3 Killed in Shootings at Michigan State University
“I have to tell my son about another shooting on campus”
I can’t not tell him, not anymore. He has a phone. He has a laptop, required for school. He has friends with phones and laptops and older siblings. I had to tell him about Oxford, in November of 2021; he listened, quietly — he is not, by nature, quiet — and asked: “Are you sending me to school tomorrow?”
…
“This needs to stop. Politicians need to stop choosing money over death. What soul do you have if you let kids die, and teachers, and as a matter of fact regular people, die, and choose money?”
“Politicians need to stop choosing money
over death!”
(Excerpt from an article in the Detroit Free Press)
Nan's Notebook 
Just heartbreaking.
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I am WAY BEYOND nauseated and vomiting over the same old same old RHETORIC, non-stop “talking” Congress (state & federal) have been doing in the U.S. since… you know what(?), since the 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting, slaughtering people with military-style rifles and marksmen began mass shooting massacres!!! WAKE THA EFFIN UP Republicans and pro-gun 2nd Amendment “defenders” of 18th-century flint-lock musket firearms!!! So incredibly sick of the same repeated lip-service over the last 57-yrs by our governments/Congresses (Repubs) and their wealthy gun-manufacturing donators/constituents! 🤬
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It’s a fair comment, choosing money over death. Money has become the be-aii and end-all of life for some people. But money is only worth something if you are alive. It is absolutely useless after death.
I am not trying to be ignorant, or mean, but if someone shot up a conference of rich people, killing them en masse, I don’t think even that would change anything for the survivors, or the ones who could not attend. What is the attraction of money? That it can buy power? Or is it just being able to say you have it?
Money is useless in a time of famine. It is not edible. And if there is no food to buy, money does not help. But humanity does. The poor know how to share. The rich do not!
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Certainly money in and of itself is nothing, but the prestige, stature, and influence that comes with it has been proven to be irresistible. And this is why politicians continue to take $$$$$ from the NRA and other gun-supporting organizations — in spite of the senseless deaths that continue to take place in the U.S.
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I just listened to a tiktok from someone who was at Sandy Hook (fracturing her young back while staying in a corner for hours, dealing with ptsd) and now Michigan. Two mass shootings experienced by one person. Imagine.
So, I think this issue is a really good example of understanding that how one thinks determines what one thinks.
On the one hand, if one assumes this issue is about public safety, then the conclusion is obvious: we need more gun regulations and fewer of them that cause so much harm to so many. And we can look to many western countries on how they achieved some balance between responsible ownership and very few mass shootings – the rare exception rather than multiple events weekly.
On the other hand, if one assume this issue is about fundamental rights as sacrosanct, then the conclusion is also obvious: we need more rather than fewer gun owners. (It wouldn’t be the first time a belief in something as Right and Moral trumped rational thinking.)
It seems to me that a campaign aimed at reducing harm under the banners of Right and Moral would be far more effective in real world results if undertaken one small and reasonable/responsible step at a time. Fixing this problem in the States requires this gap between hands to be shrunk not by force or massive change too quickly done but by trying to get both hands to work together.
In today’s highly politicized and partisan divided population in the US, those chances are slim to none.
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I’m curious. My understanding of the 2nd amendment is that the keeping of guns is for the purposes of maintaining a “well organised militia”. Isn’t that what the National Guard is? If so, why the keeping and carrying of guns by individuals who clearly show no indication of being organised, let alone being well organised?
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People who ‘carry’ have been taught that guns will protect them. From what, I have no clue. We still have that Davy Crockett Mountain Man as hero in our history, and embedded in our ‘manliness’. No one has to prove mental stability, purpose, or intent, when they buy a rifle, handgun, or tommygun. Kids can pick up daddy’s handgun and take it to school to impress his buddies, or possibly take out a teacher who gave them a low grade.
Guns to many men are symbols of manhood, which is both sad and dangerous.
The sad thing is, even if you can’t legally buy a gun, you can always steal one, or borrow daddy’s rifle to take out that ‘mean’ teacher.
Years ago there was an unspoken rule that if a child committed suicide it was not mentioned in print. Kids are vulnerable, and easily swayed. The same thing should apply to school shootings. It ‘s called ‘copycat’ mentality, and probably accounts for most of the shootings that seem to come in waves…
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“People who ‘carry’ have been taught that guns will protect them. From what, I have no clue.”
My suspicion is that it is to protect them from the blacks. Racism is part of the gun culture.
