Odd choice of Member for Committee to Regulate Guns in the US

OCD_OCD: The President of the National Organization of Police Officers (Tom Nee) will join Biden and Eric Holder on a committee set up by Obama to attempt to solve the problem of guns.

http://www.napo.org

On Thursday, December 20, NAPO National President Tom Nee helped lead a panel of distinguished law enforcement professionals at a White House meeting convened by President Barack Obama and chaired by Vice President Joe Biden. Attorney General Eric Holder also helped lead the meeting. The immediate impetus for Thursday’s meeting was the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut the week before. But even prior to this most recent incident, NAPO has been recognized as one of the nation’s leaders in the comprehensive effort to make both officers’ and citizens’ lives safer. For example, when the administration first spoke about the terrible Aurora, Colorado theater shooting last July, it was Vice President Biden who chose the annual NAPO convention to address the issue. Prior to Thursday’s meeting, NAPO Executive Director Bill Johnson held discussions with both Vice Presidential and White House staff regarding response to, and prevention of, these incidents. As President Nee emphasized at the White House meeting, NAPO urges four related and coordinated public policy responses:

1. Keeping weapons out of the wrong hands.

2. Changing the culture of violence so prevalent in American media, entertainment and society today.

3. Providing much easier, and less stigmatizing, access to mental health care, and,

4. Hardening potential targets of mass violence, including age-appropriate education for students and all citizens, young and old, on how to respond when the unthinkable happens.

NAPO urges all people of good will to come together to address these critical issues, for the sake of our communities, our nation, and especially our young people.

OCD_OCD: The strange thing is, however, that Tom Nee is the father of Joseph Nee, who was convicted of conspiring to do a Columbine-like strike on his his high school by his group named "Natural Born Killers" in 2008.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-02-14-2050964250_x.htm

BOSTON — A former student was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder Thursday in a plot to carry out a Columbine-style high school attack that never took place.
Joseph Nee was acquitted of two other charges, promotion of anarchy and threatening to use deadly weapons at school.

Nee's attorney said the plan by four students who called themselves NBK -- "Natural Born Killers" -- was never a real threat, but prosecutors rejected that argument.

After Nee and two of the other students came forward in 2004, authorities uncovered a hit list of students, school officials and police officers. They also found hand-drawn maps of Marshfield High School, computer files on bomb-building and a shopping list of weapons and ammunition.

"There have been three school shootings in the last six days. You have to take these things seriously," Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz said.

Nee, 21, was 18 when he, Daniel Farley and Joseph Sullivan reported that a fourth student, Tobin Kerns, was planning to kill students and teachers at Marshfield, in Brockton, south of Boston. They said the attack was to be similar to the 1999 shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado that left 15 people dead.

Kerns, then 16, was arrested immediately, while Nee was arrested a month later as a conspirator. Prosecutors said Kerns and Nee were equal partners in planning the attack.

Farley and Sullivan were given immunity in exchange for their testimony against Kerns and Nee.

Prosecutors said the youths planned the attack to get back at people who picked on them.

The judge at Kerns' trial found that the plot began in the winter of 2003 when Nee told Farley: "Wouldn't it be funny if I shot up Marshfield High School?"

A few weeks later, when Nee repeated the threat, Kerns told Nee he would most likely be interested in helping.

Nee's attorney, Thomas Drechsler, said he would ask that Nee be given probation. Nee served three months in jail after his arrest.

"Various witnesses testified that they didn't take him seriously, that it wasn't a real threat," Drechsler said.

Nee, the son of Boston Police Patrolmen's Association President Thomas Nee, faces up to 20 years in prison at sentencing, set for Tuesday. Cruz would not say what prosecutors would recommend for a sentence.

Kerns was convicted in 2006 of conspiracy to commit murder and threatening to use deadly weapons. He is serving a 10-month sentence.

The shootings the prosecutor referred to occurred Tuesday at a junior high school in Oxnard, Calif., Monday at a high school in Memphis, Tenn., and late last week at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. Another shooting was reported Thursday at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

OCD_OCD: Somehow I don't see that Nee, while having had experience with his own son being a home-grown terrorist, could add much to the committee since he is obviously failed in an up-close-and-very-personal way.

Nicorrette: so,its a repeated story!

davesdatahut: But might that personal experience give him guidance on how to grapple with these issues, having confronted it first-hand?

OCD_OCD: He didn't do a good job of it the first time and he was the Chief of Police in Boston. You think he will be able to tell other people how to do something he couldn't?

It seems to me it would be like me trying to tell someone how to train a dog when my own dog is completely out of control. I mean, I can see that my dog is out of control, but apparently don't know what to do about it.

davesdatahut: I certainly would not turn over the troubled kids of Boston to this guy. But if he has learned from it, his views could be valuable. Nothing like someone who has gone through a self-made storm and paid attention to their mistakes to advise others on how not to steer into the clouds.

