So, it seems that this past weekend was particularly violent. There were at least 12 mass shootings in the United States. Hell, the database indicates that there was even one today. Also, that database is sobering / depressing.
The yet another mass shooting thread
- Thread starter Lt_Storm
- Start date
A lot of people will say that it's not the fault of firearms because there are some examples of places that also have lots of firearms, and those other places have relatively little gun violence. I agree with those people. The problem is what am I left with if that's the argument since the problem of mass shootings and gun violence uniquely persists in the United States relative to its "peers"? Something else must be the problem. Switzerland also has a lot of firearms per capita, and nothing remotely resembling the same problems with gun violence, but of course Switzerland is filled with Swiss. America is full of Americans.
It's not either or. Guns, culture, the attitudes and treatment of guns, availability of support systems for people in distress all play a factor, but availability and ease of access of guns, and in particular certain types of guns is relevant. Guns are a problem and so are some other things.
The longer I live abroad, the more spectacularly nuts the US appears than when I knew basically nothing else except for by way of fleeting glances during short visits elsewhere. Practically nothing makes any sense about how the United States organizes itself around basically anything. The gun violence issue and the gun culture issue is just one particularly acute manifestation, but there's something else wrong on a much grander scale that's hard for me to distinctly identify. Germany has some stupid policies, but so far it's rare to be confronted with the dumbest of all possible policy options. Whereas in the US somehow managing to avoid doing the dumbest of all possible things is an extreme outlier, and the rest of the time it's just a never ending cavalcade of, "Huh, WTF? (facepalm) Ugh, but that... that's the worst of both worlds." It's bananas.
edit: Kids having to do active shooter drills in schools is... fucking... kuh... ray... zee. Crazy. Shooting up classrooms full of kids has been going on for decades now, and... any end in sight? Any particular change in social behavior or norms for the better? Nope. NOPE! Just tacit acceptance of the phenomenon as "normal" and then have kids do active shooter drills like they do fire and earthquake drills. Crazy.
edit: Kids having to do active shooter drills in schools is... fucking... kuh... ray... zee. Crazy. Shooting up classrooms full of kids has been going on for decades now, and... any end in sight? Any particular change in social behavior or norms for the better? Nope. NOPE! Just tacit acceptance of the phenomenon as "normal" and then have kids do active shooter drills like they do fire and earthquake drills. Crazy.
Availability of guns should be calibrated to the culture of the population in question. Clearly America just doesn't handle its guns well.
Or, to flip the script: American culture is quite OK with the 12 mass shootings referenced (and the more numerous suicides, individual homicides, etc.) in exchange for the ability for mass firearms ownership, much like we are satisfied with our current obesity and deaths or alcohol consumption and DWIs. In which case, there's nothing to "fix" in the eyes of the native population. Especially as spree shootings tend to be localized, improbable events that will never effect the vast majority of Americans.
I don't follow this logic. There are a lot of roads in Pennsylvania therefore roads can't possibly be the problem with auto safety. Of course there is a section of Highway 322 near Harrisburg that has a lot of accidents due to its configuration.
In addition some mass shootings were done with legall owned guns and some were not. Not that many mass shootings are done with hunting rifles while many are done with AR 15, high capacity magazines, augmentations that allow for faster shooting like bump stocks. Gun culture promotes a toxi attitude where guns are seen as part of civil discourse (soap box, ballot box, ammo box).
Of course guns aren't to blame for mass shootings. They are just objects. Organizations that promote dangerous attitudes toward guns and toxic individual help create a demand and supply of murderous guns instead of a hunting or sports culture where guns are more utilitarian than status symbol.
Hasn't there been just 1 shooting that involved a bump stock or have they become more popular? Is the AR15 gaining ground in popularity for mass shootings?
How many people have to get shot to count as a mass shooting? 10? 8?
It looks to me like you're understanding me perfectly based on the below.
The US seems like a Third World society with a First World economy, and per U-99's formulation... it quite likes it that way.
If you grew up in the 50s', 60s' and you were male you had toy guns and watched endless hours of murder and mayhem on TV. All problems were solved with a gun.
Have Gun, Will Travel
And now...same thing with better access to more semi-auto large capacity weapons.
edited for: I am glad I got to watch The Andy Griffith Show. Andy the Sherriff who never wore a gun and most time didn't need one.
