Central Maine Medical Center said staff were “reacting to a mass casualty, mass shooter event” and were coordinating with area hospitals to take in patients.
This guy is exactly the kind of person that the GOP considers a "good guy with a gun". He is a mentally ill veteran firearms instructor. Sounds like a boilerplate Trump supporter. Exactly who they want to have more guns.
There was a study published from data from the last like.. 10 years, I believe, that show that people with guns are more likely to run away, and people WITHOUT guns, are more likely to jump in and try to stop the shooter.
So ya. These good guys with guns are just pussies that never actually use them for good.
Maybe be the change you want to see in the world instead of removed, then.
edit: go ahead and keep downvoting me, when the right does finally manage a coup they'll be the only ones with any guns you stupid motherfuckers. For now, the 2nd amendment is your right -- you want to forgo it until they take it away from you (and only you), be my guest.
"The weapon believed to have been used in the attack was a sniper rifle with .308 caliber bullets, and it was purchased legally this year, officials said."
"Maine court records show that a man named Robert Card who was born on the same date as the person of interest was charged with speeding in 2001 and 2002. No other criminal records were listed in the state's electronic court records system or in several other public records databases."
But also:
"It added that law enforcement said Card 'recently reported mental health issues to include hearing voices and threats to shoot up the National Guard Base in Saco, ME.'
The bulletin said Card was reported to have been committed to a mental health facility for two weeks this summer and then released. NBC News has not been able to independently verify the bulletin's statements about Card's history."
In previous incidents, people committed to mental health facilities didn't have it turn up on their background check unless it was ordered by a judge. That needs to change.
I'm seeing varying reports that he was also convicted of domestic abuse, but this link shows no such charges.
Someone once told me, be careful of your thoughts for your thoughts may affect your words, be careful of your words because your words may come to become your actions, be careful of your actions for your actions may reflect on your character.
If you ask me, owning a firearm and making violent threats don't necessarily mean actions, but I agree that there's a definitive correlation. I guess that I still believe that the action itself is the most honest and serious commitment to something a person can express.
There are so many guns in the US right now that it's ridiculous. Gun control here would be great... If it were done a hundred years ago. I'm not saying I'm against common sense laws, but like... Pandoras box is open here.
There are 120 firearms for every 100 civilians that live in the U.S. We have 46% of the total worldwide statistic for civilian ownership. The US makes up only a meager 331.9 million out of 7.89 billion people worldwide. That means 4.2% of the world owns 46% of the guns... And those people are all American.
On top of this, some of the most heinous shootings in US history were performed with illegally obtained weapons. Columbine is one of the examples most will recognize.
I'm not leading up to anything here, I just wanted to educate everyone on how fucked we are.
I'm not leading up to anything here, I just wanted to educate everyone on how fucked we are.
Definitely, but your argument is unfortunately what keeps us from ever doing anything about it. Thinking that it can't be done is just not good enough.
Your past failure to learn from these continued atrocities is your complicity. Your current preference to protect the tools of violence over lives is your complicity. Your future vote to keep the status quo even as history repeats itself is your complicity.
Yup, you're right, because millions of people have owned guns legally for hundreds of years, it's their fault and blood is on their hands for this mass shooting.
Your past failure to learn from these continued atrocities is your complicity. Your current preference to protect the tools of violence over lives is your complicity. Your future vote to keep the status quo even as history repeats itself is your complicity.
Guns three hundred years ago were only slightly more dangerous than a guy with a rock and a mean your mama so fat joke. It isn't hundreds of years it's like 150 years.
Definitely not for Maine though. This guy was a military weapons instructor for the army. My cousin was at West Point with him this summer and he is the one who got him a psych eval. One day on the shooting range I guess he had a psychotic breakdown talking about the voices in his head and wanting to shoot up places. The shooter was absolutely pissed about having to get a psych eval. The shooter is still at large and it's terrifying especially because he might be going after my cousin.
This one shooter is likely to nearly match the TOTAL homicide rate for Maine last year (30). I think that when a state is looking at HALF THIER TOTAL MURDERS being from a mass shooting event, its time to stop treating them as an insignificant aberration and as a legitimate contributor to overall violence.
Ok wait a minute. The conservatives are wrong on all 4 of those. So are you saying that logic would be wrong for banning guns also? Not sure which argument you are making here.
