*sighs, turns over "DAYS SINCE LAST MASS SHOOTING IN AMERICA" sign to 0*
- Thread starter Charlie Don't Surf
- Start date
Public fear and outrage.
I dislike headlines like that, since 2 of the dead are the shooters. 1 dead, 2 commit suicide...
Not saying anything else, waiting for word about the police that were shot and possible motive.
I guess mass shooting is the polite word when a white person commits an act of domestic terror
Dave
Staff member
Not sure why race has to be brought in, but I'd think a "mass" shooting would be one with multiple victims that don't include the shooter or shooters. We could, I suppose, use a definition of someone who intended to kill a shitton of people, but sometimes motivations are difficult to ascertain.
Normally it's when there's 4 or more deaths (not counting the shooter potentially killing themselves). It comes from how the FBI defines mass murder.
EDIT: Fixed the link I messed up
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GasBandit
Staff member
I mean, not to detract from it or anything, but as Sparhawk said, these guys shot 3 people (two of which were cops) and then committed suicide. I think the word "mass" gets bandied about too much these days. Be it this, or say, a crock pot bomb. I know it's been officially re-defined... but to me, it's just another example of cheapening a term through overuse/abuse. The term "mass" shooting should be reserved for situations were masses of people are shot. A weapon of mass destruction should be a non-conventional weapon such as chemical, biological or nuclear designed, by definition, to be much more lethal than a conventional (or certainly an improvised) one.
This is a really strange case. Did they have something against those two cops, or just happened to find them as they pulled up to start their "statement." Just from the info that we have now, the woman seems to be responsible for 3 of the deaths (assuming one cop, guy at WalMart, and her partner) and herself. I curious to the motive still, hopefully we'll find out what was going on there.
Dave
Staff member
The news reports have showed that they were right wing nutjobs who loved guns and thought that the police were nothing more than government thugs. They praised things like the white supremacists, the Tea Party, the guy who held the ranch against the feds, and anything anti-Obama. In short, they were perfect consumers of Fox news.
GasBandit
Staff member
"The guy who held the ranch against the feds"
Cliven Bundy. They were actually there during that whole thing apparently, and were too much even for the Bundys, who threw them out.
Cliven Bundy. They were actually there during that whole thing apparently, and were too much even for the Bundys, who threw them out.
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Well thats a horrifying scenario. No horror movies for me this year I guess.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yeah, in the article I read, it said he made the mistake of thinking the female accomplice was a bystander.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yeah. It's outrageous that we don't ban them all, given how we can simply make all guns, and the attached crime that goes along with them, vanish with a wave of a wand, and that we can trust there to never be any oppression possible in any future government.
Maybe, but I don't have to worry about being shot walking down the wrong street in China/S. Korea/Japan at 3am. I feel so much safer over here than I ever did in the US. In fact, I don't even know if it's a gun problem, so much as it is a cultural problem we have in regards to violence in the US.
GasBandit
Staff member
I'll leave "feeling safer in china" aside as a bit too "low hanging fruit" for me to even touch (not to mention the subjectivity of how one's self feels). As for South Korea , yes, I too feel safer in smaller, less populated areas completely steeped in monoculturalism than I do in big American cities. As for Japan, they're a complete and utter US client state - their military is barely allowed to have guns (in fact their military is only allowed to exist by not calling itself a military). Plus it's easier to control what contraband comes into an island.
Dave
Staff member
If we make them illegal and they were used in a crime, then they'd be off the streets. That's one less. Then another and another and another. Pretty soon it's really difficult to get them and their uses in crimes and suicides is making a real impact. Will bad guys still be using them? Yup. But less and less each year.
Your argument is that doing it would have little initial impact and would be hard so we do nothing. That makes no sense to me.
Now you come back with how we need to keep guns to make the government afraid and I scoff at that because they aren't scared to do anything now anyway.
Your argument is that doing it would have little initial impact and would be hard so we do nothing. That makes no sense to me.
Now you come back with how we need to keep guns to make the government afraid and I scoff at that because they aren't scared to do anything now anyway.
