… well, actually. I think I am. Any time I hear about an instance of terrorism in the USA I instantly think, “Goddam white guy, I’ll bet.” And sure enough, even if the name sounds a little Spanish–totally a white dude with an axe to grind against people that don’t look like him.
I’m not going to be shy about it: White people, esp white men as the white wimmins don’t tend to do public violence, need to get their shit together and police their own before a government happens that might actually react to these shenanigans.
The white women could do their part and stop voting for Republicans. Far too many of them voted for a guy who bought a teen beauty pageant so that he could barge in their dressing room and boasted about getting away with being a sexual predator. If that doesn’t stop them from voting for him, why should his encouragement of mass murder?
I mean obviously it’s unlikely that The Audacity of Grope will ever barge into *their *dressing room, so why should they care about some slatterns ? Thinking as a Christian ?
I feel old, I remember when they wouldn’t call it terrorism if a white guy did it. I mean, you’d have to actually blow up a building, like McVeigh. If a white guy killed innocent people AND had the nerve to damage a building in the process, that was terrorism. We’ve come a long way as a society, huh?
Don’t worry, he’ll shoot a hole-in-one in memory of each victim. All in a single round of 18 holes. Impossible!, you say. Well then, you don’t know DJT. I’m sure he’ll be only too happy to disclose his [del]taxes[/del] score card. Which he personally logged in his own hand.
I wouldn’t actually assume that someone who pictures a white guy when hearing about a mass shooter is racist. It isn’t the same as assuming a criminal is a black person–because more criminals as a whole are white than black. In this case, however, the shooters do in fact tend to be white.
Where it gets problematic is when you talk about white guys needing to get their act together, when shooters are a minority of a minority of a minority of white people. What do I need to get together as a white guy?
I’m much more on board with calling out the right wing, because there is a direct correlation with some of their beliefs and these actions. Stop acting like terrorists are mostly brown people, or left-wing, for example. Stop embracing the racists. But even then I stop short of blaming them. Just fix the parts of your ideology that encourage this sort of thing, and kick out the radicalizers, rather than embracing them simply because they are anti-liberal.
I just wonder where all those highly skilled, gun-toting, very helpful in a active shooter sitch, Trump voting, white guys were at in these two incidents? Hmmmm?
At least you wish they were there. But cops at the Dayton shooting managed to put down the shooter 30 seconds after the first shot. He still killed 9 people.
And to answer a likely question, what of some such guy was there? He probably would have been killed also if he didn’t have sufficient warning.
IIRC there was a “good guy with a gun”, an actual member of the US military, said good guy with a concealed carry permit, at the El Paso shooting. He did not stop the carnage, although the reports I heard said he did save some.
Well…I done quoted the whole thing because I didn’t know how to break it up. First, I think Beck was being sarcastic, and that she does not in fact wish they were there. I could be wrong, she is a woman of mystery.
For my part, I’m glad the good guys with guns were either absent or quietly shitting themselves in the snack aisle (as they’ve been told they would be). Because a bad guy with a gun looks just like a good guy with a gun. And another good guy with a [del]hero complex[/del] gun might just grease another good guy. If you ain’t wearing a uniform, do not engage in combat. And good job, cops. (Let the record show I have expressed sincere appreciation for the cops, at least in this instance.)
Lastly, given 1) the non-appearance of good guys with guns, 2) the pretty damned fast appearance of lead-spraying policemen, and 3) the staggeringly-high body count; I’d be interested in hearing theories from 2nd amendment diehards about why banning semiautomatic rifles is a nonstarter. I can’t be arsed to do the math, but I am willing to believe more Americans have died at each other’s muzzles than have been put down in insurrection by the US government they say the 2nd was intended to protect us from. Yeah, let’s count Kent State levels of insurrection putdown.
When black dysfunction is the topic of discussion, conservatives are frequently chock full of suggestions for black people. “Knock the chips off your shoulder and stop blaming the Man for your problems.” “Stop having out-of-wedlock babies.” “Stop glorifying thug life and listening to gangsta rape.” “Stop speaking Ebonics and assimilate”. And those of us who aren’t guilty of these sins are expected to rein in those who do. So in essence, all black people are told to “get our acts together”. Even though most of us already do.
I don’t know if white guys need to do more than anyone else to fix the mass shooter problem, to be honest. But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If minority subcultures are expected to take responsibility for their problem children (black folk and Muslims being two that come to mind), then it is fair to hold white American males responsible for theirs. If it’s not fair to make rando white guys accountable for rando white mass shooters, then it’s also not fair to make rando brown and black people responsible for their shitty randos. As a progressive, you probably intuitively understand this. But lots of conservatives don’t see the contradiction.
I guess it’s fair to say, “Don’t shame me for not fixing a problem I didn’t cause or contribute to and have no power over, and I won’t turn around and do the same to you.”
Guilty. Until fairly recently I have been loathe to give Rando credit for being anything more than an overly rambunctious murderer. Terrorists at least have some sort of goal and some semblance of organization. But now. Now I’m not so sure.
I was just musing to my cat today, as one does, about those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. It follows that unimaginative but ambitious folks can always look to history for ideas, and be reasonably sure (albeit unconsciously) that nobody will read ahead and cut them short as long as they dress the facts a little differently. So what we have is a dictatorial leader of government, despising with the most caustic venom a powerless minority, simultaneously dehumanizing and villainizing them, and saying, “Meh…” when very public violence is done to them. And we have similarly-minded people who read that indifference to suffering as a green light to get after that population. We now have a sort of organized group of people doing the violent bidding of a maniac. It just looks a little different on the outside because although we’ve seen this movie before, the actors and costumes and story details are a little different.
Just to be a contentious dick, I’m going to say I read a cite that said something to the effect of, “This kind of shit is usually perped by a white guy, but overall white guy is not disproportionately represented.” Point being, yeah more white trigger pumpers, because more white guys. I don’t know that I buy it, but fuck you, this is The Pit. Any way, the presumption that a right wing white guy is pulling the trigger on an unarmed crowd–knowing nothing else about the sitch–is no less racist than assuming that watermelon was stolen by … well, let’s see, nobody steals them from the store so we’re probably looking for a financially-strapped rural person living in watermelon country. And not a white one, because don’t nobody never seem to catch white boys stealing watermelons.
Interesting. So we are glad he was there, right? It would have been worse without him?
The reason I ask is because I see a lot of pro-gun arguments on this board that boil down to making the perfect into the enemy of the good. Here is an example of something that lessened the impact of a shooting despite being unable to stop the shooting altogether.
So if it is an armed citizen who is lessening the impact of a shooting, we need them everywhere. But if it is a common sense gun law that does the exact same thing, we don’t need those at all because they won’t stop future shootings from happening. Oh wait, how many future shootings is this Good Samaritan going to stop?