Have Gun, Will Travel
And now...same thing with better access to more semi-auto large capacity weapons.
edited for: I am glad I got to watch The Andy Griffith Show. Andy the Sherriff who never wore a gun and most time didn't need one.
Just look at most crime procedure TV shows from CBS/ABC/etc. The LEOs pull their guns weekly.
Problem here is that the world loves Hollywood. So they get to watch a lot of our violent media, especially countries that are fluent in English. None of them are shooting up the place.
Our problem is an engineered problem. Make everyone uncomfortable so you can work them better. Then use fear or the fear anger conversion to point them where you want them to go. Tell them that they are brave ass kickers who take no shit (scared people love hearing they are brave).
While other countries see the same media American get the message "You are an ass kicker who doesn't take shit!" if you are in another country odds are the message is "Americans are ass kickers who take no shit." or "Americans are crazy and violent.". Odds are better that it is the former if not both. In the US we watch plenty of hack and slash and come away with "Vikings were AWESOME!" and not "Vikings were crazy and violent.".
It is American culture. A culture that primarily represents your American "conservatives". Being stupid and quick to anger (you aren't scared you are angry!), solve it with violence, violence is awesome. If someone disrespects your dog, kill them. We look at all the things that encourage the problem and they tend to be Republican platform things. Gun access is just the cherry on top.
Our problem is an engineered problem. Make everyone uncomfortable so you can work them better. Then use fear or the fear anger conversion to point them where you want them to go. Tell them that they are brave ass kickers who take no shit (scared people love hearing they are brave).
While other countries see the same media American get the message "You are an ass kicker who doesn't take shit!" if you are in another country odds are the message is "Americans are ass kickers who take no shit." or "Americans are crazy and violent.". Odds are better that it is the former if not both. In the US we watch plenty of hack and slash and come away with "Vikings were AWESOME!" and not "Vikings were crazy and violent.".
It is American culture. A culture that primarily represents your American "conservatives". Being stupid and quick to anger (you aren't scared you are angry!), solve it with violence, violence is awesome. If someone disrespects your dog, kill them. We look at all the things that encourage the problem and they tend to be Republican platform things. Gun access is just the cherry on top.
Bump stock, high capacity magazines and other weapon accessories are quite common in mass shootings when compared to a hunting rifle with a three bullet or bolt action feed.
Not sure I do. I thought you were suggesting that limited gun availability has no effect. I can agree with that, but only conditionally. I lived in a rural area where gun deaths were limited to infrequent hunting accidents. The dairy industry got hit and farmers who were poor business people started drinking an engaging in domestic abuse and then the meth came. Now gun availability is huge problems. Everyone loves Walmart back home, but they are contributing to the downfall of family dairy farmers. We still have more suicides than murders related to guns, but the romantic notion the NRA peddles about guns doesn't exist any more.
We have to start limiting gun availability now. My grandfather had two hunting rifles with limited capacity, two shotguns and no pistols. My dad had tree hunting rifles, two shot guns and a pistol. They had them for decades. One rifle was almost a hundred years old and was only brought out for deer season. You can afford to indulge in NRA wholesome gun fantasies with situations like that, but fifteen guns owned by a twenty something might need a bit more oversight especially if the person is not part of a group that practices responsible gun ownership more than it does opposition to the government and resolving personal affronts with the brandishing of a firearm.
Yeah my perspective is that yes it might be possible to live in a society with lots of guns that isn't this violent but the US is not one of those places.
This in IMAX 3D.
Americans have demonstrated themselves incapable of controlling their violent impulses.
Guns are a sacrament in the USA and multiple daily human sacrifices are required to stave off socialism or something.
When nothing changed after Sandy Hook, believe me the rest of the world understood that the view I bolded above is the more accurate one.
We were suspecting that even before. Yet, we too love when Bruce Willis shot the bad guys left and right.
I was about to congratulate Lt_Storm for predicting a mass shooting and posting a thread just in time, but then I realized this is America. There is alway a mass shooting every day. Thoughts and prayers to San Jose.
What is even scarier is that the actual mass shooting events are likely higher than reported. Most methods of counting only include events were 3-4 people were killed. It's also seemed more reasonable to me to count events where multiple people were targeted or injured. If someone opens fire in a packed theater and there are multiple non-fatal injuries, it was a mass shooting.
