Friday, February 1, 2013

Phoenix lawyer dies after office shooting - spokeswoman


Phoenix lawyer dies after office shooting - spokeswoman

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PHOENIX | Fri Feb 1, 2013 11:21am EST
(Reuters) - A prominent Phoenix lawyer has died after being shot following a legal mediation meeting in an Arizona office building this week, a spokeswoman for his law firm said on Friday.
Mark Hummels, a 43-year-old litigator who was president of the Federal Bar Association's Phoenix chapter, had not been expected to survive his injuries from the shooting on Wednesday that also left another man dead.
"I regret to inform you that our friend, Mark Hummels, died last night. He was declared brain dead and taken off life support," said Athia Hardt, spokeswoman for his law firm, Osborn Maledon.
She asked that Hummels' family be given time to grieve in private.
The man suspected in the fatal shooting was found dead on Thursday of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in the suburb of Mesa, police said.
Arthur Douglas Harmon, 70, was suspected of opening fire in an office building in central Phoenix after a settlement conference involving a legal dispute, police said.
Also killed in the shooting was Steve Singer, 48, who was the chief executive of Fusion Contact Centers, a Scottsdale-based call center.
News reports about the Arizona shooting said that Harmon had filed a lawsuit against the Scottsdale call center, and police said the two men appeared to be his intended targets.
"For whatever reason, the litigating hearing did not go as planned or in favor of Mr. Harmon, and we believe that is probably the motive in this incident," Phoenix police spokesman Tommy Thompson said.
(Reporting by Tim Gaynor; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Vicki Allen)

High Health Care Costs Bankrupt One In Four American Seniors


By Sy Mukherjee on Feb 1, 2013 at 10:30 am
According to a new study released by the Journal of General Internal Medicine, out-of-pocket medical spending in the last five years of life left one in four American seniors bankrupt.
The study found that average “out-of-pocket expenditures in the 5 years prior to death were $38,688 for individuals, and $51,030 for couples in which one spouse dies.” That average was skewed upwards by staggeringly high out-of-pocket medical spending by seniors who had particularly expensive medical needs. All told, a full “25 percent of subjects’ expenditures exceeded baseline total household assets, and 43 percent of subjects’ spending surpassed their non-housing assets,” according to the report.
The study’s findings underscore the fact that, despite Medicare coverage — which is more efficient and cost-effective compared to private insurance — health care consumption by seniors suffering from costly diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s can often drive up prices to an unsustainable rate.
That represents the simple reality of the costs of treating diseases for which there are still no cures. Seventy percent of national health care expenses derive from just 10 percent of the population, usually by terminally ill Americans.
But when conservative politicians use that figure to justify radical cuts to social safety net programs, their logic simply doesn’t add up. Shifting ailing patients away from publicly financed insurance programs and into the private market only drives up health care costs and uncompensated care rates by forcing people to pursue treatment that they cannot afford — and those policies would simply force even more seniors to exceed their non-housing assets to pay for their medical costs. The solution to this issue lies in finding more cost-effective treatments for costly diseases, not leaving seniors to their own devices to figure out how to pay for their health care.

