday that left eight people dead, including six Asian women, at three day spas in and around Atlanta.
Ryan Borowski was inside the store when the shooting began. He told CNN: “I saw terrified faces running towards me and that’s when I turned and ran the other direction.” He said staff helped customers to exit from the back of the store but some people froze. “We ran and I don’t know why other people didn’t and I am sorry that they froze and I just wish that this didn’t happen – I wish I had an answer for why it did,” he said.
Alex Arellano, 35, was working in the meat department at King Soopers when he heard gunshots and saw people running for the exit. “I thought I was going to die,” he told the New York Times, when he heard the shot getting closer. “I’m thinking of my parents, and I was freaking out.” He hid with two other men before escaping through a rear exit.
Just a short time ago, Boulder’s assault weapons ban was lifted after a lawsuit by a gun rights group.
The Washington Post: Boulder’s assault weapons ban, meant to stop mass shootings, was blocked 10 days before grocery store attack.
The city of Boulder, Colo., barred assault weapons in 2018, as a way to prevent mass shootings like the one that killed 17 at a high school in Parkland., Fla., earlier that year.
But 10 days after that ban was blocked in court, the city was rocked by its own tragedy: Ten people, including a Boulder police officer, were killed at a supermarket in the city’s south end on Monday after a gunman opened fire, law enforcement officials said….
…for Dawn Reinfeld, co-founder of the Colorado gun violence prevention group Blue Rising,the “appalling” timing of the court decision was hard to ignore.
Michael Ancher
“We tried to protect our city,” she told The Washington Post. “It’s so tragic to see the legislation struck down, and days later, to have our city experience exactly what we were trying to prevent.”
Rachel Friend, a city council member, made a similar observation on Twitter, adding she was “heartsick and angry and mostly so, so sad.”
But the Colorado State Shooting Association, one of the plaintiffs that sued Boulder over the assault weapons ban, rejected that sentiment, arguing in a statement that “emotional sensationalism” about gun laws would cloud remembrance of the victims.
“There will be a time for the debate on gun laws. There will be a time for the discussion on motives. There will be a time for a conversation on how this could have been prevented,” the group said in a statement. “But today is not the time.”
For these awful people, that time will never come. Guns are more important to them than human lives.
The Denver Post: Analyzing Colorado’s high rate of mass shootings following the King Soopers killings.
Tom Sullivan last week took to the lectern on the floor of the Colorado House of Representatives and noted that it was the 452nd Friday since his son, Alex, was murdered at the Aurora movie theater shooting. On Monday when he learned of the Boulder King Soopers shooting, he thought of those whose own tallies would now begin.
“There are going to be people who are counting down their Mondays, because they’ve been through this as well,” said Sullivan, a state representative from Aurora.
Colorado has a disproportionate share of survivors of gun violence and of people like Sullivan, whose loved ones were killed. A 2019 analysis by The Denver Post found Colorado had more mass shootings per capita than all but four states. The Census-designated Denver metropolitan statistical area had more school shootings per capita since 1999 than any of the country’s 24 other largest metro areas.
“What we’re looking at now,” said Frank DeAngelis, the principal at Columbine High during the 1999 massacre, “is an issue for society, happening in schools, in Colorado in movie theaters, in churches around the country, airports. We’re a country, a world, of violence.”
Karin Reading, Carl Larsson
He worries about people growing numb, about the reflex Americans have developed to ask, upon hearing of another mass shooting, “How many this time?”
And DeAngelis worries about the collective trauma of a citizenry exposed so repeatedly to tragedy at places like the meat section of a grocery store or the screening of a Batman movie, where Alex Sullivan was killed.
“It’s somewhere that my wife goes to after school, and her students shop there for lunch break. It’s just a very normal setting,” state Sen. Steve Fenberg said of the King Soopers. The store is in his district, and a commercial anchor in south Boulder’s main community gathering spot.
Fenberg Monday, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have thoughts or prayers to offer; mostly anger.”
More stories to check out today:
The New York Times: Senator Ron Johnson has spread misinformation on the virus, the election, the Capitol riot, even Greenland’s greenness.
ProPublica: Mo Brooks Compared Biden’s Election to the Start of the Civil War. Now He Wants a Senate Seat.
