ongoing mass shootings thread

[Pearl]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

apparently the pain we might cause to gun owners is more important than the pain suffered by people who lose a family member to gun violence.

Which is why moments like these make me want to hang the American flag outside my window - upside down.

[deep]

[Pearl]

60 Minutes ran a story on the state of mental illness treatment in this country. It focused mostly on schizophrenics, because Alexis apparently was one.

The segment talked about how schizophrenia can trigger out of nowhere. One year, a 20 year old can be fine, the next year they're schizophrenic. Some are reluctant to take medication either because they see nothing wrong with themselves or the meds make them feel terrible.

As for treatment, the reason why so many severely mentally ill people are wandering the streets is because the laws on treating them are so lax. A judge has to decide if you are truly a danger to yourself or others, and by then someone could be almost lost to their illness. There is very little monitoring of psychotics. The old system housed them in asylums that only abused and dehumanized them. The reforms didn't seem to think ahead in dealing with schizophrenics. As a result, many end up homeless or in prison. One prison guard called prisons the new insane asylums.

So there you go. Some of you may already be aware of this, but I wanted to share it. Clearly there needs to be more resources for the mentally ill, especially the more severe ones. Whatever you stand on gun control, you can't deny we need to mental health reform in this country.

[BEAL]

Not a "mass" shooting. But another gun violence at school.

But this is just what we should accept as life in America. Gun rights are too important to have any meaningful regulations that might hep avoid these situations.

[PhilsFan]

This guy would have never dared bring a gun to school if everyone else had been bringing a gun to school.

[BoMac]

Shooting at LAX, reports of multiple injuries, flights have been grounded.

[trojanchick99]

Single shooter armed with an assault rifle opened fire at the security checkpoint then moved through Terminal 3. Incoming flights are still landing, but outgoing flights are not.

[Jive Turkey]

Originally Posted by deep

I asked this a while back in the Islam thread, thought a little more sincerely. Not sure I ever got an answer

[PhilsFan]

I'm not sure that question will go over well in this forum.

[Jive Turkey]

There should be no questions that don't go over well.

[Irvine511]

Are you a white gun owner? You're more likely to be a racist than if you weren't packing heat.

That's what researchers found in a study published by the journal Plos One, which linked racial prejudice to firearm ownership in America.

A research team led by Dr. Kerry O’Brien, a professor of behavioral studies at Australia's Monash University, examined attitudes about gun control and race using data from the American National Election Study, a survey conducted before and after presidential elections.

The researchers found that "for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism there was a 50% increase in the odds of having a gun at home," as well as "a 28% increase in support for permits to carry concealed handguns."

To measure levels of prejudice, the team asked survey participants questions that measured both symbolic racism, defined as "a belief structure underpinned by both anti-black affect and traditional values," and implicit racial attitudes, which are more subtle associations about people of different races. For example, in the symbolic racism section, participants were asked, "“How well does the word ‘violent’ describe most blacks?” on a scale of 1 to 5.

Participants were also shown statements from the Symbolic Racism Scale, such as "Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class," and asked to what extent they agreed.

The study noted that whites are twice as likely to own guns as blacks, and oppose gun control to a far greater extent. Unsurprisingly, "stronger Republican identification, being from a southern state and anti-government sentiment were associated with opposition to gun-control policies," though not with having a gun in the home.

Gun Ownership And Racist Attitudes Are Linked, Study Finds

unsurprising.

[Jive Turkey]

I'm sure you could also link the ownership of a mullet to racism. Doesn't say much in the long run though

[PhilsFan]

Man Attacked in Driveway; Wagon & Guns Stolen | NBC 10 Philadelphia

Crazy to think that this guy's guns didn't help him. Just so strange.

[nbcrusader]

Originally Posted by Jive Turkey

I asked this a while back in the Islam thread, thought a little more sincerely. Not sure I ever got an answer

I think we've hit rock bottom. When there is no rational basis for depriving millions of people of their rights based on the bad acts of a few (instead of focusing on the few), we get the now standard dirty trick: BECAUSE RACISM.

[Jive Turkey]

I think you misunderstood my point.

And no matter what point you thought I was trying to make, where are you getting racism from???

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by nbcrusader

I think we've hit rock bottom. When there is no rational basis for depriving millions of people of their rights based on the bad acts of a few (instead of focusing on the few), we get the now standard dirty trick: BECAUSE RACISM.

The rational basis -- guns as a threat to public health, and the drastically lower murder rates in all other developed nations -- is quite well established.

It's our failure/refusal to grasp these facts that beg the question as to why such mass death is still tolerated in the United States. BECAUSE RACISM is one possible contributing factor as the study -- which of course you read instead of dismissing out of hand, because that would be Alinsky-ite -- points out.

Granted, the study is no Daily Caller article, but it at least merits some attention.

[Diemen]

Originally Posted by nbcrusader

I think we've hit rock bottom. When there is no rational basis for depriving millions of people of their rights based on the bad acts of a few (instead of focusing on the few), we get the now standard dirty trick: BECAUSE RACISM.