One of the more common threads across these shootings is that the shooters tend to have some sort of mental issues that are painfully obvious and seem to get reported well before the shooting occurs. But the shooter's illness often festers in solitude, just circling a mental drain and getting more deranged until some sort of trigger sets them off. IMO, there needs to be a system that encourages gun owners to keep tabs on each other and vouch for each other (else lose their own license), and also require enlistment in the National Guard (with some sort of reduced requirements made for physical disabilities), with regular mental health screenings to check for stuff like this. Owning a gun should be treated as a huge responsibility, not something that just gets handed out to any dipshits just because they're 'Merican.
Getting rid of guns altogether would be great, but that just won't fly in America, there's just no chance of that happening anytime soon.
The big secret is ful auto or not doesn't matter, that gun will shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger. And someone like This I'm sure knows how to bump fire from damn near any position.
Yeah, people think that being able to fire off a whole magazine with one squeeze of the trigger means they can mow down 30 people like a gangster from an old black and white movie.
If anything, full auto would just make their shots less accurate and they'd run out of ammo faster in the heat of the moment.
Lewiston, about 35 miles north of Portland, emerged as a major center for African immigration into Maine. The Somali population, which numbers in the thousands, has changed the demographics of the once overwhelmingly white mill city into one of the most diverse in northern New England.
any indication that the crowd was any particular complexion?
I haven’t read anything about it, so I can’t say for sure, but I work in the Lewiston area and I’ve heard both the bowling alley and bar to be more “local” oriented businesses.
The Walmart distribution center is a weird one though, because it’s not really a store front.
Whatever his motivations are, it breaks my heart to see it happen in our neck of the woods.
did they ask the guy with the huge gun what United States American political group he affiliates with? I feel like that's the question everyone's asking but I don't know because I didn't actually look
Automatic probably would have had fewer since it would have missed with most the shots. Lethality like that requires controlled and aimed fire with individual shots.
If it was a dense crowd, an automatic has more than enough accuracy to hit a ton of people since you do not need much accuracy at all in that scenario.
As much as USA is pro-gun, I thought automatics are not sold?
Regardless as the other comment says, firing on full auto is a waste of ammo. Back in service our first range practice we were given the Rambo-fantasy; hip firing at full auto at 10 metres out. No one hit any of the targets. It was a lesson to us that firearms, as easy as they are to use, needed at least some skill to be effective.
Technically no. You can still get a fly automatic but they are expensive as hell. A cheaper solution would be a bump stock but that is even less accurate than an automatic. You could also illegally build your own.
As for ability to hit targets, how close together and how many were the targets? If it is a few targets spread out over 10-20 meters, yeah going full auto is going to miss a lot. Having dozens of people packed into a small area makes accuracy less important.
Full auto guns can be purchased. Most often they’re prior 80s ban guns. They’re older generally, although there are some newer full auto guns that have been hitting the market lately. They all require you to have full background checks and they’re serialized to match. The ATF is the one though that you have to register through to legally acquire one and from what I’ve heard it’s kind of a removed to get approval on them (as it should be).
Highly unlikely unless he built it himself. Machine guns (automatic weapons) are extremely expensive (anywhere from the cost of a new car to a new house, depending on the model) and require you to submit to a colonoscopy, administered courtesy of the ATF. The result is that it's extremely rare for a legally-owned machine gun to be used in a shooting (afaik it's only happened once or twice since the ATF introduced tax stamps for them).
The thing that confuses me is why it is the government is able to restrict automatic weapons and weapons above a certain caliber through what is effectively a license system, but isn't able to restrict anything else because it'd run afoul of the 2nd amendment.
Guns should be like cars. No one should feel like they need one (except if it's part of your work, in which case your work should be providing one), and like a car, different kinds of guns should have different licenses. You want a double-barrel shotgun? Okay. You have to go through a week of training to get a basic redneck license and show you have a gun safe (not a cheapo lockbox) to keep it in when not in use. You want a machine gun? Cool. You have to get the super-ultra-deluxe gun owner's license that requires a year of training, authorization from the ATF and FBI, and proof that you have a gun safe to store it in.
Oh yeah, and if your gun is stolen and it was improperly secured and/or you fail to report it in a reasonable amount of time then your license(s) are permanently revoked and you're considered to be an accomplice to whatever crimes were committed with it.
I'd be willing that the last bit would dramatically cut down school shootings specifically.
I can buy a car with cash, no bg check, no license, no insurance, no training, no age restriction and drive it and use it on my private property...I can also move it across state lines with no issue. I can also buy any size car or truck without anything as well. So no your car analogy doesn't work.
And no that last bit wouldn't cut down on school shootings, as most are done with handguns in the inner cities using illegally obtained firearms already, and are usually gang oriented.
Tons of other things would cut down on our violence issue, but they're harder to pull off and politicians like to have a virtue signaling single voter issue to rely on.