Gun Ownership
Category archives for Gun Ownership
Senator Kelly Ayotte: Going down in flames
Posted by Greg Laden on May 1, 2013 Hey, guess what? It turns out that if 90% of the people want something, and it is the only right thing to do, and not doing it not only “not the right thing” but it is also an abysmally horrid, insensitive, immoral, and boneheaded thing to do, that YOU LOSE. Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte of…
Remarks on the Senate’s Failure to Legislate (gun background checks)
Posted by Greg Laden on April 18, 2013 
The following video shows remarks by various individuals including President Obama on the shameful behavior of the US Senate in relation to a bill increasing the scope of background checks on individuals who plan to purchase firearms in the United States. Go HERE to pick up a nice Facebook Meme and engage in other social…
An Armed Guard, or a Big Mac, in Every School….
Posted by Greg Laden on April 3, 2013 … would not have helped at Sandy Hook … the armed guards would have been the fist to be killed … or at any of the other places where there have been mass shootings with armed guards present or very near by. Also, many, many schools already have a “school resource officer” on duty. In…
Gun Ownership is Way Down in the US
Posted by Greg Laden on March 10, 2013 
Gun ownership rates in the US have been declining in recent decades. The National Rifle Association has started to produce denialist rhetoric to obscure this well documented fact. One of the reasons there is less gun ownership is because of changes in the demography of the US population; Angry white men whose recent ancestors were…
Today’s gun question:
Posted by Greg Laden on February 3, 2013 Should we be complete morons and force our 6 year old children, by state law, to become gun nuts? Here’s one view: Here’s another view (trigger warning):
All kinds of stuff about guns and gun control
Posted by Greg Laden on January 22, 2013 For starters, I’ve put a bunch of videos including a must see by Jon Steward and another must see by Melissa Harris-Perry HERE. Following is a veritable carnival of topical and timely posts, stories, and sites: Warning shot: Gun violence lands US lowest life expectancy among rich nations Widespread gun ownership and lax firearms controls…
A little gun math
Posted by Greg Laden on January 19, 2013 As you know, I often mention reports from the Ohh Shoot blog, which chronicles the virtually daily instances of someone doing something accidental with a gun and the associated serious wounding or killing of one or more other individuals. These events are not part of the large number of suicides using guns that happen every…
Happy Gun Appreciation Day!
Posted by Greg Laden on January 19, 2013 
Happy Gun Appreciation Day! Let’s spend a little time to appreciate guns. Because this is the very first Gun Appreciation Day! I’m not sure why we’ve never had a Gun Appreciation Day before, but now that we have one let’s celebrate with a review of the last month’s interesting stories about guns! Yay! For completeness,…
Suicide (and sometimes murder) on the Gun Range
Posted by Greg Laden on January 17, 2013 
Sometimes, a person shows up at a gun range, checks out a gun ostensibly to use in target practice on the range, but instead uses the gun to commit suicide. In one case not long ago, a woman brought her teenage son to the range, and checked out two pistols. They took turn shooting for…
23 Steps Toward Reducing Gun Violence
Posted by Greg Laden on January 16, 2013 President Barack Obama has signed 23 Executive Orders intended to reduce gun violence in the United States. This alone will not be sufficient–Congress must pass new laws to address this problem as well, and the citizens of the united states have to make some cultural adjustments–but it is a start. Republican Tea Party Congressman Steve…
The Irony of the Projectile
Posted by Greg Laden on January 4, 2013 
The evidence from palaeoanthropology suggests that in the past humans were about the stature they are now, with more sexual dimporphism than now, with similar or larger brains than they have now, and used technology at the same level of sophistication as many later humans. Scientists argue over the degree to which modern day language…
Unpack this, NRA (trigger warning)
Posted by Greg Laden on December 21, 2012 Below the fold is a description from Wikipedia of the Red Lake School Shooting. Consider the details in relation to issues of gun ownership, safety, school security, and whatever other issues it brings to mind. Warning, this is graphic and horrid.
Gun Nuts Stay Home: No Teachers or Staff With Guns in Schools!
Posted by Greg Laden on December 19, 2012 
The gun nuts did not waste much time after the brutal slaying of 20 six year olds, some teachers, a principal, and some others at a school in Newtown Connecticut to start suggesting that everything would have been fine if only the teachers were armed. And now, after more days have gone by, it seems…
Don’t be pessimistic about changing gun laws
Posted by Greg Laden on December 18, 2012 A handful of us in the science-skepticism-secularism blogosphere have been saying roughly the same things for a few years now about gun ownership, regulation, and safety. (Here’s 67 posts of mine on this topic. Oh, and here’s another 60 on a different blog.) While we were busy with this issue as well as other pet…
Sandy Hook: Their Horror, Our Country, Your Guns.
