Jobless Legal Gun Owner Mows Down 13 People, Jobless Obama Hater Kills 3 Officers. Unintended Consequences of the Free Market.

Radio host Thom Hartmann often mentions that the homicide rates go up during Republican administrations, and go down with the Democrats. Family values and free markets are now taking its toll on our country. For instance, Jobless guy example one:

(AP) - A gunman wearing a bulletproof vest and "lying in wait" opened fire on officers responding to a domestic disturbance call Saturday, killing three of them and turning a quiet Pittsburgh street into a battlefield, police said. Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn't clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns. Richard Poplawski, 23, met officers at the doorway and shot two of them in the head immediately, Harper said. An officer who tried to help the two also was killed.

Jobless guy example two, NY Times:

A gunman invaded an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, N.Y., during citizenship classes on Friday and shot 13 people to death and critically wounded 4 others before killing himself …Two pistols and a satchel of ammunition were found with the body.

Mr. Wong had a NY State pistol license that listed two handguns, apparently the weapons he used at the immigration services center: a .45-caliber Beretta and a 9-millimeter Beretta. The authorities matched the serial numbers of the two weapons found with the gunman’s body to the serial numbers on the pistol license.

Two guys taking their recent bout of bad luck out on innocent their victims. Guys with guns. What are we to think when we’re told that “law abiding” people should be able to own a gun? Should we assume they will always be law abiding? Will they always use their firepower to defend themselves? If owning guns makes us safer, why aren’t we? 16 people died, just like that, in an instant. Consider this:

States routinely grant concealed carry licenses without proper background checks or training. Indeed, among the evidence Bush officials ignored in their haste to relax national park gun limits was the long list of violent crimes committed by dangerous people with state concealed carry licenses. Contrary to gun lobby claims, the evidence suggests that permitting concealed weapons drives up crime rather than decreasing it.

What else .....the Collegian:

More than 80 Americans are killed and 200 injured from gunshots every day, so
obviously something is flawed with our current system. New York City Police officers have only about a 20 percent hit rate, and they're trained professionals. Considering most Americans aren't marksmen, they'd be more prone to miss their target and put more innocent victims in the middle of dangerous crossfire.

The NY Times:

(This latest murder spree) was the nation’s worst mass shooting since April 16, 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho, 23, shot and killed 32 people in a dormitory and classroom at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va., then killed himself in the
largest shooting in modern American history. In the last month, 25 people, including 2 gunmen, were slain in three mass shootings, in North Carolina, California and Alabama.So I guess maybe we should be comforted by this amazing
revelation: “We’ve got to figure out a way to deal with this terrible, terrible violence,” from Vice President Joe Biden. A brilliant B.S.
non-response.

A brilliant bit of B.S.! And at Alternet:

The NRA is asking gunmen to refrain from mass shootings while key gun bills are before legislators," says a newscaster in a recent editorial cartoon. Ordaining that Mexico needs more guns not less and that lawmakers shouldn't legislate "on the fresh graves of tragedy," you'd never know the NRA realized its wet dream last year when the Supreme Court affirmed the Second Amendment in District of Columbia vs. Heller.

For years its hunter/rancher and rural constituents have recoiled at its paranoid
secessionist/military weapon wing, which drives so much NRA policy. In fact Alabama's Michael McLendon -- who killed his mother, grandmother, uncle, two cousins and the wife and toddler daughter of a sheriff's deputy in March and Terry Sedlacek -- who shot and killed a pastor through the Bible he held at an Illinois church service -- were poster boys for the right to own an arsenal.

Even while the Arkansas state legislature is considering a bill to block similar release of permit holder public records, the Commercial Appeal found 70 of 154 permit holders it checked had criminal records including Bernard Avery -- arrested 25 times with a murder charge dismissed on mental competency -- and Reginald Miller -- a felon with 11 arrests. Oops.

Why is it that people all across America get to work without the help of a gun -- taking trains, working night shifts -- but gun extremists are afraid to be in church, on college campuses and on state parks without being armed?

Accomplices to Murder by Harold Evans
Richard Poplawski in a bullet-proof vest guns down three policemen in Pittsburgh. Jiverly Wong shoots 13 to death in Binghamton. Robert Stewart kills eight at a nursing home in North Carolina. Devan Kalathat, five in Santa Clara, California. Cop- killer Lovelle Mixon, four in Oakland. Michael McLendon, ten across two rural counties in Alabama.

All these gun killings—43 in total—occurred over the last 26 days. All harvest profuse expressions of sympathy and prayers for the families and the communities. The detestation for the killers is universal. How could it not be? These are crazed and evil people. They merit our detestation.

The guilty are those lawmakers and officials in states and cities who obstruct reasonable gun control laws. Take Virginia as a classic case. The mentally disturbed Seung-Hui Cho was the trigger man in the massacre at Virginia Tech; he gunned down 32 and wounded 17. But last fall the legislators of the Commonwealth of Virginia voted against—repeat, against—making it impossible for the mentally disturbed to get a gun.