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Guns rights advocates struck back at calls for gun control after Wednesday night’s deadly mass shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina, saying President Barack Obama’s plea for stricter gun laws “gets it wrong” and asserting that the pastor of the church, who was killed in the shooting, could have prevented the massacre if not for his anti-gun stance.

 

“One of the biggest problems at the South Carolina church is that the potential victims were disarmed by law,” Gun Owners of America spokesman Erich Pratt said in a statement emailed to Al Jazeera. “In the Palmetto State, a concealed carry permit holder can carry in places of worship with permission from a church official. Unfortunately, the pastor was an anti-gun activist. As a state senator, the Pastor had voted against concealed carry.”

 

The pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who became the state's youngest senator in 2001 at the age of 27, voted for reproductive rights and gun control laws, and he spent his last day campaigning with 2016 Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton in Charleston.

 

The nation's leading gun rights lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), has not yet released a statement on the shooting, but one of its board members, Charles L. Cotton, weighed in on an online message board.

 

Pinckney “voted against concealed-carry,” Cotton said on a firearm issue discussion site that he moderates. “Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”

 

Pratt added that Obama “gets it wrong once again” in his response to the shooting. “The president wants to blame an inanimate object, the gun,” Pratt said. “But that just deflects blame away from the real culprit — gun control policies that leave people defenseless in the face of evil perpetrators who are never effectively prevented from acquiring weapons.”

 

South Carolina has some of the most relaxed laws on gun ownership in the nation. The state does not require background checks for private gun sales, and in 2014, the state legislature allowed holders of concealed carry permits to bring guns into places of worship with the permission of the religious leader.

 

Charleston Mayor Joe Riley called for stricter gun control laws in response to the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which killed several community leaders, including Pinckney, librarian Cynthia Hurd and high school track coach Sharonda Coleman-Singleton.

 

“I personally believe there are far too many guns out there. And access to guns — it’s far too easy,” Riley told The Washington Post.

President Obama echoed that sentiment.

 

“We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” Obama told the press on Thursday.

 

The suspect in the Charleston shooting, Dylann Roof, was pictured wearing the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on his Facebook account. Roof's father had given him a .45-caliber pistol for his birthday, Roof's uncle Carson Cowles told Reuters. Authorities have yet to disclose details about the weapon used in the attack.

 

Months before his death, Pinckney delivered a sermon at a YWCA event in late April, titled “Requiem on Racism,” in which he said that love alone could end racism. “Irregardless of our faiths, our ethnicities, where we are from, together we come in love,” he said. “Together we come to bury racism, to bury bigotry, and to resurrect and revive love, compassion and tenderness.”

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I've made my disrespect for religion as a whole very clear on here but I still can't get over how fucked up it is that they think it's okay to carry concealed guns in a church of all places.

 

As i've said before I have sympathy for the bereaved families but the nation as a whole can take its crocodile tears and fuck off as far as I'm concerned.

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Guns rights advocates struck back at calls for gun control after Wednesday night’s deadly mass shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina, saying President Barack Obama’s plea for stricter gun laws “gets it wrong” and asserting that the pastor of the church, who was killed in the shooting, could have prevented the massacre if not for his anti-gun stance.

 

“One of the biggest problems at the South Carolina church is that the potential victims were disarmed by law,” Gun Owners of America spokesman Erich Pratt said in a statement emailed to Al Jazeera. “In the Palmetto State, a concealed carry permit holder can carry in places of worship with permission from a church official. Unfortunately, the pastor was an anti-gun activist. As a state senator, the Pastor had voted against concealed carry.”

 

The pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who became the state's youngest senator in 2001 at the age of 27, voted for reproductive rights and gun control laws, and he spent his last day campaigning with 2016 Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton in Charleston.

 

The nation's leading gun rights lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), has not yet released a statement on the shooting, but one of its board members, Charles L. Cotton, weighed in on an online message board.

 

Pinckney “voted against concealed-carry,” Cotton said on a firearm issue discussion site that he moderates. “Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”

 

Pratt added that Obama “gets it wrong once again” in his response to the shooting. “The president wants to blame an inanimate object, the gun,” Pratt said. “But that just deflects blame away from the real culprit — gun control policies that leave people defenseless in the face of evil perpetrators who are never effectively prevented from acquiring weapons.”

 

South Carolina has some of the most relaxed laws on gun ownership in the nation. The state does not require background checks for private gun sales, and in 2014, the state legislature allowed holders of concealed carry permits to bring guns into places of worship with the permission of the religious leader.

 

Charleston Mayor Joe Riley called for stricter gun control laws in response to the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which killed several community leaders, including Pinckney, librarian Cynthia Hurd and high school track coach Sharonda Coleman-Singleton.

 

“I personally believe there are far too many guns out there. And access to guns — it’s far too easy,” Riley told The Washington Post.

President Obama echoed that sentiment.

 

“We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” Obama told the press on Thursday.

 

The suspect in the Charleston shooting, Dylann Roof, was pictured wearing the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on his Facebook account. Roof's father had given him a .45-caliber pistol for his birthday, Roof's uncle Carson Cowles told Reuters. Authorities have yet to disclose details about the weapon used in the attack.

 

Months before his death, Pinckney delivered a sermon at a YWCA event in late April, titled “Requiem on Racism,” in which he said that love alone could end racism. “Irregardless of our faiths, our ethnicities, where we are from, together we come in love,” he said. “Together we come to bury racism, to bury bigotry, and to resurrect and revive love, compassion and tenderness.”

