Didn’t the BATF start tracking and investigating people acquiring acquiring large quantities of fertilizer without a valid reason for doing so? If so, isn’t this a fairly stupid argument you’re using?
People will just climb over the fence.
I think Abbie Hoffman once said the nice thing about bombs is that the amateurs tend to take themselves out of the equation.
Ok. Literally it was the first link. What are the real statistics?
If the table dramatically changes by playing games with the dates, the table is suspect. One or two incidents in countries with very small populations heavily skews the ‘per capita’ rankings. Norway, Finland, Switzerland - just one incident can put you at or near the top of the ‘per million’ table. Do you really think you’re more likely to die in a mass shooting in Switzerland than in the US? If that table was for 2012-2017 would Norway even be on the table, let alone at the top?
Norway has had one rampage shooting since 2011. The US has had 273this year (four or more individuals shot or killed in same general time or location, not including the shooter).
As of about six minutes ago The NY Times says the police in Las Vegas have not yet offered details of the weapon or weapons used by the gunman in the Mandalay Bay Resort.
The shooter must have been planning to do this for at least a few weeks. He knew about the festival and scouted ahead of time for a place high enough to hit as many targets as possible. He probably watched hotel security and observed how they patrol and picked out gaps he could smuggle his weaponry through without notice. If he assembled his rifles after bringing them to his hotel room, he could have just carried a lot of luggage and told the concierge his wife packs a lot.
So was he wanting to target a particular demographic? If he was a secretly converted IS operative, as many bodies as possible. If not, it was a country music festival which likely attracted a conservative audience. Why would he kill people who were likely to be on his side politically? Did he have a grievance against whites, even though he was white himself? None of these scenarios seem likely. His family was taken completely by surprise and suspected nothing. He had been quietly stockpiling weapons, waiting for the day when he would use them all.
Lots of supposition. No confirmed facts.
It’s self-evident to a lot of evangelicals that the Bible should be the basis for all secular law. ‘Self-evident’ isn’t good enough unless it’s self-evident to pretty much everyone.
Until we can identify and fix crazy, the next-best thing is restricting potential force multipliers for crazy people.
And as discussed in this thread, we did something about that after OKC, and no big killings via bomb since.
That’s gonna be harder to deal with, but at least we all recognize this as a problem, and there won’t be anything partisan about trying to solve it.
No, the tool is very important. The planes that hit the WTC buildings took out over 1000 people each. Keeping that tool from being used in that manner again was vitally important. And we’ve gone 16 years without a repeat, thank goodness.
The OKC bombing killed 168. We decided it was important to make that tool a lot harder to access. And we’ve gone 22 years without a repeat.
Last night, at least 58 people were killed. Nothing will be done to make the killer’s tools harder to access, and we will be lucky to go a year without a mass shooting where a double-digit number of people get killed.
Sure, you can kill people with knives. But it’s damnably hard to commit mass murder with a knife, which is why it rarely happens.
Because it’s the tool that enables so many crazies to kill lots of people at once. We can’t stop crazy. We can only limit the tools available to crazies. I repeat: fucking DUUUUH.
And that shouldn’t be fucking political, any more than all the post-9/11 security around airplanes was political, or making it hard for another McVeigh from making a fertilizer bomb was political.
It’s only political because one party doesn’t want to address this problem as a problem that needs solving.
I assume that wouldn’t happen, because I assume that there are similar restrictions on general aviation to the ones any passenger on a commercial flight has to go through. But if I was wrong, and something like this did happen, yeah, I’d be mad as hell that GA had been given a pass on the post-9/11 security surrounding commercial aviation. Just the way I was upset that trains carrying hazardous chemicals apparently could roll right through the middle of major cities without regulation.
(I thought I recalled a thread of mine decrying exempting chemical plants from new security requirements when we were tightening security after 9/11 on most other things that could be used against us by terrorists. But I can’t find it.)
So you can take your WAG and shove it up your ass.
Except the one you quoted. :rolleyes:
Yep, the tool. This is what our disagreement revolves around.
I want the next crazy old white fucker (or black or brown or red or yellow fucker, I’m not particular) to not have access to the tool that makes it possible to murder 58 people and wound hundreds in just a few minutes.
Deprive him of the tool, and he’d have a much harder time killing more than a few people, and might not succeed in killing anyone.
We don’t know how to fix crazy. We have the ability to do something about the tool.
