This is Governing? Vos exposes current defeatist "Can't Do" attitude for Guns or anything else.

Like doing nothing to control the spread of COVID-19 and saving lives, you also can't do anything about preventing mass shootings, so says Republican Rep. Robin Vos:

Why do we even have a government anyway? Hey, maybe they can shrink government down by just eliminating the other party. JSOnline:

Vos said he did not see a reason to require background checks for all gun purchases because checks are already required for most of them.

"I have not seen exactly how in the circumstances that they described that the guns were obtained, but if they were done lawfully, it seems like we already have a process and if someone chooses to break the law, there is very little that we can do besides arrest them after they’ve committed the act."

Of course that would be too late for those who's lives were snuffed out for rest of eternity. It's the new defeatist "can't do" attitude. 

Prevention does work, it did once before:

But this is the prevailing do-nothing thought process of the entire radicalized Republican agenda that was allowed to fester and rot due to unaccountable gerrymandering; don't prevent water pollution; keep fossil fuels; cut taxes; deny science; minimize voting; vilify Democrats; and punish everyone else.

Listen to Democrats? Who? The echo of Democratic legislators comments are barely audible above the right wing noise machine. Similar to the pandemic...: 

"This is an epidemic," State Sen. Melissa Agard said. "It's a public health crisis and has to stop. It's time to get serious about real, life-saving gun reform policies right now. We must treat these domestic terrorists who are inflicting gun violence on all of us as if it's a national crisis. Legislative action has been proven to save lives.

…Democratic Gov. Evers...

...in 2019 called a special legislative session to expand background checks … Republican lawmakers shut down the special session seconds after convening it.

Why an assault weapons ban is needed. While no one talks about what makes high velocity weapons so deadly, it should be the number one issue of discussion. Here's the "hand gun" used in Colorado, similar to the AR-15, just more convenient in smaller areas:

It explained that one reason for the AR-15’s killing power is that its bullets were designed not to pass straight through an object but to “tumble” when they hit, destroying flesh along the way and leaving a large exit wound on departure.

And like everything else, Republicans are able to defy and outright reject massively popular solutions to huge problems without blowback:

A 2019 poll by Marquette University Law School found 80% of Wisconsin voters backed requiring background checks for all gun purchases.

Scalia's "textual" reading a mind-bending fiction, which just eliminates the first half of the Second Amendment...just because he said so:

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the Heller majority opinion. “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home,” Scalia said.

Republicans protecting Wisconsin from change! Move along, these aren't the changes you're looking for!

Republicans like things in Wisconsin just the way they are. Republicans are now willing to let things slide as a way of protecting their failing policies while the public watches in horror.

Bad Republican Timing Exposes Vos/Fitzgerald as Bad Leaders: Mass Shootings: Nothing like sticking your foot in your arrogant mouth highlighting another bad decision that ignores a Marquette University Law School poll where over 80% of Wisconsinites support new gun control measures:

Just hours before one of the worst mass shootings in state history ... Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, made clear that the state's gun laws would not change under a Republican-controlled Legislature despite a call for a review from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers:

"We’re going to have that discussion about the Second Amendment forever," Sen. Scott Fitzgerald told reporters in Franklin, about an hour before the shooting at the Molson Coors brewery. "A lot of the provisions that are in place already, people are satisfied with."

But 80 percent aren't satisfied, especially with this kind of response:

The Dumbest most repeated GOP freeloader idea Ever!!! A one time surplus in exchange for a permanent ratcheted down tax cut is madness, and an outright refusal to pay for anything. George W. Bush set the template:

“Today, our high taxes fund a surplus. The surplus is not the government's money. The surplus is the people's money.”

I have an idea. Why not take a look at Wisconsin's current list of needs including future plans, determine estimates for the amount of spending, and then compare that to state revenues!!!

