ANOTHER bad guy with a gun story

[UNCjigga]

Why hasn't the right complained that the shooter was an angry leftist yet??? Apparently he posted something on social media during the shooting, about how "thoughts and prayers won't solve anything".

I'm really surprised the usual kooks on the right haven't blamed the left yet.

 

[positivedoppler]

immigrants are, by far, safer and better citizens than your average priveliged white conservative asshole.

It's a simple goddamn fact. Data sits on the side of the truth. Sucks that you don't care. Sucks that your feels put you in a losing battle against the world around you.

But that's your problem.

Hell, I'd rather live next to 1k central american illegals than a single fucking sociopath like SlowSpider. Fuck that obvious asshole, bigoted fake American.

Racist much? Thanks for revealing yourself to be a white hating moron.

 

[Commodus]

Racist much? Thanks for revealing yourself to be a white hating moron.

Holy shit, you went from 0 to "leftists are da weal wacists" in record time.

He didn't say all white people. He said privileged white conservative assholes. You know, the overly self-entitled ones who don't know how to deal with failure or cultural change like adults and tend to resort to bigotry, violence or both in response. You can be white without being an asshole or a conservative.

 

[positivedoppler]

Holy shit, you went from 0 to "leftists are da weal wacists" in record time.

He didn't say all white people. He said privileged white conservative assholes. You know, the overly self-entitled ones who don't know how to deal with failure or cultural change like adults and tend to resort to bigotry, violence or both in response. You can be white without being an asshole or a conservative.

And Trump never said all Mexicans are criminals and rapist, but that doesn't stop the righteous Liberals from using that as a reason to label him a racist.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I don't know what the answer is. Neither do you. It's a complicated issue with nuances that needs experts to tease out. The gun issue is akin to global warming, or healthcare, or our education issues. Its a massive problem with no simple solution that will satisfy everyone.

I think as a populace we should first try and not make the gun issue as politically charged as crazies on TV make it out to be so that state and federal congresses can actually work on it.
The NRA basically wins the gun debate by not even allowing debate to occur.

I actually agree with you. But I don't blame the NRA. The NRA is a reaction to the overreach by the left to try and take away guns. The left helped shape this monster that is the NRA.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Aren’t you the same guy who created a thread just before this shooting whining that a state enacted a red flag law that allowed law enforcement to seize the guns from someone deemed to be a potential immediate threat to himself or others because a man who turned out to be a threat to himself or others was killed by police after going for a gun they were there to seize?

Tell us again how you want proactive approaches to preventing gun violence.

Yea, I'm the one that created a thread wondering how someone's rights can be swiped away based on hearsay. That story didn't end well either.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Maybe not allow people diagnosed with PTSD to purchase firearms?

Where does it end? Depression? Anxiety? Someone had a bad day? You guys are so focused on the tool and don't realize that people that want to create evil can do so easily when they have a completely unsuspecting mass of people in front of them.

 

[MomentsofSanity]

Yea, I'm the one that created a thread wondering how someone's rights can be swiped away based on hearsay. That story didn't end well either.

Based on hearsay? Sorry you have information on why they were granted the seize order? Or are you just making it up?

Only evidence you posted showed that the guy really wasn’t stable enough to own guns and he died because of it. Too bad they weren’t taken from him sooner.

 

[NAC4EV]

Where does it end? Depression? Anxiety? Someone had a bad day? You guys are so focused on the tool and don't realize that people that want to create evil can do so easily when they have a completely unsuspecting mass of people in front of them.

Maybe it's guns

 

[Commodus]

And Trump never said all Mexicans are criminals and rapist, but that doesn't stop the righteous Liberals from using that as a reason to label him a racist.

You don't have to label everyone as a criminal to still be racist. It was racist because he implied that illegal Mexican immigrants inherently brought over large numbers of rapists and other criminals, which is objectively false. I know context, nuance and complex arguments are difficult concepts in Trump land, but please don't oversimplify so that you can argue against a straw man.

