# Looks like another mass shooting
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [August 5, 2012, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529 "2012-08-05T17:11:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 12
### Author:  [@Labrador\_Deceiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labrador_Deceiver)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/221 "2012-08-07T16:42:22Z")
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#):
>
> Ah, more personal attacks. Keep 'em coming! While you’re preparing your next one, perhaps you could read [post #197](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15357454&postcount=197) and [post #198](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15357983&postcount=198) again. You did read them the first time through, right?
Clearly, you haven’t. Because you continue to show your stupidity by comparing the coal industry to guns. That means you’re either a moron, or dishonest. Probably both.
We’re in the pit. Go the fuck away if you can’t handle it.
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### Author:  [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/222 "2012-08-07T16:44:56Z")
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> Please tell me you think “well-regulated militia” means “only the army, subject to legal regulations” so I can be absolutely sure you have no idea what you’re talking about whatsoever.
Sorry, no can do. I’m pretty sure “militia” means “militia.” And before you ask, I am not saying that the Bill of Rights requires gun ownership to be in the context of a militia: it clearly doesn’t. I am just saying that appeals to the second amendment largely ignore the wording of the second amendment. I don’t really care about the intent of the amendment, since we’ve had 200+ years of jurisprudence on the subject since it was adopted.
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### Author:  [@Enkel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enkel)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/223 "2012-08-07T17:19:22Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#):
>
> Except… what happened? Apparently after 52 years of a perfect record, after having them hurt no one, the gun lobby pushed to have them effectively banned anyway. If they actually were interested in safety and preventing of crime, this was a perfect case - the weapons had become a non-threat to safety - job done. But that didn’t stop them.
Um… automatic weapons aren’t banned and the transfer form specifically calls them “machineguns”?
And now, your argument seems to be that weapons regulation is successful?
Hmmm… maybe we could expand the approach used for automatic weapons to all other fire arms?
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### Author:  [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/224 "2012-08-07T18:16:57Z")
> [@Labrador\_Deceiver](#):
>
> Clearly, you haven’t. Because you continue to show your stupidity by comparing the coal industry to guns. That means you’re either a moron, or dishonest. Probably both.
>
> We’re in the pit. Go the fuck away if you can’t handle it.
Another well-reasoned argument from you; good job!
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### Author:  [@Labrador\_Deceiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labrador_Deceiver)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/225 "2012-08-07T18:32:31Z")
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#):
>
> Another well-reasoned argument from you; good job!
Pointing out the fact that you’re too stupid to accurately follow a discussion serves a very valuable service to other participants in the thread.
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### Author:  [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/226 "2012-08-07T19:07:13Z")
> [@Labrador\_Deceiver](#):
>
> Pointing out the fact that you’re too stupid to accurately follow a discussion serves a very valuable service to other participants in the thread.
We’ll let you know when you’ve done anything remotely like that.
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### Author:  [@Labrador\_Deceiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labrador_Deceiver)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/227 "2012-08-07T20:00:46Z")
Here is SenorBeef’s original point regarding media sensationalism as it pertains to mass shootings:
> [@SenorBeef](#):
>
> To draw a comparison, people are deathly afraid of nuclear power plants because an accident might some day kill a few dozen people. However, they are completely oblivious to the hundreds of thousands of deaths per year that are caused on a regular basis by the poison that coal plants spew into our atmosphere. Nuclear threats are exotic and overblown, coal threats are mundane and ignored.
Here is your mouth-breathing, moronic, shit-brained response:
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#):
>
> By your logic, coal-fired power plants are much more desirable than guns, since they provide heat, air conditioning, lighting, refrigeration, computers, traffic signals, and a host of other applied uses to more than 300 million people, while only kIilling 13,000.
>
> Guns provide much less to far fewer people (only 100 million own guns, by your numbers) yet kill about the same amount of people.
>
> And lest you forget, coal-fired plants are regulated, and not anyone can just start one up.
It doesn’t get any fucking better than this prime fucking example of someone totally failing to follow a line of logic. Your stupidity shines with the magnitude of a thousand suns.
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### Author:  [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/228 "2012-08-07T21:22:23Z")
Buy all the guns you want, they won’t save you. Put one in every room, you’ll have to, won’t you? If they come, they will come by surprise and ambush, they won’t knock politely at the door, “Hello, home invaders here! Good evening, perhaps you should arm yourself?..” Put up a sign, advertising your armament, so that they know that your home has valuable items easily disposed of on the black market.
Strengthen your walls, your doors, it doesn’t help you, your fear is already there, it doesn’t need to burrow under your walls or batter down your doors, it is already within your innermost defenses, eroding your reason and rotting your spirit. You are afraid, it has won. Fear commands, and you obey.
The first and best defense against fear is law, civilization. The willingness to presume that the stranger is an unmet friend, rather than an unknown enemy. Civlization requires a certain courage, a willingness to agree with other civilized people that we need not arm ourselves against each other. It is the refusal to be a slave to unreasoning fear. One may rationally fear lightening, but reason is to avoid trees during thunderstorms, it is not reasonable to shove a lightning rod up your butt and attach it by wires to your tin foil hat.
