Emma Gonzalez parkland march for our lives
Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The quote of the day is presented by Guns.com.

It may seem baffling that a father’s response to his daughter being killed in a mass shooting would be to oppose gun control and run for office on that idea. After all, the most prominent mass shooting survivors-turned-activists in America are the students from Parkland, Florida, who helped create the March for Our Lives movement. David Hogg and Emma González have become national celebrities; the organization has arranged major protests and issued an ambitious “peace plan” last month.

But the randomness of most mass shootings means there’s no real pattern to survivors’ politics, even after the events that bind them together. (The astonishing number of survivors and family members contributes to a natural diversity in the population: 1,209 people have been injured but not killed in mass shootings this year in the United States, and the number of unhurt survivors and family members is much larger.) Another Parkland survivor, Kyle Kashuv, became a prominent conservative gun rights activist. (Harvard rescinded Kashuv’s acceptance this summer after evidence surfaced that he had used racist language online.) J.T. Lewis, the 19-year-old brother of a Sandy Hook victim, is running for state Senate as a Republican in Connecticut; Lewis, a Trump supporter, says he supports gun control legislation but emphasizes funding for mental health programs and school security.

Four of last month’s eight deadliest shootings took place in Texas, but Texans have complicated attitudes toward gun laws. Only 40 percent want to ban semi-automatic weapons, a number significantly lower than the national figure. Pomeroy sees gun violence as a character issue, related to the “sanctity of life,” the failure to teach values in public schools, and society’s “humanistic self-centered approach.” He would like to see faster responses by law enforcement to threats and manifestos posted on social media.But he doesn’t think restricting access to weapons is the answer. “The problem we have at the moment with the violence sweeping America is not so much to do with the firearm as much as the person holding the firearm,” he said.

– Ruth Graham in When Losing a Loved One to Gun Violence Doesn’t Change Your Gun Rights Beliefs

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73 COMMENTS

  1. No gun ever hurt or killed anyone. No more than any sword or mace or pike or arrow did so in those centuries long past.

    People do violence. The causes of violence are all found within people.

    • Pistols often hurt me. If they belong to somebody else I wear a glove. If they belong to me I sell them and buy one with a bigger beaver tail, so the slide won’t bite me.

      • While I see where you are going with that … no, the pistol did not hurt you. You chose poorly, and your choice hurt you. That thing you did, your actions. OOPS!

    • Absolutely right! In my 70 years, I have never seen a firearm that chose to shoot someone out of the blue. Firearms ALWAYS, ALWAYS, require someone to insert the bullet(s) and pull the trigger. A gun is an INANIMATE object. It can do neither good nor evil unless and until someone inserts bullets and pulls the trigger.

    • I get where you’re coming from but I was sharpening my copy of the ‘Day Walker’ one night while watching TV, Looked down and saw blood on my leg and floor, then I noticed some on the coffee table and sure enough I had laid the back of my thumb open when I reached for the remote control. I would say this was my fault, but since it was a copy of a vampire’s sword…. (True story, and yes, there is a chance some Bourbon was involved.)

    • My guns hurt me all the time. I call when I’m at work and miss them and they never call me back. I clean them, they never once offered to clean me back. Our relationship is clearly
      One sided.

      Plus they make my wife jealous.

    • Or the bar that served the alcohol, or the liquor store that sold it. Or the distillery that made the alcohol, or the delivery man who drove it to the bar or store. I don’t understand how anyone has to have any personal responsibility anymore since everything is so obviously everything else’s fault…..

      In case people miss it…. Sarc.

      • That is no joke. The US Feral Government already treats air travel as the “assault weapons” of 1A peaceable assembly.

      • Shouldn’t a shooting survivor have to have actually been shot? Else, every time I drive past an auto accident still being processed aren’t I a survivor of an auto accident? Or, every time I drive and return home alive aren’t I a survivor? Like you said, survivorism and victimhood are things aspired to today…

        • I saw the consequences of a multi car accident while I was on the bus going home. I did not consider myself a survivor. But I did consider myself lucky I wasn’t in one of the cars involved.

  4. The reality is these survivor parents don’t mind if other kids are stabbed, bludgeoned, blown up, or killed as long as it’s in a manner that is slow enough that the murderer psycho doesn’t kill their kid.

    Gun control is just narcissistic selfish power grabbing. “As long as I survive, I don’t care about anyone else.”

    That’s the reality when you complain about the tools a killer used as opposed to the killer’s existence and the real reason your kid is dead.

    Blame the inattentive village or the people connected to the psycho for not policing (or more likely ignoring) the rotten apple in their midst.

    You chose to send your kid to public school that doesn’t have armed staff or competent guards. You had every opportunity to petition to have security measures out into place at your kid’s school. But you chose to be ok with the idiotic “shelter in place” strategy. YOU chose. Live with your choices.