MSNBC Urges Viewers to Boycott Gun Manufacturers


MSNBC Urges Viewers to Boycott Gun Manufacturers

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Economic warfare as new form of gun control
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com 
February 1, 2013
News network MSBC – which is effectively owned by arms manufacturer General Electric – put out a tweet yesterday urging its viewers to financially boycott gun manufacturers, in another example of how gun control is being advanced under the radar.
“Do you know where your $$ is? Maybe it’s invested in the #gun business. Use your wallet to support #gunlimits,” the network tweeted, adding a link to a story about NYC mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio pressuring investment firms to remove funding from gun companies.
The irony of MSNBC telling viewers to boycott investments in gun manufacturers is chillingly ironic given the fact that the network is is part-owned by one of Obama’s biggest campaign contributors, General Electric, which also just happens to be one of the biggest arms manufacturers on the planet.
It’s also a flagrant example of a supposedly neutral media outlet pushing its skewed political agenda.
In response to the tweet, one user responded, “@msnbc reporting news or creating it now.”
As we have previously highlighted, prominent gun control advocates are resorting to economic warfare in a bid to accomplish what they have thus far failed to achieve through the normal legislative path – gun control via mafia-style threats of blackmail.
Last month, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter threatened gun makers and firearms sellers with what amounted to economic sanctions unless they followed draconian new gun control regulations. Nutter warned that the city would take “economic divestment actions” unless gun retailers hosted “semi-annual gun buy-back programs to retire weapons from general public circulation,” amidst a deluge of other mandates.
Nutter’s move is being mirrored by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the man who once called for a ‘no gun buy list’ similar to the no fly list, who announced that he would, “ask all his city’s pension funds to investigate whether they have any holdings in assault weapons makers and sellers, a step toward divesting of those companies.”
Other lawmakers have demanded that gun retailers stop selling semi-automatic assault rifles altogether, an order that stores like Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods have adhered to.
Last month, Bank of American also froze the funds of licensed firearms manufacturer American Spirit Arms, telling owner Joe Sirochman he “should not be selling guns and parts on the internet.”
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

As Part Of Lockdown Drill, School Fires Off Blanks In The Halls


By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jan 31, 2013 at 5:30 pm
 
Students at a high school in Illinois experienced a uniquely terrifying school shooting drill on Wednesday. Instead of conducting a regular school lockdown, Cary-Grove High School administrators simulated gunfire by shooting off blanks in the hallways while students locked their classroom doors, pulled the curtains, and hid.
The drill, understandably, upset some parents in the area, who received a letter ahead of time telling them what their children would be experiencing:
The simulation will take approximately 15-20 minutes, during which time teachers will secure their rooms, draw curtains, and keep their students from traveling throughout the building. Please note that we will be firing blanks in the hallway in an effort to provide our teachers and students some familiarity with the sound of gunfire. Our school resource officer and other members of the Cary Police Department will assist us in sweeping the building to ensure that all students are in a secure location during the drill. At the conclusion of the drill, we will take some time to process what occurred and then we will return to our normal classroom routine.
I encourage you to discuss the drill with your student both before it happens and after. These drills help our students and staff to be prepared should a crisis occur, but it may cause some students to have an emotional reaction.
Schools and parents have gone to exceedingly extreme lengths, in the wake of the horrific killing of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, to come up with ways to prepare for school gun violence. A school district in Texas is considering allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons; parents have been purchasing bulletproof backpacks for their kids to take to school; the South Carolina legislature is even considering making a gun training class for high schoolers; and some parents even packed a gun for their sixth-grader to bring to class.

Alabama Does Gun Manufacturers’ Bidding By Seeking To Nullify Federal Gun Laws


By Annie-Rose Strasser on Feb 1, 2013 at 10:01 am

The Alabama legislature is considering an unconstitutional bill that would make it a felony for federal law officers to enforce any bans on semi-automatic weapons or high-capacity magazines in the state — a measure that, its author insists, would be good for the state’s economy, or at least its gun manufacturers.
State Sen. Shadrack McGill’s (R) legislation would specifically exempt guns that were manufactured, sold, and owned within Alabama’s borders from federal laws. It would also classify anyone who did try to enforce federal laws as a Class C Felon. McGill thinks that such a law amounts to state stimulus, since creates an impetus for manufacturers to reap profit in the state:
In a time of strapped budgets, adding resource officers may be difficult for local systems. McGill said that’s why his colleagues have worked to improve the economy, and he added that there is no desire to raise taxes.[...]
McGill said the gun bill could be a way to improve Alabama’s economy, as the law would only pertain to guns made and kept inside the state.
“I’m chairman of the Small Business Committee, and one aspect of this is any state that passes similar legislation to this, it will be an attraction to manufacturing — good for the economy,” he said.
The U.S. Constitution dictates that federal law “shall be the supreme law of the land.” But the irony is apparently lost on McGill and other state legislators that in their effort to protect their constitutional right to own a firearm, they are trying to supersede the constitutional requirement that states follow federal laws.