I didn’t know you were the Amazing Kreskin. I’m thinking of one card in a standard deck right now. Which one is it?
When it’s another tool of mass murder, we’ll all be united about doing something to make it harder to use that tool, just like we were with airplanes and fertilizer-based explosives. (We’ll even be that way about cars, if only we can figure out how, given our near-total dependence on them.) This is the only tool where there’s this partisan political division. If it weren’t for one party opposing doing anything about this tool of mass murder, there would be no “political pissing contest.”
So since we can’t limit crazy people, let’s limit the tools at their disposal. That’s the part we can control. I keep saying it, but fucking DUUUUH. Sure, they can still kill with knives or the proverbial blunt instruments, but a good deal less efficaciously, with many many fewer people killed and wounded, many many fewer people having to mourn the premature deaths of their loved ones.
Speaking of self-evident, it seems self-evident to me that that would be a Very Good Thing. Why are we even having this conversation? Fucking hell.
:rolleyes:
QFT.
We do have some video where you can hear the shooting occurring. I am no expert so perhaps those here more familiar with guns can offer educated guesses. I know a semi-auto rifle can be fired quite quickly. Can one be fired this quickly? Someone who knows will have to answer that.
I don’t know what this means. Norway has 5.2 million people. The US has 323 million. I don’t know what you mean by games with the time frame. I once saw somebody roll 4 boxcars in. Row at a craps table. What is statistically significant? Why isn’t Mexico or El Salvador or Liberia on that list? What about Russia? If my cite is right leaning is Vox our yours left leaning. Where re the gun ownership/violence statistics that I should just trust?
Again, hypothetically, if Tim McVeigh had tried to buy a gun, and, if he had succeeded suppose he only would have killed 10 people instead of 168, but since he couldn’t get one he built a bomb and killed 168. Statistically could we say that gun control laws killed 158 people?
What is it you are trying to convince me of?
I go back to my original belief. The problem is that there are a small number of crazy people. Modern technology, including guns allows for a tremendous amount of kinetic energy to be accessible to those people with disastrous effects.
Since we can’t fix crazy, we should limit the tools that crazies can get their hands on. This will limit the harm that crazies can cause.
I know I said it at least four times in my last response to XT, but given the length of the post, some might’ve skipped it, which is fine. I just wanted to pull that key thought out, because this is the essence of my thinking on the issue.
The other main point from that post is:
When that tool has been airplanes or fertilizer-based bombs, restricting access to the tool hasn’t been political. Neither party’s against that restriction. If we can figure out how to limit the carnage you can cause with a car or truck without taking them all off the streets, that won’t be political either. It’s just when the tool is a gun *that restrictions on a tool of mass murder become * political.
Right. Because it’s not like guns make it easier for sickos to kill.
Three cheers for our reality: more guns, more injuries, more deaths, all hail the NRA. Get used to bloodshed. What the hell–blood washes off, doesn’t it?
But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re just using this tragedy as an excuse to indulge yourself in an orgy of self-righteous malice. You don’t care about the victims. You just enjoy that jolt of adrenaline you get from spewing hatred.
If he *did *care about saving lives, what would look different to you?
Hundreds, in fact. After a while, the “it’s just one lone wolf” argument gets old.
Look, clearly all these “blame the people, not the tool” posters are extreme libertarians who see that tens of thousands of people are dying from opioids, and suggest that the problem is addiction, not the drugs themselves. Any tightening of regulations on getting one’s hands on opioids is bound to backfire, since there’s a lot of Americans who use them responsibly; and in fact the best thing to do is to make sure that everyone has free access to as many opioids as they want.
Good example. If you tried to determine the likelihood of boxcars by taking a sample of 30 rolls, it would skew your results if that streak fell into your sample, you’d think the probability of boxcars on a given roll was .13333… rather than .027777… . You’d be off by a factor of 5.
Same thing with these small countries. In a given short period of time, some small countries will have way fewer mass shootings than their norm over a much longer period of time, and some small countries will have way more.
The ones with way more in that period will show up, in the numbers for that period, as having more mass shootings than the U.S. per capita, based on a happenstance clustering of these rare incidents. (And they will cluster. The math of a stochastic process known as an arrival process says so. Just a question of whether they cluster in your sample period, if it’s of short duration, or sometime outside of it.) But if you had a longer period that you were looking at, the clusters and the times of no clusters would balance out.
See post #154.