    Ever since the first “mass shooting” there was always the obvious choice that would save lives — no gun free zones and people arm up.

    But no, you all were SJW clowns and now your kid is dead. Go write a book about it and stay away from MY choice to protect myself and my own because the last thing I want to be is YOU.

    • You hit on the reason they will blame somebody else. Its too hard to admit your loved one is dead because instead of demanding tighter security you sat back and thought a “Gun Free Zone” made them safe.

    • Speaking of comments, looks like an entire thread (from multiple users including myself) regarding Emma Gonzalez from this morning is suddenly gone. Someone asked about why she shaves her head, and in the responses that followed, I added a link to her Wikipedia page. Nothing whatsoever that could be considered inappropriate, yet my comment’s gone along with all the ones above it. Those didn’t say anything that isn’t already smattered all over the TTAG comments every day.

  6. When Rep. Steve Scalise was shot at that baseball game by a tolerant and accepting of others not like himself ‘Bernie Bro’, I remember reading in the comment section of the Wash.Post where a woman said – “Well! Now that it happened to one of theirs, we can finally get some gun control passed!”.

    No, we understand that people are evil, not guns.

    Leftists are utterly incapable of understanding that simple truth…

    • So too does the Right. Partisanship is a mental illness. It manifests on both sides of the political divide, on different issues in different ways. Gun Control as a solution to Human Violence is the crackpot thinking of left wing partisans. Right wing partisans have their crackpot thinking on other topics.

      It really gets to be fun when partisans of both sides have crackpot ideas on the same issues. That’s when we see the fullest Crazy possible in politics.

  9. The SJWs call all attempts to identify and punish violent young males in school a part of the “school to prison pipeline” and try to prevent the one thing that might redirect or prevent their behavior.

    • “…identify and punish violent young males in school a part of the “school to prison pipeline…”

      And that’s where rubber is gonna hit the road with the ‘profiling’ act they are considering, it will require concrete steps be taken that the Leftists are *not* gonna like.

      The Parkland murders were the crop that was harvested because they refused to accept that punk was permanently broken years earlier…

  11. Last weekend we hosted a big gun raffle cancer benefit at our fire station, we quickly ran out of parking room, there were roughly 1000+ people there. The guy across the street let a few people park in his yard, well more people parked there than he felt he wanted. He came over and announced that if those cars weren’t moved from his property immediately that he was going to shoot them up. Some were moved, shortly after that he came back over and announced that if the cars didn’t move soon he was going to “get my AR-15 and come over and start shooting into the crowd”.
    State police were called, 45 minutes later (welcome to rural USA), they came and talked to him about it.

    Every morning since the event when I meet my ride for work there, he sits at his property and stares across to the fire station, watching.

    This is a man who just a week or so ago threatened to shoot into a crowd with an AR……

    I can tell you what the cops said. He has rights, until he actually hurts someone, we can’t do anything.

    Know how I know, because I’ve pointed out more than one person who screamed for help mentally and seemed on the edge of a psychotic break and I am always told the same thing.

    So you can take your preemptive measures and shove them up your ass.
    Everyone wants to “do something” until it comes time to “do something”.

    Most mass shootings we’ve had were preceded by the lunatic showing mental instability and was swept under the rug.

    Stop ignoring crazy people.

    I’m not a fan of red flag laws, but by gosh, he waved a pile of red flags that weekend!

    • At a gun event?
      Was everyone disarmed like they seem to do at the local gun shows or were there possible lots of armed folks?
      If the latter maybe he really just wanted to commit suicide.

    • Bill’s yarn sounds like BS. A THOUSAND people come to the fire station for a RAFFLE??? BS. That’s something like 6000ft2 of empty space. For a RAFFLE? Who goes to a raffle.

      In the US we don’t arrest people for having a big mouth anyhow. Mostly

      • Thats right, I made it up.
        We don’t run the event chief, just host it, they sold all 3000 tickets, all locally. I WISH we could have such a turnout!

        Regardless, yes people were carrying, no, nobody got shot from some gun nut with a hair trigger.

        My point is, how are we to stop mass shootings if we ignore warning signs. If he had acted on it, he could easily have dumped two mags into the crowd just from his house, maybe more if he shot from inside out a window before anyone would have a chance to return fire or get a hit.
        Maybe next year you can read about it on page 7 of the daily news.

        • Bill, there was a direct threat of violence in this case. A red flag law is not needed to address that. The threats are already serious crimes.

        • That was also my assumption, but whatever he got, didn’t involve him staying away long.
          He could of easily finished the job that evening.
          As I said, this isn’t the first time, lots of leniency, but that’s also good that our rights are recognized.

