For the time being. This whole situation is why, as I’ve said before, I’m not particularly anti-gun-ownership, just anti-Second-Amendment. IMHO, it’s not responsible people owning reasonably regulated and registered firearms that’s the problem. The problem is ultimately our culture of firearm worship that encourages so many Americans to believe that owning a firearm is in itself an act of heroism or patriotism intrinsically requiring an attitude of militant defiance.
Get rid of that attitude by de-sacralizing firearm status from God-Given Right to Just Another Dangerous But Useful Object, and IMHO gun ownership per se will become a lot less hazardous to public health.
[QUOTE=Brickerthe law is not going to change.[/quote]
Scylla and Bricker (and anyone else advancing the “sick people” narrative):
(1) Does any other country have as many mass killings as the US per capita, excluding war zones?
(2) If not, is America uniquely full of “sick people?” Why?
ISTM, the most compelling part of the “it’s about access to guns” narrative is that it explains the huge outlier that is the US. If you want to honestly argue otherwise, you should probably explain why the US is different (or contend that it doesn’t actually have more mass killings).
And you’re calling me incoherent? According to you, it’s important to know about this guy…because it’s important to know about this guy.
Because guns are the unifying factor in these “completely random events (black swan events and all that)” that keep happening.
What’s fucked up about it?
Hell, just a few years ago, people on both sides were saying, “let’s say as little as possible about the perpetrators of these incidents, maybe if the next potential killer knows that there will be as little about him as possible in the news after he dies, that his name won’t be on everyone’s lips, then maybe fewer people will seek that perverse sort of glory.” I don’t know if that theory still has any credence, but it speaks against the need for us non-LEO types to know much about the killer, regardless.
As Mother Jones said, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” I’ll mourn this guy’s victims, but fight like hell to prevent the living from being the next round of victims. As you say, knowing this killer’s particulars doesn’t help, so I’m not interested in them.
Hundreds of people have been deprived of a spouse, a child, a loved one, a dear friend, in a matter of a few minutes. Hundreds more are in hospitals as a result of this shooting spree, many with physical wounds that they will never completely recover from, even though they live. And the trauma of this event will never be forgotten by those who were there. They matter. Not the killer.
The people who might be in their shoes in the next mass shooting, they matter too, whoever they might be. I don’t want them and their family and friends to have to go through this. It’s unpredictable who they will be, because as you say, it’s unpredictable who the next killer will be, just that there will be one. So the ultimate problem isn’t the identity of the killer, but the means by which the killer, whoever he may be, is able to ruin so many lives at once.
Moreover, they appear to have worked. When’s the last time someone killed 168 people – or even 10 people – with the combination of a rental truck, fertilizer and fuel oil in this country?
Well, that or maybe equipped with a bump stock. Forgive me if everyone else already knew about these; today’s the first I’ve heard of them.
It does seem that these have little practical purpose except recreational badassery, or, as unfortunately decided by the Vegas shooter, indiscriminate rapid fire into a crowd.
Yes. Ironic, I’m sure since I’m considered a fairly incoherent poster at the best of times.
The guy killed 50+ people and injured 100’s more. It’s important to know who this guy is, and what his motivation is. Seems self-evident to me, but I admit MMV.
Not really. The single unifying factor seems to be crazy fanatics or just crazy. After all, bombs have been used, and cars, even knives in China. The tool is less important than the person using it…and the victims of course. You seemingly don’t care about anything BUT the tool, however.
That your only focus is on the political aspects, not the shooter or the victims…just the tool used. My WAG is if this guy had decided to fly his plane into the crowd stuffed with some volatile and set the crowd of 22,000 on fire or blow them up this thread wouldn’t have happened in this way. You wouldn’t be decrying the use of that tool to kill…you might have posted something in someone else thread about the victims and how evil the guy was or called him names or whatever. THAT is fucked up, IMHO. Obviously, most here don’t agree and are aligned with your thinking on this.
And yet, you made no mention of any of this in your OP or even in subsequent posts. Instead you, again, focused on the tool used, not the events that transpired. You attempted, successfully of course since this is the SDMB, in making this a political issue about the 2nd Amendment instead of about a vicious attack by a crazy old white fucker who murdered a bunch of people.
