Meh, leave it to Russia to bungle the whole concept of school shootings. If less than two kids get killed, that's just a normal school day here in America. And really what is so tragic about kids getting shot? Life is best to those who live the least of it.
Fucking wow, a mod deleted a whole comment chain because it wasn't directly related to the post. That's pretty fucked. So much for being able to have any sort of discussion here.
Got it mod. No conversation between Lemmy users. Yes sir. Way to be so much fucking better than reddit, huh?
Yeah, there's a lot of censorship going on here.
The modlog is nice, but it's still possible for entire chains to be wiped from view if the post at the top gets removed.
I think we should have the option to see what mods censor. That way everyone wins.
Wtf is this comment trying to say?
Are shootings that occur near a school but don't involve any students let alone kids really school shootings? Not enough people look at the details of reported "school shootings". They are massively inflated with events that I would not consider a school shooting.
A quintessentially American viewpoint; that a shooting isn't that bad because it happened near a school rather than inside.
Embarrassing.
I mean to be fair, it's a difference between a public shooting and a school shooting. Property law matters. Contact your lawyer today, before it happens to you!
Property law matters
My guy, you're making that argument to the wrong person lol
How is that any better? So when a shooting isn't at a school but near it it doesn't danger the children at all? Is there a magic barrier? I mean ye, it's not technically a school shooting but it is still fucking mental. The anxiety those kids would feel when they hear shots, "am I gonna die now?". No child should be afraid like that, the adults are failing them in the States.
As I stated a lot of the school shootings did not involve any children, but you want to still use the arguement of "think of the children!" Most of the shootings could not be verified to have even happened. Most of the reported shootings occured with handguns and not rifles. Most of the shootings involved drug dealing. You idiots are twisting the facts on these shootings as much as republicans twist facts on abortion and it is disgusting.
We have a right to bear arms because ever government wants to become totalitarian and our ability to arm ourselves is the only defense when protecting our right to vote and have democracy. Why did the USSR and CCP disarm their population? Why have successful laws passed to disarm americans only been targeted at blacks and other minorities? Use your head for two fucking seconds and realize that the threat of violence is the only thing that keeps corrupt politicians honest. I am thinking of the kids and praying they still have a democratic government when I die that respects their rights.
Do you really think your little pop gun is going to defeat a satellite-guided drone bomber?
Afganistan and Vietnam won dumbass.
Also ask the many assasinated leaders how things are.
After how many deaths and how many years?
Oh shit guys yeah Phew thanks. We can all relax now. No need to do anything .
Or you could stop believing every bullshit thing that the anti-gun groups make up...you know it's bad what NPR can't find everything they report as true and calls into question what's real.
Yes, let's not rush into to taking any sort of precaution to protect our kids. Much better to have this wild West situation we have going on now just in case me, Clyde, and Peepaw need to go toe-to-toe with the US Government in some sort of hypothetical hyperbolic David vs Goliath scenario. Totes makes fucking sense, dunnit.
As a gun owner, I recognize how absolutely lax the gun laws are. Let them make it harder to buy a gun. It won't hurt you. At least then I know fucking "Off-His-Meds" Jeb down the street from me won't be able to buy an AR-15 and mow down my family because my weeds keep "blowing on his lawn" or whatever inane shit he constantly yells as me about.
Maybe you could stop being susceptible to all of the gun lobbyists arguments and learn to think for yourself at some point. I don't know. That's just my 2¢. Maybe once you have a kid or grandkid going through school your tune will change.
Exactly. Let's not even raise a finger to do the minimum amount to stop guns getting into the hands of impulsive kids or men to begin with...lets just give a gun to every motherfuckin' buttwipe out there and let everyone shoot at whoever they want. Eventually one person will be left, with nothing but a ruined earth to comfort themselves. And maybe that's truly what should happen, poetically justice speaking.
The only times I see pistols is when I see policemen.
The only times I see machine guns is in the hands of policemen at the airport, or when extremist groups are demonstrating and need protection by the police.
Why would I even need a gun, when hardly any criminal owns one?
The concept of gun ownership is flawed in itself.
There's nothing inherently wrong with gun ownership. However, there is a shit ton wrong on how we handle distribution and tracking of them. We have more prerequisites for operating a vehicle than we do a firearm, and in a country where we have a SIGNIFICANT number of mass shootings, we are doing SIGNIFICANTLY little to fix the issue.
Gun ownership is totally fine. I bought a handgun and a shotgun on the same day (after someone tried to break in and attack my wife - they didn't realize that I had just come home from a trip) and was blown away that I could just walk right out the door with them within a few minutes. A rifle for hunting is also not an issue.
Fun fact: handguns are used in mass shootings more often than AR15s. In fact, all rifles, of which AR15s is merely the most popular type, are responsible for ~500/60,000 gun deaths/yr in the US. Probably because, as you may guess, handguns are a lot more concealable than rifles.
Also, be fair about the buying process, you still went through the National Instant Criminal background check system. Sure instant checks don't take long anymore due to Al Gore inventing the internet in the 90s, but they do still happen and adding arbitrary length does nothing to stop crimes. In fact even if they did, they don't stop nor are they designed to stop the types of planned attack we're talking about (mass casualty events), they are to stop "crimes of passion" (guy killing his wife), and there's some contention that they effectively do that as it isn't like the couple necessarily receives the proper counseling, so he just picks it up and does it next time he's in a wife killin' mood, or if he can't wait goes all Chris Benoit or that "Stairs" jerkoff.
Sounds like a good reason to highly regulate handguns to me.
They are regulated.
There is a difference between regulated and highly regulated?
Crimes like straw purchasing or lying on a NICs form are punishable by 10yr in prison, federal prison in some cases. I'd say that's pretty "high."
You know what would be a lot higher? Not letting mentally ill people or domestic abusers, or people who have shown to use them in an unsafe manner around children have access to them. But apparently that is way too far in America.
People who have been convicted of domestic violence are already federally barred from firearms ownership, same for people who have been involuntarily committed, and child endangerment is already also a crime that falls outside the scope of simply firearms.
People who have been convicted of domestic violence are already federally barred from firearms ownership
I cannot relate to that. I am 37 years old and I think I have never witnessed violent crime, except in television or on playgrounds (children are assholes to each other!)
Yeah, it was terrifying. Like the guy knew she was there, we had just put the dog outside, so they were obviously watching the house. They tried to kick in the front door, and I ran to the front door have naked and half asleep. The terror slammed full force into me when I realized someone was at our door (could see through glass), and I had no weapon to deal with them. They ran as soon as they saw me. I had just gotten home late the night before, so they obviously knew that I wasn't home, and the knew that my wife was.
It still wigs me out to this day.
How long does the police need to arrive at your home? For me in case of an active break in it would probably be around 120 to 180 seconds. So this usually only happens when nobody is home, it’s too dangerous otherwise.
Someone stole my e-bike from the back yard. And I have heard of break ins in cellars. But that kind of crime that you describe is very very rare.
Does that mean that gun ownership is a side effect of a security system that has flaws in itself?
National average response time to emergencies is 11min, 23 to non emergencies. In the cities it'll be "less" (maybe, and not much), but in the country it could be hours.
That’s long. 😱 For non emergencies I have waited long times. Like 40 minutes or even hours. But when I called the fire department once it came like 30 seconds after I had hung up. And it was just a smoking trash can, nothing really dangerous.
Fire dept is a bit quicker I think but they only protect you from fires of course, also, analogous to firearms, fire extinguishers are good to have on hand if a fire breaks out. Also, fortunately the fire often doesn't actively prevent you calling the fire dept, though often due to the nature of being victimized violently you won't be able to even call the police until after the event unless you're lucky, you often have to focus on fighting or running in the moment.
People are not always logical. Even if the cops could get there within 2 minutes, that's still 2 minutes that you have to deal with someone that is intent on doing harm to you. I wouldn't want to risk that.
The police also have no legal obligation to protect you. Meaning if there is a situation that they consider "dangerous" they might not even enter the house to protect you. Like....I'm not hedging all of my bets on a cop to protect me. Because there's still a chance that I lose.
I understand your point that there's not really any point to having weapons when we have a "protector", but we've already seen that those "protectors" have no obligation to actually protect you if they feel endangered. Guns are tools. A rifle is a tool to provide food for yourself. A handgun/shotgun is a tool that you use to protect yourself. We just shouldn't hand those tools out to literally everyone that wants one.
Here, they are less afraid because almost no household is armed. It is a dangerous situation to enter a home, but they always come in pairs and might do so with guns drawn.
But we are talking about very extreme cases. German police shot 14 people in 2017, 11 in 2018, and 15 in 2019. So about the same amount of people that die from lightning strikes. The vast majority of policemen do not discharge their gun in their whole line of duty.
