Another thing I'm generally leery about is jinxing a long-awaited/much wanted/greatly needed gun control bill by posting of its "success" before it actually happens ~ keeping fingers, toes, and other body parts crossed until this is a "done deal" ~ Sooz

After Parkland, everything is different: NRA's in decline and gun control is possible
House Democrats will pass a gun control bill this week — amazingly, Senate Republicans may go along. It's a new day.
Sophia Tesfaye / February 13, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)

The Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee is expected to pass a gun control bill on Wednesday. Some of the most vulnerable House Democrats, including those elected in previously red districts, have said they would support gun control bills as expansive as a ban on assault-style weapons. Many of them ran on an unabashed push for increased gun control in the midterm elections and beat GOP incumbents backed by the National Rifle Association. This sweeping shift in the gun debate comes on the one-year anniversary of the Feb. 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. That's no accident.

Gun control measures failed to gain traction in Congress in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland shooting. But that was with Republicans in complete control on Capitol Hill. The activist movement driven by Parkland survivors has clearly of shifted the political climate around gun-safety legislation, and was a major factor in flipping the House to the Democrats last November.

An Associated Press survey found that 8 percent of midterm voters called guns the top issue facing the nation. While that's not a remarkable percentage in itself, those voters broke for Democrats over Republicans better than four to one. Nearly 80 percent of the 62 freshman Democrats elected in the midterms ran on increased gun control. According to a Reuters analysis, that figure far outstripped the proportion of candidates who did so in 2016. The NRA was even outspent by gun control groups in last year's election, for the first time in recent history.

Parkland has served as a watershed moment, and gun control advocates have seized it.

Parkland students and their allies began calling for legislation only hours after a gunman shot 17 people with a legally-purchased AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. Those students went on to create one of the largest youth-led movements in history, organizing the March For Our Lives rally and visits to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers. Less than a month after the Parkland shooting, Florida's Republican legislature passed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, It was the first gun control bill enacted in Florida in decades and was signed by then-Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican. The law allows authorities to seize firearms from people deemed a threat, and implements a three-day waiting period on gun purchases.

“I’ve never seen a community so unified in the way that it was after the shooting. It’s not just that something horrible happened, it’s that it’s a shared experience that we’ve all had,” Parkland survivor Delaney Tarr told Salon’s Rachel Leah. “We get it. We get not only going through this tragedy, but the huge weight of activism, the pressure of it.”

Parkland’s activism has been intergenerational and bipartisan. Parents have traveled to the White House to meet with President Trump’s task force on school shootings. Some community members have partnered with prominent Republicans to advocate for an assault-weapons ban in Florida. A bipartisan bill in the House that requires background checks is expected to pass a major hurdle on Wednesday.

Still, 2018 was America’s worst year in terms of gun violence in schools. Last year, 113 people were killed or injured in school shootings in the U.S. and 1,200 children had their lives cut short by gun violence in the year. There were 339 other mass shootings in 2018.

Since the beginning of this session, Democratic lawmakers in Congress have pushed for gun control legislation. One week after taking control, House Democrats marked the eighth anniversary of the mass shooting that nearly killed their former colleague, Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, by introducing a bill to expand background checks to nearly all firearms sales. A week before the Parkland anniversary, House Democrats held the first hearing on gun violence in eight years. (At that hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., got into a shouting match with a Parkland parent who lost his child in the Valentine’s Day massacre.)

A number of high-profile Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate have co-sponsored an assault weapons ban bill, including Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar. In all, 67 new gun laws were enacted by both Republican and Democratic legislators in 26 states and the District of Columbia in 2018, according to a year-end report by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

But as the scourge of school shootings has stained the nation over the last two decades, Republicans and the gun lobby have only grown more radical in their defense of gun proliferation. In 2004, 52 percent of Republicans supported unlimited gun rights, versus 25 percent of Democrats, according to polling from the Pew Research Center. By 2017 that divide had widened immensely, with 79 percent of Republicans supporting that nebulous principle, but only 20 percent of Democrats.