For Republicans, Surprise, THIS is a Functioning Government? Republicans like former Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch now wants to push a similar but more simplistic idea stressing there really is a "free lunch" entitling conservative freeloaders a pass on paying their current bills, fixing things up, and improving the future of our state. Just off the top of my head:

Who needs to pay for transportation, new youth prisons, replacing lead water pipes, dairy farm support, broadband fiber optics in all rural communities for job creation, provide affordable health care, return schools to 2/3rds funding, fund the UW again, provide expanded public transportation, affordable housing, ask manufacturers to help pay for schools that educate their future employees by repealing their tax credit, and finally, wiping out our structural debt. 

Assembly "Leader" Robin Vos repeated W's nonsensical deficit growing logic:



Kleefisch:

Try this instead: A growing business, like our growing state, has a good year and higher profits. Should that business give back those higher profits, or invest, expand, and prosper? Tough one huh?

One year under Tony Evers limited control as governor, Republicans have conditioned their low information voters to think like this. Note: remember how Republicans accused Democrats of wanting Trump empeached right from the beginning...

Still, I'm waiting for Wisconsin Democrats to frame their message of responsibility in the simplest terms...hmm, what could they say...

Reasonable Gun Regulation cuts down on Mass Shootings!!!

I'd like to send out a challenge to most gun supporting conservative voters; make sense of and explain what the following ideas mean when arguing against any attempt to reasonably regulate guns.

Let's start with the real enemy of empty platitudes, "resource wasting knowledge" and studies that "don't add anything." Note: Fortunately, Lott's book "More Guns, Less Crime" wasn't titled "More Guns, Less Mass Shootings":

1. John Lott, a controversial researcher whose book “More Guns, Less Crime” downplayed the role of federally funded research ... “It’s important that we don’t waste valuable resources on studies that don’t add anything to our knowledge,” he said.

Avoid "quick fixes and simple solutions" that would saves lives now, because it would just create political anger and division? You can't make this up...:

2. The subcommittee’s ranking member Republican Rep. Tom Cole's open(ed) with a paean to “true freedom from despotism,” which he implied could only be achieved through gun ownership. And he appeared to refer to federal investigation of gun violence of the kind Democrats support as “quick fixes and simple solutions” that would only worsen political divisions.

Still, Gun Regulation isn't perfect, so lets change...Human Nature First?: That means waiting for these gun toting neanderthals like Cole and Lott to evolve. Still, "broader and more inclusive" does not include quick fixes like background checks and banning high velocity weapons:

3. “More funding for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention will not, by itself, solve our systemic problems. Our response must be broader and more inclusive,” Cole said. 

A "Broader" response oddly means ignoring guns, but debating the topic of Mental Health:

4. To that end, he stressed the importance of mental health funding. Supporters of gun rights often argue that psychiatric maladies, not guns, are at fault for gun violence. Statistics, however, indicate that the only factor that correlates with America’s extraordinary incidence of mass shootings is the rate of gun ownership. Other countries with similar rates of mental illness have many fewer mass-shooting events.

New Study on Mass Shootings proves regulation saves lives:  

The new study on mass shootings, in particular, seems to call into question whether guns do make people safer. That does not appear to be the case on the whole, according to the study, “State gun laws, gun ownership, and mass shootings in the US: cross sectional time series,” published in the British Medical Journal and authored by researchers from Columbia University, New York University and other institutions.

Gun rights advocates have long held that mass shootings could only be prevented by the proverbial “good guy with a gun.” But the new study finds that, in fact...

1.  States with less restrictive gun laws are more likely to experience mass shootings, defined as a shooting in which four people or more were killed. “States with more permissive gun laws and greater gun ownership have higher rates of mass shootings,” the researchers conclude. “There is a growing divergence in recent years as rates of mass shootings in restrictive states have decreased and those in permissive states have increased.”

2. The worst shooting in American history — the murder of 58 people at a country music concert in Las Vegas — took place in a state, Nevada, with a notorious lack of restrictions on gun ownership. The second-deadliest shooting — that claimed the lives of 49 at a nightclub in Orlando — happened in another state, Florida, known for its gun-related permissiveness.