The Ultimate Guide To The Gun Safety Debate


By Zack Beauchamp on Jan 31, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Since the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the debate over gun violence in the Untied States has begun in earnest. Some common talking points can and should be easily dismissed — the idea that regulating access to guns is always unconstitutional or makes tyrannymore likely, to take two examples. But not every argument against expanded gun regulation is ridiculous. There are some, based on the evidence about and history of gun use in the United States, that are worth taking more seriously. You’re likely to hear them a lot over the course of the coming debate. Here’s a list of some of the more commonly made, more serious arguments against gun regulation — and why they fail to effectively make the case against new laws:
THE ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN
These so-called “external features” not only themselves allow for faster rates of fire and other more lethal uses of the guns, but also serve as effective proxy definitions for the sort of weapons best suited to kill people as efficiently as possible. The definition of “assault weapon” in the new federal ban proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) with respect to semi-automatic rifles and pistols is focused on two kinds of each. The rifles are civilian equivalents of “assault rifles,” the main class of rifle used by modern militaries. “Civilian” versions are distinguished only by their inability to fire either automatically or in bursts without a conversion kit. The pistols have features that make them liable to be converted to full automatic versions (that is, into submachine guns) or otherwise enhance their lethality (e.g., allow for faster rate of fire).
The Feinstein law picks out those sorts of weapons in two ways. First, it bans specific guns (like the AR-15s used by James Holmes in Aurora and Adam Lanza in Newtown) that are particularly deadly. Many of these guns are civilian equivalents of military assault rifles, because — as assault rifle expert C.J. Chivers puts it — these guns were “conjured to form solely for the task of allowing men to more efficiently kill other men” because they are “smaller, lighter in weight, more tactically versatile and require a lighter per-man effective ammunition load than the infantry rifles that preceded them.” The Feinstein provisions, unlike in the 1994 federal ban, specify that “altered facsimiles with the capability of any such weapon thereof” are also banned, so taking out a single screw and calling the weapon something different would not allow manufacturers to skirt the ban. The second provision defines generic features — like barrel shrouds that allow for faster fire or (for pistols) magazines outside the pistol grip — and bans any gun that has more than one of them and a detachable magazine (the old ban allowed a maximum of two features, making it easier to skirt).
These aren’t merely cosmetic features: they’re the ones that mark guns optimized for effective performance in combat-style situations. They also mark guns easily convertible to full automatic fire, like the TEC-9 submachine guns once favored in gang killings. One such kit is fully legal, despite the 1934 National Firearms Act banning the possession of automatic weapons without a permit. The kit produced by the company Slide Fire product allows you to turn your AR or AK series assault rifle into a rapid-fire machine without technically running afoul of the federal definition of “machine gun.”
The notion that assault rifles are similar in caliber to hunting rifles, and hence no more dangerous, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny for similar reasons. As the California Attorney General’s office explains, “Caliber has no bearing on a weapon’s status as a series weapon and should be disregarded when making an identification. For example, upper receiver conversion kits are available to convert almost any AR series weapon into .45 ACP, .40 S&W, 7.62 X 39 mm, 9 mm, 10 mm, or .223 caliber.”
There is evidence that the 1994 federal ban saved lives despite a series of loopholes closed in the Feinstein bill and several state bans. Though there isn’t reliable data on the number of people killed by assault weapons in the United States, there is strong evidence from the Mexican border that both California’s assault weapons ban the federal assault weapon ban lowered the homicide rate. The clearest comes in a 2012 academic paper that treated the expiration of the federal assault weapon ban in 2004 as a natural experiment — California still had its assault weapon ban, but Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona didn’t have equivalents. The authors tracked homicides and weapon seizures in the Mexican provinces bordering the states, finding disproportionately lower homicide rates in provinces near California. This difference remained when other potential causes (like police presence) were accounted for, suggesting the federal and California bans had successful kept assault weapons out of the hands of cartels and other criminals. The expiration of the federal law, on this paper’s model, has gotten roughly 239 people killed on the Mexican border per year since 2004. This is consistent with another paper that found “the expiration of the AWB is responsible for at least 16.4 percent of the increase in the homicide rate in Mexico between 2004 and 2008.”
The 1994 ban, according to a Department of Justice review, also appears to have caused the percentage of crimes involving assault weapons in some major US cities to drop from 72 percent to 17 percent.
While it’s true that the same review couldn’t find support for the idea that the Assault Weapons Ban reduced crime in 2004, the authors concluded that there simply hadn’t been enough time or data to come to a strong conclusion. The more recent Mexican studies may have filled this gap.
The reality is that even a minor percentage decline in fatalities could means hundreds of fewer people killed per year. Estimates about the percentage of crimes involving assault weapons range from two to eight percent. But if the Feinstein law could make a dent in that number, that’s still a big deal. Consider one estimate, based on federal gun trace data, that the original federal assault weapons ban reduced the national percentage of gun crimes involving assault weapons from about five percent to about two percent. Assuming that, because assault weapons are rarer and deadlier and hence more likely to be responsible for homicides, this translated to a one percent decline in the homicide rate. That’s 110 fewer murders per year given the roughly 11,000 Americans killed by gun homicide every year. We can debate whether would-be murderers would simply use other types of guns, and whether they’d be as deadly, but the point is that even a small percentage drop in gun homicides nationwide would be a huge victory.
This one is just an abuse of statistics — just because violence is declining doesn’t mean it couldn’t be declining faster. It’s true that violent crime as a whole, including gun homicides, has declined over the course of the past decade. This suggests that gun laws aren’t the only factors that determine the crime rate — see Kevin Drum’s fantastic series on lead and crime for a clear explanation of the other causes that might’ve mattered.
Moreover, when you compare different states with different gun laws at the same time, you find states with tighter gun regulations (including assault weapon bans) have significantly lower rates of firearm death. This suggests that, independent of whatever good fortune the United States has seen the past decade, better gun laws could significantly accelerate decline in lives lost to gunfire.
UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS AND DEALER INSPECTIONS

