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Anti Civil Rights ideas & "Friends" California Grumpy's hall of Shame

CA bill would require liability insurance for gun owners by: Associated Press

California would be the first state to require gun owners to buy liability insurance to cover the negligent or accidental use of their firearms, if lawmakers approve a measure announced Thursday.

“Guns kill more people than cars. Yet gun owners are not required to carry liability insurance like car owners must,” Democratic state Sen. Nancy Skinner said in a statement.

She said the costs of gun violence shouldn’t be borne by taxpayers, survivors, families, employers and communities: “It’s time for gun owners to shoulder their fair share.”

The state of New York is considering a similar requirement in the wake of numerous recent mass shootings and a rise in gun violence.

In January, the Silicon Valley city of San Jose approved what’s believed to be the first such insurance requirement in the United States.

No insurance company will cover the misuse of a firearm, predicted Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California.

He said such requirements are an illegal infringement on gun owners’ constitutional rights.

“We don’t believe you can put precursors on the exercising of a constitutional right,” Paredes said. “By requiring somebody to get insurance in order to exercise their right to keep and bear arms, that ceases to make it a right.”

Skinner is amending an existing bill on another topic to allow gun owners to be held civilly liable if their firearms are used to cause property damage, injury or death.

The bill would also require gun owners to have insurance that covers loses or damages from the negligent or accidental use of their firearm. And they would have to keep proof of insurance with their firearm and show it to police if they are stopped for some reason.

Paredes had similar objections to a second bill that also would affect gun owners’ costs, this one by imposing an excise tax on firearms and ammunition.

The bill would impose an excise tax equal to 10% of the sales price of a handgun and 11% of the sales price of a long gun, ammunition or parts to build firearms.

Democratic Assemblyman Marc Levine estimated his bill would bring in more than $118 million annually that would go toward gun violence prevention programs.

Because it would impose a tax, Levine’s bill would require approval by two-thirds majorities in the Legislature. His similar measure last year fell four votes short of the 54 it needed in the 80-member Assembly.

The bills are among numerous firearms measures being considered by California lawmakers this year, including one that would make it easier to sue gun-makers and another that would allow private citizens to sue those who traffic in illegal weapons.

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 THE CASE TO REPLACE WAYNE LAPIERRE AS CEO/EVP by Rocky Marshall (former NRA Director) 

June 9, 2022

This letter was provided to Gun Talk Media by Rocky Marshall. All views expressed are his own. Published with permission

As a former NRA Board of Director, I have an insider perspective of recent events regarding the National Rifle Association. A few observations: 

NRA Election of CEO/EVP:

At the most recent NRA Board of Directors meeting in Houston-May 30, 2022, Allen West was nominated to run against Wayne LaPierre for the position of CEO/EVP. As has been reported, Wayne LaPierre received 54 votes, Allen West received 1 vote and 7 board members abstained from voting for either candidate. The overwhelming majority of current NRA Board members reelected Wayne LaPierre and enthusiastically support his actions in the past and present. The re-election of Wayne LaPierre sends a message to the New York court that no action will be taken to remove key management personnel involved in malfeasance and misuse of members’ donations. The NRA Board of Directors have solidified their untenable position which forces the court to review legal actions towards not only Wayne LaPierre but also the NRA Board of Directors.

NRA Board fiduciary failure:

The NRA Board of Directors should have taken a corrective course of action that would be considered appropriate in the eyes of NRA members and the New York Court. For example, in light of so many accusations and supported evidence of blatant wrong doing, the Board could have suspended Wayne LaPierre and appointed a temporary/interim CEO until the trial was fully litigated. Suspending a CEO or Executive of a large company or charity accused of malfeasance is a fairly common practice and reinforces to shareholders or members that the Board is acting responsibly. Unfortunately for the NRA and the members, the actions taken by the NRA Board of Directors appears to be complicit with the misdeeds of NRA management. 