So long as you submit to your fear, it will rule you. Your weapon is its amulet, you wear it like a Christian might wear a crucifix, it is its symbol and announces your faith in fear. Anger, hatred, irrational prejudice, all these things corrupt the mind and weaken the spirit, but none so effectively as fear.
I have been afraid, I am not an avatar of blind courage. I have been beaten, I have been mugged, I have been robbed at gunpoint and at fear for my life. But I am still here, and the odds are very good that the men who did these things are dead, in prison, or in brief transit to either destination.
But I will not reduce myself to them, I will not nourish the worm of fear into my heart. And, by unusual circumstance, I have seen another be afraid of me. I have seen that animal cringing fear in another’s eyes upon me, and as God is my witness, I never will again.
TL:DR?
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### Author:  [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/229 "2012-08-07T21:48:08Z")
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> Yes it does, because the whole point is that gun ownership is a right. Once a concession is made to “regulate” it beyond the point where other rights may be regulated (e.g. for the mentally incompetent or underage) then all guns WILL be banned, having removed the legal impediment to the gun-confiscation nuts’ desire to do so.
I doubt it. As I’ve said before in gun-related threads, I think the real problem is not guns _per se_ but the ultimately indefensible notion of gun ownership as an inalienable right. I think we should openly and honestly resolve this problem by repealing the Second Amendment. Then we can argue the pros and cons of specific policies to regulate gun ownership in specific ways, just as we now do with policies regulating ownership of other types of machinery.
I see absolutely zero evidence either from past history or current politics to believe that such a change would result in a legislative decision or even a credible attempt to ban ALL guns from US society altogether. Nor should it, IMO: reasonably regulated gun ownership is a perfectly acceptable thing (although I think it’s silly to regard it as an inalienable individual right), and I find it completely implausible that a majority of Americans will ever just decide to do away with it entirely.
That being the case, I’m not particularly impressed by irrational fearmongering about how some inexplicably influential minority of so-called “gun confiscation nuts” are somehow going to ensure that “all guns WILL be banned” (:rolleyes: ) despite most Americans’ opposition.
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### Author:  [@Freakenstein](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freakenstein)
#### Post date: [August 7, 2012, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/230 "2012-08-07T21:53:58Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#):
>
> What’s the cost of 12 deaths a year versus all the wealth created directly from the firearms hobby.
How many of these ‘12’ You would see to be Your friends and family or what would be a suitable number of them?
> [@SenorBeef](#):
>
> How many deaths per year do you think that spree shootings result in? How does this compare to other unnatural causes of death?
So if tsunami destroys whole California You wouldn’t mind some psycho killing everybody in Las Vegas 'cause it would be just peanuts?
QUOTE=SenorBeef;15351946]Guns save lives all the time. It’s just that they do it in a way that doesn’t make the news. People defend their lives with the threat of deadly force or actually using deadly force.
[/QUOTE]
And this is a major example of successful self-defending since the psycho was gunned down. Right?
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> The rest of the world has higher rates of overall crime and violent crime, as it does lower murder and gun crime, rates than the US.
I can’t cite so You could trash this easily.
Could this be ( as I heard ) because in the U.S. people just don’t bother to report to police 'cause they don’t think it’s any use.
> [@SenorBeef](#):
>
> My example with drowning was to demonstrate that they occur at a much greater rate than spree shootings, but get far less press coverage. If the media suddenly decided drownings were big viewer attractors, and started covering all of them extensively, you’d all suddenly think “there’s a drowning epidemic! WE MUST DO SOMETHING!” even though nothing about the rate of drownings would’ve changed, just your willingness to be lead around by the narrative.
If there would be 12 000 murders by drowning every year, some of them happening a dozen at a time, I’m sure press would make pretty big headlines.
( So there, I’m only in the page three now… )
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### Author:  [@gamerunknown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gamerunknown)
#### Post date: [August 8, 2012, 9:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/231 "2012-08-08T09:19:27Z")
> [@Condescending Robot](#):
>
> A large number, almost certainly a supermajority, of people who think that banning scary-looking guns or automatic weapons, have in fact plainly stated that they want to ban all or nearly all guns
Nope. All that’s needed for an argument to qualify as a slippery slope is for the progression not to be inevitable. Argue against an outright gun ban if you want. Argue against the government hampering first amendment rights if you want. They are not necessary correlates of gun control.
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### Author:  [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)
#### Post date: [August 8, 2012, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/232 "2012-08-08T13:36:14Z")
Update: it’s [becoming clearer](http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/08/us/wisconsin-temple-shooting/index.html?hpt=hp_t1) that the shooter was knee-deep in hate groups. Acting alone from all indications, but _not_ just some insane apolitical wacko. Looks like terrorism to me.
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### Author:  [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)
#### Post date: [August 8, 2012, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/233 "2012-08-08T14:12:53Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#):
>
> The thing is, we care do care about those who were hurt. We care so much about the ease and unfairness of senseless murder that we want to prevent it from happening again. There’s no way to bring back today’s dead, but there is a way to prevent tomorrow’s. (Yes, I know that without guns we’d see crazy mass poisoners, but that’s a separate issue yet again.)
