Everyone: I composed this thread's title myself. The article's title is something completely different. I felt the tale of the article was that the father was at fault, but learning about his life and relationship with his son, I sensed no malicious neglect or indifference on what he was trying to do to reach his son.

But that doesn't absolve him from full responsibility. And I'd say the same had it been me and my own son. My point was to note the entire situation was much more complicated that one of just unquestioned neglect in securing his firearms. Colin was trying to love his imperfect son from his own imperfect life and imperfect decisions.

#3 Tonyroma The father should be held responsible.

Did you miss my unqualified statement?

Let me be clear: Colin Gray deserves to be held responsible for his role in allowing his son access to a weapon he took to school and killed and injured innocent children and teachers who'd never done Colt any harm.

It's amazing we all have the ability to focus on what we want and miss what else is clearly there. No criticism, because I often do that myself here.

Methinks you have the intellect of an amoeba with diarrhea.

There is no difference in meaning: Vance thinks that the killing of school children is a fact of life.

The preface only establishes his dislike of a "fact" that isn't a fact. It's only a fact to those unwilling to do something to change the current status quo.

Hardening schools won't eliminate shootings, stopping deranged people from accessing the weaponry used in school shootings will stop school shootings.

This quote has been taken out of context.

No it wasn't you ignorant ass. Even the abbreviated quote says the same thing. There is zero difference in meaning.

"I don't like this. I don't like to admit this. I don't like that this is a fact of life."

To me, the actual full quote is worse, because it reveals Vance admitting 1) He doesn't like to "admit" his truth on the subject; 1) He doesn't like that "this (school shootings resulting in the murder of innocent children and teachers) is a fact of life."

It's NOT a fact of life, it's wholly preventable if we want to! There are myriad ways where law-abiding Americans can have weapons while we stop them from being used to slaughter our children. Only a coward and a fool says "I don't like to admit the indiscriminate killing of our children by weapons designed for warfare is a fact of life."

Vance is just another scared coward unwilling to join rightly concerned citizens to amend our 2nd Amendment to better protect non-carrying Americans if we can't find a way to stop these shootings within its language somehow.

I don't think there's been enough discussion about Trump's lies.

#8 cont.

And because the buyer doesn't open the card package at the point of purchase, they don't realize they've been scammed until the physical card is removed from the packaging, and someone attempts to use it or check its account balance.

The store where the card was purchased isn't going to refund the money because to them, the money was electronically passed through to whoever holds the real card. The purchaser is left simply SOL.

#6

If I read this correctly here's how the scam works.

A person goes to buy a sealed gift card package where the card's activation number/barcode is duplicated on the outside of the package while the physical card remains hidden inside.

When the purchaser goes to the register and places money on the card's account, they're actually putting their money on the card the scammer's possess because inside the sealed card package is another card - often from a different vendor - that doesn't have the numbers the buyer placed his money towards.

#104, #105

Weak arguments, even weaker minds.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It seems to me that you identify with Colin Gray,

I don't think that I 'identify' with Colin as much as it was the facts and details of his life are so familiar with thousands of fathers like him. I've never owned a gun, never encouraged my son to partake in any firearms related activities, so in the sense of the weapons at issue here, I couldn't be more different because I both respect and understand the double-edged nature of firearms to both protect and project lethality as a matter of their purpose.

This morning, there's stories about the mother having contacted the school to warn them about her son. Obviously, there are complications I have no idea about. But I guess my initial response to reading excerpts from the police report indicated to me a single father ironworker trying to raise his troubled son while dealing with all the other things swirling in and around their lives. I saw in these two, a common theme of modern life where parents have pressures upon them that my parent's generation simply didn't in the scale we see today.

And I wonder, what programs or specialists might have been able to provide a better path for Colt had he been willing or able to seek guidance and counseling. But it's equally possible that he rejected the help being offered to him.

But at the end of the day, people that shouldn't be, are dead and some injured. None of them deserved their fates. And that's where we are at this moment, with the future ready to extract punishment and retribution through our courts and laws. But we know it's going to happen again and again if we don't change the ways we deal with the conflict that proliferation of firearms causes due to their constitutional protections.

Maybe the answer with AR-styled weapons could be some kind of law regulating their non-use and storage - nothing affecting their non-criminal active use at all. Perhaps such a law might demand that when not in use all of these weapons must either have trigger locks attached or be kept in locked gun safes or other lockable devices. Maybe even making it against federal law to sell or transfer any firearm that doesn't come with a working trigger lock at the point of sale. The trigger lock manufacturers would certainly be happy, and just maybe we could put a meaningful impediment between teenagers and weapons capable of shooting many people in very short periods of time.

#13

Jun 25, 2018

Oooooh, how currently relevant.

I am truly not one who's disinterested in the heartbreaking tragedy of school shootings, especially when we know what keeps them from happening in nearly every other civilized nation on this planet. When we hear a child had access to a weapon originally designed for warfare, it simply makes no sense, and we immediately blame the parent(s) for allowing it to happen.

