School killers are all Democrats

[snopes]

Comment: Why is it that those who steal guns and kill movie goers and
children in school are always Democrats and not conservatives or NRA
members?

Ft. Hood shooter - Registered Democrat – Muslim

Columbine shooters - Too young to vote but both families were registered
Democrats and progressive liberals.

Virginia Tech shooter - Registered Democrat - Wrote hate mail to President
Bush and to his staff.

Colorado Theater shooter - Registered Democrat; staff worker on the Obama
campaign; Occupy Wall Street participant; progressive liberal.

Connecticut School Shooter - Registered Democrat; hated Christians.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ shooter – Leftist, registered Democrat.

All of these shooters were progressive Democrats!

Why is that the media always tells us that conservative NRA-type
gun-owners are the real danger?

Lesson... Don't trust the media! Or politicians!

[Chloe]

And male. Don't forget male.

[Swordmaster]

Originally Posted by snopes

Columbine shooters - Too young to vote but both families were registered
Democrats and progressive liberals.

While I can't say for sure what the political affiliations of either the Harris or Klebold families are/were, I can say that both boys came from families that appeared, basically, very All-American.

Eric Harris came from a fairly strict military family and Dylan Klebold's family was pretty active in their Lutheran church.

My copy of of Dave Cullen's book about Columbine is packed away, currently, but if I find it, I'll look and see if any mention of the families political affiliations is made.

[lavender blue]

Originally Posted by Chloe

And male. Don't forget male.

And unlike political or social leanings, the fact most are male can be definitively determined without wild extrapolation and drawing narrow conclusions from a widely variant data set.

[snopes]

Originally Posted by snopes

Virginia Tech shooter - Registered Democrat

I'm not sure how Seung-Hui Cho could have been a "registered Democrat" given that:

a) He was Korean national with permanent residency status, not a U.S. citizen.

b) He lived all of his adult life in Virginia, a state which does not record party affiliation in the voter registration process.

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/204826
http://votesmart.org/elections/voter-registration/VA

[Steve]

Originally Posted by snopes

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ shooter – Leftist, registered Democrat.

He was registered Independent.

[Chloe]

Facts are also Democrats, and should not be trusted.

[mags]

Originally Posted by snopes

I'm not sure how Seung-Hui Cho could have been a "registered Democrat" given that:

Duh. He was a school shooter. QED

[firefighter_raven]

Holmes purchased all his firearms legally

Klebold and Harris got someone to straw buy their guns for them.

Cho legally purchased his handguns

Loughner legally purchased his handgun

Hasan legally purchased his handgun

Lanza used a rifle legally purchased by his mother(who also took him to learn how to shoot) so guess it might of been stolen(or it might of been bought for him)

Of other shootings I'd looked up previously, the few times the weapons had been stolen was by minors from family members.

Westroads Mall shooting Omaha 2007- the rifle was stolen from the shooter's stepfather

Millard South Omaha 2011- The shooter took his father's handgun to kill my former English teacher.

Kip Kinkel- Weapons were legally purchased for him by his father

Sikh temple shooting- rifle legally purchased

Chadron High shooting- weapon stolen from his uncle

The DC Sniper's rifle was part of a group of firearms that went "missing" from a dealer in Seattle.

Klebold and Harris stole their firearms. One thing all but the Fort Hood terrorist shared was a history of mental problems or behavior that indicated mental illness.

[snopes]

Originally Posted by jjk308

Klebold and Harris stole their firearms.

No they didn't. Three of the weapons were purchased for them by a friend at a gun show (because they were too young to buy them on their own), and the other weapon was purchased from a fellow employee at the pizza place where they worked.

[Troberg]

However, these people were not democrats:

David Koresh
Randy Weaver
Timothy McVeigh
James Huberty

[Don Enrico]

Originally Posted by snopes

Comment:
Why is that the media always tells us that conservative NRA-type
gun-owners are the real danger?

Does "the media" actually do that?

My impression is that the conflict the anti-gun lobby has with the pro-gun lobby that NRA-sponsored legislation allows the wrong people to get guns (and subsequently use them in a devastating way), not the the actual NRA lobbyists (or even the NRA members) are the danger.

Anti-gun lobbyists want to ban guns, not ban the NRA.

[Magdalene]

Originally Posted by Swordmaster

While I can't say for sure what the political affiliations of either the Harris or Klebold families are/were, I can say that both boys came from families that appeared, basically, very All-American.

