Ongoing Mass Shootings Thread pt 2

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The country I live in has more mass killings than any other first world nation... by far. We're 5 years removed from someone walking into an elementary school and murdering 20 kindergartners and 7 teachers. That resulted in absolutely nothing being done. We actually elected someone to the highest office in the land who gives credence to a man who claims that atrocity was a hoax.

We're a few months removed from a man firing thousands of bullets into a concert with modifications that turned his weapon into a machine gun. Nothing has changed. They're "looking into it."

In the past year, as the right yells on about how it's more of a mental health issue, a right elected Congress and white house have stripped regulations preventing those with mental health issues from buying guns, and are doing everything in their power to strip their access to healthcare.

We've had a year of "resistance" by the left - marches in the streets over immigration, women's rights, general disgust at the administration. Where are the marches now? Where is the demand for action? All it is as throwing hands up and saying "welp, it's hard."

This country is, indeed, sick and twisted.
 
But that doesn't mean I will sit by while a pathetic little malcontended asshole like this cobbler d-bag spouts off because he's just an angry human being. His posts in general are sad and ridiculous. And this forum seems to enable this bullshit.

:rolleyes: you are the only person in this whole thread who has repeatedly made personal attacks against another poster. attacking a country in the abstract isn't against forum rules, but directly calling someone names again and again sure is. if anyone is in the wrong here bud, it's you. get over yourself.
 

Yep, I saw that. They're good at that sort of thing (what the Soviets called "Active Measures").

Ever hear the one about how AIDS was invented by the CIA as a weapon, and that's why Reagan didn't want to fight the disease? If you guessed that particular bit of disinformation was started by the KGB, to wipe out the gays or blacks (it varied) you'd be right. Operation Infektion. Millions of Americans bought into it at the time, and many still do. The one about the CIA assassinating Kennedy and MLK? KGB had a hand in that as well. George Bush's (I) secret trip to Iran to delay the release of the hostages to embarrass President Carter? Check.

Oh, there's more where that came from (Moscow). In the 60's, in an attempt to subvert US interests in Berlin the Soviets spread rumours that American politicians had secretly been in league with Nazis during WWII (the use of 'fascist' or 'Nazi' to describe political enemies is something the Soviets have promulgated since Stalin). The also tried to secretly subsidise Hubert Humphrey's campaign against rabid anti-communist Richard Nixon. In the 80's, they funnelled money to anti-war/anti-nuke groups in the US as part of the the infamous and ambitious "Reagan Means War" campaign (which they created) because they didn't want Reagan re-elected (for obvious reasons). Then there's the one, still controversial, about how Ted Kennedy sought the Soviets help in beating Reagan in '84. To say nothing of course about what they did in the last election.

What did all most of these things have in common? They were designed primarily to divide Americans and turn them agains each other. I'd say they hit the jackpot this time.

They're been doing this for decades. Only the technology has changed.
 
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:rolleyes: you are the only person in this whole thread who has repeatedly made personal attacks against another poster. attacking a country in the abstract isn't against forum rules, but directly calling someone names again and again sure is. if anyone is in the wrong here bud, it's you. get over yourself.



Yup.

Iggy, someone having harsh words to say about your country doesn’t give you free license to sling personal insults their way. Keep it on topic and leave the personal attacks out of it.
 
The actual violent crime rate in the US has plummeted since the 1980s. It is not a fucking warzone where you have to be afraid. That is patently false and silly and...math tells us different.

What we have here is a particular facet of the violence we still do have in this nation. A preventable facet. An ingrained culture that is starting to make itself seen where we are most vulnerable...where our children learn, and where children go through insane levels of shit trying to make the grade, both in an increasingly expensive university system that pits the top 10% of each high school in a death match for scholarship dollars until someone breaks, and the social grade, where kids can be fucking cruel. Teen suicide isn't a new thing. Teens deciding to take a few of their classmates out on the way is a new thing. And these awesome, complex, sometimes fucked up, hormonal creatures can ALL get their hands on guns. Maybe not like Florida, where 18 is a license to by semi-auto (so easy to convert) assault rifles. But guns are everywhere. Dad, mom, the neighbor, black market. It is cultural and almost celebrated by parts of our society.


So, spare me the "I went to Dallas and thought I was gonna die" rhetoric. Violent crime in this nation has precipitously dropped since my childhood. But gun violence? This is preventable. Or able to be mitigated. If our misunderstood or poorly-written 2nd Amendment guarantees the rights to own guns, our Supreme Court, which interprets that document, has made it clear that capacity limits, caliber limits, bullet limits, and waiting periods, as well as mental health checks are all within the rights provided by that amendment.

There is a real discussion going on now. It took a suburban school getting shot up with kids brave enough to film the horror and clap back on right wing pundits on social media. Social media manipulation cost the near left an election in this country. No one knows how to use it better than the kids. I really hope this is our Vietnam footage, because this has to stop.
 
