In Lafayette Louisiana. The shooter was a 58-year-old white man, who killed himself. Two others dead, 7 injured at least one very critical.
I post this because I used to live in Lafayette - and in fact when we got married we lived about three blocks from the theater, which wasn’t there 37 years ago.
Scary. I hope everyone else survives and recovers.
I hope this isn’t too hijacky, but I’ve been getting the “update” about this since the wee hours of the morning (update in quotes because nothing new has been said since the first time I heard about it) and it’s striking me as very strange that the event is always described as “a 58 year old white man goes on a shooting rampage in a Louisiana theater”. Why the need to mention his race, or his age for that matter? He’s not at large so we don’t need a physical description, there’s been no indication that it was race related.
It’s just so conspicuous every time I hear it, and I mean every time I’ve heard it it’s always stated the same way. Anyone else notice / puzzled by this?
I’m getting a case of outrage fatigue. OK, two innocents died. Yes, it’s a shame and they didn’t deserve it, nor did the injured deserve their fate. But a shitload more will be killed in traffic accidents today. There will be more single murders in the next hour. So every time there are multiple killings, we’re supposed to lose our shit? So they culprit was killed, fine bay all means see if others were involved. Important local news item yes, national news item no.
If you guys have become desensitized to a shooting that just happens to take place in a theater (as opposed to an alley, or highway, or an apartment building) then what is the media going to endlessly cover for the next several weeks to make you watch/read/listen?
What are the criteria for it being terrorism? Number of bodies? Ethnicity of gunman? I haven’t seen the outcry about Obama not calling it terrorism yet, so this must not qualify.
I…
I, um…
I agggrr…
I aggrrrrr…
I agggrrre.
I agree with BobLibDem.
There, I said it! Now, let’s all just forget this ever happened and go on our merry way.
Just like the last shooting, the only people talking about it are using it to further their own agenda. So far we know he’s white and male. Apparently the theater was a “gun free zone” so the gun rights folks love that. People who look to blame all the ills of the world on white men are loving it too. Amy Schumer fans are impressed by her heartfelt tweet. And now apparently he has links to Westboro and white supremacy… but whether those are just internet links in his favorites folder or he was a secret wizard have not yet been determined.
Someone stabbed a bunch of family members the day before. I don’t think anyone even noticed, because it doesn’t fit anyone’s agenda so much. I suppose they could use the “see people kill even without guns” but admittedly I haven’t seen this. I haven’t really seen much of anything despite the fact that there were more victims and that most were children.
I suspect they did it because they didn’t want anyone to think it was a typically terrorist act - though it seems white shooters seem to have a proclivity for theaters.
The movie, by the way, was the Amy Schumer movie “Trainwreck,” so I doubt there were many killings in it. Though I wonder what this guy was doing in this movie.
As of last night the cops were not releasing the name so that they could go investigate his house or apartment and car without press interference.
Yeah, plenty of people get killed in cars and in bad neighborhoods, but you don’t expect being at risk in a theater in a good part of town. We assumed this place was north of Lafayette near the mall - when my wife looked it up on Google maps. zoomed out a bit, and the street we used to live on showed up, we were shocked. It’s a few miles from the university also.
If anything refutes the claims about a post-racial America, the immediate and almost unconscious assignment of shooter motives based on race is a pretty clear refutation.
It is disturbing how desensitized we are all becoming. This story was on page 11 of my local paper this morning. How often are these shootings happening now…every week? Twice a week? If there’s a shooting in a public place every day, how long till we start shrugging those off?
I’m personally of the opinion that the media attention provided to these incidents is a large part of what drives unstable people to commit them.
If I were king, I’d prohibit the news media from identifying the person, or providing any details that might enable people to discern the identity of the person. The only exception would be if the shooter was still at large, and the public needed to be made aware of what the suspect looked like. But once he was captured or dead, the ban would immediately go into effect.
As a disincentive, any references to the suspect (say, reports about the trial) would refer to the suspect as “Stupid Moron,” or something equally insulting. If you must distinguish between multiple such incidents, a system would be used where the first such person of 2015 would be reffered to as Stupid Moron 2015-1, the second would be Stupid Moron 2015-2, and so on.
I started a threadrecently making this very point, especially when the shooter has stated somewhere that he did it for a political/ideological reason. Those who disagreed with my suggestion seemed to think I was advocating censorship by some government entity, when what I was really promoting was responsible journalism.
See, I figured the reason they’ve begun doing it is because almost every piece of ‘news’ detailing the so-called shenanigans of any minority leads with race, it’s only appropriate to now call out while people too. You know, so we can all only equate humans’ behave with their lineage. As to age, I just thought they detailed that with everyone.