If you compare likelihood of violent crime the bigger danger comes from people inside your house, rather than burglary. Therefore, weapons in houses would make life more dangerous here, since you are less likely to escape your step mother armed with a gun, than your step mother armed with a kitchen knife.
PS: I don’t know your step mother. Maybe she is a world class samurai swordswoman. I apologise if my analogy insulted her.
Yeah but my dude, before any of this happens, you're way morelikely to just lose your shit yourself and murder yourself or one of your family or more.
Live by the sword die by the sword I guess.
No we do not, you can purchase a car at any age, transport it across any state lines, drive it without insurance or a license at any age on private property, and you don't have to register it once to do any of this.
Yea as a gun owner lol what bullshit are you shoveling?
And that shit doesn't happen, stop making up bullshit scenarios....not even going to speak on the fact that none of what you said or propose will stop someone from obtaining a firearm. It's not illegal to sell privately and as you probably know prohibition didn't work.
Every other country has a FRACTION OF A FRACTION of the amount of shootings that we do, and you have the gall to sit there and go "none of what you said or propose will stop someone", when politicians and gun control groups have literally proposed NUMEROUS extremely common sense fixes to help curb the violence. It's fucking loons like you that rally against it ad nauseum because "DeMs CuMmInG fEr MuH gUnS!1!". You're nothing but a gun lobbyists mouthpiece who would rather let kids get killed so you can keep an overpowered AR than try LITERALLY anything to help alleviate the situation.
No one is coming for my shotgun, or my handgun, or my hunting rifle. Literally no one will ever pass a law that will ban those. Red flag laws WORK. Mandatory withholding periods WORK. Banning AR weapons and bump stocks would be a step in the right direction. Pushing these laws on a federal level would help. Would it stop everything? No, but it would provide a LOT more opportunities to catch someone before it happens.
Fuck, do something to help our kids, don't be the barrier that makes it more difficult.
Lol and you're a mouth piece for emotional ignorance...you even saying no one is touching your handguns when 95% of all gun deaths are via handguns...rifles of all kinds are around 3% of all gun deaths, and then the AR style rifles make up around 50 deaths a year...50...more kids are killed by being punched and kicked to death by an order of magnitude 10xs the amount done via AR pattern rifles.
Wanna actually do something to help, stop focusing on guns, you're not going to stop the violence that way. Focus on:
We can start with:
Single payer healthcare
Ending the War on Drugs
Ending Qualified immunity
Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren't 30-40 kids for one teacher.
UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
End for profit prisons
Enforce the laws already on the books
Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don't turn to violence/gangs to survive.
Increase the minimum wage
Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don't turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
Banning Insider Trading for Congress
Term limits
Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
So what do you think is going to decrease school shootings? What are you proposing or support that will improve the situation?
We can start with:
Single payer healthcare
Ending the War on Drugs
Ending Qualified immunity
Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren't 30-40 kids for one teacher.
UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
End for profit prisons
Enforce the laws already on the books
Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don't turn to violence/gangs to survive.
Increase the minimum wage
Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don't turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
Banning Insider Trading for Congress
Term limits
Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
So basically... Fix every other nearly impossible to fix problem first before even deciding to do anything about the actual guns, if anything at all?
And to be clear, by impossible to fix, I mean politically, not that these problems are actually unsolvable.
So you're plan is to try and tackle something that's written into the constitution.... that's your goal? Say it's nearly impossible to do everything else on that list which isn't written into our constitution...but guns... they're easier to fix...fucking hell you all are really naive.
So you’re plan is to try and tackle something that’s written into the constitution… that’s your goal?
You mean like slavery?
Are you equating slavery to owning firearms? You white privileged ivory tower types are hilarious.
Nope. I'm equating slavery to tackling something in the constitution and changing it. You know, the thing you just implied was not something that could be done. I'm sure you know that and are obfuscating.
Yea everyone basically agreed slavery was bad...we fought a fucking civil war over it...the majority of the USA is pro-gun. You will never radify the constitution to remove or nullify the 2nd. It's not going to ever happen.
If everyone agreed, why did we fight a civil war over it?
I didn't specify a plan one way or another. I just think it's crazy that the talking points you presented seem pretty clearly designed to just kick this issue down the road, cause at least that way you still get to have your guns.
And believe me, solving all those things you mentioned would be great. But why not also try and do something about the major gun issues at the same time too?
Those "talking points" would solve our firearm violence. We don't have a gun problem, we have a societal one. Random mass shootings are a new phenomenon...gang violence and drug violence are not. Solving these things with the list I posted, would curb our violence epidemic 100xs more than just another emotional gun law from people who don't understand guns.
We do have a societal problem. We also very much have a gun problem.
And proposing all these other things you know won't get accomplished is a way to shift all the responsibility away from the gun issue itself.
And you aren't being emotional about even the thought of some more gun control or anything to even tackle that issue head on? Come on.
It might be because I'm not delusional about why we have the violence in the first place. I'm proposing things that actually would make a difference, another AWB or mag cap/mag ban/etc is emotional policies that will not put a single dent in our gun violence... I'm not the one kicking the can down the road, you are.
I personally didn't propose any of those policies. I genuinely don't know what would work best. I just think you are being really transparent in treating the guns themselves as having nothing to do with the issue of gun violence.
I think everything you were saying would be great to accomplish. It's just really disingenuous to propose them knowing there is a slim chance any of them will happen while completely ignoring the actual guns, just because you want to keep your guns.
Lol fantastic response. And its crickets from everyone else being critical
No, not crickets. Those things sound great, let's do them. We should do everything we can, and that also includes stricter gun laws.
Not term limits though. It may sound like a good idea, but I implore you to research issues with term limits.
Term limits need to happen, otherwise you end up being ruled by politicians who are in a perpetual cycle of trying to stay in office.
Term limits will seal the deal to the end of our Democracy.
Either you're arguing in bad faith, and know this, or you're refusing to inform yourself of the downsides.
So you're ok with SCOTUS and other judges being appointed and no term limits? What about the POTUS, are you saying it's ok if Trump won and kept being president as long as he continues to win?
Please tell me the good sides of having no term limits. Laws shouldn't be straped to a single person.
Buddy, I'm not going to do all the work for you. This is a well researched subject with a ton of information, it's not some brand new idea.
I was mainly referring to elected positions, I'm not necessarily against term limits for Supreme Court Justices.
Edit: See my reply to the knob below for a few sources.
Lol that's a cop out for, I don't have anything other than shit from life long politicians who say it's bad. You're the one making the claim not me.
Those are all fantastic suggestions. In my opinion we absolutely should be taking much more drastic measures to decrease school shootings in the meantime, as nearly everything you suggest would still take at least ~15-20 years to see results. Any dead kid is too many and there are way too many school shootings.
And you can end with bringing your gun regulations up to speed to every other developed nation.
Or not because it's not the guns... it's our society that needs fixing.
Nothing will improve the situation until we make a concerted effort to shut down gun manufacturing and distribution, even forcibly removing them from the hands of criminals any way we possibly can. And since the kid-killers at the NRA won't allow that, the answer is - this problem of mass murder in schools is only going to intensify until everyone's child is at risk and can no longer attend public schools of any kind. And that's only the tip of the horrific iceberg of a shitshow that's coming to our country.
Wow you're really off the deep end aren't you...I thought most conspiracy theory nut jobs where mainly right wing...but shit you just went into over drive and leaned hard left on that one...
I am as leftist as any human being ever could be - and damn proud of it. Saying the truth always seems like "going off the deep end" to people who aren't able to comprehend. I consider your remark proof of that.
Just look at counties without school shootings, the answer is pretty obvious: none of them have... video games, mental illness, or Democrats.
The fact that they don't have an insane amount of privately owned firearms, or the ability to purchase them legally, easily, and with barely any restrictions, is just a coincidence. Definitely not relevant.
But then they bring up Switzerland's huge stockpile of guns.
Without mentioning they only have them through military training, meaning they are fully trained on gun safety.
Or that they aren't allowed to have ammo for those guns.
You had me in the first half ngl.
Hello, I am from the uneducated north, what are these "vid eh oh gams" of which you speak?
They also have safety nets, way less gang violence, not a war on drugs, of for profit prison systems...and a whole shit load of other things, but naa it's the guns...
Oh shit I forgot that Eric Harris and Adam Lanza both claimed Crips. I heard they C walked down the hallways as they shot up the schools.
I honestly can't tell if you're intentionally giving bad faith arguments, or just stupid. But I'm betting it's the latter.
O shit I forgot columbine happened during the AWB...and so did VT...shit...kinda sounds like I'm not the one arguing in bad faith.
Their government doesn't deny the impending climate catastrophe.
NPR is a pretty neutral news source. Your comment on them seems a bit unhinged.
