“Fans of Christina Grimmie have begun calling for guns to be banned in wake of her death,” themirror.co.uk reports. “The Voice star was tragically shot dead as she signed autographs at a concert in Florida on Friday. In the US, the deadly weapons are allowed under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. The controversial bill says: ‘The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'” Kudos to The Mirror for not including the militia clause. Brickbats to Grimmie fans reacting to her shooting by taking to #banguns.

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On the other hand, I welcome news of gun control advocates who don’t hide behind the “I support the Second Amendment but — ” rubric. If politicians like, say, Hillary Clinton would drop her “common sense gun laws” pretenses and come out of the civilian disarmament closet, Americans could understand that statists gotta state state state. And send them packing. Which is why anti-gun rights pols prevaricate. Meanwhile, condolences to Ms, Grimmie fans, friends and family.

BTW: The venue was a “gun free zone.”

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62 COMMENTS

    • This story is local to me.

      There are *un-confirmed* reports from Orlando media that the shooter was someone known to the family.

      Keep her family in your thoughts, her brother was standing there when she was shot, and then he tackled the gunman. The gunman then suicided. Her brother is likely going through hell right now, probably wracked with grief he didn’t save his sister…

    • Hispanic doesn’t refer to skin color, but language/culture. There are Hispanics of African, European, Asian, and Amerindian racial background (and various mixtures of all of these).

      Of course you do still make a good point. It is like when they refer to a “Frenchman” named Mohammed committing a crime. He may be a French citizen, but more importantly, he is probably a follower of a certain particular non Christian religion. The media doesn’t want to talk about that.

      • I have also seen the media prevaricate on ethnicity by referring to middle-eastern perpetrators as “Asian”, especially those from Syria and on east. This is especially infuriating not only by their unwillingness to correctly identify the social group of the perp, but the majority of those persons, regardless of the darkness of their skin, are technically CAUCasian [sic], NOT Asian.

    • Remember, the media insisted George Zimmerman, who had native Peruvian and black African ancestry, was “white”, or “white Hispanic” or “identifies as Hispanic” because without a White on Black Shooting narrative the story wouldn’t have made it out of the local news market.

  2. “In the US, the deadly weapons are allowed”

    Those wacky Brits, you gotta love em. Aren’t they cute?

      • Watched a rerun of CSI:NY last week. The perp (while in prison) used a AA battery and the foil wrapper from a stick of gum to start a fire that ignited a bowl of Fritos. The burning Fritos were used to melt plastic dinner utensils into a thick, hard plastic stick which was then ground to a point and sharp edge on a cinder block. This shiv was subsequently used to slash a man’s carotid artery and he bled to death.

        No amount of government interference is going to stop a determined person from bearing arms or making arms when all else fails.

        • In 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright’s butler killed seven people with a can of gasoline and a hatchet.
          Set the house on fire and hacked them up as they tried to escape.
          Where there’s a will, coconuts will always find a way.

  3. “In the US, the [insurrectionist] weapons [that crippled our Empire] are allowed.”

    There. FIFY.

    • When exactly did that happen? The British Empire won the war in which the American Revolution was just a theater. They lost that theater, but won everywhere else, against Spain, France, the Dutch, an Indian insurrection… etc

      The British empire fell apart after World War II, and was crippled by nationalism, not guns.

      • It was undone by both. Indeed, the American theatre was one of several, but our theatre was the first to show the Empire could be fought successfully. And the spark that fundamentally lit the fuse was the British attempting to confiscate colonial arms. And I didn’t say our arms ended the Empire; I wrote that it crippled it.

      • “”Crippled by nationalism”? Yeah…that’s’ exactly the same agitprop being used to destroy the USA.

  4. First off, what a senseless loss of a talented life at the hands of another person who (probably) should not have been walking the streets. That being said, is anyone besides me starting to think that some of these kinds of publicity generating shootings are orchestrated? I’m not a tin foil hat conspiracy guy, but something is starting to stink…badly.

        • Exactly this. Every single mishap or crime with a gun that will resonate with the public and make them think, “That could happen to me” makes the national news. Gang bangers shooting each other doesn’t make the news, but the toddler that gets ahold of grandma’s pistol does. The fairly regular successful defensive shooting gets buried in the news cycle if it is mentioned at all, but the tragic shooting of and innocent victim gets plastered over the media for days, weeks or even months. And in a country of 320 million it’s not hard to find stories that fit your agenda, plaster them all over the media and talk about “an epidemic of gun violence” when in truth gun death numbers, even including the two thirds that are suicides, are below all the other major causes of death in America.

