So it now appears that the Texas GOP plans to violate Texans’ God-given right to get drunk and shoot someone. Wayne Slater reports:

Open carry advocates say they’ll be at the Fort Worth Convention Center this week for the state GOP convention to encourage a change in state law to allow open carry of handguns in Texas. State GOP chairman Steve Munisteri says it’s fine if demonstrators want to gather outside the hall, but can’t bring their rifles inside. He warns that would violate the prohibition against carrying guns anyplace that has a permit to sell alcohol.

Obviously, they’ll need to secede from the GOP — or Texas, or both. But perhaps not immediately. The gun-toters of Texas have a lot on their plate these days. The NRA, they can handle, apparently. After a post on the NRA’s “News and Issues” page criticized their strategy of carrying assault rifles into retail establishments as both “weird” and “scary,” not to mention “unneighborly,” Texas long gun open carry groups pushed back hard, and the NRA quickly backed down. But they did not fare nearly as well when asked a simple question about their public gun-toting strategy by MSNBC’s Joy Reid.

“Do you think it would scare people?” Reid asked repeatedly, when she had Tov Henderson, communications director for Open Carry Texas, on “The Reid Report” on May 3. “I can’t get you to answer a very simple question, of do you think it scares people to see, let alone one armed person, but a bunch of armed people in this day and age, when we have so many mass shootings? Do you think it scares people?”

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/10/gun_extremists_finally_go_too_far_what_will_make_the_nra_realize_theyve_lost_america/

The NRA and its academic acolytes like John Lott have been tirelessly promoting the idea that guns protect us from crime, which is another way of saying that everyone should carry a gun, which is another way of saying that we should all buy more guns. And the proof that more guns equals less crime comes in the form of a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which shows that over the past twenty years, violent crime, particularly gun crimes, have fallen by more than 50 percent. Since it's over the same two decades that every state has adopted some form of concealed carry weapons (CCW) law, the gun lobby argues that the reason we are a much safer country is because everyone's walking around with a gun. Now if we could get rid of those unhealthy gun-free zones, right?

Another, much more troublesome report was issued in January with data and conclusions that the NRA chooses to ignore. The report was based on a study of 6,300 patients admitted to a Level 1 trauma center in Newark suffering from gunshot wounds between 2000 and 2011, a time when, according to the FBI-UCR data, overall violent crime in Newark dropped by 22%. Actually, the murder rate during that period increased by nearly 60%, but since we're only talking about less than 60 dead bodies lying around, we'll leave that one alone.

Getting back to the gunshot wounds, the physicians who conducted the research found that the number of patients didn't significantly change, notwithstanding the alleged drop in gun violence everywhere else, and the severity of the wounds substantially increased. Despite the fact that Level 1 trauma centers utilize the most advanced life-saving skills imaginable, the mortality rate from gunshot wounds climbed from 9% to 14%, the number of spinal cord and brain injuries nearly doubled, and the incidence of multiple bullet wounds increased from 10% to nearly 25%.

The gun lobby could (and will) ignore these numbers were it not for the fact that the national picture for the trend gunshot wounds is roughly the same as what happened in Newark. According to the CDC, the rate of intentional gun injuries per 100,000 was 17.25 in 2000 and 17.83 in 2011, holding steady nationally just like the researchers in the case of Newark's University Hospital found over the same eleven years. That being the case, how does one reconcile those numbers with the BJS report that the NRA uses to bolster its claim of such a dramatic decrease in the criminal use of guns? The BJS report shows a decline in the gun homicide rate from 7 per 100,000 to less than 4 from 1993 to 2011, and a decline in nonfatal gun victimizations from above 7 per 1,000 persons to less than 2. So who's right?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-weisser/concealed-carry-laws_b_5479055.html

WASHINGTON — President Obama, speaking hours after a gunman killed a student and wounded a teacher at an Oregon high school, said Tuesday that his failure to push through stricter gun laws was the greatest frustration of his presidency, declaring, “We’re the only developed country on earth where this happens.”

