Tag: shootings

Trump and Pence compete for ovations at the NRA after a rash of mass shootings

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“This is not a gun problem, this is a mental health problem, this is a social problem, this is a cultural problem, and this a spiritual problem,” Trump said, while also making a detour to blame problems with immigration. He proposed a new tax credit to cover the cost of concealed-carry firearm trainings for teachers. “If even 15 percent of teachers, people that are skilled with arms, we want that 15 percent were voluntarily armed and trained to stop active shooters, we would achieve effective deterrence and the problem would cease to exist and that would be a lot of people.” he said.
Pence, meanwhile, called for the quick execution of mass shooters as a solution to gun violence.
“I’m tired of the senseless violence and loss of life that could be prevented if our leaders would support law enforcement, protect our schools, institutionalize the obviously mentally ill, and enact legislation that would ensure that anyone who engages in these heinous acts of mass violence meets their fate in months, not years,” Pence said.
Pence, speaking in his home state, was met with boos from the crowd once he appeared on stage. Pence said that Democrats need to address the “very real problems of violent crime and mental health that are costing thousands of American lives every year.”
“Ignoring the motivations of the trans activist who killed three children and three adults at that Christian school in Nashville, and the ‘mental health challenges’ of the man who killed five people and injured eight others in Louisville, President Biden and the Democrats have returned to the same tired arguments about gun control and confiscation,” Pence said.
Pence seemed to win the crowd over by the end, and earned a standing ovation of his own.
Trump seemed to chide the crowd for its negative reaction to his former vice president. “I hope you gave Pence a good, warm approval,” he said. “I heard it was very rough — you’ve made news today.”
The event marks the first time both Pence and former President Donald Trump have shared a stage since they left office. Pence has ramped up criticism of his former boss recently, including over the Jan. 6 riot.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy received warm applause and standing ovations.
Noem signed an executive order on stage with NRA CEO and Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre that puts an end run around some banks’ recent efforts to stop lending to gun retailers and manufacturers in her state.
“I will be signing it on behalf of protecting those industries related to the gun and firearm industry from being discriminated against by financial institutions banking, credit card or otherwise,” said Noem, who is weighing her next political move.
Other presidential contenders, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, sent in video messages. Guy Relford, a prominent Indiana talk show radio host and 2nd Amendment attorney sitting in the front row, said he’s leaning toward DeSantis in the primary but found his decision to send a video message “disappointing.”
“Trump has always said all the right things. He’s got a little bit of a spotty record as president,” Relford said. He mentioned many in the gun rights movement didn’t like Trump’s swift action on bump stocks even though “there’s not a lot of people who care a lot about bump stocks necessarily.”
Ramaswamy criticized candidates who didn’t appear in person. “I didn’t want to be one of those career politicians that checks the box on NRA,” he said, adding that he came here to tell folks he owns an AR-15.
The NRA convention was once a must-stop cattle call for presidential contenders, but the group’s influence has been on the decline in recent years. In 2019, NRA held its annual convention in the belly of Lucas Oil Stadium adjacent to where the actual convention takes place in the Indiana Convention Center. This year, the speeches were delivered in a tiny ballroom in the convention center.
In the wake of the recent mass shootings, some Republicans changed their tune. Republican Gov. Bill Lee publicly urged the Tennessee state Legislature to pass a version of a red flag law in the state. That’s a policy Pence once embraced when he was governor of Indiana. But as a potential presidential contender today, Pence said America doesn’t need gun control but crime control.
“We don’t need lectures about the liberties of law-abiding citizens. We need solutions to protect our kids,” Pence said. “So to Joe Biden and the gun control extremists, I say: Give up on your pipe dreams of gun confiscation, stop endangering our lives with gun bans, and stop trampling on our God-given rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution!”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 15, 2023
Kentucky, Tennessee governors both lost friends in recent mass shootings