3. The researchers also find a clear correlation between looser laws, the resultant increase in gun ownership and the subsequent rise in mass shootings. “A 10% increase in gun ownership was associated with an approximately 35% higher rate of mass shootings after adjusting for key factors,” they found.

Student Protesters Nationwide Smarter than Republican Politicians on Gun Crisis.

It always seemed the gun debate pitted logic and common sense against cliches and imagined 2nd Amendment gun rights that even covered specific gun models.

The Children: For example, here are the fearless articulate messages we're hearing from high school students:



and this...



The "Adults:" Now here are the "look over there" distractions being sold first, by Wisconsin's own embarrassing NRA sellout Paul Ryan, who couldn't look or sound more ridiculous:



and this position...where "we has the wisdom."



Republicans are Everything They Say We Are: We have to come up with a new word to describe those blindly hypocritical "real Americans." It's not funny or ironic anymore. How do you have a debate with someone who has no self-awareness at all? For instance...this kid's protest sign and the fact that schools had to cancel their protests due to what, armed threats?

Schools Try to Stop Student Protesters with Threats, Suspensions: Those "constitutional conservatives" out there never did like the First Amendment much. You know, this part...the "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" lacks the necessary obedience-to-power Trumpian right-wingers can't get enough of.

First, from the Waukesha School District, in the words of one student there:

As students at Waukesha North march and walk out to create a movement, we are being faced with threats of truancy tickets from an administration which has backtracked their own statements to the point of incoherency. First, student organizers at North were threatened by the School District of Waukesha for any type of advocacy in any way pertaining to them or their students. After the district's statement made national news on CNN, Todd Gray gave an interviewing denying his stance against students taking part in the movement.

Then again, they changed their stance, with principals giving guidelines to something closer resemble an assembly than a protest. Still, we tried to find a compromise. The realization that they were warping our ideas beyond recognition came when we were told we couldn't call it a walk out or a protest. The same administration with the audacity to tell us that The Women's March, a group actively advocating for legislative change so that it's harder for students to get hurt, was using us to push their own agenda, turned out to be using us to warp and quiet the story.

And so many others...

Nevada school administrators threatened to withhold students’ diplomas and kick students off sports teams for participating in the walkout.

Students in Texas were told they would be suspended if they protest gun violence, on the same day a local 14-year-old was charged over a shooting threat..."All will be suspended for 3 days and parent notes will not alleviate the discipline ... A school is a place to learn and grow educationally, emotionally and morally. A disruption of the school will not be tolerated.”

Sophomore Rosa Rodriquez the only student to walk out of Sayreville HS this morning #nationalwalkout Under threat of suspension several hundred others allowed to attend gathering in school auditorium #1010wins

A number of high schools cancelled or postponed their planned walkouts after receiving anonymous violent threats related to the protests. In Broughton High School in Raleigh, North Carolina; Hackensack High School in Bergen County, New Jersey; D.C. Everesthigh school in Weston, Wisconsin; Mukwonago High School in Wisconsin; and Romeoville High School in Illinois, protests were cancelled or postponed because of threats, sometimes in instances in which the threats were found not to be credible, out of an abundance of caution. In one instance, Shikellamy High School’s protest in Pennsylvania was cut short because of the threat of a drive-by shooting. Clearview Regional High School and Clearview Middle School in Gloucester County, New Jersey, were closed entirely because of an anonymous threat.

And finally...a school that forced their students to take a side:

An Ohio high school student has found himself at the center of political controversy after an online post about his suspension for staying in class during the national student school walkout went viral ... he chose not to join his classmates because he didn’t go to a designated area of the school where the non-protesters were supposed to be, he didn’t want to choose a side, and instead stayed by himself in a classroom. 