First, some mass shooters do have criminal or worrisome mental health records, like James Holmes and Seung-Hui Cho. Both Holmes and Cho bought their weapons legally. Cho even passed a background check despite being ruled “an imminent danger to himself because of mental illness” because of Virginia’s lax standards about what counts as a red flag for purposes of a background check.
Second, there’s another kind of mass murder — the 11,000 gun homicides per year — that improving our background check and inspection system could unequivocally help prevent. One percent of gun dealers sell half of the guns used in crimes nationally, which other evidence indicates have been deterred in the past by stepped-up ATF enforcement. Domestic violence perpetrators, people with substance abuse problems, and individuals convicted of other violent crimes are all more likely to commit firearm crimes, yet they can freely purchase a weapon in a private sale at, say, a gun show, no questions asked. In a finding that should surprise no one, 80 percent of firearms used in crimes appear to have been purchased privately. State and city-level comparisons indicate that “states which do not regulate private gun sales, adopt permit-to-purchase licensing systems, or have gun owner accountability measures, like mandatory reporting of gun thefts, export significantly more guns used by criminals to other states that have constrained the supply of guns for criminals by adopting strict gun sales regulations.”
It’s hard to estimate a specific number of lives that would be saved by requiring background checks on all sales, requiring all states and federal organizations to input criminal and drug records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (they don’t have to, currently), and giving the ATF more power to trace and sting “bad apple” gun dealers and traffickers, but this mountain of evidence suggests that the effect of such measures could be substantial.
Background checks are hardly onerous and likely won’t “unjustly” disqualify that many people. A check usually process very quickly at the point-of-sale and even abnormally long wait times top out around five days. It’s hardly an excessive burden for someone seeking a deadly weapon they’ll then be able to own for life.
But does current federal law unfairly bar certain groups of people from acquiring guns? Currently, only one percent of sales are blocked by background checks, the vast majority of which because the purchaser has committed or been indicted for a felony, is a fugitive from justice, or is a perpetrator of domestic violence. Presumably, both the percentage and absolute number of people denied would go up if the background check system were improved, but the breakdown suggest that only a minute number of (for example) harmless, recreational drug users would have their access to guns restricted because they failed a drug test.
Moreover, it’s critically important that felons be restricted from accessing firearms. The New York Times surveyed felons and people convicted of “domestic violence misdemeanors” who (as a consequence of state-level, NRA-backed legislation loosening restoration standards) regained their gun rights. It found that 13 percent went on to commit crimes, half of which were felonies. As the Times notes, there’s also evidence that denying handguns to people arrested for or convicted of felonies reduces their likelihood to commit future crimes by 20 to 30 percent.
It is almost certainly true that universal background checks and a more complete database of disqualified persons will lead to less people being able to buy guns legally. Some fraction of them likely wouldn’t commit crimes — your average pot smoker isn’t the violent type. But the misguided excesses of the war on drugs shouldn’t obscure the fact that, right now, domestic abusers, violent felons, gang members, and drug addicts can buy guns with impunity. The evidence is very clear that members of these groups are more likely to commit gun crimes and that improved background checks can limit their ability to do so, saving lives in the process. A minor limitation on a tiny percentage of Americans’ ability to buy guns seems like a trade-off that’s easily worth making in light of America’s gun homicide rate.
HIGH CAPACITY MAGAZINES
