“In this season of hope, however, we should not despair and say this kind of violence is inevitable. We should not tolerate the steady drumbeat of gun deaths and injuries that tears our families and communities apart. We can and should do all that is within our power to find solutions to gun violence.
“In the New Year, we hope that our nation’s leaders have the courage and conviction to take steps that will help protect our families and communities from gun violence.”
How? This guy lived in California, which is the Brady #1 rated state for gun laws. If the “reasonable” laws they advocate that every state should have were so effective, how did this happen in the first place? You can’t make laws to stop all evil acts.
No law has ever stopped an evil act–ever.
All a law can do is categorize an evil that society will not tolerate and define a punishment.
Didn’t he use a home-made flame-thrower? Last I checked, Bass Pro wasn’t stocking those at their retail outlets.
Yeah, it’s worth noting that the people we know for sure that he shot all lived; cause of death on the other victims has yet to be determined due to the damage of the bodies by the fire.
I think I read in my local newspaper that this Santa shooter guy was an engineer of some sort with a decent salary. He apparently was bright enough to build his own flame-thrower from scratch, as well as a bomb the cops found in his car later on. I’d bet that he could have also built at least a gun or two if he had felt the need to do so – it’s not exactly rocket science.
All the gun laws in the world wouldn’t have deterred this guy from his rampage – somebody else with a gun in this house that he attacked might have though.
Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen the call for more gun control filter into the news stories.
I was expecting it, but haven’t found it yet.
I have a sick feeling there are high-fives all around in the Brady Campaign ranks whenever a mass murder like this happens that involves guns. And now they’ll claim that 1 gun a month, an AWB, closing the “gun show loophole” (gun registration, already present in Cali) and a .50 caliber ban will stop this from happening in the future.
It’s what is in the heart, not the hand, that defines a mass murderer.
I heard (TeeVeeNooze) thast he worked at (and got fired from) JPL in Pasadena – that stands for Jet Propulsion Laboratories – a buddy of mine worked there, it’s rocket science stuff. To work there he very likely had a security clearance since they do/receive the telemetry for the Mars lander robot-stuff and the Saturn flyby’s and other undocumented .gov stuff.
He also built a number of LPG gas-accelerators to increase the speed of the fire’s propagation through the house, too. He probably could have built any number of “gun alternative” devices – like a magnetic-beam rail-gun…I think they have one there at JPL too.
It’s rumored that Helmke said, “Who needs a gun at a Christmas party?”
Well, DUH!!!!
If you can find an authoritative source for the quote, I’ll run with that.
i love how he walks into a party with an incendiary bomb and a gun… and gets called a gunman… not an arsonist… not a bomber… not a terrorist… but a gunman…
no, there is no bias there…
Perpetrator had a gun.
How many victims had a gun?
Media bias? What media bias?
(/snark)
Chuck, KIDS are building flamethrowers from supersoakers or trips to home depot, and GASP they post the plans online websites and get tips on how to make them better.
http://www.instructables.com/tag/?q=flamethrower&limit%3Atype%3Aid=on&type%3Aid=on&type%3Auser=on&type%3Acomment=on&type%3Agroup=on&type%3AforumTopic=on&sort=none
Youtube has video of guns. How any person with multiple brain cells can still blame objects is beyond me.
The guy broke, what, over a dozen laws, maybe several dozen. How was ANY NUMBER going to stop him? Shackle everyone Hannibal Lector style?
He wouldn’t have got away with it if it weren’t for those meddling antis and their stupid dog!
Brady Bunch tilts against windmills when they go against the murderous impulse of humans. Laws only punish not prevent. Prevention is only possible when each individual decides to abide by core values of not killing a fellow human unless in self defense.
A moral people rarely need police to police themselves. An immoral people require a police force. Hopefully this country is still in the middle.
So, the Santa shooter actually WAS a rocket scientist of some sort? If that’s the case, then I’d bet that he was capable of secretly making just about any type of conventional or unconventional small arm/destructive device in his garage or basement.
This story is both tragic and bizarre at the same time – to me it seems almost as if a real-life Lex Luthor-type guy hatched a murderous revenge plot which resulted in the deaths of nine innocent people. Lex Luthor’s evil schemes in the comic books were never foiled by the laws – Superman had to stop them. While we don’t have Superman to help save us in real life when a madman goes on a rampage, those of us who believe in the Second Amendment and our self-defense rights have our guns, and they seem to do the trick just fine more often than not.
Unfortunately, that truism will never stop complete and utter idiots from repeatedly trying to do so, at the cost of abridging, infringing, and outright destroying everyone’s rights while doing so.
Hell, for those idiots, the abridgements of everyone’s rights are probably bonuses…
Rocket-science v.s Brady Bunch…