On Friday a fourth person was arrested for issuing death threats against African-American college students this week—this time in MIchigan.
Police said they took a suspect into custody Thursday afternoon in connection with an anonymous threat posted on social media directed at students at Michigan Technological University, reported The Detroit News.
The university’s Department of Public Safety and Police Services spotted a message posted about noon Thursday on the Yik Yak social media platform and increased security on the Houghton campus.
The person who made the threat vowed he or she was “going to kill all black people,” authorities said.
Many Republicans truly believed that the only thing that stops a “bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.” So the next logical step should be to call for black students at colleges across the nation to openly carry firearms. It’s only logical right? They have repeatedly argued that the real problem that encourages mass shootings is “gun free zones,” haven’t they?
Oddly, not a single Republican presidential candidate has called for this in the case of African-American college students who are being repeatedly threatened with death. Wonder why that is?
Here’s what Donald Trump, in addition to calling for a national right to open-carry, said about guns following the mass shooting at Chattanooga.
“Get rid of gun free zones,” Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump tweeted after a gunman massacred five in Chattanooga last month. “Gun-free zones [are] an easy target for killers” an opinion headline on Fox News read after a white supremacist shot up a black South Carolina church and killed nine. Conservative sites also blamed gun-free zones after massacres at multiple movie theaters and other shootings.
They’ve told us again and again that the last thing we need are “more gun laws.”
Here’s what many of them said after the Oregon mass shooting.
“What we end up doing doing lots of times is we create rules on the 99.999% of human activity that had nothing to do with the tragedy that had forced the conversation about doing something and we're taking people's rights away each time we do that," [Jeb!] Bush said.
He went on to say, "Stuff happens, there's always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something and it's not necessarily the right thing to do."
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who once received an "F" rating from the National Rifle Association for supporting the 1994 assault weapons ban, told NBC News that "stripping law abiding people of their guns … I don't believe will get the job done."
Dr. Ben Carson said Friday in Iowa said early warning systems that identify a possible culprit need to be put in place. "You're not going to handle it with more gun control because gun control only works for normal law abiding citizens. It doesn't work for crazies," Carson said.
And it’s not like people who actually were open carrying during that very same Oregon school shooting didn’t come galloping in to save the day, guns a’blazing. Or not.
Parker explained that his military training provided him with the skills to “go into danger,” but said he felt lucky he and others didn’t try to get involved going after Mercer.
“Luckily we made the choice not to get involved,” he explained. “We were quite a distance away from the building where this was happening. And we could have opened ourselves up to be potential targets ourselves, and not knowing where SWAT was, their response time, they wouldn’t know who we were. And if we had our guns ready to shoot, they could think that we were bad guys.”
Yeah, okey dokey, glad that’s settled.
So gun laws just don’t work, see? It’s not as if we have any studies that indicate that states with comprehensive background checks have 64 percent fewer instances of mass domestic shootings:
Loopholes in federal and state law make it easy for dangerous people to obtain firearms and commit crimes. Previous research by Everytown for Gun Safety found that more than one in three perpetrators of mass shootings—incidents with four or more firearm homicide fatalities—had a prior history of felonies, domestic violence, or mental illness that prohibited him from buying or possessing guns.
This analysis offers further evidence that common-sense public safety laws may help prevent dangerous people from obtaining guns and save lives: controlling for population, in states that require background checks for all handgun sales, there were 52 percent fewer mass shootings between January 2009 and July 2015. Notably, states that require criminal background checks on all handgun sales experienced 63 percent fewer mass shootings committed by people prohibited from possessing firearms and 64 percent fewer domestic violence mass shootings.
And now that we’ve proven conclusively that gun laws and background checks won’t help anyone at all, and that concealed and open carry is the only way to protect people because it clearly works so well: Why precisely is it that Republicans aren’t clamoring for black students to open carry?
That seems like it would be a slam dunk position for Ted Cruz, who called for our soldiers to concealed carry in the wake of shootings on our military bases.
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R) said this week as an appeal to gun owners in New Hampshire that he is pushing the Senate to allow soldiers on military bases to carry concealed firearms. George H.W. Bush enacted the ban on weapons on bases in 1992. Defense leaders oppose relaxing the rule and say only military police should be armed on bases. But Cruz’s comments highlight the trend among the candidates to flaunt gun rights as a way to one-up each other’s conservatism.
“One of the things I’ve publicly called for on the Armed Services Committee is for us to have hearings on why the military has a policy of not allowing soldiers to carry their firearms onto bases. I am very concerned about that policy,” Cruz told 120 gun owners at a hunting club on Sunday. He added that he thinks “it’s very important to have a public discussion about why we’re denying our soldiers the ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights.”
So clearly black students on our college campuses deserve the same Second Amendment rights that the soldiers enjoy. Don’t they?
I mean, it’s not like having a hunger strike and a boycott and standing up non-violently without firearms is going to get anything done at all.
Who could possibly believe any of that namby-pamby stuff might work? Pffft!
Saturday, Nov 14, 2015 · 10:20:29 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Just for the record Mizzou’s current weapons policy prohibits any firearms on campus, they’ve even been sued by one of their own professors over it.
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- A University of Missouri law professor is suing the school over its gun policy. Mizzou prohibits all workers from possessing or discharging a firearm anywhere on campus. In his lawsuit, Professor Royce Barondes says the current policy infringes on the constitution. He says the Mizzou campus is not free of crime, and therefore should not be above the law. "I think it was a well-intentioned rule meant for the safety of individuals on campus. The problem is that the bad guys don't care about the rules," said Barondes' lawyer.
I would expect that the ban also extends to students, even though gun rights in the state were recently broadened to allow teachers to carry weapons.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri lawmakers expanded the potential for teachers to bring guns to schools and for residents to openly carry firearms, in a vote Thursday that capped a two-year effort by the Republican-led Legislature to expand gun rights over the objection of the Democratic governor.
The new law will allow specially trained school employees to carry concealed guns on campuses. It also allows anyone with a concealed weapons permit to carry guns openly, even in cities or towns with bans against the open carrying of firearms. The age to obtain a concealed weapons permit also will drop from 21 to 19.
Now the current issue on Mizzou’s campus, in all seriousness, is that direct threats have been issued specifically against the African-American students, so it only makes sense that those who have been specifically threatened should have the right of self defense. It’s only because the threats themselves have been race-based that the gun-rights, self-protection issue in response is —for purposes of this discussion— focused in that direction.
It’s also very strange that these threats are against college students who, one would presume, are exactly the kind of example of “go getters” who are making something of their lives as opposed to the typical stereotype of the lazy, chip-shoulder, excuse-making, unemployed, government dependent negro. These are some of the “Good Ones”, yet it’s seems even they aren’t respectable enough for some people.