There are plenty of large capacity magazines that aren’t more likely to jam that could majorly amplify the death toll in a mass shooting. While it’s true that 100-round magazines are more likely to jam, most high-capacity magazines aren’t nearly that large, and hence can use mechanisms that don’t appreciably increase the risk of jamming. The modern US Army M-16, for example, has a 30-round magazine, as does a standard AK-47 (a gun famous for jamming rarely). And as magazine technology improves, larger magazine sizes become more practicable: as Josh Sugarmann, executive director and founder of the Violence Policy Center, told ThinkProgress, evidence “from gun magazines and industry publications [suggests] the trend is towards higher capacity magazines.”
The Feinstein law, then, bans magazines that hold more than ten bullets for a reason. Suppose a shooter had the same assault weapon, but had four magazines or clips that could hold thirty rather than ten bullets. That shooter would have 80 more bullets, or three times the number, than he would have without the high-capacity magazine ban. Since magazine size doesn’t make much of a difference for how many magazines an individual shooter could carry on their person, limiting access to high-capacity magazines could result in a shooter carrying significantly fewer bullets — and hence being able to fire at significantly fewer people.
Not only is this assertion dubious on its face, but it’s bad justification for making policy given how rare defensive gun use is. Presumably someone who’s attacking a school or a family would have more people to shoot, and hence require more bullets than the people trying to stop just him. But debating the nuances of this very specific hypothetical situation misses the point broader point that it doesn’t make sense to fixate on these extraordinarily uncommon cases.
The often-cited number that guns are used defensively 2.5 million times a year in the United States is mathematically impossible (more on that later). A survey of criminals who had been shot in a Washington, DC jail indicated that, far from being injured by their victims, they had almost all been hit by other criminals. These data suggest, when combined with other evidence, that defensive gun use is quite rare: “to believe fully the claims of millions of self-defense gun uses each year would mean believing that decent law-abiding citizens shot hundreds of thousands of criminals. But the data from emergency departments belie this claim, unless hundreds of thousands of wounded criminals are afraid to seek medical care. But virtually all criminals who have been shot went to the hospital, and can describe in detail what happened there.”
There are at least two other reasons to believe that defensive gun use is rare. First, people very commonly label criminal and/or aggressive behavior as “defensive” when asked in surveys, for somewhat obvious reasons. Second, many crimes, like most sexual assaults, simply aren’t likely to be deterred or stopped by guns.
Defending one’s family is surely a legitimate use for a gun, but the fact that a high-capacity magazine *might* be useful in some subset of these already-exceptional cases isn’t a good reason to permit their widespread ownership if keeping them legal also comes with real, identifiable costs in human lives.
It very likely the ban reduced the supply of high capacity magazines to criminals and a decent chance it prevented unnecessary deaths. While it’s hard to separate the effects of federal and state high-capacity magazine bans on crime from assault weapons bans (they’re generally enacted at the same time), there is excellent evidence that the federal ban on high-capacity magazines ended up restricting access to them. The Washington Post tracked police seizures of high-capacity magazines in Virginia during and after the federal assault weapons ban was in effect. The Post‘s reporters found a steady decline in number of magazines recovered from 1994-2004 (when the law was in effect), but saw the trend halt and then reverse after the ban expired, indicating more criminals were getting high-capacity magazines. One gun expert who was “skeptical” that the federal ban worked said the Post’s evidence changed his mind; its data was “about as clear an example as we could ask for of evidence that the ban was working.”