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The Louisville shooting comes just two weeks after three children and three adults were killed at a Christian elementary school in Nashville. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said that one of the victims, Cindy Peak, was friends with his wife Maria.
“What happened at Covenant School was a tragedy beyond comprehension. Like many of you, I’ve experienced tragedy in my own life, and I’ve experienced the day after that tragedy. … Cindy was supposed to come over to have dinner with Maria last night after she filled in as a substitute teacher yesterday at Covenant,” Lee said in an address the day after the shooting.
After both shootings, local police confirmed that the shooter was dead.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 10, 2023
‘Not if, but when’: Mass shootings change what it means to be a mayor in America

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Jose Sanchez took over as mayor just four days after the Lunar New Year shooting that killed 11 people and injured nine. The Monterey Park City Council member and longtime civics teacher had spent years studying firearm laws, helping his class of high school seniors craft gun-safety legislation that reached the House floor. He thought he knew what to expect.
Nothing could have prepared him.
He was running on two to three hours of sleep a night as he juggled the demands of teaching with the tragedy’s aftermath. Meetings with state and federal government officials. Vigils and community events. Round-the-clock emails from residents worried about safety.
The father of three small children, he started bringing his oldest child to the office so they could spend more time together. Her sixth birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, which had been set for the day after the shooting, was canceled.
Two days after a gunman opened fire in a ballroom dance studio, Sanchez was back in his classroom at Alhambra High School, trying to talk with his students about what had happened without breaking down.
“I remember at the end of that period, a student patted me on the shoulder and asked if I was OK,” he said. “It’s not that often that my students ask me how I’m doing.”
Sanchez, a Democrat, had thought about the probability of a shooting while running his first campaign for elected office. He remembers telling his wife he would make sure Monterey Park was prepared.
The city, a majority Asian American suburb outside of Los Angeles that for decades attracted immigrants with the promise of good schools and single-family homes, had largely been spared from the proliferation of shootings across the nation.

His wife warned him that he was thinking about gun safety too much, and he wondered if she was right. That issue had consumed him since 2016, when he and a group of students visiting UCLA barricaded themselves in a women’s restroom after a professor was shot and killed.
“I wish I didn’t have to think about this issue,” Sanchez said. “And now that it has happened, it makes you think, how could we have been better prepared? What can we do now to prevent another one?”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 5, 2023
School shootings: Bane of United States of America

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The United States of America must make an all-out effort to root out school shootings which are really giving it a bad name globally. In the last two decades, the number of school shootings has doubled.
Is there something seriously wrong in the social system of the US, why does a highly developed country generate abhorrent violent incidents of this kind where the lives of very young children, supposedly in a safe and secure environment of the school, are wiped out, leaving a large number of others highly traumatized.
Is it all due to the mental illness of some individual assailant or due to the easy availability of gun?
More study needs to be done to find out the possible reasons for people unleashing this kind of violence on vulnerable groups of school children.
The US newspaper Washington Post did a study that showed that gun violence left over 348,000 school students traumatized following 376 mass shootings which took place in their schools, since 1999.
The year 2023 itself has seen more than 13 school shootings with six children and four adults being killed and several others injured.
The mass shooting incidents in the country crossed 100 by March 5, 2023.
The latest event which occurred in Nashville on March 27, 2023, capital of Tennessee, was a rare case where a woman (transgender) Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, a former student of the Covenant Christian school in Green Hill neighbourhood killed three 9-year-old children and three adults.

