You wrote, how could you do a real background check before computer databases existed? The answer is with armies of clerks: handwritten or typed records, such as were widely employed by credit reporting bureaus before computers caught on in the 1960s.
~Max
Well, if your one magic bullet could magically remove nearly 400 million firearms from the US, I think you would see mass shootings and overall gun murders drop precipitously without doing a single other thing.
Hmmm…I don’t know, I keep hearing about rental vans and pencils. Do they cause gun murders?
Not from me.
I am entirely comfortable with vastly increased taxes on billionaires and hundred-millionaires to pay for it.
oh hell, I’m okay with vastly increased taxes on me and people like me if it meant that I never had to worry about being homeless, or about my kid being homeless, or about being able to pay for medical care.
In either case nobody should be broadcasting or sharing her grief. Leave her alone. You’re an asshole for sharing this.
I see that this has (almost inevitably) turned into another gun-debate thread, with the gun-nut OP who started it now doing cheerleading for the gun-nut side with all the usual bullshit arguments.
Sorry, I’m not biting. At least, I’m trying to resist. What I will say is that in scanning recent posts I briefly misread this thread title as “I pity the mother of the Texas shooter”. Which would have been appropriate, considering the lose-lose all around in the multiple deaths and injuries in this terrible tragedy. But one wouldn’t expect that from a gun nut. One would expect gun nuts to rain down hell and damnation on a disturbed teenager, because heaven forfend that one should ever blame guns and America’s totally out-of-control gun culture for these shootings. And when that teenager is dead, why, rain down hell and damnation upon his grieving mother.
That’s the mind of a gun nut, in a nutshell.
Just out of curiosity, if the parents of those dead kids were to object to her statement what would your response to them be.
Those parents are grieving, too:
Just out of curiosity, if it were your gun store that sold the weapons to the shooter, what would your response be?
Thread 
I’d leave them alone too. I wouldn’t be using the selective media amplification of out-of-context snippets of the emotional reactions of distraught grieving people caught up in a terrible tragedy to try to provoke other people into piling on them with violently hostile expressions of rage.
In particular, I wouldn’t be calling them “cunts”.
As human beings I think we should be understanding of what grief and trauma does to a person and how it may influence what they say or do.
Not much of a mystery to me, not a tricky conclusion to arrive at.
How they feel is how they feel and they have a right to their own opinions.
I don’t have to agree with them. And I’d cut them a lot of slack for being grieving parents.
That doesn’t explain your asine opinion, but like everyone else you have every right to your opinion. And we have every right to our opinions. Expressing your opinion means that sometimes you discover that other people do not agree with you, and might even have the opinion you’re an asshole.
Have there been any reports that they did anything illegal?
Did the mother you’re pitting?
Based on his posts in other threads, and considering that these were expensive rifles that cost nearly 2k each (not counting the ammo bought), it would seem that pkbites’ reaction would be “sweet, I made 4 grand!”
“I’m so sorry for your loss. How horrible. I can’t even imagine.” [and if I knew them, “would you like a hug?”]
Dude, you don’t get into fights with grieving parents about their immediate emotional response. At least, decent human beings don’t. Have you never paid a condolence call? This is not a difficult question.
Of course not. So I guess we should also call the owner of the gun store a cunt.
Not only is the mother experiencing raw grief over the death of a child, she most likely is doing so without emotional support of family and friends. On top of that she has probably heard taunts directed at her and feels villainized for giving birth to and raising a monster. Furthermore, she is probably racking her brain in torment wondering if she could have done something, anything, to have prevented the massacre of innocent victims and the death of her son.
That’s enough psychological trauma to make anyone crack under the enormous pressure. If she was indeed a good mother and tried her best to not enable the deranged actions of her child, then I feel very sorry for her (as I do for the victims and their families). Anything she says, appropriate or not should be taken with a huge grain of salt and disregarded.
The fault lies with whoever shot and posted the video to make tawdry news and the viewers who assume her words were uttered by a rational person and should be taken at face value. If you want a true account of how she feels about the actions of her son, interview her later, when she’s not in shock.