Earlier this year in Arkansas, nine-year-old Hank asked if he could go rabbit hunting, alone, with his .22-caliber rifle. His uncle said OK, because the boy had been hunting with his family all through his childhood

Hank never came back. He slipped somehow, the rifle went off, and he was shot in the forehead.

Both Kelli and Brad, from whom she is separated, believe that the gun was faulty - it shouldn’t have gone off unless the trigger was pulled, they claim. Since Hank’s death, she’s been posting warnings on her Facebook page about the gun her son used: “I wish someone else had posted warnings about it before what happened,” she says.

Had Kelli not bought the gun and had Brad not trained his son to use it, Hank would have celebrated his 10th birthday on 6 June, which his mother commemorated by posting Hank’s picture on her Facebook page with the message: “Happy Birthday Hank! Mommy loves you!”

Little Hank thus became one in a tally of what the makers of a Channel 4 documentary called Kids and Guns claim to be 3,000 American children who die each year from gun-related accidents. A recent Yale University study found that more than 7,000 US children and adolescents are hospitalised or killed by guns each year and estimates that about 20 children a day are treated in US emergency rooms following incidents involving guns.

Another nine-year-old in Texas named Gia hunts zombies — cardboard cutouts her father places in trees, and has other targets for her shooting practice.

Instead of playing with Barbie dolls, Gia shoots them as target practice near her home. She owns six pistols, a shotgun and a Winchester rifle. Her dad has even more, and says: “There’s an expression in Texas: ‘If you know how many guns you’ve got, you haven’t got enough.’”

Again, Spyder, a single father, considers himself to be a good parent. He teaches his daughter the four rules of gun safety, rule four of which is: Know your target and what is behind it. “I taught her to have her finger off the trigger and point the gun away. That was already ingrained in her by [age] five. If you live in Texas or Oklahoma where there are guns, you’ve got to teach them that part,” says Spyder.

What about those who say that teaching children to use guns is wrong? “Tough shit. That’s what we do.”

More: Kids, Guns and the American Way

Both families, and several others are featured in a Channel 4 documentary, Kids and Guns, which airs in the UK on July 31. According to The Guardian, it’s a non-judgmental look at how Americans gun-users raise their children, and how Americans avoid examination of the sometimes painful consequences of easy gun ownership.

Check out the NRA’s latest anti control proposal. In a Think Progress Video, I originally saw over at Wonkette ( where we had a lot of fun making fun of it ), Billy Johnson, proposed for lack of a better term “Gun Socialism.”

Kyle Kulinski ( Secular Talk ) Created an excellent response video to Billy Johnson’s “Gun Socialism”

Youtube Video

I have to agree with Kulinski.

How would putting guns into the hands of children stop school shootings? We’re supposed to trust little kids now, who are barely mature enough to survive on their own to use dangerous weapons?

Also I’ll bet, Johnson expects us to believe the old myth that more guns equals less crime, sorry but it doesn’t exactly work that way.

His idea may fall in line with the most extreme interpretations of the second amendment, but how is he supposed to squire with the wingnut opposition to anything even perceived to be socialist?

Now how is it that Obamacare, which is supposedly socialism and therefor bad, but this isn’t socialism and this is good? I mean he’s advocating the government spend our tax dollars on giving people guns? Not to mention government funded shooting ranges, and “free” ammo? How is it that wingnuts wouldn’t call him a socialist if he was proposing something like this for anything else?

Also the reason why even the most extreme anti gun control advocates in general can’t perceive guns as a need, in the way he says we should, probably has something to do with this fact. Human beings have literally survived for over a million years without guns.

Yet he claims that he opposes violence at the same time? How exactly is he opposing violence here? Oh and this guy was arrested for violating our gun control laws, no surprise there. The Southern Poverty Law Center needs to keep monitoring people like Adam Kokesh. Everyone here should consider donating to them

David Edwards at Raw Story has more on what this sick idiot had to say,

A libertarian gun activist — who was convicted on weapons charges after he carried a loaded shotgun in downtown Washington, D.C. — this week defended two people who recently went on a shooting rampage in Las Vegas, killing two police officers and another person.

On his Wednesday Internet show, Adam Kokesh blasted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for noting that Jerad and Amanda Miller had been inspired by his gun activism.

“You’re not going to get away with it this time USA Today and SPLC,” Kokesh insisted, arguing that the shooters had acted because “authority has become a homicidal institution against freedom.”

Wow, what a wingnut! Defending the murder of police officers, yeah, that’s really going to help your cause.

Read more at Raw Story

The one thing that surprises me about this is that it wasn’t Jim Hoft, the dumbest man on the internet who said it. You’ll think the same thing when you hear how the “Center for Accuracy In the Media” Is trying to convince us that Jarad and Amanda Miller were “progressives.”