NRA in Decline:

The NRA continues a downward spiral as revenues, total members, and members’ dues continue to decline as reported in the most recent financial data for 2021. At the NRA Board meeting on May 30, 2022, Sonya Rowling (NRA Treasurer) reported that members’ dues and donations were down due to economic inflation according to NRA phone solicitors. Contrarily, comments by NRA members to articles or videos posted about the NRA is overwhelmingly negative towards Wayne LaPierre. The often-repeated comment is “I will not donate another dime until Wayne LaPierre is gone!” With record setting first time gun buyers purchasing firearms, the explanation that paying an additional $45.00 to the NRA is due to inflation pressure appears disingenuous. 

New York Court Action:

The New York Court is witnessing the failure of the NRA Board of Directors and consequentially is forced to take action that should have been directed by the board. If the NRA Board of Directors had replaced Wayne LaPierre (temporarily or permanently) the New York Attorney General claims against the NRA would be significantly diminished and would position the NRA favorably to negotiate a settlement. Aside from the NRA, individual Claims would continue to be litigated for Wayne LaPierre, Woody Phillips, Josh Powell, and John Frazer. In my opinion, the best possible outcome for NRA members at this time would be if the New York court took action immediately to suspend Wayne LaPierre and replace with a court appointed administrator. This is obviously not ideal, but would be an improvement over allowing current management (who has admitted wrong doing during the bankruptcy trial) to continue to direct the NRA. Hopefully the New York court will recognize it is in the best interest of NRA members to have an overseer to protect the NRA members assets and resources. The NRA members deserve to have an organization that they can trust and believe in to support the goals of the NRA. Unfortunately, the current NRA management and Board of Directors have violated the trust of all NRA members. In order for trust to be restored, Wayne LaPierre must be replaced sooner rather than later. 

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What a Cluster is all that I can say! Grumpy

Bloody Gina and Her Team of Torturers

Last week, at a pretrial hearing at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi who is charged with being the mastermind of an attack on the USS Cole in 2000 at which 17 American sailors were killed, the psychologist in charge of interrogating Nashiri described in vivid detail both the modern and the medieval techniques of torture used upon him.

The psychologist was called as a defense witness in order to demonstrate to the court that a good deal of the evidence that prosecutors plan to introduce against Nashiri was obtained directly or indirectly through, or was tainted by, his torture and thus cannot lawfully be used at his trial.

Torture committed by government officials and their collaborators upon a person restrained by the government is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in a federal prison, and its fruits are inadmissible in all courts. For many years, the CIA documented torture through video tapes of its disguised agents and contractors torturing its captives so it would have a record of the events without the need for revealing a participant’s identity.

But the tapes of Nashiri’s torture were destroyed by either the chief CIA official in the United States in charge of all torture or his then-chief of staff. Hence the live testimony last week. That chief of staff would go on to become the director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, nicknamed by her colleagues “Bloody Gina.”

This column will spare the reader the gruesome and stomach-churning details of Nashiri’s torture, but for the one medieval procedure. What caught the eyes of those of us who monitor these events was the mention of the name of the CIA official under whose watch the torture occurred and who wrote detailed, graphic descriptions of it to her bosses in Langley, Virginia. That official is the same Gina Haspel. She was the head of the CIA station at Thailand in 2002, at which Nashiri was tortured, and she was the senior member of the torture team.

Nashiri’s torture went on for four months, at the end of which the interrogation team concluded that Nashiri was being truthful and essentially said the same things under torture as he told interrogators prior to torture. But Bloody Gina does not trust testimony unless it comes with great fear and pain.

In 2006, Nashiri was shipped from Thailand to Gitmo, where he was charged with capital murder. His trial has not yet commenced. The testimony last week was one of many pretrial hearings ordered by military trial judges.

Nashiri, who has the same speedy trial rights as anyone being prosecuted by the U.S. government, has been waiting for his trial for 14 years. He is on his second team of military and civilian defense lawyers. His first team quit when they discovered that their communications with their client had been secretly listened to and recorded by federal agents.