I wanted to hate Colin Gray, but after only reading a couple paragraphs I came to an unmistakable conclusion: Except for the fact this father didn't make a habit of locking down all his weapons as a matter of practice - especially since his son showed obvious troubling signs - Colin was just a single dad trying to deal with a son challenged by mental health issues. Or in other words, a simple father dealing with all the cards life has dealt him in the best way he knows how.

At least by this rendering, this dad wasn't encouraging his son to be violent with their sharing of hunting, he was trying to connect with his son's self esteem, trying to make him more secure when confronting his fears and the bullying he's said to have been haunted by.

Let me be clear: Colin Gray deserves to be held responsible for his role in allowing his son access to a weapon he took to school and killed and injured innocent children and teachers who'd never done Colt any harm.

Having said that, I can still see myself in his shoes playing the cards I was dealt, and honestly - knowing how much you want to love and encourage your child when they have mental health struggles - there but for the grace of God,... under similar circumstances, it could have been my child.

Middle school had also been rough for Colt Gray. He had just finished the seventh grade when Miller interviewed the father and son.

Colin Gray said the boy had just a few friends and frequently got picked on. Some students "just ridiculed him day after day after day."

"I don't want him to fight anybody, but they just keep like pinching him and touching him," Gray said. "Words are one thing, but you start touching him and that's a whole different deal. And it's just escalated to the point where like his finals were last week and that was the last thing on his mind."

A year before they would both end up charged in the high school shooting, Colin Gray insisted to the sheriff's investigator that his son wasn't the type to threaten violence.

"He's not a loner, Officer Miller. Don't get that," the father said, adding: "He just wants to go to school, do his own thing and he doesn't want any trouble."

Now both Colt, 14, and Colin Gray, 54, are charged in the killings of two students and two teachers Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta. Nine others were hurt, seven of them shot. The teen is charged with murder, and his father is accused of second-degree murder for providing his son with a semiautomatic, AR 15-style rifle used to kill children. Arrest warrants say the elder Gray did so knowing his son "was a threat to himself and others."

Jackson County authorities ended their inquiry into Colt Gray a year ago, concluding that there wasn't clear evidence to link him to a threat posted on Discord, a social media site popular with video gamers. The records from that investigation provide at least a narrow glimpse into a boy who struggled with his parents' breakup and at the middle school he attended at the time, where his father said others frequently taunted him.

"He gets flustered and under pressure. He doesn't really think straight," Colin Gray told the investigator on May 21, 2023, recalling a discussion he'd had with the boy's principal.

Shooting guns and hunting, he said, were frequent pastimes for father and son. Gray said he was encouraging the boy to be more active outdoors and spend less time playing video games on his Xbox.

When Colt Gray killed a deer months earlier, his father swelled with pride. He showed the investigator a photo on his cellphone, saying: "You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer."

"It was just the greatest day ever," Colin Gray said.

An eviction upended the Grays' family in summer 2022. On July 25 of that year, a sheriff's deputy was dispatched to the rental home on a suburban cul-de-sac where Colin Gray, his wife, Colt and the boy's two younger siblings lived. It was following the eviction, he said, that his wife left him, taking the two younger siblings with her.

Colt Gray "struggled at first with the separation and all," said the father, who worked a construction job.

"I'm the sole provider, doing high rises downtown," he told the investigator. Two days later, there was a follow-up interview with Colin Gray while he was at work. He said by phone: "I'm hanging off the top of a building. ... I've got a big crane lift going, so it's kind of noisy up here."

#1

You mean where the propaganda can't be challenged, or we can have a "conversation" FFS.

Again, a complete lack of understanding on how American elections work. The opponent is the adversary, not the press. The opponent makes substantive critiques of the other sides issue and policy positions. The media's job is to report it, not inject themselves into the process for the sake of its own business model.

Printed pieces aren't government edicts that voters are bound to like in authoritarian countries your thought process is more familiar with. Every person has multiple choices when receiving something in the mail from a politician: 1) Read it, and consider what it says as it pertains to the individual's electoral decision; 2) Throw it in the trash/ignore the information; 3) Use the information given and then do independent research on BOTH candidate's positions and policies; 4) Do something not mention in 1-3.

And every voter is free to have "conversations" with whomever they want to, no one needs the media to moderate these conversations for them.

In America, both voters and candidates have the freedom to run and vote however they want. The media can either assist or hinder any particular candidate, and how they choose to deal with the media is their choice alone. Again, if voters think that NOT taking precious time away from speaking to actual voters and sitting down with media members is a dealbreaker, then that's up to them, not the media, to decide. The media's in it for money, not patriotism. Don't conflate the two.

