Are copycat serial killers really a thing outside of the movies?
Really?
I just don’t understand that mind set. This morning you and I are no more (or less) likely to be a victim of a shooting than we were last night or last week.
On top of that, despite having lived in such big, bad cities as St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago and I have never in my life felt a need to own a gun. I have gone target shooting with friends and fired several different guns (hand guns .22, .38, 9 mm, and .45; long guns a .22 rifle and an AK-47, two different shotguns whose calibers I can’t recall, though one was a break-open and the other a pump) so it’s not that I’m afraid of touching one or can’t appreciate using them, I’ve just never owned one and never felt the need to go out and buy one, much less wear one every day. I have considered the option, and I have been exposed to violence (shot at twice, various assaults, and attempted mugging, etc.) so I’m not naive to the possibilities, but there are strategies other than “return fire”.
So I’m going to go to work this morning unarmed, like I do every day I go to work. The odds of me being shot are no different than they were before.
I’m going to go about my life where I live, unarmed, like I’ve done all my life. The odds of me being shot are no different than they were before.
Now, I don’t have a problem with responsible citizens owning and carrying guns, but I think too many people (which may or may not including @Crafter_Man because, honestly, I don’t really know him) view them as magic talismans that will keep them safe. Safety involves a lot more than owning and carrying a gun. Most people I know who own/carry are, indeed, responsible people but I know a few who, to my mind, rely a little too much on the gun and not enough on other things, like situational awareness and willingness to run away. Then again, I’ve long said the best part of being a woman is not having to prove what sort of man I am. I don’t have issues with running away or hiding if that seems the best strategy at the time to keep myself safe and whole. Of course, someone who is in the position of defending young children (as an example) might have a different calculation.
Maybe you have reasons for living where you do, but if I felt where I lived was so dangerous I’d have to be “extra conscientious about making sure I’m armed when I go somewhere” I’d move elsewhere.
The Native Alaskans might had a difference of opinion on the need to hunt for food thing - there are still subsistence hunters up there. OK, OK, most of us don’t live near the Arctic Circle.
Also, there’s Shoot. Wound. Animal staggers off in agony. Dammit, reloading. Shoot. Put animal out of its misery.
And there’s Shoot. Wound. Animal turns around and attacks in a rage. Dammit, reloading. AAAAGH! Reload. AAAAGH! Shoot. Animal out of misery. Apply tourniquet if needed, direct pressure to bleeding wounds. Call 911 if you have bars on your phone. Not so much the case with hunting rabbits but people do hunt larger game.
Maybe not bushpig, but the US has a significant problems with feral pigs. Which can be freakin’ dangerous.
From what I’ve found, getting inspired by movies is more common.
Let me turn this around on the OP:
How many people need to die before you’ll support banning alcohol?
Let’s keep this nice and simple and only consider the effects of drunk driving deaths to innocent people (ie not the person who chose to drink and drive). It happens every day - thousands of completely innocent people have been killed by drunk drivers.
Now, banning alcohol wouldn’t completely eliminate the problem, but it would obviously dramatically reduce it. By advocating for the continued legality of alcohol, you are simply accepting that lots of people are going to die that wouldn’t have died if alcohol were prohibited.
Yes, we try to keep drunk driving from happening. We try to keep shootings from happening, too. The reality is that widespread availability of guns and alcohol are both going to lead to a lot of innocent death.
What if I came to you with a news story every time it happened? What if we covered DUI deaths like we do mass shootings? What if I showed you a picture of a cute family every day and say “the 5 year old is dead, the mother is dead, and the father is in critical condition - all because you think alcohol should be legal… how many dead people do we need before you’ll change your mind?”
But you won’t change your mind, because you’ve just accepted that it’s going to happen and you’re okay with that tradeoff. You want to drink, you want alcohol to be available, so you’re okay with accepting that people are going to die because of it. Maybe you yourself have never drank irresponsibly (just as the vast, vast majority of gun owners don’t ever shoot anyone) and so you don’t feel like you’re contributing to the problem, but by advocating for the legality of alcohol, you are condoning a legal state in which people will pay with their lives for your desire for alcohol to be legally available.
How is that any different from gun owners how gun owners who don’t want to ban guns feel?
The difference is simply that you don’t like guns and you do like booze, so it seems obvious that one should be banned and the other allowed, and you can’t understand how people who have the opposite values can possibly be comfortable with all the death that legal guns bring.
