Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps the stupidest thing that gun nuts do—that would be aside from all the phenomenally stupid things that leave thousands and thousands of Americans dead every year from murder by gun, suicide by gun, accidental shooting by gun—is believing that their numbers are anything beyond a small, small fraction of the nation’s population.

Take, for instance, last weekend, when two gun nuts shot down three people in Las Vegas…

Hey! Hey! Hey! I see what you’re doing, Cope. You’re trying to make all of us Second Amendment patriots out to be like them killers. Ya’ know, if there’d been more of us around with our guns, they wouldn’ta gotten away with that.

Ah, I see the representative of the NRA has joined us. And already, it seems we need to remind him that two of the victims were policemen. Armed policemen. Yet the gun nuts… or should I call them “Second Amendment patriots?”… killed them precisely because they were policemen. Policemen whose duties would naturally include protecting citizens from the likes of these “Second Amendment patriots.”

http://www.boiseweekly.com/Cobweb/archives/2014/06/13/mr-copes-cave-more-stupid-things-that-gun-nuts-do

There have been at least 74 school shootings in America since Adam Lanza killed his mother and 26 students and teachers before committing suicide in Newton, Connecticut. They were lives – both young and old – lost at the hands of a man and his gun, a violent rampage that has been replicated at academic institutions nationwide day after day, month after month and year after year. As we continue to contemplate what went wrong on that fateful date in December 2012, trying to think of ways to prevent gun violence and save lives, two George Mason University professors are actually taking action.

Volgenau School of Engineering associate professor Ken Hintz and School of Management assistant professor Jim Wolfe are developing technology that can detect a weapon before it's shot, manufacturing a method to determine the location of a brandished gun before the first shot is fired. The detectors, they say, could not only make schools and workplaces safer, but also better protect deployed military members and heads of state.

According to the university, the professors' tech transfer startup company FirstGuard Technologies Corporation received a $2.3 million contract form the Office of Naval Research to create prototypes of the pre-shot weapons detector, which was discovered thanks to an Office of Naval Research grant to George Mason in 2008.

The technology, the school says, "can detect a range of firearms, from a four-inch revolver to an 81-millimeter mortar launcher. And, unlike previous anti-sniper technological advancements that locate the shooter after the first shot, this one detects the weapon before it is fired whether the weapon uses optical or iron sights." Clearly an advanced, cutting-edge detector, it's no wonder the Office of Naval Research is so enthusiastic about the product.

http://inthecapital.streetwise.co/2014/06/19/george-mason-university-technology-that-can-detect-a-weapon-before-its-shot/

Violence against women looks very different than violence against men. Whether in the context of sexual assault on college campuses or in the military, violence by an intimate partner, or other types of violent victimization, women’s experiences of violence in this country are unique from those of men. One key difference in the violence committed against women in the United States is who commits it: Women are much more likely to be victimized by people they know, while men are more likely to be victims of violent crime at the hands of strangers. Between 2003 and 2012, 65 percent of female violent crime victims were targeted by someone they knew; only 34 percent of male violent crime victims knew their attackers. Intimate partners make up the majority of known assailants: During the same time period, 34 percent of all women murdered were killed by a male intimate partner, compared to the only 2.5 percent of male murder victims killed by a female intimate partner.

A staggering portion of violence against women is fatal, and a key driver of these homicides is access to guns. From 2001 through 2012, 6,410 women were murdered in the United States by an intimate partner using a gun—more than the total number of U.S. troops killed in action during the entirety of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. Guns are used in fatal intimate partner violence more than any other weapon: Of all the women killed by intimate partners during this period, 55 percent were killed with guns. Women in the United States are 11 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than are women in other high income countries.

Limiting abusers and stalkers’ access to firearms is therefore critical to reduce the number of women murdered in this country every year. This idea is not new: Congress first acted 20 years ago to strengthen our gun laws to prevent some domestic abusers from buying guns. But we are still a long way from having a comprehensive system of laws in place at both the federal and state levels that protect women—and children and men—from fatal violence in the context of intimate and domestic relationships. This report provides an overview of the data regarding the intersection of intimate partner violence and gun violence, describing four policies that states and the federal government should enact to reduce dangerous abusers’ access to guns and prevent murders of women:

http://americanprogress.org/issues/guns-crime/report/2014/06/18/91998/women-under-the-gun/

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about her views on gun control Tuesday, saying she was "disappointed" Congress did not pass a universal background checks bill after "the horrors" of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

"I believe that we need a more thoughtful conversation, we cannot let a minority of people -- and that's what it is, it is a minority of people -- hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people," Clinton said during a CNN town hall.

Clinton said she feels for parents sending their kids to school, noting that there have been 74 school shootings since Sandy Hook.

"I don't think any parent, any person, should have to fear about their child going to school or going to college because someone, for whatever reasons -- psychological, emotional, political, ideological, whatever it means -- could possibly enter that school property with an automatic weapon and murder innocent children, students, teachers," Clinton said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/hillary-clinton-gun-control_n_5505080.html

Noir -- a weekly program aired by the National Rifle Association as part of its efforts to reach a younger audience -- has run two segments that fetishize an assault weapon as an attractive woman.

Over the past year the NRA has launched a number of initiatives to engage with women, minorities, and younger Americans. Noir, a Sunday web series hosted by popular gun blogger turned NRA News commentator Colion Noir, is packaged for a Millennial audience, although the show has been widely mocked by critics as a phony and out-of-touch attempt at messaging.

A segment during the June 15 edition of Noir opened with a black-and-white scene of a stylishly-dressed woman standing in an alley. Doing voice-over work, Noir appeared to describe the woman, ranging from her clothing ("Her Jimmy Choo's can't be comfortable, but you'd never know it", to her intellect ("Chess, yeah it's a men's game, but when she plays, men pay", to her actions ("Flirts more than you can handle too. She's the kind to tell the bartender how to make her drink".

In the final shot, the woman is seen holding a Heckler & Koch MR556 assault weapon and Noir reveals he was talking about the firearm the whole time:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/06/16/why-does-the-nra-keep-comparing-women-to-guns/199743

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court dealt a rare blow to the gun lobby Monday by ruling that purchasers must report when they are buying firearms for other people.

The decision upheld two lower courts that had ruled against so-called "straw purchasers," even though the justices acknowledged that Congress left loopholes in gun control laws passed in the 1960s and 1990s.

For gun purchasers to be allowed to buy from licensed dealers without reporting the actual final owners of the firearms, the justices said, would make little sense.

The 5-4 ruling was wriitten by Justice Elena Kagan. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissent for the court's conservatives.

http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2014/06/16/supreme-court-deals-rare-blow-to-gun-purchase/10574215/

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/