She was gunned down by the police.
According to police she was emotionally disordered and was under a doctor’s care. She had been collecting guns. She had a detailed map of the school showing entry points and other places where she planned to carry out shootings.
Besides her resentment to going to the Christian school as a child there are no clear motives present as yet.
The assailants are supposed to have been neutralized within 20 minutes after police knew about the incident.
It marked the 90th school shooting though the 129th mass shooting in the US in the year 2023.
Last year saw 303 such incidents, the highest of any year in the database, which goes back to 1970.
Ilinois had 8 mass shootings incidents this year while California, Texas and Florida had 12 each. Such incidents also occurred in Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
All these guns connected incidents have left 63 children dead in the US and 128 injured.
The fact, that psychological studies point to “bullying” in school being one of the reasons for such incidents as it leaves a psychological impact and desire for carrying out revenge underlines the importance of divesting schools from the scourge of “bullying” which leaves students psychologically scarred.
In the latest Nashville incident, she had two assault-type rifles and a handgun which brings us to the question of guns.
The easy availability of guns (according to one study 120 guns to every 100 Americans) is, of course, an issue in the US and gun control has been debated for a long with sharp divisions in society on the issue. About 44 per cent of US adults live in families with guns.
A large number of people personally own guns and believe that guns would not only provide them protection but bring down incidents involving guns. The simple belief probably is that if I have a gun and you have a gun, then I would avoid shooting you. One generally shoots defenceless people at least that is what is seen in school shooting incidents.
But other studies have shown that the availability of guns leads to more suicides, murders and accidental shootings resulting sometimes in killings and injuries.
An important finding is that most of these crimes are committed by White gunmen though the majority of victims are seen to be more coloured like black or Hispanic.
On average the age group of the shooter is about 16, though you have cases of someone as young as a six-year-old boy killing another child with a gun in the school or a school girl killing a boy for rejecting her.
The easy availability of firearms results in a situation where the rate of firearm incidents is five times higher than drownings.
In 2022 there were 46 deaths in school shootings.
According to an estimate 4.6 million children stay in a house where there is a gun which is kept loaded and unlocked. Most parents remain satisfied with the false belief that their children do not know where the gun is, which is a completely wrong notion.
Most school mass shootings are planned and not spontaneous.
Studies show that despite not being physically harmed the young developing brains of the children in the school and in neighbouring schools undergo trauma which affects their mental health and also educational performance and career for the next several years.
The educational outcomes of the surviving children are greatly affected. There is a drop in student enrolment and a decline in average test scores.
The loss of trust that the school environment can keep them safe is a major psychological impact on the child and increases his sense of fear.
A study showed that the intake of anti-depressants increases in the neighbourhood following such incidents.
Another study found 17.2 per cent of those exposed to shooting in a school less are likely to enroll in a four-year college and 15.3 per cent less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree by age 26.
The US cannot afford to keep its eyes closed and must redouble its efforts by showing zero tolerance to bullying, not allow guns to be easily made available to anyone, have social systems in place where children can vent their resents and fears in a positively and socially acceptable ways.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 31, 2023
6 dead after shootings in US suspect in custody

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Washington: Six people were shot and killed in a rural town of the US state of Mississippi, authorities said.
The Tate County sheriff said on Friday that the shooter killed the victims at various locations in Arkabutla, which lies about 50 km south of Memphis, Tennessee, Xinhua news agency reported.
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said in a statement on Friday afternoon that he had been briefed on the series of shootings in Tate County.
“The individual responsible has been taken into custody alive,” Reeves wrote. “At this time, we believe he acted alone. His motive is not yet known.”
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation has been asked to assist in the investigation, according to the governor.
The US has lost more than 5,500 lives to gun violence so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

February 18, 2023
3 people dead in Michigan State shootings; gunman also dead

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Hundreds of officers had scoured the East Lansing campus, about 90 miles northwest of Detroit, for the suspect, whom police described as a short Black man with red shoes, a jean jacket and ball cap.
Rozman said it was too early to know a motive and whether the man had some type of affiliation with the university. His name was not immediately released.
“There’s a lot that we don’t know at this point,” Rozman said.
Two people were killed at Berkey and another was killed at the MSU Union, he said.
Sparrow Hospital spokesperson John Foren said he had no information on the conditions of five injured people.
By 10:15 p.m., police said Berkey, as well as nearby residence halls, were secured.
Before the gunman was found dead, WDIV-TV meteorologist Kim Adams, whose daughter attends Michigan State, told viewers that students were worn down by the hours-long saga.
“They’ve been hiding, all the lights off in a dark room,” Adams said. “Their cellphones are starting to lose battery charge. They don’t all have chargers with them and losing contact with the outside world is terrifying on a normal day for college kids, let alone when there’s someone out there that they haven’t caught yet.”