    • No, but you are not far off. The main stream news media has a political agenda. When these things happen, they blast it all over the news for weeks to get their message out. In turn, the crazies see these broadcasts and start seeing murder as a viable way way to get attention. The media knows that the more they push this message, the more of these things will happen, but they do not care. They are using these deaths as propaganda for a political goal, so in their mind, sacrifices must be made. For example, if she had been stabbed to death, it would have been an article below the fold for perhaps one day. Instead, it will be front page for some time.

    • I do think that the timing for these kinds of things is so weird. Here in California, we have 12 gun control bills going through the “process” and several low key shootings have happened.

      • California has several major cities with draconian gun control laws. All the media has to do is watch the police blotter and pick the stories that fit their agenda.

        Case in point, on of the firearms forums I go to has Australian members. While normally Australian gun laws are held up as a model of successful gun control, this year saw thier National Firearms Act coming up for review. In the five or six months leading up to the review, the Australian media suddenly started reporting every single shooting they could find to give the impression of a “surge of gun violence”. The number of shootings actually remained as normal, but the media did their best to leave the impression of an, wait for it, “epidemic of gun violence.” Once the review went through without any relaxing of the laws, the Australian media went back to pretending no shootings every happened in Oz at all.

        • perfectly correct regarding the play in Aussie. Further, you couldn’t turn an idiot box on without constant re-runs and reminders of Port Arthur and how flak jacket Johnny ‘saved the country’ with his nefarious National Firearms Agreement.

          It went on for weeks – our media sucks more than your media….

    • Speaking of the biased news cycle, Yahoo News reported today on celebrities who had been attacked with murderous intent by people they apparently did not know. Of the nine celebrities mentioned, FOUR were stabbed! A fifth, the most recent, the attacker had two pistols and shot her, but he also carried a very large knife, just in case.

    • I’ve been saying that for awhile now…Some of these high profile media blitzed mass shootings look a lot like “put-up-jobs “. After the NSA/CIA spygate issue in America…Anything is possible….CIA propping up some “Lee Harvey Oswald ” types to go on public “social engineering projects..?” It just wouldn’t surprise me….

  5. Giving up my guns now.
    And going to vote for hillary.
    Australia is right.
    Its the victims fault.
    Gonna live on tofu and flax seeds.
    Knit my clothing from sustainable alpaca hair.
    Recycle my body fluids to enrich my organic roof garden.
    Change my name to rainbow 7
    Gonna personally apologize for every unkind human act since the beginning of time.
    And on and on and on and on..
    .

  6. Yeah, because the guy who murdered someone and committed suicide immediately after is going to be stopped by not being able to legally acquire a gun…

    • The event was in a “Gun Free Zone”, which meant that everybody there believed they were perfectly safe. The resulting failure of situational awareness was such that this guy could probably have walked up as though wanting an autograph, reached over the table, and slit her throat before anyone could stop him. This crime was not about the gun used, regardless of all the nincompoops who hashtag about guns.

      Better to use #don’tmurderpeople. Probably just as effective as the GFZ sign or the unarmed brother.

      Condolences to the grieving family and friends, but leave my guns and the Second Amendment alone.

  8. I’m sorry she’s been murdered, and I’m sorry she never had the training, equipment, mindset or opportunity to defend herself.

  9. Likely another perp that wasn’t legally allowed to poses firearms, or nut that should still have been institutionalized for everyone’s safety. That said there is no way to have everyone in a bubble that is safe from all possible harm. Life involves risk, and those who would impose their will on you in the name of making you safe because they know what is best for you are tyrants. A benevolent tyrant is no less a tyrant because they only want good things for you than the most hideous, grasping, thieving, murderous third world dictator!

  10. Hold on to your lifevests! The sea of angry pop-culture consumers is roiling with pseudo political ambition running on general outrage!!

    All this stupid is just flowing through society 24/7 then, like a prism placed on a windowsill, something happens which causes them to focus their general discontentment on a pseudo cause.

    What follows is annoying, stupid and eaten up by equally annoying and stupid politicians who claim to represent us all.

    All I know for sure is this better not cancel Kidz Bop tonight.

  12. Might I suggest #banmurder? Perhaps a law should be created criminalizing homicide? Also, why is it only news when someone of celebrity status takes a lead pill, but not poor urban kids? Do they really think a someone who will take a life cares about gun free zones or carrying an illegal device?