Posted by Greg Laden on December 17, 2012 Let me start with this. People talking about Sandy Hook need to stop saying that “20 children between the ages of 5 and 10 were killed.” That is technically true but misses an enormously important point and indicates that you really haven’t thought this through. All of the children who were killed were born between…
Guns Ownership and Control: Newtown is one more last straw in a series of many
Posted by Greg Laden on December 15, 2012 
I have been writing about this topic for years. Lately, I have been ignoring it. Last few massacres, I didn’t say or do anything. I think Gabby Gifford’s shooting was a last straw for me; I became too disgusted with our situation and I became too disheartened with the number of people who require that…
Mentally Ill, Criminals, Obama, Olivia, Guns
Posted by Greg Laden on October 22, 2012 I am uncomfortable discussing ableism and related topics linked to mental illness for several reasons. One is that I don’t know enough about it to ask people to pay a lot of attention to what I have to say. Despite the whingings of my many detractors, I actually do tend to know a fair amount…
Settling Conflicts: Guns and Homeschooling
Posted by Greg Laden on May 13, 2012 There was a time when I blogged regularly about homeschooling, though I have not done so in a long time. A while back I started to blog about gun ownership. I engaged in each of these topics for similar reasons. I have a political and professional interest in homeschooling (as a science educator) and a…
Accidental v. Intentional, Fatal v. Non-Fatal, Gunshots, 2000-2007 in the USA
Posted by Greg Laden on April 24, 2011 From 2000 through 2007, inclusively, approximately 780 thousand people in the United States took a bullet. Most of them were wounded by another person in an act of violence. A fairly large number were wounded by accident, killed by a bad guy, or killed themselves. A small number died in a shooting accident, tried to…
Deaths from firearms in the US, 2000-2007
Posted by Greg Laden on April 24, 2011 Because you wanted to know: First observation: Far more men are killed in this manner than women. Boys with their toys. Presumably, women are being killed by something else. Second observation: There may be a trend towards decreasing rates of death by accident involving firearms. This could be a simple increase in the effectiveness of…
Injuries and Deaths from Firearms in the US in 2000
Posted by Greg Laden on April 24, 2011 Since this came up I thought you might like to see the data. NOTES: It would be interesting to look at the ratio of fatal to non fatal over long time spans (before/during/after transition to high quality trauma treatment in the US); I would like to see good data breaking down suicide by age that…
“We’ve grown up around firearms. We know the safety and we practice it.”
Posted by Greg Laden on April 24, 2011 Yet the 11-year old girl lies in a coma, the bullet removed from her brain on Friday, with a poor prognosis.
Fear, Loathing and Misogyny in the Upper Midwest
Posted by Greg Laden on February 18, 2011 Two local stories you might be interested in from my neighborhood. First, a girl high school wrestler advanced yesterday but was beaten today in the state tournament in Iowa. Why is this interesting? Well, first, this is not a girl wrestling on a girl’s team. It is a girl wrestling on the regular team which…
If you do something wrong, you should be fired or killed.
Posted by Greg Laden on February 10, 2011 If you do something wrong, you should be fired or killed. Whether you should be fired or killed has nothing to do with what you did, but rather, the context in which you did it. If you do something wrong in the presence of a legal gun owner with a Conceal Carry permit and a…
Elderly Minnesota Couple Fends Off Home Invader With Gun
Posted by Greg Laden on February 3, 2011 … they weren’t scared, but the guy trying to rob them sure was. … Wally was sitting at his computer when the man entered his home. “He just stood there in that doorway, standing there with a shovel,” said Wally. “I thought, ‘what the hell is going on here?’ I thought it was a joke!”…
I See Dead People Everywhere
Posted by Greg Laden on January 24, 2011 And most of them are boys with their toys
14 year old kills most of his family with a butter knife and a small piece of twine
Posted by Greg Laden on January 18, 2011 Since he is a minor his name has been withheld. The 14 year old boy in South Carolina called the police to tell them that he had attacked his father, his grandmother, and his great aunt. He told the police he’d be there when they arrived, possibly waiting outside. When police appeared on the scene…
Should Gabby Gifford have been packing heat?
Posted by Greg Laden on January 11, 2011 Gun nuts in the Arizona State Legislature have introduced what they insensitively and stupidly call the Gifford-Zimmerman act, named after the wounded Congresswoman Gifford and her slain aid, requiring the state to train politicians and their staff as part of the process of arming them. Read about that stupid idea as well as a very…
Violent words can lead to violent actions: Joyce Kaufman
Posted by Greg Laden on January 9, 2011 The racist tirade, which shockingly invokes the words of Margaret Meade, starts around six minutes into this violence inciting speech by a talk show host I’d never heard of before.
Is being armed the best way to thwart an armed robbery?
Posted by Greg Laden on January 6, 2011 This was just across the river from me: It looks like this may have stopped a local crime wave of armed robberies in the area. More inf here. In contrast, when this couple was burglarized, there was nothing they could have done to stop it: A 28-year-old man is facing burglary charges after police say…
, which is now available for the 
