<BREAKING> Active Shooter in San Bernardino, California

Yeah and people are generally against those things right? Funny how the same people who were against the Patriot Act are some of those who are upset that this disaster of a bill wasn't passed.

 

Are people generally against those things? I tend to remember the Patriot Act being enacted with overwhelming support, and many of its key statutes and provisions being preserved to this day.

 

The difference is that there is no constitutionally protected right to fly on a plane, there is a constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. As such you can't just strip people of that right arbitrarily.

Personally I'm against the no-fly list as well, but not AS against it because while IMO it's an un-American thing to do, at least it's not stripping constitutionally protected rights. I'd be just as mad about a bill trying to quarter soldiers in people's houses if they were on a list or stripping their right to vote based on that list. There's some things the government just can't do arbitrarily, stripping the individual right to keep and bear arms is one of them.

 

Well people who care about civil liberties were always against it. Just because it made things easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to do their job doesn't mean it was a good thing. IMO it was disturbing.

 

There may not be a constitutionally protected right to fly on airplanes, but there is certainly a constitutionally protected right to due process.

https://www.aclu.org/news/court-rules-no-fly-list-process-unconstitutional-and-must-be-reformed

Speaking of airplanes, are assault rifles also technology the founders would have anticipated?

 

Except it is much harder to change ideology and mindset especially when it is coming from areas outside of US laws. Changing gun laws is something that can be done here and improved background checks is something that is relatively simple.

Also just focusing on ideology ignores that most mass shootings in the US are not due to a foreign ideology or even a domestic ideology but basically due to lunatics. The shootings at Newtown, Aurora, V-Tech, Tuscon, and Lake Charles had nothing to do with a widespread ideology but mentally unstable individuals driven by personal motivations.

 

Actually, all of these shooters made it pretty clear why they were doing what they did with either online postings or even manifestos of their own (V-Tech went so far as to shooting an entire video manifesto). Whether we choose to interpret that as ideology or lunacy is really a subjective choice. Certainly, a lot of those shooters had themes and certain ideas in common.

 

There is nothing in the 2nd Amendment that prevents regulation or registration of firearms. While Heller established that the 2nd applies to firearms it doesn't say that greater restrictions aren't allowed.

Further this isn't even a matter of new laws current laws are difficult to enforce because Congress has hamstrung enforcement. That is one reason the ATF doesn't do background checks or is able to track purchases digitally.

 

I would hesitate to call a personal manifesto as an ideology in regard that it only really applies only to that individual and isn't a movement.

Anyway following Ipaman's post if we should place more emphasis on combating ideology how would you combat an ideology that is internal to one diseased mind?

 

If you are trying to strip someone's constitutionally protected right without due process based on some arbitrary list then you are not talking about a simple regulation that would be allowed under the constitution. It would be the same if you were talking about imprisoning people without trial based on winding up on a list due to having an Arab sounding name.

I've never been against reasonable regulation, unfortunately the anti-civil liberties people are almost never reasonable.

 

I wanted to point out that a lot of mass shooters do actually share a corpus of ideas with one another, and they often draw inspiration from one another. I'm tired of people ignoring that by saying "we can't control this or change this, it's just lunacy" and leaving one categories of shootings to apathy, while hyperdriving another category.

I agree that you can't "fight an ideology warped by diseased minds", and that applies equally to the set of ideas that drive "lunatics" and "Islamists". You can take meaningful steps to reduce the probability of risk but that risk, like any risk, will never be zero. I wouldn't characterize "fighting an ideology" as a meaningful step in this context, especially since the specific ideas mentioned (stop immigration, repress free speech) are exactly the opposite of what should work.

 

what? The ATF is ****. You want them instead of the FBI to be doing NICS? They check out and regularly inspect dealers. I don't think I clearly understand your point here because you can't be seriously saying congress has messed up by restricting the ATF's power.

 

You have to decide what is reasonable. I would consider keeping someone like James Holmes who had a history of mental illness and health professionals had warned could be violent keeping them from firearms would be reasonable.

As conservatives frequently like to cite rights end when they threaten the rights of others. As such there are restrictions on rights like speech and assembly when exercise of such rights threaten the safety of others. Also the 2nd is unlike other rights in that it is stated in the amendment itself. that it is a right for collective safety rather than individual. Again this is not an absolute right. If it was then individuals could own bazookas and stinger missiles. Restrictions on high capacity magazines alone would reduce the amount of carnage that any single shooter could wreak.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/u...mit-atfs-ability-to-fight-gun-crime.html?_r=0

Legal Curbs Said to Hamper A.T.F. in Gun Inquiries

MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been without a permanent director for six years, as President Obama recently noted. But even if someone were to be confirmed for the job, the agency’s ability to thwart gun violence is hamstrung by legislative restrictions and by loopholes in federal gun laws, many law enforcement officials and advocates of tighter gun regulations say.
From Our Advertisers

For example, under current laws the bureau is prohibited from creating a federal registry of gun transactions. So while detectives on television tap a serial number into a computer and instantly identify the buyer of a firearm, the reality could not be more different.