In 2017, the NRA’s revenues dropped by 15 percent from the previous year, driven largely by a decline in member dues following the election of Donald Trump. Combined with its heavy spending in the 2016 campaign and record spending on lobbying federal agencies and lawmakers over the last two years, the NRA now finds itself in deep financial debt. Last year, for the first time in nearly two decades, polling indicated that more Americans held a negative view of the gun lobby than a positive view.

As Salon's Amanda Marcotte has argued, "The gun industry may soon find itself in the same boat as the tobacco industry was a couple of decades ago, hit by the twin forces of increasing public support for regulation and declining public interest in its products. What was once a behemoth that seemed impossible to defeat is starting to show signs of weakness, beaten down as much by the invisible hand of the free market as by political opposition."

Given the monomania of executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, the NRA never had the vision or imagination to seize the initiative after the Columbine school shooting in 1999. It could have done so by championing sensible firearm regulation, particularly enhanced background checks prior to the sale of a firearm, closing the gun show loophole and denying a firearms to the mentally unstable.

Instead, after Sandy Hook in 2012 the NRA doubled down on the crazy and with each subsequent massacre it has tried to demonize any survivors who dared question its increasingly unhinged logic. Since then, parents who lost children to gun violence have taken office in state legislatures and Congress with the express intent to write legislation meant to clamp down on the gun lobby.

Republicans, reluctantly, admit as much. “There is a distinct possibility that we could have enough Republicans to get to 60,” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said of House Democrats' bill to pass universal background checks for gun purchases this week.

This may be the Parkland massacre’s lasting legacy: It has accelerated the NRA's long march to irrelevancy, and turned the tide on an issue that long seemed intractable. It's about time.

https://www.salon.com/2019/02/13/after-parkland-everything-is-different-nras-in-decline-and-gun-control-is-possible/

8% is HUGE in a 2-party system. An 8% shift creates a 16% margin.

Much as I'd like to see gun control laws enacted I'd be very surprised if this bill (or any other one) makes it thru the Senate. For that matter, I'll be surprised if McConnell allows the Senate to vote on it. But, in the unlikely event that it does make it to Trump's desk, anyone want to make book on his signing it? Too much of his base would go ballistic.

Someone posted this story on my town's Facebook page;

Florida school hires armed combat veterans as guards
https://popularmilitary.com/florida-school-hires-armed-combat-veterans-as-guards/?fbclid=IwAR2YlKpx_vJy_neYrVTerEvEl-Hv54Iza_mEyukMB5uLe2fRjBjBcLQCsLU#utm_source=5%20Bravo


Amazing how many thought this is a good idea.

This turned up on my Facebook page almost a year ago in response to the Parkland shooting. It's about arming teachers but much of the commentary applies to combat vets as well.

BTW - there was an armed guard in the Florida high school.



Jim Wright
Milton, FL, United States ·

Sheriff Grady Judd: “We have got to wake up, wake up and understand that we have to have… specially trained people that have concealed firearms that can run to the threat and protect our children.”

"specially trained"

By ... who?

Who designs the training. On what criteria? To what standards? No, don't just say, "the local police department" or something similar. This training would have to specially designed because you're talking about non-professionals with guns in a building full of panicked children AND those "specially trained people" will be very likely facing a CHILD with a gun who is killing other children. We don't train soldiers for that. We don't train cops for that. So we're going to need special training, including not just the mechanics and theory of combat arms, but the psychology of killing a CHILD in an active shooter situation. If you don't understand why this is a problem, then you're very likely unqualified to be in this conversation in the first place. It takes years of training to condition a soldier to kill another human being on command, let alone a child. And when that killing occurs, it's usually in a warzone, alongside your squadmates, and while that engagement is very, very often chaotic, it can't be compared to the confusion and chaos of a building packed with screaming running children that you are supposed to be protecting. In a warzone, if your bullets hit a civilian, even a child, well, that's collateral damage. It happens. It can't NOT happen. That's war. But a school? Full of American kids? You starting to see why you'd need some VERY, VERY specific training?

Who pays for it? Combat arms is a perishable skill, so how often is refresher training and re-qualification mandated?