NPR leans left, while they're not super left, they're not fully neutal. The point is, a lot of lies get used as truths to spread political propaganda, and it works.
The fucking truth leans left. The fuck do you want? Right wing shit is divorced from reality.
The truth doesn't have a political side.
I've seen the opposite lately, actually. They've been criticized historically (unfairly, it was just objective reporting) for leaning left, but they've since overcorrected and now lean center-right a lot of the time.
News to me, those bias sites are all showing them as light left still, but I'm not saying you're wrong.
I know what the sites say... They're pretty reliably in the center. I think the whole "reality has as liberal bias" thing made it seem like they leaned left when in reality, that's just what the center actually looks like.
From my experience, since I've been paying attention, they've over-corrected in the other direction. Still mostly center, but they seem kind of scared to be completely objective when it makes the GOP look as bad as it actually is. They seem perfectly OK with the fascist element taking control (who will most likely either do away with all of their funding, or turn it into a state-backed propaganda mouthpiece), because they seem scared that calling people what they are will make them appear "left-leaning".
Just my observations. Maybe keep it in mind going forward and see if you notice as well.
I'll have to pay closer attention to that, it would be crazy if they did that though. As you said they've already been attacked by the GOP for funding.
Such as?
So you didn't read the article I posted....at bare minimum do that instead of wasting my time.
I was wondering how long it'd take for the word "propaganda" to show up on Lemmy. 3 seconds flat this time, congratulations!
Americans be like "see, not enough children died, so we should keep our glorious god given guns" as soon as any discrepancies in number of kids killed show up.
Euros be like, I don't know what the fuck is happening in the states...let me chime in...
I'm a proper American, from the Americas. You know, one of those countries your country likes to fuck around with every now and then with a little coup or private militia invasion. With those guns you guys worship so much. That kind of American.
I don't know of a country there that allows private ownership of firearms...what we need to do with SA is leave it alone and end our war on drugs, so the cartels lose their income.
I don't know of a country there that allows private ownership of firearms
Well, we do allow private ownership of firearms, just, AFAIK, a very limited number of models provided by a very specific entity rather than just about anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if most countries in the americas allowed some degree of firearm ownership (don't care enough to look it up).
I didn't mean that when I said "privately owned militias". I meant the banana companies which dealt with strikes by sending privately owned troops on privately owned ships to these countries in order to reign in their poorly disguised slavery.
So far, anti-gun groups have never made up anything. They don't have to, the stats are there for anyone who isn't completely ignorant to see for themselves. Two mass murders in the U.S. in the past two days, and this is what you come up with? It's no wonder humanity is plummeting into mass murder and insanity keeps rising.
Did you even read the article I posted from NPR? It's literally calling out how bad the everytown info is. It's made up, and continually used as factual information.
Sounds good, it's a great day!
And Ajit Pai just joined NPR The American Public TV Board of Trustees. I'm not entirely certain if they and NPR are the same organization. so I'm sure the journalistic integrity is going into his giant Reese's Mug, to be thrown in the toilet.
Edit: found the article, will leave the original text up as the sentiment remains the same, just struck out.
That's terrible, but that article is from 2019...so not much of shit pie joining means much...still sucks as NPR I really liked, even if they did have a lean on some things I disagreed with.
The worst is the Gun Violence Archive and their "mass shooting index" which gets quoted uncritically in the media, so you get headlines like:
"There have been more mass shootings than days in 2023, database shows
The United States has experienced 627 mass shootings so far this year."
The problem is they define "mass shooting" differently from how the public sees a mass shooting.
Their definition is a shooting event where 4 or more people are injured or killed.
So were there 627 events similar to the UNLV situation where a nut with a gun shows up in a public place and starts shooting indescriminately?
No.
Most of the shootings listed on the Gun Violence Archive are situations where there was a party, alcohol or drugs were involved, two parties got into an argument, the argument turned into a fight, and people got shot. That's not how most people define a "mass shooting".
I'd argue for a mass shooting definition of "person(s) arrive at a public location with the sole intention of shooting as many people as possible."
That would rule out the bar fight incidents, or robberies gone bad, or people who go nuts and kill their family in their own house. We should distinguish between psychotic episodes that put the public at risk, vs. normal crime, vs. domestic vioence that does not involve the general public.
So your objection is that they call a mass shooting a mass shooting? What magic number would you like them to use?
No, my objection is they call normal shootings mass shootings with the agenda of making and keeping people scared.
"Normal shootings"
You just made me realize how much I'd love to live in a country where there was no such thing as a "normal shooting".
Gun culture in America is absolutely fucked.
While it's not quite "throw a dart board at a map", it's pretty close.
They're so goddamn brain rotted that they don't even realize how completely fucked that is.
That's just "crime", not a mass shooting, unless you talk to the gun violence archive.
They want you to be scared. You need to ask why.
The "normal" number of people getting shot is 0.
They want you to sweep gun violence under the rug. You don't need to ask why, it's because gun sales bring in millions in profits for the gun-lobby and the Republicans they purchase.
Unfortunately, no, that's never going to happen. Even in countries that severely limit guns, the number is not 0.
I didn't claim the number could be 0, I claimed the acceptable number is 0.
Following every one of those shootings you linked, people demanded to know how it happened. Why did they have a gun? Was there warning signs that were missed? Was anybody negligent? How can we stop it from happening again and limiting the damage if it does?
That is the reaction of a society that finds any number above 0 unacceptable. They treat mass shootings as a failure of the system.
Meanwhile in America, they don't bother to ask those questions.
They had a gun because it's trivial to get your hands on semi-automatic rifles and handguns, even if you can't pass a background check, because there are millions of unsecured weapons and no universal background checks.
The police and politicians are deliberately negligent, staunchly opposing red flag laws despite most mass shooters having multiple red flags.
No effort is made to prevent it happening again, because the murder of 20 children is shrugged off as some kind of inevitability, no more preventable than an earthquake or tornado -- much the same as you're doing right now.
Limiting the damage isn't just staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, many of them fully support making more dangerous weaponry available.
These are not the actions of people who find all gun violence unacceptable and the only reason the Ulvade police are criticized and the Newtown police are given a pass is because the Ulvade police didn't bother to pretend they cared.
To be clear, I'm not arguing against sensible legislation, there are many things that can and should be done starting with an actual analysis if what could or should have prevented any specific shooting, once you realize that "banning guns" is off the table thanks to the second amendment.
An example I like to cite is the guy who shot up Michigan State. He had previously been arrested on a felony gun charge, was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, did his time, did his probation, had a clean background check, bought guns and shot up the school.
Now, we already prevent felons from owning guns. Maybe, just maybe, if someone is arrested on a felony gun charge, that is something that should not be allowed to be pled down to a misdemeanor? Ya think?
Alternately, since we block felons from owning guns, as well as domestic abusers, and people charged with crimes that can land them in prison for more than a year, how about we block people with ANY gun charge from owning a gun? Felony OR misdemeanor? They've already proven they can't be trusted with a gun.
These are the sorts of conversations we need to have but aren't having because people get so caught up in knee jerk actions that can't be taken.
I remember years ago the call was for "common sense gun reform!" and the action was "Did you know, people on the no-fly list can buy guns? How is that common sense??!??" Obama was making that call.
To which my reaction was "How many of these shooters were on the no-fly list? Oh, right, NONE of them? Good jorb!"
And there's no set process for adding or removing people from the no fly list and it, itself, appears to be non-sensical:
So you'll only care about children dying in school when the numbers go up even higher than they already are?
No, a shooting at a school would most likely be a mass shooting, unless it were something like a gang shooting, or a robbery, or some fight that got out of control.
I'm talking about the Gun Violence Archive posting up stories like this:
Which, regardless of how many people died, is a murder/suicide, not a mass shooting. The general public was not at risk, the killings weren't random, and did not happen in a public space. In fact, based on the early reporting, may not have even been a shooting.
There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting" and different organizations tracking such incidents use different definitions. Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare and sometimes exclude instances of gang violence, armed robberies, familicides and terrorism.
Maybe it has something to do with it not being any kind of official term and your panties are twisted over how the media writes them up ignoring the pain and suffering from others and building your strawman off semantics?
It's not that the media writes it up in such sensationalist terms, "if it bleeds, it leads" has been journalism 101 since... well since forever.
My beef is the unquestioning repetition. Once you see it, you can't un-see it:
"nearly a thousand mass shootings to have taken place since the Newtown shooting in 2009"
Newtown is the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting. So when they conflate those two things in the same sentence they want you to believe that there have been nearly 1000 shootings as horrific, deadly, senseless and random as the one that claimed the lives of 20 six and seven year olds, and that is absolutely, patently, false.
