The day after the San Bernadino shooting, things seem different, at least to me. The usual suspects who are so prominent after a shooting seem to be absent, here and on Facebook.
I haven’t fully thought it through, but I have some ideas. One is that the suspects are Muslim. When it’s a loony white guy, it seems easy to say “let’s calm down for a couple of weeks so things aren’t so emotional.” Of course, it all gets forgotten in the meantime. But with Muslims, the same people who defend the gun culture are often the ones who jump to immediate conclusions when Muslims are involved. You can’t defend all gun owners and the gun culture when they apply to “those people” as well. It’s also hard to trot out the “if only the victims were armed” excuse when the target was a facility for the developmentally disabled.
The TV anchors are pissed, even on Fox News. They’re not giving equal time to the gun lobby.
Even the cops are speaking out now. They are freely saying that there are too many guns on the street, they are too powerful, and too easy to get. You never used to hear that from the rank and file of law enforcement. It’s perfectly reasonable, too, when they’re put into these horrible situations more and more often. Their spouces must be talking to them about their choice of professions when they get home after something like this.
I don’t know. Things seem different today. The reaction is new. Maybe since it took place on TV and we saw the bodies, the blood, the bullet-ridden SUV and the hundreds of cops going through residential areas with guns drawn.
I’ll have to watch Hannity tonight to see what the spin is going to be.
Other than that, I don’t really see it as that different. There was a lot of initial speculation, most of it based on whichever ideology one has on who did it and why, then it got a bit quiet when the ties to terrorist groups started popping up. I don’t think the fact that the couple were Muslim were huge factors, but certainly the ties to possible terror groups has made this a bit different. I’m unsure why you think news commentators, be they on Fox or anywhere else will be ‘pissed’, but you seem to have a different view on how this is spinning out so I guess that explains it.
I watched CNN and a little Fox during lunch and people are angry. Pissed off is not too strong. We may just see it differently, but 24 hours after the incident, emotions have not changed in my view.
People keep saying that if things didn’t change after Sandy Hook that they can’t change. I disagree, and I think this might be the one to change things for the reasons that you stated.
When it’s a lone white guy, you get to say, “Mental illness is the problem.” But, this time, the gun control groups can put together campaigns centered around the idea that the lack of background checks, and the wide availability of guns inevitably means that homegrown radicalized religious fanatics have just as easy access to guns as white guys. I don’t care if this is politicizing tragedy. Time to politicize tragedy.
My Facebook feed looks pretty much the same as it does after every mass shooting: most people demanding gun control, lots of people posting memes about how gun control doesn’t work or wouldn’t have affected this shooting, and a bunch of people posting glurge “to break up the mass of sad stories on Facebook.”
I’m talking about the right-wingers who usually show up, not the supporters of responsible gun legislation. The former are conspiculously absent this time.
The ‘supporters of responsible gun legislation’ have had their nice, neat little utopian ideals shattered. California has some of the strongest gun laws in the country. And it made absolutely no difference. We live in a free society, the major thing stopping stuff like this from happening is not having the desire to do it. Radical muslims see our free, happy society getting along just fine without their religious mumbo-jumbo (and their own islamic countries ridden with religious violence) and stamp their little feet and shout ‘No fair!’. And then commit mass murder in the name of their moon god.
My Facebook feed has been suspiciously silent on the shooting. The only thing that I’ve seen is the “This is why the police need to be more militarized” meme.
Oh, what predictable bullshit. There are many countries that are as much or more of a “free society” as the US. Some people just use one simple definition of what “free” means.
That’s produced by the Cato Institute, BTW. Look them up to see where their politics lie.
Except… from all of the latest accounts the guns purchased and used in this latest shooting were done so under the strictest laws in the US, those in California. In addition, most of the shooters in the last several high profile shootings also passed their background checks.
These weren’t crimes committed with “gunshow loophole” guns, or black market guns. They were legally obtained and done so with the very measures that the gun control groups are demanding (background checks) in place. I’m not sure how they will gain any traction with those facts in play.
There was an article recently (I think in the New York Times?) that showed how incredibly easy it is to get guns into California from neighboring states with much looser gun control laws, such as Arizona and Nevada.
Thus, the takeaway might not be that the lesson from California is not that gun control doesn’t work, but that it won’t work unless it is implemented on a nationwide basis.
I’ll confess one difference I see is that following the Colorado shooting, when it was less than 12 hours old, I saw huge groups of people declaring the man “a terrorist” and denouncing conservatives Politicians who kept saying “let’s wait till we have all the facts” or “we don’t know yet why he did it” whereas now I see a completely different group of people condemning Obama for not right away condemning this as “terrorism”.
It’s sad how both groups of people are so dumb they don’t realize they’re flip sides of the same coin.
Breaking existing federal law in the process. Transferring guns to owners in other states, not just California, requires going through a dealer and completing a background check. What law would you like to add to what is already in place?