Most judges would have dismissed the charges against the defendant for such criminal behavior by the government. But at Gitmo, where the judge and the prosecutors have the same boss — the Secretary of Defense — the niceties of due process are sometimes watered down.

The significance of Bloody Gina’s personal supervision of this torture cannot be gainsaid. It is the first time we have learned from a witness under oath that CIA torture was approved and supervised at the highest CIA levels. It is also the first time we have learned that a CIA director, earlier in her career, committed federal crimes, as each torture session is a separate felony.

We also learned that Bloody Gina may be an amateur historian. In the late 1400s, when the Medici in Florence had been deposed by a mad monk named Girolamo Savonarola, he instituted aggressive torture for those accused secretly of sins of the flesh, looking for their public confessions and the identities of their sexual partners.

He, like Bloody Gina, refused to accept testimony from a detained person unless it was obtained under torture. And he, like Bloody Gina, instituted a novel torture technique of hanging a victim by his arms secured behind his back so as to induce excruciating shoulder dislocation.

Those of us who believe that the Constitution means what it says have argued that attackers of U.S. military personnel who are not in combat pursuant to a congressional declaration of war should be tried in federal court and accorded constitutional protection from the government’s torturers. Had that been done, Nashiri’s case and all others at Gitmo would have been completed years ago, and the government would not be spending $500 million a year there while it continues to trash the Constitution.

I was surprised to learn that one of the torturers admitted to these crimes and implicated Bloody Gina. Torture by government officials — no matter their goal — is the most tyrannical government overreach imaginable. It presumes that there are no natural rights or moral standards; it utterly negates the personhood of the victim; it reveals that there are no limits to what the government can do and get away with. It is expressly prohibited by the Constitution and federal law.

Bloody Gina and her team of torturers may feel safe from American prosecutors, as the Nashiri tortures took place well outside of the statute of limitations — but not from all prosecutors. The International Criminal Court in The Hague claims jurisdiction over the entire globe, and Thailand — the place of Nashiri’s torture — is a signatory to the treaty that established the court. The ICC characterizes torture as a war crime that has no statute of limitations and recognizes no executive pardons.

When the Medici returned to power after a popular uprising deposed Savonarola, he was tortured by his own torturers before he was hanged for heresy. Torture is government without limits. Only limited government respects persons.

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Ammo Grumpy's hall of Shame

What a waste of Ammo!

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All About Guns Cops Grumpy's hall of Shame

CBS Poll Shows Growing Hysteria Over Mass School Shootings Despite Their Rarity by AVA CANNING

 

With school shootings being publicized in the media now more than ever, parents and students alike are becoming hysterical.

According to a new CBS News poll, three out of four parents of school-aged children are at least somewhat concerned about gun violence in schools, and more than half of parents of school-aged children would like for teachers and officials to be able to carry guns in schools (which GunsAmerica supports).

While mass killings are always a concern, in actuality, they are a statistically rare event. The odds of a child being killed in a school shooting is almost 10 million to 1, the same odds as being struck by lightning, according to criminologist James Alan Fox, who spoke to City-Journal.org in a recent interview.

In reality, the main culprit behind the fear of school shootings is the mainstream media’s nonstop coverage of these events.

(Photo: CBS)

The recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas resulted in the publication of over 6,000 news articles, and it was the top story on multiple news channels across the United States. It has become impossible to turn on the television or look at your phone without seeing coverage of Uvalde.

Journalists and politicians often exploit the children and families affected by these killings, which works to exacerbate concerns and fears amongst the public.

“There is not an epidemic of mass shootings,” said Fox, who teaches at Northeastern University.  “What’s increasing and is out of control is the epidemic of fear.”

Fox has been studying these tragedies for decades and curates the AP/USA Today/Northeastern Mass Killing database.

Fox was critical of journalists who misidentify “mass public shootings” to inflate the numbers. A mass public shooting is correctly defined as an incident where four or more people are killed in a public place (school, church, business). It excludes shootings where another crime is being committed, such as gang violence or a robbery in progress that goes awry.

