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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBoulder - Gun rights advocates planning huge high capacity magazine giveaway in Colorado
Boulder Police say the giveaway is legal, even if it's not popular with everyone. Savant Suykerbuyk is the event organizer. If his event goes as planned, he'll be giving away hundreds of high capacity gun magazines. "That's one of the great things about this nation, is that -- if you really care about something, you can make a stand for it. No matter what it is," said Suykerbuyk.
Suykerbuyk is stepping straight into the cross-hairs of the gun rights debate. He's organizing a massive gun magazine giveaway in the parking lot of a Boulder gun store in two weeks on Sat., March 16. "Donation, fundraiser, giant give-away," said Suykerbuyk. "It's all of the above." He's already received donations from as far away as Pennsylvania.
"Is it legal? asked 7NEWS. "It is completely legal. We're not distributing ammunition. We're not distributing firearms. The only thing that we're distributing is the one little tiny inanimate object itself -- the magazine," said Suykerbuyk. The give-away is legal because the magazines are not for sale. But, the event certainly has its detractors. In particular, the sponsor of the bill that would ban high capacity magazines. "Why in the world does someone need to have a high capacity magazine?" said state Rep. Rhonda Fields, the sponsor of the bill that aims to ban high capacity magazines. "When we know what that is going to do is someone is going to be able to kill a high amount of people in a short amount of time."
"I don't see anybody explaining why they're picking a certain number," said Suykerbuyk. "Why 15 makes us safer, or 10, or New York's seven makes us safer, or Denver's current 20?" "I absolutely do understand the other side," said Suykerbuyk. "And there are people that have opposing opinions, and I totally respect those opinions. I'm just as upset over the violence that's happening, but I feel like maybe they're taking it out in the wrong place. You're legislating the law-abiding, you're not legislating criminals."
Organizers will be asking participants to make a small donation to Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. Police say brandishing weapons at the event will not be tolerated, but the magazine give-away is legal under Colorado law.
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maxsolomon
(38,721 posts)Until they're not.
James Holmes
Ian Stawicki
Jared Laughner
All law-abiding. All crazy.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)and relevance to the serious problem of trying to figure out who are potentially dangerous to themselves and others and who therefore really should not have guns in their possession...even guns that they may have previously purchased legally.
Crazy is a street term with virtually no value to diagnosis or the prediction or prevention of criminal violence by the mentally ill. And when the phrase criminal violence is used it includes simple assault/battery like bar fights through domestic violence to homicides, including simple and mass shootings.
The link is to a report on a study published on February 12th 2013.
The article starts off straight away with terms that the experts think are much more relevant and which won't leave you using a useless word like "crazy" that taints opinion with language more appropriate for stigmatizers and bigots.
----------------------
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/disaster-psychiatry/content/article/10168/2127900
Mass Shootings: Research and Lessons
By James L. Knoll, MD | February 12, 2013
While the existing research is hampered by methodological problems, certain psychosocial factors are consistent (eg, problems with self-esteem, a persecutory/paranoid outlook, narcissism, depression, suicidality, social rejection). The problem of focusing too heavily on these factors is that too many false positives result. The reality is that “no consistent and reliable profile of school shooters exists, and most researchers and clinicians would agree that predicting violent behavior is a slippery slope.”1
In an excellent review of school-associated homicides in kindergarten through 12th grade, Flannery and colleagues1 noted that “a need remains for researchers and commentators to examine other factors beyond the individual that may explain school shootings, including culture, the social ecology of the school, or other community factors.” For example, there are differences between urban and suburban school shootings—some acts are related to threats to the perpetrator’s social identity.2,3 Suburban and rural shootings may be characterized by social alienation, whereas urban incidents may be associated with a general inner-city tolerance of violence. The issues of social marginalization and familial dysfunction are other common findings.4
Lindberg and colleagues5 noted that peer groups played a role in facilitating school shootings; they sought to study whether adolescents who had expressed an online threat of a school massacre differed from those who had expressed a threat offline. Those who expressed their threats online were more likely to have been bullied and depressed, more often made threats with clear intention, and more often were prepared. In contrast, those who expressed threats offline were more likely to have problems with impulse control and to have shown delinquent behavior before the threats.