Aedan Kelley, a junior who lives a half-mile east of campus, said he locked his doors and covered his windows “just in case.” Sirens were constant, he said, and a helicopter hovered overhead.
“It’s all very frightening,” Kelley said. “And then I have all these people texting me wondering if I’m OK, which is overwhelming.”
Michigan State has about 50,000 students. All campus activities were canceled for 48 hours, including athletics and classes.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 14, 2023
Newsom renews call for federal action on gun safety after 2 mass shootings in California

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California has some of the most stringent gun policies in the nation, which the governor says helps explain why the state has a gun death rate 37 percent below the national average. Some of those restrictions, however, are in jeopardy following a Supreme Court decision in June on a concealed carry law in New York that invited challenges on a wide range of firearm laws.
Even with California’s laws, people can just bring weapons into the state from elsewhere — which is why Congress should take actions such as restricting the size of magazines and banning assault weapons, Newsom said.
“We can’t do this alone,” Newsom said. “And with all due respect, we feel like we are.”
The governor made the trip to Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, after the killing of seven farmworkers Monday, apparently by another worker. It came less than 48 hours after the attack by a gunman at a dance hall during a Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, a small city east of downtown Los Angeles.
Newsom had harsh words for McCarthy, who represents the Bakersfield area, for not making any public statements addressing either shooting.
“I’m still waiting for Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the House of Representatives, who purports to represent the people of the state of California,” he said. “We haven’t heard one damn word from him, not since Monterey Park, not what happened here, not one expression of prayers, condolences, nothing, and it should surprise nobody.”
The Speaker addressed the shootings at a press gaggle on Tuesday in the Capitol, around the same time Newsom was speaking in Half Moon Bay.
“Let me begin by expressing my condolences to the families in California with the recent violence over the last couple days,” McCarthy told reporters.

Newsom said he was in the hospital in Southern California visiting victims and family members when he was pulled aside and informed of the second shooting in Half Moon Bay.
The governor, like others in his party, has doubled down on the need for gun restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. Last year the Democrat-dominated legislature passed a dozen more restrictions, and new bills are in the works for this year.
While the state does have a lower rate of gun death than the national average, it’s been impossible to insulate it from tragedies like the ones seen this week. Increasingly, California Democrats have been looking to Washington to place protections in areas that state policies simply can’t cover.
“We can figure this out — we can,” Newsom said. “We know what to do. It’s not complicated. We do. And we don’t have to do this again and again and again.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 25, 2023
Harris to travel to California after 3 mass shootings

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The announcement comes a day after seven people were killed in two related shootings in Half Moon Bay, and three days after a shooting at a Monterey Park dance hall east of Los Angeles that left 11 people dead. On Monday, another shooting killed one person in Oakland and wounded seven others.
“We have more than lives lost in mass shootings, after mass shootings,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said during her briefing on Tuesday. “The flags at the White House were already at half-mast in honor of those murdered in Monterey Park when we learned of the shooting in Half Moon Bay.”
“President Biden, like most Americans, believes that this is an urgent issue; that too many of our neighbors, colleagues, kids are losing their lives to gun violence,” Jean-Pierre added. “Over the last two decades more school-aged children have died from guns than on-duty police officers and active-duty military combined.”
Already this year, the U.S. has seen 39 mass shootings across the country, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The deadly episodes led to renewed calls from state and federal officials for gun control legislation, including from Newsom, who likened the Second Amendment to “a suicide pact” during an interview with CBS. On Monday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced legislation with Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) that would ban assault weapons.
Harris recently returned from a trip to California that included a stop in San Francisco following the series of winter storms that left 22 dead across the state.
Olivia Olander contributed to this report
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect time frame for three mass shootings in California.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 25, 2023