Well first off I have an M1 and an AR15. Ain't nobody that knows that will tell you they are the same. You can't get me on a cockamamie picture comparison. Those two rifles are much much different even if you want to try and act like they are not. Also my M1 is now considered a collectors item so nobody will be shooting that anytime soon. Yes I'ts fully operational and yes it's semi auto but in no way is it like the AR. They are both in my gun safe by the way. Where they should be.
I did wonder why so many more little girls were killed vs boys. Now we know. Before massacre, Uvalde gunman frequently threatened teen girls online Young people who met the alleged gunman online said he had threatened to kidnap, rape or kill. But they said their reports were ignored and that his kind of angry misogyny was just “how online is.” He could be cryptic, demeaning and scary, sending angry messages and photos of guns. If they didn’t respond how he wanted, he sometimes threatened to rape or kidnap them — then laughed it off as some big joke. But the girls and young women who talked with Salvador Ramos online in the months before he allegedly killed 19 children in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, rarely reported him. His threats seemed too vague, several said in interviews with The Washington Post. One teen who reported Ramos on the social app Yubo said nothing happened as a result. Some also suspected this was just how teen boys talked on the Internet these days — a blend of rage and misogyny so predictable they could barely tell each one apart. One girl, discussing moments when he had been creepy and threatening, said that was just “how online is.” In the aftermath of the deadliest school shooting in a decade, many have asked what more could have been done — how an 18-year-old who spewed so much hate to so many on the Web could do so without provoking punishment or raising alarm. But these threats hadn’t been discovered by parents, friends or teachers. They’d been seen by strangers, many of whom had never met him and had found him only through the social messaging and video apps that form the bedrock of modern teen life. The Washington Post reviewed videos, posts and text messages sent by Ramos and spoke with four young people who’d talked with him online, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of further harassment. The girls who spoke with The Post lived around the world but met Ramos on Yubo, an app that mixes live-streaming and social networking and has become known as a “Tinder for teens.” The Yubo app has been downloaded more than 18 million times in the U.S., including more than 200,000 times last month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Sensor Tower. On Yubo, people can gather in big real-time chatrooms, known as panels, to talk, type messages and share videos — the digital equivalent of a real-world hangout. Ramos, they said, struck up side conversations with them and followed them onto other platforms, including Instagram, where he could send direct messages whenever he wanted. But over time they saw a darker side, as he posted images of dead cats, texted them strange messages and joked about sexual assault, they said. In a video from a live Yubo chatroom that listeners had recorded and was reviewed by The Post, Ramos could be heard saying, “Everyone in this world deserves to get raped.” A 16-year-old boy in Austin who said he saw Ramos frequently in Yubo panels, told The Post that Ramos frequently made aggressive, sexual comments to young women on the app and sent him a death threat during one panel in January. “I witnessed him harass girls and threaten them with sexual assault, like rape and kidnapping,” said the teen. “It was not like a single occurrence. It was frequent.” He and his friends reported Ramos’s account to Yubo for bullying and other infractions dozens of times. He never heard back, he said, and the account remained active. Yubo spokeswoman Amy Williams would not say whether the company received reports of abuse related to Ramos’s account. “As there is an ongoing and active investigation and because this information concerns a specific individual’s data, we are not legally able to share these details publicly at this time,” she said in an email. Williams would not say what law prevents the company from commenting. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Wednesday that Ramos had also written, “I’m going to shoot my grandmother” and “I’m going to shoot an elementary school” shortly before the attack in messages on Facebook. And Texas Department of Public Safety officials said Friday that Ramos had discussed buying a gun several times in private chats on Instagram. Ten days before the shooting, he wrote in one of the messages, “10 more days,” according to the official. Another person wrote to him, “Are you going to shoot up a school or something?” to which Ramos responded, “No, stop asking dumb questions. You’ll see,” the official said. Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and the chat service WhatsApp, referred The Post to an earlier statement from the company that said the messages were sent privately. The rise of services that connect strangers through private messaging has strained the conventional “see something, say something” mantra repeated in the decades since the Columbine High School massacre and other attacks, according to social media researchers. And when strangers do suspect something is wrong, they may feel they have limited ways to respond beyond filing a user report into a corporate abyss. Many of Ramos’ threats to assault women, the young women added, barely stood out from the undercurrent of sexism that pervades the Internet — something they said they have fought back against but also come to accept. A 2021 Pew Research Center study found these experiences are common for young people, with about two-thirds