On social media Shoemaker’s now-viral suspension slip has been spun into a tale about how a liberal school system impeded the rights of a student who supported the Second Amendment, On Twitter, users shared Shoemaker’s photos of the suspension slip with hashtags such as #GunControlNever and #LiberalismIsAMentalDisorder. One person tweeted, “To paraphrase George Orwell, some speech is more equal than others.”

To all the students who suddenly realized they all have truly remarkable power. Their message is so clear and so well-stated that it stands in stark contrast to the mindnumbing nonsense spewed out by Republican politicians.

School Protection Devices offered up by Wisconsin Inventors!!!

When concealed carry passed in Wisconsin, I told my conservative friend in Milwaukee that not only will firearms change how we personally solve social conflicts for the worse, but it will eventually coerce everyone else to either carry a gun or require armed security at large gatherings. So here we are.

School Security doesn't have to be Costly: The need to shore up school entryways will still cost a lot, thanks to gun drooling juvenile adults that never advanced past their reckless teen years. These are the same rugged individualists complaining about wasteful spending and high taxes. Irresponsible gun laws are now forcing taxpayers to spend more money on schools that have nothing to do with learning.

While high school students advocate passing common sense gun laws that PREVENT school shootings, one student from the dairy state came up with a device we can use in the meantime.

"JustinKase" door jam: A better way to go, for just $95, protects interior classroom doors, and was invented by a Wisconsin Somerset high school student.  His district is snapping them up because they work:

According to a WCCO-TV report, Somerset, Wisconsin, High School Justin Rivard invented a tool called the "JustinKase" that is designed to stop intruders from entering a classroom. More information on the device can be found here.

Gun Shot Detector: An additional option for high schools was developed by a Wisconsin woman in Baraboo, that detects gun shot anywhere in the building:

WISC: Stacy Jax will forever remember Dec. 14, 2012, the day a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and within minutes, killed 20 children and six adults. “My daughter was in kindergarten at the time and I am a previous teacher,” Jax said. “So putting myself exactly in that classroom was very disturbing.”

Several people in the building heard gunshots, but did not immediately recognize them. She came up with Trinity Gunshot Alarm System, a sensor inside a school that could listen for the sound of a gunshot and then set off an alarm similar to a fire alarm. The sensor picked up the gunshots almost instantaneously, meaning in a real active shooter situation everyone would have seconds longer to react. Those seconds, Hodges said, could make all the difference. “It only takes seconds to fire a round, so if you think every time a gun goes off, that’s another victim, every second does count,” he said.

Yay! Scott Walker solving school safety problem he created!

Well, Scott Walker wasn't exactly rushing to protect Wisconsin schools from the next lunatic exercising his 2nd Amendment right to high-velocity high capacity weapons:

CapTimes: Walker said he has had several conversations with lawmakers who are drafting a comprehensive school safety legislative package. Walker could call a special session to bring lawmakers back to the Capitol. 

NRA Money? Lot's of it? Walker not Influenced? Like the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, money does not corrupt:

Walker, who received about $3.5 million from the National Rifle Association for elections in 2010, 2012 and 2014, disputed the argument that contributions from gun rights groups influence policy. He noted that he differs with the group on whether to give firearms to teachers.

Opposing that obviously crazy idea to arm teachers now qualifies as a brilliant decision by our governor? The bar is that low now? 

Walker will Solve Mental Health Failure He Created with Funding/Job Cuts: Maybe we should crack down on the mentally ill?

Yet the party deemed not responsible enough to govern had a few suggestions...

An effort by Senate Democrats to allow schools to exceed their revenue limits to implement school safety plans was blocked by the Republican majority last week. Democrats have also proposed reinstating a 48-hour waiting period for handgun purchases, banning the sale of bump stocks and banning anyone with a domestic violence misdemeanor conviction from owning a firearm.

