There’s been some level of mystery about just why Adam Lanza’s first victim, Nancy Lanza, had such a stock of weapons, particularly military style weapons like the .223 Bushmaster, the weapon we now know was actually used in the killings. She wasn’t just into guns. She was apparently stocked up for when the economy collapses and when everyone’s on their own with their guns.
Yeah, like that. Read More
The Connecticut vigil for the victims of Friday’s shooting is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. ET. President Obama is in attendance. Watch.
From TPM Reader JW …
I was having dinner with a childhood friend earlier this year in Texas. (I live in NYC now.) This was shortly the April tornadoes that hit the area pretty hard, and he was telling me how scary the roads were. No street lights, fallen trees, tornado sirens wailing, a sense of general panic and that spooky pre-tornado quiet. I assumed the reason he was on the road was because he was trying to get home, but then he told me that he had actually been at home when the sirens began, and left precisely because the danger seemed imminent.
From TPM Reader JS …
I’ve lived in a small rural town close to Sandy Hook for about 25 years. (We moved up from NYC, in the late ’80s, for family and job reasons.)
Although I’m a liberal Democrat, my circle of friends and acquaintances includes some right-wingers who take it as an article of faith that we’re approaching an economic and societal collapse. I have a pretty good window into that world.
According to the Post, in his last discussion with President Obama, offered a half-way proposal on upper income tax hikes and offered to forego any debt-ceiling hostage taking for one year.
President Barack Obama: “Are we prepared that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”
To a far greater extent than in previous negotiations with Congress, President Obama has been very explicit about his non-negotiables in fiscal cliff discussions with John Boehner. The biggest two are that marginal tax rates on high earners must rise, and the debt limit must be increased — and ideally removed altogether from the realm of legislative brinksmanship. Read More
This is a disturbing article. You have to read it to get the full feel. But the gist is that over recent years the town of Newtown, CT. tried to place some limits on the rise of what might be called extreme gun-owning and shooting in the community. It wasn’t a fight between gun-owners and non-gun-owners but traditional gun owner and hunters versus people shooting close to other people’s homes, shooting at unlicensed firing ranges, firing military style weapons, even firing into explosives. Read More
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who famously shot the Cap and Trade bill with a rifle to show his in-state conservative bonafides in a 2010 TV commercial, says it’s time to take action on assault weapons.
That’s a big deal.
I noted in my earlier post the oddity of the widespread notion that firearms are the reason we’re free in America. Having discussed this this weekend with a lot of people who deeply believe this and read many of the online debates, I can’t help but notice that this overwhelmingly white, predominantly very conservative group most often references the internment of Japanese-Americans and restrictions on gun ownership to black freedmen in the post-Reconstruction South as the key supports for their views.
The right to self-awareness is not be exercised along with the right to bear arms.