Strawman. No one is arguing that we should take away everyone's guns.

Asking for stricter regulations, or a more thorough background/licensing/training procedure is not equal to painting every gun owner as a murderer, nor is it depriving millions of people of their rights, unless you think every American should have the right to a gun no questions asked.

[BEAL]

Better background checks. Easier access to criminal records and or mental health history.

Insurance for guns. I think criminal charges can be brought up against those who don't have their weapon properly locked up (assuming they aren't killed for the weapon like in Newtown).

Among other strict laws to try and help prevent people who are not fit to owning a gun.

If you're not one of those people, there should be nothing to worry about. Is it more work for you? Yes. But wouldn't you feel better knowing more is done to protect the lives of others? You still get your gun, but maybe those who can cause trouble do not.

Can you protect everyone? No. Will the laws stop EVERY gun crime? Nope. But that's no excuse to do nothing!

[PhilsFan]

Originally Posted by nbcrusader

I think we've hit rock bottom. When there is no rational basis for depriving millions of people of their rights based on the bad acts of a few (instead of focusing on the few), we get the now standard dirty trick: BECAUSE RACISM.

Jive's point is that a lot of the people who say that about one of those things (be it guns or Muslims) don't say it about the other (again, guns or Muslims). There's literally nothing about racism involved here. He's criticizing hypocrisy.

[Irvine511]

fascinating stuff here, and does much to expand and nuance the cultural factors and historical influences that get swept away with the mindless BECAUSE RACISM dismissal:

Up in Arms
THE BATTLE LINES OF TODAY’S DEBATES OVER GUN CONTROL, STAND-YOUR-GROUND LAWS, AND OTHER VIOLENCE-RELATED ISSUES WERE DRAWN CENTURIES AGO BY AMERICA’S EARLY SETTLERS

BY COLIN WOODARD, A91
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER
Last December, when Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with a rifle and killed twenty children and six adult staff members, the United States found itself immersed in debates about gun control. Another flash point occurred this July, when George Zimmerman, who saw himself as a guardian of his community, was exonerated in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. That time, talk turned to stand-your-ground laws and the proper use of deadly force. The gun debate was refreshed in September by the shooting deaths of twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard, apparently at the hands of an IT contractor who was mentally ill.

Such episodes remind Americans that our country as a whole is marked by staggering levels of deadly violence. Our death rate from assault is many times higher than that of most other countries, whether highly urbanized or sparsely populated. State-sponsored violence, too—in the form of capital punishment—sets our country apart. Last year we executed more than ten times as many prisoners as other advanced industrialized nations combined—not surprising given that Japan is the only other such country that allows the practice. Our violent streak has become almost a part of our national identity.

What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.

The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.

There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a distinct nation. There are eleven nations today. Each looks at violence, as well as everything else, in its own way.

[...]

The nations are constituted as follows:



YANKEEDOM. Founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists as a new Zion, Yankeedom has, since the outset, put great emphasis on perfecting earthly civilization through social engineering, denial of self for the common good, and assimilation of outsiders. It has prized education, intellectual achievement, communal empowerment, and broad citizen participation in politics and government, the latter seen as the public’s shield against the machinations of grasping aristocrats and other would-be tyrants. Since the early Puritans, it has been more comfortable with government regulation and public-sector social projects than many of the other nations, who regard the Yankee utopian streak with trepidation.

NEW NETHERLAND. Established by the Dutch at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, New Netherland has always been a global commercial culture—materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged as a center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants, and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians in the early twentieth. Unconcerned with great moral questions, it nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom to defend public institutions and reject evangelical prescriptions for individual behavior.

THE MIDLANDS. America’s great swing region was founded by English Quakers, who believed in humans’ inherent goodness and welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies like Pennsylvania on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate. An ethnic mosaic from the start—it had a German, rather than British, majority at the time of the Revolution—it shares the Yankee belief that society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, though it rejects top-down government intervention.

TIDEWATER. Built by the younger sons of southern English gentry in the Chesapeake country and neighboring sections of Delaware and North Carolina, Tidewater was meant to reproduce the semifeudal society of the countryside they’d left behind. Standing in for the peasantry were indentured servants and, later, slaves. Tidewater places a high value on respect for authority and tradition, and very little on equality or public participation in politics. It was the most powerful of the American nations in the eighteenth century, but today it is in decline, partly because it was cut off from westward expansion by its boisterous Appalachian neighbors and, more recently, because it has been eaten away by the expanding federal halos around D.C. and Norfolk.

GREATER APPALACHIA. Founded in the early eighteenth century by wave upon wave of settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands, Appalachia has been lampooned by writers and screenwriters as the home of hillbillies and rednecks. It transplanted a culture formed in a state of near constant danger and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic and a commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty. Intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike, Greater Appalachia has shifted alliances depending on who appeared to be the greatest threat to their freedom. It was with the Union in the Civil War. Since Reconstruction, and especially since the upheavals of the 1960s, it has joined with Deep South to counter federal overrides of local preference.