I'll bite. Does it involve communism/dictatorship/drone Chinese or any other of those ridiculous stereotypes that people tend to make when they any have a superficial knowledge of what goes on and how people live across the pacific?
You'd be hard pressed to find an expat who feels safer back in the states than they do in East Asia. Shanghai has a population of 22 million. That's nearly three times the population of New York. Seoul sits at around 10 million. Mono-ethnic maybe (although that's debatable in China's case) but "less populated" they are not. "Big American city" is kind of a joke compared to those numbers. Size matters not. I mean, if you're a numbers guy, the crime statistics are readily available. I like guns. I'll eventually buy one when I go back to the states---but I'm not going to pretend I'm safer in Florida than I am in my Wuxi apartment, gun or not. It doesn't jive with my experiences.[DOUBLEPOST=1402436468,1402436380][/DOUBLEPOST]
I doubt it, not with the kind of open borders we have.
EDIT: I probably shouldn't have mentioned Florida. It nullifies my argument.
GasBandit
Staff member
That's what subjectivity means. And you're mixing the arguments - I compared South Korea to "big american cities," and there not particularly about the size of the city but rather due to the cultural and socioeconomic diversity.
But yes, the low hanging fruit about china is that a swaddled infant does indeed feel very safe, and I imagine the streets of a totalitarian regime are relatively crime free, even at 3 am.[DOUBLEPOST=1402436715,1402436582][/DOUBLEPOST]
If you make them illegal, you disarm the law-abiding first and only. And no, "pretty soon it's difficult to get them" is a complete fantasy. We've got thousands of miles of de facto uncontrolled border to our south that makes it easy to get contraband inside. Your ideas on eliminating guns are even less sound than those driving the war on drugs - and look how well THAT'S going.
It is very difficult to argue this point with someone who hasn't spent a day over here. I maintain the lower crime stems not from totalitarian practices but from different cultural values. People generally do whatever the hell they want over here. If you don't step on their toes, they won't step on yours. I won't bother arguing this point much more because it helps to have actual personal experience and few on this board do. I have to roll my eyes about some of the BS I see on cable news when they do stories about China.
That being said, I get the whole "save us from oppression" argument, but how many people honestly step into a gun store with that thought on their mind anymore--and if that isn't a major factor in the purchase of a gun, does that not point to a problem?
GasBandit
Staff member
We can't really adjudicate purchases based upon motive. Now, bear in mind (in ALL posts from me) that my opinion is not law (no matter how I might wish it to be) unless otherwise stated, but it seems to me that trying to regulate firearm purchases with some sort prerequisite to somehow audit the person's motivation for the purchase would fall somewhere between impossible and intolerable - at least so long as the 2nd amendment is not amended or repealed.
Do we have problems with violence? Undoubtedly, including gun violence. But bear in mind those graphs I posted a page or two back. We're actually still in the trough of a low in violent crime - it's just that lately, for whatever reason (again ranging from "it bleeds it leads" to "what a great opportunity to drum up more outrage to support our anti-gun cause") the media seems to be trumpeting every single instance of gun violence they can get their hands on - including labeling quite limited shootings as "mass" shootings (no, the fact that the accomplice shot the other gunman to make the magic 4th person dead does not make it a "mass shooting"). We're in the middle of a political media war - a war in which the target is perception. And everyone on all sides has their reasons for exaggerating.
More food for thought - the so called "wild" west was also actually an invention of the media (mostly to sell pulp novels or movies). Despite near-universal gun ownership, violent crime per capita was actually much lower in the western cowtowns - even the infamous ones - than in modern cities. A point I've brought up in the last few gun control threads as well.
GasBandit
Staff member
I've already said elsewhere I fear what happens when it's politically advantageous to declare your opponents mentally ill.
So, what do we do about it? How do we preserve liberty while also trying to protect society from the deranged in a devastated economy where nobody wants to pay for such things?
GasBandit
Staff member
As I said earlier, historically we've actually had more - it just wasn't as reported. Even before Reagan is purported to have ruined the mental health industry.
Will you stop screaming "crazy crazy crazy" to every shooting? It's reductive and means literally nothing, not to mention is extremely offensive to millions of people with mental illness that DON'T shoot people.