Who do these "specially trained people" answer to? Are they trained to work together? Or are they Lone Wolf McQuade?

How do you insure the school in this situation?

Because you going to HAVE to insure the school.

Are the specially trained people personally liable for their fire? If they hit an innocent kid, if they kill an innocent kid or cripple him or her for life? Who's responsible for that?

Moreover, is the "specially trained person" responsible for failure to stop an active shooter?

Well?

No. No. Don't roll your eyes. You live in America (most of you). We are a litigious society. Somebody has to be responsible. You were trained. You had a gun. You failed to stop the shooter, when the grieving parents sue you, will the school board pay your legal fees? Or will the the school, school board, state take responsibility?

SOMEBODY has to be legally responsible.

What weapons?

It makes a difference, you know. Larger, high velocity rounds can penetrate body armor, but also walls, doors, etc, meaning increased chance of collateral damage in a building full of children. We made the cockpit doors on commercial aircraft bullet proof, are we going to do that with classrooms? If not, well, we're back to that question of who's responsible when the school gets sued for not protecting the students from stray bullets fired by their own teachers.

So, do you mandate acceptable weapons? Ammunition? Fields of Fire? Zones of responsibility. Or is it the Wild West?

How do the cops know who the licensed and qualified "specially trained people" are?

This hole is bottomless.

You are essentially talking about turning teachers into soldiers and schools into warzones. You would do everything, EXCEPT address the actual problem. Easy availability of high powered weapons of war.

Now look, I did not say there shouldn't be armed guards in schools. I didn't say there should.

Likewise, I didn't say teachers shouldn't be armed. Or that they should.

Instead, I asked some VERY basic questions regarding the proposed idea of allowing or even mandating armed teachers and school personnel.

I used to do this for a living. I've had advanced training and extensive experience in this area. I was trained by both military and civilian schools. I taught combat arms. I'm a gun owner. I have a concealed carry permit. I'm hardly anti-gun. I didn't suggest anything, one way or the other. Instead, I'm asking BASIC questions about this idea of arming up teachers and putting amateurs with guns in schools. Questions that any competent gun operator should ask.

You want to put more guns, carried by amateurs, into a building packed full of children. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here.

You could argue that combat vets are not amateurs but it's a given that they've had no training about how to handle a situation in which a child is shooting up a building that is full of other children, all of whom are panicking. And as the article points out, unlike a war zone where a stray shot is to be expected this is a school.

I was just reading a few of the stories....but it got too depressing.

"Teen journalists have reported on the nearly 1,200 American kids who have been shot and killed in the year since Parkland.

Spend some time with their stories."

https://sinceparkland.org/?fbclid=IwAR1 ... UXlNTM9yB4

You could argue that combat vets are not amateurs but it's a given that they've had no training about how to handle a situation in which a child is shooting up a building that is full of other children, all of whom are panicking. And as the article points out, unlike a war zone where a stray shot is to be expected this is a school.

These are also the guys who have been trained to throw grenades into buildings where fire is coming from regardless of who else might be inside.

Yep - and who exactly is going to be responsible when some random kid is killed by friendly fire?

How many insurance companies are going to be willing to insure those guards? Or the school? Or the school district?

Did they really think no one would notice??? ~ ~ Sooz

‘School violence is a wedgie’: Anger as Trump changes ‘gun violence’ to ‘school violence’ in Parkland tweet
David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement / 14 Feb 2019 at 16:55 ET



President Donald Trump‘s statement on the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, which stole the lives of 17 people, used the word “gun” just one time. As NCRM reported, it was in the last of the statement’s six paragraphs.

“Melania and I join all Americans in praying for the continued healing of those in the Parkland community and all communities where lives have been lost to gun violence.”

But in a tweet sent out Thursday afternoon, several hours after the White House published the President’s statement, the phrase “gun violence” was changed to read “school violence,” as The Washington Post noticed.


Many on social media noticed the change, and many expressed anger over what one person called President Trump’s “rebranding” of gun violence to school violence.












https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/school-violence-wedgie-anger-trump-changes-gun-violence-school-violence-parkland-tweet/

Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided

There’s scant evidence that they’re effective. They can, however, be psychologically damaging—and they reflect a dismaying view of childhood.