Journalists and activists tend to use “mass shooting” as a catchall term to describe any incident involving gunfire, regardless of how many victims there were or what the circumstances were, which leads readers and viewers to believe mass public shootings are more common than they are.

(Photo: CBS News)

In the 1990s, mass shootings in schools were more frequent than they are today, as GunsAmerica previously reported. The main difference is they did not receive the media attention they do now.

Overall, schools in America today are overwhelmingly safe places. Annually, only about 10 children were killed by gunfire at schools over the past decade (including Uvalde) — out of 50 million students nationwide, according to Fox.

“Hundreds of children die every year in drowning accidents,” Fox stated. “We need lifeguards at pools more than armed guards at schools.”

(Graph: James Alan Fox/Northeastern)

It is undeniable that mass public shootings are frightening, but they are not nearly the threat mainstream media makes them out to be. Needlessly inducing fear and hysteria among parents and young students is not the correct way to combat these rare, but nevertheless tragic events.

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Waiting Was Inexcusable BY JACK DUNPHY

Townhall Media/Julio Rosas
Some years ago, while working as a police sergeant in South Los Angeles, I rushed to the scene in an adjacent patrol division where an officer had been shot by a robbery suspect. I arrived to find the crime scene in chaos, with officers from several patrol divisions careening in, parking their cars haphazardly, and running this way and that with no apparent purpose. Seeking to bring some order to the situation, I approached an officer standing in the middle of the intersection. “Who’s in charge?” I asked.

The officer’s back had been to me, but when he turned to face me I was surprised to see the lieutenant’s bars on his uniform collar. “I guess I am,” he said.

Yes, he was the highest-ranking officer at the scene, but he was not in charge. No one was, that is, not until I and another sergeant from the neighboring division harnessed the energy of the amassed officers and put it to constructive use.

That lieutenant may have managed his officers efficiently on a daily basis, he may have turned out well-written watch commander’s logs, and in all other ordinary circumstances he may have performed every duty expected of a patrol lieutenant satisfactorily. But in that moment of crisis, with his wounded officer’s life on the line, he failed.

This is often what happens in police work, a field in which adherence to the chain of command is relentlessly emphasized. Such adherence serves the organization well under mundane conditions, but when a crisis occurs, as happened in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, the chain of command does not always produce the leader the circumstances demand. When rapid, tactical decisions are called for, the highest-ranking officer at the scene may not be the most qualified to make them, and in most cases is guaranteed not to be.

If the current timeline of events is accurate (and bear in mind there have been several corrections since Tuesday), the first 911 call regarding trouble at Robb Elementary School came in at 11:30 a.m., and the gunman was not shot and killed until 12:50 p.m. As I write this, much of what occurred in the intervening 80 minutes is yet to be revealed, but it has been reported that for much of it, 19 police officers staged in the hallway outside the classroom but did not attempt to make entry, even as 911 calls from inside continued to come in to police dispatchers.

The incident commander at the time, we are told, was the school district’s police chief, whose qualifications for leadership under these circumstances will be the subject of much debate in the coming days. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, addressed the issue with reporters on Friday. “The on-scene commander at that time believed it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject,” McCraw said. “It was the wrong decision. Period.”

Of course the wrongfulness of the decision is apparent now, in retrospect. But in the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Graham v. Connor, we are admonished to evaluate police actions not with the benefit of hindsight, but rather “from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene.” Should it have been apparent that waiting in the hallway was unreasonable?

Yes. Indisputably yes.

Consider: The gunfire heard from inside the classroom was described as a “barrage” when the gunman first entered, but later became “sporadic” as officers assembled in the hallway. From this we may reasonably conclude, as the incident commander should have, that victims were being sporadically shot while he and his officers waited for a key to the door. The situation had not in fact transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded suspect, but rather to one in which the shooter was merely less active than he had been. To wait outside under these circumstances in inexcusable.