Last I looked the Swiss have gun laws regulating types and licensure of guns.
In my state you can walk into a gun store and walk out as the owner of a gun with no license requirements as quickly as the sale can be rung up, freely wearing it on your waist.
Its about more than just the number of firearms but types, documentation, and accessibility.
A few years ago a guy wearing ear protection and shooting glasses went into a local restaurant and shot thee people--two children and an adult. Two other people went out to their trucks, retrieved their firearms, went back inside and killed the guy.
One might argue the guys who killed the first guy having access to their weapons potentially averted a larger tragedy. However it was the access the first guy had that sparked the need for someone else to need to stop him.
IMO that's possibly true if by "mass shooting" you mean "media salient events where many people are killed". It's probably not true in the statistical sense linked above where a mass shooting is when 4 or more people are killed or injured by gun fire. The incidents listed like "1 killed, 3 inured" or "4 injured" could easily be caused by a handgun - including in places that have magazine capacity limits.
I suspect the uptick in mass shooting in the statistical sense has a lot to do with the increase in murder generally, and I don't think there's a good solution for that short of a handgun ban. No ban is going to be perfect of course, but reducing the number of people walking around with guns will reduce the number of shootings, and reducing the number of shootings will reduce the number of instances where bystanders get shot, too.
Oddly I don't recall an epidemic of mass shootings in my youth when the murder rate was considerably higher than it is today.
But yes, less handguns floating around seems like it should result in fewer opportunities for people to kill each other.
Ho Hum, it's Wednesday in the USA.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/multiple-deaths-shooting-san-jose-railyard-490953
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),
edited for: cutting the Most Read stuff off the quote
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/multiple-deaths-shooting-san-jose-railyard-490953
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),
edited for: cutting the Most Read stuff off the quote
I think it's just unclear. The tracking database linked in OP only goes back to 2014. I think it's likely is someone had been counting using the same 4+ people killed/injured metric back in the early 1990s the numbers would be pretty high. But the data doesn't exist because it wasn't a major concern at that point.
Columbine (1999) was huge in shifting public concerns about guns, but my recollection is it still took awhile for that concern to become about mass shootings generally as opposed to school shootings.
Not a mod, obviously, but don't we already have a thread on gun control? Most of the above points are already being/have been made there ad nauseam.
I think this thread was just supposed to be an echo chamber of people being sad/upset about mass shootings.
I think this thread was just supposed to be an echo chamber of people being sad/upset about mass shootings.
It depends on how you look at it. You have to pick a definition and stick with it, otherwise you get "data by googling media articles", which is a terrible way of collecting data in a meaningful way.
If rival gangs have a shootout and 4 of them die, including the shooters, that becomes counted as a mass shooting. That's technically true, but not what the people think of as a mass shooting like Sandy Hook.
I would posit that we don't really have a lot of good data, the further back you go. Before Columbine, nobody really cared to track it. It took a long time for the proper computerized databases to be stood up. Obviously, we have a lot of data for the last 10-15 years that we can slice and dice, but a lot of it is still very influenced by the War on Drugs, too.
I've said this several times here and it still blows my mind. I was living temporarily in Oklahoma when Sandy Hook happened. The day after I was at work and I heard an older female coworker complain that the liberals were going to use it as an excuse to take away their guns. Followed by weeks of talk about waiting in line early in the morning to buy bullets since Obama was going to ban everything any moment. The victims never even made it into the picture, let alone forgotten.
I suspect the uptick is that after planning murders for a year, now that everyone is getting vaccinated you can go out and commit those murders before turning the gun on yourself, without having to wear a mask to avoid COVID.
I mean... it's a just a little bit worse than that. The American public decided to start electing Sandy Hook "truthers" to the highest elected offices in the land.
Chris Hedges views on anomie and the rise of magical thinking are worth a look.
Before the US had an epidemic of mass shootings (by entitled trash losers who are most sensitive to the American Dream being a lie) high school rifle clubs which were considered unremarkable, but we also had better citizens.
Low speed whites were the most vulnerable to the American Lie and traditional racist lies that told these shitty little people they were somehow special. Now they're pissed off and as society declines they themselves are good reason to be armed along with the millions and millions and millions of other shitbags too dim to compete in a very harsh world.
