Ayn Rand on Gun Control

[Ellen Stuttle]

I think that a revived gun control bill would have a great chance if it included a provision for making it easier to commit troubled people to psychiatric facilities and to ensure that they're taking their meds. And I think it would have an even better chance if it were to somehow address the issue of bullying in schools.

J

J,

Checking: Is that your serious opinion?

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

The price of freedom can be high, and the list goes on and on when one lives in a semi-free society.

I'm reminded of a sign that hangs on the wall of the UHa physics/math department:

"If you think that education is expensive, try the alternative."

Caveat: I'm aware of how mucked up the current US educational system is. The analogy is flawed. Still, a good educational system would have costs, including those of the effort needed to learn.

Ellen

[Selene]

I'm aware of how mucked up the current US educational system is.
Ellen

Ellen:

Assuming that we both attended elementary, secondary and post high school at about the same general time.

How do you evaluate the educational system that you experienced?

Mine was superior, even though the class size was large by current "standards."

A...

[Jonathan]

I think that a revived gun control bill would have a great chance if it included a provision for making it easier to commit troubled people to psychiatric facilities and to ensure that they're taking their meds. And I think it would have an even better chance if it were to somehow address the issue of bullying in schools.

J

J,

Checking: Is that your serious opinion?

Ellen

Yes, that's my serious opinion. I think that there are probably a lot of Republicans who would go along with stricter gun laws if there were also some new legal means of locking up/medicating/caring for mentally disturbed individuals who are currently out on the streets despite giving the signs of being potentially dangerous. I also think that many Republicans would be more likely to trade support for certain gun control laws if they were given more power to control bullying, as well as violence in the arts. I think the Republicans are eager to cave in on a lot of things, and that any type of trade which allows them to claim that they've at least gained something could be appealing to majorities of both governing parties.

J

[Xray]

[double post deleted by me]

[Xray]

I think that a revived gun control bill would have a great chance if it included a provision for making it easier to commit troubled people to psychiatric facilities and to ensure that they're taking their meds. And I think it would have an even better chance if it were to somehow address the issue of bullying in schools.

J

J,

Checking: Is that your serious opinion?

Ellen

According to info in The Huffington Post, Lanza's mother was in the process of having him committed to a psychiatric facility:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/adam-lanza-motive_n_2329508.html

Nancy Lanza, the mother of the Sandy Hook shooter, was in the process of having her son committed to a psychiatric facility when he went on the mass shooting spree, a lifelong family acquaintance told Fox News.

A senior law enforcement official also confirmed that 20-year-old Lanza's anger over his mother's plan is being investigated as a possible motive for the Newtown shooting.

"From what I've been told, Adam was aware of her petitioning the court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed," said Joshua Flashman, 25, who grew up not far from where the shooting took place. "Adam was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off."

[Ellen Stuttle]

How do you evaluate the educational system that you experienced?

Mine was superior, even though the class size was large by current "standards."

A...

Mine was good fortune for which I literally give a thought or several thoughts of thanks most every day. I'm reminded of the contrast between then and now most every day because of hearing Larry's reports concerning students and how badly prepared the overwhelming majority of them are.

I was really lucky in ye olde Peoria, Illinois, of all places -- not the town which people might think of for educational excellence. However, at both my grade school and high school I had good-ranging-to-superb teachers, with only three exceptions in high school.

And the teacher I had for junior and senior English and literature was, imo, the best for my benefit I could have had in the whole world.

She retired early a few years after I'd graduated, because at that point a change was starting in attitudes and preparedness of students and she was no longer enjoying teaching.

I was lucky in college too, since I went to Northwestern, and there were some very fine teachers of the "old school" there. Northwestern was behind the times as contrasted with the University of Chicago, although even at Northwestern, in the sociology and philosophy departments especially, there was starting to be a leftist drift.

Ellen

[Jonathan]

Mine was good fortune for which I literally give a thought or several thoughts of thanks most every day. I'm reminded of the contrast between then and now most every day because of hearing Larry's reports concerning students and how badly prepared the overwhelming majority of them are.

I have an adult family member who is currently taking college courses, so I've been hearing how much worse the education system is than I had realized -- and I had assumed that it was pretty bad. Everything is tainted with leftist dogma. Math classes aren't about math, but about sustainable this and environmental that; writing isn't taught in writing classes, but rather the students are encouraged to have a "dialogue" in which they quickly discover that they had better echo the instructor's opinions.

One specific example is that an assignment was given to investigate an issue of the student's choice. Since the instructor had been expressing her hippy opinions on the destruction of the middle class (an instructor whose degree is in poetry and not economics), my family member decided to investigate what the term "middle class" means since no definition is usually given and different people seem to mean different things.