Why are you like this? So since every mass shooting isn't worse than the worst one they don't matter? Stop making up excuses. I'm don't with you.
No, I'm saying it's not the same class of crime and the only reason the media conflates them is to scare people.
I'll give you an example from my own back yard... one of those "thousand mass shootings since Newtown" was this one:
A couple of brothers in Portland decided to do an illegal weed operation. Oregon allows you to grow, own, smoke, sell, and buy weed, but only for in state use.
3 guys fly in from Texas for the illegal weed buy. Words were had, guns were drawn, both brothers shot and killed, 2/3 Texans shot and killed, 3rd Texan arrested sometime later.
That is just normal crime. That's not a mass shooting in the same way Sandy Hook was and to breath it in the same breath as Sandy Hook disresepects each of the 20 kids that died there.
Gun Violence Archive? 4 people dead = "mass shooting". No, robbery gone wrong? Sure. Crime? Absolutely. Save the mass shooting shit for when innocent people get killed.
Read very carefully please. It doesn't matter what people call it, children dying to gun violence at school should not be happening, one per incident or 50 per incident is irrelevant, and the only difference between the US and first world nations where it doesn't happen is our gun culture.
Oh, agreed, which makes it WORSE when they are conflated in the "more mass shootings than days of the year" bullshit.
You have no idea how badly you've outed yourself as living in a little bubble where you think it will never happen to you, so you don't care.
Because you'll never be in a relationship with a domestic abuser that executes a house full of people will you? You're the gun owning male, so you get to decide who around you lives or dies.
4 innocent people were killed -- a number that is much more difficult to achieve without a gun -- but you don't want them counted because they knew the gun owner.
You've let the gun lobby turn you into a fucking sociopath.
That doesn't make a murder/suicide a "mass shooting". I'm sorry apporoaching this rationally has you so upset.
That doesn't make a murder/suicide a "mass shooting". I'm sorry apporoaching this rationally has you so upset
Thanks, I love this reply. It's only two sentences, but its so fantastically revealing.
The first sentences calls your very own example a "murder/suicide", a term which is unquestionably more misleading than "mass shooting". The "murder" isn't even plural, despite there being 4 of them.
If you gathered up a million people, told half of them it was a murder/suicide and half of them it was a mass shooting, then asked them to guess the number of people killed, the latter would easily be closer to the truth.
The second sentence just makes it clear you're a fuckstain.
And resorting to ad hominem attacks proves you have nothing to actually say on the topic. Congratulations, you lose.
This isn't high school debate class. Ad hominem means you're not inherently wrong just because you're a fuckwit. You can still be wrong and you can still be a fuckwit.
The thing is, by resorting to childish attacks, you are showing everyone else reading this thread in the future you have no argument. I'm not after you, you're a lost cause. I'm after them.
I don't really understand why it fucking matters. It is literally the number one cause of death among young people in this country. This happens nowhere else in the modern world. It's unacceptable.
Stop trying to make the conversation about semantics
It matters because the Gun Violence Archive and the uncritical mass media are inflating the statistic to make people scared so they can push an agenda.
When you read a headline talking about the UNLV shooting and they go "more mass shootings than days in the year!" they are NOT talking about a random nut with a gun showing up in a public place and killing random people like the UNLV shooter.
It's disingenuous to conflate the two together, and I'd argue, disrespectful of the victims of actual mass shootings.
It matters because the Gun Violence Archive and the uncritical mass media are inflating the statistic to make people scared so they can push an agenda
Bullshit. You're attacking it because it's counter to your agenda.
Republicans, right-wing media, the gun lobby and the pro-gun community routinely fearmonger as a way to boost their own profits and power.
Not only do you not care when they do it, you've enthusiastically put yourself and your own family in more danger because of it.
You're hopelessly compromised and your thoughts about how gun violence statistics are about as trustworthy as a cops views on police brutality statistics.
My agenda is "words mean things" and if you're going to throw around a phrase like "mass shooting" you shouldn't have a low hanging fruit definition that does not take intent into consideration.
Here are two scenarios:
You have a party, two groups of people are talking. Words are had, there's an argument. Punches are thrown. One person pulls a gun, causing another person to pull a gun, multiple shots are fired and 5 people are injured.
You have a party, a disgruntled incel was not invited, shows up with a semiautomatic weapon and shoots 4 people before being dragged to the ground.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, both of these are "mass shootings" and if you go down their list of shootings of the year, the vast majority of them fall under category 1, not category 2.
The difference is, in scenario #1, nobody went to the party intending to shoot anyone. You can't say the same for scenario #2.
Lumping them together so you can make people think there are more cases of scenario #2 than there actually are is disingenuous.
My agenda is "words mean things"
If that was actually your agenda, this wouldn't be your position. You want to lower the statistic using semantics and as an added bonus, take away the vocabulary needed to discuss a huge percentage of gun violence.
The difference is, in scenario #1, nobody went to the party intending to shoot anyone. You can't say the same for scenario #2.
5 people were shot. Intentional vs accidental, premeditated vs impulse, none of that changes the fact that 5 people were shot and the event was a mass shooting.
Even in your own example that you made as contrived as you needed, 3 innocent people were still shot and swept under the rug.
The organizations you're rallying against are completely open about their definitions, making them far more honest than you're being.
I'm sorry if that hurts your guns feelings.
They aren't being honest because they do not discuss intent and they are intentionally trying to scare people by masking that.
I tell you what, starting 1/1 pay attention to what they're doing. By the end of January I expect you'll be stunned at the number of "mass shootings" that aren't what they're trying to scare people into thinking they are.
I should say too, the Gun Violence Archive isn't alone in this:
"This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government's Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn't confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn't meet the government's parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn't respond to our inquiries."
So, again, why do they want to keep everyone so afraid?
That's not how most people define a "mass shooting".
That's is I and many others define it...
If you want to scare people, sure, you can define it that way.
No. It just takes some basic intelligence to figure out that mass shootings are shootings of multiple people. Sorry that concept is hard for you to understand.
There is, fundamentally, a difference between a crime that, when reported, makes your average citizen go "OMG! That could have been me!" vs. a crime which, while tragic, does not endanger the general public or people at random.
"Mass shooting" carries with it a sense of reckless disregard or casual indifference that does NOT apply to, say, crimes of passion.
Gun Violence Archive treats that as a mass shooting. Unless you lived next door to the shooter in question, you were never at risk. The shooting was not random, and it did not happen in a public space.
So why do they categorize it as the same sort of crime as the UNLV shooting? Which was random and did take place in a public space?
Because they have an agenda and want to pump up their numbers.
Ummm...why would you not consider that a mass shooting? Do you not have neighbors? It kind of seems like that really could be anybody considering many people have at least one unhinged neighbor around them.
A mass shooting happens in a public place with random targets, making your average person feel victimized even if they weren't there. It's an act of terror, the murder is ancillary.
In the case of a targeted killing at a private home? That's just murder.
Where does your definition come from? I'm not saying it's wrong, it's just not the same as what I and people I know use. For context, I live in the US.
Definition comes from a position of rationality and not wanting to scare people. :)
I'm confused. Is your position that yours is the most generally-held definition, or that it should be?
My position is that when the average person hears the phrase "mass shooting", the scenario that comes to mind is a shooter, going to a public space, with the intent of killing and injuring as many people as possible.
They don't percieve it as extensions of other crimes that weren't planned or concieved as mass shootings. Bar fights, domestic violence, gang shootings, etc. etc.
The Gun Violence Archive fails to make that distinction because they have an agenda, one which the mass media perpetuates unquestioningly.
Well that's nice that you made up your own definition...
Your distinction can make sense but not how you are looking at it. Saying murder is ancillary is ridiculous. The killers in those cases are not just wildly shooting in the air and it just so happens to hit people and kill them. Killing them is their intent. You could make an argument to split our random mass shootings vs targeted but there is still a pretty obvious base reason for both of those: ease of access to guns.
Of course, it doesn't do any good to say "their definition is bullshit" if I'm not willing to provide an alternative.
We need to distinguish terrorist level events where one or more nuts with a gun enter a public space with the intention of causing as much mayhem as possible than other forms of gun crimes where armed people do end up shooting, but that was not their stated purpose, it just worked out that way.
There's an issue with Familicides as well. Those are often in private, but can wipe a household out. Ease of access is what is being discussed largely, as well as the general terrorism of a 'public space' mass shooting.
Meh, leave it to Russia to bungle the whole concept of school shootings. If less than two kids get killed, that's just a normal school day here in America. And really what is so tragic about kids getting shot? Life is best to those who live the least of it.
Fucking wow, a mod deleted a whole comment chain because it wasn't directly related to the post. That's pretty fucked. So much for being able to have any sort of discussion here.
Got it mod. No conversation between Lemmy users. Yes sir. Way to be so much fucking better than reddit, huh?