Youtube Video

Once again Pat Robertson gives sage wisdom to a kid who wrote in. “”Say, ‘Mom, this thing is scaring me and I ask you, please, to get my father to have some help,’” Robertson said. Yeah, so Moms had a piece pulled on her so many times, it’s old. But don’t call the authorities, that might cause Pop to go Pop. Wisdom from a grifter. How about get the hell out?
Like I said, with shows like this you don’t have to wonder what is wrong with us.

Should what Rebecca Schoenkopf found surprise anyone?

Jerad and Amanda Miller, the super-patriots who gunned down a couple of cops and a lady who was going to Wal-Mart in Vegas yesterday, may have bragged constantly to all their neighbors about their guns and about how they’d been hanging at Bundy Ranch with fellow super-patriot Cliven Bundy, but Jim Hoft, the Stupidest Man on the Internet, knows what really drove them: They were Socialists, Dude. Say what you want about their tenets, at least it’s an ethos.

Where would Jim Hoft get the idea that the Millers were Socialists?

Read more at Wonkette

When news of the Isla Vista shootings broke, myself and other Canadians no doubt began to see parallels between this incident and one of the worst mass murders in Canadian history, the Montreal Massacre of 1989:

The École Polytechnique Massacre, also known as the Montreal Massacre, occurred on December 6, 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained Mini-14 and a hunting knife, shot twenty-eight people before killing himself. He began his attack by entering a classroom at the university, where he separated the male and female students. After claiming that he was “fighting feminism” and calling the women “a bunch of feminists,” he shot all nine women in the room, killing six. He then moved through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, specifically targeting women to shoot. Overall, he killed fourteen women and injured ten other women and four men in just under twenty minutes before turning the gun on himself. Lépine was the son of a French-Canadian mother and an Algerian father, and had been physically abused by his father. His suicide note claimed political motives and blamed feminists for ruining his life. The note included a list of nineteen Quebec women whom Lépine considered to be feminists and apparently wished to kill.

It’s clear from the descriptions that there were similar motivations behind both attacks. There’s also a rather eerie similarity between the perpetrators: both single men, in their early 20s with similar backgrounds.

Regarding Lepine:

A police psychiatrist who interviewed Lépine’s family and entourage, and who had access to his letters, suggested that he may have had a serious personality disorder, as he chose the multiple homicide/suicide strategy (killing one’s self after killing others) that is a characteristic of this disorder. The psychiatrist noted “extreme narcissistic vulnerability” as shown by fantasies of power and success combined with high levels of self-criticism and difficulties dealing with rejection and failure. Feelings of powerlessness and incompetence were compensated for by a violent and grandiose imaginary life. Other psychiatrists suggested that Lépine was psychotic, having lost touch with reality as he tried to erase the memories of a brutal (and absent) father, while at the same time unconsciously identifying with a violent manhood that dominates women. Other theories were that Lépine’s experiences of abuse as a child had caused brain-damage or led him to feel victimized as he faced losses and rejections in his later life. His mother speculated that Lépine may have suffered from attachment disorder, due to the abuse and sense of abandonment he had experienced in his childhood. She also wondered whether Lépine viewed her as a feminist, and that the massacre might have been an unconscious attempt to get revenge for her neglect while she pursued her career, and for his sister’s taunts. Others take a less individualistic approach. Many feminists and governmental officials view it as an illustration of misogynist violence committed against women.

And about Eliot Rodger:

According to the Rodger family’s attorney, Rodger saw multiple therapists and was a student at Santa Barbara City College. The lawyer also claims that Rodger was diagnosed with “highly functional Asperger syndrome” as a child[28] and was allegedly bullied.[12] He had a YouTube account, a Facebook account, and a blog titled Elliot Rodger’s Official Blog, all of which contained posts expressing loneliness and rejection. His manifesto mentions a cocktail of drugs that he was prescribed, though how long he was being treated with them and what drugs remain unknown at this time.

I can personally relate to Lepine and Rodger to a point. In my late teens and early 20s (I was single until age 25), I dealt with rejection. I was stood up at my senior prom, I was stood up twice by the same girl in college, I was quiet, somewhat introverted and shorter than average height. I admit I was angry and frustrated because I couldn’t understand why women weren’t attracted to me.

Most guys my age had a girlfriend, didn’t I deserve one too?

Was I emotional? Yes.
Was I despondent? Yes.
Did I ever get violent? No.

I decided to live my life as who I was and let the world take me for me. Not an easy decision mind you, but the right one.

Now I don’t have Aspergers, but I do have ADD. One of the symptoms of ADD (beyond the obvious difficulty in focusing on things) is difficulty socializing. This is something I’ve struggled with greatly through my adult life. I have been making steady progress in the area, but it’s still an issue I deal with.