Knowing that the instructor was a leftist, my family member decided to play it safe and get a good grade by researching leftist economists as sources, but even those did not support the instructor's opinions, so my family member -- despite not stating any opinions or conclusions, but only definitions -- was graded to be not only wrong, but to have been attempting to push a conservative agenda/conclusion rather than to have made a neutral investigative inquiry as the assignment required.

If that's typically what's going on in classrooms today, and it sounds as if it is, then it's understandable that students would be very poorly prepared to learn. They're trained and expected to not learn and to not think.

J

[Ellen Stuttle]

[...] some new legal means of locking up/medicating/caring for mentally disturbed individuals who are currently out on the streets despite giving the signs of being potentially dangerous.

Thanks for the reply. The part quoted of course raises the spectre, Who's to decide who's psychotic?

It's a question the difficulties of which I know from first-hand experience, since one of my two brothers who committed suicide was dangerous. I used to think of living with him as being like playing critical distances with a man-eating tiger. When he disappeared (this was in the early '70s), the whole family (minus Mother, who had died a couple years before then) thought that either he'd gone off and killed himself or he would return and kill the rest of us. Yet I'd have been very loath to have him committed to an institution -- shades of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

They're trained and expected to not learn and to not think.

J

But they do know how to twitter.

Larry's been having a problem -- one which is shared widely today -- of what to do about cellphones in classes. In one of his classes, he has a student assistant -- assigned by the administration as a liaison with the other students (we never had those when I was in school). Larry floated the idea with the assistant of having all cellphones put in a box at the front of the classroom at the start of the class. The assistant responded, "That would be brutal!" When Larry told me this, I just cracked up. "Brutal," not being able to use your cellphone in class.

Ellen

[Jonathan]

Thanks for the reply. The part quoted of course raises the spectre, Who's to decide who's psychotic?

Indeed, but that's also what I think would make it appealing to some ACLU-type Democrats who would normally be against locking up psychotics. Who is to decide? Why, the Democrats are to decide, and then they'd have the new option of deciding that anti-government opinions might be symptoms of psychosis.

J

[Selene]

J/Ellen:

Ellen is correct. I am very close with a whole network of teachers and administrators at all three (3) levels and the classrooms are a complete disaster for any learning.

This just hit last week...

Published on Dec 12, 2012

15 year veteran elementary teacher says "I quit". Parents need to know what is being done to their children in many of today's public schools - and it is not the teacher's fault....

[Selene]

As a parent, or, just as a citizen walking in the park, what assault weapon would you want to have in this instance?

Answer one:

range, with the maximum at 35 feet (10.6 m).^[18]

Answer two:

Remington Nylon 66.- my favorite weapon and the best rifle ever made for personal use.

It is also an assault weapon based on Carol's "standard" of evaluating weapons.

Range several hundred yards. 15 shot semi-automatic, fires HOLLOW POINT BULLETS THAT SPIN AND EXPAND AS THEY GO THROUGH THE BODY, Assassin's weapon, has quick reloadability with tubular swap magazines and much much more...

A...

ALERT:

The "Eagle snatches kid" video is a fake...

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-now/video-golden-eagle-snatching-kid-real-181954669.html

A...

[Selene]

Well Folks:

Now I know we are wrong in supporting the Second Amendment. I now agree we should remove it from the Constitution. I have seen the light.

The official Chinese government news agency, Xinhua, has demanded the US immediately adopt stricter gun control measures to reduce the number of firearms the US populace is permitted to possess.

The Chinese state-controlled media’s statement, titled “Innocent Blood Demands No Delay for US Gun Control,” is primarily focused on the Newtown tragedy in which 26 Americans were killed by a mad gunman. Twenty of the victims were young children.

I bow down to the new great global thug China...

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/12/18/China-Demands-US-Citizens-Be-Disarmed

[Jonathan]

But they do know how to twitter.

Larry's been having a problem -- one which is shared widely today -- of what to do about cellphones in classes. In one of his classes, he has a student assistant -- assigned by the administration as a liaison with the other students (we never had those when I was in school). Larry floated the idea with the assistant of having all cellphones put in a box at the front of the classroom at the start of the class. The assistant responded, "That would be brutal!" When Larry told me this, I just cracked up. "Brutal," not being able to use your cellphone in class.

Brutal. Heh.

One good instance of cell phones in class: My continuing-education family member is very knowledgeable on the subject of fracking, so when the lefty instructor of a class started an informal "dialogue" on the subject, in which everyone's opinions (other than the instructor's, of course) were presumed to be uninformed, unprepared, provisional and malleable, my family member began citing facts which the instructor reminded everyone were just opinions and no more valid than any of the other students' in the room, but other students began chirping up and saying that the web searches that they were doing on their phones showed that they were indeed facts.