of adults under 30 reporting that they’ve experienced online harassment. Thirty-three percent of women under 35 say they have been sexually harassed online. Danielle K. Citron, a law professor at University of Virginia, said women and girls often don’t report threats of rape to law enforcement or trusted adults because they have been socialized to feel they do not deserve safety and privacy online. Sometimes, they don’t think anyone would help them. Women and girls have “internalized the view, ‘What else do we expect?’” said Citron, the author of the upcoming book “The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age.” “Our safety and intimate privacy is something that society doesn’t value.” Ramos’ hatred toward women and obsession with violence were clear in the messages viewed and interviews conducted by The Post, but his identity was mostly hidden. The teens who spoke with The Post said they saw him on live videos he did on Yubo, then they exchanged Instagram user names to message with him. And he’d constrained his comments to private messaging services like Yubo and Instagram, leaving only the recipients with the burden to react. Like many of the people he spoke with, Ramos had shared little about himself online. He used screen names like “salv8dor_” and “TheBiggestOpp” — and shared only his first name and his age. His profile pictures were selfies, him holding up his shirt or looking dour in front of a broken mirror. He shared animal videos, struck up flirtatious conversations and shared intimate things about his past that left some feeling like distant friends. But in recent months, he’d also started posting darker imagery — moody black-and-white photos and pictures of rifles on his bed. His threats were often hazy or unspecific, and therefore easily dismissed as just a troll or bad joke. One girl told The Post she first saw Ramos in a Yubo panel telling someone, “Shut up before I shoot you,” but figured it was harmless because “kids joke around like that.” In the week before the shooting, Ramos began to hint that something was going to happen on Tuesday to at least three girls, she said. “I’ll tell you before 11. It’s our little secret,” she said he told them multiple times. On the morning of the shooting, he messaged her a photo of two rifles. She responded to ask why he’d sent them, but he never wrote back, according to a screenshot viewed by The Post. “He would threaten everyone,” she said. “He would talk about shooting up schools but no one believed him, no one would think he would do it.” Another 16-year-old said she met Ramos on Yubo in February and that he messaged her asking for her Instagram account. Earlier this month, he reacted to a meme she’d posted that referenced a weapon with a laughing emoji and said, “personally I wouldn’t use a AK-47″ but “a better gun”: an AR-15-style rifle like the one police have said he used in the shooting, according to a screenshot viewed by The Post. The Uvalde shooting comes less than two weeks after another gunman killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo grocery store. He live-streamed the attack through the video service Twitch, which removed the stream within a few minutes; copies of it remain online. The alleged gunman, Payton Gendron, also used the chat platform Discord as a place to save his online writing and pre-attack to-do lists. On the day of the attack, he invited people to his private room, and the 15 who accepted were then able to scroll back through months of his racist screeds and see another view of his attack live-stream. Discord has said the messages were visible only to the suspect until he shared them the day of the attack. The revelations about the Uvalde gunman’s social media activity follow years of complaints from activists and high-profile figures about Instagram’s ability to combat its most troubling users. Instagram has said that tackling abusive messages is harder than in comments on public pages, and that it doesn’t use its artificial intelligence technology to proactively detect content like hate speech or bullying in the same way. Instagram users can report direct messages that violate the company’s rules against hate speech, bullying and calls to incite violence, and they can block offensive users. But many abusive messages still slip through the cracks. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy group, said last month it had analyzed more than 8,000 direct messages sent to five high-profile women and found that Instagram had failed to act on 90 percent of the abusive messages, despite the posts having been reported. Facebook’s critics have alleged that the ability to tackle dangerous posts could get harder once the company follows suit on its plan to expand end-to-end encryption, which scrambles the contents of a message so that only the sender and receiver can see it, as a default setting on all of its messaging services. Currently, encryption is the default setting on WhatsApp but users only have the option of encrypting their messages on Instagram and Facebook. But the company has argued that as more people flock to private messaging it wants to ensure social media networks are “privacy focused.” In recent years, Instagram has launched new tools to protect teens from predatory users, particularly adults attempting to groom them. Last year, the company began making young teens’ accounts private by default once they signed up for Instagram, and they stopped adults from being able to send direct messages to teens that don’t follow them. The company also recently announced a “hidden words” feature, which allows users to filter offensive words, phrases and emoji in message requests into a separate inbox. Yubo said it bans posts that threaten, bully or intimidate other people and uses a mix of software and human moderators to curb inappropriate content. People can block others’ accounts