I will grant that it is difficult to breach a door that opens outward, as most classroom doors do, but this means it was time for some creative thinking, which the school district police chief seems to have been incapable of. Judging from pictures of the school I’ve seen in news reports, there were windows that should have been considered as an alternate entryway. For that matter, in the time they waited, officers could have created an opening in the exterior wall with sledgehammers or cut a hole through the roof had they been directed to do so. Anything would have been preferable to waiting as long as they did.

Let the investigations unfold, and let the consequences fall where they may.

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Cops Handcuffed, Arrested a Uvalde Mom for Trying To Rescue Her Kids Why did it take an hour for the police to stop alleged killer Salvador Ramos? by ROBBY SOAVE

The performance of law enforcement during the mass school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday appears to have been even worse than previously known.

Early reporting that a school resource officer confronted alleged killer Salvador Ramos and engaged him in a gunfight was erroneous. At a press conference on Thursday, Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Chris Olivarez clarified that no such confrontation took place and became increasingly irritated as journalists pressed him to explain the source of the misinformation.

Ramos entered through an unlocked door and faced no opposition until the police arrived several minutes later. He then became barricaded in a classroom, and the police failed to gain access and neutralize him for the next hour. It is likely that most of his victims—perhaps all of them—died in that classroom.

As that hour elapsed, desperately frightened parents arrived outside the school and were prevented from entering by law enforcement. Video footage obtained by The New York Times shows parents frantically begging the police to either enter the school and intervene or get out of the way so that they could rescue their kids themselves. Their pleas were in vain.

 

In fact, it took the police so long to get the situation under control that one mother who was 40 miles away when she learned about the shooting had enough time to drive to the school. According to The Wall Street Journal, police arrested and handcuffed her to prevent her from trying to save her children:

Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, said that she was one of numerous parents who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school. After a few minutes, she said, federal marshals approached her and put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation.

Ms. Gomez convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free. Around her, the scene was frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.

It’s understandable that the police would not want to contend with the mayhem of parents storming the school themselves. But the apparent fact that they exerted considerable effort to keep parents at bay while failing to dislodge the shooter—who was actively murdering the kids inside the room with him—is disgusting. Any significant delay in gaining access to the shooter’s classroom is hard to explain in light of the fact that Uvalde employs a SWAT Team for this very purpose.

These alleged failures bear some similarity to what transpired during the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. In that instance, School Resource Officer Scot Peterson hid instead of confronting the active shooter, Nikolas Cruz, who would ultimately kill 17 people. It was eventually revealed that Cruz—a disturbed teenager with a long history of violent, threatening, and anti-social behavior—was well-known to various law enforcement agencies, including the county sheriff’s office and even the FBI.

The public deserves answers about exactly what transpired in Uvalde on Tuesday and why these questionable decisions were made. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D–Texas) has called for an investigation of the timeline: Any public official whose actions detracted from the urgent need to save the lives of all those kids should be held fully accountable.

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Grumpy's hall of Shame Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad

Now that is what I call a Girl Friend!

Ballsy Maxine

Maxine Feldstein & Nicholas Lowe: 5 Fast Facts | Heavy.comMeet Maxine Feldstein and Nicholas Lowe. Maxine always wanted to play cops and robbers, and recently she was able to try both sides of the coin.

Maxine Feldstein’s boyfriend, Nicholas Lowe, was at the Washington County Detention Center on July 27 with a hold for criminal impersonation out of Ventura, California.
Feldstein, who had bonded out that day, called Washington County jail staff and identified herself as deputy “L. Kershaw” with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office. She also provided a forged VCSO document releasing the agency’s hold on Lowe.
Jail staff learned of the forgery and accidental release two days later, when a VCSO deputy called to say he was on his way to pick up Lowe.

Wow, Maxine is both ingenious and ballsy. And yes, I would probably hit it like the side of a tree on the forest moon of Endor.

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Cops Grumpy's hall of Shame Some Sick Puppies!

Remembering the deadliest school massacre in U.S. history by Theresa Vargas

Aversion of this article was originally published on April 16, 2017, under the headline “Virginia Tech was not the worst school massacre in U.S. history. This was.”

