These are two perspectives I both agree with. But a third consideration is that the motives of the killer make a legal difference also. They are culpable for the loss of many lives. But “terrorism” as a legal charge is about the intent behind an act, rather than its effects. Because it is the intent that an accused person is responsible for, and is crucial to an evidence-based trial - even if that trial is only recording the killer’s actions after their death.
For example, I might feel terrified if a person mugged me, but the mugger’s intent was probably not to cause that. This is more difficult since I guess most of us here agree that there is no good reason to kill 50 strangers, but there was certainly some sort of cause. Be it political, religious, medical, psychiatric, etc. Ideally, knowing that cause can help us to prevent further harm. Cynically, others can (and probably will) use it to further reenforce their prejudices and push their agenda.
The kind of reaction I am seeing contributes to my skepticism of “terrorism” as a useful charge/label because it is becoming more generalized from what used to be a very specific definition. And there is a risk of a sort of witch-hunt reactionary mentality when the charges a person faces are based principally upon the degree of agitation of the public, rather than actual evidence. If we combine public outrage with police firepower to solve social problems, nothing good will become of it. There is a special psychology to police culture in the US where everybody is a potential perpetrator and/or victim, and nobody can ever be just a normal person, the basic citizen-as-agent who they nominally serve. So I see the broad domestic terror narrative as strengthening an already bigoted and corrupt legal system, while eroding the rights of people who are more scared and vulnerable than ever. There is a real risk of that approach making social unrest worse.
Until the NRA changes their position on banning the research of gun violence, the NRA in general and Wayne Lapierre personally are accessory to 100% of gun deaths in the USA, and we should be treating them as such. The federal government is not even allowed to try to find out if there is anything we can do to reduce gun violence because the NRA and Wayne Lapierre are cowards who are afraid of learning the truth. They are willing to let 10s of thousands of people die to protect themselves from it.
Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a list of what I thought were common-sense ideas for reducing gun crime (whether “repeal the second amendment” is common sense or not I’ll leave to you, but given the Supreme Court’s modern interpretation of it, most of my thoughts on implementing gun control would be hard to implement without doing so). Since that time, it’s become increasingly obvious to me that those ideas are insufficient when it comes to preventing large-scale atrocities like this one. It’s also become increasingly obvious that even if they were sufficient, nobody in Congress would care.
How do we deal with this sort of assault on society when the tools that made it possible are sold freely at every Walmart in the country? How do we deter the perpetrators with threats of punishment when they’re already willing to add themselves to their body count? When anyone in the country can legally amass a battalion’s-worth of weapons and ammunition because it’s their “right”, how can we possibly guard against the risks of such people snapping and taking out their fears and frustrations on literally hundreds of innocent people? What do we do when an entire political party is dedicated to needlessly stoking the fears and resentments of the people most likely to own these stockpiles?.
Clearly, “do nothing” is not an option, because this chart from the BBC (which horrifically has to disclaim that it still may not yet fully account for the death toll) shows that things are getting worse, not better:
The fact that this happened in Nevada, where there are virtually no obstructions to gun ownership whatsoever, is also proof that de-regulating the problem will not solve it, and that “more guns” and “eliminate gun-free zones” are not solutions.
Two years ago, my approach to gun control was to institute corrective measures that, while imperfect, would at least hopefully work to address the more egregious pain points in this epidemic. Now, I’d rather just melt down every single god-damned gun in the country, because people have demonstrated over and over and over again that they can’t be trusted with the fucking things. The utter absence of any attempts to do anything about this uniquely American problem have exhausted me to the point that I’m no longer interested in playing nice or meeting people half-way here. Every gun owner who defensively shouted “but we’re not the problem, don’t make it harder for us to own single-purpose death machines!” is complicit in this fucking bullshit, and I have absolutely no interest in listening to anything you have to say anymore.
But it’s a nod-and-a-wink kind of illegal. It’s legal to sell weapons that are easily modified to be automatic, and the kit (or DIY instructions) to make them automatic is readily available. There is no superficial way of telling a legal weapon from an illegal one short of disassembly by someone who knows what they are looking for. And good luck getting someone who has illegally modified their AR15 to hand it over for dissassembly inspection.
And as some on social media have pointed out, our cherished 2nd Amendment was crafted in a time when guns held one bullet. The concept of a solitary man being able to freely purchase, arm, and utilize a firearm that can cause mass destruction and death on this level wasn’t conceived of by our founding fathers. I think any reasonable human being can see that that needs to be revisited immediately.
Being able to see the diagram really shows how little anyone at the target area could have done anything about it. My first thought was someone walking up to the venue at ground level. Shooting from across the street from an elevated position pretty much beyond visible distance is way worse.