Also, we don't just think Trump is racist because of that one issue. We think he's racist because he also forcibly separates children from families and finds excuses to deport people who've been in the country a long time, in some cases legally. We think he's racist because he wanted to ban all Muslim immigrants during the campaign and implemented a limited ban only because the courts would have immediately shot down what he really wanted. We think he's racist because he regularly hesitates to condemn racist violence and even seems to tacitly endorse it at times (say, calling the Charlottesville right-wing protesters "nice people" when almost all of them were neo-Nazis). We think he's racist because neo-Nazis and KKK members love his policies. We think he's racist because some of the people closest to him have described him using racist language.

In short, we think Trump is racist because everything he does indicates he's racist. His bigotry against Mexicans is just the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Pipeline 1010]

I think the anti-depressant connection is a red-herring. There are many mass shootings where the shooter isn't on them, and a vast number of people on them who don't go on killing-sprees. Plus what overlap there is, is at first glance probably explainable by confounding factors (i.e. correlation not causation). Though I am personally skeptical about psychiatric medication (I don't trust the pharmaceutical companies or the psychiatric profession) and am far from convinced they do more good than harm, I don't see they are of much importance in the larger picture, not least because they are just as commonly used in countries that don't have these mass shooting incidents.

Yeah it could easily be a red herring, it could be a correlation thing, and it could be a conspiracy theory thing. It is probably jumping the gun to start thinking about alternatives to these drugs when it hasn't been even established as fact that they are even a contributor to these incidents. It is just striking to me how many of them involve someone either currently on, or recently off these drugs...to the point where every time I see one of these things I assume the shooter was on these drugs and then I find out they actually were. I think they'll find it with this guy too. I still think effort should be made to study this topic. It can't hurt.

Though you are assuming 'taking guns away' is a meaningful form of 'harm'. I don't see that is necessarily the case. People are denied all sorts of things and don't seem to suffer much harm as a consequence. There are always constraints to life in a society.

I'm more talking about HOW taking the guns away could cause harm. Let's say there was some kind of blanket ban, including guns already owned. Who is going to take the guns away from people who don't want them taken away? Are these people going to get shot? Are the people who don't want to give up their guns going to be shot? How much will this cost, and how will we accomplish it with anything short of a total police state. I know that there are other proposals such as banning future purchases, but I see them as ineffective compared to other alternatives, at least in the short term.

More to the point, I don't think you can say it will 'never' happen. It depends largely on numbers, I would have thought. When that group is a very small one the 'sell' becomes a lot easier. Probably at the moment there are still too many folk emotionally attached to their firearms.

In my opinion it's less an emotional attachment to the firearm and more of an emotional attachment to not being punished for something someone else did. Any way you try to sell it, you are still telling me I have to give up something I'd never use to hurt someone in order to prevent people from being hurt. And if I don't, you support me getting ass-raped in prison. That will always be a tough sell.

 

[Pipeline 1010]

But to fixate on the perceived harms "of taking away things from people who never used them to hurt anybody" is part of the gun hysteria.
We don't have that level of hysteria about anything else and its whats preventing even minor things being done that may not even have anything to do with removing owned guns from people.

I think we should focus on low hanging fruit first. Until our politicians focus on quickly and easily eliminating a huge amount of gun murders by ending the war on drugs, I find it hard to believe that their goal is to eliminate a huge amount of gun murders.

As for the harms caused, I am trying to think long-term outcomes. I often hear that nobody wants to take away my guns and that an assault rifle ban would be for future purchases. Assault rifles only account for about 100-150 murders per year, most of which would still happen with an alternative weapon. The people proposing this KNOW it will not register as anything more than a rounding error on the stats. Do you really think a significant portion of people who are screaming about stats and calling for assault rifle bans will be like "whelp, we tried...whatevs" when the numbers don't change?

My bet is no, they'd look for the next ban. And then the next because that didn't work. Eventually you ARE left with confiscation.

