Free Republic

There's No Place Else Like This:: By: Larry Walker II ::Reminiscent of Secretary of State Kerry's now infamous speech in Mexico, in which he erroneously declared that temperatures in Europe and in Vietnam were at “unprecedented” levels, and had broken "every record that's ever been seen", last week, referring to the latest school shooting in Oregon, Potus 44 proclaimed, "We're the only developed country on Earth where this happens. And it happens now once a week. And it's a one-day story. There's no place else like this."Really? Are we the only developed country on Earth where school and mass shootings...

The source of information for this news post came from Roger Hedgecock’s 1/17/13 radio show. Here’s the link. Fast forward to 21:13 for Roger’s comments. The five worst mass killings, where a firearm was used, have a common thread. Hint #1: They didn’t belong to the NRA. They don’t fit the stereotype of the “red-neck” gun owner. Check it out … Ft Hood: Registered Democrat/Muslim. Columbine: Too young to vote; both families were registered Democrats and progressive liberals. Virginia Tech: Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff. Colorado Theater: Registered Democrat; staff worker on the Obama campaign;...

An Arizona rancher and Republican congressional candidate said during a primary debate Saturday that the vast majority of mass shootings in the United States are committed by Democrats. “If you look at all the fiascos that have occurred, 99 percent of them have been by Democrats pulling their guns out and shooting people,” Gary Kiehne, who is running for the state's 1st U.S. Congressional District, said during Saturday's GOP primary in Florence, Arizona. “So I don’t think you have a problem with the Republicans.” When asked how he would protect gun rights, Kiehne, a hotel owner and member of the...

The school in Newtown. The Sikh temple in Wisconsin. The movie theater in Aurora. America’s angst over shootings in public places is growing, and for good reason. According to a study obtained by Yahoo News, rampages like the Washington Navy Yard and Los Angeles airport shootings have tripled in recent years. The report, written by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University, will be published next week in the “FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin,” a training publication for criminal justice professionals. Researchers considered only active shootings in public settings where the primary motive appeared to...

Right-wing politics are key to a murderer’s motivations; leftism must be ignored.Let me venture a guess, and wager that you have heard very little about the political preference of the young man who, on Friday, walked into his high school and tried to murder his teacher. On the face of it, this is a blessing, for in all but the most extreme cases a murderer’s ideological proclivities are wholly irrelevant to his crime. The “why” really matters when a terrorist group shoots up a mall, because the “why” explains the action. But when a man bears a grudge against his...

Investigators are planning to release a long-awaited report on the Newtown school shooting, nearly a year after the massacre of 20 children and six women inside Sandy Hook Elementary School.

After every mass shooting, I write a variant of the same column. Perhaps I'll republish this one when the next attack happens. The increase in mass shootings over the course of the past several decades is not imaginary. In 2000, The New York Times analyzed 100 mass shootings between 1949 and 1999 and found that 73 of them had happened since 1990. Since 2000, according to Mother Jones magazine, there have been 33 more, including the recent massacre at the Navy Yard. The majority of the killers have untreated mental illness. A significant portion of the political and journalistic worlds...

The next mass shooting will take place on February 12, 2014, in Spokane, Washington. It will be committed by an emotionally disturbed, 38 year-old white man who will kill seven people and wound six more at a place he used to work using a semi-automatic handgun he purchased legally in the state. That, at least, is what a look at the data on past such shootings might indicate. We'll say at the outset: Every assertion in the first paragraph is a function of probability, not fact. The next mass shooting — which will happen somewhere, sometime — will almost certainly not be in...

If you consider the deadliest mass shootings in American history -- at this point, shootings with 12 or more fatalities -- you'll find the first one happens in 1949. A deranged lone gunman's "Walk of Death" in Camden, New Jersey, claimed the lives of 13 people. The next one happened in 1966, when a lone gunman climbed the bell tower at the University of Texas and began shooting. He killed 16 people. The first half of the list of these horrible shootings, as Rachel pointed out on the show last night, took place over half a century. The second half...

I know I’m not the only one who remembers how, almost exactly 6 years ago at Virginia Tech, mass-murderer Seung-Hui Cho chained and padlocked the doors to an academic building shut. That was so that he could effectively trap his numerous (32 killed and 23 wounded) , defenseless victims inside – except for the handful who managed to breach and exit second story windows, suffering injuries from falling to the ground – and to keep the responding police outside for long, crucial minutes while he conducted his murderous rampage. Cho knew he’d face no armed opponent once he had his...

