Mr. Brooks

Gordon must be added this offseason, or he will be eligible for the Rule 5 draft.

Perhaps. But I think more often some (not all) of these mass killers want to go down in infamy. The Aurora theater shooter, for one.

I actually agree that the media should not publish the shooter's name, if that's what they are getting at with that tweet.

Most of the time, it doesn't go to arbitration. And even if it does, the arbitration panel has to pick one of the submitted numbers.

If Rogers goes down, another lefty would take his spot. I can't see them rolling with only one lefty in the pen.

And the small niche that it has become can be taught at home.

Well said.

I think the gripe with DSan was that he was bad at everything.

I think he was saying they'd be solo shots because the Twins aren't getting anyone on base.

He gets paid the same either way. If the Twins save their option, May could theoretically spend all of next year in the minors as well. If he's going down either way, I'm sure he'd rather ensure that it's only the one time, by forcing the team to use his last option.

I thought Carter took Hughes 40 man spot?

Well we all have hundreds if not thousands of items in our homes that "could" be used to kill someone. None of them except firearms are designed specifically to kill things. Therefore firearms should be held to a higher standard of liability, IMO.

Negligence, for me. I took Van to be speaking about more. For me, I'm not just saying parents. Although they are often the ones with the accessible guns in these cases, it could be anyone. If you don't reasonably secure your guns, and someone takes them and kills someone (or accidentally kills themselves), you should be criminally liable, IMO.

Great game by Lynn, but he needs to follow it up with another good start against KC.

There is only wiggle room if the player plays along. In May's case, he has an option left. He's not going to go along with a DL manipulation, just to save the team an option year.

Well, I have two thoughts on that: 1) There is no reason why they can't train their kids to shoot, and hunt with them, while still locking them away at all other times. 2) That's fine if a person is certain their kid isn't a threat. I refuse to believe these kids exhibit zero warning signs before they act. In fact we nearly always find out that the red flags were everywhere. If your child shows those warning signs, you have a responsibility not only to the child, but to everyone in society that child could harm, to get them help and to secure any firearms in the home. I'm not saying every case should result in liability, but sometimes it's there. We recently had one of these shootings (sadly there are so many that I can't recall which one it was), where the police took the shooters guns away, but gave them to the father. The father assured police he'd keep them secure from his son, but not only failed to secure them, he actively returned them to his son. Now tell me how any possible measure to keep guns out of the hands of violent or disturbed people has any chance of working if there is no liability for someone else giving them access to, or downright giving them guns?

Ok, yeah, and I agree with that as well. But that's completely different than the responsibility that should come with guns in particular, or should I emphasize firearms, not nail guns. People should have a responsibility, if they are going to own something that is intended to kill things, to keep that secured. It will be impossible to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them, if the people who can have them don't take reasonable steps to ensure that someone who can't doesn't use theirs.

So what did Harley Davidson do with its big tax cut, four months after Speaker Ryan paraded their CEO around as a proclamation of how their tax cuts would keep jobs in America? They cut 350 US jobs, opened a plant in Thailand, and used their tax savings to buy back $700 million in company stock.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be purposely obtuse, but I really have no idea what you are trying to say here. A nail gun? What is the relevance to a nail gun to what's been discussed?

I actually think a tanking team probably will start him in the majors. At the league minimum, on a tanking team, it's a no-lose situation. If he's bad, it helps them get a higher draft pick. If he's good, they can flip him at the deadline.

Correct. One of the saddest days of my life so far, was when I realized how frequently my kids do lockdown drills at school. They asked me how they did them when I went to school, and I had to explain to them that they didn't exist when I went to school, because this didn't happen then. I'm glad they do them, but I'm saddened, disgusted, and embarrassed that they have to.

And I personally don't even think that gun ownership, as a whole, is necessarily the problem. Yes, there are people who are not psychologically capable of responsibly owning a gun, and it's essential that we do everything possible to make sure those people can't access them. But the bigger problem with guns, in this country, IMO, is the obsession and culture of them. A gun, when owned and used properly is a tool. But the culture in this country glorifies them so far beyond the status of a simple tool, to a level that is sickening. You have magazines and websites, hundreds or thousands of them, devoted to people posing with their guns. You don't see that with other tools. You have people who obsessively buy, and collect more than they would ever need if used strictly with the purpose of a tool. When is the last time you heard of someone (let alone millions of people), who obsessively collected as many wrenches or hammers or pliers as they could get their hands on? And posted pictures of themselves posing with them, in every conceivable pose, all over their social media? You haven't. People don't do that. Many of the gun owners that I know, feel the need, or the overwhelming desire to immediately show me every "cool" aspect of their new "toy" (their words), when they get a new one. Not once have they done this when they've purchased a new screwdriver or hacksaw. My wife and I own a small collection of guns. Each one of them has a specific purpose, because they are tools. We don't buy new ones, because we don't have a need for new ones, just like people don't buy a new tape measure if the one they have already works perfectly fine. We keep them locked away, out of sight, except the few occasions we need one of them. We don't display them all over the house, like trophies, just like nobody displays their channel locks and crescent wrenches in that manner. It's very disturbing the hero culture that this country has built around guns. The vast majority of the population can roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders at that idolization of guns. But, when one of those people who have a violent psychological tendency are consumed by that aura, it's easy to see how they could think that lashing out with those guns that are seemingly universally glorified in this country is an okay, or even proper thing to do when a situation arises where they think they've been wronged.

Correct. There are a whole list of issues that go into these shootings, but one thing on that list carries far more weight than the rest. Plenty of other countries have mental illness, bad parenting, lack of religion, bullying, and violent video games. Yet this doesn't happen in those countries. The one variable on that list, that differentiates us from those other countries is our collective obsession, romanticization, and ease of access to guns.

Well then it's time to take back our country from the NRA. We shouldn't need the NRA's permission to protect ourselves. We already hold people liable for other dangerous items. Dogs, pools, hazardous materials, trampolines, etc.

And how are we to decide if a lack of parenting had anything to do with a person's crime? Do we just automatically charge parents when their children commit a crime? Sometimes people have perfectly normal upbringings, and still commit horrible crimes. I can certainly see some level of parental responsibility if a 3 year old is acting out, but as that child ages, they grow more and more capable of making independent decisions, that often times (not always) have very little to do with how they were parented. When does that liability stop? If a 25 year old does this, do we charge the parents? What about someone a day shy of 18? Is that person's parents really more at fault than someone who turned 18 last week? No two minds are psychologically identical. The type of parenting that works for one child, might have the opposite of the desired effect on another child. At some point, these children reach a stage of development where they are capable of making decisions independently of anything they've ever been taught. And I'm not saying parenting isn't part of the problem. I just don't think it's correct to assume that these crimes are always, or even often the result of a level of parenting that could even remotely rise to a criminally negligent level. If there are specific, and provable things that the parents are allowing to happen? Sure. We already do that. If you fail to ensure that your child isn't truant, you can be charged with a crime. More specific to this issue, I wholeheartedly think that if parents don't secure their weapons, they should be liable. If parents know, or reasonably should know that their child is mentally ill, and don't provide treatment for them, they should be charged. We already do that if parents neglect treatment for physical ailments. It's time we stop stigmatizing mental illness as less of a real illness as a physical one.