Yeah, there's a lot of censorship going on here.
The modlog is nice, but it's still possible for entire chains to be wiped from view if the post at the top gets removed.
I think we should have the option to see what mods censor. That way everyone wins.
Wtf is this comment trying to say?
Are shootings that occur near a school but don't involve any students let alone kids really school shootings? Not enough people look at the details of reported "school shootings". They are massively inflated with events that I would not consider a school shooting.
A quintessentially American viewpoint; that a shooting isn't that bad because it happened near a school rather than inside.
Embarrassing.
I mean to be fair, it's a difference between a public shooting and a school shooting. Property law matters. Contact your lawyer today, before it happens to you!
My guy, you're making that argument to the wrong person lol
How is that any better? So when a shooting isn't at a school but near it it doesn't danger the children at all? Is there a magic barrier? I mean ye, it's not technically a school shooting but it is still fucking mental. The anxiety those kids would feel when they hear shots, "am I gonna die now?". No child should be afraid like that, the adults are failing them in the States.
As I stated a lot of the school shootings did not involve any children, but you want to still use the arguement of "think of the children!" Most of the shootings could not be verified to have even happened. Most of the reported shootings occured with handguns and not rifles. Most of the shootings involved drug dealing. You idiots are twisting the facts on these shootings as much as republicans twist facts on abortion and it is disgusting.
We have a right to bear arms because ever government wants to become totalitarian and our ability to arm ourselves is the only defense when protecting our right to vote and have democracy. Why did the USSR and CCP disarm their population? Why have successful laws passed to disarm americans only been targeted at blacks and other minorities? Use your head for two fucking seconds and realize that the threat of violence is the only thing that keeps corrupt politicians honest. I am thinking of the kids and praying they still have a democratic government when I die that respects their rights.
Do you really think your little pop gun is going to defeat a satellite-guided drone bomber?
Afganistan and Vietnam won dumbass.
Also ask the many assasinated leaders how things are.
After how many deaths and how many years?
Oh shit guys yeah Phew thanks. We can all relax now. No need to do anything .
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent
Or you could stop believing every bullshit thing that the anti-gun groups make up...you know it's bad what NPR can't find everything they report as true and calls into question what's real.
Yes, let's not rush into to taking any sort of precaution to protect our kids. Much better to have this wild West situation we have going on now just in case me, Clyde, and Peepaw need to go toe-to-toe with the US Government in some sort of hypothetical hyperbolic David vs Goliath scenario. Totes makes fucking sense, dunnit.
As a gun owner, I recognize how absolutely lax the gun laws are. Let them make it harder to buy a gun. It won't hurt you. At least then I know fucking "Off-His-Meds" Jeb down the street from me won't be able to buy an AR-15 and mow down my family because my weeds keep "blowing on his lawn" or whatever inane shit he constantly yells as me about.
Maybe you could stop being susceptible to all of the gun lobbyists arguments and learn to think for yourself at some point. I don't know. That's just my 2¢. Maybe once you have a kid or grandkid going through school your tune will change.
Exactly. Let's not even raise a finger to do the minimum amount to stop guns getting into the hands of impulsive kids or men to begin with...lets just give a gun to every motherfuckin' buttwipe out there and let everyone shoot at whoever they want. Eventually one person will be left, with nothing but a ruined earth to comfort themselves. And maybe that's truly what should happen, poetically justice speaking.
The only times I see pistols is when I see policemen.
The only times I see machine guns is in the hands of policemen at the airport, or when extremist groups are demonstrating and need protection by the police.
Why would I even need a gun, when hardly any criminal owns one?
The concept of gun ownership is flawed in itself.
There's nothing inherently wrong with gun ownership. However, there is a shit ton wrong on how we handle distribution and tracking of them. We have more prerequisites for operating a vehicle than we do a firearm, and in a country where we have a SIGNIFICANT number of mass shootings, we are doing SIGNIFICANTLY little to fix the issue.
Gun ownership is totally fine. I bought a handgun and a shotgun on the same day (after someone tried to break in and attack my wife - they didn't realize that I had just come home from a trip) and was blown away that I could just walk right out the door with them within a few minutes. A rifle for hunting is also not an issue.
Fun fact: handguns are used in mass shootings more often than AR15s. In fact, all rifles, of which AR15s is merely the most popular type, are responsible for ~500/60,000 gun deaths/yr in the US. Probably because, as you may guess, handguns are a lot more concealable than rifles.
Also, be fair about the buying process, you still went through the National Instant Criminal background check system. Sure instant checks don't take long anymore due to Al Gore inventing the internet in the 90s, but they do still happen and adding arbitrary length does nothing to stop crimes. In fact even if they did, they don't stop nor are they designed to stop the types of planned attack we're talking about (mass casualty events), they are to stop "crimes of passion" (guy killing his wife), and there's some contention that they effectively do that as it isn't like the couple necessarily receives the proper counseling, so he just picks it up and does it next time he's in a wife killin' mood, or if he can't wait goes all Chris Benoit or that "Stairs" jerkoff.
Sounds like a good reason to highly regulate handguns to me.
They are regulated.
There is a difference between regulated and highly regulated?
Crimes like straw purchasing or lying on a NICs form are punishable by 10yr in prison, federal prison in some cases. I'd say that's pretty "high."
You know what would be a lot higher? Not letting mentally ill people or domestic abusers, or people who have shown to use them in an unsafe manner around children have access to them. But apparently that is way too far in America.
People who have been convicted of domestic violence are already federally barred from firearms ownership, same for people who have been involuntarily committed, and child endangerment is already also a crime that falls outside the scope of simply firearms.
Not for long.
That's not what I said, I said a history of mental illness.
But it doesn't include handgun ownership, which you know full well. And that's what we're talking about here.
But since you are blatantly misrepresenting what I said and being incredibly dishonest, I don't think this conversation needs to continue.
I cannot relate to that. I am 37 years old and I think I have never witnessed violent crime, except in television or on playgrounds (children are assholes to each other!)
Yeah, it was terrifying. Like the guy knew she was there, we had just put the dog outside, so they were obviously watching the house. They tried to kick in the front door, and I ran to the front door have naked and half asleep. The terror slammed full force into me when I realized someone was at our door (could see through glass), and I had no weapon to deal with them. They ran as soon as they saw me. I had just gotten home late the night before, so they obviously knew that I wasn't home, and the knew that my wife was.
It still wigs me out to this day.
How long does the police need to arrive at your home? For me in case of an active break in it would probably be around 120 to 180 seconds. So this usually only happens when nobody is home, it’s too dangerous otherwise.
Someone stole my e-bike from the back yard. And I have heard of break ins in cellars. But that kind of crime that you describe is very very rare.
Does that mean that gun ownership is a side effect of a security system that has flaws in itself?
National average response time to emergencies is 11min, 23 to non emergencies. In the cities it'll be "less" (maybe, and not much), but in the country it could be hours.
That’s long. 😱 For non emergencies I have waited long times. Like 40 minutes or even hours. But when I called the fire department once it came like 30 seconds after I had hung up. And it was just a smoking trash can, nothing really dangerous.
Fire dept is a bit quicker I think but they only protect you from fires of course, also, analogous to firearms, fire extinguishers are good to have on hand if a fire breaks out. Also, fortunately the fire often doesn't actively prevent you calling the fire dept, though often due to the nature of being victimized violently you won't be able to even call the police until after the event unless you're lucky, you often have to focus on fighting or running in the moment.
People are not always logical. Even if the cops could get there within 2 minutes, that's still 2 minutes that you have to deal with someone that is intent on doing harm to you. I wouldn't want to risk that.
The police also have no legal obligation to protect you. Meaning if there is a situation that they consider "dangerous" they might not even enter the house to protect you. Like....I'm not hedging all of my bets on a cop to protect me. Because there's still a chance that I lose.
I understand your point that there's not really any point to having weapons when we have a "protector", but we've already seen that those "protectors" have no obligation to actually protect you if they feel endangered. Guns are tools. A rifle is a tool to provide food for yourself. A handgun/shotgun is a tool that you use to protect yourself. We just shouldn't hand those tools out to literally everyone that wants one.
Here, they are less afraid because almost no household is armed. It is a dangerous situation to enter a home, but they always come in pairs and might do so with guns drawn.
But we are talking about very extreme cases. German police shot 14 people in 2017, 11 in 2018, and 15 in 2019. So about the same amount of people that die from lightning strikes. The vast majority of policemen do not discharge their gun in their whole line of duty.
If you compare likelihood of violent crime the bigger danger comes from people inside your house, rather than burglary. Therefore, weapons in houses would make life more dangerous here, since you are less likely to escape your step mother armed with a gun, than your step mother armed with a kitchen knife.