...
In one Massachusetts kindergarten classroom hangs a poster with lockdown instructions that can be sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”: Lockdown, Lockdown, Lock the door / Shut the lights off, Say no more.
...


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/active-shooter-drills-erika-christakis/580426/

I hope everybody realizes the Repubs are going to use Grabem's Emergency Declaration against the Dems. They'll be all over the country saying electing a Democrat will automatically mean you'll lose your guns and have socialist medicare shoved down you throats. We already know a lot of Americans aren't all that bright. They'll fall for it.

A former Parkland school resource officer will have to prove he wasn't criminally negligent when he failed to confront a gunman during the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 students and staff were shot and killed the afternoon of Feb. 14, 2018.

Former Parkland school resource officer accused of hiding during 2018 mass shooting will face trial
By JESSICA SCHLADEBECK

A former school resource officer will have to prove that he was not criminally negligent when he failed to confront a gunman during the massacre at a Florida high school where 17 students and staff were shot to death on Feb. 14, 2018.

Broward Circuit Judge Martin Fein denied a motion on Thursday to dismiss 11 charges, including counts of felony child neglect, brought against 58-year-old Scot Peterson. His attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, during a court hearing earlier this week attempted to argue the law Peterson is accused of breaking specifically applies to caregivers — parents teachers and baby-sitters — and that, as a school resource officer, did not apply to him.

“While we are extremely disappointed with the judge’s decision and plan to appeal, we take solace knowing that the truth will come out at trial. My client is innocent of any criminal wrongdoing, and did all he could to save lives during Nikolas Cruz’s abhorrent massacre,” Eiglarsh said in a statement to CNN.

“The public has been fed a false narrative about Scot Peterson. We have overwhelming evidence proving that the numerous actions that my client took during the attack was done to save lives,” the attorney added.

Peterson was working at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland school when 19-year-old Cruz began to gun down students and teachers on Valentine’s Day 2018. He has claimed that while he was radioing for help, he didn’t know where Cruz was on the campus.

Surveillance video taken the day of the deadly attack shows the former officer never entered the building while the shooting unfolded.

Prosecutors have said that Peterson failed to ...

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/nation ... story.html

wow

It's more than two years since the Parkland shooting and they still don't have enough evidence to convict Cruz? What the fu.....!!!!

Parkland victims’ families reach $25 million settlement with school district 3 years after massacre
Timothy Bella

The families of the 17 students and staffers killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and dozens who were injured or traumatized reached a $25 million settlement with the school district Tuesday ahead of a guilty plea by accused shooter Nikolas Cruz, according to a lawyer representing some of the families.

Attorney David Brill said the largest chunk of the settlement with Broward County Public Schools would be split among the families of the 14 students and three faculty members killed on Feb. 14, 2018, in one of the deadliest school massacres in the nation’s history. The agreement settles 52 of the 53 negligence lawsuits filed against the school district over the shooting. The settlement includes 16 of the 17 people injured in the attack and 19 suffering from PTSD or other conditions years later.

“It’s a fair and frankly remarkable result,” Brill said in a statement. “It gives the families a measure of justice and accountability.”

A spokesperson for Broward County Public Schools said the district would not comment on the settlement or pending litigation.

The settlement, which was first reported by the Fort Lauderdale-based Sun Sentinel, came a day before Cruz, a former student at the school, pleaded guilty Wednesday to 17 counts of premeditated murder and 17 counts of attempted murder.

The plea sets the stage for a trial focusing on whether Cruz, 23, will be sentenced to death. Prosecutors are asking for the death penalty, but Cruz’s defense team is seeking 17 consecutive life sentences for him.

Nikolas Cruz will plead guilty to killing 17 people in Parkland mass shooting, defense team says

The rampage at the South Florida high school set off a legal back-and-forth for more than 3½ years between family members of victims and the Broward school district over the district’s alleged negligence. During that time, Parkland students helped to ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... ment-cruz/

That doesn't finalize things. There is still one outstanding lawsuit filed by a severely injured student as well as these