They were affirmed, praised and otherwise gulled and still are by their demagogues. Look into the eyes of Dylan Roof. That's a face beyond any rehabilitation but execution. Whoever told those people they were superior to anyone not only lied but fed their racism.
Most gun owners bother no one but today it is socially acceptable to be a piece of shit. It's acceptable to confuse freedom with license in an era where people who deserve social censure find online affirmation instead. Society degenerated and will continue to degenerate.
The mass (political) shooter problem is a white problem the white community is unwilling to address because blaming people for what they do is unfashionable.
Before the US had an epidemic of mass shootings (by entitled trash losers who are most sensitive to the American Dream being a lie) high school rifle clubs which were considered unremarkable, but we also had better citizens.
Low speed whites were the most vulnerable to the American Lie and traditional racist lies that told these shitty little people they were somehow special. Now they're pissed off and as society declines they themselves are good reason to be armed along with the millions and millions and millions of other shitbags too dim to compete in a very harsh world.
They were affirmed, praised and otherwise gulled and still are by their demagogues. Look into the eyes of Dylan Roof. That's a face beyond any rehabilitation but execution. Whoever told those people they were superior to anyone not only lied but fed their racism.
Most gun owners bother no one but today it is socially acceptable to be a piece of shit. It's acceptable to confuse freedom with license in an era where people who deserve social censure find online affirmation instead. Society degenerated and will continue to degenerate.
The mass (political) shooter problem is a white problem the white community is unwilling to address because blaming people for what they do is unfashionable.
White and Hispanic people are actually underrepresented (vs share of population) as mass shooters. Black, Asian, and Native American people are over represented. Contrary to popular belief and the current discourse
You got some data on that to share?
I am sure you are also aware of the dangers of trying to make such an assertion with such a limited sample size (and as many mass shootings as we have we would need way more to reasonably measure the actual racial variance off the demographic norm for shooters.)
Statista website claim Race of mass shooters reflects the U.S. population. Though males is over-represented. We should just take away guns from all the males. 
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476 ... er-s-race/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476 ... er-s-race/
That is not how this works, you made the assertion comrade, go ahead and back it up.
Oh thanks Blind, knew he was full of shit.
- Between 1982 and April 2021, 66 out of the 123 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white shooters. By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 21 mass shootings, and Latino in 10. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 53 percent, 17 percent and eight percent respectively.
Contra Statista's editorializing, those are the numbers and my point stands. Popular culture has mass shooters being overwhelmingly white but this is not the case. Even if you take Statista's editorializing at face value at best you have an even distribution and both monckywrench and popular culture are still wrong.
You are completely right, looks like if you are from New Zealand you will never commit a mass shooting since of all the mass shootings in the US so far not a single one ever was done by a new zealander so clearly the culture is immune to mass shooter behavior.
Or maybe you should stop trying to use bad data to make bullshit assertions to protect the poor over targeted white man.
(like I said, that sample size is less than 300 total shootings, it also does not clarify what it considers to be a mass shooting) but hey, as a white man I appreciate the vocal defense my guy.
(as a right off the dome example, if you count gang activity as a mass shooting then it will skew the data African American and clearly by mass shooter no one is talking about a gang war where 3+ people were killed by a single hitter so whatever definition used really matters)
"Popular culture has mass shooters being overwhelmingly white but this is not the case. "
If you define mass shooting by random acts of violence perpetrated unilaterally by an Individual not involving criminal conflict then I would bet dimes to doughnuts the average mass shooter is white and male.
Or maybe you should stop trying to use bad data to make bullshit assertions to protect the poor over targeted white man.
(like I said, that sample size is less than 300 total shootings, it also does not clarify what it considers to be a mass shooting) but hey, as a white man I appreciate the vocal defense my guy.
(as a right off the dome example, if you count gang activity as a mass shooting then it will skew the data African American and clearly by mass shooter no one is talking about a gang war where 3+ people were killed by a single hitter so whatever definition used really matters)
"Popular culture has mass shooters being overwhelmingly white but this is not the case. "
If you define mass shooting by random acts of violence perpetrated unilaterally by an Individual not involving criminal conflict then I would bet dimes to doughnuts the average mass shooter is white and male.