I also hope this is a joke, but somebody on a Facebook feed my friend posted actually made this absurd argument! The mind boggles!
In response to the OP, I assume news crews are used to bystanders wandering nearby to check out what’s happening. Even if it’s just one guy, they don’t pay him any mind and just go about their interview. I’m not at all surprised that nobody noticed him flashing his gun while a news interview was taking place.
It is the go to story of Alex Jones. I’m afraid to go to his site to see what he has to say about this. Afraid that I will get so angry that I will stomp on my computer.
I made the voyage for you. Even Alex Jones agrees that this is real. But he says it was political correctness that drove the shooter to kill these people.
:Stomp stomp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLC0A3CAC7B3A0E288&v=FWSxSQsspiQ
This explains the epidemic of mass knifings recently.
The Aurora, Co. bomber, the Boston Marathon bombers, the Columbine, Co. bombers, the Oklahoma City bomber all have something in common with the WDBJ monster. They all wanted to murder people.
I too have seen both videos, and it isn’t unusual that no one notices the gun. It is incredibly creepy, but both women (the interviewing reporter and the interviewee) are on live television and looking directly into each others eyes. IMO the gun is clearly *not *even (or barely) in their peripheral vision. And when concentrating on an important task your peripheral vision is non-existent. The cameraman of course has his back to it.
Just in the interest of fighting ignorance, neither video contains what I would call any ‘graphic’ images. This is not to discount the, as I said, incredibly creepy and disconcerting images it conveys, but there is no blood nor any obvious visual signs of bullet impacts. There is the screaming of the female reporter, and the POV of the cameraman falling down shot, both of which are more than enough to not want to see it. However, anyone who’s perused so-called gore sites on the internet will not be shocked.
As far as anything else goes, the guy was mentally ill. You can’t really apply any rational legal, political, societal etc. discussions to it. Not that this will prevent anyone from… :rolleyes:
And it indicates to me that the problem is too many guns. We shall have to agree to disagree.
EDIT: Actually, it indicates to me that rather being one single problem, the problems include both the people and the guns. We can’t get rid of the people, so let’s at least get rid of the guns.
Thank you both, Cochrane and Asimovian.
I’ve seen neither video, and don’t plan to. I grew up in Roanoke (though I moved from there about 40 years ago), and remember Smith Mountain Lake well.
My opinion is this is a two fold problem. Guns and mentality. One is relatively easy to solve, the other, I have no clue.
We’ve got to have stricter gun laws in this country. Although I don’t see it happening, but why aren’t gun owners required to take a test every so often, as do drivers? Because it’s a “right,” and driving is a “privilege”? None of our rights are absolute. You have free speech, but can’t falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater. You can criticize the government, but not threaten the life of the president. Freedom of assembly is a right, but inciting a riot is not. Voting is a right, voting multiple times in the same election is not.
I’m not going to change anyone’s mind here, I know that. There have been (probably) hundreds of pages of threads on gun debates on this board. I’ve got nothing new to add. I just don’t buy the unspoken argument that there’s only one amendment to the Constitution–the Second Amendment.
There was a joke about Groucho and his son. The son wanted to get a gun. Groucho (supposedly) said, “As long as I’m head of this household, you will not have a gun.” Arthur, the son, said, “If I had a gun, you wouldn’t be head of the household.”
Good joke, but not to be taken literally. Might doesn’t make it right. At least now, this is legal.
Where the hell will it stop? Are we headed toward “A good guy with a flamethrower…”? Or “Maybe if the cameraman had been armed…”
The second part is of course what to do about people with mental or emotional problems. This guy bought his gun legally in June, but was obviously unstable. What to do about that, I don’t know.
Someone smarter than I will have to figure out both problems. Al I know is we can’t keep going on like this with guns.
Don’t forget the guy who ran down people with his car.
If you’re going to deflect, deflect like you mean it.
With knives.
Ahem, in a thread about the shooting murder of two WDBJ employees and the wounding of the interviewee, Colibri introduced knives as a possible choice of mass murderers. Eye, doorhinge, introduced bombings, and ewe, Esox Lucious, introduced vehicular murder.