Mass shootings are also very salient, whereas drunk driving deaths are routine. We love stories about mass shootings - we watch the news where they recreate the shooting, they bring in psychologists to talk about the motives of the shooter, and they just milk the shit out of it in every way they can. They’re rare and big and spectacular and that makes us react more emotionally to them, and we lose track of how they fit into the world rationally and statistically. It’s similar to plane crashes vs auto crashes - plane crashes are extremely rare and car crashes are constant, but people often become terrified of plane crashes when one happens and don’t care at all when a billion car crashes have happened since the last plane crash.
But imagine a world where the news covered every drunk driving crash like they covered mass shootings. Imagine a world where something around 50% of the American public wants alcohol banned. That would change your perceptions dramatically even though the same number of people were dying.
And in fact, if the media did do this, it would probably dramatically increase the number of prohibitionists. People aren’t good at judging issues purely rationally, weighing the costs and benefits of every decision. They think emotionally, they look for the salient, they’re easily manipulated by what the media chooses to cover. At any time, the media could choose a topic to cover - like drunk driving deaths, or dog attacks, or anything that happens regularly that hardly anyone pays attention to - and just by reporting on these things they can convince people that these things are very real dangers and the sort of thing they should be afraid of in complete disproportion to the actual risk that the public faces.
Since the public loves to consume media about mass shootings, the media gives people what they want, which makes people dramatically overestimate the relative threat and importance of mass shootings as a means of death. This is why you see the focus on these rare but spectacular events rather than the more mundane every day gun homicides, and you get proposals for laws that aren’t sound public policies because they’re trying to ban the salient - say, guns that look scary - rather than the rational. This also means that the fact that drunk driving deaths are so routine, so common, that it’s not worth reporting on any particular one. The more rare and more spectacular something is, the more attention we give to it.
If you were a prohibitionist, every day you could harp on the new slate of drunk driving deaths, focus on the most emotionally charged ones (cute kids dying, for instance), get righteous about how your opponents - people who want to keep these kids dying just so they can get drunk - are awful people. You’d ask “how many more innocent dead people do we need to see before you’ll change your mind?” This is what we see every time there’s a mass shooting.
You’re saying to yourself “I can’t believe gun owners are willing to allow the slaughter to continue just so they can have their guns!” like it’s some rare, incomprehensible behavior, but almost everyone does this exact same thing for multiple issues. Everyone wants things that aren’t really essential to their lives despite the fact that these things statistically are going to result in harm and death to innocent people.
People willing to accept gun deaths to keep gun legal aren’t thinking any differently than you, there are just personal preference, emotional, and salience factors that make you perceive it differently.
You still have feral pigs and other dangerous animals there (wolves, grizzly bears, etc). So even though I’m in Australia, my point stands.
I don’t have hard statistics in front of me but anecdotally there are a significant number of people who do actually feed (or significantly supplement the diets of) their families via hunting.
Mississippi, for example, has a program called Hunter’s Harvest where hunters can donate deer they’ve shot so they can be processed and turned into food for the impoverished.
A single deer has quite a bit of meat on it too - a white tail deer (the most commonly hunted kind) can easily weigh more than 50kg - which, even factoring in the reduction in weight once it’s been properly field dressed and then processed, is still a lot of meat - especially for someone who might be struggling with skyrocketing grocery/fuel/cost of living prices in other areas.
Deer aren’t the only edible game animal, either.
If I thought people I care about or people I don’t care much about were at non-negligible risk of harm from mass shootings, I’d be more supportive of policy action to address that risk. I don’t know what that critical mass is, but currently the risk simply doesn’t register. Holding up mass shootings as a prime driver for policy changes is evidence of poor risk assessment.
That doesn’t mean no policy changes are warranted. Just not because of mass shootings.
Frankly I am not convinced banning “assault weapons” would have any effect on the number of mass murders committed in the United States.
There have been mass murders using other weapons before–cars, bombs. car bombs, fire, poison, even stabbings. I think the real issue is America’s violent culture.
And I don’t think using other countries’ example of banning firearms really is a good analogy because of the cultural differences between them and the US.
I think the caveat given in the source article is important – it’s what occurred to me as I saw the gun ownership rate by state stat:
The following table shows the number of registered firearms in the U.S. by state.3 While reading, it’s important to remember that only six states and the District of Columbia require the registration of firearms.4 The sum of registered firearms equals only 6,058,390, a far cry from the 393 million total in America. Still, this can give us an idea of how gun ownership breaks down by state.
