""Kids don't need guns. No guns under 21," read one sign." I sincerely believe that ARs and possibly handgun should be further restricted to 24. Shotguns and standard hunting rifles left as they are. The reason I pick this number is I am familiar with it as the age you have to be in the UK to do a "direct access" course to get a motorcycle over 595 cc / 40 kW. There is a path to an unlimited bike before this but it involves staging up from tiny to larger engines over years. DAS is when you just want a 1000cc Fireblade but have no proven experience. You must do a three day course and pass a stringent practical test. Men are on average not mature at 21, probably not until 30 however 24-25 is reasonable and has precedent & research to show guys are past teenage depression, hormones settled a bit and have lived a little.
" Men are on average not mature at 21, ... " Typo: You just missed one single zero! Not adding, but missing!
Could be true. DAS courses make money in the UK. I started one as a business idea in Goa, India for an ex-pat living there who needed money to live. There were serious injuries & fatalities every week with tourists renting big heavy bikes (Enfields*) and no prior experience on them. We got a plot of land, cones etc. and offered a "DAS lite" two day training on how not to just die on the first sandy bend. I've seen the NRA minimum safety courses... they are a joke. If they add some hurdles & monetize Direct Access to the most lethal (AR) and in the case of handguns, commonly used in crime weapons... a profit motive works. Current / ex-military who would have been trained properly, get earlier access under 24. If you are worried about home defense, there are plenty of simple rifles, just they are not as sexy and featured on video games etc. *Foot gear selector and rear brake being flipped to normal did not help either.
Evidence Linking Alleged Florida Shooter To White Supremacist Group Is Really Thin Here’s what we know — and, more importantly, what we don’t. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr...oup-is-unraveling_us_5a860d74e4b004fc3190630c Law enforcement officials in Florida have reportedly not yet found ties between the Parkland school shooting suspect and the white supremacist paramilitary group Republic of Florida, despite claims from the group’s leader. Those claims were widely circulated by news outlets on Thursday. As of Thursday evening, it was seemingly too soon to say what might have motivated Nikolas Cruz, 19, to allegedly shoot at least 17 people to death at his former high school. It was likewise too soon to say whether Cruz held any white supremacist views. So far, though, the evidence linking him to this specific white supremacist group is thin. (We will update this story if that changes.) Jordan Jereb, an ROF leader, told the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday that Cruz participated in training exercises with the group, but that the group hadn’t ordered Cruz to carry out the school shooting. Multiple media outlets, including HuffPost, picked up the ADL’s report and repeated the claim that Cruz was an ROF member. In several reports, Jereb, an obscure white nationalist figure, was the sole source. “We are still doing some work, but we have no known ties between the ROF, Jordan Jereb or the Broward shooter,” a Leon County Sheriff’s Office spokesman told the Tallahassee Democrat. The sheriff’s office has arrested Jereb at least four times since January 2014 and has been monitoring ROF’s membership, The Associated Press reported. By Thursday evening, Jereb appeared to be backing down from his claim. “There was a misunderstanding because we have MULTIPLE people named Nicholas in ROF,” a user named @JordanJereb posted on Gab, a social media platform popular among fascists and racists. “Are you really going to blame ME for the lying jew media? We know they are liars. Fuck em,” the user wrote. (HuffPost messaged the user, who had posted about ROF months before Wednesday’s shooting, but was not immediately able to confirm his identity.) HuffPost has not found evidence that Cruz was affiliated with ROF — or that he had even interacted with anyone in the group. Jereb did not respond to repeated requests for proof of Cruz’s involvement with ROF. Cruz’s Facebook and Instagram were taken down after the shooting. On one of his since-deleted Instagram profiles, Cruz’s Twitter avatar wore a “Make America Great Again” hat and he shared pictures of an assortment of guns and knives. The FBI and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the shooting, declined to comment. The existing reporting on the supposed ties between Jereb and Cruz is inconsistent. Jereb told the Miami Herald he has never personally met Cruz. But ABC reported that three former classmates of Cruz identified him as part of the ROF. The former classmates claimed that Cruz was “often seen with Jereb.” Jereb’s last address listed in public records is in Tallahassee, 430 miles from where the shooting took place. ABC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on how it verified the identities of Cruz’s former classmates. A spokesman for the ADL, which first reported the supposed tie between the ROF and Cruz, told HuffPost on Thursday that “it is for law enforcement to 100% confirm that he was a part of this group.” “Given what we found today and the timing of the case, there is no doubt the information raises a red flag and should be investigated further,” the spokesman said. As reports of Cruz’s supposed link to ROF appeared in the media, members of an “alt-right” white supremacist forum claimed the entire story was an attention-grab by Jereb, or possibly a