PS: I don’t know your step mother. Maybe she is a world class samurai swordswoman. I apologise if my analogy insulted her.
Yeah but my dude, before any of this happens, you're way morelikely to just lose your shit yourself and murder yourself or one of your family or more.
Live by the sword die by the sword I guess.
No we do not, you can purchase a car at any age, transport it across any state lines, drive it without insurance or a license at any age on private property, and you don't have to register it once to do any of this.
Yea as a gun owner lol what bullshit are you shoveling?
And that shit doesn't happen, stop making up bullshit scenarios....not even going to speak on the fact that none of what you said or propose will stop someone from obtaining a firearm. It's not illegal to sell privately and as you probably know prohibition didn't work.
Every other country has a FRACTION OF A FRACTION of the amount of shootings that we do, and you have the gall to sit there and go "none of what you said or propose will stop someone", when politicians and gun control groups have literally proposed NUMEROUS extremely common sense fixes to help curb the violence. It's fucking loons like you that rally against it ad nauseum because "DeMs CuMmInG fEr MuH gUnS!1!". You're nothing but a gun lobbyists mouthpiece who would rather let kids get killed so you can keep an overpowered AR than try LITERALLY anything to help alleviate the situation.
No one is coming for my shotgun, or my handgun, or my hunting rifle. Literally no one will ever pass a law that will ban those. Red flag laws WORK. Mandatory withholding periods WORK. Banning AR weapons and bump stocks would be a step in the right direction. Pushing these laws on a federal level would help. Would it stop everything? No, but it would provide a LOT more opportunities to catch someone before it happens.
Fuck, do something to help our kids, don't be the barrier that makes it more difficult.
Lol and you're a mouth piece for emotional ignorance...you even saying no one is touching your handguns when 95% of all gun deaths are via handguns...rifles of all kinds are around 3% of all gun deaths, and then the AR style rifles make up around 50 deaths a year...50...more kids are killed by being punched and kicked to death by an order of magnitude 10xs the amount done via AR pattern rifles.
Wanna actually do something to help, stop focusing on guns, you're not going to stop the violence that way. Focus on:
We can start with:
Single payer healthcare
Ending the War on Drugs
Ending Qualified immunity
Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren't 30-40 kids for one teacher.
UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
End for profit prisons
Enforce the laws already on the books
Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don't turn to violence/gangs to survive.
Increase the minimum wage
Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don't turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
Banning Insider Trading for Congress
Term limits
Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
So what do you think is going to decrease school shootings? What are you proposing or support that will improve the situation?
We can start with:
Single payer healthcare
Ending the War on Drugs
Ending Qualified immunity
Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren't 30-40 kids for one teacher.
UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
End for profit prisons
Enforce the laws already on the books
Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don't turn to violence/gangs to survive.
Increase the minimum wage
Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don't turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
Banning Insider Trading for Congress
Term limits
Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
So basically... Fix every other nearly impossible to fix problem first before even deciding to do anything about the actual guns, if anything at all?
And to be clear, by impossible to fix, I mean politically, not that these problems are actually unsolvable.
So you're plan is to try and tackle something that's written into the constitution.... that's your goal? Say it's nearly impossible to do everything else on that list which isn't written into our constitution...but guns... they're easier to fix...fucking hell you all are really naive.
You mean like slavery?
Are you equating slavery to owning firearms? You white privileged ivory tower types are hilarious.
Nope. I'm equating slavery to tackling something in the constitution and changing it. You know, the thing you just implied was not something that could be done. I'm sure you know that and are obfuscating.
Yea everyone basically agreed slavery was bad...we fought a fucking civil war over it...the majority of the USA is pro-gun. You will never radify the constitution to remove or nullify the 2nd. It's not going to ever happen.
If everyone agreed, why did we fight a civil war over it?
I didn't specify a plan one way or another. I just think it's crazy that the talking points you presented seem pretty clearly designed to just kick this issue down the road, cause at least that way you still get to have your guns.
And believe me, solving all those things you mentioned would be great. But why not also try and do something about the major gun issues at the same time too?
Those "talking points" would solve our firearm violence. We don't have a gun problem, we have a societal one. Random mass shootings are a new phenomenon...gang violence and drug violence are not. Solving these things with the list I posted, would curb our violence epidemic 100xs more than just another emotional gun law from people who don't understand guns.
We do have a societal problem. We also very much have a gun problem.
And proposing all these other things you know won't get accomplished is a way to shift all the responsibility away from the gun issue itself.
And you aren't being emotional about even the thought of some more gun control or anything to even tackle that issue head on? Come on.
It might be because I'm not delusional about why we have the violence in the first place. I'm proposing things that actually would make a difference, another AWB or mag cap/mag ban/etc is emotional policies that will not put a single dent in our gun violence... I'm not the one kicking the can down the road, you are.
I personally didn't propose any of those policies. I genuinely don't know what would work best. I just think you are being really transparent in treating the guns themselves as having nothing to do with the issue of gun violence.
I think everything you were saying would be great to accomplish. It's just really disingenuous to propose them knowing there is a slim chance any of them will happen while completely ignoring the actual guns, just because you want to keep your guns.
Lol fantastic response. And its crickets from everyone else being critical
No, not crickets. Those things sound great, let's do them. We should do everything we can, and that also includes stricter gun laws.
Not term limits though. It may sound like a good idea, but I implore you to research issues with term limits.
Term limits need to happen, otherwise you end up being ruled by politicians who are in a perpetual cycle of trying to stay in office.
Term limits will seal the deal to the end of our Democracy.
Either you're arguing in bad faith, and know this, or you're refusing to inform yourself of the downsides.
So you're ok with SCOTUS and other judges being appointed and no term limits? What about the POTUS, are you saying it's ok if Trump won and kept being president as long as he continues to win?
Please tell me the good sides of having no term limits. Laws shouldn't be straped to a single person.
Buddy, I'm not going to do all the work for you. This is a well researched subject with a ton of information, it's not some brand new idea.
I was mainly referring to elected positions, I'm not necessarily against term limits for Supreme Court Justices.
Edit: See my reply to the knob below for a few sources.
Lol that's a cop out for, I don't have anything other than shit from life long politicians who say it's bad. You're the one making the claim not me.
Those are all fantastic suggestions. In my opinion we absolutely should be taking much more drastic measures to decrease school shootings in the meantime, as nearly everything you suggest would still take at least ~15-20 years to see results. Any dead kid is too many and there are way too many school shootings.
And you can end with bringing your gun regulations up to speed to every other developed nation.
Or not because it's not the guns... it's our society that needs fixing.
Nothing will improve the situation until we make a concerted effort to shut down gun manufacturing and distribution, even forcibly removing them from the hands of criminals any way we possibly can. And since the kid-killers at the NRA won't allow that, the answer is - this problem of mass murder in schools is only going to intensify until everyone's child is at risk and can no longer attend public schools of any kind. And that's only the tip of the horrific iceberg of a shitshow that's coming to our country.
Wow you're really off the deep end aren't you...I thought most conspiracy theory nut jobs where mainly right wing...but shit you just went into over drive and leaned hard left on that one...
I am as leftist as any human being ever could be - and damn proud of it. Saying the truth always seems like "going off the deep end" to people who aren't able to comprehend. I consider your remark proof of that.
Just look at counties without school shootings, the answer is pretty obvious: none of them have... video games, mental illness, or Democrats.
The fact that they don't have an insane amount of privately owned firearms, or the ability to purchase them legally, easily, and with barely any restrictions, is just a coincidence. Definitely not relevant.
But then they bring up Switzerland's huge stockpile of guns.
Without mentioning they only have them through military training, meaning they are fully trained on gun safety.
Or that they aren't allowed to have ammo for those guns.
You had me in the first half ngl.
Hello, I am from the uneducated north, what are these "vid eh oh gams" of which you speak?
They also have safety nets, way less gang violence, not a war on drugs, of for profit prison systems...and a whole shit load of other things, but naa it's the guns...
Oh shit I forgot that Eric Harris and Adam Lanza both claimed Crips. I heard they C walked down the hallways as they shot up the schools.
I honestly can't tell if you're intentionally giving bad faith arguments, or just stupid. But I'm betting it's the latter.
O shit I forgot columbine happened during the AWB...and so did VT...shit...kinda sounds like I'm not the one arguing in bad faith.
Their government doesn't deny the impending climate catastrophe.
NPR is a pretty neutral news source. Your comment on them seems a bit unhinged.
NPR leans left, while they're not super left, they're not fully neutal. The point is, a lot of lies get used as truths to spread political propaganda, and it works.
The fucking truth leans left. The fuck do you want? Right wing shit is divorced from reality.
The truth doesn't have a political side.
