They used their ‘artistic license’ on the bloodstain patterns. scoffs and sips martini
You obviously do not know pretentiou… good art when you see it. turns on heal and proceeds to buy a old rotting armchair for 250,000 dollars
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Honest, no relation.
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Of course.
In Stand on Zanzibar John Brunner foresaw that fifty years in his future, random mass murders with no conventional motive would be so common that they were just a regular segment on the evening news, like the weather.
In the book, the perpetrators are referred to as muckers, as in “persons running amok.”
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The gun fondlers will not be happy until either every single person owns a gun, or every single person is dead of a gunshot wound. They want to talk mental illness? How about we classify a desire to own a gun as such? Problem solved.
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Gross overgeneralization. Who do you call “gun fondlers”?
I haven’t touched one in months, yet a rifle hangs on the wall in the other room. Am I a Gun Fondler?
And if you have a gun, why would you want everyone else to? Doesn’t it make more sense to be the only one with a gun and have situational control?
I don’t like the extremes. Only reasonable people with truly workable ideas will make any difference here.
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Right. I’m just waiting for all the reasonable gun owners to . . . well, you’ll tell us what that might be in just a moment.
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There was his modest proposal, which seems sincere despite the title:
4 Strict gun control must apply to both manufacture and possession. It is the unrestricted availability of firearms that has made violent crime and the drug abuse problem so intertwined.
I think mental illness does have an impact, but mainly in bringing existing messages accepted by many people with and without psychological problems to a kind of logical conclusion. Elliot Roger and Christopher Harper-Mercer both felt like losers for their lack of a sexual relationship, which ties into strong messages that women are a sign of status. Christopher Harper-Mercer added the “religious people are the problem” message of internet atheists, and ran with that too. Many school shooters were bullied in school and apparently wanted to take out their anger on their school in general, as if the whole student population were against them. I think plenty of people get bullied or excluded, but not so many have this idea that they are ‘betas’, but should rightfully have been ‘alphas’ (rather than just regular students). I still think psychological problems make it more likely that someone will carry out this kind of revenge fantasy, but other factors like the entitlement that these people felt and the reinforcement of this in certain groups, their ability to buy guns despite their inability to use them responsibly (I mean, being able to buy 14 guns from a federal dealer in the space of three years?), the prevalence of these incidents in recent years, the fact that schools are often quite abusive spaces where people can feel isolated and build resentment, the way that calls for looking after mentally ill people in this context often don’t mean much more than locking them up, among other issues, make mental illness no more than one part of the whole picture.
I don’t think any sensible strategy will focus on one issue to the exclusion of the others, but any reasonable strategy has to involve restricting the availability of guns and emphasising constructive ways of dealing with these issues for everyone, rather than looking at it as a problem for the sector of society that we can identify as having mental health problems.
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Oh, understood then. No argument here.
Small detail, but classes were not cancelled at NAU. Classes were held as normal.
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In a way it’s sad: Only one dead and a few wounded, business as usual. Please open your math book on pg 20 and solve the first four problems.
“If only we lived in an entirely different reality where everyone was careful, rational, and non-murderous at all times”
To a statistical farthing, we do, at least as far as rampage murderers go.
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what’s bad about the Texas Southern University shooting is that it is the third in three months.
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We’d live in pretty much a cozy safe world if not for the media that feed us with whipped up realtime reports of every incident within several thousand mile radius.
If we read only local news, covering perhaps the geographically nearest 10,000 people, we’d have a more accurate perception of our surroundings.
A good rule of thumb is to ignore everything that makes headlines - these things are rare enough to not worry about.
I wonder how much of the reaction here is due to how these are reported. The incident at NAU could just as easily have been described as “angry and possibly drunk teen shoots four in possible drunken altercation”.
I wonder if this had been kids in one of the poorer neighborhoods instead of kids in a fraternity how different the reporting would be? Likely “suspected gang member shoots other in presumed gang fight”
Both situations would be just as awful and I think deserving of attention but would be treated very differently.
I know a lot of people around me are talking about how we need to ban guns or somehow magically make them all disappear. I think its a knee-jerk reaction that sound really simple. After all if there are no guns then no one can shoot people. The problem is we are trying to solve some deep complicated social issues with quick fixes.
What we should be doing is figuring out why this is becoming so common, not just on school campuses but in our neighborhoods and try fix that.
My thoughts and prayers out to all the people affected by these nationally reported shootings and all those that don’t hit the national stage.
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True that. And the next statement from @drunken_oranget is useful too, because there are more crazy gun nuts than crazy anti-gun-nuts. Reasonable people who want to own some hunting weapons or even a handgun or two get lumped into the crazy category so easily. And the crazy gun people see anyone saying we need to curtail gun ownership, especially of the most dangerous weapons, as a personal affront. It’s crazy!!! As you say, the extremes are horrid. I do have to say though that more crazy is on the gun-nut side, a lot more.
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Statistics don’t fart. But old farts do statistics!
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You make a good point, but for some of us local news only would be worse, not better!
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No.
The black market for automatic weapons is not walmart. What the fuck? How is this so hard to grasp?
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