Please somebody anybody fucking make it stop.
They talk a lot about God
Streets run with children’s blood
Deep in the heart of Texas
Kiss your kid goodbye
He probably will die
Deep in the heart of Texas
The Lone Star State’s lots of fun
'Til someone pulls a gun
Deep in the heart of Texas
Texas is the best
Just wear your Kevlar vest
Deep in the heart of Texas
The mall’s the place to be seen
And face an AR-15
Deep in the heart of Texas!
The fact that we are not allowed to discuss gun control in the threads makes these threads worse than pointless, they are pro-gun threads because none of us are allowed to discuss the obvious solution to this ridiculous problem.
An outsider perspective, so take it for what it’s worth, i.e. nothing.
If you mean gun control I don’t think that’s the ‘problem’; you guys need to figure out why people are so fucking trigger happy in the U.S. There are a shitload of guns in horrible places like Somalia, Mali ASF. And people are routinely killed by guns in those countries. But even there, 19 year old juveniles don’t walk into elementary schools and shoot kids younger than 10, just because the shooter doesn’t like Mondays.
It does happen in other countries- this past week in Serbia - but not in any way with the frequency it does in the U.S.
There is something, and I sure as hell don’t know what, fundamentally broken in the society of America. And I feel sad that a country I love, with people I love have devolved to this.
Well, my reply to that is:
Every other civilised first-world westernised (you know what I mean) country has disaffected 19-year old juveniles who don’t like Mondays - and they do nearly everything that they do in the US - steal cars, do pointless vandalism, hate authority figures, feel forgotten and/or ignored, get lost in strange corners of the internet etc - but they don’t (or very, very rarely) take a gun and shoot people at random.
Because guns aren’t a normal part of their society, and guns are even barely considered. Also, it’s bloody difficult to get hold of one.
The thing (one of the things) that is fundamentally broken in the US is that guns are seen as a normal way of addressing problems or perceived problems.
That’s a good point, guns are just one of the ways America is fundamentally broken. Although it’s a major one.
We aren’t doing quite as good a job of hiding our fucked-up-itude from the rest of the world as I had hoped.
Sigh.
It is the love of guns at the root of this evil. Other society’s have the drugs and the mental illness and the hatred and even sometimes the guns. But in America we have the love of guns. And that love is so very very deep and powerful and dangerous.
You’re no more fucked up than anywhere else.
The problem in the US that the 30% assholes and crazies (this is a universal number, it is the same everywhere) are united in the GOP. Elsewhere their very nature makes them utterly incapable of working together. Here (Holland) the religious nutcases vote for their own party, the conspiracy nuts vote for their own party, etc. etc. the numbers stil add up to ~30% (or half the people who actually vote), but they never quite get a good grasp on power.
Agreed.
The American GOP is evil, but they’re not – in aggregate – stupid. They have an organization and they have funding. They are awash in data, which allows them to survey the electorate, identify a coalition (let’s call them the “deplorables”), and then tailor a message to them.
I’ve said it before (for quite a while now), and will add it here (but end the threadjack there):
Conservatives used to believe in individual liberties and limited government. Only in the 1960’s … when [wait for it] black people were about to get equal rights … did the Southern Baptist, so-called “social conservatives” FLEE the Democratic party FOR the waiting arms of the Republicans.
That “Southern Strategy” was an amazing deal with the devil, in that the Republicans picked up millions of the least informed, least logical, least thoughtful, most dogmatic and cognitively rigid voters in the country, and went AGAINST the values that Conservatives had held until that point.
Today’s GOP are doubling down on that, using a “bring out the gimp” strategy, and unearthing the kind of people who are reminiscent of “Deliverance” (in tandem with gerrymandering and voter suppression) in order to gain and maintain power. It’s disgusting.
On top of that (and, arguably, more relevant) is the demagoguery that paints Every Single Thing That The Other Side Wants To Do (all straw men) as an existential threat. Very little rallies the troops and builds coalition like the common enemy ploy.
I guess the paroxysmal European “populist” movements aren’t so vastly different … particularly not historically.
You’re in the Pit discussing how pointless therads about pointless mass shootings are. This is so meta-pointless that hijacks are impossible.
Mental health, lack of gun control, NRA, disaffected youth. Yeah. But I wonder what is at the very base? What kind of circumstances intersect to create a society where someone shoots another human for cutting them off in traffic? Where LEO think that military equipment is necessary and that kneeling on a guys neck long enough for him to fucking die is a proportional use of force when detaining a suspect?
Why are Americans, in the richest and most powerful country in the world, so fucking angry and so fucking afraid?
“This is all too good to be true. It can’t last. The other shoe has got to drop and it can happen before I can get my due. Everyone who has ever been f&$@ed over is about to snap any minute now and will take ME with them, I’ll do it to them before they do it to me.”
I think it’s about the afraid part.
Fear mongering media, politicians, social media.
I think this is more present in the USA than here (Holland). I also think that we have the right idea in having nonprofit media next to commercial stuff.
(The non-profit channels are watched slightly more than the commercial offerings— I think especially the news is of a higher quality and ,ironically, more independent) this is something you see in most Western European countries; a mostly independent news desk on the (mostly highly regarded) state owned channels.