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Living with someone who “carries,” I daresay that is hardly his reason. Although he has a “distaste” for the black community, his reasons are much more related to the U.S. “gun culture.” For some reason, he –and thousands of others like him– seem to think a gun is the ultimate protector against all villains, imagined and real.
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The other part of the gun culture is the person who trusts that gun to protect him from whatever invisible monsters hide under his bed. What never occurs to folks like this, what if someone gets that gun away from him..
The other thing that often sends a shooter over the edge is bullying. A lot of the kids who have been caught as shooters or potential shooters have been bullied all through their school years–too short, too thin, too “different”; they have emotional or family problems that no one cares about, and one day they slip that gun in their backpack and finally fight back.
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I might as a aside note that Davy Crocket’s heroism, and the whole Alamo nonsense, was definitely not about freedom but protecting their right to hold slaves inMexican territory.
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Everyone seems to completely ignore that “organised militia” part and pretend it isn’t part of the statement. I was taught that originally at that time the country didn’t have a standing army and couldn’t really afford to stock enough weapons and equipment to support one. It was expected that able bodied men could be called up to defend the country on short notice and appear already equipped and more or less knowing how to use a firearm properly.
Certain persons make the claim that firearms were an essential “tool” at the time and that almost everyone owned some kind of gun. In actual fact, only about 12% of Americans at the time actually owned a gun, and most of those didn’t actually work. The vast majority of people didn’t need one and couldn’t afford on. Guns were almost entirely hand made, took a long time to make by highly skilled craftsmen, and were very expensive. The story of the great American farmer/soldier/marksman is complete nonsense, a myth promoted by the movies in the early 20th century and in popular literature before that.
Local colonial governments did surveys of who owned weapons and what kind in preparation for potential conflicts with the British. Constables and bailiffs were sent out door to door. In Maryland, for example, they found in 1768, the inventory listed 200 muskets, 86 carbines and six pistols in usable condition in private hands. And another 400 muskets were “very rusty” or “without locks and not worth repairing. “
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It’s really unfortunate that more people aren’t aware of the REAL history of guns and their place in society.
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I have often wondered the same. It is no wonder, that some morons with “small penises” defend their need to compensate and do feel the urge to hold on to their “safety” handles in a country with too many guns, deep socioeconomic division, hardly any social mobility, overtly competetive culture, inefficient and poorly trained police force. Even by appealing to an outdated law, that they have obviously never even bothered to read. What is much more disturbing, is that the judges of the supreme court, indipendent of politics after their nomination and with expensive education and years of experience, are unable to read – word to word – their own constitution.
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Our next neighbor gave his idiot wife a pistol for christmas one year. She showed us how she kept the pistol in one room and the bullets in another, up over the sink (had to fetch a stepstool to reach them), so her kids wouldn’t get into trouble with it. It took about five minutes for her to find the gun and the bullets and get it ready.
I kept envisioning the burglars/rapists/home invaders waiting patiently on the step while she shouted, “you can’t come in yet! I have a gun, but it’s not loaded!”
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❤️🤣🤣❗️
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Ha! Nothing says: “I can not protect my family, even though I think they are in mortal danger”, like giving a gun to the wife.
How frequent are home invations and burglaries in your area? Guns in the house are a pretty big incentive to burglary, especially if they are not kept in a strongbox.
How long is the police response time there? I bet it is not much longer, than the time to get the gun, the bullets and to load the damn thing.
What training and/or experience does she have to handle the weapon? If none, the weapon is a hazard to the family in her hands.
Does the husband think the wife is a natural born killer? That she would really be ready to fire the gun to maim and kill? Because according to the US military research by far most people are not inclined to do that, exept under extreme pressure, or after extensive training and suggestion. The criminal is far more likelier to use their gun, than the average citizen.
Are there any statistics about how often the gun in the house has been succesfully used to stop a burglary?
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From over here in England, all this seems crazy. Ever since I read about the Texas Tower shootings in 1966, (when I was 14) it has not stopped. It gets worse every year, and I do not believe it is ever going to stop in America.
Best wishes, Pete.
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It -IS- crazy!!!