And what then? How do you confiscate 300,000,000 guns? With force? What kind of force? Are you OK with sending 10,000,000 people to prison if they don't give up their guns? Are you OK with tens of thousands of swat raids per year to try and get the guns from people? What about the swat members or gun owners killed in these raids?

What do you think we should do and why should it not begin with ending the war on drugs?

 

[pmv]

I think we should focus on low hanging fruit first. Until our politicians focus on quickly and easily eliminating a huge amount of gun murders by ending the war on drugs, I find it hard to believe that their goal is to eliminate a huge amount of gun murders.

As for the harms caused, I am trying to think long-term outcomes. I often hear that nobody wants to take away my guns and that an assault rifle ban would be for future purchases. Assault rifles only account for about 100-150 murders per year, most of which would still happen with an alternative weapon. The people proposing this KNOW it will not register as anything more than a rounding error on the stats. Do you really think a significant portion of people who are screaming about stats and calling for assault rifle bans will be like "whelp, we tried...whatevs" when the numbers don't change?

My bet is no, they'd look for the next ban. And then the next because that didn't work. Eventually you ARE left with confiscation.

And what then? How do you confiscate 300,000,000 guns? With force? What kind of force? Are you OK with sending 10,000,000 people to prison if they don't give up their guns? Are you OK with tens of thousands of swat raids per year to try and get the guns from people? What about the swat members or gun owners killed in these raids?

What do you think we should do and why should it not begin with ending the war on drugs?

The trend seems to be for more-and-more guns owned by fewer-and-fewer people. Plus for ever-larger spree-killer bodycounts. (Though it's true that such mass killing incidents only make up a small proportion of gun-deaths, they do focus the public mind). Eventually it will be one guy owning several million guns, and arresting him won't be as hard as arresting a few million people with one gun each.

Being serious, I do believe demographic change (not just racial demographics, but urbanization and increasing education) is going to eventually change attitudes, but it's going to take quite a long time and a big pile of bodies.

Also, the evidence seems to be that the critical driver of the US love of guns is its history of racial politics, or, more crudely, racism. Race has poisoned everything in the US. Europe is only now starting to experience race as a domestic issue to the same degree, and, while there's no 'moral' difference (that is, I wouldn't claim European white people were 'less racist' in any possible sense - quite the reverse, if anything), I don't think it's ever going to be the same in its effects because it lacks that very specific long traumatic history.

For Europe racism has traditionally had its effect as a foreign-policy issue, as a driver of imperialism. We feared and exploited non-white people overseas rather than at home. So personal gun ownership didn't really come into it.

Actually, for the UK, feels as if that 'non-white' category was quite an expansive one, including much of Europe itself.

 

[MomentsofSanity]

Her son survived Las Vegas only to die in Thousand Oaks.

 

[HomerJS]

Yea, I'm the one that created a thread wondering how someone's rights can be swiped away based on hearsay. That story didn't end well either.

You actually started that thread in the age of Trump?? Want the answer just ask the Central Park 5. Just ask the creator of "lock her up".

 

[uclaLabrat]

I think we should focus on low hanging fruit first. Until our politicians focus on quickly and easily eliminating a huge amount of gun murders by ending the war on drugs, I find it hard to believe that their goal is to eliminate a huge amount of gun murders.

As for the harms caused, I am trying to think long-term outcomes. I often hear that nobody wants to take away my guns and that an assault rifle ban would be for future purchases. Assault rifles only account for about 100-150 murders per year, most of which would still happen with an alternative weapon. The people proposing this KNOW it will not register as anything more than a rounding error on the stats. Do you really think a significant portion of people who are screaming about stats and calling for assault rifle bans will be like "whelp, we tried...whatevs" when the numbers don't change?

My bet is no, they'd look for the next ban. And then the next because that didn't work. Eventually you ARE left with confiscation.

And what then? How do you confiscate 300,000,000 guns? With force? What kind of force? Are you OK with sending 10,000,000 people to prison if they don't give up their guns? Are you OK with tens of thousands of swat raids per year to try and get the guns from people? What about the swat members or gun owners killed in these raids?