or report concerns to a team of “safety specialists,” who the company says respond to each person’s report. Researchers have documented that a history of violence or threats toward women is a common trait among gunmen in mass shootings, as evident in the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting and the 2019 shooting in Dayton, Ohio. Whitney Phillips, a researcher joining the faculty of the University of Oregon this fall, said social networks could do more to push back on violent harassment toward women, but that the threats on their site are a reflection of a larger “boys will be boys” cultural attitude that normalizes men’s bad behavior online and offline. “When someone says something violent to you or makes some sort of death threat to you, for many women that happens so often that it wouldn’t even register with them,” Phillips said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/28/uvalde-texas-gunman-online-threats/
Fact-Checking Trump and Cruz at the N.R.A. Convention The former president and the Texas senator made inaccurate or misleading claims about the efficacy of gun restrictions, gun ownership trends and school shootings. Prominent Republicans defended gun rights at the National Rifle Association convention on Friday with some misleading claims about the efficacy of gun restrictions, gun ownership trends and school shootings. Here’s a fact check. WHAT WAS SAID “Gun bans do not work. Look at Chicago. If they worked, Chicago wouldn’t be the murder hellhole that it has been for far too long.” — Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas This is misleading. Opponents of firearm restrictions frequently cite Chicago as a case study of why tough gun laws do little to prevent homicides. This argument, however, relies on faulty assumptions about the city’s gun laws and gun violence. There were more gun murders in Chicago than in any other U.S. city in 2020, fueling the perception that it is the gun violence capital of the country. But Chicago is also the third-largest city in the country. Adjusted by population, the gun homicide rate was 25.2 per 100,000, the 26th highest in the country in 2020, according to data compiled by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. Supreme Court nullified the ban in 2010. An appeals court also struck down a ban on carrying concealed weapons in Illinois in 2012, and the state began allowing possession of concealed guns in 2013 as part of the court decision. Today, Illinois has tougher restrictions than most states, but it does not lead the pack, ranking No. 6 in Everytown’s assessment of the strength of state gun control laws, and No. 8 in a report card released by the Giffords Law Center, another gun control group. Conversely, the state ranked No. 41 in an assessment on gun rights from the libertarian Cato Institute. Gun control proponents have also argued that the patchwork nature of gun laws in the country makes it difficult for a state like Illinois with tough restrictions on the books to enforce them in practice. A 2017 study commissioned by the city of Chicago found, for example, that 60 percent of guns used in crimes and recovered in Chicago came from out of state, with neighboring Indiana as the primary source. WHAT WAS SAID “As for so-called assault rifles, which the left and the media love to demonize, these guns were banned for 10 years from 1994 to 2004. And the Department of Justice examined the effect of the ban and concluded it had zero statistically significant effect on violent crime.” — Mr. Cruz This is exaggerated. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 banned the possession, transfer or domestic manufacturing of some semiautomatic assault weapons for 10 years. The Justice Department commissioned a 2004 study on the effect of the 1994 assault weapons ban. The study found that, if renewed, “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement” as assault weapons were rarely used in the crimes. But Christopher Koper, a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Va., and the lead author of that study., has repeatedly said that the ban had mixed effects overall. “My work is often cited in misleading ways that don’t give the full picture,” Mr. Koper previously told The New York Times. “These laws can modestly reduce shootings overall” and reduce the number and severity of mass shootings. WHAT WAS SAID “We know that there are no more guns per capita in this nation today than there were 50 or 100 years ago. That’s worth underscoring. In 1972, the rate of per capita gun ownership in the United States was 43 percent. In 2021, the rate is 42 percent. The rate of gun ownership hasn’t changed. And yet acts of evil like we saw this week are on the rise.” — Mr. Cruz This is misleading. In arguing that cultural issues, rather than the prevalence of guns, are to blame for mass shootings, Mr. Cruz conflated and distorted metrics of gun ownership. The per capita number of guns in the United States roughly doubled from 1968 to 2012, according to the Congressional Research Service, from one gun for every two people to one gun per person. And it has continued to rise since, to about 1.2 guns for every person by 2018, according to the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. Gallup survey of gun ownership. It is not a per capita measure but rather asked participants if they had a gun in their home, with 43 percent responding yes in 1972 and 42 percent in 2021. Historical surveys from the University of Chicago research center NORC show, however, that the percentage of American households that own guns has decreased from about half in the 1970s to about a third in recent years. WHAT WAS SAID “Inner city schools rarely have these kinds of mass shootings. I didn’t know that until just recently. Think of that. They rarely have this problem despite being located in very tough neighborhoods, in many cases where there’s tremendous levels of high crime and violence. They’re much more dangerous outside the school than inside. The reason is that for decades inner city schools have had much stronger security measures in place in the school itself, including metal detectors and, yes, armed guards.” — former President Donald J. Trump This is misleading. Mr. Trump has a point that high-fatality shootings perpetrated by a single person have mostly occurred in suburban and rural schools, but the notion that schools in cities have been spared from gun violence is inaccurate. