NRA

Saturday February 25, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday February 25, 2018

President Trump at CPAC Insists Arming Teachers, Not Gun Control, Will Keep Schools Safe

President Donald Trump reiterated his support for arming teachers during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday morning, saying that keeping guns out of schools makes them targets for mass shooters.

January 17, 2013

“When we declare our schools to be gun free zones, it just puts our students in far more danger,” said Trump. “People that are adept with weaponry and with guns — they teach. I don’t want to have 100 guards with rifles standing all over the school. You do a concealed carry permit.”

Other than one mention of “strengthening” background checks, Trump did not talk about the ideas for tighter gun control that he has floated in the last week – including raising the age of purchasing some weapons and banning bump stocks. The National Rifle Association, which was an early backer of Trump’s and channeled over $30 million towards supporting his campaign, opposes raising the age limit.

July 25, 2015

The speech seemed in line with many of the talking points of NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, who went on the offensive on Thursday on the same CPAC stage, accusing gun control advocates of exploiting last week’s Florida school shooting tragedy.

Nikolas Cruz, 19, allegedly opened fire with an AR-15 rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, killing 17 people. In the days following, Trump pledged to take action to help prevent more school shootings in America, inviting those who have experienced school shootings to the White House. He reiterated his call to action on Friday, telling the audience, “We will act. We will do something.” (Source: TIME) 

 

Saturday July 25, 2015

Saturday July 25, 2015Editorial cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday July 25, 2015

Gun safety laws biggest unfinished business of my presidency, says Obama

Barack Obama is “distressed” he has been unable to strengthen gun-safety laws in America, acknowledging it will be the unfinished business of his presidency.

Obama’s comment went to air on the BBC a few hours before the latest shooting in America which left three people dead, including the gunman, at the Grand Theater in Lafayette, Louisiana.

“The issue of guns, that is an area where if you ask me where has been the one area where I feel that I’ve been most frustrated and most stymied it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense, gun-safety laws,” he told the BBC.

“Even in the face of repeated mass killings.”

Obama said the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism was less than 100 while tens of thousands had been killed by gun violence.

“For us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing. But it is not something that I intend to stop working on in the remaining 18 months,” he said. (Source: The Guardian)

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Thursday, January 17, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday, January 17, 2013

How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?

Slate partners with @GunDeaths for an interactive, crowdsourced tally of the toll firearms have taken since Dec. 14.

The answer to the simple question in that headline is surprisingly hard to come by. So Slate is collecting data for our crowdsourced interactive. This data is necessarily incomplete (click here to see why, and to learn more about @GunDeaths, the Twitter user who helped us create this interactive). But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please email a link to a news report to slatedata@gmail.com. And if you’d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it’s open. You can download it here.

Update, June 19, 2013: As time goes on, our count gets further and further away from the likely actual number of gun deaths in America—because roughly 60 percent of deaths by gun are due to suicides, which are very rarely reported. When discussing this issue, please note that our number is by design not accurate and represents only the number of gun deaths that the media can find out about contemporaneously. Part of the purpose of this interactive is to point out how difficult it is to get accurate real-time numbers on this issue.

Using the most recent CDC estimates for yearly deaths by guns in the United States, it is likely that as of today, 10/4/2013, roughly 26,278 people have died from guns in the U.S. since the Newtown shootings. Compare that number to the number of deaths reported in the news in our interactive below, and you can see how undertold the story of gun violence in America actually is. (Source: Slate)