That spring morning in 1927 could not have been more beautiful, one of the students would later recall.

The Bath Consolidated School just outside East Lansing, Mich., was holding final exams, but before the morning bell rang on May 18, 1927, children ran and played outside. Peals of laughter could be heard.

“Little did their young minds, as the rest of ours, fancy their destiny was at hand … perhaps in half an hour they would rest in eternity with their playmates,” a 15-year-old student name Martha Hintz later recalled in an essay.

Later that morning, once students and teachers had settled into their classrooms, an explosion brought walls and ceilings down. The school had been dynamited by an angry school board member, but no one knew that yet. The only thing certain was that children and educators were hurt and others were dead or dying.

14 students dead in Texas elementary school shooting, governor says

“We began to run screaming and crying in the same breath, some running for the door while others made for the windows,” Hintz, a ninth-grader, wrote in an essay published in a book titled, “The Bath School Disaster.” Once outside, she recalled: “From every direction, we could see people coming, some running at their utmost speed, and others driving machines, both hoping and praying that their children or friends were not among the dead.”

After each school killing, there is an urge to capture its magnitude in superlatives. That happened after the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, in which senior Seung Hui Cho killed 32 people and then himself. Media outlets at the time — and as recently as 2015 — described the event as the country’s “worst school massacre.” One Virginia newspaper ran a headline with the phrase: “Nation’s Worst Rampage.”

But they were wrong. As horrific and devastating as that April 16, 2007, day proved, it was not the worst mass killing on a school campus.

Bath Township School Bombing: Why Have We Forgotten It? | Time

That distinction belongs to the mostly forgotten, harrowing explosion at Bath Consolidated School 95 years ago. That day, local farmer Andrew Kehoe, angry about taxes used to fund the school, killed his wife and then blew up the building before doing the same to his car as he sat inside it. In total, 45 people were killed, among them 38 children.

Larger memorial image loading...

After the bombings, a sign found fastened to a fence on Kehoe’s farm read, “Criminals are made, not born.”

Unlike the school killings that would later follow it — among them Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary and now Tuesday’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex. — the Bath event did not spur debate about mental health. A New York Times article that ran at the time described Kehoe as the “Michigan maniac” in the headline and as a “madman” in the first sentence.

Bullies and black trench coats: The Columbine shooting’s most dangerous myths

The sign on the fence, the author wrote, “may give an inkling to the psychology of the man who with measured deliberation, it is believed, attempted to wreak vengeance on this community for what he felt was the high tax imposed on him and other financial troubles … He was notified last June that the mortgage on his farm would be foreclosed, and that may have been the circumstance that started the clockwork of anarchy and madness in his brain.

Monty Ellsworth, one of Kehoe’s neighbors, who later wrote “The Bath School Disaster,” described him as “the world’s worst demon.”

Kehoe’s mother had died when he was young, and he didn’t get along with his stepmother, Ellsworth wrote. He recounted a story Kehoe’s former neighbors and classmates told him about the day the boy’s stepmother lit an oil stove and it exploded, setting her on fire: “Andrew stood and watched her burn for a while and then he got a pail of water and threw over her. It spread the flames and made them worse. His stepmother died from the effects … Although there was never any trouble made about it, the neighbors whom the writer talked with were of the opinion Andrew knew something about what was wrong with the stove.”

In the book, Ellsworth described in painful detail those who were killed in the school that educated more than 300 elementary to high school students: a teacher who was found with a child in each arm; a sixth-grade girl who had a talent for the piano and had picked a bouquet of lilacs that morning; a 7-year-old boy who loved to play baseball and before he left for school had said, “Goodbye mama, I’ll be good.”

A masked shooter. A campus killing. And a manhunt 159 years before Columbine.

Also killed that day was the school’s superintendent, Emory Huyck. He had a contentious relationship with Kehoe, who became the treasurer on the school board in 1924. Huyck survived the blast but was killed when Kehoe blew up his car. An 8-year-old boy was also killed at that time.

