Gun Owners of America president Erich Pratt has issues the following statement in response to the Mandalay Bay massacre:
GOA Statement on Las Vegas Shooting
Springfield, VA – Executive Director of Gun Owners of America (GOA) Erich Pratt stated the following after the tragic shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada:
“Everyone at Gun Owners of America was extremely troubled and saddened to see the tragic and terrifying report of the shooting in Las Vegas. GOA and all our employees send their sincerest prayers to the victims, their families, and all involved in this heartbreaking incident.
“Nonetheless, it is disturbing to see anti-gun politicians and celebrities politicizing the tragedy by calling for further restrictions on guns.
“We cannot blame gun owners, the gun itself, or the liberties protected in the Second Amendment for how evil people abuse that freedom.
“The vast majority of gun owners handle their firearms responsibly. Guns are used up to 100 times more often to save a life than take life (according to Obama’s Center for Disease Control in 2013). Even so-called ‘assault weapons’ are used in self-defense. Consider the Texan homeowner who successfully used an AR-15 to defend himself against a drive-by attack involving three shooters.
“Furthermore, terrorists and evil doers use other instruments, such as trucks, to take lives as shown in the tragic attack in Nice, France, where 86 people lost their lives.
“Again, GOA is heartbroken over this tragedy and our deepest sympathies go to out to all involved.”
Erich Pratt, or another GOA spokesperson, is available for interviews. Gun Owners of America is a nonprofit lobbying organization dedicated to protecting the right to keep and bear arms without compromise. GOA represents over 1.5 million members and activists. For more information, visit GOA’s Newsroom.
This is thoughtful, compassionate, and well-argued.
And were I to post it to Facebook, 90% of my “reasonable” friends would call me every nasty name in the book, and the rest would unfriend me immediately without further discussion.
The inability to have discussions past screaming political talking points–the ones, as you so accurately point out, we all know BOTH sides of by heart–seems to have effective killed civil discourse at the moment. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, we scream our catechisms, pat ourselves on the back, and wait for our friends to do the same.
This simply can’t end well for our society.
Why do we give a name and a mission to this guy. The reason they do these shootings is to get their name into history. Deny them the right for this and these shootings will stop.
ok so he passed a background check, so do terrorist. ok he might have gotten all the guns leagally, so what. any one of you reading this can go to your kitchen cabinet under the sink and pull out a lot of ingredients to make a bomb. some form of pvc pipe and aerosol can and you can launch that bomb like a rocket at a crowd of people.mix in some other ingredients and you can make it blow up and spread a poisoness gas into a crowd. and there is no background check for that. background checks do nothing. having the concert in a controlled area with armed security would have done something though, and in this day and age of terrorism having and open air concert where a terrorist could easily attack is not a bright thing to do. nor is having a concert where someone can shoot up the crowd. this was totally a failure to think and a total lack of security.
According to the ATF a “machine gun” is any firearm which fires more than one cartridge with each pull of the trigger.
Close but no cigar.
“Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
This is why binary triggers are legal, at least until the ATF decides otherwise. The pull and the return, each firing a shot, consist of two functions.
These days a proper legal machine gun is as rare as a living doctor with a Porsche 911.
Also close but no cigar. The Porsche 911 is now and always has been The Dentist Killer.
LoL at them doing “something”
How is what you wrote “hinting” at new laws?
The truth is that he did not have any full automatic weapons. He used the very much legal bump stocks that do enhance the ability to fire rapidly but still require an individual pull of the trigger to discharge each round. So many folks here do not know enough about firearms to even speak about it. But they too have a first amendment right to offer their opinion which I respect. Now I only require that you also respect my constitutional right to keep and bear arms uninfringed.
I figure the atf bans the use of bumpfire stocks, just like it did for a while for ‘shouldering’ a pistol brace. You can still own them just not use them. So then binary trigger sales go nutz…
Ban guns? Never. Gonna. Happen.
Now that we have that settled, this idiot is the Very reason I need a gun to protect me and mine. Until you, Pelosi, can guarantee my safety, you can pound sand.
Dennis Milleris right, she’s bat shit crazy.
There’s a book called “How to lie with statistics”, and many of these graphs would be great examples for such a book.
Ok, where to start:
1) “Accidental Death Rate High, but Guns are Not the Problem”
The exact same argument/chart could be used to claim that Ricin, nuclear weapons, and anthrax should be legal: not many accidental deaths there! The better chart is to look at whether accidental deaths with guns are correlated to the number of guns in a state (or better yet, the rate of gun ownership). Are they? Would make for a great scatterplot.
2) “Concealed Carry: Safer and More Law Abiding than the Police”
First off, it would be great to see this correlation against police in other countries (e.g., in the UK where police killed a total of 5 people, which for a population of 65,000,000 equates of a rate of about 0.008 (v.s. 1.8 in the US, or about 225 *times* more). Secondly, police officers are more likely to be put in positions where they might have occasion to use their gun. So for this statistic to make any sense at all, it would need to be compared to OFF DUTY police officer killings. Might you have this rate handy?
3) “Firearms and Children: Declining Murders and Accidents”
Yes, it’s declining. So what? It was utterly horrible to begin with. What’s the ratio to other countries? What’s the state by state correlation with gun prevalence or ownership rate?
Indeed, for you to be at all honest with any of your charts, every statistic you present should be accompanied by a chart that shows a scatterplot of this statistic against the prevalence of guns on a state by state basis. If there is no correlation, i.e., if the number of guns in a state is not correlated to gun-related accidents, homicides, or suicides, then great, you win. If there is a correlation then sorry, the position that guns aren’t a huge part of the problem is hogwash.
I think all the TTAG. talking heads need to lay off the caffeine and calm down. JEEZ guys…….do you ever stop and listen to yourselves? You sound like chicken little. OHHHH…….THE SKY IS FALLING! OHH, IF WELOSE OUR GUN RIGHTS FREEDOM WILL EVAPORATE BECAUSE THE CONSTANT THREAT OF VIOLENCE IS ALL THAT MAINTAINS IT!!!!!!! OHHHHH NO MR. BILL……NOOOOOO!!!!.
I can’t believe you did that. I am super pissed with you guys right now.
Oh, I just had a thought. Do we have to wait for the NRA to mention what Pelosi and Fienstein are doing before we can say they’re fear-mongering to sell more guns? Or are the Dems now working with the NRA to sell more guns through fear-mongering? Who’s mongering all the fear? One things for certain, the Dems attempts to ban a thing certainly isnt mongering any fear.
I’ve had a 686 lock up on me a few times, too.
What the “not one inch”ers are missing is that this is a golden opportunity to use some legislative judo of our own. They want to treat bump fire stocks like machine guns? Sure! Let’s do that!
Oh, dear… We can’t unless we repeal the Hughes amendment and let people register them.
Oh, dear… Looks like we’ll have to preempt states from regulating Title II items so that people won’t challenge the law on entrapment grounds.
Well, let’s do this. You want to make people safer? Right? Heck, now you got your background checks for owning these things. After all, background checks for Title II items are clearly effective given that they are rarely, if ever, used in crimes, right?
Yeah, never need them. Wait, what… a student last year at Univ. Of Texas attacked other students with a Bowe knife, killing one. Nah, never need them. However, they need to trained in use of non-lethal force options and de-escalation techniques.