In any case guess we’re going through this song and dance again. Now with a jarbled singer in the white house.
Wait, they’re liars? Oh my goodness, who would have expected such perfidy from them
Well many of 'em just reduce the muzzle blast without slowing the bullet to subsonic. Which means that the noise that people hear is just the supersonic crack of the bullet passing, making localizing the shooter more difficult. We were speculating this morning that there were probably hotel guests calling in to report that somebody was shooting a gun from the room next door. Because guns firing close to you are LOUD. If it has been just bullets from on high into the crowd it would have been much more difficult to tell exactly where they were coming from. Even if you could figure out the building, which room is important.
Of course the Right wing doesn’t think that mental health should be a required part of health insurance.
They’re not claiming it’s fake, but that the shooters was a liberal/Muslim. Shooting children is so awful that it has to be made fake, but mass shooting of adults can be warped into a narrative about terrorists - so now the problem is those guys rather than guns.
Doesn’t need to be. Under Nevada law, the legal definition of “terrorism” covers simply randomly attacking a mass of people, regardless of why they did it. So this was, under the law, terrorism.
I’m pretty sure that carrying a gun makes you bulletproof. Or at least I assume so, because that’s the only way that all that talk about how carrying a gun would protect you from a mass shooting would actually make any sense.
Most people in this country get shot with handguns. Because most gun violence is perpetrated by someone known to the victim. Whenever we focus on mass shooting like this, we miss the fact that we could eliminate them and it would have little to no effect on murder rates in this country or even on the “typical” mass shootings that we have almost every day, which are guys with handguns angry at their wives/ex-wives/girlfriends/objects of desire and the people around them.
The “warmest condolences” is really weird. It seems like the response of someone who’s been told that his responses are emotionally inappropriate, so he’s trying really hard, but he’s a sociopath who doesn’t understand what the appropriate response would be, so he still is slightly off.
Oh for sure there’ve been more. I should point out, though, that the BBC’s chart shows the worst ones since 1991, and while the Wikipedia list does have a few higher-casualty shootings since 1991 not included on the chart, it also includes countries other than the US. Wikipedia’s list is also quick to point out that it doesn’t include mass shootings in a number of other categories, because we’ve had this happen so often we have to start putting them into categories to keep track of them. Assuming the BBC’s cut-off was 13 people dead, there’s only one incident in this particular Wikipedia list that they didn’t include: Binghamton, New York in 2009 (I’m assuming their cut-off was 13, because the Aurora shooting that left 12 dead also isn’t listed). Realistically, you’d need a lot more column inches if you wanted to produce a comprehensive list of every mass shooting in the US, even just in the past year, let alone 26.
I should also also point out that of the 125 entries in that Wikipedia list stretching back to the middle of the Civil War, the US accounts for all but 31 of them, and those 31 other entries are divided among 15 other nations. This is absolutely a singularly American problem, and nobody is doing anything to fix it.
Ha. As if most men consider the cultural training in Being a Man worth addressing in any way shape or form, let alone as a major factor in this particular discussion.
(Which is not at all to say that I don’t think that cultural training is worth pointing out, again and again and again and… along with the race of the vast majority of mass shooters.)
Number of gun deaths: 11,565
Number in mass shootings: 271
I’m all for banning assault weapons, high cap magazines (which I define as more than 15 rounds), and retracting the gun carry laws which encourage morons to walk around like they are living in Afghanistan. I am afraid of where we are going with this militarization of the American public, and the idiots like the Bundy family and their psycho “patriot” army. We should get on top of that ASAP, before it is too late.
But if you think that any of these proposed gun control measures is going to put a real dent in these numbers, you are wishfully thinking.
First off, almost 2/3 of those gun deaths are suicides, not homicides. You don’t need an assault rifle or high cap mag to shoot yourself. Any “normal” gun will do.
As for the 1/3 that are homicides, try think of what any of these reasonable gun control measures could possibly prevent. I mean 271 people killed in mass shootings. Most of those were not from assault rifles, or from people who would have been prevented from doing what they did even with all of the proposed laws in place. So if we banned the assault rifles and high cap mags, etc, etc, we could prevent a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of deaths. I say let’s do it anyway, but let’s not fool ourselves.
Either we propose confiscating all of the guns, or come to the sad conclusion that in a country with 320M people, and almost as many guns, these are the numbers you should expect.
“Warmest regards” is what you say when you hear someone got married or had a kid.
“Deepest condolences” is what you say when you hear of a friend’s grandmother passing away.
“Warmest condolences” is most definitely the wrong thing to say to victims of the worst mass murder in US history.
