The Thread Where We Discuss Guns and Gun Control

[Farm Boy]

I've been thinking of Litchfield, why not?

 

[Arwon]

There's no fundamental reason for a mass shooting to make national news??? Lmao

Got incredible news for old mate about how this works in other countries. I think pretty much every murder in this country ends up reported by the ABC, if not nationally then at least regionally. A mass shooting would never not be the first story on the TV news. It's not an agenda it's just - they're pretty shocking events!

 

[Birdjaguar]

remember, there's no fundamental reason a mass shooting in tx or a guy defending himself from assault with a knife in nyc make national news.

Hmmm...how many mass shooting have there been in 2023? Do you know? I'll make it easy for you:

Spoiler :

There have been 202 mass shootings so far this year.

There have been more mass shootings than days in 2023, database shows

The Gun Violence Archive shows that there have been more mass shootings than days in 2023 so far.

abcnews.go.com

 

[Cloud_Strife]

There's no fundamental reason for a mass shooting to make national news??? Lmao

The dude doesn't live in reality, he knows the ridiculousness of what he says, but as sartre once opined; it is his only way of dealing with the fact that it's his precious toys that make him feel like a man

 

[Gorbles]

The whole "it doesn't make the news" bit is a very popular part of the ongoing "false flag" allegations conservatives are making all over social media right now.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

The whole "it doesn't make the news" bit is a very popular part of the ongoing "false flag" allegations conservatives are making all over social media right now.

They're so desperate to spin it, despite the dude having nazi tats

 

[Sommerswerd]

given the fraud and violence involved, would make sense to at least disambiguate the concept (which should be obvious) with the organization/2020 actions (which were criminal).

Its not an "organization", particularly not in the sense that you've been convinced... ironically by folks with a very specific agenda, which you have either been seduced by, or were predisposed to be sympathetic to... for whatever reason

many people will be anti-fraud and anti-violence w/o consequences, while far fewer will be against the assertion that lives matter.

That's part of my point... far fewer people would declare themselves "anti-life" or "anti-choice", just like anti "lives matter"... Its just branding, and trying to play gotcha games with the wording of the slogan isn't anywhere near as clever as people who do it often think it is.

the perhaps sad reality is that this just flatly isn't true. people don't have that much empathy for complete strangers. it only gets attention due to the degree it's emphasized in news and political discussion. these "mass" shootings are a tiny fraction of homicides in usa, yet the degree to which they're reported relative to plain homicide is wildly disproportionate.

people's "sense of safety" calibrates to expectations, and reporting influences those expectations. in using still rare events as a lynch pin for arguing policy, one is more or less using a megaphone to claim they're arguing an agenda rather than a legit platform of safety. though truly random mass shootings do seem more common now than two generations ago, despite tighter gun controls, so maybe there's something to the unease where the shootings are a symptom, increasing in frequency despite tighter controls.

remember, there's no fundamental reason a mass shooting in tx or a guy defending himself from assault with a knife in nyc make national news. those stories were chosen, to fit agendas. sometimes agenda is just to make money, but sometimes it's to push narrative/cater to the typical political views of their viewers.

This whole position makes me wonder whether you have children, because the blind-sided nature of this is is the kind of sentiment I'd expect from someone who does not have kids (or grandkids).

 

[Sommerswerd]

A mass shooting would never not be the first story on the TV news. It's not an agenda it's just - they're pretty shocking events!

For now at least... thankfully, frankly. God help us when mass shootings are so mundane that they don't warrant national news coverage... and the sad thing is... we seem to be getting there, apparently, far too quickly for comfort.

 

[Samson]

For now at least... thankfully, frankly. God help us when mass shootings are so mundane that they don't warrant national news coverage... and the sad thing is... we seem to be getting there, apparently, far too quickly for comfort.

You are there, right? As posted above, there have been 202 this year, are they all on the news? The fact that they have to be as horrific as this to get attention says it all.

 

[Kyriakos]

The video was rather striking, certainly. Though perhaps most of the shooters act with much the same callousness and automatism.
Due to the blurred image, it isn't clear if the first victim (iirc it is that woman from Pakistan?) at first didn't understand she was shot and tried to keep moving. Of course pretty soon she stopped.

Something quite consistent in all those attacks appears to be that the shooter(s) end up dead. Which is itself rather preventing research on why they did it - you can speculate. But if you literally just get out of your car and start gunning people down in a central location, obviously you didn't plan to survive in the first place = fundamentally different situation from thrill killers, imo.

 

[Farm Boy]

at first didn't understand she was shot and tried to keep moving. Of course pretty soon she stopped.