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Pete, as Nan well knows and has heard my impassioned rant about the “defense” of our 2nd Amendment Right, I have since argued back to Pro-gun, Pro-2nd Amendment nutcases, that if our 1791 ratified Amendment is NOT an 18th-century law about flint-lock musket-ball rifles & pistols—all of which took 2-4 mins to reload by a very well-trained soldier, and that our Core Founding Fathers could not have POSSIBLY predicted 21st-century weaponry, their sheer lethality, and ease of obtaining and terrorizing…
Then by the exact same argument those nutcases make still today, then I am perfectly within my own 2nd Amendment Right to own a nuclear weapon or garage full of nukes & WMD’s! Period.
Yes, it is indeed bonkers idiocy in this weapons-loving, now subhuman country and Congresses the last near 60-years! Spin-cycle, repeat again, and again, and again still. 🤦♂️😢
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A country with more guns than people that also allows children to openly carry firearms in many states is beyond help, I regret to say, Professor. The future for America looks bleak, and I fear it will only get worse.
Best wishes, Pete.
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Yes, and we Americans can only blame ourselves for the decay and collapse. Our plight falls strictly and only on us highly educated or highly ignorant citizens and what we’ve done with our civic virtue and privilege of living in and electing, as well as overseeing, the honorable avowed performance our government officials have done over these 2+ centuries.
As our famous Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, replied so poignantly sharp and with acute context, both historically and as a fledgling poor nation in 1775-76 to the Lady Elizabeth Powell after the Constitutional Convention… when she asked, “Well Dr. Franklin, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Franklin said:
Obviously, most Americans today have no real, full understanding of just how prophetic Dr. Franklin’s response was to commissioning this great, never-ending task and duty requires every week, every month, every year, every decade, in every single election year and primaries that occur AT LEAST every two years, if not splattered in between sometimes on the state, local, and municipal levels. They just don’t… and our voter turnout rates across about 35-40 states, especially mine (Texas), PROVE Americans just don’t get it. 😞
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Hmmm…it looks like, just maybe, thoughts and prayers are utterly useless. Whodda thunk it!!?
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Maybe clicking the heels of your red slippers and saying, “This Needs To Stop!” would, could, should be useful.
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Most likely it would have the same results … 😈
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Utterly useless? Perhaps. Unless one has a different attitude towards prayer. May I quote from Quaker Advices:
“The sick and those caring for them have need of our prayers. But let us not imagine … that a few sentimental good wishes from a distance are all that is needed. Whenever we intercede in prayer we must be prepared for an answer which places a practical obligation upon us. A prayer is always a commitment.”
and
“There is little point in praying to be enabled to overcome some temptation, and then putting oneself in the very position in which the temptation can exert all its fascination. There is little point in praying that the sorrowing may be comforted and the lonely cheered, unless we ourselves set out to bring comfort and cheer to the sad and neglected in our own surroundings. There is little point in praying for our home and for our loved ones, and in going on being as selfish and inconsiderate as we have been. Prayer would be an evil rather than a blessing if it were only a way of getting God to do what we ourselves will not make the effort to do.”
The simple truth is that if no-one gets off their arse and takes action, nothing changes. And that’s true whether one believes in a deity or not. So if one merely offers thought and prayers and does nothing else, the the logical conclusion is that one wishes the status quo to remain. In this case: lives don’t matter, guns do.
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Yep. And since the GOP offer up nothing but thoughts and prayers, and continue to block any and all attempts to regulate gun sales, said prayers are not only utter useless, they are meaningless and an affront to anyone actually trying to change our effed up way of life here as it pertains to the deification of weapons and the money that is made from their unrestricted sales.
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Good phrase, Jeff — deification of weapons — because that’s exactly what it is.
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The problem has never been with normal people owning guns.
But then again, with the exception of a few specialized areas / professions normal people really don’t need guns, now do they?
Just another day in the US of eh?
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Sadly, they think they do. Some part of the population grew up with Davy Crockett and cowboys and indians in their dreams. And in some parts of the country, yeah, people do need guns. You live in an area where bears drop in for snacks, or alligators greet you at the lake, yeah, it’s a reality. But we have seen entirely too many cop shows and horrific movies, and some of that gets embedded in our brains.
My mother in law, god love her, had a saying she lived by: “if I can’t talk my way out of a situation, then I deserve what I get”.
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Not only do the movies play a role in the gun culture, but because the producers and directors have total license to show what they want, they eliminate all feelings and emotions related to death resulting from guns. Just SHOOT those bad guys … and move on to the next adventure.
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It has always been like this.
I’m sure Westerns had a similar effect on how people responded to Native Americans.