OCD_OCD: I guess I don't believe that there is an answer, Dave, unless we can prevent crazy.

We can't seem to prevent crazy people from getting access to guns, knives, propane tanks, or anything else that can cause death and destruction.

Nicorrette: this is not about prevention here!

davesdatahut: We can't just give up. The committee, such as it is, will hopefully draw on enough circles in society to think up some ideas that will make some dents in the problems. One thing, alas, I don't see on the list is drug legalization, which would reduce untold amounts of gun violence in our country.

OCD_OCD: The problem is what drugs to legalize. Even if you legalize pot, there is still going to be other drugs that should NOT be legalized and that people will deal in.

Nicorrette: I think reaction on a reaction leads me to those country movies!was it that true that time,gun violence in America?

davesdatahut: All of them. And then regulate them and use the tax money from them to educated people about the dangers. You have to go all the way with it. Then you will get the drug dealers off the streets and stop a whole lot of gun violence in crappy neighborhoods.

Nicorrette: hei man?who ure speaking like this?I don't agree!shoot ur mouth out!ure as stupid as can be!

davesdatahut: Say again????

OCD_OCD: You want to legalize all drugs? I can't imagine doing that. Meth? Black tar heroin? Crack?

Nicorrette: man ,there had been legalization!u are both useless minds!I want to give it up!u don't care about people!u care about your triumph!

davesdatahut: Of course, yes. All of them. Every one, with strong regulation on dosage levels and who can get them and under what circumstances. People who don't do drugs now aren't going to all of a sudden going to become drug addicts, just as people who weren't alcoholics during Prohibition didn't become boozers after that drug was legalized. In fact, when the allure of doing something clandestine and illegal is removed AND education is increased, you might see a reduction in drug use. But if alcohol is a good case study, there will not be some kind of huge rush to do meth, heroin and other really hard drugs among people who don't do it now.
I do drugs every weekend when I drink a beer or two. But I am not a drug abuser and wouldn't become one if I could go out and buy them legally. Would you or anyone you know?

davesdatahut: Ok, Nicorrette....back in your cage! Until you can make sense.

OCD_OCD: Dave, people aren't going to pay attention to "dosage" levels. LOL They aren't going to pay any attention to age requirements, either. If they did we wouldn't have underage drinking or drug abuse.

Even if they are legal, there's still a cost factor. You think everyone is going to give up and pay for their drugs? Where do the addicted get the money to pay for their drugs? They can't keep a job so they are going to have to find a way to get the money (illegally) or take the drugs from someone else by force.

Laws and regulations only regulate people who are willing to be regulated.

davesdatahut: I disagree, O.
You will never eliminate the problem of drug use, as long as humans are fallible, and boy are they fallible. But if booze is a guide, you can indeed regulate them and educate people on the dangers. You do have underage kids drinking, and you'd likely have underage kids doing drugs even if they were legal. But would you have more? Or less? Even if you had the very same number of people getting addicted, you would gain by collecting tax money, improving education and getting the gun-blasting drug dealers off the streets. Prohibition took care of booze related violance almost overnight, so the same could happen with other drugs. It's not a perfect solution. But it's the right one.

Nicorrette: I see!

OCD_OCD: Prohibition only drove up the price of booze in the black market. It didn't get rid of booze or the violence. It made booze a profitable (and very violent) business and drove it underground.

Legalizing pot would chill out the pot users, but it's not going to make other drug users revert to pot instead of their illegal drugs. Oxycontin is legal, as are many other prescription drugs, but to people hooked on Oxy's and Roxy's, nothing else is going to work. Do we just get rid of it and sell it without a prescription?

davesdatahut: Exactly correct on Prohibition, which is why I draw the parallel. When Prohibition was lifted, the mobsters no longer had a control on the booze trade...or gradually lost control of it. And there went the violence associated with it.
Legalizing drugs, as noted, won't cure the country's drug problem. But it will help, by taking some control over the supply and the flow of that supply. And unless my take on humanity is way off, I see no reason why people not susceptible to drug abuse would all of a sudden become susceptible to drug abuse. If that were the case, we'd be a nation of boozers. In fact, booze abuse has actually declined a bit in recent years, as we have educated ourselves a little better on it's dangers.
At least legalizing drugs would help reduce gun violence, here, as well as in some of those horrendous border towns in Mexico where you can't walk the streets if you aren't in league with the drug cartels.

OCD_OCD: Booze is something that it takes time to form an addiction to. Not so with many drugs. One pop and it's all over with.

The border towns (and most of Mexico, for that matter) are hell holes.

davesdatahut: So do you think legalization will make addicts of lots of people in your community?