Which would make that last sentence (above) rather dubious to me.
Carry on.
So many things lend themselves to easily turning the ‘knob’ UP or turning the knob DOWN.
Take speed limits or the legal Blood Alcohol Concentration limit before Driving While Impaired kicks in. They’re basically tied to clean metrics that we can tweak after negotiation.
Gun ownership ain’t that.
It’s a very difficult issue around which to create valid, legitimate, enforceable, legally tight legislation even if the political will shifted.
[And – obviously – unless the laws were federal, then our states’ rights model makes that infinitely harder to implement.]
Much like Wall Street stays up all night trying to figure out how to marginally skirt the existing laws and get rich, the power of capitalism (and greed) in such a powerful industry won’t sleep. Capitalism – in this regard – works like prisoners: all the time in the world, and no greater priority than how to escape.
If there were a way to just tweak the rheostat and see what happened … I’d definitely be in favor of turning it toward “fewer guns” for a generation or so and seeing what happened.
If only.
Also … as somebody alluded to upthread …
I have to hand it to the NRA. Not only for advancing their “it’s because of anything BUT the gun” position but for having the unmitigated grapes to use mass shootings as a call for MORE guns.
[Can you even imagine the left wing saying that the solution to the abortion issue is more abortions, not fewer ??]
Mad props for stones … pure granite stones.
Yes, if we don’t stop (often illegally, but too often not) killing all the wolves and other predators but do stop killing deer, the deer population will explode.
I do think this is equivalent to:
Before we (white Europeans) got here, the math on animal numbers seemed to work at least reasonably well (I’d defer to any Dopers with bison in their lineage to correct me).
Now, it’s valid to argue “how far back do we want to go in this discussion ??” but my very limited understanding of herd management distills to “we have met the enemy and it is us.”
Thoughts and prayers
[quote=“Broomstick, post:64, topic:964380”]
Logical or not, I completely understand that mind set. The more occurrences of mass shootings the more people feel “oh my god, what would I do in a situation like that, how in the world am I going to protect myself when a nutjob is shooting people and heading my way?”
They also fear, rightly or not, that nutjobs committing these shootings probably never got these guns in a legal manner anyhow. Gun control measures would punish those who follow all the rules in obtaining, owning, using firearms while criminals doing illegal things would just continue doing illegal things getting their hands on guns.
Their next jump to conclusion is that now the law abiding citizen good guy (themselves) has their last line of defense taken away while the criminals continue to arm up like they always have, illegally.
In the “us versus them” mind set the bad guys suddenly have the upper hand.
Well, this discussion has rapidly turned to hyperbole, semantically broken ‘logifying’, thinly veiled insults, and uninformed presumption about who “needs” to own a firearm for hunting or self-defence rather than a rational discussion of practical means to reduce mass shootings and other firearm-related violence.
Bowing out.
Stranger
To be fair, before we got here and ripped the North American ecosystem to shreds, Native Americans had already done a great job decimating America’s wildlife (just like humans had on every continent outside of Africa, where the animals had 2 millions years to evolve alongside us). The “noble savage in tune with nature” myth is just that, a myth.
But it’s certainly true that the ecosystem had settled into a certain equilibrium until colonial powers got involved.
Yes, in places where both prey AND predators are allowed to restore their populations, you don’t need to go in and cull deer. Of course, such places are few and far between. For example, wolves in Yellowstone have had their mating and hunting dynamics totally messed up, begause Montana lets hunters line up outside the national park and shoot Yellowstone wolves as they leave the park. (No, not literally. But they have let 24 wolves be killed just outside the park in the last few months).
Let’s start with something basic. Under gun control laws if I
am 18
am not a convicted felon
have taken a gun safety class (like for a CWP)
Then should I be allowed to buy a gun?
If I then take that gun or guns and conduct a mass shooting, where is the flaw in the system?
If there were a rational means to reduce gun-related violence in the U.S., it would have already been implemented.
I hate these mass shootings as anyone else. But as noted by @SenorBeef, the only rational solution is to live with it.
My emphases.
2/5 of your “not killing people” examples are all about killing people.
And are there many guns that are designed as collectables? As in, that’s the primary intended reason for that gun’s existence.
Africa is no exception, once guns entered the picture. Look at elephants, rhinos or gorillas.
Better hurry up, though…