hoax aimed at tricking media outlets into pushing a false narrative. Jereb already comes across as a caricature of a Florida white nationalist, and he has been seeking attention for his views for years. “Jereb was a weird character even in the extremist underworld to which he so badly wanted to belong,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, wrote in 2014. Most white supremacists avoid the SPLC, but Jereb “wanted desperately to be mentioned in these pages,” the group wrote. “He flooded us with pleas for attention.” The SPLC has not been able to confirm any ties between Cruz and ROF, Heidi Beirich, the director of the group’s intelligence project, told HuffPost. “It may seem odd that Jereb would bring attention to his group by claiming a connection to Cruz, but Jereb has always been somewhat of a publicity seeker,” Beirich said. In 2016, Jereb was arrested for allegedly threatening a high-ranking staffer of Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R). The Tallahassee Democrat reported at the time that Jereb was “known to ride a bike through neighborhoods wearing para-military garb. He has filmed numerous run-ins with law enforcement.” On Thursday afternoon, members of The Right Stuff, a white supremacist forum, claimed that the story of Cruz being tied to ROF was false. “Started out as an inside joke until Jordan Jereb literally told the media that it was true and that he was affiliated with a school shooter,” a TRS user posting under the name “Jordan Fash” wrote. Fash posted screenshots of an ABC reporter messaging a user named “Ethan” on Instagram asking for information about Cruz. Ethan told the reporter that Cruz was an ROF member. “It was common knowledge he did rallies with ROF, I frequently saw him conversing with Jordan Jereb in person,” the user said. The ABC reporter declined to comment. ABC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on how it reported its story. It didn’t take long for other far-right extremists to latch onto a possible reporting flub as a way to attack the entirety of the mainstream media. Cameron Padgett, the campus fixer for Richard Spencer’s college speaking engagements, tweeted that the media “will do anything to smear white people.” In his quotes to the media, Jereb elevated anti-feminist and anti-Semitic views, and claimed that Cruz “probably used that training [with ROF] to do what he did.” There tends to be an information vacuum after a mass shooting, and trolls and propagandists often take advantage of the confusion in order to promote their own interests. After the shooting at a Texas church last year, right-wing conspiracy theorists were quick to claim that their political enemies — everyone from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to anti-fascist protesters — were somehow connected to the shooter. Trolls will also routinely claim that Sam Hyde, a real-life comedian, is behind a mass shooting before the real shooter has been identified. In the immediate aftermath of a shooting, it’s easy for false information to spread rapidly. In 1999, Bill White, a former leader of the National Socialist Movement, injected himself into the conversation surrounding the Columbine High School massacre by suggesting that shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold might have visited White’s extremist website before the rampage. White, who identified as an anarchist at the time, managed to garner national attention for his obscure website, which urged kids to build bombs, blow up schools and slaughter football players.
What about the evidence linking him to a MAGA hat, is that thin? Or threatening black lives matter members? Thin too?
Well go read the article from the left-leaning Huff Post and figure it out for yourself. BTW -- post your citations linking him to a MAGA hat or threatening black lives matter members. They are just as thin as the ABC story tying him to a white supremacist group. Merely people inventing "news".
I see. No need to see how they handle school and airport security to see if there are any learnings for us because Israel is Israel and America is America, and the binary mind can only process black and white. Got it.
So, I have not read up yet today. Have we determined yet whether the FBI put a subpoena on to YouTube as part of the attempt to identify the poster or whether that information was not provided or was provided voluntarily by YouTube?
I see. So the country that all the shit-hole countries look to as the beacon of freedom and are willing to risk life to get here just coincidently has the highest civilian ownership. WHY OH WHY DID THE FRAMERS NEVER THINK OF THAT!!!!
Here is what I see a bunch of right wingers obfuscating because the entire country is at the mercy of their out of control gun agenda. The NRA is silent and the republican politicians are sending thoughts and prayers but nothing is being done. You want me to look to one of the most dangerous places in the world for answers of how we can protect ourselves from ourselves because of the availability of guns to anyone. Let’s just do something about the availability of the guns. I see more and more guns in our country and they are becoming more deadly while nut jobs are able to get them and slaughter school kids and church goers and club goers and movie goers. Innocent people doing innocent things are getting killed for an ass backwards lunatic idea that somehow hundreds of millions or guns floating around without any check is a good idea. It’s not. It’s a stupid idea and what Israel is doing isn’t going to help because our problem is the amount of guns in this country. There is no safe way to control almost 400,000,000 guns.