otohara

otohara's Journal

April 21, 2013

Gun Folks Think It's Funny Two Were Shot @420 Rally

a sampling of posts at The Denver Post:

Stupid hippies. The waste product of society. Too bad more didn't go down.

This is what you get from the pot crowd. It's all just peace, love, togetherness, until reality hits. Nobody saw anything; anything goes. No responsibility when you're getting high. It's off to the planets. Getting stoned, not looking for a job, not caring about anything is such a cool thing to teach your kids, right? Really?

never seen stoners move so fast...

Pot smokers are just as peaceful as Muslims.

All the pot heads have something in common w/Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a fellow pot head and jihadist.

Pavement apes, little great leaders, if Obama had a son it would look like this. Need I say more?

Pot smokers are just as peaceful as Muslims.

It says the suspected shooters are two black men, one wearing a hoodie.
If Obama had a son . .

http://neighbors.denverpost.com/viewtopic.php?f=230&t=23070899&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

April 21, 2013

Crowd @ 420 Rally Terrorized By Gun Shots- 2 Shot

DENVER - Police are searching for the two men who fired shots during the 4/20 pot rally in Denver's Civic Center Park on Saturday, injuring three people and causing thousands of festival-goers enjoying the jovial atmosphere to flee in panic.

A man and woman, between 20 and 30 years old, were shot in the leg, Denver police tweeted. Their injuries were considered non life-threatening.

A third victim, a juvenile, was grazed by a bullet and walked into a nearby hospital, police tweeted.

A dog, belonging to one of the victims, also appeared to have been grazed or shot and was seen limping from the scene. Several other people suffered some minor injuries from running or being trampled, according to witnesses who talked to 7NEWS.

Police asked those attending the rally for possible photo or video of the shootings, and had no immediate motive for the shooting.

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/marijuana/shots-fired-at-denver-420-rally-in-denvers-civic-center-park

Don't forget to watch the video of thousands of people running for their lives.

April 21, 2013

420 Rally Video - Shots Fired, People Running For Their Lives

Click on the video titled AIRTRACKER7
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/video

4/20/13 - 5pm - Raw AIRTRACKER7 video over shots fired at 420 rally. At the beginning you can see people running away. Later, you can see officers responding to an apparent victim.

I love that President Obama says, we won't be terrorized, but everyday somebody or many bodies are terrorized by a gun.

April 18, 2013

Research Shows That The Mere Presence of Weapons Increases Aggression.

So much for "Guns Make For A Polite Society"

The "Weapons Effect"

“Guns not only permit violence, they can stimulate it as well. The finger pulls the trigger, but the trigger may also be pulling the finger.”

—Leonard Berkowitz, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin

In 1967, Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage conducted a fascinating study.[1] First, participants were angered by a person pretending to be another participant (called a confederate). Next, participants were seated at a table that had a shotgun and a revolver on it—or, in the control condition, badminton racquets and shuttlecocks. The items on the table were described as part of another experiment that the researcher had supposedly forgotten to put away. The participant was supposed to decide what level of electric shock to deliver to the confederate who had angered them, and the electric shocks were used to measure aggression. The experimenter told participants to ignore the items on the table, but apparently they could not. Participants who saw the guns were more aggressive than were participants who saw the sports items. This effect was dubbed the “weapons effect.”

The weapons effect occurs outside of the lab too. In one field experiment,[2] a confederate driving a pickup truck purposely remained stalled at a traffic light for 12 seconds to see whether the motorists trapped behind him would honk their horns (the measure of aggression). The truck contained either a .303-calibre military rifle in a gun rack mounted to the rear window, or no rifle. The results showed that motorists were more likely to honk their horns if the confederate was driving a truck with a gun visible in the rear window than if the confederate was driving the same truck but with no gun. What is amazing about this study is that you would have to be pretty stupid to honk your horn at a driver with a military rifle in his truck—if you were thinking, that is! But people were not thinking—they just naturally honked their horns after seeing the gun. The mere presence of a weapon automatically triggered aggression.

