I could of sworn I made this op before but like I said in the link post I asked this years ago either in a topic or a thread and I cant find it I think it was on the old board
But this didn’t even make the news as I didn’t see the story until the next day and everywhere else it seems its just head shaking and "well its sad but what can ya do "
just like hearing about a suicide bomber in 1992 …
I’ll leave it somebody else to posit the equivalent number of domestic “adverse confrontations” in the US for the same period. And, like belonging to the exclusive club of nations who execute minors, you aren’t really making a comparison to aspirational goals, are you?
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These attacks/atrocities you cite are acts of war, revolution or counterrevolution … they are disturbingly commonplace but even the guys committing them don’t consider them normal.
While as stateside getting shot because you knocked on the wrong door is just the price of doing business.
Mass shootings and gun violence in general is obviously entrenched in American life – that’s not possible to dispute. But the intractable tragedy isn’t that Americans accept it as the “new normal”, because the vast majority do not; the intractable tragedy is that gun culture is so deeply entrenched in the American psyche that it’s virtually impossible for most to consider the kind of really effective alternative that exists in virtually all other industrialized countries. To many Americans, especially those on the right, prohibitions on gun ownership or on gun-totin’ are as inconceivable as prohibitions on bread and butter would be in other democracies.
The result of this strange dichotomy is a bizarre sort of cognitive dissonance, where gun rights and gun proliferation are assumed as a given, and Americans with a conscience struggle with the impossible problem of how to “fix” this. Hence the well-meaning but utterly useless distraction about “mental health”. The real problem – as evidenced by the spate of “stand your ground” laws just as one sorry example – is that America is still in the thrall of the zeitgeist of the Old West shootout, and the belief that only the quick survive.
This classic Onion article perfectly illustrates this cognitive dissonance:
There is a huge double standard in how we thonk about mass shootings: one we can inagine happening to us or our loved ones, and ones we can’t. We tend to think the former is a problem the government shpuld solve and the latter is not, because we wouldn’t have been there, so everyone who was, deserved it. This is why some gun rights advocates will argue that suicides and “gang violence” (often any black-on-black crime, or even BIPOC-on-BIPOC) shouldn’t count as evidence that guns are a problem, and literally see it as a disingenuous scare tactic used with deliberate intent to deceive by gun-grabbers.
The Alabama shooting falls into the latter category for a variety of reasons. Most school shootings fall into the former.
Anybody ever been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC? Two of The Most Moving Exhibits in the entire museum are:
A huge pile of shoes that belonged to those exterminated in the camps, and
A pile of hair brushes that belonged to the same people
Maybe it’s time to pile up belongings from all of America’s dead children, lost to gun violence – their clothes, their cell phones, their books, their toys.
Maybe we need a museum. Maybe we need another “Never Again” movement.
It hurts me to my core when the coverage of today’s mass shooting references another, very recent mass shooting, and I already can’t remember the previous one.
The difference between terrorist attacks in the Middle East and shootings in the United States is that some people in the Middle East are actually trying to prevent attacks.
It’s not that endless legislation isn’t proposed. 83% of Democrats and even 49% of Republicans want gun control. It’s that it doesn’t pass, or isn’t enforced if it is. The neofascist racists who control this country want all whites pointing a loaded gun at everyone else at all times. They are a sickness. Quite possibly a fatal sickness.
Here is a discussion from a week ago on substantially the same topic. The title starts out being about SDMB, but real quickly the thread content switches to being about the country at large.
I’ll admit to complete and utter surprise when I first heard that Bill Lee actually signed an executive order to strengthen gun laws. Of course, everything he put in place are things that should have already been done long ago - like making sure that the TBI has the most up to date information requiring arrest/conviction data to be entered and uploaded within 72 hours. Why wasn’t it done before? Probably (though I don’t know for sure) because data entry is overwhelmed with everything they need to do. Hire new people to make sure that this information can be entered in a timely fashion? Of course not! That costs money and we here in TN are about making money, not spending it. The more I thought about it, the more convinced that it’s more virtue signaling to the Left than the fact that he actually wants anything done about it.
If the shooting at Covenant had been in one of the MNPS schools, particularly one in my neighborhood, I don’t expect this to have been his reaction. Instead, he would have laid it on the heads of the teachers, the neighborhood, the district, the students. Because it’s not someone coming to shoot up lily white kids, but kids that are predominantly of color. I honestly think that’s the only reason even that much has been acceded to by him.