When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau’s National Tracing Center here — a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town — begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm.

About a third of the time, the process involves digging through records sent in by companies that have closed, in many cases searching by hand through cardboard boxes filled with computer printouts, hand-scrawled index cards or even water-stained sheets of paper.

In an age when data is often available with a few keystrokes, the A.T.F. is forced to follow this manual routine because the idea of establishing a central database of gun transactions has been rejected by lawmakers in Congress, who have sided with the National Rifle Association, which argues that such a database poses a threat to the Second Amendment. In other countries, gun rights groups argue, governments have used gun registries to confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens.

Advocates for increased gun regulation, however, contend that in a country plagued by gun violence, a central registry could help keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and allow law enforcement officials to act more effectively to prevent gun crime.

As has been the case for decades, the A.T.F., the federal agency charged with enforcing gun laws and regulating the gun industry, is caught in the middle.

Law enforcement officials say that in theory, the A.T.F. could take a lead role in setting a national agenda for reducing gun crime, a goal that has gained renewed urgency with the school massacre in Newtown, Conn. But it is hampered, they say, by politically driven laws that make its job harder and by the ferocity of the debate over gun regulation.

“I think that they’ve really been muzzled over the last several years, at least, from doing their job effectively,” said Frederick H. Bealefeld III, a former police commissioner in Baltimore. “They’ve really kind of been the whipping agency, caught in the political turmoil of Washington on the gun issue.”

The bureau’s struggles are epitomized by its lack of a full-time director since Congress, prodded by the N.R.A., decided that the position should require Senate confirmation. That leadership vacuum, Mr. Bealefeld and others said, has inevitably depleted morale and kept the agency from developing a coherent agenda.

Advertisement
Continue reading the main story

At a news conference last Wednesday, Mr. Obama called on the Senate to confirm a permanent director, saying lawmakers should “make this a priority early in the year.” But given the complicated politics, it may be difficult for the White House to get a director confirmed. Mr. Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, was unable to do so.

In 2010, Mr. Obama nominated Andrew Traver, who is now the head of the bureau’s Denver division, for the post. But Mr. Traver, whose candidacy is opposed by the N.R.A., has yet to have a hearing, and his nomination has languished in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The senior Republican on the panel, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, has raised questions about Mr. Traver’s nomination, and his prospects for confirmation looked so dim that the White House told Democrats on the committee to make nominations for other posts a higher priority, according to a Senate Democratic aide.

The persistent controversy over the A.T.F.’s role, historians say, also contributed to its neglect in the financing bonanza that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. While other law enforcement agencies like the F.B.I. have benefited from greatly increased budgets and staffing, the A.T.F.’s budget has remained largely stagnant, increasing to about $1.1 billion in the 2012 fiscal year from just over $850 million a decade ago.

The bureau’s tracing center performed 344,447 gun traces in the 2012 fiscal year, but its staffing is no higher than it was in 2004, according to its chief, Charles Houser. Still, he added, the center manages to complete urgent traces in about an hour, and routine traces are done within several days.

The distrust between the A.T.F. and gun rights groups is longstanding. The bitterness runs so deep that some critics of the agency are still angry about events from more than 40 years ago. Alan Gottlieb, the founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, cited a 1971 case in which A.T.F. agents raided the apartment of Ken Ballew in Silver Spring, Md., in the belief that he was stockpiling unregistered grenades. Agents found a cache of weapons, according to a lawsuit filed in the case, and Mr. Ballew was shot in the head after pointing a revolver in the agents’ direction.

The 1992 siege of Ruby Ridge in Idaho and the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Tex., are also sore points, Mr. Gottlieb said.

“Waco is not something that made us feel warm and fuzzy about A.T.F.,” he said.

Mr. Gottlieb said the “low point” came with the bungled gun trafficking investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious, in which A.T.F. agents, in an effort to trace guns to a network based in Arizona, did not quickly intervene as the weapons were smuggled over the border to Mexico. Last Wednesday, in a development that may inflame the controversy further, Mr. Grassley sent letters to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General demanding an investigation and requesting more information about why a gun bought by an A.T.F. agent involved in Operation Fast and Furious was found at the scene of a homicide in Mexico.

Advertisement
Continue reading the main story

Advertisement
Continue reading the main story

Marc Willis, a spokesman for the A.T.F., said the bureau could not comment on continuing investigations.

The bureau’s acting director, B. Todd Jones, who was installed in the summer of 2011 to revamp the agency after the trafficking investigation, has said he has increased oversight and has carried out changes recommended by the inspector general in a report in September.

Yet law enforcement officials and criminal justice experts who would like the A.T.F. to have greater latitude in fighting crime say its effectiveness in reducing gun violence is still hampered by a thicket of laws that limit the information it can obtain and constrain its day-to-day functioning.