In another study, Lindberg and colleagues6 attempted to characterize adolescent copycats who had threatened to carry out a school massacre. A majority of these copycats were found to have a history of mental health treatment, depressive symptoms, suicidal ideas, and impulse control problems. The prevalence of pervasive developmental disorders was high.
<snip>
The assertion that severe mental illness is to be blamed for mass shootings is a distraction. In reality, research shows that “even if one assumes that the association between severe mental illness and recorded violent crime is entirely causal . . . the overall contribution of patients with severe mental illness (is a mere 5%).”7
<snip>
(the article then goes on to discuss issues including issues of self-esteem and social rejection in school shootings)
Note: edited to change brackets into parentheses, which DU uses as part of HTML code.
maxsolomon
(38,721 posts)i'll drop "crazy" & use "certain psychosocial factors are consistent (eg, problems with self-esteem, a persecutory/paranoid outlook, narcissism, depression, suicidality, social rejection)."
the 3 mass murderers i cited were all schizophrenic, but that takes longer to type than crazy. i'm lazy.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)with language associated with stigmatizers and bigots.
maxsolomon
(38,721 posts)the topic of this thread is not 'stigmatizing' the mentally ill by calling them crazy (the mentally ill people i see every day on the streets of seattle do a good job of that already). it's about distributing high-capacity magazines for free just to poke a finger in the eye of people who sincerely believe they're damaging american society.
the debate on firearms here is constantly derailed by langauge policing. if i call high-capacity magazines "clips", someone jumps down my throat. if i call a military-styled semi-automatic rifle that accepts those clips an "assault" weapon, someone jumps down my throat.
so much of our political debate gets derailed by insisting on precise terminology. i get the reason, and i recognize that you think this is vital to mental health advocacy, but at a certain point it approaches minutae.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)I am not proposing policing words.
I accept that words like 'crazy'and 'lunatic' and 'insane' are parts of common speech. True, I don't really like the chauvinistic use of 'crazy', etc, as adjectives to disparage political and rhetorical opponents, but I accept that using such words is too common to prevent.
So, I accept that everything that Congresswoman Bachmann or Rand Paul, etc says is going to be considered crazy. The GOP leadership is going to be discussed as a bunch of insane lunatics. That's the nature of the ignorant/uneducated/unsophisticated language of the streets and consequently of blogs and bulletin boards.
But,
There is something quite different about the way that 'crazy is used by Wayne LaPierre, and meme-repeaters of NRA positions, who are literally mounting a political pogrom against the mentally ill. That pogrom exploits ignorance and promotes fear. And in that pogrom protection of millions of mentally ill hangs on the meanings within "crazy, lunatic, monster' etc.
The focus of the NRA on mental illness has been reasonably argued as a distraction: a slight of hand if you will. An effort to point the blame away from the tools without which mass murderers would be much more difficult.
In that context an ambiguous 'crazy' is VERY useful to make a "guilty other" as big and as risky and obvious a target for suppression as possible.
In that sense 'crazy' and 'lunatics' and 'monster become very effective in their nebulous pointing at something misunderstood, something that seems all the more scary when is left ill-defined and free to morph according to the fearful products of imagination.
A truth is that the unconditioned risk of a mentally ill person committing a mass shooting at a school is almost identical to the risk of a licensed American gun owner committing the same crime. BOTH hover around 0.00004%.
Yet, undeniably, persons who possess guns do sometimes use them in crimes, and persons with mental illness do sometimes commit gun violence. Being able to keep the tools of destruction away from them is an objective that is completely a matter of common sense.