I've seen the opposite lately, actually. They've been criticized historically (unfairly, it was just objective reporting) for leaning left, but they've since overcorrected and now lean center-right a lot of the time.
News to me, those bias sites are all showing them as light left still, but I'm not saying you're wrong.
I know what the sites say... They're pretty reliably in the center. I think the whole "reality has as liberal bias" thing made it seem like they leaned left when in reality, that's just what the center actually looks like.
From my experience, since I've been paying attention, they've over-corrected in the other direction. Still mostly center, but they seem kind of scared to be completely objective when it makes the GOP look as bad as it actually is. They seem perfectly OK with the fascist element taking control (who will most likely either do away with all of their funding, or turn it into a state-backed propaganda mouthpiece), because they seem scared that calling people what they are will make them appear "left-leaning".
Just my observations. Maybe keep it in mind going forward and see if you notice as well.
I'll have to pay closer attention to that, it would be crazy if they did that though. As you said they've already been attacked by the GOP for funding.
Such as?
So you didn't read the article I posted....at bare minimum do that instead of wasting my time.
I was wondering how long it'd take for the word "propaganda" to show up on Lemmy. 3 seconds flat this time, congratulations!
Americans be like "see, not enough children died, so we should keep our glorious god given guns" as soon as any discrepancies in number of kids killed show up.
Euros be like, I don't know what the fuck is happening in the states...let me chime in...
I'm a proper American, from the Americas. You know, one of those countries your country likes to fuck around with every now and then with a little coup or private militia invasion. With those guns you guys worship so much. That kind of American.
I don't know of a country there that allows private ownership of firearms...what we need to do with SA is leave it alone and end our war on drugs, so the cartels lose their income.
Well, we do allow private ownership of firearms, just, AFAIK, a very limited number of models provided by a very specific entity rather than just about anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if most countries in the americas allowed some degree of firearm ownership (don't care enough to look it up).
I didn't mean that when I said "privately owned militias". I meant the banana companies which dealt with strikes by sending privately owned troops on privately owned ships to these countries in order to reign in their poorly disguised slavery.
So far, anti-gun groups have never made up anything. They don't have to, the stats are there for anyone who isn't completely ignorant to see for themselves. Two mass murders in the U.S. in the past two days, and this is what you come up with? It's no wonder humanity is plummeting into mass murder and insanity keeps rising.
Did you even read the article I posted from NPR? It's literally calling out how bad the everytown info is. It's made up, and continually used as factual information.
Sounds good, it's a great day!
And Ajit Pai just joined
NPRThe American Public TV Board of Trustees. I'm not entirely certain if they and NPR are the same organization.so I'm sure the journalistic integrity is going into his giant Reese's Mug, to be thrown in the toilet.https://indiawest.com/ajit-pai-elected-to-public-television-board-of-trustees/
Edit: found the article, will leave the original text up as the sentiment remains the same, just struck out.
That's terrible, but that article is from 2019...so not much of shit pie joining means much...still sucks as NPR I really liked, even if they did have a lean on some things I disagreed with.
The worst is the Gun Violence Archive and their "mass shooting index" which gets quoted uncritically in the media, so you get headlines like:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mass-shootings-days-2023-database-shows/story?id=96609874
"There have been more mass shootings than days in 2023, database shows
The United States has experienced 627 mass shootings so far this year."
The problem is they define "mass shooting" differently from how the public sees a mass shooting.
Their definition is a shooting event where 4 or more people are injured or killed.
So were there 627 events similar to the UNLV situation where a nut with a gun shows up in a public place and starts shooting indescriminately?
No.
Most of the shootings listed on the Gun Violence Archive are situations where there was a party, alcohol or drugs were involved, two parties got into an argument, the argument turned into a fight, and people got shot. That's not how most people define a "mass shooting".
I'd argue for a mass shooting definition of "person(s) arrive at a public location with the sole intention of shooting as many people as possible."
That would rule out the bar fight incidents, or robberies gone bad, or people who go nuts and kill their family in their own house. We should distinguish between psychotic episodes that put the public at risk, vs. normal crime, vs. domestic vioence that does not involve the general public.
So your objection is that they call a mass shooting a mass shooting? What magic number would you like them to use?
No, my objection is they call normal shootings mass shootings with the agenda of making and keeping people scared.
"Normal shootings"
You just made me realize how much I'd love to live in a country where there was no such thing as a "normal shooting".
Gun culture in America is absolutely fucked.
While it's not quite "throw a dart board at a map", it's pretty close.
They're so goddamn brain rotted that they don't even realize how completely fucked that is.
Yes, for example:
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/at-least-3-fatally-shot-in-dallas-home-suspect-wanted/
That's just "crime", not a mass shooting, unless you talk to the gun violence archive.
They want you to be scared. You need to ask why.
The "normal" number of people getting shot is 0.
They want you to sweep gun violence under the rug. You don't need to ask why, it's because gun sales bring in millions in profits for the gun-lobby and the Republicans they purchase.
Unfortunately, no, that's never going to happen. Even in countries that severely limit guns, the number is not 0.
Just this year in England for example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_shooting
Or Germany:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamburg_shooting
Last year in Australia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieambilla_shootings
It is not and never will be 0.
I didn't claim the number could be 0, I claimed the acceptable number is 0.
Following every one of those shootings you linked, people demanded to know how it happened. Why did they have a gun? Was there warning signs that were missed? Was anybody negligent? How can we stop it from happening again and limiting the damage if it does?
That is the reaction of a society that finds any number above 0 unacceptable. They treat mass shootings as a failure of the system.
Meanwhile in America, they don't bother to ask those questions.
They had a gun because it's trivial to get your hands on semi-automatic rifles and handguns, even if you can't pass a background check, because there are millions of unsecured weapons and no universal background checks.
The police and politicians are deliberately negligent, staunchly opposing red flag laws despite most mass shooters having multiple red flags.
No effort is made to prevent it happening again, because the murder of 20 children is shrugged off as some kind of inevitability, no more preventable than an earthquake or tornado -- much the same as you're doing right now.
Limiting the damage isn't just staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, many of them fully support making more dangerous weaponry available.
These are not the actions of people who find all gun violence unacceptable and the only reason the Ulvade police are criticized and the Newtown police are given a pass is because the Ulvade police didn't bother to pretend they cared.
To be clear, I'm not arguing against sensible legislation, there are many things that can and should be done starting with an actual analysis if what could or should have prevented any specific shooting, once you realize that "banning guns" is off the table thanks to the second amendment.
An example I like to cite is the guy who shot up Michigan State. He had previously been arrested on a felony gun charge, was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, did his time, did his probation, had a clean background check, bought guns and shot up the school.
Now, we already prevent felons from owning guns. Maybe, just maybe, if someone is arrested on a felony gun charge, that is something that should not be allowed to be pled down to a misdemeanor? Ya think?
Alternately, since we block felons from owning guns, as well as domestic abusers, and people charged with crimes that can land them in prison for more than a year, how about we block people with ANY gun charge from owning a gun? Felony OR misdemeanor? They've already proven they can't be trusted with a gun.
These are the sorts of conversations we need to have but aren't having because people get so caught up in knee jerk actions that can't be taken.
I remember years ago the call was for "common sense gun reform!" and the action was "Did you know, people on the no-fly list can buy guns? How is that common sense??!??" Obama was making that call.
To which my reaction was "How many of these shooters were on the no-fly list? Oh, right, NONE of them? Good jorb!"
And there's no set process for adding or removing people from the no fly list and it, itself, appears to be non-sensical:
https://www.aclu.org/documents/statement-david-c-nelson
I'm sure that reply was fascinating but you've already revealed that you're full of shit, so I'm not going to read it.
Proving, yet again, why you lose the debate.
So you'll only care about children dying in school when the numbers go up even higher than they already are?
No, a shooting at a school would most likely be a mass shooting, unless it were something like a gang shooting, or a robbery, or some fight that got out of control.
I'm talking about the Gun Violence Archive posting up stories like this:
https://www.koin.com/local/clark-county/vancouver-murder-suicide-suspect-victims-identified-by-clark-county-authorities/
Which, regardless of how many people died, is a murder/suicide, not a mass shooting. The general public was not at risk, the killings weren't random, and did not happen in a public space. In fact, based on the early reporting, may not have even been a shooting.
Maybe it has something to do with it not being any kind of official term and your panties are twisted over how the media writes them up ignoring the pain and suffering from others and building your strawman off semantics?
It's not that the media writes it up in such sensationalist terms, "if it bleeds, it leads" has been journalism 101 since... well since forever.
My beef is the unquestioning repetition. Once you see it, you can't un-see it:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/campus-shooting-2
"nearly a thousand mass shootings to have taken place since the Newtown shooting in 2009"
Newtown is the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting. So when they conflate those two things in the same sentence they want you to believe that there have been nearly 1000 shootings as horrific, deadly, senseless and random as the one that claimed the lives of 20 six and seven year olds, and that is absolutely, patently, false.
