This is what some Christians consider courage in the face of gun violence in this country.

Of course Sarah Palin never had an original idea in her life, so this one seems to have come from presidential hopeful Ben Carson.

It is shameful that Palin and Carson would use this tragedy to further the myth of Christan persecution instead of addressing the actual problem.

And speaking of the actual problem Carson has something incredibly ignorant to say about that as well.

Courtesy of Breitbart: 

“Well, obviously, there are going to be those who are going to be calling for gun control,” Carson said in an interview with Hugh Hewitt on Thursday. “But you know, that happens every time we have one of these incidents. Obviously, that’s not the issue. The issue is the mentality of these people. And we need to be looking at the mentality of these individuals and seeing if there are any early warning clues that we can gather that will help us as a society to be able to identify these people ahead of time.”

Okay let me lay a little truth on this moron.

The VAST MAJORITY of gun deaths are not perpetrated by individuals with a diagnosed mental illness, and in fact most of them would easily pass a mental health screening.

The fact is that people get angry, sad, jealous, and scared.

Most often these are a temporary state of mind. And eventually this person will get over it and live a relatively healthy and long life.

However when firearms are readily available it provides the means to turn what is a minor glitch in a person's state of mind into a life altering event.

When Australia was confronted with their own gun massacre, they did not dick around talking about mental health, they passed some comprehensive laws. Which included the following:

At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

The end result was a dramatic decrease in gun related deaths, including by suicide. And perhaps most dramatic of all is that there has not been ONE mass shooting since the laws were put in place.

So if Sarah Palin and Ben Carson want to show their courage, then they should put down those ridiculous signs and instead call on their followers to defy the NRA and write to their Representatives to tell them to start working on some comprehensive legislation that will keep students safe in their classrooms, movie goers safe in their seats, and Americans safe while walking down the streets of their own neighborhoods.

This is the country we live in today. 

Source

 And if we want to change that, we need to stop being such candy asses and get serious about taking on a lobby that cares more about selling guns than it does about human lives.

Newly released dashcam video suggests that Sandra Bland should never have been arrested. Update!

Courtesy of CNN:  

The family of Sandra Bland, whose death in a Texas jail has boiled over after newly released video showed what happened at a routine traffic stop, expressed anger Wednesday at what they said was further proof that Bland was unnecessarily arrested. 

Bland, who authorities say hanged herself in her jail cell, was not clinically diagnosed with depression or on any medication and was "ecstatic" at the prospect of starting a new job at her alma mater in Texas, family attorney Cannon Lambert said at a press conference Wednesday. 

"Why is it that a 28 year old woman who had received two job offers take her own life? Why would she call her mom in excitement about those jobs and take her own life?" Lambert asked. 

"That just does not jive with someone who would take their own life," he added. 

Sharon Cooper, Bland's sister and a spokeswoman for her family, the family was "infuriated" by the actions of the officer who arrested Bland, as seen on the trooper's dash-cam video.

I have kind of kept my powder dry on this story, waiting for this video along with more evidence to emerge.

Now that it has I feel confident in saying that none of this makes any sense.

That woman may have been labeled disrespectful in her response to the police officer, but he was downright abusive. And her attitude in fighting back, and exclamation of wanting to have her day in court, certainly does not suggest the mindset of a person who would take their own life only days later.

This thing stinks to high heaven and I am quite glad that the inquiry into what happened is being treated like a murder investigation.

Update: If you think the dashboard video is bad, take a look at the transcript.  

New study debunks claim that most gun owners only use them for self defense.

Courtesy of The Hill:  

A new study attempts to debunk the claim that gun owners rely on their firearms for self-defense. 

The left-leaning Violence Policy Center released a study Wednesday that finds people are much more likely to use a gun to kill someone without cause than to protect themselves. 

According to the study, gun owners committed 259 justifiable homicides compared to 8,342 criminal homicides in 2012, the most recent year data was available. 

That means gun owners are 32 times more likely to kill someone without cause than to act in self-defense, the study reasoned.

Nothing about that statistic surprises me. 

You may tell yourself you are buying that gun to protect yourself and your family, but the reality is your are buying it for the sense of power that it provides.

And the idea of wanting to feel powerful when you are angry, or scared, or frustrated, is very seductive. And all a gun owner has to do is grab their gun when they are in a heightened emotional state, to change their lives, and their victim's life, forever.

Baltimore State Attorney calls the death of Freddie Gray a homicide. Issues arrest warrants for six police officers.

Courtesy of HuffPo:  

Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby gave an update on the investigation into the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old who died after suffering a spinal cord injury while in police custody in April, calling his death a homicide. 

"We have probable cause to file criminal charges," Mosby said in a press conference Friday. 

Charges including second degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and assault, among others, will be filed against the officers involved in Gray's arrest, Mosby said. 

Mosby noted that "no crime had been committed by Mr. Gray." Police had said Gray was arrested for possessing a switchblade, but Mosby said Friday the knife in Gray's possession was not a switchblade and was lawful, and said officers "illegally arrested" Gray. 

"We are very much committed to pursuing justice," Mosby said.

Wow! I have to admit that I was beginning to think that the broom was out and that things were about to be swept under the rug. 

This is nothing short of amazing, and I think the people of Baltimore will finally feel that their voices have been heard.

The charges in #Baltimore. pic.twitter.com/N7k18a5hVV

— Alan Blinder (@alanblinder) May 1, 2015

Of course this in no way ensures that these men will be convicted, but it is the first step to making sure that justice is served.