Speaking in blunt and bitter terms about a bloody trail of shootings in the last month, Mr. Obama said: “Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced, developed country on earth that would put up with this.”

While the president said he had undertaken several executive actions to tighten existing regulations, the failure to require a background check for buyers of guns left the nation vulnerable to an unending series of mass shootings. “The bottom line is, is that we don’t have enough tools right now to really make as big of a dent as we need to,” Mr. Obama said to a young audience at a White House question-and-answer session sponsored by the social media site Tumblr.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/us/troutdale-oregon-reynolds-high-school-shooting.html?hp

A man shot and killed his best friend, his roommate, by accident. It happened Saturday night around 8:00 in Bradenton off 50th Avenue West and 30th Street West.

Manatee County deputies said 22-year-old Kyle Guessford was showing off his new flashlight gun mount to his friends at his apartment. As he went to turn on the flashlight, the gun discharged and shot his roommate in the head, 22-year-old Austin Brunson.

"He was a good kid, we always cooked and brought food over there, they were both good guys, food friends," said their neighbor and friend, Walter Mays Junior. "Austin loved playing guitar, he had ten guitars sitting in their living room."

"They know better than to have a loaded gun in the house," said Mays. "My heart goes out to their families, they all seemed close. I feel so sorry for their parents. This was horrible. This was a tragic accident."

http://www.wtsp.com/story/news/local/manateecounty/2014/06/08/bradenton-florida-accidental-shooting/10205689/

Macon-Bibb County Commissioner Al Tillman hopes someone will mount a legal challenge to block the July 1 implementation of Georgia’s new gun law.

But in the longer term, he wants a concerted effort to scale back the authorization for guns in various public places.

The concern is twofold, he said: expense and safety. In discussing hot-button issues, he’s often heard people talk about what they’d do “if I had my gun.”

“Well, now, folks will have their gun,” said Tillman, himself a gun owner who thinks the new law goes too far in removing oversight.

http://www.macon.com/2014/06/08/3139564/macon-bibb-officials-talk-of-push.html#storylink=cpy

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David Letterman let loose on Anderson Cooper Wednesday night by telling him that he's fed up with legislative inaction on gun control following Sandy Hook, which he thought would be a turning point. Cooper concurred, and said if that didn't prompt efforts to curb the availability of guns, nothing would.

"For the love of Christ, when are we going to do something about this nonsense?" inquired Letterman, rhetorically. "Nothing will move until everyone knows or has a family member that has been gunned down."

http://politix.topix.com/story/12429-letterman-throws-down-on-guns-for-the-love-of-christ-when-are-we-gonna-do-something

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The lyrics in Serial Killa, a track on Snoop Dogg’s breakthrough album, Doggystyle, are emblematic of the violence associated with the former gangsta rapper from California. The main message of the song: if anyone insulted him, he would shoot to kill.

More than twenty years after the release of his premiere album, Snoop Dogg, now known as Snoop Lion, is an outspoken voice in the ongoing campaign to end gun violence.

“We are the voices that the youth listen to; they respect us. So, we are the ones who can put a half pause on the gun violence when we speak as one – as a whole rap community,” he said during a “No Guns Allowed” event last Thursday. During a time when gun violence is projected to kill more people than car accidents, and violent lyrics used to criminalize people of color, Snoop’s call for no more guns is both timely and necessary.

The title of the event was inspired by Snoop’s entrance into anti-gun advocacy two years ago. After re-branding himself in 2012 — by changing his name to Snoop Lion and releasing the reggae album Resurrection — his song No Guns Allowed became a hit single. In it, the rapper-turned-singer croons, “Let the music play, me don’t want no more gunplay. When the bodies hit the ground, there’s nothing left to say, ay, ay. Me don’t want to see no more innocent blood shed. Me don’t want to see no more youth dead. Come hear me now.”

http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/06/03/3443815/snoop-dogg-gun-violence/