  13. Golly I just watched a few minutes of headline news followed by a “story” about retired military and former astronaut join forces to battle “gun violence”. Yeah Gabby’s puppeteer…sorry she’s dead in a “GFZ”-with unarmed guards it is reported. Evil finds a way…especially in GFZ’s…

  14. Sad. It was a gun free zone without metal detectors. Per other articles he also had a hunting knife and was yet another deranged stalker. As if he would not have killed her with only the knife. Deranged and probably with a mental health history like almost all the other high publicity murderers yet the media never discusses that deinstitutionalization does not work when the patient prefers the voices to the meds.

  16. #protectourselves

    It is a tragedy this singer was killed. One “ought” to be able to be a celebrity and entertainer without attracting crazies. But the world isn’t as we would have it. This is not a world without crazies. Until it is, #protectourselves.

    #instantheroes

    Sometimes, good people without spangly suits or authoritah do the unfathomable right thing in an instant. No prep. No gear. Not their job. We get to know them as heroes in an instant.

    From a teacher herding kids away or “just” a student standing in a doorway declaring “You shall not pass.” with less than a stick in hand, to strangers lifting a burning car to free someone none of them know, to “first responders” walking into burning buildings to save who they can, to a brother tackling tha crazy hurting his sister, #instantheroes happen all the time. Sometimes it’s a kid home alone, or a mother barricaded in a closet with her kids, somebody’s grandma just getting groceries; suddenly left with no choice but fight or die.

    I would not presume to disarm the #instantheroes among us. Aside from just being the right thing to do, many of us are probably alive because of one of them.

    Maybe if we let there be more of them, another one of the #instantheroes could have protected this singer, sooner. We’ll never know.

  17. So sad.

    Unfortunately, young and attractive popular culture figures have a heightened risk of attack from psycho fans.

    Another unfortunate reality: it is next to impossible to stop an assassin who is willing to die during their assassination attempt.

  18. Well, this is of course awful. Just awful.

    As far as the whole #Banguns thing…. I think we banned crack too, and as far as I know there isn’t one coca plant growing in the US, but there sure are a lot of people smoking crack out there. How many people does crack kill? How many lives does crack ruin? How much crime does crack cause? Same with heroin. Totally ‘banned’. No poppy plants growing in the US. Tons of people doing it, dying from it, tons of crime caused by it… but we get ZERO media coverage of every crack/heroin crime or death that occurs, like there is with guns…

    All that “banning guns” does is leave only the Police and criminals with guns… and every citizen is of course a ‘potential criminal’ according to our pre-crime overlords who want to guarantee our safety at the cost of our liberty. And the real criminals would then have almost zero deterrence with a disarmed populace. So where does that lead?

    These people think by the government ‘banning’ something, it makes it disappear. These are the same people that couldn’t tell you who fought in WW2, or cite one sentence from our Constitution, or tell you anything about the function of the 3 branches of our government, or tell you anything about the American Revolution…

    Yeah, wouldn’t it be great if all the guns and knives and bats and explosive material and evil people and violence just went *poof*, and we had NO NEED to ever protect ourselves in a perfectly safe society. It’s called fantasy land. And that’s where these moonbats live. Fantasy land. I choose not to live like a naive fool, but instead in the real world, like a responsible adult. And unfortunately in the real world, there is evil and violence, and I choose not to be a defenseless victim to it.

    • Stephen Michael Stirling wrote a book series about as world where explosives ceased to function, meaning no more deaths from firearm shootings or automobile crashes. (Dies the Fire was the first book.)

      And yet, in that series, 90% of humanity died after the Change. I wonder why.

    • An interesting aside about poppies.

      Poppies are indeed legal if they are certain species of poppy. Opium is mainly produced from Papaver somniferum and yes, that plant banned in the US by DEA scheduling which means you need a DEA license to grow it. The seeds are legal however because they’re used in food.

      Now, the interesting part. Of the 12 (or more) varieties of poppy only four are technically legal under DEA scheduling (which is BS btw but that’s another topic). However, nearly all varieties of poppy are readily available from garden stores be they brick & mortar, online or catalogs. The DEA and local police basically just allow this sort of sale because most of the plants sold have so little opium in them that producing drugs with them would be logistically impractical.

      This is actually a problem for inexperienced horticulturalists who grow poppies for competition. A number of them have grown the “winning plant” for a competition and angered more experienced growers. The experienced grower asks, in a friendly sort of way, to see the winner’s greenhouse and then, finding poppies that are technically illegal reports the winner of the competition to a LEO. The DEA generally chooses not to prosecute under federal law unless there is evidence that the grower knew the specific plant was illegal to grow or there is evidence they are harvesting opium, however many states are not so friendly about this.