 

 

So really its the Pastor's fault he got shot? And what's more, he could have prevented the entire massacre if he were a responsible gun totting maniac like everyone else?

 

This is unbelievable. Its bad enough that innocent people have been murdered without idiots like these victim blaming. Fuck sake man.

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:o

 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/teenager-took-selfies-sex-dog-5904281#rlabs=8

 

Tbf, back in the nineties there was a story circulating locally of a lass doing this sort of of thing in what she thought was her parents empty house only to be "caught out" by all her closest family who were silently waiting for her in another room by way of a surprise. Apparently she left the area shortly afterwards for somewhere abroad :lol:

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:o

 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/teenager-took-selfies-sex-dog-5904281#rlabs=8

 

Tbf, back in the nineties there was a story circulating locally of a lass doing this sort of of thing in what she thought was her parents empty house only to be "caught out" by all her closest family who were silently waiting for her in another room by way of a surprise. Apparently she left the area shortly afterwards for somewhere abroad :lol:

I like how they've posted a picture of the dog instead of the lass.

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When is a tax increase not a tax increase??? from the Economist:-

 

EVEN in a place inured to budget trickery, the stratagem was absurd. Louisiana’s treasurer, John Kennedy, called it “nonsense on a stick”. He was referring to the “tax credit” that would apparently balance Louisiana’s budget for the coming fiscal year, closing a deficit gap of $1.6 billion.

 

This was the plan. The state’s cigarette tax, the third-lowest in the country, would be raised substantially, with the proceeds going to higher education. But rather than declare it as a tax increase, the state would create a phantom fee of about $1,600 applied to each of its 220,000 university students. The students would not actually pay the fee, because it would come with a matching tax credit. This credit would then be handed over to the universities, which would in turn receive the actual money generated by the cigarette-tax increase and a few other things.

In this section

Two words explain such gimmickry: Grover Norquist, or, as some in Louisiana have begun calling him, “Governor Norquist”.

 

Mr Norquist runs Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a powerful Washington lobby group, whose bread and butter is a never-raise-taxes pledge signed by politicians around the country. Being on the list, and staying in ATR’s good graces, have become litmus tests of ideological purity in some Republican circles.

 

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Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, who is expected soon to leap into the crowd of Republican presidential hopefuls, is desperate to be among the fiscally untainted. Since April he has been wrestling with the problem of how to close the budget gap without either raising taxes, which would inflame Mr Norquist, or inflicting further damage on programmes like higher education. Louisiana’s colleges, on his watch, have already sustained some of the deepest cuts in the country.

 

A simple solution might have been to pare back some of the state’s lucrative and questionable tax breaks for business. But Mr Norquist would frown on that. According to his rules of engagement, any legislative change that results in extra revenue—even eliminating a poorly crafted giveaway—is a tax increase. In February (as furious legislators point out, before he had consulted them), Mr Jindal sought advice privately from the guru himself.

 

As a result, in came the SAVE Act, an acronym for “Student Assessment for a Valuable Education”. (One legislator moved to amend its title to the DUMB Act, for “Don’t Understand Meaning of Bill”.) Mr Norquist has previously blessed tax increases, provided they are paired with offsetting cuts that make the whole package revenue-neutral. He therefore gave the nod to Louisiana’s contrivance.

Even the legislators who backed the bill cringed at it, and admitted it served only to protect Mr Jindal’s anti-tax credentials. A group of ten Republican legislators, including four who had signed the ATR pledge, added their names to a letter to Mr Norquist written by Joel Robideaux, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Louisiana House. The letter, released to the media, tartly noted that the SAVE Act was a “purely fictional, procedural, phantom, paper tax credit”, and asked Mr Norquist whether he really endorsed it. He replied, the next day, by saying that the SAVE Act was Louisiana’s creation, not his. If the conservatives didn’t want to use that workaround to balance the books, he suggested, they should make cuts elsewhere.

 

In the end, lawmakers held their noses and voted for a budget that included SAVE, after Mr Jindal made it clear that he would veto the package otherwise. It was quite a spectacle. One of the bill’s chief backers, arguing for its adoption, sold it thus: “Our love for higher education is greater than the embarrassment over the instrument.”

 

Although Messrs Jindal and Norquist won the battle, it is unclear whether they have won the war. The episode has soured many Louisianian lawmakers on ATR for good. Add in resentment at having to please a Washington power-broker, rather than local constituents, and it seems that Mr Norquist may well have pushed his anti-tax crusade too far.

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Somebody retweeted something Piers Morgan put up on twitter, saying how on a pretty shocking day the legalisation of Gay marriage is a good thing. The responses to his original tweet are predictably depressing.

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I just happened to be watching Fox News when this broke, and they were all over it like stink on shit. Not a mention of the terror attacks in Europe or Africa, and only begrudging coverage of the funeral service for the Charleston victims. Absolutely fucking obsessed. Some seem to even be hoping Texas will seceed rather than allow their ban to be overturned, so there can be another Civil War. Loons.

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  • 4 weeks later...

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/22/donald-trump-reveals-republican-rival-lindsey-grahams-phone-number-on-tv

Trump is a fucking madman. :lol:

 

Jon Stewart does a pretty good job of demolishing him here; his comments about McCain man: "He's a war hero cos he was captured?.....I like people who don't get captured." :lol:

 

http://time.com/3965860/jon-stewart-donald-trump-john-mccain/

Edited by Gemmill
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