That’s just a rationalization. People who care express the fact that they care, and don’t try to stir up arguments they know will piss others off in threads specifically designed to express emotion about the situation.
You’re about the only person who has even addressed the gun control topic that has shown even the remotest amount of caring about the incident as anything more than something to stir up a political agenda.
The reason the argument that you are politicizing stuff works is because you ARE politicizing it. And thus, even if you have a good idea, you are wasting it on people who are now going to be defensive. Sure, a tragedy can inspire good policy, but it’s not going to happen in an environment where all your arguments can be completely short-circuited by a single sound bite.
I’m starting to get to the point where I think you guys are intentionally doing this so you know nothing will get done. It makes more sense than trying the same tactic over and over again.
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### Author:  [@Condescending\_Robot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Condescending_Robot)
#### Post date: [August 9, 2012, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/234 "2012-08-09T02:58:11Z")
> [@elucidator](#):
>
> But I will not reduce myself to them, I will not nourish the worm of fear into my heart. And, by unusual circumstance, I have seen another be afraid of me. I have seen that animal cringing fear in another’s eyes upon me, and as God is my witness, I never will again.
>
> TL:DR?
Yeah, whatever. I think the people who react to any news of a murder with certainty that they are next and we must start confiscating 300 million guns, on the off chance that all the evidence is wrong and that will somehow protect them from the already-vanishing chance of being killed with a gun, are the ones letting fear and other emotions rule their minds.
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### Author:  [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)
#### Post date: [August 9, 2012, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/235 "2012-08-09T14:53:51Z")
Good thing there aren’t any of those people, then.
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### Author:  [@JXJohns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JXJohns)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2012, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/236 "2012-08-10T22:17:44Z")
> [@Enkel](#):
>
> Um… automatic weapons aren’t banned and the transfer form specifically calls them “machineguns”?
>
> And now, your argument seems to be that weapons regulation is successful?
>
> Hmmm… maybe we could expand the approach used for automatic weapons to all other fire arms?
By banning all civilian sales of guns manufactured after 1986? No thanks.
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### Author:  [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2012, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/237 "2012-08-10T23:02:11Z")
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> Yeah, whatever. I think the people who react to any news of a murder with certainty that they are next and we must start confiscating 300 million guns, on the off chance that all the evidence is wrong and that will somehow protect them from the already-vanishing chance of being killed with a gun, are the ones letting fear and other emotions rule their minds.
Yeah, maybe so. But who buys those magazines? Maybe you haven’t seen them, but you find them in your convenience store magazine rack, with your Cosmopolitan, your tattoo magazines, _New York Review of Books_…
Gun Porn. Evocative photos of pistols, meant to arouse the drooling passions like the swimsuit issue of _Sports Illustrated_ does for the comparatively normal. Car magazines are sort of similar, I suppose, same kind of weirdness, to arouse lust for metallic objects rather than fleshy orbs. But one sort of metallic object goes zoom-zoom, where the other punches holes in people.
Who do they sell those mags to? Hippies?
If you’re gonna get all snarky ass about how unreasonable and emotional gun control people are, oughtn’t you take a moment to assess the demographics of gun fetishists? How many are there? A legitimate demographic, or a public health issue?
Here, check out home defense at _Guns Magazine_…
[http://www.gunsmagazine.com/home-self-defense/](http://www.gunsmagazine.com/home-self-defense/)
> [@](#):
>
> …Back in my cop days I met a guy who kept a small, quick-open handgun safe within arm’s reach of his bed. On top of it was a bright orange screamin’-shrill lifeboat whistle. The instant a suspicious “bump in the night” woke him, he would first grab that whistle—and then the gun. His family knew that one blast meant get into your “safe position” and stay there. Two meant evacuate the house according to our plan. And they all knew he was deadly serious…
Where do these people live, Baghdad? Aleppo? Where is this sane and reasonable behavior for civilized people? Who are these people, and how many are there?
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### Author:  [@Condescending\_Robot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Condescending_Robot)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2012, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/238 "2012-08-10T23:07:31Z")
No one’s saying you have to get a gun or be one of those people. They can live in their worlds and, despite the insistence that evidence doesn’t matter, the fact is that they have essentially no chance of ever harming you.
Saying “nobody is allowed to have a gun/a scary-looking gun” is imposing your irrationality on everyone else.
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### Author:  [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2012, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/239 "2012-08-10T23:13:50Z")
Oh, lest I be misunderstood, I am firmly in the Keep the Goddam Things If They Mean That Much to You Camp. Not about to advocate for complete banning, if for no other reason than its fucking impossible.
Only way forward is the long slog, the hard road of changing our culture, person by person. Ain’t gonna be soon, ain’t gonna be easy, but the political/legislative approach is a proven loser. Maybe down the road a piece, when the NRA’s pockets aren’t full of Congressgits testicles.
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### Author:  [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2012, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/240 "2012-08-17T22:03:17Z")
Looks like it may not be over – another member has been murdered: [Dalbir Singh Murdered: Another Sikh Killed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin | HuffPost Religion](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simran-jeet-singh/dalbir-singh-murdered_b_1794063.html)
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