Nutty right? Next thing you know they'll want to spend hard-earned taxpayers money protecting kids. Dane County Executive Joe Parisi appeared on WKOW's Capitol City Sunday and reminded us what might be keeping many school districts from acting:

Parisi: "It used to be, that there was an exception in the levy limits that would allow schools to spend more money for safety enhancements like that. Gov. Walker also eliminated that exemption to the levy limit, making it more difficult for schools to do that."

Make no mistake, Scott Walker and the Republicans own these mass shootings and the civil decay gun madness brought with it. In fact, Republicans are now trying to blame the gun carnage on gay marriage, liberalism, socialism, the pill, video games, movies, and racial equality...not guns.

Sure, let's change human nature first, got it.

Yet guns keep killing people and Republicans keep pushing myth after insulting myth. Dare we even look at the evidence?

After Florida's Mass Shooting, High School Students Repulsed by Republican Reaction!!!

Maybe the mass shooting issue will finally focus the nations attention on just how inhumane the Republican Party has become, and how sold out it is to NRA business interests. Hell, what percentage of the economy is dependent on firearms manufacturing anyway?

One irony: Republicans who pushed that mindless "civics test" to graduate, who also didn't know ours schools already have detailed U.S. history courses, may be getting activist teenage blow-back from a very educated electorate. How about that! 

Porn vs Assault Weapons...Porn bigger problem: This is that epiphanic moment if there ever was one...Keep in mind this. Porn Viewing Stat: Florida Number 21, 127 page views per capita:

Less than a week after a shooter killed 17 people at a school in Florida, the state's House of Representatives voted not to discuss a ban on assault weapons after earlier declaring pornography a health risk, angering people on social media.

A high school students response to the "adults" in the Florida legislature?

A similar resulted happened right here in Madison:



Trump White House Considered Florida Shooting a Reprieve from Critics: Here's Chris Hayes with the ugly details and other repugnant Republican reactions:



Make Paul Ryan Go Away...Please: After plunging the nation into deeper debt with his dream tax cuts, he's not going to bother with trying to end mass school shootings with common sense, bi partisan gun control that polls see big support for:

Last October, Politico/Morning Consult found that 64 percent of Americans and 55 percent of gun owners believe gun laws should be stricter. Furthermore, 84 percent support universal background checks, 76 percent support a mandatory 3-day waiting period, and 72 percent support a ban on assault weapons.

House Speaker Paul Ryan called the shooting “horrific,” but said Congress shouldn’t do anything until it has “all the facts and data.” There’s just one problem with that: The GOP, at the behest of the National Rifle Association (NRA), is blocking scientists from producing the “facts and data” on gun violence.

Thanks to the Dickey Amendment — a 23-word rider attached to a spending bill in 1996 and enacted in 1997 — research on gun violence has been frozen for two decades. As a result, gun violence was the least-researched cause of death in the U.S. over the past decade, and the answers to even the most basic questions about gun violence prevention remain elusive.

Fox News' Shep Smith railed against the idiocy of the amendment.

“Forget your political arguments. Why can’t we come together as a society and say ‘No, we’re going to study this, we’re going to research this, we’re going to bring our best and brightest together and put them in a room and give them whatever they need to figure out why are our children killing each other more in the United States than anywhere else in the world?' We change the course of human events around the world. We put a man on the moon 50 years ago and we can’t figure out why only our children are running around in their schools killing each other. It doesn’t happen everywhere else. It happens here. Why can’t they put the best and the brightest together to research it, to figure it out, and help us stop it? We’re failing our children."

MSNBC's Nichole Wallace and Steve Schmidt called it like it is; a big GOP problem:

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace has had enough of Republicans feigning concern about gun violence and doing nothing ... students and parents are holding Republican politicians accountable for inaction ... Republicans are not just refusing to help, they are responsible for the bloodshed. And as a “non-practicing” Republican, Wallace said, she shares the “culpability of a party being held hostage by the NRA.”

