I think the thinking goes something like: Mass shooters are criminals. If guns are illegal, getting them will be a crime. So, since mass shooters are criminal types, they’ll still get guns. And so, outlawing guns won’t do any good.
It’s a stupid line of thinking because most guns used in mass shootings are obtained legally, and many mass shooters would very likely not go through the trouble of getting them if they were illegal. But, there ya go. Grasping at straws in defense of one’s position is nothing new, especially from that side of this debate.
You are driving down the road in your car, some buddies riding with you.
You hear a loud bang from under the car.
‘I think a tire just blew out’, you say.
‘Nah, I think you might have hit an animal’, says buddy 1.
‘No way, stone flipped up from the road, nothing to worry about’, says buddy 2.
‘I didn’t hear anything’, says buddy 3
A mile later there is another loud bang from under the car.
At what point do you stop the car, discover and sort out the problem, then continue your journey in safety?
"Here’s what doesn’t get the headlines: Empathy. Listening to those around you. Even if you don’t like them very much. We have come to live in a culture where it’s taboo or unacceptable to simply check in with people emotionally and offer some empathy and understanding. I’m not saying this would magically fix all gun violence. I’m just saying that all of these things — the lack of gun laws, the lack of health care, the inability to have basic conversations with friends and neighbors about what’s going on with them, these are all extensions of a callous and self-absorbed culture that lacks any real empathy.
Despite being relevant and important discussions, the glamorous headlines are ultimately distractions — they just feed into the carnage and the attention and the fame the killer desired. They are distractions from what is right in front of you and me and the victims of tomorrow’s shooting: people who need help. And while we’re all fighting over whose pet cause is more right and more true and more noble, there’s likely another young man out there, maybe suicidally depressed, maybe paranoid and delusional, maybe a psychopath, and he’s researching guns and bombs and mapping out schools and recording videos and thinking every day about the anger and hate he feels for this world.
Dude, innocent people die everyday, that’s not the point of what I’m saying.
Your judgement call that they are innocent is even out of place, when we don’t know the details of what happened and we aren’t the ones to say who is and who isn’t innocent.
Again, the rumor is that the three men in the fraternity started a fight with the shooter, who was in another fraternity. Not that it excuses it, but it creates a different narrative than the one being presented here.
If you’re really going to resort to an appeal to emotion like that, I hope you don’t make policy decisions.
What makes these innocent people so important that they get reported, while others don’t?
Everything about Xeni’s post reeks of bad journalism. Like saying that “the average is higher than 1 per day” then being aghast that we now have two shooting in one day. Clearly Xeni doesn’t understand how averages work. But maybe that’s okay here at boing boing.
I’d like to recommend the movie Nightcrawler with Jake Gillenhall. Great directing, acting, cinematography, and a relevant message.
(i’d also like to apologize that this post is several sentences with little interconnection, but I’m trying to choose the main points.
Must be, since no one here has said that curtailing easy access to guns would stop all mutilation and murder. I hope you didn’t spend a lot of time constructing such a flimsy straw dude.
Yeah, no shit. Look up “rhetoric”, or just read posts from pro-gun fanatics.
“Who do you call ‘gun fondlers’?”
Almost everyone that owns a gun. Certainly everyone who owns a handgun. There is almost no reason to own a firearm. If you’re hunting for food, it’s a tool. If you’re putting holes in a piece of paper, and fantasizing about overthrowing a vastly more well-armed government, you’re a fondler. Usually, when it comes to fetishes, I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but not when it comes to deadly weapons. Sorry if I hurt your feelings.
I agree with your categorizations… mostly. However, give some facts to back up this particular statement. Without them, it just sounds like a blathering epithet.
I mean, it’s meant as an epithet. Dishonesty really makes me dislike people, hence the name calling. These people want to own guns because they like guns. Yeah, they make up excuses about protection and patriotism, but in the end, it’s all about the guns. They just love them some guns. Frankly, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t any fondling going on. Not sure I need to provide photographic evidence of it, though. Comments on articles like this, here or on FB or Reddit, are enough proof for me.
But how do you know it’s “most”? What if it was a clear half or a vocal minority? Or do you just want to complain about all the crazies? Go ahead, but it’s not adding much to the conversation.
About 100 million Americans own an estimated 300 million guns.
The NRA has 4.5 million members.
Personally, I’d peg the number of fondlers at the lower end, close to the NRA membership number, within, say a few million people. Why? because the NRA is not like being in Ducks Unlimited anymore and people who want to be in it now use it as a badge of their fondling.
That’s 10 million out of 100 million gun owners. Do you really think there are more than 50 million gun-fondlers in the USA?
I highly doubt that 50 million people here are gun fondlers. That’s 1 in 6 people we know. It’s just not true. Prove me wrong; I’d like to hear it.
Maybe it’s a vocal minority. Maybe it’s everyone. I don’t know. And I don’t really care. In my experience, every single person I know that owns a gun is railing against any government action, even if all they own is a long gun or two. Sure, they think all the shootings are a tragedy, but gun control is not the issue to them. I can’t think of anyone I know that accepts the evidence that they are less safe owning a gun. They all think they’re safer, and they seek out more guns to be even more so. They compare their handguns and talk about the new models. They’re disgusting, so I’m treating them as such.
They are more fun than most of the other people. You can talk with them about metallurgy, ballistics, surface coatings, lubricants, propellants, and a lot of other topics that most of the non-gun ones react to with a blank stare.
And some have highly interesting things to share - slo-mo videos (Taofledermaus on youtube, for example), terminal ballistics on gelatine and other materials (Box of Truth), machining (various, including that apparently Russian who shows off a way to make an AK47 mostly from a steel shovel), exotic ammunition (FPSRussia on youtube).
Some get a bit difficult to argue with when it comes to politics, but with so many interesting topics on hand you don’t have to walk that way often.