Horseshit. The killer could have used any number of things to do what he did. The only reason it’s important to you is it was a gun he used. If, next time, it’s a bomb or a car or truck or basically anything else it won’t be important to you either since it won’t be a gun and you won’t be able to make this a political pissing contest. Ultimately, it’s about the crazy killer, willing to use any tool at their disposal to slaughter innocents.
Rental trucks, fertilizer and fuel oil also have other beneficial uses. Guns do not.
Also, some of those things are…you know, regulated. I’m a US citizen, been living overseas for many years. I came back to the US for a few weeks. Renting a car was a serious PITA, but if I wanted to I could have purchased a gun at the local Rural King for less than my week-long car rental.
We already regulate cars and trucks, so your point is irrelevant. if it was a bomb, sure that’s important as well. But you have to -work- to make a bomb and it’s dangerous.
You can buy a fucking gun online, FFS.
I’m sorry you’re too stupid to understand the difference between a truck and a gun.
I don’t follow this closely, but having read various SDMB threads on the subject, I gather that whether the US is #1 (by a lot) or not, depends almost entirely on how many people have to be killed or injured to consider it a mass shooting.
Which I guess points to why a better argument is to examine gun homicides generally. Is it safe to say you agree that the gun homicide rate in the US is a wild outlier because of how many guns we have? (I think that’s true even though I don’t think gun control efforts would solve it, so I figure you might think it’s true too, but I’m curious to find out.)
And I would not describe this shooting as a “one off”. As has been pointed out to you in this thread mass shootings in the US are somewhat common. It was only a year or so ago when 49 people were shot in a Florida nightclub.
One has to make you wonder why they chose such a short time window for those statistics as well as why they didn’t specify what they meant as a rampage shooting.
I mean, it’s bleedingly obvious that the data was cherry picked to get the US down to sixth, but you knew that already.
The very first link you found just happened to be from a heavily Republican-leaning website? What a coincidence.
The article of course is ridiculous. It says the US is ‘only’ sixth in terms of mass shootings based on ‘rampage shooting fatalities per 1 million’ - only counting from between 2009 and 2013. Norway only has five million people. One horrific mass shooting is of course going to skew the data. If only 10 people were killed, it would have a ‘higher’ count of ‘rampage shooting fatalities per 1mn’ any other country on the table. Nobody in their right mind thinks Norway has more mass shootings - doesn’t pass the smell test. So that doesn’t seem to be a very representative statistic.
Also note that the table leaves out cases where they decide it wasn’t a mass shooting, it was actually gang violence, robbery, domestic violence, etc. That also significantly reduces the body count.
Well, I dunno; I’m impressed. The International Journal Review. Very… academic sounding. Probably politically neutral, dedicated only to the flame of Truth to lighten the way forward for all concerned citizen voters. Something you can trust, otherwise it wouldn’t have a name like that.
I couldn’t understand the math; apparently something about Norway being the dangerest place on earth because they had 1 total fatal rampage incident’ from 2009 - 2013 like most listed countries whilst America had 38, because the U.S. by far has most armed citizens in the world.
I think I would disagree. There are a lot of other countries , and a lot of them are a bit more wild and less lawful than ours. I would guess that gunhomicide per capital is higher in Mexico, Latin America, and in the third world than in the US. I’m just guessing though.
I remember reading and seeing some statistics about suicide and guns that were pretty poignant. Apparently suicidal people with access to guns succeed very often. Those without access often have to take time to plan out there suicide which gives them time to change their mind. A lot of suicides are impulsive and easy access to guns let’s them act quickly.
I’ve seen this several times that suggests there is no correlation between gun ownership and murder.
I’m not sure I buy it. I would really expect there to be a correlation, if for nothing else than for the same impulse reason that drives the suicide/gun ownership correlation.
I think, unlike mass shootings, there is no real debate that the US leads the world in gun death, even if you omit suicide.
It seems to me that people in favor of widespread gun ownership need to own that. You might still argue that an individual’s right to bear arms outweighs any kind of utilitarian argument (or whatever), but it strikes me as dishonest not to own the fact that it leads to an awful lot of innocent death.