I heard somebody today, it might have been Sharpton,  suggest that Baltimore was setting an example which could shame other cities where this kind of thing has happened, and where justice was denied.

The cost of gun violence in America.

Courtesy of Mother Jones: 

Nobody, save perhaps for the hardcore gun lobby, doubts that gun violence is a serious problem. In an editorial in the April 7 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, a team of doctors wrote: "It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis." 

And solving a crisis, as any expert will tell you, begins with data. That's why the US government over the years has assessed the broad economic toll of a variety of major problems. Take motor vehicle crashes: Using statistical models to estimate a range of costs both tangible and more abstract—from property damage and traffic congestion to physical pain and lost quality of life—the Department of Transportation (DOT) published a 300-page study estimating the "total value of societal harm" from this problem in 2010 at $871 billion. Similar research has been produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the impact of air pollution, by the Department of Health and Human Services on the costs of domestic violence, and so on. But the government has mostly been mute on the economic toll of gun violence. HHS has assessed firearm-related hospitalizations, but its data is incomplete because some states don't require hospitals to track gunshot injuries among the larger pool of patients treated for open wounds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also periodically made estimates using hospital data, but based on narrow sample sizes and covering only the medical and lost-work costs of gun victims. 

Why the lack of solid data? A prime reason is that the National Rifle Association and other influential gun rights advocates have long pressured political leaders to shut down research related to firearms. 

In response to the fact that data was hard to come by Mother Jones found their own researcher, Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. And this is what he found:

Miller's approach looks at two categories of costs. The first is direct: Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations, and long-term medical and mental-health care, as well as court and prison costs. About 87 percent of these costs fall on taxpayers. The second category consists of indirect costs: Factors here include lost income, losses to employers, and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death. 

In collaboration with Miller, Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion. Direct costs account for $8.6 billion—including long-term prison costs for people who commit assault and homicide using guns, which at $5.2 billion a year is the largest direct expense. Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence, in other words, the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.

Of course 2nd Amendment advocates will argue with the numbers, even though traditionally conservatives are not very good at math, however even if this data is off a little the numbers are staggering.

So $229 billion is the annual cost for the freedom that the 2nd Amendment provides for us?

That seems a price that is simply too high to pay. And that does not even include the simple cost of human life.

Ohio police officer refuses to shoot double homicide suspect pleading for death.

Courtesy of New York Daily News:  

An Ohio police officer refused to shoot a charging suspect even as he begged for the officer to take his life. 

The officer's decision not to fire at a man accused of double murder, who was pleading for him to follow through with his "suicide by cop" plans, was captured on his bodycam video. 

New Richmond Officer Jesse Kidder was called to follow a possibly armed suspect in an Ohio murder Thursday. Suddenly the suspect, identified by police as Michael Wilcox, got out of his car and started to charge at the cop. 

"Law enforcement officers all across the nation have to deal with split-second decisions that mean life or death," Kidder told TV station WLWT. "I wanted to be absolutely sure before I used deadly force."

There is all kinds of praise coming this officer's way right now, and surely he deserves it.

This is a picture of the suspect.

Michael Wilcox, accused of killing his girlfriend and a friend.

 Now the cynical side of me, in the wake of all of these police shootings around the country, wonders if the result would have been the same if Mr. Wilcox had been a black man.

I will tell you that I want to believe that it would, I truly do.

However a part of me has to wonder.

Sometimes like looking for gold coins in a septic tank.

I remember reading the Bible for the first time in my late teens, after my only previous exposure having been during Sunday school lessons and a few boring sermons.

At first it was a little like reading Shakespeare in that I had to adjust to the language before it started to flow. But once it did I was almost immediately horrified at the amount of rape, death, and destruction that poured from its blood soaked pages.

The god of the Old Testament was a tyrannical creature who relied on abject terror in order to control his subjects. And the New Testament god was not much better in that he killed without mercy and even sacrificed his own son in the most brutal way imaginable when he could have easily done away with original sin with a wave of his omniscient hand.

I came away wondering how the words in that book could have inspired even a small cult, much less the largest religion in the world.

Man "accidentally" shoots his pregnant girlfriend in the face during argument.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

Doctors in central Pennsylvania delivered a baby during emergency surgery on a pregnant woman shortly before she died from a shotgun wound. 

Police said 25-year-old Denver Blough told them he had accidentally shot his girlfriend, 23-year-old Caressa Kovalcik, during an argument Saturday at the Windber apartment they shared with their 11-month-old son. 

Kovalcik died after delivering the child she had been carrying for nine months, reported The (Johnstown) Tribune Democrat, and the baby was flown to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh for additional care. 

“What’s going to happen to my baby?” Blough asked state police as they took him into custody. 

Blough, who worked for an asphalt company, was charged with criminal homicide, attempted criminal homicide, aggravated assault charges, and other charges.

Blough claimed that he broke his 20 gauge  shotgun into two pieces and went to show his girlfriend, and that the weapon fired hitting her in the face.

That seems highly implausible to me, if not outright impossible.

I would think it more likely that he shot his girlfriend, panicked, and then broke his gun into pieces.

I think the police might be making a similar assumption which explains why he was charged with criminal homicide instead of manslaughter.

The NRA is always talking about how weapons keep us safe, but it only takes a cursory knowledge of gun deaths to recognize that the vast number of people shot in this country are shot in similar domestic squabbles, where one person becomes angry and there is easy access to a weapon.

And now this poor child has been robbed of both their mother, who is now dead, and their father, who may not get out of prison until the child is an adult.