The gun lobby and it's lawyers play with parsing the language of the law and definitions of 'assault' and 'military style' weapons. The reason they argue about details such as the presence or absence of a bayonet mount is to find a 'work around' what would otherwise have been a banned weapon legal under previous law.
That sort of parsing really isn't the object of getting it right about mental illness.
Some mentally ill persons REALLY shouldn't be in the possession of firearms. Even those they purchase legally. But the majority (literature says is greater than 95%) of mental illnesses--which in facile laziness can be called 'craziness'--really don't contribute to gun violence. Even among diagnoses that have patterns of association with gun violence (for example depression) millions of people depressed people aren't killing themselves. And they are not killing others.
We really do need to get guns out of the hands of those who would hurt themselves and/or others. Developing within society a capacity to recognize, report, and thereby achieve intervention for such events really depends upon accurate diacritical distinctions that split apart and make distinguishable rather than lump together and cloud perception of the risky and the unrisky.
Consequently, facile use of words like 'crazy' and 'lunatic' and 'monster' associated with bigoted and uninformed speech aren't useful to a meaningful discussion.
Those words inject what could be called purposeful 'stupidity' or 'dumbing down', as is the case of Wayne LaPierre and the NRA, that confounds rather than helps resolve the problem.
Consequently, stigmatizing terms leave their user looking variously non-serious, obstructive, and/or bigoted. None of those adjectives would seem desirable within the framework of participation in a discussion of a serious problem.
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)These people are too stupid to make -- or own -- lethal weapon accessories.
The Magistrate
(96,043 posts)"If you seriously think the government is coming to take away your guns, it's high time somebody did."
one_voice
(20,043 posts)antagonize people.
You don't do this kind of shit with such a tender subject. There's been too much death recently for them to play 'one up you'. Horrible decision on their part. I would think anyone that may have been on the fence would be offended by this.
You don't do it just because you can. Stupid fuckheads.
SayWut
(153 posts)It would be fantastic to see this kind of defiance spread to other 'magazine ban' states as well.
nadinbrzezinski
(154,021 posts)
frylock
(34,825 posts)SayWut
(153 posts)Better hang on to your hats, because it's going to be an interesting ride for the next few months.
frylock
(34,825 posts)the defiance would lie in congress doing something noble for a fucking change.
Coyotl
(15,262 posts)It is only defiance if it is illegal. Are you supporting illegal activities?
Oh, and didn't you intend to post this on Free Republic. This is DU, the Democratic Underground. Read the TOS.
Moses2SandyKoufax
(1,290 posts)At Wed Mar 6, 2013, 04:30 PM you sent an alert on the following post:
Grassroots activism and protest at it's finest.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2467411
The reason for the alert was:
This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate. (See <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=aboutus#communitystandards" target="_blank">Community Standards</a>.)
You added the following comments:
Single issue, low post count gun nut who joined DU in the weeks following Sandy Hook. In this post he is supporting a company that is flaunting a gun control law being passed by a Democratic state legislature. Also equating this to the Berlin airlift.
A randomly-selected Jury of DU members completed their review of this post at Wed Mar 6, 2013, 02:49 PM, and voted 3-3 to keep it.
Thank you.
Coyotl
(15,262 posts)It can be at times, but more often than not, it can take the form of a simple "fuck you" to the powers that be; or as in this case, opposition to an over reactionary, feel good, useless law, (and possibly unconstitutional), formulated and contrived by preying on the emotions resulting from a tragic event.
de·fi·ance (d-fns)
n.
1. The act or an example of defying; bold resistance to an opposing force or authority.
2. Intentionally contemptuous behavior or attitude; readiness to contend or resist.
Oh, and didn't you intend to post this on Free Republic.
well, you might think that, but you'd be wrong.
This is DU, the Democratic Underground.
And therefore...
Lizzie Poppet
(10,164 posts)Except, of course, that's wrong...
Robb
(39,665 posts)
denverbill
(11,489 posts)frylock
(34,825 posts)Coyotl
(15,262 posts)And give them Monopoly money for donations 
TNLiberal4
(15 posts)Do it!