      So we have a situation where the DEA has scheduled something to make it illegal to possess without a license but doesn’t regulate the sale of those items in any way, meaning it’s entirely possible to innocently buy and grow illegal plants with out knowing their legal status and end up in a heap of trouble if someone notices them and knows what they are. In fact, when my parents bought the house I grew up in there were a couple dozen poppies that came up every year in one of the flower beds. They were gorgeous plants really. Unknown to us until I was in high school those plants were in fact that those plants were indeed Papaver somniferum, straight out “opium poppies”. Likely they were planted by someone who didn’t know what they were and just thought they were pretty.

      So yeah, my parents were unknowingly committing federal crimes by allowing plants to grow on their property even though they were planted before they bought the house and were not known by my parents to be illegal.

      • I don’t know what to tell you Wilson, the laws here are dumb. They were written from the same genetic stock as those punching trump supporters in the face exiting a trump rally.

  20. I don’t care who it was, what it was or what color of some ones skin is.
    No one. No one should be shot for entertaining the public. Well I can think of some we might want to shoot for their so called entertainment value. But.
    Another Gun Free zone shooting that couldn’t be stopped by anyone at the time it was happening. Shit happens. It will turn out to be some social psychopath. Whos family knew he had guns and a fixation for this poor girl. Another unfortunate victim of what will turn out to have been. A useless member of society shielded by his family.
    My sympathies to the young girl and her family.

  21. This is really horrible. My sincerest thoughts, prayers and condolences to the family of this young lady, and complete outrage to her murderer.

    If I were a psychiatrist, I’d probably say that those who tweet such things as #Banguns – and try to express a higher level of outrage than others – are only seeking self gratification, to subconsciously put themselves on higher moral plane than others, who they can then point the finger at and blame for this horrible act, rather than blame the actual murderer (who seem these days to be portrayed almost as blameless by those with an agenda), or even the root cause of the issue, not the tool that was used to commit it.

    And thinking that the solution to such a horrible act or problem can be found a one-line hashtag tweet is the thought process of a simpleton, dumbed-down by the media who controls the messages that they happily consume with ignorant bliss, further feeding their want for self gratification and simpleton solutions to complex problems.

    But, I’m not a psychiatrist, so who the hell knows… It just comes off as really fake and self serving to me.

  23. Yeah the bill of rights grants rights it doesn’t recognize natural rights that every human being has. (sarcasm)

  24. The whole thing is sad but it’s not a reason to ban guns. None of the people who care about this singer seem to care about the people shot dead in Chicago nearly every day, so I’d say they’re engaged in selective outrage and can take a long walk off a short pier. A swim might do them good.

    • Perhaps we could convince them to take that long walk off the pier with a back-pack full of “Gun buy-back” items? (more /sarc)

  26. I wonder how those calling for bangunsandeverything, for all their righteousness, manage to slide so low on moral scale.

    Of course, putting all blame on tool, not criminal, is nothing new. Should not they ask to ban pointy things too, though? All of them. Scary auto folders, big fixed knives, one-hand opening folders, then just locking folders (some idiot may murder his victim with Buck 110!), and then kitchen knives that are ridiculously large and, in many cases, are actually well-suited for inflicting deadly wounds. Saws, screwdrivers and tire irons should be banned too – a single thrust with big flat can (and did) kill able-bodied man.

    Ban-ban-ban everything, till one needs written approval (given by local police) to cut meat or buy USB cord. Let those wanna-be rapists and stalkers begrudgingly switch to sticks and stones.

  27. Meanwhile… in the UK, where firearms are banned, police data says that criminals are using either real handguns or replicas are still committing robberies. Now how can that be. Didn’t their criminals ditch all firearms when the bans went into effect? More and more police officers are being trained in firearms use, and are either armed or have access to arms.

    In Australia, personal and property crimes have soared since guns were banned. Police attribute this to criminals no longer having reason to fear being shot. Street gangs (as in the UK) now brazenly attack people on the streets. Firearms have been used in conflicts between Muslims and gangs selling protection to business owners, as well as using firebombs. Criminals involved with drugs continue to use firearms.

    The jurisdictions with the strictest gun control laws have the highest crime rates involving firearms.

    AKs are being produced one at a time in small shops in Palestine. Caches of arms have been found to have been smuggled into the USA via Mexico, in one case filling an underground bunker found by a hiker.

    Odd that pro gun control people can incapable of using logic to realize that taking guns away will never rid society of guns. That you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Apparently, their minds just go blank when faced with real life.

  29. It is a tragedy. But the 15 aspiring rappers that will be killed in Chicago today won’t get a blip in the news cycle.

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