Eric Harris came from a fairly strict military family and Dylan Klebold's family was pretty active in their Lutheran church.

And while not an absolute truth, most military families tend to lean towards conservative and Republican. (Again, I am aware this is not an absolute truth, but given my own personal experiences and the current political affiliations of my former Army buddies.)

There is a website for Colorado where if you enter your first name, last night, zip code, and date of birth, you can pull up yours--or someone else's--political registration. Not knowing the DOB for any of the Klebolds or Harrises or their addresses (for all I know, they may not even be in the state anymore), I can't do this, so I'm wondering how somebody else suppsedly did. I don't know if this is information Colorado officials would just hand out upon request.

Magdalene

[Mickey Blue]

Besides the issue most have is with gun owners (or more accurately, guns). While I suspect that in general the majority of gun owners are conservative there are plenty who are not.

In addition in many of those cases there were failures in the system that allowed people to (as shown above) legally obtain guns for the purpose of killing others. While it's possible these people would have gotten guns illegally somehow if they couldn't legally at least we would have tried, and perhaps they would have gotten caught before the attacks. Heck if even one got caught earlier, or decided he couldn't successfully get a stolen gun, it would save lives.

If we had laws in place to regulate how people (particularly minors) bought guns, laws in place that regulated how guns are to be stored or better yet required biometric(?) triggers that determined who could use them we may have been able to avoid these tragedies without impacting how any law abiding Americans could purchase guns. If we went one step further and just made assault weapons out-and-out illegal (Save for, perhaps, special permits) then we likely could have reduced some of these as well with only minimal infringement on the gun rights of law abiding Americans.

Really it's a no brainer.

[fitz1980]

Originally Posted by jjk308

Klebold and Harris stole their firearms.

Originally Posted by snopes

No they didn't. Three of the weapons were purchased for them by a friend at a gun show (because they were too young to buy them on their own), and the other weapon was purchased from a fellow employee at the pizza place where they worked.

I did not know that; but looking into it snopes is totally correct. I had always heard that they stole their guns. Goes to show how effective the gun lobby's misinformation campaign has been.

Originally Posted by firefighter_raven

Klebold and Harris got someone to straw buy their guns for them.

Legally what they did wasn't technically a straw buy. They did bring an 18 year old friend to the gunshow who bought their guns for them. Since she bought them from private dealers they were under no legal obligation to for proof that the buyer was over 18. Klebold and Harris could have walked right into that gunshow and bought the same guns from those same private dealers and it would have been totally legal on the dealers part.

[snopes]

Originally Posted by fitz1980

Legally what they did wasn't technically a straw buy. They did bring an 18 year old friend to the gunshow who bought their guns for them. Since she bought them from private dealers they were under no legal obligation to for proof that the buyer was over 18. Klebold and Harris could have walked right into that gunshow and bought the same guns from those same private dealers and it would have been totally legal on the dealers part.

I believe the law required that purchasers of long guns had to be 18 years old, so although Klebold and Harris likely could have bought those weapons at a gun show with no difficulty (because private sellers weren't required to check ID), they still would have been breaking the law if they did so. That's why they brought along a friend who was 18 to make the purchases for them (and indeed, one of the three sellers she bought from did check her ID to make sure she was 18).

You are correct that it wasn't legally a straw buy, though. No law prevented someone 18 or older from purchasing a long gun and giving it to someone under 18. If the sale had involved handguns rather than long guns, then it would have been an illegal straw buy.

[A Turtle Named Mack]

Originally Posted by fitz1980

Since she bought them from private dealers they were under no legal obligation to for proof that the buyer was over 18.

Point of terminology - I believe 'dealer' has a technical meaning that requires such person to register with the federal government as a dealer and to comply with all those various federal rules. A private 'seller' is what these people should have been in order to sell without complying with the federal requirements. BTW, I will readily acknowledge that there is reputedly quite a few people whose firearm sales are substantial enough that they really ought to be classed as 'dealers' - the lack of a brick-and-mortar facility or a website does not mean that you are not making a business of buying and selling arms, which is certainly what I would expect being a dealer to mean. I am not fully cognizant of the actual definitions, though, nor the extent of violations thereof.

[fitz1980]

Correct; I should have said "private seller" and I don't even know if it's possible to put enough air quotes around the word seller so I won't try.

[Sara@home]

The word is spreading that Ariel Castro is a registered Democrat though the research I've seen indicates that Ohio residents can't name a party when they register to vote. Ohio folks...is that true?