Where you'll discover no billionaires are interested in supporting Harris and further not trying to get her to drop an issue. Mm
We can take a wager on whether or not Harris drops this issue before the election.
Or whether she even takes up this issue once she takes office.
Think about it.
Harris knows this is a huge loser of an issue. No chance of it passing and she knows it

I wasn't questioning the veracity of the article. I'd read it when it was first printed and recognized the usual pattern of the uberwealthy and their endless quest to protect more of their lucre from taxation.

My issue was solely with the numbers of small donors compared to wealthier ones and how much of the $361 million came from small donors in comparison. Excuse me if I misinterpreted your point. But saying that there are wealthy people who don't want their taxes to go up is akin to saying the sun rises in the East. IMO, it's not news, it's normal.

And the larger point is that Kamala is now in the strongest position ever of rebuffing these donors because she can call on the millions not maxxed out in their giving instead of leaning on bundlers and high dollar fundraisers as Trump now finds himself wedded to for survival. And as he incoherently rambles in front of each group, even many there have to question why they're financially backing the losing horse in a two horse race.

And if I'm correct, and Trump's instigation and conduct around and regarding 1/6 becomes the defining issue that will cleave off enough usually Republican voters due to the literal tsunami of high profile rock-ribbed GOP conservatives publicly backing Harris over Trump's manifest unfitness, she likely won't feel any real pre-election pressure to bend to their wishes, knowing doing so would enrage much of her coalition on the left.

But I also don't disagree that she'll be pressured to a degree once in the White House, but a Democratic House/Senate or both doubtfully would feel the same regardless.

Kambala's donors want nothing in return.

It's more like Kamala's donors and voters simply want to make sure the only way Orange Julius Caesar ever sees inside the White House grounds again is if he's on the outside - nominally, with a local prison detail picking up trash.

it's the Democrats who are endorsing the Cheneys' vision

You don't know how this thing works. No Democrat anywhere is endorsing anything that Dick Cheney ever did. I can tell you have no understanding of the uniting against a common enemy. That common enemy is the only thing the parties agree on - and in this situation, they agree that standing up for America means standing against its greatest threat and subversive enemy.

After Trump is vanquished, as hopefully he will be, both sides will return to their normal grievances with each other, safe in the knowledge that their temporary partnership was the only thing insuring that they could again cross metaphorical swords.

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said he is "absolutely not" voting for Trump. Neither is former Vice President Dick Cheney, former vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, or, presumably, former Vice President Dan Quayle, who helped prevent Trump from stealing the election in 2020. Trump's own former vice president, Mike Pence, whom Trump nearly got killed on Jan. 6, 2021, said "it should come as no surprise" that he will not endorse Trump.

Former Republican President George W. Bush has not said if he's voting for Trump, but in 2020 he reportedly said he would not support his reelection.

Bush didn't have a positive response to Trump's inaugural address in 2016, where Trump described the country as a dark wasteland of American carnage: "That was some weird ----," Bush reportedly said.

See you guys later, gotta go make some money.

I'm going to market hats and tees with lettering of "KA (in shaded print)MALA" - bolded, with red, white, and blue positioned vertically on each letter in horizontal stripes - with the definition printed below or besides: Make America Law-abiding Again

Put it on a background relief of blindfolded Lady Liberty and her scales and I've got a product Cheney Republicans will eat up like mice in a cheese factory.

MALA vs. MAGA - wonder who wins?

Jesus H. Tony Roma is actually implying that the media treats Harris worse than Trump.

If by worse you mean that the media expects coherent answers and details from Harris while they accept gibberish and word salads from Trump, then you're right.

The media treats her differently than Trump, holding her to a higher standard than they do with him. And she's not going to play that game.

And frankly, after today, she won't have to. Trump just became the only issue that matters and will dominate from here forward, and I'll tell you why:

The Cheney's are telling Republicans 'You can either be with us and Kamala who were totally appalled by January 6th, or you can be with the person who caused January 6th, Donald Trump, and support everything else that comes with him.'

Tell me I'm wrong.

What the Cheney's are saying is simply this:

You can vote with those who were utterly disgusted about what we all witnessed happen on January 6th; or you can vote for the actual person who caused January 6th.

Your choice.

Proving my point - twice.

Complete ignorance.

Hey moron, daycare affects every aspect of your life when and where you depend upon another adult who can only do their jobs for you if they can figure out how to have their younger children taken care of. The cost of daycare is built-in to the price of almost anything, since most people with children make their employment choices based on whether it allows them - by pay or practice - to insure their children are taken care of while they work.

Saying the above doesn't mean that every parent expects something. Saying the above only recognizes the child care is a huge sector of our economy on its own, and impacts even more. Daycare has a direct impact on worker productivity, something every business is concerned with.

The federal government employees almost 3 million citizens. Daycare is an issue impacting more than half of them. Government can make things better for families by shaping policies where they're needed. And they likely will be offset by savings or taxes on extra revenues made if the industry grows.

Don't be so myopic.