Stephan: There is another aspect to the Uvalde, Tx murders that is not getting covered by the media and, unless you are familiar with weapons and their ammunition, would not even be thought about by most Americans. I am speaking here about the rounds of ammunition the killer, Salvador Ramos, purchased and used to kill the children and their teachers. He deliberately bought hollow point bullets. These are bullets with a little hole in their tip which, when they enter a body, expand to much greater size and literally chew their way through a body. In this case, with 10-year-olds as his targets, the damage was so great some of the children could only be identified through DNA tests, their faces were so mangled by the hollow point rounds they could not be identified by their parents.
Now let me give you the evil truth about those bullets. The use of expanding rounds by soliders on the battlefield is a war crime. That's right. Ramos, backed by the Republican Party and the NRA used a bullet that causes such horrible damage it cannot be used on the battlefield in wars. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court bars their use, and they are prohibited by a declaration of the Hague Convention. Why did the police wait so long to accost the shooter? The reporters covering the Uvalde murders don't mention this but I think the answer is obvious; they were afraid. An AR-15 round travels at such a speed that it can penetrate the standard safety vests worn by police, chew up the body, and come out of the body with enough energy to pierce the vest on the back and still have enough power to kill a second policeman standing behind the first one. The Uvalde police and their commander knew all this, and so they waited nearly an hour while the children called over and over on their phones crying for help from the police.
A hollow-point bullet expanded after being fired from a gun. Credit: Getty
Many circumstances of this week’s elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are incomprehensible. That a teenager did not need a license to legally buy two military-style long rifles. That police were unable to breach the classroom in which the rampaging shooter locked himself for well over an hour and, by some accounts, even prompted kids to draw fatal attention to themselves before neutralizing the gunman. That parents were getting body blocked and threatened with Tasers for trying to save their children themselves.
And then there was the damage.
The damage was so severe that agonized parents had to give DNA samples to identify their children. This horrific process would take hours and already hint at the baffling reality that the teenage gunman legally obtained not only a military-style weapon, but one of the most destructive forms of ammunition as well.
As the gunman bragged in his online messages, expanding, or hollow-point, bullets open upon impact to cause more damage to their targets.
The use of expanding rounds on the battlefield is a war crime. The […]
Stephan: How revealing it is that even as the NRA brays out about everyone's right to carry guns, you cannot carry a gun at an NRA conference. Could the hypocrisy be more blatant?
Donald Trump speaking at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Indianapolis, Indiana on April 26, 2019 Credit: Wikimedia Commons
This Friday, May 27, former President Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at the National Rifle Association’s “leadership forum” — which will be part of its three-day convention in Houston, Texas. Guns will be allowed during other parts of the convention, but not during the leadership forum — an “irony” that journalist Lauren Tousignant slams as “almost too disgusting and predictable to even bother pointing out” in an article published by the feminist website Jezebel on Tuesday night, May 24.
Tousignant’s article was written the day in which yet another horrific mass shooting occurred in the United States. Earlier on May 24, at least 19 children, along with two adults (including 4th Grade teacher Eva Mireles), were fatally shot at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The gunman was identified by police as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who was also killed.
The massacre in Uvalde — which is about 80 miles […]
Stephan: When Australia had only a fraction of the gun deaths that occur most weekends in the United States because their politicians still believe they have a responsibility to serve the interests of the people who elected them they instituted a weapons buyback program. Here's what happened. Could it be done in the U.S.? It could but it won't. Why not? Because congressional whores like Ted Cruz have been rented by the weapons industry and value staying in office more than the wellbeing of the people they are sworn to serve.
That’s a lot of Australian guns. Credit: William West/AFP via Getty
Tuesday’s shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has already kicked off another national debate about gun control. It is worth considering, as one piece of evidence about what policies do and do not work, the experience of Australia in the late 1990s.
Between October 1996 and September 1997, Australia responded to its own gun violence problem with a solution that was both straightforward and severe: It collected roughly 650,000 privately held guns. It was one of the largest mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history.
And there’s decent reason to think it worked. That does not mean that something even remotely similar would work in the US — they are, needless to say, different countries — but it is worth at least looking at Australia’s experience.
What Australia did
On April 28, 1996, a 28-year-old man with a troubled past named Martin Bryant walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, a tourist town on the island of Tasmania, and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle. He killed 35 […]
Stephan: Once again the Republican death party served its corporate masters rather than the interests of the people they had sworn to serve.
The U.S. Capitol in Washington Credit: Marisa Demarco / Source New Mexico
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a bill that would require federal agencies to monitor domestic terrorism incidents, including those potentially related to white supremacy.
The failure of the Senate procedural vote showed again how difficult it is for Congress to agree on any response to U.S. gun violence. It followed a racist mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, earlier this month that took the lives of 10 Black people in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
Another mass shooting, this one at an elementary school in Texas on Tuesday, killed 19 children and two adults.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had scheduled the domestic terrorism legislation, already passed by the Democratic-controlled House, for a vote following the shooting in Buffalo.
“The bill is so important, because the mass shooting in Buffalo was an act of domestic terrorism. We need to call it what it is: domestic terrorism,” said Schumer, a New York Democrat.
“It was terrorism that fed off the poison of conspiracy theories like white […]
Paul Krugman, Columnist, 2008 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. - The New York Times
Stephan: As is usually the case Paul Krugman gets it right.
Credit: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg
It’s hard to say which of the Republican responses to the latest mass shooting was most reprehensible. The reliably awful Senator Ted Cruz attracted considerable attention by insisting that the answer is to put armed guards in schools, never mind that Uvalde’s school system has its own police force and officers seem to have been on the scene soon after the shooter arrived.
And the Buffalo supermarket that was the location of a mass shooting just 10 days earlier also had an armed security guard, who was killed because his gun was no match for the shooter’s body armor.
But if you ask me, the worst and also most chilling response came from Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. What we need to do, declared Patrick, is “harden these targets so no one can get in, ever, except maybe through one entrance.”
That restriction would have interesting consequences in the event of a fire. But in any case, think about Patrick’s language: In a nation that’s supposedly at peace, […]