J

[Jonathan]

Coulter:

WE KNOW HOW TO STOP SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

December 19, 2012

In the wake of a monstrous crime like a madman's mass murder of defenseless women and children at the Newtown, Conn., elementary school, the nation's attention is riveted on what could have been done to prevent such a massacre.

Luckily, some years ago, two famed economists, William Landes at the University of Chicago and John Lott at Yale, conducted a massive study of multiple victim public shootings in the United States between 1977 and 1995 to see how various legal changes affected their frequency and death toll.

Landes and Lott examined many of the very policies being proposed right now in response to the Connecticut massacre: waiting periods and background checks for guns, the death penalty and increased penalties for committing a crime with a gun.

None of these policies had any effect on the frequency of, or carnage from, multiple-victim shootings. (I note that they did not look at reforming our lax mental health laws, presumably because the ACLU is working to keep dangerous nuts on the street in all 50 states.)

Only one public policy has ever been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.

Their study controlled for age, sex, race, unemployment, retirement, poverty rates, state population, murder arrest rates, violent crime rates, and on and on.

The effect of concealed-carry laws in deterring mass public shootings was even greater than the impact of such laws on the murder rate generally.

Someone planning to commit a single murder in a concealed-carry state only has to weigh the odds of one person being armed. But a criminal planning to commit murder in a public place has to worry that anyone in the entire area might have a gun.

You will notice that most multiple-victim shootings occur in "gun-free zones" -- even within states that have concealed-carry laws: public schools, churches, Sikh temples, post offices, the movie theater where James Holmes committed mass murder, and the Portland, Ore., mall where a nut starting gunning down shoppers a few weeks ago.

Guns were banned in all these places. Mass killers may be crazy, but they're not stupid.

If the deterrent effect of concealed-carry laws seems surprising to you, that's because the media hide stories of armed citizens stopping mass shooters. At the Portland shooting, for example, no explanation was given for the amazing fact that the assailant managed to kill only two people in the mall during the busy Christmas season.

It turns out, concealed-carry-holder Nick Meli hadn't noticed that the mall was a gun-free zone. He pointed his (otherwise legal) gun at the shooter as he paused to reload, and the next shot was the attempted mass murderer killing himself. (Meli aimed, but didn't shoot, because there were bystanders behind the shooter.)

In a nonsense "study" going around the Internet right now, Mother Jones magazine claims to have produced its own study of all public shootings in the last 30 years and concludes: "In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun."

This will come as a shock to people who know something about the subject.

The magazine reaches its conclusion by simply excluding all cases where an armed civilian stopped the shooter: They looked only at public shootings where four or more people were killed, i.e., the ones where the shooter wasn't stopped.

If we care about reducing the number of people killed in mass shootings, shouldn't we pay particular attention to the cases where the aspiring mass murderer was prevented from getting off more than a couple rounds?

It would be like testing the effectiveness of weed killers, but refusing to consider any cases where the weeds died.

In addition to the Portland mall case, here are a few more examples excluded by the Mother Jones' methodology:

-- Mayan Palace Theater, San Antonio, Texas, this week: Jesus Manuel Garcia shoots at a movie theater, a police car and bystanders from the nearby China Garden restaurant; as he enters the movie theater, guns blazing, an armed off-duty cop shoots Garcia four times, stopping the attack. Total dead: Zero.

-- Winnemucca, Nev., 2008: Ernesto Villagomez opens fire in a crowded restaurant; concealed carry permit-holder shoots him dead. Total dead: Two. (I'm excluding the shooters' deaths in these examples.)

-- Appalachian School of Law, 2002: Crazed immigrant shoots the dean and a professor, then begins shooting students; as he goes for more ammunition, two armed students point their guns at him, allowing a third to tackle him. Total dead: Three.

-- Santee, Calif., 2001: Student begins shooting his classmates -- as well as the "trained campus supervisor"; an off-duty cop who happened to be bringing his daughter to school that day points his gun at the shooter, holding him until more police arrive. Total dead: Two.

-- Pearl High School, Mississippi, 1997: After shooting several people at his high school, student heads for the junior high school; assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieves a .45 pistol from his car and points it at the gunman's head, ending the murder spree. Total dead: Two.

-- Edinboro, Pa., 1998: A student shoots up a junior high school dance being held at a restaurant; restaurant owner pulls out his shotgun and stops the gunman. Total dead: One.

By contrast, the shootings in gun-free zones invariably result in far higher casualty figures -- Sikh temple, Oak Creek, Wis. (six dead); Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. (32 dead); Columbine High School, Columbine, Colo. (12 dead); Amish school, Lancaster County, Pa. (five little girls killed); public school, Craighead County, Ark. (five killed, including four little girls).

All these took place in gun-free zones, resulting in lots of people getting killed -- and thereby warranting inclusion in the Mother Jones study.