It keeps the commercial offerings more honest and keeps the more sensationalist and fear mongering away.
…I mean, we are talking about the United States of America. The land of the free. The home of the brave.
It was a country that was founded on the slaughter of its indigenous people. That bought Black people to the country, shackled and enslaved. But has convinced themselves because a bunch of long-dead-white-men put together the sacred document called “The Constitution”, they are more exceptional than anyone else.
America has locked up right now more people per capita than anywhere else in the world. Most of those people haven’t been convicted of any crime. You could release half of everyone locked up in America right now and you would still have twice as many (per capita) locked up than you do in Australia.
And you know what?
Americans don’t care.
This single issue, on its own, is a plot for a dystopian nightmare. George Orwell couldn’t have written it better. From incompetent and corrupt police to District Attorneys who want to be seen to be “tough on crime” to literal hanging judges, the entire system is fucked up.
And nobody cares.
The NYPD issued 17,000 summons for fare evasion in January 2022. And yet Jordan Neely was lynched by an unemployed man, reportedly strangled for fifteen minutes with not-a-cop-in-sight.
This isn’t a serious country.
Its a country that is riddled with corruption at every level, from school boards to the Supreme Court. It’s a country that demands you “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” then wonders why there are so many living on the streets.
And its a country that is now broken due to decades of relentless propaganda. You can be living in the same house as somebody else and have no idea they are being fed a daily diet of unhinged racist and misogynistic conspiracy theories. We can no longer look to history to see where this all ends up. We are in uncharted territory.
So why are Americans so fucking angry and so fucking afraid? Because its baked into your national identity. Because the corrupt have been running the show for so long. Because the propaganda has been too loud and drowned everything else out.
“Banning guns” isn’t going to fix this. Because the rot is too deep that doing any one single thing would ever be enough to make a difference. Not at the moment. The divide between states is growing. And even the so-called “left-leaning” states like New York are riddled with corruption and self-interest and over-policing and racism.
Imagine a fictional book about a country where “stopping and frisking” people of colour is routine, where history books that talk about the realities of your countries racist history are labelled “critical race theory” and banned, where abortion is outlawed, where people are charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for routine healthcare, where mass shootings just become background noise, where the Supreme Court of the Land is essentially a bunch of unelected Wizards who remain in power until they die. Where millions of people are locked up, many not convicted of any crime and their best hope of getting released is to plead guilty.
But this isn’t a fictional story. This is America. The mass shootings are a symptom of a rotting core. And it won’t get fixed until the next revolution.
This is an idea that comes up a lot and I want to dig into it a bit.
Let’s take the idea of a hypothetical person who is having a mental health crisis and the midst of it, decides they would like to harm others in the manner we’ve been discussing. But just as they are about to head out to the mall/school/club/festival/etc they have a moment where they realize they are not doing so good mental health wise and they decide to proactively seek help. Then what?
Aren’t all mental health workers mandatory reporters? So if you go to one and tell them you were thinking about harming others, aren’t they obligated to immediately report you to the police? And what are the police going to do? They are going to come to wherever you are and possibly arrest you. Depending on how twitchy they are feeling, they might just shoot you. But if you survive the encounter where do you go from here? Either jail or a hospital that might as well be a jail. And they take your guns away and you probably never get them back (although your jurisdiction may vary, I have heard of places where a person got red-flagged and then released so they could do exactly what they said they were going to do). And now you have a criminal record that ensures you will never, ever be able to work at anywhere so much as a Walmart because you are a dangerous, violent person who admitted it publicly.
Who is going to pick the “mental health” option when it means losing all of your freedoms and all that expensive hardware you bought and paid for? Where are the success stories? Where are those young adults who can go around telling stories of how they almost shot up a school and if not for the timely and kind intervention of the mental health system, they would have? Do we have any heroes in that category?
Mental health as gun control is the idea of stopping people from exercising their freedom by asking them to voluntarily surrender it in advance. For this latest shooter in Texas (or the one a week before), did they go on their rampages because they called a crisis line and no one answered? If only someone had thought to tell them about this thing called mental health so they could have gotten themselves thrown in jail in advance of actually doing anything. It is bizarre that politicians put it out there with a straight face. Yes, law enforcement would be trivial if the criminals would just turn themselves in before committing their crimes! Let us pray they see the light!
This is an excellent summary of where America is.
Sure, if you’re fine with the way revolutions usually go. And believe me, I agree with everything you’ve said about the troubles we’re facing and that massive changes are needed. I just wanted to make a note of that bit. Maybe we’ll have a nice peaceful revolution like Estonia! Naw, it will be more like France.
To answer the question in the OP, no, i don’t think there’s a lot of use to “breaking news” threads about mass shootings. But an omnibus thread of “gun culture in the US is out of control, here’s the latest mass shooting”, or “we have this pesky 2nd amendment, so what CAN we do to reduce gun deaths in the US?” both seem like potentially fertile thread topics.
I’ll start: i think those mass shooting practice sessions they do in schools these days, where all the kids hide in a closet while police officers pretend to be shooters, are counter-productive. I think they teach kids that shooting up a school is a normal thing to do, and put the idea in the head of every child who grows up to be a disgruntled and unstable teen.
“And then. . .depression set in. . .”