I went to MPSIMS to see if there was a thread about the shooting in Louisville this morning and there wasn’t yet. I thought about starting one but what is the point? These things really have become the norm. Nothing is going to change and after a while our threads on shootings are all the same, like the Onion article that repeats itself over and over every time this happens. News updates are easily available elsewhere as we track the number of dead and this week’s motive. I guess I feel a sense of family and shared experience reading these threads, but the deep despair I feel that nothing will change is overwhelming. I feel like our gun society is like a terminal cancer diagnosis. It cannot be cured and every week we die a little more. Looking away and quietly hoping it is not us and not our city, our school, our grocery store, our bank, our friends, our family.
What about it folks? Any reason at all to talk about this anymore?
The usual follow-up “debates” & hand-wringing are indeed pointless as you say.
As @Love_Rhombus said, the threads serve some value for any locals to share news they get that we can’t, and for them (but not the rest of us) to talk out their stresses because of this particular event close to their home and not yours or mine.
My own take is that I’m past being emotionally involved. Drunks kill ~30K innocents per year using a car. Wackos kill a couple thousand using guns. Selfish ignorance kills WAG 60K/yr via spreading or catching unvaccinated COVID.
Humanity collectively is stupid, violent, and not infrequently intoxicated. You aren’t; I’m not either. But enough people are, and they spread their messes everywhere for others to step in. Like the poor, idjits and their messes will always be with us. Therefore needless premature death will also always be with us.
At one point the variously-named user @Paul_was_in_Saudi used to create and curate an annual “Mass Shootings of 20xx” thread. I don’t recall the title exactly, and I’m not 100% sure it was him. I do know it was one of the ex-pats.
IIRC a couple years ago he caught a bunch of grief from a pile-on of people questioning his motives so he quit doing it. Up until that point I never had cause to suspect anything objectionable about his motives, nor did I think much of the pile on when it happened.
Just now a search didn’t find what I wanted, but if is/was Paul, his many names may be fooling my meager efforts.
The 15 mass shootings this year are the most during the first 100 days of a calendar year since 2009, when 16 had occurred by April 10, according to a mass killings database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.
Going back to 2006, the first year for which data has been compiled, the years with the most mass killings were 2019 and 2022, with 45 and 42 mass killings recorded during the entire calendar year. The pace in 2009 slowed later in the year, with 32 mass killings recorded that year.
We all know this about humanity and we still find it OK to allow that massive number of guns to spread throughout our communities with the inevitable results.
I work in a grocery store where we had an employee attacked two weeks ago by a fortunately unarmed person with mental health issues. The employee in question suffered a deep cut on his face. Another time in the past week we had a suspected shoplifter that the security guard believed to be armed. They were allowed to steal rather than risk violent confrontation.
This is day to day life and we cannot even have serious debate about how to stop it without open hostility between “sides” on the issue. The Onion is the most accurate reporting on the gun violence. Nothing will change, more will die.
What is this ‘MPSIMS’ of which you speak? It’s is a speed trap like Tuxedo, NY… yes?
Designed to give posters tickets and warnings? I stay out of there…
Yes. This is day to day life. And it is insane. But there’s no point in us here on SDMB wasting further electrons on it. Y’all can help yourself as much as you’re willing, but I won’t. Since you’re the OP it sounds like you won’t either. You’re frustrated, but you’re not in a head-banging mood any more.
IMO:
Until we’ve had a revolution and new constitution, and following the deaths of millions, not thousands, nothing can change. Because the idjits who like things as they are now are simply too powerful. And growing more so by the day. The time to have stopped the “gun culture” was in 1945 when the veterans came back from the war. They could have agreed to a “well-regulated militia” that really was such a thing. We missed that train and now we have this monster of private clubs of thug-fetishists, most of whom were never subject to the military’s moderating influence about the limited actual utility of fetishism and violence.
They will be on the upswing for another 50-70 years before things start moving the other way. Recall the Shah was deposed and the Ayatollah installed in 1979. That was 44 years ago and still most of the rural less-educated population wants to keep the theo-klepto-authoritarians in charge. Plus a lot of younger more urban people as well. And most of the oldsters wherever they live. Enough that although protests are commonplace, nobody expects real change for another decade or 2, maybe 3.
When the Reactionary Right eventually wins the presidency again, whether that’s in 2024, 2028, or 2032 and regardless of who their candidate is, that will be our 1979 moment. And that’s when we can start the clock to our eventual get-well date long after I’m dead and forgotten.
Rabid authoritarianism doesn’t lose enthusiasm and crawl back in its box. Especially not when fomented by modern for-profit propaganda 24/7. It has to rampage and destroy until it’s a spent force and the survivors vow “never again”. Which vow lasts about 100-150 years until anyone whose parentss lived through the chaos is dead and forgotten. Then collective amnesia sets in and the cycle repeats.
I’ve said for a while now that it was clear that mass shootings were a price a lot of people were willing to pay to keep their guns, but that none of them would say that out loud.
Now that it’s been said out loud, there’s really no more point in discussing it. This will be with us until those who want gun control are willing to fight a war over it.
And while the Louisville police were dealing with the bank shooting, a call came in from the community college for - yeah, you guessed it. AFAIK, nobody has been arrested, and reading between the lines, it appears that the shooter(s) and victims may have known each other.
I find them useful as breaking news threads. Dopers can usually find more news stories together than I could on my own. I appreciate the mods running a tight ship and heading off tedious repetitive gun control “debates” before they overwhelm the thread.
I don’t know, Larry_Borgia. I think the sad thing is everything about the shooting threads is repetitive. Every damn thing.
I want to feel more than the numb helplessness and ineffective but somewhat cathartic anger. I want it to stop. The senseless over and over and over again.