What do you think we should do and why should it not begin with ending the war on drugs?

we've sent that many to prison for drugs, probably just weed.

 

[Pipeline 1010]

we've sent that many to prison for drugs, probably just weed.

Let's stop doing that k?

 

[uclaLabrat]

I wholeheartedly agree.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Yeah it could easily be a red herring, it could be a correlation thing, and it could be a conspiracy theory thing.

Probably is in fact. People are on these drugs because they have mental problems. People with mental problems are more likely to do something like this. That fact alone is reason enough to think that this is more likely correlation than casual. I think it is a good idea to look into it anyway, just in case. A little research can clear up this question, and we might learn a little bit about how these drugs affect homicidal ideation, which might help us understand this problem a little more.

I'm more talking about HOW taking the guns away could cause harm. Let's say there was some kind of blanket ban, including guns already owned.

There is definitely wrong ways to go about a ban, but I don't think anyone has ever seriously suggested a door to door confiscation of guns. Every plan I have ever heard seriously discussed used voluntary buyback programs followed by making the guns contraband with stiff penalties for being caught with one and jail time for using one even in self-defense. Then just let time remove the guns for you. No one thinks there are any quick fixes. Slow and steady will win this race.

In my opinion it's less an emotional attachment to the firearm and more of an emotional attachment to not being punished for something someone else did. Any way you try to sell it, you are still telling me I have to give up something I'd never use to hurt someone in order to prevent people from being hurt. And if I don't, you support me getting ass-raped in prison. That will always be a tough sell.

If you would never use it to hurt someone then why do you own it?

 

[vi edit]

I'm not positive, but my radar says we have a lethargic arachnid lurking around.

 

[Pipeline 1010]

If you would never use it to hurt someone then why do you own it?

Maybe I need to qualify that statement: I would never use it to hurt someone except in self defense. Even then I don't know if I could bring myself to do it. For all I know I'll freeze up and do nothing. Or just rack the gun and hope the sound scares off the intruder. Or use it like a club and hit them with it. Maybe I'd even squeeze off a warning shot. In real life, most people who use guns in self defense don't actually fire the gun during that incident.

Why do I own guns? I can't speak for everyone but I own it so that I can shoot bullets. What else would I use a gun for?

 

[Pipeline 1010]

Probably is in fact. People are on these drugs because they have mental problems. People with mental problems are more likely to do something like this. That fact alone is reason enough to think that this is more likely correlation than casual. I think it is a good idea to look into it anyway, just in case. A little research can clear up this question, and we might learn a little bit about how these drugs affect homicidal ideation, which might help us understand this problem a little more.

I was referring to articles I've read that say a certain percent of people on this drug have violent psychotic episodes. This percent is beyond the episodes that occur in the placebo group (who also have mental problems). Buy yeah I'd love to drop some tax money and study this issue.

 

[Pipeline 1010]

There is definitely wrong ways to go about a ban, but I don't think anyone has ever seriously suggested a door to door confiscation of guns. Every plan I have ever heard seriously discussed used voluntary buyback programs followed by making the guns contraband with stiff penalties for being caught with one and jail time for using one even in self-defense. Then just let time remove the guns for you. No one thinks there are any quick fixes. Slow and steady will win this race.

There might not be quick fixes, but a quick win could be had by ending the war on drugs and treating drugs as a medical issue and not a criminal issue, since drug-war related gun murders make up a significant portion of overall gun murders. Not to mention that jailing non-violent people and taking away their financial future tends to turn them violent.

And I hate the idea of jailing people who didn't hurt anyone. Why would you jail someone who used a gun to protect their family?

 

[pmv]

I'm not positive, but my radar says we have a lethargic arachnid lurking around.

You mean your spider sense is tingling?

 

[shortylickens]

We should ban guns.
That'll definitely solve all these problems.

Just like banning cocaine.