          But the “see something, say something” does very little I guess is my point.

        • Vic – only if the police want to do something. I had a laptop stolen, made a police report, they said there were no leads so we’re going to call it completed right after they filled out the paperwork. Later somebody taped a note to my door that said I think I found your laptop, here’s my phone number, but the guy hung up on me when I called him. I gave it to the police with the case number and they did nothing with it.

    • I bet he would be much happier if the male role model in his life took him target shooting. Just a guess.

  13. i have a hard time understanding alot of things. is that so hard to understand?
    how long can emm and dave milk this? will they make a porno?

    • She could make a lot of money with a film and then charge people not to see it. Then she could write a book about surviving the porn industry.

  15. Emma González?

    Sorry, we speak English in America. The accent over the “a” needs to be removed. We don’t use accent marks in English.

    When we print a Chinese name, do we print those characters?

    Sorry- but WTF. I don’t expect Mexicans to speak English in Mexico.

    • A language I don’t understand! Oh no! We must put a stop to it, or pretty soon we’ll all be speaking Mexican! Muh Murican valuz!

      • You can suck up to libturds and love open borders all you want faggot. The rest of us Americans will keep fighting for America.

        • Amen Hank. have fun when your daughter marries a cholo and your grand kids speak Mexican faggot!

          -We speak English in America.
          -We don’t write Japanese names using Kanji. We don’t use accent marks for other Romance languages.
          -I use vosotros when I talk to illegal aliens here in America just to piss them off when I have to use Spanish
          – we need to be honest about the truth, Emma Gonzalez does not belong here.

          BTW, where is the wall that Mexico would pay for?

  16. It may seem baffling that a father’s response to his daughter being killed in a mass shooting would be to oppose gun control …

    It is only baffling if you have bad information or if emotion, fantasy, and virtue are your prime directives.

    Suppose that spree killers used gasoline and matches (arson) to kill 200,000 people in 8,000 separate mass-casualty attacks last year. Would lots of people be baffled when many in society refuse to support bans on the possession and use of gasoline and matches?

    And what about other items that spree killers could use to kill thousands of people in thousands of separate attacks? Items such as:
    — vehicles
    — knives
    — baseball bats
    — bleach and ammonia (mixed to create toxic gas)
    — batteries (rigged to explode or start fires)
    Would anyone be baffled when many people opposed bans on the ownership, possession, and use of them?

    • No one. These are the usual whose who of woke of brands and a few companies with 500 or fewer employees who were on an email blast and signed up for feelz. What’s the minimum? How many of the companies contacted signed? When did leftists start careing about the opinions of the corporations?

      How about investors with a net worth of of less than a million dollars?

  19. If one doesn’t understand that all arms are inanimate objects controlled only by their possessor ,then that person is more than likely a Leftard moron only interested in pushing the agenda of disarmament.

  20. Replace “gun” with any other object and their argument becomes as illogical as their obsession with massive phallic symbols.

  21. It just seems to confirm Haidt’s work on the subject of how conservatives and progressives understand each other. Long story short: progressives generally seem incapable of understanding the conservative mindset, but the opposite is not the case.

  23. Do they blame the car driven by the DUI perp? The knife someone gets stabbed with? The 2×4 one is brained with? The nightstick the cop uses to beat the Antifa member? Oh, no, that doesn’t happen, does it?

  24. And how do these anti-gunners explain away the CDC study that says between 250,000 and 2,000,000 cases of defensive gun usage save lives every year? They ignore it. I have no faith in surveys. If I am at an airport and ask what is the best method of travel, airplane win every time. If I am at a dock with a cruise ship and ask the same question, the overwhelming majority will say by ship. Unless a poll is nation wide, I don’t believe any of it.

    • 250,000 and 2,000,000? The difference between the 2 numbers is so significant it casts serious doubt on the credibility of the numbers. Plus, these CDC studies, were they based on surveys themselves? Surveys which you just stated you don’t tryst anyway?

  25. I like the choice of photo for this article. Ms. Crocodile Tears there has since dropped off the face of the planet because it came out that she was one of the group bullying the shooter.

    • She actually is quite pretty. There’s a good reason why she’s always front and center in the photo ops.

      Sexy? No.

      For one thing, there’s something deeply offputting and wrong about any female who voluntarily shaves her head.

      Plus, there’s something about her that says she’s performing. Everything she does is a performance calculated for effect; she’s a drama addict and professional tragedy model, and she knows it and loves it. People like her only make other people (especially men) miserable in the long run.

      Put that all together, and… Ick. Just ick. No.

  28. It appears that Slate, like some other publications, is unable or unwilling, perhaps both, to recognize the fact some people will continue to recognize the fact that 2 + 2 = 4, no matter how loudly they shout otherwise.

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