99Forever
(14,524 posts)... for their fellow human beings.
You Delicate Flower are such wellsprings of human compassion. Bless your hearts.
frylock
(34,825 posts)these gun fuckers continue to make the argument that limiting mag cap won't change anything, because anyone can reload in the blink of an eye. when you point out that if that is indeed the case, then why the need for 30 rd+ mag capacity if reloads are so easy, they just sit there and drool like fucking imbeciles.
Tommy_Carcetti
(44,498 posts)Biting 
Aristus
(72,187 posts)I'm sure NAMBLA uses the same arguement... 
Archae
(47,245 posts)Too many guns and too many big magazines already out there.
How would bans on certain kinds of guns and bigger magazines be enforced?
Like the way the "War On Drugs" is?
Oh that'll go over REAL well...
Right now there's a guy in Milwaukee who sprayed a crowd with an assault rifel, he needs to go to jail for a *LONG* time, evn though only two people were hurt, no one was killed.
Coyotl
(15,262 posts)to ban them.
spin
(17,493 posts)As soon as the word "ban" is mentioned, a high percentage of the 80,000,000 gun owners decide to show up at the polls to vote against any politician, local, state or national. who supports this type of gun control.
However many gun owners actually do wish to see effective laws that would limit the sale of firearms to violent criminals and those with severe mental issues. They also wish to see current laws better enforced.
I feel there is a lot of room for compromise between gun rights supporters and gun control advocates.
Unfortunately it is hard to get gun rights supporters to sit down at a table to discuss the issue when some in our party start by calling for "bans" and confiscation.
MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) didn't start its campaign against drunk drivers by trying to get a "ban" on whiskey and wine.
Marr
(20,317 posts)It's just plain in bad taste. The message that the average person takes from this is, "Ha! Fuck you and yer dead brat!".
Robb
(39,665 posts)Good luck with that.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)We're still going to ban them.
apocalypsehow
(12,751 posts)they are really going to continue to be "law abiding" or not, or act like those white restaurant owners in the South who defiantly said those "whites only" signs on their windows weren't coming down, by God, they didn't care what the law said!
You see some of that defiance in this very thread from some of our "pro gun progressives"*, and one up-thread even linking this to the Berlin airlift, one of the most repulsive and disgusting linkages of an historical event I've ever seen DU: giving starving people food is the same thing as giving assholes with Phallic Deficiency Disorder more ammunition magazines for their precious little popguns. Really some sick nonsense. 
Peter cotton
(380 posts)Someone who already has dozens of 30 round magazines can keep and use them to their heart's content. What's more, the law doesn't take effect until July 1st...so assuming that the ban goes into effect (as seems likely), there's nothing to prevent the acquisition of as many magazines of over 15 rounds (8 in the case of shotgun magazines) that one wishes to purchase until that date. I would anticipate many gun owners buying multiple magazines for guns they don't even own...yet.
Starting July 1st, the supply of high capacity magazines in Colorado becomes fixed, in theory. As a practical matter, though, there's nothing to prevent someone in Colorado from attending a gun show in another state and paying cash for magazines that are legal in that state, and then bringing them home. Even if they're found guilty of breaking this law, it's only a misdemeanor (compared to New York where it's a felony). What's more, unless they were so foolish as to admit their guilt, it would be virtually impossible to prove that they didn't own the magazines before July 1st, 2013, making the law almost impossible to enforce unless they were somehow "caught in the act" (unless it was a type of magazine that didn't exist before that date).
It will make it illegal to import high capacity magazines into the state (except for law enforcement, of course), so none of the legitimate arms dealers such as Brownells and MidwayUSA will ship them there in the future.
All in all, it's a rather weak law as such things go.
reformist2
(9,841 posts)
Llewlladdwr
(2,175 posts)when DU's anti-gun community realizes that the current crop of gun-control laws is going exactly...nowhere.