I do believe one of the problems is the way society portrays women. They are seen as a symbol of success along with money and power. Think of the rap videos where the star is surrounded by gold jewelry, expensive cars and a bunch of scantily clad women or the end of numerous movies where the heroic man finally gets the woman who’s been dodging his advances up to that point.

We do a fine job of presenting women as property and less fine a job of presenting them as human. No man deserves a woman just because’s he’s a man. A relationship with a woman is something that is earned, not given.

And that brings me to my next point. The murders in Montreal shook the Canadian national conscience and brought about a lot of change for my country.

The massacre galvanized the Canadian women’s movement, who see it as a symbol of violence against women. “The death of those young women would not be in vain, we promised”, Canadian feminist Judy Rebick recalled. “We would turn our mourning into organizing to put an end to male violence against women.”

In response to the killings a House of Commons Sub-Committee on the Status of Women was created. It released a report “The War against Women” in June 1991, which was not endorsed by the full standing committee. However, following its recommendations, the federal government established the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women in August 1991. The panel issued a final report, “Changing the Landscape: Ending Violence - Achieving Equality”, in June 1993.

In addition, the violent acts also led to, guess what? Stricter gun control laws.

The massacre was a major spur for the Canadian gun control movement. One of the survivors, Heidi Rathjen, who was in one of the classrooms Lépine did not enter during the shooting, organized the Coalition for Gun Control with Wendy Cukier.Suzanne Laplante-Edward and Jim Edward, the parents of one of the victims, were also deeply involved. Their activities, along with others, led to the passage of Bill C-68, or the Firearms Act, in 1995, ushering in stricter gun control regulations. These new regulations included requirements on the training of gun owners, screening of firearm applicants, rules concerning gun and ammunition storage and the registration of all firearms.

Unfortunately, some of those tight restrictions have been successfully rolled back by the current Conservative Government in Canada:

Between 2009 and 2012 survivors of the massacre and their families publicly opposed legislative actions by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government aimed at ending the long-gun registry. A bill was narrowly defeated in September 2010, but following their 2011 majority election win, the long-gun registry was abolished by the Harper government in April 2012. The Quebec government subsequently won a temporary injunction, preventing the destruction of the province’s gun registry data, and ordering the continued registration of long guns in Quebec.

Those laws will probably be reinstated in some form after the Conservatives lose power, but the main point I am making here is that it’s clear the Isla Vista shootings will have nowhere the impact on the American people that Montreal incident did on the Canadians.

And that’s quite telling. Because it means no real change will occur. Women will continue to be objectified, guns will continue to be easily available.

Sooner or later, another Marc Lepine/Eliot Rodger/will come along and we’ll have the same conversations all over again.

With the same results.

A new metric needs to be developed to better disseminate the numbers on gun violence…

How many Americans have been shot over the past 10 years? No one really knows. We don’t even know if the number of people shot annually has gone up or down over that time.

The government’s own numbers seem to conflict. One source of data on shooting victims suggests that gun-related violence has been declining for years, while another government estimate actually shows an increase in the number of people who have been shot. Each estimate is based on limited, incomplete data. Not even the FBI tracks the total number of nonfatal gunshot wounds.

“We know how many people die, but not how many are injured and survive,” said Dr. Demetrios Demetriades, a Los Angeles trauma surgeon who has been studying nationwide gunshot injury trends.

While the number of gun murders has decreased in recent years, there’s debate over whether this reflects a drop in the total number of shootings, or an improvement in how many lives emergency room doctors can save.

Doctors and researchers have been advocating for better gun injury data since the late 1980s. But fierce political battles over gun violence research — including pressure from congressional Republicans that put an end to some government-funded studies on firearms — has meant that we still don’t know many basic facts about gun violence in America.

“In the absence of real data, politicians and policymakers do what the hell they want,” Dr. David Livingston, the director of the New Jersey Trauma Center at University Hospital in Newark. said “They do what the hell they want anyway,” he added, “but in the absence of data, they have nobody to call them on it.”

More: Why Don’t We Know How Many People Are Shot Each Year in America? - ProPublica

Gun culture:

When Christopher Roupe answered the door last Friday, he probably didn’t think death would be waiting on the other side. But that’s exactly what the 17-year-old ROTC student found after the police officer outside mistook his Wii controller for a gun, a lawyer for his family says.

Roupe was killed Friday night after an officer arrived at his mobile home in Georgia to deliver a probation violation warrant for the teen’s father. As the officer tells it, Roupe was holding a gun when he answered the door. But Cole Law, who is representing Roupe’s family, disagrees.

“We don’t know where [the claim that he had a gun] came from,” Law told WSBTV in Atlanta. “The eyewitnesses on the scene clearly state that he had a Wii controller in his hand. He heard a knock at the door. He asked who it was, there was no response so he opened the door and upon opening the door he was immediately shot in the chest.”

thinkprogress.org