DEEP SOUTH. Established by English slave lords from Barbados, Deep South was meant as a West Indies–style slave society. This nation offered a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. Its caste systems smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight against expanded federal powers, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer regulations.

EL NORTE. The oldest of the American nations, El Norte consists of the borderlands of the Spanish American empire, which were so far from the seats of power in Mexico City and Madrid that they evolved their own characteristics. Most Americans are aware of El Norte as a place apart, where Hispanic language, culture, and societal norms dominate. But few realize that among Mexicans, norteños have a reputation for being exceptionally independent, self-sufficient, adaptable, and focused on work. Long a hotbed of democratic reform and revolutionary settlement, the region encompasses parts of Mexico that have tried to secede in order to form independent buffer states between their mother country and the United States.

THE LEFT COAST. A Chile-shaped nation wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade and Coast mountains, the Left Coast was originally colonized by two groups: New Englanders (merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen who arrived by sea and dominated the towns) and Appalachian midwesterners (farmers, prospectors, and fur traders who generally arrived by wagon and controlled the countryside). Yankee missionaries tried to make it a “New England on the Pacific,” but were only partially successful. Left Coast culture is a hybrid of Yankee utopianism and Appalachian self-expression and exploration—traits recognizable in its cultural production, from the Summer of Love to the iPad. The staunchest ally of Yankeedom, it clashes with Far Western sections in the interior of its home states.

THE FAR WEST. The other “second-generation” nation, the Far West occupies the one part of the continent shaped more by environmental factors than ethnographic ones. High, dry, and remote, the Far West stopped migrating easterners in their tracks, and most of it could be made habitable only with the deployment of vast industrial resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment, ore smelters, dams, and irrigation systems. As a result, settlement was largely directed by corporations headquartered in distant New York, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, or by the federal government, which controlled much of the land. The Far West’s people are often resentful of their dependent status, feeling that they have been exploited as an internal colony for the benefit of the seaboard nations. Their senators led the fight against trusts in the mid-twentieth century. Of late, Far Westerners have focused their anger on the federal government, rather than their corporate masters.

NEW FRANCE. Occupying the New Orleans area and southeastern Canada, New France blends the folkways of ancien régime northern French peasantry with the traditions and values of the aboriginal people they encountered in northwestern North America. After a long history of imperial oppression, its people have emerged as down-to-earth, egalitarian, and consensus driven, among the most liberal on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes toward gays and people of all races and a ready acceptance of government involvement in the economy. The New French influence is manifest in Canada, where multiculturalism and negotiated consensus are treasured.

FIRST NATION. First Nation is populated by native American groups that generally never gave up their land by treaty and have largely retained cultural practices and knowledge that allow them to survive in this hostile region on their own terms. The nation is now reclaiming its sovereignty, having won considerable autonomy in Alaska and Nunavut and a self-governing nation state in Greenland that stands on the threshold of full independence. Its territory is huge—far larger than the continental United States—but its population is less than 300,000, most of whom live in Canada.

If you understand the United States as a patchwork of separate nations, each with its own origins and prevailing values, you would hardly expect attitudes toward violence to be uniformly distributed. You would instead be prepared to discover that some parts of the country experience more violence, have a greater tolerance for violent solutions to conflict, and are more protective of the instruments of violence than other parts of the country. That is exactly what the data on violence reveal about the modern United States.

Most scholarly research on violence has collected data at the state level, rather than the county level (where the boundaries of the eleven nations are delineated). Still, the trends are clear. The same handful of nations show up again and again at the top and the bottom of state-level figures on deadly violence, capital punishment, and promotion of gun ownership.

Consider assault deaths. Kieran Healy, a Duke University sociologist, broke down the per capita, age-adjusted deadly assault rate for 2010. In the northeastern states—almost entirely dominated by Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Midlands—just over 4 people per 100,000 died in assaults. By contrast, southern states—largely monopolized by Deep South, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia—had a rate of more than 7 per 100,000. The three deadliest states—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, where the rate of killings topped 10 per 100,000—were all in Deep South territory. Meanwhile, the three safest states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Minnesota, with rates of about 2 killings per 100,000—were all part of Yankeedom.

Not surprisingly, black Americans have it worse than whites. Countrywide, according to Healy, blacks die from assaults at the bewildering rate of about 20 per 100,000, while the rate for whites is less than 6. But does that mean racial differences might be skewing the homicide data for nations with larger African-American populations? Apparently not. A classic 1993 study by the social psychologist Richard Nisbett, of the University of Michigan, found that homicide rates in small predominantly white cities were three times higher in the South than in New England. Nisbett and a colleague, Andrew Reaves, went on to show that southern rural counties had white homicide rates more than four times those of counties in New England, Middle Atlantic, and Midwestern states.

Tufts Magazine / fall 2013

much more to read. fascinating stuff.