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the presence of armed guards deters mass shootings is not borne out by the evidence. A 2020 report from the Government Accountability Office examined 318 shootings from the 2009-10 school year to the 2018-19 school year. Almost half, 47 percent, of shootings occurred in urban areas, and the report noted that “urban, poorer and high minority schools had more shootings overall.” There is little evidence that the presence of police or armed security prevents or deters shootings in schools. A 2019 review by the New York State School Boards Association found that research on the topic has been “inconclusive.” Researchers examined 133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019 in a paper last year and found “no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence in these cases.” WHAT WAS SAID “It’s even reported that the Biden administration is considering putting U.N. bureaucrats in charge of your Second Amendment rights.” — Mr. Trump False. This was a reference to reports that the Biden administration was considering re-entering an international arms treaty. But Mr. Trump is grossly exaggerating what that treaty would do. 100 other nations have. Mr. Trump announced he was withdrawing the United States’ signature during a speech to the N.R.A. in 2019. The treaty aims to establish international norms for regulating arms sales between countries and addressing illegal arms sales. It prohibits selling weapons to nations that are under arms embargoes or will use them to commit genocide, terrorism, war crimes or attacks against civilians. In the preamble, the treaty explicitly reaffirms “the sovereign right of any state to regulate and control conventional arms exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal or constitutional system.” The Congressional Research Service noted that the treaty “does not affect sales or trade in weapons among private citizens within a country” and, even if ratified, “would likely require no significant changes to policy, regulations or law” since “the United States already has strong export control laws in place.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/...UhS8DAVIvLL4bc9-Ubfripr8ekdPne429rUicGV_QlqK8
Portland has now joined Chicago in the pantheon of "GOP Boogeyman talking points". It means we've gone big league!
I don't think it's the "main" concern, but why does someone need a gun that has rapid fire as an option?
Texas schoolgirl shot when gunman heard her yelling for help 'after police told her to' A 10-year-old killed in the Texas school massacre was shot when Salvador Ramos heard her "yell for help" after she was encouraged to do so by police officers, a surviving classmate claims A schoolgirl was shot dead by the Texas gunman after police told children to shout out for help, a young survivor has claimed. With Salvador Ramos still rampaging through Robb Elementary school, a boy has said that officers who had finally entered the school asked hiding pupils to call out so they could find them. A boy was hiding with four others under a table that had a cloth covering it, which he thinks meant the 18-year-old shooter did not see them. The youngster, whose parents did not want his name revealed, told how they were doing their best to keep hidden. "When the cops came, the cop said: 'Yell if you need help!' And one of the persons in my class said 'help.' The guy overheard and he came in and shot her," the boy told Kens5. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/texas-schoolgirl-shot-after-gunman-27078293
It seems the 'good guy with a gun' theory has rightly taken a huge hit in popularity this month - that is at least some progress towards sensible gun attitudes. barfo
No, not just because it's black. What a stupid gotcha question. The argument to be made to ban those types of weapons is this. Alot of people like to blame video games for kids shooting people, like call of duty. The issues isn't the games themselves. It's the very conception of civilianized versions of military guns, aimed to attract youth, that's the problem. These guns are not for hunting animals, they are for killing. Soldiers use versions of them to kill people, so that is what they are known for. They should be banned because they are perceived by youth as more dangerous and because weapons equipped with high velocity magazines increase the number of potential victims. They need to be banned not just because of their color, but because what they look like and what they represent.
In past conversations you have iterated that Ar15s are not as dangerous. They are just as dangerous in that they both kill, but Ar15s are more dangerous because of what they represent.
I am so incredibly conflicted right now and admit to feeling like a hypocrite. I am opposed to gun ownership (hand guns and semiautomatics in particular) yet there are so many politicians who need to be put out of their (and our) misery in order for this country to move forward in a way that benefits the majority of Americans. And I'm not particularly picky about how it gets done (which is the hypocritical part). Why does a minority always get to steer the American boat??? When does the majority actually RULE? Lunatics like Marjorie Failure Greene (and her cronies) are a mortal danger to us all.