People who understand they're shot still move for a while. Sometimes they even pull through. But even if they're not going to, they fight it. Mammals die a lot harder in person than on screen.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Its not an "organization", particularly not in the sense that you've been convinced... ironically by folks with a very specific agenda, which you have either been seduced by, or were predisposed to be sympathetic to... for whatever reason

That's part of my point... far fewer people would declare themselves "anti-life" or "anti-choice", just like anti "lives matter"... Its just branding, and trying to play gotcha games with the wording of the slogan isn't anywhere near as clever as people who do it often think it is.

This whole position makes me wonder whether you have children, because the blind-sided nature of this is is the kind of sentiment I'd expect from someone who does not have kids (or grandkids).

Gonna say it, the dude has no empathy

 

[Lexicus]

How to talk to children about mass shootings

Similarly to how flight attendants instruct travelers to “put your oxygen mask on” before helping others, experts suggest parents cope with their own anxiety...

www.dallasnews.com

This is just normal country stuff, please move along

 

[Samson]

How to talk to children about mass shootings

Similarly to how flight attendants instruct travelers to “put your oxygen mask on” before helping others, experts suggest parents cope with their own anxiety...

www.dallasnews.com

This is just normal country stuff, please move along

Moving forward
If children feel weighed down by the news, Larson recommends parents seek ways in which they can get involved to help the community.

Praying for other families, writing letters to thank first responders for their service or attending a vigil can help children take proactive steps to deal with complicated emotions, she said.

I guess in Dallas they were never going to list "write to their representative" or "Join an anti-gun protest organisation" there.

 

[9gkj548hkm20vk79dj689bnj4]

while it's hard to avoid the news, what isn't particularly hard is avoiding endless speculation without the facts of the case, which only serves to give the suspects an air of mystique that they happily indulge in, similar to the serial killers of a generation ago. (wonder why they're not as apparent anymore hmmmm...)

ex. such as asking whether or not the suspect was (first of all) allowed to have a certain weapon and, if not, why that was. admittedly that's a harder thing to discuss than this a priori "well if we had no guns this wouldn't have happened" that we're more ritually accustomed to

 

[Gorbles]

How to talk to children about mass shootings

Similarly to how flight attendants instruct travelers to “put your oxygen mask on” before helping others, experts suggest parents cope with their own anxiety...

www.dallasnews.com

This is just normal country stuff, please move along

As simply posting a meme would be frowned upon, all I can say is this reminds me of the scene from Shrek where Lord Farquaad says "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make".

 

[Farm Boy]

As simply posting a meme would be frowned upon, all I can say is this reminds me of the scene from Shrek where Lord Farquaad says "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make".

Well, yeah. That's how society operates. But the classes usually have the decency to do it in their own spaces so as to not make the gentry overly uncomfortable. We did lose like a million in nice sanitized little spaces, isolated from view in the past couple years. The mass shootings certainly break that accord. It's probably the principle reason they're so disruptive.

 

[Samson]

ex. such as asking whether or not the suspect was (first of all) allowed to have a certain weapon and, if not, why that was. admittedly that's a harder thing to discuss than this a priori "well if we had no guns this wouldn't have happened" that we're more ritually accustomed to

It is only harder because we do not know the details. If you do there is nothing stopping you posting them and we can discuss them. As it is the easy question to discuss is "should we have guns at all", because from abroad that seems like the first question to ask.

 

[Gorbles]

Well, yeah. That's how society operates. But the classes usually have the decency to do it in their own spaces so as to not make the gentry overly uncomfortable. The mass shootings break that accord. It's probably the principle reason they're so disruptive.

What if I told you: we could care about all kinds of shootings?

 

[Farm Boy]

What if I told you: we could care about all kinds of shootings?

I'm thinking to a conversation I remember watching between Lex and El_Mac and some other people after Captain Hammer Underpants cracked Mr. Pelosi on the noggin for being the worst America has to offer. The conversation was about expressions of sympathy or care as opposed to the people who rolled their eyes. The eye-rollers were getting this sort of reflected shame that this post I'm quoting now contains. "Oh, you don't even care." El_Mac actually had a pretty astute observation - the people offering more care in that situation were generally the people who saw that as costing essentially nothing. There would be no personal action to follow up on it. The "uncaring" were more likely to be the people who saw "caring" as an action of the hands not of the heart. And those actions are finite. Sommer, up above, lays out the line that gun control advocates need to hit if they want all these guns gone. It's a political threshold. It's an action of the hands, not of the heart. And everyone's time and attention are indeed limited. Society actually only can handle so much at any given time. The problem is upstream of the symptom. Spending the effort at the symptom treats what makes the gentry uncomfortable - in the hopes that they can go back to quietly enjoying the society that advantages them, with all the costs nicely out of sight. It might even be worse, in some ways, than not treating the symptom. When you can't ignore the festering wounds, you might actually invest some real effort into the diseases themselves.