If what we care about is saving the lives of innocent human beings by reducing the number of mass public shootings and the deaths they cause, only one policy has ever been shown to work: concealed-carry laws. On the other hand, if what we care about is self-indulgent grandstanding, and to hell with dozens of innocent children being murdered in cold blood, try the other policies.

COPYRIGHT 2012 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK

[Selene]

J.

Excellent article. Love the way she argues.

A...

[Ellen Stuttle]

[...] the classrooms are a complete disaster for any learning.

So I'm sitting here reading Adam's post when L interrupts with, "I'm not going to do it."

Usual story, umpteenth verse, happens at least once nearly every semester's end.

Grading time is in process. Pleading e-mail from a student -- this one comes from a student from a MidEast country, here on a scholarship, mother has cancer, her health insurance depends on student's scholarship, student must have an "A," and other lengthy details.

L always gently says "No" to changing a grade. And I always have the hope that the student to whom the "No" was said isn't one who's unstable enough to decide to go on a shooting spree. I support Larry's saying "No" despite the worry.

--

J,

I like the fracking story.

On the other hand, among the pernicious uses of cellphones....

Early this school year (last September) a couple girls came to Larry's office wondering why they should work hard studying to get an honest grade on an exam when other students were being allowed to cheat by getting the answers from the web.

But how could they get the answers from the web?, Larry wanted to know, astounded. Apparently there are large data bases with representative questions, even exact questions from some standard tests. L forthwith announced the policy that anyone seen using a cellphone during an exam would be given an "F" on the exam.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

J.

Excellent article. Love the way [Coulter] argues.

A...

Notice this detail, though, in connection with J's thoughts further up the thread:

(I note that they did not look at reforming our lax mental health laws, presumably because the ACLU is working to keep dangerous nuts on the street in all 50 states.)

Ellen

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I have an idea.

The left has this premise that the government can control the crazies from going on a rampage. All it has to do is outlaw gun ownership by private citizens.

How about if the government outlaws mental illness?

You simply won't be able to become mentally ill anymore because it will be against the law.

Voila.

Problem solved.

Milk and honey will flow from the very stars to alight on earth like fluid feathers of paradise...

Michael

[Selene]

Ellen:

I taught for five years at Queens College both days and nights. I also taught one year at York College.

In those six (6) years, I gave out two (2) A's, both to Magna Cum Laude students. Additionally, in my third year of teaching I decided to make up individual final take home exams for each of my students. It worked out quite well and the students knew that I cared about their chosen topics for the entire term.

I expected them to apply what I had taught them to the particular topic that they had chosen to devote their term too.

So tell L that I empathize with every teacher's struggle to properly evaluate a student and to be as objective as one can be. Additionally, I respect him because he maintained his dignity in the way he grades.

A.

[...] the classrooms are a complete disaster for any learning.

So I'm sitting here reading Adam's post when L interrupts with, "I'm not going to do it."

Usual story, umpteenth verse, happens at least once nearly every semester's end.

Grading time is in process. Pleading e-mail from a student -- this one comes from a student from a MidEast country, here on a scholarship, mother has cancer, her health insurance depends on student's scholarship, student must have an "A," and other lengthy details.

L always gently says "No" to changing a grade. And I always have the hope that the student to whom the "No" was said isn't one who's unstable enough to decide to go on a shooting spree. I support Larry's saying "No" despite the worry.

--

[Ellen Stuttle]

Thanks, Adam.

Fortunately, so far, Larry's always had the support of the administration in a few cases where the students have tried to talk higher echelons into upping a grade. (Actually, there's another case of that type in process now.)

It occurred to me after I'd posted that since the particular student I mentioned is probably Muslim, beheading not shooting might be the method of choice in the nightmarish scenario of a student bent on revenge. Somehow that thought gives me even worse weebiejeebies.

Ellen

[BaalChatzaf]

Thanks, Adam.

Fortunately, so far, Larry's always had the support of the administration in a few cases where the students have tried to talk higher echelons into upping a grade. (Actually, there's another case of that type in process now.)

It occurred to me after I'd posted that since the particular student I mentioned is probably Muslim, beheading not shooting might be the method of choice in the nightmarish scenario of a student bent on revenge. Somehow that thought gives me even worse weebiejeebies.

Ellen

One can lop of heads only one at a time. A sharp blade is not a weapon of mass destruction when wielded by only one maniac.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Ellen Stuttle]

A sharp blade is not a weapon of mass destruction when wielded by only one maniac.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Did anyone say it was? Not I.

Ellen

[Jonathan]

One can lop of heads only one at a time. A sharp blade is not a weapon of mass destruction when wielded by only one maniac.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Tell that to The Bride (warning: the video clip below contains images of simulated violence that may cause you to go out and kill people for real in the same way):

J