proposed laws

PA Bill Number: HB2170

Title: In assault, further providing for assault of law enforcement officer; and making editorial changes.

Description: In assault, further providing for assault of law enforcement officer; and making editorial changes. ...

Last Action: Referred to JUDICIARY

Last Action Date: Mar 28, 2024

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Everytown Once Again Proves That The Best Domestic Violence Prevention Is An Armed Victim :: 08/27/2015

Michael Bloomberg’s various gun control groups have had very limited success, despite investing tens of millions of dollars in propaganda dissemination and constant attempts to reframe the gun control debate.

One of his latest pushes has been attempting to argue for gun control as a domestic violence issue, which started last summer with a short video that backfired spectacularly.

People place flowers and balloons at a house in Houston, Texas, on Aug. 9, 2015, where Valerie Jackson, her husband, and six children were murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend.

Instead of terrifying women and convincing them to call for stricter gun control laws, the video had the opposite effect, and served to encourage women to obtain their own firearms and self-defense training.

Even the reliably left-leaning ladies of The View saw the video as a call for women to arm themselves.

It was an unmitigated disaster… as will be Everytown for Gun Safety’s newest attempt to reframe mass shootings as a domestic violence issue.

Here’s their latest spin, using a Huffington Post editor as their puppet:

The untold story of mass shootings in America is one of domestic violence. It is one of men (yes, mostly men) targeting and killing their wives or ex-girlfriends or families. The victims are intimately familiar to the shooters, not random strangers. This kind of violence is not indiscriminate — though friends, neighbors and bystanders are often killed alongside the intended targets.

The Huffington Post analyzed five years of mass shooting data compiled by Everytown For Gun Safety, a gun violence prevention organization backed by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. We looked at shootings in which at least four people were killed with a gun (the common definition of mass shootings, though there is debate over the best way to define them).

We found that in 57 percent of mass shootings, the shooter targeted either a family member or an intimate partner. According to HuffPost’s analysis, 64 percent of mass shooting victims were women and children. That’s startling, since women typically make up only 15 percent of total gun violence homicide victims, and children only 7 percent.

If you look strictly at the 57 percent of mass shootings that involved an intimate partner or another family member, 81 percent of the victims were women and children.

Part of the reason mass shootings that happen in public are so frightening — and the reason they receive national attention — is because they are often unpredictable. The victims bear no discernible relationship to the shooter; they are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. These public acts of bloodshed create the perception that all of us are vulnerable to acts of indiscriminate violence at any waking moment; that there is nowhere safe from harm.

But mass shootings that happen in the home are not unpredictable. They’re frequently preceded by a flurry of red flags: 911 calls, hospitalizations, broken protective orders, repeat arrests, contentious custody battles, death threats and stalking.

As a set of data from the Everytown/Moms Demand Action, the information above is immediately suspect. Their previous research on “school shootings” was roundly debunked by nearly every mainstream media outlet and fact checking organization as being grossly exaggerated to the point of being fiction.

We’ll no doubt see that the figures in this latest are somewhere between “massaged” to “abused like a Jodie Foster character.”

But—for the sake of argument—let’s take their claims at face value for a moment.

If 57-percent of mass shootings are targeted at family members or intimate partners, and of those, 81-percent of the victims were women and children, doesn’t this once again suggest that the best thing a woman can do to protect herself and her children is to obtain defensive firearms training, a concealed carry permit,  and a firearm to defend her family?

The horrific domestic violence mass murder they cited in the article was an event earlier this month in Houston:

On Aug. 8, D____ C_____* allegedly broke into his ex-girlfriend Valerie Jackson’s house in Houston, Texas, and killed her, her husband and her six children, methodically shooting each one in the head. Jackson had recently dumped C_____ and reunited with her husband after C_____ allegedly smashed her head into a refrigerator. When she reconciled with her husband, she changed the locks on her house. So C_____ climbed in a window.

The crime was a horrible one, but was also apparently preventable.

We know, for a fact, that Valerie Jackson was able to acquire her phone and text her mother before C_____ started shooting, and warned her of their situation. She has been left alone. If she had a handgun and training instead of just a phone, might we not be instead be reading about the death of a repeat domestic abuser, and the brave mother who saved the lives of six children and her husband?

Once again, Bloomberg’s Everytown attempts to frame the argument that everyone (except the bodyguards of the very wealthy, of course) must be disarmed for anyone to be safe.

Instead, they once again inadvertently show that the best defense against a bad man with a gun is a good guy or a strong woman with a gun, and the training to use it properly.

http://bearingarms.com/everytown-proves-best-domestic-violence-prevention-armed-victim/