Before the day was done, hundreds of people had joined the rescue effort, and the town hall had became a morgue. Some families lost multiple children. Among the survivors, dozens were left with horrific wounds.

“There were sights that I hope no one will ever have to look at again,” Ellsworth wrote. “Children would be brought out, some with legs dropping, some with arms broken and hanging, some would be moaning, and others would be still. When carrying them, you would know they would never answer their mother’s call again.”

Days later, on a Sunday, the town’s roads were clogged with thousands of cars, each filled with people hoping to pay their respects at the many funerals.

“I think,” Ellsworth wrote, “we had the greatest demonstration of American sympathy ever awarded a grief stricken community.”

The instinct for superlatives, it seems, existed even then.

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Grumpy's hall of Shame Our Great Kids The Green Machine

A very sarcastic “GREAT” our Troops get f**Ked again!

After 30 Years, Genetic Study Confirms Sarin Nerve Gas As Cause of Gulf War Illness

Helicopter Gulf War

 

Troops who had genes that help metabolize sarin nerve gas were less likely to develop symptoms.

For three decades, scientists have debated the underlying cause of Gulf War illness (GWI), a collection of unexplained and chronic symptoms affecting veterans of the Persian Gulf War. Now researchers led by Robert Haley, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine and Director of the Division of Epidemiology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern), have solved the mystery, showing through a detailed genetic study that the nerve gas sarin was largely responsible for the syndrome.

 

The findings were published on May 11, 2022, in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, with an accompanying editorial on the paper by leading environmental epidemiologists.

Dr. Haley’s research group not only identified that veterans with exposure to sarin were more likely to develop GWI, but also found that the risk was modulated by a gene that normally allows some people’s bodies to better break down the nerve gas. Gulf War soldiers with a weak variant of the gene who were exposed to sarin were more likely to develop symptoms of GWI than other exposed veterans who had the strong form of the gene.

Robert Haley, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Ross Perot

Robert Haley, M.D. (left) visits with two longtime GWI research supporters, former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and the late Ross Perot, at a campus event in 2006. Credit: UT Southwestern Medical Center

 

“Quite simply, our findings prove that Gulf War illness was caused by sarin, which was released when we bombed Iraqi chemical weapons storage and production facilities,” said Dr. Haley, a medical epidemiologist who has been investigating GWI for 28 years. “There are still more than 100,000 Gulf War veterans who are not getting help for this illness and our hope is that these findings will accelerate the search for better treatment.”

In the years immediately following the Gulf War, more than a quarter of the U.S. and coalition veterans who served in the war began reporting a range of chronic symptoms, including fatigue, fever, night sweats, memory and concentration problems, difficulty finding words, diarrhea, sexual dysfunction, and chronic body pain. Since then, both academic researchers and those within the military and Department of Veterans Affairs have studied a list of possible causes of GWI, ranging from stress, vaccinations, and burning oil wells to exposure to pesticides, nerve gas, anti-nerve gas medication, and depleted uranium.

Over the years, these studies have identified statistical associations with several of these, but no cause has been widely accepted. Most recently, Dr. Haley and a colleague reported a large study testing veterans’ urine for depleted uranium that would still be present if it had caused GWI and found none.

“As far back as 1995, when we first defined Gulf War illness, the evidence was pointing toward nerve agent exposure, but it has taken many years to build an irrefutable case,” said Dr. Haley, who holds the U.S. Armed Forces Veterans Distinguished Chair for Medical Research, Honoring Robert Haley, M.D., and America’s Gulf War Veterans.

 

Sarin is a toxic man-made nerve agent, first developed as a pesticide, that has been used in chemical warfare; its production was banned in 1997. When people are exposed to either the liquid or gas form, sarin enters the body through the skin or breathing and attacks the nervous system. High-level sarin often results in death, but studies on survivors have revealed that lower-level sarin exposure can lead to long-term impairment of brain function. The U.S. military has confirmed that chemical agents, including sarin, were detected in Iraq during the Gulf War. In particular, satellite imagery documented a large debris cloud rising from an Iraqi chemical weapons storage site bombed by U.S. and coalition aircraft and transiting over U.S. ground troop positions where it set off thousands of nerve gas alarms and was confirmed to contain sarin.