The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, for example, prohibits A.T.F. agents from making more than one unannounced inspection per year of licensed gun dealers. The law also reduced the falsification of records by dealers to a misdemeanor and put in place vague language defining what it meant to “engage in business” without a dealer’s license.

Both provisions, said William J. Vizzard, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento, and a former A.T.F. special agent, made it more difficult for the bureau to go after gun sellers who broke the law.

The so-called Tiahrt amendments — named for Todd Tiahrt, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, and first attached as riders to appropriations bills in 2003 and 2004 — limited the A.T.F.’s ability to share tracing information on firearms linked to crimes with local and state law enforcement agencies and with the public. Those restrictions have been loosened in subsequent versions of the amendments. But under the most recent Tiahrt amendment, adopted in 2010, the A.T.F. still cannot release anything but aggregate data to the public. The amendment still prohibits the bureau from using tracing data in some legal proceedings to suspend or revoke a dealer’s license, and it requires that records of background checks of gun buyers be destroyed within 24 hours of approval. Advocates of tighter regulation say this makes it harder to identify dealers who falsify records or buyers who make “straw” purchases for others.

Mr. Gottlieb said the Tiahrt amendment protected data “from people who are anti-gun rights who want to manipulate things” to bolster support for gun regulation.

Congress has long resisted the idea of a central transaction database.

David Kopel, a lawyer and the Second Amendment project director at the Independence Institute, a research group concerned with individual choice, said Congress was aware that a registry could be misused. “We don’t have an automated database of everybody who’s had an abortion or of anyone who owns controversial books,” he said.

But Mr. Bealefeld, the former Baltimore commissioner, said the notion that a central database would create “some Orwellian Big Brother oversight that’s going to monitor target shooters and hunters and sneak into their houses in the dead of night to steal their rifles and their pistols” was “more fiction than reality.”

“I’ve hunted since I was 7 years old,” he said, “and I don’t live in fear that anyone’s going to come and take my hunting rifles.”

 

Again, I'm not against all restrictions, I think that you could set up a system by which people with documented mental health concerns are prohibited from owning firearms without it being a problem. Of course you'd also have to set up a system for those people to fight the diagnosis and reclaim their rights, but if you did then it would be just fine.

Your characterization of the 2nd amendment is flat out inaccurate though. It's not a right merely for collective security, but for individual security as well.

Also, when it comes to magazine capacity, that's just a feel good move that wouldn't make any significant difference whatsoever. More than half of the total gun violence incidents are with hand guns....large capacity magazines would make no difference whatsoever in those cases.

Really the backlash against "assault rifles" and high capacity magazines is just a knee jerk response to the relatively few incidents involving those weapons. In fact, knives are used in MANY times more murders every year than assault weapons.

 

This has to be the reason for the address tonight. Calling ISIS the JV team, saying they are contained, saying workplace violence makes the WH look clueless.

Tonight is damage control.

 

ATW, I never denied it was an act of terrorism. It clearly was.

I simply said I didn't know enough to exclude the guy's personal relationship with this place as a factor as well. Either way, it still looks like a clear-cut terrorism case, motivated by an extremist, militant Islamic ideology.

 

San Bernadino shooter's father tells Italian daily his son supported ISIS, obsessed over Israel

The father of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook says he was aware that his son supported ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq in Syria) and shared the ideology of its leader, in an interview with the Sunday edition of Italy's La Stampa daily.

"My son said that he shared (ISIS leader Abu Bakr) Al Baghdadi's ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State," said Syed Farook. "He was also obsessed with Israel."

"I told him he had to stay calm and be patient because in two years Israel will not exist any more. Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China and America don't want Jews there any more. They are going to bring the Jews back to Ukraine," he told the Italian newspaper's US correspondent Paolo Mastrolilli.

He said he told his son, who is suspected of carrying out the mass shooting that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California last week: "What is the point of fighting? We have already done it and we lost. Israel is not to be fought with weapons, but with politics. But he did not listen to me, he was obsessed."

http://www.straitstimes.com/world/u...says-his-son-supported-isis-in-interview-with

Well, we have a few people here (e.g. glynch, CometsWin, Exiled, Hydhypedplaya, adeelsiddiqui, Mathloom, to name a few) who are obsessed with Israel as well, and hate it.

The interesting thing here is how much the father represents mainstream Muslims - he is not as extremist as his son, but to have Israel and Jews as the enemy is pretty much part of the identity of most Muslims, even the so-called moderate ones.

And that, my friends, is the fertile soil people like this murderer are grown on.

I am pro-Israel and its right to exist. The people who demonize it make people like this shooter possible.

 

Well color me surprised.

You know the same people who are obsessed over Palestinians being "oppressed" by Israel would never show the same sympathy for the Kurds. Do you know why??? Because the people Kurds are fighting are muslims, plain and simple.

 

I hope you know that the Kurds are Sunni Muslim.