And to be clear, this is not the only place where gun violence is an issue. Not saying that at all. We also have an ingrained racial issue that has destroyed any chance at generational wealth for some minority groups, and poverty = violence, and guns help with the violence. The right wing clap back - CHICAGO - but they don't want to talk about why we have gang violence. I live in a border state and can tell you the lack of illegal immigration due to asinine and illegal sweeps and, quite frankly, a good Mexican economy, is killing housing starts in my area. The old school right wingers were businessmen and had no problem exploiting illegal labor. But those men and women who sneak across aren't looking to call attention to themselves. Violence is much more ingrained in the 2nd generation that has some sense of relative depravation, and is pissed. The illegals I have known bust their fucking ass. Sometimes, their kids see their ma and pa getting used and grow up with that anger. Mix that with no money, shit schools funded by...property tax, largely...and the lure of quick money (again...teenagers here), and it is a powder keg waiting to explode. That's one group of demonized minorities. Then there are the ones whose forefathers came on slave ships and have only recently seen even the law work in their favor (on paper...not necessarily enforced).

So there is that gun violence, too. Not as easy a fix. It is generational, fed by poverty and lack of access to education, and I am not sure what gun laws do there. Some good, as we saw in the assault rifle ban, but enforcement just leads to more incarceration.


but I do know that we had a school shot up by a guy being watched by everyone from the school to the FBI, and no one could do a fucking thing because his having an AR-15 and showing pics of all his guns to students and on social media...WAS LEGAL.
 
Yeah. I'm told gun violence is down. I mean ... yay, I guess? That doesn't make me feel any better about 17 kids being gunned down and we remain stuck.

The comparisons often used bug me. "One guy tries to blow up a plane with his shoes and now we all have to take our shoes off." "Lettuce kills someone and we recall lettuce." Like it or not, the gun thing is literally an American right.

I think it's absurd and obscene that we can't even talk about changing that, but it is what it is. Like, it was written by the same people and the same time that slaves were 3/5ths of a person, and we eventually (too late) got around to changing that, but omg heavens no we can't go back and look at the second amendment.

And then like Nick has said in the past, let's say tomorrow a magic amendment was passed, no more guns. What happens to the gajillion guns already out there? Not even the illegal ones, but the ones purchased legally? Some people would be willing to bring them in, but many would not.

I guess not adding more guns is a good step, but the state of this country right now, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that I could see Really Bad Things happening.

I'm heartened by seeing the students involved clapping back at the political bullshit. Maybe they'll be the generation to figure it out, because they're the ones living through these high-profile, completely preventable tragedies.

(To say nothing of the other piece - guns aside, how do we fix a culture where guns are the answer? It always seems to be this toxic male bullshit. I guess I'll keep trying to topple the patriarchy.)

/ramble ramble ramble
 
Yeah. I'm told gun violence is down. I mean ... yay, I guess? That doesn't make me feel any better about 17 kids being gunned down and we remain stuck.

I don't know that gun violence is down...just violent crimes/murder. I suppose that core number represents gun violence, too. And the drop is more than a tick...the point was that the US is not some place where we are dropping and ducking to avoid being killed every day like portrayed. It is actually the safest time in the nation's history.

And that is mutually exclusive to the discussion of gun violence. Because there is no point where you should go "OK...it's down. We're cool. We can stop here." And the type of violence, the mass shooting, is incredibly preventable with even mitigation around our fucked up notion of the 2nd Amendment preserving gun ownership.

They are two distinctly different points. And one does not excuse the other. And worse, yet...we now have a clear trend of kids who don't have a fucking clue that it can get better within arm's length of some kind of romanticized solution.

We can get better. But we can also lose momentum with reckless rhetoric about bullets wizzing past our heads, about feeling "unsafe" as a tourist in this nation unless the tourism board booked you on a tour of great gang spots. That's bullshit.

And has nothing to do with our need to stop this madness with guns.
 
I'm heartened by seeing the students involved clapping back at the political bullshit. Maybe they'll be the generation to figure it out, because they're the ones living through these high-profile, completely preventable tragedies.

same thing was said two decades ago after columbine about my generation...i'm not too hopeful, sadly. you're probably right that if there was a major attempt to reduce the number of guns in the country it would lead to some really bad shit, especially for the federal agents responsible for enforcement.
 
(To say nothing of the other piece - guns aside, how do we fix a culture where guns are the answer? It always seems to be this toxic male bullshit. I guess I'll keep trying to topple the patriarchy.)