Why are you like this? So since every mass shooting isn't worse than the worst one they don't matter? Stop making up excuses. I'm don't with you.
No, I'm saying it's not the same class of crime and the only reason the media conflates them is to scare people.
I'll give you an example from my own back yard... one of those "thousand mass shootings since Newtown" was this one:
A couple of brothers in Portland decided to do an illegal weed operation. Oregon allows you to grow, own, smoke, sell, and buy weed, but only for in state use.
3 guys fly in from Texas for the illegal weed buy. Words were had, guns were drawn, both brothers shot and killed, 2/3 Texans shot and killed, 3rd Texan arrested sometime later.
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2021/06/two-portland-brothers-two-marijuana-buyers-die-in-gun-battle-during-attempted-drug-ripoff.html
That is just normal crime. That's not a mass shooting in the same way Sandy Hook was and to breath it in the same breath as Sandy Hook disresepects each of the 20 kids that died there.
Gun Violence Archive? 4 people dead = "mass shooting". No, robbery gone wrong? Sure. Crime? Absolutely. Save the mass shooting shit for when innocent people get killed.
Read very carefully please. It doesn't matter what people call it, children dying to gun violence at school should not be happening, one per incident or 50 per incident is irrelevant, and the only difference between the US and first world nations where it doesn't happen is our gun culture.
Oh, agreed, which makes it WORSE when they are conflated in the "more mass shootings than days of the year" bullshit.
You have no idea how badly you've outed yourself as living in a little bubble where you think it will never happen to you, so you don't care.
Because you'll never be in a relationship with a domestic abuser that executes a house full of people will you? You're the gun owning male, so you get to decide who around you lives or dies.
4 innocent people were killed -- a number that is much more difficult to achieve without a gun -- but you don't want them counted because they knew the gun owner.
You've let the gun lobby turn you into a fucking sociopath.
That doesn't make a murder/suicide a "mass shooting". I'm sorry apporoaching this rationally has you so upset.
Thanks, I love this reply. It's only two sentences, but its so fantastically revealing.
The first sentences calls your very own example a "murder/suicide", a term which is unquestionably more misleading than "mass shooting". The "murder" isn't even plural, despite there being 4 of them.
If you gathered up a million people, told half of them it was a murder/suicide and half of them it was a mass shooting, then asked them to guess the number of people killed, the latter would easily be closer to the truth.
The second sentence just makes it clear you're a fuckstain.
And resorting to ad hominem attacks proves you have nothing to actually say on the topic. Congratulations, you lose.
This isn't high school debate class. Ad hominem means you're not inherently wrong just because you're a fuckwit. You can still be wrong and you can still be a fuckwit.
The thing is, by resorting to childish attacks, you are showing everyone else reading this thread in the future you have no argument. I'm not after you, you're a lost cause. I'm after them.
I don't really understand why it fucking matters. It is literally the number one cause of death among young people in this country. This happens nowhere else in the modern world. It's unacceptable.
Stop trying to make the conversation about semantics
It matters because the Gun Violence Archive and the uncritical mass media are inflating the statistic to make people scared so they can push an agenda.
When you read a headline talking about the UNLV shooting and they go "more mass shootings than days in the year!" they are NOT talking about a random nut with a gun showing up in a public place and killing random people like the UNLV shooter.
It's disingenuous to conflate the two together, and I'd argue, disrespectful of the victims of actual mass shootings.
Bullshit. You're attacking it because it's counter to your agenda.
Republicans, right-wing media, the gun lobby and the pro-gun community routinely fearmonger as a way to boost their own profits and power.
Not only do you not care when they do it, you've enthusiastically put yourself and your own family in more danger because of it.
You're hopelessly compromised and your thoughts about how gun violence statistics are about as trustworthy as a cops views on police brutality statistics.
My agenda is "words mean things" and if you're going to throw around a phrase like "mass shooting" you shouldn't have a low hanging fruit definition that does not take intent into consideration.
Here are two scenarios:
You have a party, two groups of people are talking. Words are had, there's an argument. Punches are thrown. One person pulls a gun, causing another person to pull a gun, multiple shots are fired and 5 people are injured.
You have a party, a disgruntled incel was not invited, shows up with a semiautomatic weapon and shoots 4 people before being dragged to the ground.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, both of these are "mass shootings" and if you go down their list of shootings of the year, the vast majority of them fall under category 1, not category 2.
The difference is, in scenario #1, nobody went to the party intending to shoot anyone. You can't say the same for scenario #2.
Lumping them together so you can make people think there are more cases of scenario #2 than there actually are is disingenuous.
If that was actually your agenda, this wouldn't be your position. You want to lower the statistic using semantics and as an added bonus, take away the vocabulary needed to discuss a huge percentage of gun violence.
5 people were shot. Intentional vs accidental, premeditated vs impulse, none of that changes the fact that 5 people were shot and the event was a mass shooting.
Even in your own example that you made as contrived as you needed, 3 innocent people were still shot and swept under the rug.
The organizations you're rallying against are completely open about their definitions, making them far more honest than you're being.
I'm sorry if that hurts your guns feelings.
They aren't being honest because they do not discuss intent and they are intentionally trying to scare people by masking that.
I tell you what, starting 1/1 pay attention to what they're doing. By the end of January I expect you'll be stunned at the number of "mass shootings" that aren't what they're trying to scare people into thinking they are.
I should say too, the Gun Violence Archive isn't alone in this:
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent
"This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government's Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn't confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn't meet the government's parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn't respond to our inquiries."
So, again, why do they want to keep everyone so afraid?
That's is I and many others define it...
If you want to scare people, sure, you can define it that way.
No. It just takes some basic intelligence to figure out that mass shootings are shootings of multiple people. Sorry that concept is hard for you to understand.
There is, fundamentally, a difference between a crime that, when reported, makes your average citizen go "OMG! That could have been me!" vs. a crime which, while tragic, does not endanger the general public or people at random.
"Mass shooting" carries with it a sense of reckless disregard or casual indifference that does NOT apply to, say, crimes of passion.
For example:
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/at-least-3-fatally-shot-in-dallas-home-suspect-wanted/
Gun Violence Archive treats that as a mass shooting. Unless you lived next door to the shooter in question, you were never at risk. The shooting was not random, and it did not happen in a public space.
So why do they categorize it as the same sort of crime as the UNLV shooting? Which was random and did take place in a public space?
Because they have an agenda and want to pump up their numbers.
Ummm...why would you not consider that a mass shooting? Do you not have neighbors? It kind of seems like that really could be anybody considering many people have at least one unhinged neighbor around them.
A mass shooting happens in a public place with random targets, making your average person feel victimized even if they weren't there. It's an act of terror, the murder is ancillary.
In the case of a targeted killing at a private home? That's just murder.
Where does your definition come from? I'm not saying it's wrong, it's just not the same as what I and people I know use. For context, I live in the US.
Definition comes from a position of rationality and not wanting to scare people. :)
I'm confused. Is your position that yours is the most generally-held definition, or that it should be?
My position is that when the average person hears the phrase "mass shooting", the scenario that comes to mind is a shooter, going to a public space, with the intent of killing and injuring as many people as possible.
They don't percieve it as extensions of other crimes that weren't planned or concieved as mass shootings. Bar fights, domestic violence, gang shootings, etc. etc.
The Gun Violence Archive fails to make that distinction because they have an agenda, one which the mass media perpetuates unquestioningly.
Well that's nice that you made up your own definition...
Your distinction can make sense but not how you are looking at it. Saying murder is ancillary is ridiculous. The killers in those cases are not just wildly shooting in the air and it just so happens to hit people and kill them. Killing them is their intent. You could make an argument to split our random mass shootings vs targeted but there is still a pretty obvious base reason for both of those: ease of access to guns.
Of course, it doesn't do any good to say "their definition is bullshit" if I'm not willing to provide an alternative.
We need to distinguish terrorist level events where one or more nuts with a gun enter a public space with the intention of causing as much mayhem as possible than other forms of gun crimes where armed people do end up shooting, but that was not their stated purpose, it just worked out that way.
Sad to see this so heavily down voted. A ton of emotional reasoning from people in this thread rather than by logic.
A gang shooting, police shooting, robbery, self defense etc are not mass shootings. Period. Its dishonesty to include those statistics.
Or even simple bar fights. How long have we been having bar fights in this country? If you include those then this is absolutely nothing new.
There's an issue with Familicides as well. Those are often in private, but can wipe a household out. Ease of access is what is being discussed largely, as well as the general terrorism of a 'public space' mass shooting.