Thirteen people have been killed in Serbia after a man went on a gun rampage in a village near Belgrade, local media report. Six men, six women and a two-year-old boy died before the gunman tried to kill himself and his wife. The pair are now said to be in a serious condition. Police identified the gunman as Ljubisa Bogdanovic, a 60-year-old war veteran.

When tragedy strikes on a national scale, our initial reactions have a commonality to them: We recoil in shock and are overcome with sorrow. But then, as anger and frustration set in, we begin to divide, to blame the things we have always blamed for the evils around us. We insist that something must be done, steps must be taken, laws must be passed. Adam Lanza, an honors student with no criminal record, murdered his mother, stole four of her guns, and—for reasons we may never know—decided to rob the world of the lives of 20 children and six adults...

<p>THE widow of a victim of the US theatre massacre is suing a psychiatrist for neglect, for failing to have the alleged shooter arrested despite him having "fantasised about killing a lot of people."</p> <p>The lawsuit, also citing the University of Colorado, alleges that Dr Lynne Fenton advised campus police about her concern regarding James Holmes, after he told her about the fantasy in June last year.</p>

The way the media branch of the government salivates over shootings, you would think another theater shooting not long after Aurora would be big news, especially if it offered the added excitement of beginning in a nearby restaurant before moving into the theater. Yet we never heard much about last month’s Mayan Palace 14 shootings in San Antonio, in which two innocents were wounded. Detective Louis Antu, spokesman for the Bexar County Sherriff’s Office, said the shooting began at a nearby China Garden and “carried on into the theater.” At one point, the suspect fired at a San Antonio Police...

President of the National Assocation of Police Officers and Boston Police Officer Thomas Nee is a member of Vice President Joe Biden's gun control task force, which was created by President Obama in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Nee's son, Joseph Nee, was convicted in 2008 for planning to commit mass murder of students and teachers at Marshfield High School in Massachusetts, similar to that of Columbine in 1999. After spending nine months in prison, Nee's conviction was upheld by the Supreme Judicial Court. Nee told police the plan involved taking ammunition and explosive devices into...

In response to last week's massacre in Connecticut, Mother Jones has put together a "study" on mass shootings that makes a pretty bold claim: In the wake of the slaughters this summer at a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 62 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun.  There are a couple of major problems here with arguing...

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2011, there were 12.664 total homicides. 8,583 of those murders were committed with firearms, a number that has been trending down for years. In 2011 there were 3 mass shootings that produced 19 deaths and many more injured. The FBI defines mass murder as four or more murders occurring during a particular event with no cooling-off period between the murders. We have had 61 mass murders in the last 30 years (since 1982). In 2012, we have had a banner year with 6 mass murder events totaling 63 deaths. Our latest mass...

If you are reading any opinion column during the Christmas season, you are likely an individual who seeks out information and observations, and comes to your own conclusions. In other words, you are a "thinking" man or women, and whether you ever agree with a single word I write, I nevertheless both congratulate and give thanks for you. And this column is for you. Most politicians and many in the media truly believe we are stupid. We are the masses. We are those meant to receive a pat on the head, an empty promise and a warm feeling --- that...

There are now calls from the Left for gun control legislation in response to Adam Lanza's unconscionable mass killing of innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary. However, very few people seem to be asking the most basic question of all before getting started: What gun control legislation could have stopped Adam Lanza? The answer is "none." Let's consider a few alternatives: 1) The school was already a "gun free zone;" so obviously that wasn't effective. Of course, the sort of people who would respect a "gun free zone" in the first place are the very ones you wouldn't have...

Professor Glenn W. Muschert of Miami University, Ohio, is a sociologist. He published, in 2007, in Sociology Compass an online peer-reviewed journal, a study he conducted of school shootings. Some of his conclusions and revelations were astounding. Why it has not attracted more notice is puzzling. Muschert noted the lack of a holistic approach to analyzing school shootings. He wrote, “Studies of school shootings have been conducted in a variety of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, and media studies. However, to date there is no unified body of knowledge about such events.” His study made recommendations “to synthesize past studies, and...