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The Repulsive Republicans are hoping to drive most of the Democrats out of the US with the fear of gun violence so they can take over and turn the US into a huge Mickey Mouse clown town….if it isn’t already.
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Don’t you get it? We are the expendables. The huge conglomerate global companies, the most powerful governments and the sophisticated technology and spying of these countries and the legal maneuvers in their laws, that are so biased towards the wealthy, are all working against us.
I believe they know what the planet is up against with climate change and the ramping up of much less food, medical care, education and quality of life for tens of millions. So it will work to their advantage if there are not nearly as many people left. So they couldn’t care less about guns, poor healthcare, poverty, inequality and crazy conspiracy theories that harm millions. They want a lot of us to die!
Politics is nothing more than a way to gather wealth and power and it’s done by the politicians being up for sale to the wealthiest bidder.
This is a worldwide problem, not just the US. It’s the unraveling of a civilization, if not humanity in it’s entirety….for the gain of a few…
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some believe it is civilization itself that is the problem. That the Great Mistake occurred 10,000 years ago with organized agriculture. Problem is I don’t myself want to live in a flea ridden grass hut and hunt wild animals for a living 🤪
As for your conspiracy theory, I think the legalization of weed is part of the plot.🤪 passivity, laziness, sleepiness exacerbated by the wonder herb! And profits.
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There is a real degree of control in play.
We are ‘tracked’ every second of the day.
It’s all in the clicks.
I don’t doubt for a moment gun manufacturers utilise cookies like any other business.
So if a weapons designer comes up with a super duper rifle with all the bells and whistles it will be paraded in as many media areas as possible. Sponsor a Netflix film with all the standout well-known gun totin’ heros all using your brand new rifle and before long you have a million hits on your website and YouTube and enough advance orders you can almost eliminate arms dealers in one fell swoop!
Tell me why I don’t like Mondays?
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IMO, you’ve summed it up quite well with this statement: Politics is nothing more than a way to gather wealth and power and it’s done by the politicians being up for sale to the wealthiest bidder.
Sad but true.
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Just did a quick Google search.
According to the Daily Mail, as of the 14 th Feb, in the US 104 people have died in what are regarded as mass shooting incidents this year.
Wow! 104 gun related deaths in six weeks!
Way to go America.
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But in South Africa it is a LOT worse!
As I rarely read the news these days even I was surprised at these figures
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-02-14-let-akas-murder-be-line-in-the-sand-that-stops-gun-violence-virus/
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But is it really? How many people in the USA die daily from gun violence? The figures, that represent either mas shooting incidents, or daily gun violence are not comparable, as the mas shootings only include gun violence in regard to cases where at least four people were shot. If we had the comparable figures, we would still have to scale them to size of populations. Both countries have a history of serious racial segregation and though that is seemingly in the past now, the deep economical division created still lingers. Not to mention the cultural burden accumulated during those “bad old times”.
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Well, based on the article I linked South Africa has a high incidence of gun related deaths, maybe higher overall than the US. Like the US the majority of these deaths would appear to occur among non- white South Africans.
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You mean to say, that they occur among the poor people of both of the nations? Both nations seem obsessed with the colour of the skin of people and keep putting it into statistics, but if person A is more likely to commit gun violence, than the person B, is it really because of their perplexion, or perhaps their socioeconomic status and cultural heritage linked with the former?
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EXCELLENT point!! Of course I can’t speak for So. Africa, but I would say it definitely applies to the U.S.
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I have never actually seen stats based on demographics.
It isn’t something those at the helm like to bandy about.
In South Africa it will be reported much like this:
“Five people were gunned down over the weekend in a Township outside of Durban ..”
Whenever you read the term Township you know the journalist is referring to non white individuals.
Undoubtedly socioeconomic issues play a major role in determining who kills whom,especially, in a country like South Africa.
Unfortunately after nearly thirty years into democracy the ANC, which is as corrupt and incompetent as they come, hasn’t managed to address many of the basic issues that lead to such violence.
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I need to take a test to show proof that I can operate an automobile. This is for the public’s safety. I need to register the vehicle I’m operating yearly. I have to have liability insurance minimum just in case I damage someone else’s property with my vehicle or worse, hurt someone.
This seems to be a no nonsense, open and shut case that common sense laws should be enacted for firearms. The NRA spent a ton of money to scare the general public into thinking the government was overstepping their reach if they did so.
The film, “Idiocracy” was set in 3001. I think someone took that as a challenge. We should be there sometime last year.
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