Pooped at Target. Didn’t have my coffee today.
Month: October 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5XzQ1BS7gU
A cheap household rubber band can turn a semi-automatic rifle into a fully-automatic rifle. Banning “bump stocks” saves shooters money which they can then spend on more ammunition.
$5 for 335 rubber bands at Amazon.
https://smile.amazon.com/Universal-00419-19-Size-Rubber-Bands/dp/B000783OPI
Bushmaster M4A1 AR-15 (rubberband trick)
Turn your M4 semi-auto into a full-auto machine, like bump firing, using a household rubberband! brought to you by Matt, Jared, Dave, and Keaton.
FBI and ATF approving background checks and straw purchases for sales of large volumes of weapons to arms dealers and potential criminals for sting operations (which are known to go wrong) is standard ATF policy and not the least bit controversial. Letting guns “walk” (up the chain) was a step too far.
“ATF ran a series of sting operations between 2006 and 2011 in the Tucson and Phoenix area where the ATF “purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them”.”
“Operation Fast and Furious began on October 31, 2009, when a local gun store reported to the Phoenix ATF that four individuals had purchased multiple AK-47 style rifles. In November 2009, the Phoenix office’s Group VII, which would be the lead investigative group in Fast and Furious, began to follow a prolific gun trafficker. He had bought 34 firearms in 24 days, and he and his associates bought 212 more in the next month. The case soon grew to over two dozen straw purchasers, the most prolific of which would ultimately buy more than 600 weapons.”
“The tactic of letting guns walk, rather than interdicting them and arresting the buyers, led to controversy within the ATF. As the case continued, several members of Group VII, including John Dodson and Olindo Casa, became increasingly upset at the tactic of allowing guns to walk. Their standard Project Gunrunner training was to follow the straw purchasers to the hand-off to the cartel buyers, then arrest both parties and seize the guns.”
“Since the end of Operation Fast and Furious, related firearms have continued to be discovered in criminal hands. As reported in September 2011, the Mexican government stated that an undisclosed number of guns found at about 170 crime scenes were linked to Fast and Furious. U.S. Representative Darrell Issa (R–Calif.–49) estimated that more than 200 Mexicans were killed by guns linked to the operation.”
ATF gunwalking scandal – Wikipedia
“Gunwalking”, or “letting guns walk”, was a tactic of the Arizona Field Office of the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which ran a series of sting operations[2][3] between 2006[4] and 2011[2][5] in the Tucson and Phoenix area where the ATF “purposely allowed l…
Out of 508 federal terror related cases since 2001, the FBI was involved in and aware of 89% of them prior to the act. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t believe that the FBI is ever going to uncover the real motive of the Las Vegas shooter and their possible involvement in and awareness of the act. FBI Counter Intelligence goes deeper than anyone realizes.
“Osmakac was the target of an elaborately orchestrated FBI sting that involved a paid informant, as well as FBI agents and support staff working on the setup for more than three months. The FBI provided all of the weapons seen in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. The bureau also gave Osmakac the car bomb he allegedly planned to detonate, and even money for a taxi so he could get to where the FBI needed him to go. Osmakac was a deeply disturbed young man, according to several of the psychiatrists and psychologists who examined him before trial. He became a “terrorist” only after the FBI provided the means, opportunity and final prodding necessary to make him one.”
“Informant-led sting operations are central to the FBI’s counterterrorism program. Of 508 defendants prosecuted in federal terrorism-related cases in the decade after 9/11, 243 were involved with an FBI informant, while 158 were the targets of sting operations. Of those cases, an informant or FBI undercover operative led 49 defendants in their terrorism plots, similar to the way Osmakac was led in his.”
“The FBI isn’t always nabbing would-be terrorists so much as setting up mentally ill or economically desperate people to commit crimes they could never have accomplished on their own.”
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/fbi-terrorist-informants/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/terror-trials-numbers/
How the FBI Created a Terrorist
In 2012, Sami Osmakac was 25 years old, broke and struggling with mental illness. His family wanted to get him help. The FBI wanted him to plot a terrorist attack.
https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/
People with guns are more effective at killing than people without.
And people with trucks (Nice, 2016, 84 dead) and airplanes (Germanwings, 2015, 150 dead), are more effective at killing people than people with guns are.
Airplanes are available to everyone. Some idiot accidentally crashed his Cessna into the 405 freeway nearby a couple of months ago. Small planes crash into buildings all the time. Nevertheless, when they do “deliberately” happen, they dwarf the death count of mass shooters (i.e. 9/11). Truck attacks, which are the current weapon of choice in Europe, occur frequently, and are easily accessible to everyone.
You’ve also got your pressure cookers (Tsarnaev Bros, 2013, only 4 deaths but 264 injured) and home depot pipe bombs; plenty of deaths due to bombing. If you’re in the market to buy a pressure cooker, someone should do a background check on you.
This whole topic is obviously in the context of mass shootings. So when we talk about gun control to prevent another mass murder event it has to be compared to other forms of mass murder (trucks, planes, bombs, etc.) that would take it’s place. In that regard, it’s not that different (negligible over decades).
Yes, obviously if you look at all gun killings, and not just mass shootings, then gun killings are much higher at approximately 30,000 per year. However, when you remove suicide by gun (2/3rd of gun deaths) then you end up with 8454 firearm deaths in 2013 (according to FBI data) due to homicide i.e. murder; down from 9199 firearm deaths in 2009.
Of those 8454 firearm deaths, 5782 were carried out with handguns and only 285 deaths occurred due to rifles (of which an even smaller subset are “assault style” rifles and of which “automatic assault rifles” or “machine guns” are an even still smaller subset).
1490 murders in 2013 were carried out with knives and 687 murders in 2013 were carried out with hands, fists, etc. Both higher than the 285 carried out with rifles.
The gun control debate isn’t around banning handguns, which make up 68.4% of the gun homicides (and which liberals confess to being “OK” with; it’s the “assault” rifles that scare them). Perhaps if the debate was about handguns it might have some credibility. The gun control debate is an irrational emotional debate around banning “assault style” rifles, which are a subset of 285 deaths and only make up 0.03% of the gun homicides; a relatively small and declining statistic (down from 351 and 0.04% in 2009).
If reducing gun deaths is important to you then you would have far more success at reducing the death by gun statistics and would encounter far less political resistance if you focused on suicide prevention and general anti-gang / anti-crime policing efforts than by counter productively trying to ban “assault style” rifles.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2009-2013.xls
https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/High_Score