“The NRA is a gun lobby out of step with the vast majority of its members that support more common-sense gun measures. Most gun owners are for things like gun locks and gun safes. Most gun owners are for background checks. Democrats who are for gun control are fine with doing more for the mentally ill, but Republicans who are for doing more for the mentally ill never, ever, ever, ever want to have gun control. When is the Republican Party going wake up and realize it has blood on its hands?”

Madison High School Students get more guns in school instead of sane gun laws!

Public opinion never did matter much to Republicans dead set on rolling out their deadly firearms agenda, and now it's showing, vividly.

Instead of keeping guns from getting in the hands of the next mass killer, Republicans turned background checks upside down, and into...more guns in schools. Funny, I'm beginning to think Republicans are the mentally unstable folks who definitely shouldn't have guns.

Oh, and a real lesson for soon-to-be voting age high schoolers who live at home and won't have any problem at all registering to vote:

WPR: Republican state lawmakers on Tuesday blocked their Democratic colleagues' attempt to take up a bill that would institute universal background checks for gun purchases in Wisconsin ... GOP lawmakers used procedural moves to replace the measure with a proposal to fund grants for schools to provide firearms to safety officers.
 
Madison high school students joined Democratic lawmakers in the Capitol on Tuesday morning to call for strengthening Wisconsin’s gun laws in the wake of another deadly school shooting. "We have an obligation to these kids, to the people of the state who want us to act on background checks," said Rep. Chris Taylor, D-Madison, during the floor debate. "This is the bare minimum we should be doing."

What did Republicans find so unreasonable that they had to put everyday Wisconsinites lives at risk? Something is very very wrong when the following is called "all politics all the time:"

...proposal to institute universal background checks, and bills that would prohibit individuals convicted of domestic violence from buying firearms and outlaw the sale of bump stocks, which make weapons more deadly.

Sound like politics, not reasonable gun legislation? Don't forget that Republican Rep. Robin Vos said that after another mass school shooting and 17 dead teenagers. What's to fear:

 "It's all politics, all the time. And I think it's really sad, and it's really cynical, because they are preying on the fears of some Wisconsinites and using it for their own political purposes."

And again, the evil Democratic terrorists are leading the charge, and this time with the next generation of voters fed up with ruthless killing and Republican inaction:

Madison East High School senior Carlos Vanhook said current gun laws are doing the opposite of helping prevent violence. "There’s a system in this country that’s entitling some people to violence."

"Law-abiding gun owners don’t go out and shoot up schools."

Some gun rights advocates have pushed for arming teachers in response to the violence. Students pushed back on that idea. "I think the question we should be asking is what if we did something to prevent the action from happening in the first place?" said Caitlin King, a student a Memorial High School in Madison.

Prevention, Republicans ask? What's that? Student get it...heck, everyone gets it except for our Republican NRA lackeys. They either know or are just plain stupid. It should be embarrassing. WISC:

Democratic Minority Leader Gordon Hintz, D-Oshkosh, said Democratic lawmakers have been pushing gun legislation "for years," but it "hasn’t been a priority" for GOP lawmakers in power. "We have reached the point where enough is enough," Hintz said. "The silence has been deafening for too long in this state."

Despite the mass shootings, Republicans are stuck in some kind of Bizarro World 1950's time bubble where none of this is really happening:

Republicans had proposed a bill, supported by the National Rifle Association and other firearms advocates, that would have allowed individuals to carry concealed guns without getting training or state permits, and in some cases bring them onto school grounds. Also, on Monday, Rep. Jesse Kremer (R-Kewaskum) began circulating for signatures an 11th-hour bill that would allow the carrying of concealed weapons in private schools and reducing the penalty for carrying a weapon on public school grounds to a Class B forfeiture.

Guns, Mass Shootings still not the problem...

The Florida school shooting is another unthinkable heart wrenching tragedy made worse by the knowledge no one in the Republican Party will anything about it...again. It's not just the NRA campaign money, but their rationalization that nothing can be done and will be done, or that treating the mentally ill will silence the even louder calls for rational gun control laws. Republicans proactively passed a law giving guns to those with dementia and mental illness.