You consider those to be deflections. I don’t. One of the things that mass murderers have in common is their decision to murder en masse. Blaming an inanimate object for the murders is absurd. It should be obvious that mass murders will find a way to murder others. Mass murderers are people. People who justified the murder of people.
To be fair, there was a mass knifing relatively recently in Houston, at a community college.
A dozen people got stabbed. How many died? Zero.
A lawn mower and a pair of hand shears are both ways to cut the grass. So’s a chainsaw and a bush saw. But you’re going to get a lot more grass cut with a mower, especially a riding mower, a lot more wood cut with a chainsaw, and a lot more people dead with an autoloading rifle.
I feel that implying that if you could take away people’s easy access to autoloading and large magazine fed rifles and handguns, it would not make any difference, is dishonest.
You can argue that there are just too many guns out there to take away enough of them to matter. This might be true. But if you could take them away, and mass shooters had to go to being mass stabbers, the actual number of deaths would be about a tenth what it is now.
Well, sort of. You would also have to take away trivially easy access to ammonium nitrate - there are reformulated versions of the fertilizer that aren’t so explosive, but they cost more to make.
Other than that’s factually untrue. There are nations with something like 1/10th the number of guns as other nations:
UK: 6.2 guns per 100 people
Switzerland: 45.7 guns per 100 people
Homicide deaths per capita: Effectively the same
Bosnia: 17.3 guns per 100 people
Serbia: 58.2 guns per 100 people
Homicide deaths per capita: Effectively the same
And remove access to poisons, diseases, construction equipment, metal bars, vehicles, bricks, rocks, and general human ingenuity. You can kill a bunch of people simply through doing some clever engineering, if you’re in the right position to do so (not that this particular case was purposeful):
Though purposeful things can be done:
That’s actually a refreshing take forever from Alex. He has never met a flag that wasn’t false.
I saw both videos and it is definitely disturbing. I was stunned too, when no one seemed to notice a man pointing a gun at them as he hesitated. My guess is all involved had tunnel vision.
The reporter was focused on the interviewee. The interviewee was probably scared shitless from being on live TV and was focused on nothing but the reporter. The camera man was clearly focused on the other two and may likely have had his left eye closed, eliminating his peripheral vision. That being said, it isn’t unusual for people to be moving around in the background behind the scene.
My worry is that given the shock value, this probably inspired a lot of domestic terrorists to repeat it and get national attention and shock value.
On the gun control front any sensational event like this is going to bring the anti-gunners out of the woodwork.
Naturally, you can do that comparison of Switzerland versus other example countries and arrive at the opposite conclusion - if you count the suicides, you actually end up showing that guns kill an extra 100 folks or so. One sometimes poorly appreciated fact about suicides is that making it inconvenient to commit suicide actually matters - suicidal people are too depressed to kill themselves if no readily available means is at hand or something. Most golden gate bridge jumpers who are talked down don’t kill themselves later, etc. A gun is pretty much an instant and guaranteed way to commit suicide, while other methods take much longer and are painful.
Yeah, I know about the inert gas method - probably the easiest of all - but most people don’t, and most people don’t actually have an inert gas tank at their house, while lots of people feel suicidal and kill themselves on impulse with the gun they already have. Just having to shop for an inert gas tank is too much planning for many suicidal people I guess.
People have been killing themselves at probably a pretty consistent rate throughout history and well before the advent of the firearm. Again, you are talking about mental illness and not a “gun problem”. If someone has suicidal tendencies and has a gun they will either kill themselves or they won’t, no different than someone with suicidal tendencies without a gun. Shooting yourself is a less painful way to kill yourself? Taking a bunch of pills and falling asleep seems a hell of a lot less painful that shooting yourself. I have a coworker whose son killed himself. He and his son were hunters so he had access to guns… His son hung himself in his bedroom closet. To use suicide to justify taking guns or having more gun control is silly.
My question to all the anti-gun/ gun control crowd is; realistically, short of banning guns, what measure of gun control could have possibly prevented this tragedy?
Probably nothing. Even if you could start a draconian gun control regimen tomorrow, there’s almost as many guns circulating as there are citizens.
Still, this is supposed to be the straight dope, and the straight dope seems to be that being awash in weapons leads to more violence. That is the result of virtually every study done on it. Maybe the numbers are compiled by liberal anti-gun staticians, but that’s the dope.