Research also shows that drivers with guns in their cars more likely to drive aggressively.[3] A nationally representative sample of over 2,000 American drivers found that those who had a gun in the car were significantly more likely to make obscene gestures at other motorists (23% vs. 16%), aggressively follow another vehicle too closely (14% vs. 8%), or both (6.3% vs. 2.8%), even after controlling for many other factors related to aggressive driving (e.g., gender, age, urbanization, census region, driving frequency).

Weapons can even make people aggressive when they cannot “see” them because they are presented subliminally. In a study conducted in our lab[4], for example, participants who were exposed to weapon words (e.g., gun) for only 17/100 second were more aggressive afterwards than were participants exposed to nonaggressive words (e.g., water).http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/get-psyched/201301/the-weapons-effect

April 18, 2013

Rep John Lewis on failure of gun control in the Senate

April 18, 2013

Effects of Gun Violence on Children and Youth

Exposure to gun violence can traumatize children and youth not just physically, but emotionally as well. Studies have documented that young people exposed to gun violence experience lasting emotional scars. Some children may develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can affect brain development. The psychological trauma of gun violence may lead some children to arm themselves "for protection," or desensitize them so that they feel less hesitation about engaging in violent acts.

Psychological Impacts Associated with Exposure to Gun Violence

Young people who are exposed to gun violence may experience negative psychological impacts in both the short and long term. For example, a recent study of rural third- through eighth-graders indicated that children exposed to gun violence reported significantly higher levels of anger, withdrawal, and posttraumatic stress.5 The problem is exacerbated when youth get caught in a cycle of violence: Those who witnessed at least one incidence of gun violence reported significantly greater exposure to other types of violence, higher levels of aggression, and less parental monitoring than their peers.5 Exposure to gun violence also can desensitize youth to the effects of violence and increase the likelihood that they will use violence as a means of resolving problems or expressing emotions.

Sleep Distortion and Withdrawal

Research shows that exposure to violence can cause intrusive thoughts about the traumatic event and sleep disturbances.6 Therefore, it is not surprising that children and youth exposed to gun violence commonly experience difficulty concentrating in the classroom, declines in academic performance, and lower educational and career aspirations.7,8 Other outcomes associated with exposure to violent trauma include increased delinquency, risky sexual behaviors, and substance abuse.7,8

http://futureofchildren.org/publications/journals/article/index.xml?journalid=42&articleid=166§ionid=1068

Violent Events Have Long-Term Effects on Children

If the struggling economy hasn't made it tough enough to keep food on the table and clothes on the family, and if the hectic pace in Los Angeles hasn't made all of us more than a little agitated, what ought we be telling our youngsters to try to calm them and offer them some kind of sense and solace about the continuing violence that dominates the headlines?

Yes, it's true that the number of violent crimes in our country may be nearing historic lows, but parents still must look into their children's anxious faces, comfort them about bad dreams and seek to explain some inexplicable highly publicized recent incidents.

What to do with or say to your kids after a 24-year-old gunman dresses up in SWAT gear and opens fire on a packed Aurora, Colo., theater audience at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, a mass homicide in which a dozen people, including a 6-year-old girl, die and 58 others are wounded?

How do you start to talk about a white supremacist who guns down seven people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, or the shoot-out near Texas A&M that left three dead or the gunplay on the streets of New York near the Empire State building, a crime that left a gunman dead and nine wounded?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-d-braunstein-md/children-ptsd_b_1901651.html

Children’s Defense Fund Highlights Effects of Gun Violence on Children
Data analysis: More preschool kids dead from gunfire than police

In a report released this month, the Children’s Defense Fund has analyzed recent national data on gunfire deaths and produced some alarming figures on child casualties.

The report also criticizes a wave of new state gun-rights laws that the Washington D.C.-based advocacy group argues put children in ever more peril.

The nonprofit advocacy group dedicated its report, “Protect Kids, Not Guns 2012,” to Florida teen Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead in February by a neighborhood watch volunteer.

George Zimmerman, 28, disregarded police advice and followed the unarmed Martin, 17, because Zimmerman thought the boy looked “suspicious.” Zimmerman killed Martin, who was walking to his father’s girlfriend’s home, during a confrontation and claims he acted in self-defense.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/03/27/8536/childrens-defense-fund-report-kids-gun-deaths-new-gun-laws

April 10, 2013