Former Republican Rep. David Jolly of Florida is now openly advocating flipping the House of Representatives. Below is his advice to voters and to Democrats that makes sense. I know, Democrats have been saying this stuff for years, but as Jolly notes, this one is in the hands of the voters-flip the House:   

Jolly: “And so if this is the issue that defines your ideology as a voter, there are two things I would suggest tonight. First, flip the House. Flip the House. Republicans are not going to do a single thing after this shooting we saw today. But I would also offer to Democrats, work for incremental wins."

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on the Senate floor that mass shootings are "a consequence of our inaction."

"This happens nowhere else other than the United States of America — this epidemic of mass slaughter. It only happens here not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction. We are responsible for a level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else."

For a guy like Paul Ryan, who would be very happy seeing 26 million Americans lose their health care while cutting Medicare for seniors, this irresponsible and detached response makes it clear who he really represents:




Kind of makes this the argument about how money corrupts your moral and ethical values:

Sen. Tammy Baldwin's potential Republican opponent State Sen. Leah Vukmir would ignore the gun carnage by going after those destructive self-esteem programs:

Vukmir wrote in the post about Columbine: “[O]ur national obsession with the feelings of teenagers has played an enormous but heretofore unrecognized role in what is transpiring nationwide. Unless we change our attitudes and approach to dealing with the normal developmental phase of [the] years known as adolescence, I fear another Columbine is inevitable.”

Vukmir criticized what she said was parents and administrators “coddling” teens’ emotions and making them “self-absorbed” rather than teaching them to roll with the punches. “It is under these circumstances that a despondent teen may find no other recourse but to lose control and act out violently,” she said.

There hasn't been a new federal gun law since 1994, because...we don't have a problem:

Yes, Something Can Be Done: The myth that nothing can be done to stop someone hell bent on committing a mass shooting is the wall Republicans love to stand behind. The facts say otherwise:

Europeans had school shootings, too. Then they did something about it. In Europe, there hasn't been a major high-casualty gun attack on a campus in almost a decade. Meanwhile, Wednesday's shooting in Florida was at least the sixth of its kind in the United States this year — 45 days into 2018.

In his famous study, “Public Mass Shooters and Firearms: A Cross-National Study of 171 Countries,” University of Alabama criminology professor Adam Lankford found a link between the number of guns and mass shootings that killed four or more people. The data set ranged from 1966 through 2012 ... a decrease in the number of weapons also would probably result in a decrease in shootings. That’s exactly what happened in Australia after the country tightened gun legislation following a mass shooting in 1996. Countries where gun ownership is rare, such as France or Britain, have largely been spared such catastrophic incidents.

Switzerland has one of the world’s highest ratios of firearms per person, Why has there never been a school shooting in Switzerland, despite the Swiss enthusiasm for weapons? Switzerland’s weapons are distributed to citizen soldiers, as they are known. Conscription is mandatory for male Swiss citizens, and conscripts can keep their semiautomatic assault rifles at home even after returning to their nonmilitary careers. (They still have to report for a short annual training). Meanwhile, those who wish to buy weapons themselves need to undergo a weeks-long background check.

Some sociologists say that Switzerland's military service comes close to an extended background check, too, and that the country's education system teaches children early on to search for compromises instead of risking open conflicts. Hence, while almost every home in Switzerland may have a weapon, access is still indirectly regulated. There’s also another crucial difference with the United States: extensive, mandatory health insurance, which allows schools to have direct and immediate access to psychologists and intervention teams. Psychological tests are also standard practice for Germans younger than 25 who want to purchase firearms. Age restrictions were tightened and a national registry of all weapons was created in 2013.

Here's Voldemort wannabe Gov. Rick Scott with the standard issue do-nothing talking points that won't cut it anymore:



Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin had this safety suggestion for lawmakers: