Arizona's response to the Gifford shooting: Only guns can stop gun violence.

Gun-law arguments heat up after Arizona shooting
TUCSON, Ariz. | Jared Lee Loughner had trouble with the law, was rejected by The Army because of a history of drug use and was considered so mentally unstable that he was banned from his college campus, where officials considered him a threat to other Students and faculty. But the 22-year-old had no trouble buying the Glock semiautomatic pistol that authorities say he used in the Tucson rampage Saturday that left six dead and 14 injured, including Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Mr. Loughner...

New gun control legislation in Congress unlikely
Washington (CNN) - Accused gunman Jared Lee Loughner opened fire with a gun using a magazine holding up to 30 bullets before he was tackled while trying to reload. Some Democrats in Congress argue such high capacity magazines should not be legal, and are renewing their push for a ban. "That enabled him to do the kind of damage that he did. There is no earthly reason for these weapons to have that kind of bullet capacity," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-New Jersey. In 1994, President Clinton signe...

Rep. King Explains His 'Thousand-Foot' Gun Restriction
After huddling with detectives and security experts over the weekend, Rep. Peter King, a Long Island Republican, decided to respond to the Tucson tragedy with a legislative proposal: make it illegal to carry a firearm within 1,000 feet of a federal official. In an interview with National Review Online, King explained his rationale and defended the measure’s constitutionality, calling it a “reasonable restriction.”  King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committe...

Second-guessing red flags, action taken in Tucson case
The colleges are 2,000 miles apart, but the scenarios are eerily similar: a troubled Student triggers red flags in the classroom, bringing Campus Police and university administrators in to deal with bizarre behavior. Some action is taken, but the Student nevertheless unravels and ends up on a slow path to an alleged murderous rampage. Those are among the parallels between accused Arizona gunman Jared Loughner and Virginia Tech assassin Seung Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in a day of horror in a ...

Congress readies new gun-control bills after Gabrielle Giffords shooting
Congressional advocates of Gun Control are preparing Legislation to renew a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines of the sort suspected used in last Saturday’s shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz. Arizona shooting: How safe are members of Congress? Such a ban was in effect between 1994 and 2004 as part of a ban on assault weapons, which also expired. Since then, clips such as those allegedly used by suspect Jared Loughner, which contained more than 30 rounds, have been available for purc...

Commentary: Kentucky gets low marks on Brady Campaign score
It would be just as easy for a mentally troubled young person, someone who had been rejected by The Army and banned from his community college, to walk out of a gun store with a semi-automatic Handgun and a 30-round clip of bullets in Kentucky as it was in Arizona. Both Kentucky and Arizona scored 2 out of 100 possible points on the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence's scorecard in 2009. Since then, Arizona outdid Kentucky by becoming the third state to allow the carrying of concealed weap...

Budget cuts, stigma cause mentally ill to fall through cracks (The Lookout)
State Budget cuts, as well as a widespread stigma attached to Mental Illness, may have made it easier for the suspect in Saturday's deadly Tucson shootings to slip through the cracks despite clear signs of Mental Illness, according to Mental Health advocates in Arizona and nationally. Cuts to Arizona's Mental Health services wiped out funding for the kind of early detection and intervention programs that might have steered the shooting suspect, Jared Loughner, into treatment, they say. But a b...

Citing Arizona, Va. delegate proposes banning firearms in State Capitol
A Virginia delegate is introducing a bill to ban Firearms from the State Capitol and General Assembly Building in response to the shooting rampage in Arizona that left a U.S. Congresswoman in critically wounded. Del. Patrick A. Hope (D-Arlington) will propose that the General Assembly consider the ban when it convenes for its annual legislative session Wednesday. "The tragedy this weekend in Tucson should cause all public officials to re-examine the safety and security of themselves, their staf...

Tuscon Heroes: Unarmed People Who Stopped the Armed from More Killing
It is a common battle cry of Gun Rights Extremists, reinforced by thousands of Dirty Harry faux heroes in movies and television, to claim that if only everyone carried Firearms, and everyone knew that, murderers and crazy people would be stopped in their murderous rampages as armed, law-abiding citizens rescued the crowd by taking out the would-be shooter. It’s the ultimate male fantasy for those who have a need for that. And no doubt one can conceive of scenarios in which the sequence of...

CBS Attacks 'Permissive Gun Laws' And Gun-Toting Tea Partiers in Wake of Shooting
On Monday's CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric used the Tucson shooting to go after Gun Ownership: "As we reported, Jared Loughner purchased his gun legally....Saturday's attack is now putting the state's Gun Laws under a magnifying glass." In the report that followed, correspondent Dean Reynolds declared: "Arizona has among the most permissive Gun Laws in the nation." Reynolds portrayed Arizona's commitment to Gun Rights as a danger: "The right to ke...

Being Wyatt Earp
Being Wyatt Earp by digby Wow. I had heard there were other people with guns at the Tucson massacre, but I didn't know about this: "I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready," he explained on Fox And Friends. "I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this." Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And th...

Do We Need Gun Restrictions For The Mentally Ill?
As always happens after a shooting tragedy the nation is about to go through another round of debating Gun Control laws. One facet of that debate is whether or not the mentally ill should be allowed to buy guns. As the Associated Press reports, there were a lot of indicators for Jarred Loughner’s mental problems, but none of those indicators stopped him from being able to buy a gun. Tucson, Ariz. — Jared Loughner had trouble with the law, was rejected by The Army after flunking a dru...

Arizona trauma surgeon unfazed by shooting
By Peter Henderson TUCSON, Arizona | Tue Jan 11, 2011 6:47pm EST TUCSON, Arizona (Reuters) - The head of the trauma team that fought to save the lives of Arizona Shooting Victims on Saturday may lack swagger, but not confidence. When word came that a gunman had opened fire at a Tucson Shopping Mall and that Victims including the local Congresswoman were on the way to his Hospital, University Medical Center Trauma Unit chief Peter Rhee's reaction was understated. "I thought my weekend was goin...

Gun control debate follows Arizona shooting
The National Rifle Association and Gun Rights advocates are trying to counter a new push for Gun Control in light of the Arizona shootings. The National Review is already taking issue with claims that had the federal assault-weapons ban not been allowed to expire in 2004, the shooter in Arizona would not have been able to buy the 31-round ammunition magazine for his gun. Not true, says the National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson. Under the old ban, Williamson said the 9mm Glock 19 pistol tha...

Bloomberg, King, offer gun legislation after shooting in Arizona
 In light of the recent shooting in Arizona, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Republican Congressman Peter King are joining forces in support of a safe, sane, federal policy towards Firearms. In New York City, during a news conference at City Hall, the two introduced Legislation that would make it illegal to bring a gun within 1,000 feet of a member of Congress and Federal Judges. The measure will also apply to carrying weapons near the president or vice president.  New Y...

Sheriff Dupnik Spoke Out Against Conceal & Carry Laws
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been a vocal critic of conceal and carry laws in Arizona. Dupnik believed that such laws would further endanger innocent bystanders in these situations. Recent multiple homicides on college campuses, like those that occurred at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, have inflamed the national community and brought about a call to arms that is at once understandable and dangerous. Currently, 13 states are considering Legislation that would allow i...

Apparently, The Real Culprit In The Giffords Shooting Was…..Guns!
Now that we are a few days from the shooting of Representative Giffords, and the cold blooded Murder of many others, including a judge and a 9 year old, the media and Democrats are slowly ratcheting up the meme that guns are to blame. They haven't dropped their fixation on "vitriolic Speech".......you know, all the blamestorming coming from the mostly liberal media, elected Democrats, and liberal talking heads could be considered "vitriolic speech." You also have Joe Scarborough, RINO, complaini...

Arizona shooting: Christina-Taylor Green's neighbour 'suffering nightmares and guilt'
The neighbour who took the 9-year-old Victim of the Tucson shootings to see her congresswoman on Saturday is suffering from nightmares and "dark moments" of guilt, her husband said on Tuesday....

There Is No Evidence That Politics In Any Way Contributed To This Atrocity: Arizonas Biggest Newspaper Rips Leftist Political Op
Arizona Republic: On Saturday afternoon, with his friend Gabby Giffords in surgery fighting for her life, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik railed against the tense partisan politics - “the anger, the hatred, the Bigotry” - that prompted the mass Murders outside Tucson, in his view. And, jarring as such claims may be, we understood. Or tried to understand, despite the spectacle of a lawman - an official whose very job it is to dispassionately gather facts and to...

Poll: In the Wake of Arizona Shootings, Americans Split on Gun Control
(Credit: CBS) CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto. In the wake of Saturday's shootings in Tucson, Arizona, Americans are split over whether Gun Control laws should be made stricter, according to a new CBS News Poll. According to the poll, 47 percent of Americans believe that Gun Control laws should be more stringent in the wake of the Arizona shootings. Meanwhile, 36 percent believed the laws should remain the ...

Media Matters Boehlert Links Tucson Shooting to Rush, Fox News and Breitbart
Behold, the logic of the left: "No one is saying that they are responsible for what happened in Arizona, but they appear to have no regrets whatsoever in terms of what they have done to the political discourse in this country." For the record, the oblique reference Mr. Boehlert made can be seen here in context. The analogy refers to President Obama's seeming willingness to allow Democratic Congressman to lose re-election for the sake of getting his Health Care Legislation passed. (A pr...

Omaha police review how guns stored after shooting spree
OMAHA, Nebraska (Reuters) - Police are reviewing how off duty officers store their weapons after a Student used his detective father's police Handgun in a school Shooting Spree last week. Robert Butler, Jr, retrieved his father's gun from a closet on Wednesday and shot and killed High School assistant principal Vicki Kaspar, who had earlier suspended the boy from school for driving his car onto school athletic fields. He also wounded principal Curtis Case before killing himself. The debate over...

Rush Limbaugh: Jarred Loughren Has The Support Of The Democrat Party
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik continued his attacks on Conservatives by suggesting that he has “no doubt” that “Talk Radio had to do” with the Tucson shooting. Dupnik couldn’t be more wrong, and I suspect his comments are motivated more by a desire to silence political opponents than anything else, but even so Rush Limbaugh isn’t helping his own cause much with comments like these: “What Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major...

Arizona votes to ban funeral picketing
Arizona legislators have approved an emergency law to head off picketing by a fundamentalist Kansas church near the Funeral service for a nine-year-old girl who was killed during a Mass Shooting in Tucson. The Arizona bill, which would make it a misdemeanour to picket or conduct other Protest activities within 100 metres of a Funeral or burial service, comes after the Westboro Baptist Church said it planned to picket Thursday's Funeral for Christina Taylor Green because "God sent the shooter to ...

Rep. Brodeur files Doc, dont ask gun bill
TALLAHASSEE — Doctors and other medical providers would be barred from asking patients - or the parents of child patients - if they have guns in their home under a measure that promises a major showdown between powerful lobbying groups. The National Rifle Association’s top Florida Lobbyist and a Florida Medical Association member both say the issue is among the top priorities for the session, with the groups holding diametrically opposed positions on what doctors and thei...