The thing that a lot of the “we should have access to all our guns at all times, no matter what kind of guns they are because were Amurikans” gun nuts think is that those of us who want to stop these kind of things from happening (or at least becoming far more rare) want to get rid of all guns. They refuse to believe that 1) if we, as a country, enforced the laws on the books, that would help mitigate some of this; 2) if we banned high capacity semi-automatic rifles, that would reduce the ability of someone to kill so many in a short time; 3) Hi Opal!; 4) a good guy with a gun doesn’t stop someone opening fire nearly as often as they think it does because a lot of the people shooting are planning on suicide by cop anyway; and 5) saying that the criminals would just get the guns anyway is not a valid reason for putting gun restrictions in place.
Regarding the OP, I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I see mass shootings as a part of life. To me, that says it’s something that can’t be controlled and I have to live with it. I have two teenagers still in school. They have gotten used to active shooter drills where I had gotten used to fire drills. I hate that. Unlike a fire or tornado, there is NO WAY that an active shooter can be either natural or an accident. And if it can’t, then we should be able to stop it. I hope I never get used to it so that I can continue fighting for the day that enough of the country says to our elected officials that enough is enough.
I’m going to be honest, the “gun control” that these percentages of Americans want won’t do shit to reduce gun violence or mass shootings. Ok, it’ll nibble around the edges of the problem, get a few violent assholes here and there to not have guns to kill with, but it won’t make a dent in the 15,000+ murders a year, the 15,000 suicides a year, or the big shoot’em ups.
Are you saying why bother then? I was responding to the idea that “nobody really wants to control gun access in the US”. In reality the majority do. But everyone is held hostage by the extreme Right. If that contingent could be disempowered, gun control could be possible. It’s no use saying that what people think of as gun control wouldn’t work, since even that much hasn’t been tried.
For me, it’s not so much a “why bother” issue as the fact that no amount of “gun control” is going to solve the actual problem. It will only mitigate it. Mitigating it is good: fewer deaths, fewer injuries, less tragedy overall. But the idea that the problem can be solved through gun control…
It’s like the music is terrible, and most of us hate it and want to turn it down. A few people sneak in and turn it up every once in a while. The few people who suggest turning the music OFF are crazy and un-American.
Well, the number of problems whole vast countries have that can be completely solved are going to be few. Mitigation is all there is, really. There are, of course, all sorts of deeply imbedded reasons for gun violence, including toxic masculinity, racism, poverty, despair, mental illness … which would all remain, without the guns. But people would be reduced to stabbing, or throwing things, which would be a big improvement.
Yes, but in the USA, one of the biggest problems is the Second Amendment, and the conventionally accepted interpretation to mean “any American citizen can own a gun.” No amount of mitigation will touch either the document (at this point, un-amendable in any practical terms) or its cultural centrality. So there is no “without the guns.” And unless the hundreds of millions of guns go away, mitigation will only be a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
I wish we, as a nation, could explain, discuss, and hammer home the notion of externalities. When I dream, I dream of a citizenry that can wrap its head around the concept and understand what a kitchen table issue it is, to wit,
Fewer guns would take a TON of money out of the firearm (and related) industry. Nuh-uh. Not in America. In America we:
Privatize profit and
Socialize loss
So the “solutions” (that aren’t) to the gun problem have to create more profit at the taxpayers’ expense: bulletproof clothing, arming teachers, arming students, armoring buses, hardening schools, ballistic backpacks, anti-personnel mines in the hallways of K-12 buildings, snipers, hi-tech security systems, more School Resource Officers, trauma surgeons, etc., etc.
All of us … spend countless billions … in a never-ending game of Reactive Public Policy?
Or we could start chipping away at the 400,000,000+ guns in private ownership in the USA.
I find it difficult to imagine that your average schlub – particularly those who constantly bark about “Socialism,” “Communism,” or “Marxism --” has even a whisper of a clue how much most of us are actually ‘taxed’ for the “Freedoms” they purport to hold so dear.
It’s a really sad commentary that one of my Facebook friends posted a birthday fundraiser for a children’s group home in the Deep South, and when I Googled it, the second link was “XYZ Facility shooting.” Granted, it was an police officer who shot a fugitive who ran onto the campus, but still.