/ramble ramble ramble

And this. I am a white male. And I am representative of the problem. No matter how much any one of us thinks we have beaten back that mentality I call the FFK of white teen males...everything is to be fucked, fought, or killed...it is there, latently. Like when a guy talks shit to you, or your wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/friend/etc, and even though the other person is like "let's just leave", you feel you HAVE to do something, or you leave and stew about it all night. Or just the cultural idea of the "last call" hookup...it can be mutual, but it is laden in the idea that a woman drunk is a woman to target. And so on. There are a lot of calls on us to get our shit together. That's nice...but unrealistic. The most righteous of us still have some of that FFK in us, some feeling that our dick defines us, some need to break shit (physically or metaphorically), no matter how much we push it down. It's cultural. Guns are cool, man...we all watched Rambo and Terminator and every blowshitup show we could. It was culture and condition. The A-Team shot 1000 times an episode...no blood. Clean, easy...goddamn.

Teen boys with guns and a never-ending loop of examples of how to end your problems AND get revenge.

We need to teach our boys different. Period. We can Band-Aid guys like me who really want to not have that in us. But it has to change in how we raise our kids.

Not an America thing. At all. Except for the guns.
 
same thing was said two decades ago after columbine about my generation...i'm not too hopeful, sadly. you're probably right that if there was a major attempt to reduce the number of guns in the country it would lead to some really bad shit, especially for the federal agents responsible for enforcement.

visuals help.

Scary, sad, gut-wrenching visuals.
 
To further illustrate Wide Awake's point above, and to tie into Dave's comment about the reaction back during the days of Columbine, just saw this article:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/guns-par...online-activists-wake-shooting-205351647.html

I totally understand people wondering if things will ever change on this issue. I've felt that feeling many a time myself, and still wonder now.

But stories like this give me a little hope. Fight the good fight, guys :up:.
 
I don't think it's funny. I just think it's a painfully accurate reminder of how shitty Trump's response to any serious issue is.

(Seriously, I heard clips from his speech about the shooting, and he just sounded so emotionless. It was so clear he was reading from his script the whole time. Such a stark contrast to Obama, who I remember being on the verge of tears when talking about Sandy Hook, and who had anger in his voice when addressing other mass shootings.)
 
There's no doubt Trump's response to this issue has been crap...he's all for saying "radical Islamic terrorism" but he won't say gun. Pathetic.

That said, I've been following this since it happened, and I haven't seen a comment from a single US politician on this issue that I can respect. Republicans thoughts are with the families, Democrats bleat "common sense gun control" and say vote for us.

And Obama's rebleating the "common sense gun control" lie was particularly disappointing. I mean, it's touching that President Obama was emotional when discussing the mass shootings that occurred while he was in office, and I agree he was genuinely moved. Unfortunately, he never put forth a serious policy proposal that would actually stop most the mass shootings that so distressed him.
 
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Sadly, "Everytown for Gun Safety" is responsible for pushing the fake "18 School Shootings in 2018" story that was repeated and retweeted endlessly, including by news organisations that later had to retract it.

As I've said many times in this thread, a big part of the problem is that no one is being honest about the problem, or solutions. And the terms of the debate are largely based on lies.
 
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Sadly, "Everytown for Gun Safety" is responsible for pushing the fake "18 School Shootings in 2018" story that was repeated and retweeted endlessly, including by news organisations that later had to retract it.

As I've said many times in this thread, a big part of the problem is that no one is being honest about the problem, or solutions. And the terms of the debate are largely based on lies.



Would you mind being more specific? Genuine question, not snark. What are the problems and solutions that politicians should be recognizing, in your eyes?

This is one issue where it feels to me like the Democrats have a lot more realism and honesty on the issue than Republicans, who are basically burying their heads in the sand. “Common sense gun control” may not go far enough in my mind (a few pages ago, I was pushing for something far more radical), but it certainly seems like a decent 80/20 place to start that would likely fix some of the problem.

Are you disputing that Democrats recognize the magnitude of the policy fix needed? Or are they not seeing some orthogonal issue (i.e. not gun control) altogether?
 
The killer grew up in a highly dysfunctional home environment. Thirty nine calls to the police over the last however many years. His Mom was a single parent, when she died last November from the flu four people showed up to her funeral. He was said to be distraught over that fact, and her death. Obviously plenty of people grow up in dysfunctional families(I did) and don't commit mass murder. I feel no sympathy for him, but his life circumstances still make me sad. It's also sad to me to think that perhaps even one person could have made a difference in his life to the extent that he wouldn't have become a mass murderer.

Common sense gun control to me means no regular citizen needs an AR 15 or similar weapon. And no troubled mentally ill person should have one, or any guns in my opinion. All these politicians take money from the NRA, even Democrats. I for one am sickened beyond words by endless "discussion" about gun control while kids and adults are slaughtered.

There also are obviously issues going on with some boys, and men, that need serious consideration and intervention. Teenage girls are not going on school shooting rampages. That's already been mentioned here, and it's not anti-male. Just a fact.
 
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