There is also some old, very tentative evidence that “that victims killed with guns having large-capacity magazines tend to have more bullet wounds than victims killed with other firearms, and that mass murders with assault weapons tend to involve more victims than those with other firearms.” While this evidence is, again, rudimentary, it suggests that a renewed, effective ban on high-capacity magazines might very well save more lives.
THE SCIENCE ON GUNS
The best evidence we have says the opposite.
The “guns reduce crime” argument gets made in two ways, often together: 1) the presence of more guns deters crime and 2) concealed carry laws allow citizens to stop crime where they encounter it. The two main sources cited for these claims are John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime, and a series of papers written by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz suggesting that Americans used guns defensively 2.5 million times per year.
The overwhelming consensus among scholars is that Lott, Kleck, and Gertz are wrong. In a blockbuster article after the Newtown shooting, Salon‘s Alex Seitz-Wald reviewed this research in great detail, finding a series of glaring methodological flaws and a wealth of evidence suggesting more guns led, in fact, to more gun death. It’s really worth reading Seitz-Wald’s piece in full, but to summarize a few salient points: Lott has been unable to produce the survey data supporting his major claim about guns and concealed carry reducing crime, while independent reviews of the evidence have come to opposite conclusions. Kleck and Gertz fail to account for the fact that people often falsely self-report as using guns defensively when they’re actually intimidating people a la George Zimmerman and the Kleck-Gertz numbers mathematically require assuming “burglary victims use their guns in self-defense more than 100 percent of the time,” among other problems.
Suffice to say, more guns are not the answer to gun violence.
This argument is mistaken as a matter of both statistics and law. While a simple glance at rough homicide rates suggests very little difference in crime rates between cities with strict gun laws and those without, the relevant research strongly suggests that ease of acquiring guns legally increases the local gun homicide rate. A 2001 paper by Mark Duggan estimatedcounty-by-county gun ownership, finding that counties with higher rates of gun ownership had higher gun homicide rates. A second paper, which used a different measure of gun ownership, came to a similar conclusion. Both papers found that only gun homicide rates — and a county’s other homicide or broader crime rates — is affected by gun ownership, suggesting that easy access to guns increases gun homicide by getting more guns to more people.
A third, more recent paper goes further, finding that gun ownership increased gun homicides even when you control for levels of urbanization and poverty. That is, cities with more guns, all other things being equal, will have more homicide deaths, as will poorer areas. This points to the basic statistical error in the “what about Chicago?” argument — the question isn’t whether gun regulation is the only or principal determinant of gun homicide rates, it’s whether there’d be more or less gun death in Chicago if Chicago and nearby counties did a better job restricting access to guns. Given that states with tighter gun laws also have less guns (and less gun deaths), it seems the same would hold true (again, if you hold other variables like poverty and overall crime rate constant) on the city-to-city level. Moreover, studies of cities with strong background check and illegal sales enforcement provisions have found clear evidence that imposing these measures lowered the number of guns being diverted to criminals.
There’s another, well-known problem with this conceit — lax federal and state laws make it easy to purchase guns from nearby, underregulated counties or states and bring them into cities. In Chicago, for example, gun sellers will simply set up shop just outside the city limits and sell to traffickers who bring the weapons into the city. That’s one of the key arguments for the sort of federal action being considered today, especially universal background checks at nearby gun shows to prevent this sort of trafficking. A uniform federal standard would make it much harder for criminals to take advantage of state and local variation.