Was anything of value learned about the motives of the Las Vegas music festival shooter? How about the shooters behind the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre or the Virginia Beach municipal complex attack?
The authorities dig into the personal lives of these men, the media diligently amplifies their efforts, and in the end we learn what we could have guessed: that these were men with a grievance- the exact nature of which is never relevant, that they felt isolated or overlooked and wanted attention, and that they had access to a gun.
Maybe it’s a failure of my imagination, but of those three antecedents, only the last one seems accessible to public policy.
NRA (and most gun enthusiasts) are not a hobby community. They are advocates to ensure people retain easy access to devices with little purpose except to kill other people*.
*Rifles in the boonies are okay; semi-automatics and handguns are not needed. Turns out the founding fathers goofed on this one.
It’s a park. Around the main entrances/more developed areas there is a low fence to prevent children and pets from running in the streets. Around the less developed areas along the thoroughfares there is a modest chain link fence in various states of repair. It isn’t much of a fortress. Example
To a degree yes… It’s certainly important to learn about what books / media these shooters are consuming and how they become radicalized. But there’s a way in which that investigation can have a unintended consequence of amplifying their hate-filled messages. So it’s a tough line between sweeping the motives under the rug to prevent copy-cats, and trying to find out about the root grievances (not to rectify those illegitimate grievances , but to better identify the markers of what can turn an individual to violence). But this would largely be a moot point if there was vastly stricter gun control like they have in other countries. Kinda need both I guess.
Toxic masculinity, misogyny and guns are the roots of most mass shootings. Take the weapons of war from civilian hands, and smash the patriarchy.
A little boy was murdered by a terrorist. My deepest condolences to his parents, their only apparent sin was to go to a festival to have fun as a family.
Sad to see that this kind of vile and savage behaviour takes place in what I would call our brother/sister nation. Sometimes maybe not the best brother/sister we could ask for, but still, family is family. I hope that Americans can elect people who can fix this problem, people who don’t take bribes from anyone who offers it.
You know, he has a point that Twitter, CNN, etal DO monetize on tragedy. But even they are self aware enough to not advertise something like, “Something bad happened? Check it out on CNN/Twitter!”
I can’t tell if he is that big of an asshole, or that awkward as a human that he doesn’t understand how humans work. It’s like a twist ending where he was the mindless automaton the whole time!