Previous studies have found an association between Gulf War veterans who self-reported exposure to sarin and GWI symptoms. However, critics have raised questions of recall bias, including whether veterans with GWI are simply more likely to remember and report exposure due to their assumption that it may be linked to their illness. “What makes this new study a game-changer is that it links GWI with a very strong gene-environment interaction that cannot be explained away by errors in recalling the environmental exposure or other biases in the data,” Dr. Haley said.

Robert Haley

Robert Haley, M.D., here reviewing brain scans of Gulf War veterans, has been studying the illness for 27 years. Credit: UT Southwestern Medical Center

In the new paper, Dr. Haley and his colleagues studied 508 deployed veterans with GWI and 508 deployed veterans who did not develop any GWI symptoms, all randomly selected from more than 8,000 representative Gulf War-era veterans who completed the U.S. Military Health Survey. They not only gauged sarin exposure – by asking whether the veterans had heard chemical nerve gas alarms sound during their deployment – but also collected blood and DNA samples from each veteran

 

The researchers tested the samples for variants of a gene called PON1. There are two versions of PON1: the Q variant generates a blood enzyme that efficiently breaks down sarin while the R variant helps the body break down other chemicals but is not efficient at destroying sarin. Everyone carries two copies of PON1, giving them either a QQ, RR or QR genotype.

For Gulf War veterans with the QQ genotype, hearing nerve agent alarms – a proxy for chemical exposure – raised their chance of developing GWI by 3.75 times. For those with the QR genotype, the alarms raised their chance of GWI by 4.43 times. And for those with two copies of the R gene, inefficient at breaking down sarin, the chance of GWI increased by 8.91 times. Those soldiers with both the RR genotype and low-level sarin exposure were over seven times more likely to get GWI due to the interaction per se, over and above the increase in risk from both risk factors acting alone. For genetic epidemiologists, this number leads to a high degree of confidence that sarin is a causative agent of GWI.

“Your risk is going up step by step depending on your genotype, because those genes are mediating how well your body inactivates sarin,” said Dr. Haley. “It doesn’t mean you can’t get Gulf War illness if you have the QQ genotype, because even the highest-level genetic protection can be overwhelmed by higher intensity exposure.”

This kind of strong gene-environment interaction is considered a gold standard for showing that an illness like GWI was caused by a particular environmental toxic exposure, he added. The research doesn’t rule out that other chemical exposures could be responsible for a small number of cases of Gulf War illness. However, Dr. Haley and his team carried out additional genetic analyses on the new data, testing other factors that could be related, and found no other contributing causes.

 

“There’s no other risk factor coming anywhere close to having this level of causal evidence for Gulf War illness,” said Dr. Haley.

The team is continuing research on how GWI impacts the body, particularly the immune system, whether any of its effects are reversible, and whether there are biomarkers to detect prior sarin exposure or GWI.

References:

“Evaluation of a Gene–Environment Interaction of PON1 and Low-Level Nerve Agent Exposure with Gulf War Illness: A Prevalence Case–Control Study Drawn from the U.S. Military Health Survey’s National Population Sample” by Robert W. Haley, Gerald Kramer, Junhui Xiao, Jill A. Dever and John F. Teiber, 11 May 2022, Environmental Health Perspectives.
DOI: 10.1289/EHP9009

“Invited Perspective: Causal Implications of Gene by Environment Studies Applied to Gulf War Illness” Marc G. Weisskopf and Kimberly A. Sullivan, 11 May 2022, Environmental Health Perspectives.
DOI: 10.1289/EHP11057

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study include John Teiber, Gerald Kramer, and Junhui Xiao. The U.S. Military Health Survey was a collaborative effort of UTSW and a large survey research team at RTI International including Jill Dever, who also contributed to this paper. The study was funded by the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the U.S. Departments of Defense or Veterans Affairs.