The Washington Post: There’s no migrant ‘surge’ at the U.S. southern border. Here’s the data.
Ryan Cooper at The Week: There is no immigration crisis.
The Washington Post: USPS chief DeJoy said to cut post office hours, lengthen delivery times in 10-year plan.
CNN: Former Capitol riot prosecutor’s comments on Trump alarm new no-drama Justice Department.
The New York Times: Justice Dept. Said to Be Weighing Sedition Charges Against Oath Keepers.
The Washington Post: Trump officials hindered at least nine key oversight probes, watchdogs said. Some may finally be released in coming months.
The Washington Post: Thanks to Trump-era covid relief bill, a UFO report may soon be public — and it’ll be big, ex-official says.
As always, this is an open thread. What’s on your mind?
Sandy Hook Up Dates
Posted: December 16, 2012 Filed under: Gun Control | Tags: Assault rifles, gun control, NRA, Sandy Hook 49 Comments
The President will speak tonight in a memorial to the victims of the Sandy Hook Shooting. I thought I’d try to provide you a list of various articles and updates to read as we try to make sense of something senseless.
This moving article by Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books aligns the interests of the gun fetishists with the worship of Moloch a blood thirsty old testament god who was only appeased by the sacrifice of small children.
Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).
The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.
Senator Diane Feinstein announced her intention to introduce gun control legislation on the first day of Senate Business in 2013.
Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein said Sunday that she will introduce a new ban on assault weapons when the new Congress convenes next year, and she expects President Barack Obama to support it.
Appearing on Meet The Press in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 26 on Friday, Feinstein, who sponsored the first federal ban on assault weapons which expired in 2004, said she is ready to push to reinstate it.
“It’s being done with care, it will be ready on the first day, I’ll be announcing House authors, and we’ll be prepared to go — and I hope the nation will be prepared to help,” she said.
State Police in Connecticut announced what we all knew and feared. The slaughter in Sandy Hook was caused by a military style semi-automatic assault rifle capable of showering those little bodies with hundreds of bullets in a matter of minutes. The shooter had hundreds of rounds and magazines.
Adam Lanza had hundreds of rounds and used multiple high capacity magazines when he went on a rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 first graders and six adults, Connecticut State Police said today.
After shooting at victims in two classrooms and a hallway with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle, he put a bullet into his own head with a handgun.
“The weapon that was utilized most of the time during this horrific crime was identified as a Bushmaster AR-15 assault weapon,” Connecticut State Police Lt. Paul Vance said. “The trajectory of the shots and all of the ammunition used in the horrible crime will be examined.”
Vance said three weapons were found at the scene, while a fourth, a shotgun, was recovered from Lanza’s vehicle.
Amid all the discussion, the NRA remains silent. Additionally, no pro gun rights senator would appear on MTP. Many folks believe that “The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre Has Blood on His Hands”.
There should be special place in hell reserved for LaPierre. He likes to fulminate about gun owners’ rights. But so far he’s has been silent on the nation’s most recent gun massacre.
The NRA not only lobbies on behalf of “stand your ground” laws, but also offers insurance to members to pay for the legal costs of shooting people in “self-defense.” The NRA also defends the right of Americans to carry concealed weapons, including handguns.
Adam Lanza—the 20-year old man who walked into the Connecticut school shot his victims with a semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle—is no doubt deranged. He’s not alone. There are lots of crazy people around. But if we make it easy for them to obtain guns, they are more likely to translate their psychological problems into dangerous and deadly anti-social behavior.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2011 there were 15,953 murders in the United States and 11,101 (30 a day) were caused by firearms. Suicides and unintentional shootings account for another 20,000 deaths by guns each year. Of course, many more people are injured—some seriously and permanently—by gun violence.
Will we actually see the NRA’s death grip on Congress come to an end?
According to a 2011 Gallup survey, 47 percent of Americans own some kind of firearm, and the total number of nonmilitary guns in circulation exceeds 300 million. There are nearly 130,000 federally registered gun dealers across the country, three and a half times the number of grocery stores. Although the sales transacted by registered dealers are subject to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which screens out buyers with disqualifying felony convictions or histories of confinement in mental institutions, 40 percent of gun sales are unregulated transactions made by private, unlicensed vendors, many at gun shows and conventions.
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