How depressing that I can’t tell if the news headline flashing across my PC is from Syria or Wisconsin. I’m sure the gun rights activists are satisfied and content, secure in the knowledge that they are backing such a worthy cause.
Back to the actual topic at hand: the guy was an ex army vet, and unnamed sources alleged that the shooter was possibly a “skin head” or “white supremacist.”
Think maybe Peter King (NY-R) can get on this domestic terrorism or is he a strictly ‘only Muslims are domestic terrorists’ types?
I’ll give you one guess how that is likely to go…
Quoting myself from the other thread:
It’s ironic that you’re the only one who brought political parties into this and then implied all gun advocates and/or right wingers are against expanded access to mental health care, etc., but then you caution us against painting people with a broad brush one paragraph later.
Are you filled with guilt anytime someone is harmed when, if they had access to a gun, they could’ve defended themselves? You might argue that the situation comes up less frequently (and it’s hard to have good statistics on this), but certainly you must concede that it does happen. Are you partially responsible for the harm they receive?
Logically, explain to me the fascination with mass anything. If a dozen people get murdered individually in a night, is it less tragic than 12 people getting murdered all at once? This, again, is part of my point. I’m not even trying to have the general generic gun debate in this thread - I’m saying that caring more about spree shootings than any other random shitty way to die, including regular old gun murders, is illogical.
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.
But I do think those deaths are somewhat comparable as a shitty random way to go sort of thing. Getting shot randomly by a spree killer at a movie theater, drowning in your own pool, getting hit on the highway by a drunk driver - they’re all in a big category of “wow, shit happens, you didn’t deserve that” deaths. And as such, you can start to evaluate which of these deaths are more frequent, what the cost is to prevent them from happening, etc.
And once you start looking at them logically like that, you’ll realize that spree shootings are a negligible chance on the “shit happens” list of deaths. They just score high on the outrage/emotional meter.
Fuck the Army story line. The media got a real big boner when they saw that. Real quick to put it in their headlines. The guy was a Hawk missile (anti-aircraft missile replaced by the Patriot) repair technician. During the 90s after Desert Storm. He wasn’t a Combat Arms soldier he was a wrench turner. He doesn’t have PTSD. The only combat he saw was in John Wayne movies. Can we just put that to rest? He had a job repairing equipment for a few years 20 years ago. That did not make him a killer.
To pick a closer analogy, do you feel guilty every time you have a beer? Every time some drunk driver plows into a car full of cute little kids in the back seat and kills everyone, unless you’re out trying to create prohibition, that one’s on you.. Have you voted for someone who will ban alcohol consumption yet? How many people has your desire to be able to have a beer killed?
You just want to get drunk and it’s KILLING CUTE LITTLE CHILDREN!!!11
Sorry to quote myself.
And its not like the Army turned him into a shitbag, they just couldn’t fix him. He was reduced in rank and kicked out in 98.
With an OP that asks…Perhaps with another dozen massacres, gun laws will start making headway in Washington, you didn’t see that coming?
Ah, the old “this happens a lot and that happens a lot and we still do those things” argument.
It’s the denominator, stupid. Exposure. How many people swim or take a bath each day? How many people fire a weapon each day? Which is bigger? How many people drink alcohol a day?
Why do people still take trips in airplanes? The frequency of use of a thing and the value derived from that thing combine with the frequency of morbidity and mortality per unit of exposure.
Apart from that, we actually place significant restrctions on alcohol use and motoring. You can’t drink and drive. You can’t drive with open containers. There’s no lobby fighting against reasonable limitations to the right to bear beer.
Well technically, it’s illegal to shoot innocent people too.
You and your fancy legal jargon.
But by and large for many people everything right up to shooting other people would be legal. I mean, I’m not up on the laws around transporting firearms, but I don’t remember hearing that they had to be in original unopened packages while in the car with you. How about driving under the influence of firearms? Is that illegal?
Seriously, these people who advance ladder, pool, bucket or automobile arguments in these matters are like the guy that heard that 90% of accidents occur within 5 miles of home, and think “Oh shit, I better move!”
Does it have to be firing a weapon each day? Is that required for it to be a potential danger or useful object? Presumably anyone with posession of a gun could go on a killing spree at any time. So with 80 million gun owners, and a spree on average every, I dunno, 6 months? we’ve got one spree per roughly every 3.5 billion man-hours of gun owners just sitting on their guns (stroking lovingly) who aren’t going on killing sprees with them.
I would imagine that compares pretty favorably vs beer consumption/drunk driving death ratio, pool ownership vs drowning ratio, etc.
This is true and part of the rational argument I’ve spoken of. Reaction to spree shootings is more like ignoring the fact that planes are the safest way to travel long distance and demanding air travel be banned after a flight with a few hundred people crashes because it’s a really dramatic story.
Oh please. You can’t legally drink and drive, and you can’t legally fire your guns in the air or set up a practice range on the playground at your local school or carry without a license (generally).
When people make these analogies, they compare doing actively dangerous or harmful actions with simply owning guns. Yes, the first amendment isn’t a defense against libel or yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, and the second amendment isn’t a defense against murder or behaving recklessly against guns.
But the analogy you try to make is - you can’t drink and drive, and therefore you shouldn’t be allowed to own guns or certain types of guns, as if the ownership was the reckless action in and of itself.
Pretending that there aren’t already thousands of laws that affect the uses of guns is absurd.
That’s why I am primarily complaining in this thread.
You should know by now that any thread on the dope with “gun” or “shooting” in the title will sidetrack to gun control by the second page.
How is it a sidetrack? The guy posted the thread looking for a gun control fight. “Ooooh, a mass shooting! How quickly can I get on the boards starting a thread about how DUH we need gun control and then berate the people who argue against me for their audacity to talk about gun rights so soon after a mass shooting!”
I also know that threads about Africa will end up turning into white supremacy arguments, and that any thread remotely connected with a gay person will end up about SSM. It doesn’t mean I can’t bitch about it.
That is based on how they vote, lets not play the naive here. When I talked about wide brushes, I was referring to the posters here.
Gun rights advocates are universally republican then? All gun rights advocates are also against increased access to mental health care, etc.?