America outdoes itself with not one but two school shootings in a single day

iPhones and the Internet don’t make us any less savage and ignorant.

Probably, but there are so many asshats posting here with the same opinion, it’s not going to stop them and they’re not going to feel the sting of being terrible humans anyway.

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Well, I reason that if Sandy Hook didn’t cause any change it just means there weren’t enough children killed.

For example, the WTC bombing in 1993 only killed six and wounded thousands, but wasn’t enough to cause any policy changes. Apparently 2,977 was enough people to commit to constricting freedom including the 4th Amendment.

Of course, none of the ammosexuals ever want to fight for that cause, only when guns are at stake. At any rate, we’ll have another large school shooting and hopefully it will be able to tip the balance to sensible gun controls like every other civilized nation. I just wonder what that number will be.

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Why only take note of school shootings? Chicago had 351 people shot in September.

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Exactly. And yet, that is precisely what the governor of Oregon said after the last mass shooting, and no doubt what someone else is being primed to say in response to these incidents (if they haven’t said it already).

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Agreed. Diarrhea of the keyboard. Withdrawn…

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Was kinda hoping I’d missed some subtle sarcasm in that comment.

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Man, Xeni, jumping on the hype train a little quickly here.
One crime didn’t happen at the school.
The connection between the shooter and victims is unknown. Rumor has it one was self-defense. (I’m glad you didn’t report rumor)
Sensationalizing American crime as some new record like this is shady.
Putting focus on a crime that affects upper class America and bursting their bubble is discrimination.
Not reporting the shootings that happened in, say, Chicago, today, is classist or racist, or something.

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I think we’re talking specifically about shootings of more than one person in a single incident in this thread.

Train. License. Insure. Inspect.

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Do something, for fucks sake. Demonstrate. Write your representatives. Stop a highway. Every time I ask why you don’t demonstrate, I get squeamish responses “I’ll get arrested” “I’ll get shot by the gun nuts” “It’s a mental care thing”

It always just looks like you’ve already somehow accepted this as the new normal. This isn’t normal.

Do something.

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Compared to 1400 people crushed by religion, this is peace and quiet.

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Thank you for proving my point.

It’s statistically zero.

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I’m not sure who this “you” you’re talking about is.

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I’m sure it’s a great comfort to the parents of the 560+ children aged 11 or younger who have been killed by guns in the US so far this year, along with the friends and families of the other 9,700+ people killed by guns in the US so far this year, that their loved ones are “statistically zero.”

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I think when most people think of mass shootings they tend to focus on motive. In which case a mass shooting is a shooting where the shooter doesn’t have a specific grudge against the victims but either wants to kill a lot of people or has a grudge against the place the victims are in.

I think it freaks out people for the same reason terrorism freaks them out, the idea that they could be killed by something they have no control over. The second shooting mentioned here sounds like it was a confrontation that got out of hand. Most people will see that and not feel quite as threatened or sympathetic because they don’t see the victims as entirely innocent or helpless because they had some role in escalating the situation.

Note I don’t endorse that view, but I think it’s why people don’t really take the 4+ mass shooting label seriously.

Sure, and Chicago qualifies easily under that as well. If it’s deaths per shooting then a couple of these school shootings are “only” one dead.
In a 15-hour period beginning Monday night, 14 people were shot, six
fatally. Most of those victims were hit during two mass shootings just
two miles apart on the South Side. Among those victims, an 11-month old
boy, Princeton Chew, was shot in the hip as his mother held him
outside their home in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. The baby’s
pregnant mother, Patricia Chew, and grandmother, Lolita Wells, were shot
and killed. Two other relatives were also shot.

WGNTV

It seems to me that the time to stop talking about gun control is when you have had at least a year without these kinds of incidents. It’s not that high a bar for other countries, but it’s a start.

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Ah, yes, but if the perpetrator is a particularly bad shot and doesn’t hit a single person, but still has the same motive, then it could hardly be called a mass shooting. Attempted mass shooting, maybe. I think that’s why the quantity of dead/injured is an important piece.

Gawd, I can’t believe I’m talking about this like I’m discussing which cereal to eat in the morning…