StrangeSox

More grifting Lawsuit: HUD Official ‘Demoted’ for Restricting Ben Carson’s Expensive Office Makeover

Adam Hoge @AdamHoge 5m #Bears release Pernell McPhee and Quintin Demps.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 26, 2018 -> 10:39 AM) I love how you apply your leftist talking points to everything, even when it hasn't been said. I'm not sure what the "leftist talking point" there is. What specifically do you object to? Should we not consider the negative impacts of adding more guns? Should we not recognize that schools aren't the only places where mass shootings happen? Should we not do things to prevent mass shootings from happening in the first place rather than increasing the armed response to them? e: another thing to keep in mind with the Arm Teachers/Everyone! idea: the NYPD's accuracy rate in police shootings is something like 17%. What do you imagine the armed teacher's accuracy is going to be as they're receiving the biggest adrenaline dump of their lives?

I can simultaneously think that the FBI sucks at their job in general and doesn't pay nearly enough attention to domestic terrorists for ~reasons~ while also thinking that arming teachers (or letting them carry their own guns) is a disastrous and frankly disgusting response to mass shootings. I don't want our schools to be armed camps as if we're in a war zone. Our society should be better than that. We should actually do something to prevent these situations before they happen rather than dumping even more guns into everyone's lives. Arming teachers against people who are willing to kill and be kill, as most mass shooters are, means that maybe only a dozen children are murdered instead of 17 or 24. It's a purely reactive measure, and if you're actually serious, you need to consider all of the ramifications of "MORE GUNS" beyond just stopping a mass shooter event. And, again, it does absolutely f***-all to respond to mass shootings and gun violence in general that happens anywhere else but schools.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 26, 2018 -> 10:15 AM) Unless the FBI and police are who you are calling victims here, you are full of it. That's honestly how I see a post-"arm-the-teachers!"-school-shooting playing out. I don't think you'd do that, but I think that'd be the excuse a lot of people who oppose ever doing anything about restricting guns would turn to. It's not like we don't see that playing out in similar responsibility-offloading situations again and again. What, nobody in the school was armed? Well, we gave Mr. Dead Teacher the opportunity to arm himself to protect him and his students. He must not have valued their lives very much! Let's arm more teachers and talk about Mental Illness, something that's definitely relevant in all mass shootings and will actually have good faith proposals for addressing. QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 26, 2018 -> 10:13 AM) Law enforcement failed these children literally at every single stage of this incident. We keep getting told to report, report, report. All of the reporting here worked out to 17 kids dead. Kind of hard to have faith in that system that seems to be taking agents buying lunches for families of potential NBA players more seriously than essentially domestic terrorism. The FBI is really good at entrapping people in schemes that the FBI cooks up in the first place. Not so great at proactively finding and stopping people plotting on their own.

Again, It's Not Just Schools All of the potentially dumb and awful things that could result from turning every school into a heavily armed prison camp aside, it still only addresses one particular location for a mass shooting. It does nothing about work place shootings, concerts, churches, night clubs or any other public venue.

It's a great way of dumping the responsibility on the potential victims.

QUOTE (New Era on South Side @ Feb 25, 2018 -> 10:10 PM) Thanks for the post. I read somewhere that Scott Drury breaks with his party and is anti-Madigan so I’m thinking of voting with him. I figured Biss might be better to vote for than Pritzker or Rauner but I don’t know if Pritzker would break with Madigan on policy direction or not. I'm not sure how much being pro- or anti-Madigan matters for the AG position since it's not really involved in the legislative process the way Reps, Senators and Governors are. Pritzker hasn't really been critical of Madigan so far. Biss has been slightly more critical, but he's running more of a "fight against the wealthy billionaire interests" campaign than an anti-Madigan one in the primaries. QUOTE (New Era on South Side @ Feb 26, 2018 -> 07:41 AM) Well, he’s 75. Having Madigan in as the speaker is one factor, but the Illinois constitution also restricts doing anything as well. Hopefully that can get amended and there’s a way to ensure new employees, current employees and retirees of the teacher’s retirement system can get some sort of retirement benefit, but with age cutbacks and with a greater emphasis on 403(b)s while still contributing to the pension system. Honestly, probably need another constitutional convention so we can fix the possible tax structures as well.

Rauner is not really friendly with Trump or pushing policies like that. He came in to office with the idea that he could just get his policy preferences done completely with little or no compromise, and that helped lead to that record period of no budget and all the associated problems. He's recently been trying to avoid any responsibility ("I'm not in charge!"), and his only political play seems to be too whine about madigan (though that's true of a lot of Illinois politicians). He could still win in November, but he's not particularly popular and turnout is expected to favor Democrats nationally, and races like the one against Roskam could get more motivated Dems that'd vote against Rauner too. AG is important and there are eight Democrats running for the open spot. Two Republicans I think. Democrat machine politics are heavily controlled by madigan, and Rauner essentially owns the state GOP with his personal wealth. It's a bad situation all around as far as that goes. Make sure to vote both in the primaries next month and then the general!

Or maybe the solution isn't "more guns!" We're also talking about schools, but that's not the only place mass shootings happen.

The FBI seriously f***ed up here. Transcript of the call alerting them to Cruz. https://t.co/B82y7d4sJE

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 04:51 PM) armed SRO never entered the building, waited outside https://twitter.com/passantino/status/966799616602615808 The three other Broward cops who arrived on scene first also waited outside. Post-Columbine, the standard procedure is to enter immediately rather than form a perimeter because odds are very high they're just trying to kill, not take hostages.

The CNN 'scripted' question 'scandal' https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-w...m=.15d932856a30

The NRA is very effective at mobilizing voters. That's a lot more important than any of their direct campaign contributions.

Gothamist is coming back as part of public radio station WNYC https://twitter.com/Gothamist/status/967063828658835456

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 04:21 PM) Missouri Gov. Greitens is indicted over his mistress-revenge-porn scandal on invasion of privacy charges. https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/poli...arge/365050002/ The Missouri GOP official statement today is blaming...George Soros and (((St. Louis Liberals))) https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/...073286478811136

ProPublica obtained the chat logs of Atomwaffen, a notorious white supremacist group. When Samuel Woodward was charged with killing 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein last month in California, other Atomwaffen members cheered the death, concerned only that the group’s cover might have been blown. Long piece looking at a particularly violent and rising Neo-Nazi group that's already been linked to multiple murders. This is just the intro: Continues a deep dive into the organization and some of its members and their violent actions. edit: can a mod please edit the title? Inside Atomwaffen As It Celebrates a Member for Allegedly Killing a Gay Jewish College Student edit2: whoops forgot the article link!

Twitter thread with a bunch of links to contemporary gun violence research https://twitter.com/jenniferdoleac/status/915932641211375616 Based on the abstracts: 1) gun shows don't increase local violent crime rates 2) strengthened self defense laws don't decrease burglary, robbery, or aggravated assault. they do increase murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rates. 3) marginal externalized social cost of gun ownership is $100-$1800 per household 4) Right-to-carry laws: a very mixed bag, increasing some crimes, decreasing others, and varying over time 5) Right-to-carry laws: higher aggregate violent crime rates with increasing rates over time. 10 years after RTC implementation, violent crime is estimated to be 13-15% higher than it would have otherwise been. 6) Curfews can increase gunfire incidents by 150%, but in contrast voluntary reports of gun crimes (911 calls) indicate reductions in gun violence. 7) Child access prevention laws reduce gun carry rates by 13% and rates of students reporting being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property by 18%. They promote a safer school environment but appear to have no impact school deaths 8) Banning juvenile gun possession does not appear to have the intended effect 9) The "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis is bunk (John Lott was the primary pusher of this and has been shown over and over to be a hack if not outright fraud) 10) gun availability at home increases rates of juvenile crime 11) 3-day handgun purchase delays provide a small decrease in suicide rates (3%) but not overall homicide rates 12) The underground gun market in chicago has high transaction costs 13) Rates of gun ownership positively correlate with rates of homicide but show less impact on other crime categories 14) A "disease" model for urban gun violence doesn't really hold up--gun violence doesn't really "spread" 15) Demand shock (e.g. after Sandy Hook, gun purchases increased in many states) positively correlates to increased murder rates, especially for women. Delays for purchasing firearms could have saved and estimated 98 people per month in 2013.

armed SRO never entered the building, waited outside https://twitter.com/passantino/status/966799616602615808

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 04:14 PM) Gotta remember that CPAC is a collection of the worst of the worst. Vice President was there. So was chief White House Counsel. DoE Sec. Perry DoEd Sec. DeVos Kellyanne Conway FCC Chairman Ajit Pai SBA Sec. Linda McMahon That's pretty strong White House representation. This is mainstream conservatism now. This is the GOP.

Missouri Gov. Greitens is indicted over his mistress-revenge-porn scandal on invasion of privacy charges. https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/poli...arge/365050002/

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 21, 2018 -> 02:29 PM) Additional charges against Manafort and Gates https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/fe...tion-fbi-latest 32 additional indictments for tax and bank fraud the emails in the charging documents read like taxcrimes.pdf

Explosives that can "wound or kill hundreds of people" are bigger and more complicated than some shrapnel sparkler bombs. e: that doesn't mean that they're impossible to pull off, obviously. Both the Boston Marathon and the Ariana Grande bombings were pressure-cooker shrapnel bombs. But it still takes additional knowledge, skills and time to be able to successfully carry out an attack like that. It's more difficult than just shooting someone with store-bought guns. The opportunities don't present themselves as easily.

Ben Shapiro busy giving a speech at CPAC reiterating just how much he loathes trans people and how Hollywood makes movies about rich white businessmen organizing terror attacks but never about Muslim terrorists. A Serious Intellectual.