Four dead in garlic festival mass shooting

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/29/four-killed-and-15-injured-in.html

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Some preemptive responses to the bullshit that will follow throughout the day:

  • No, it doesn’t matter why he did it.
  • No, It doesn’t matter what color he was.
  • No, it is not important what kind of gun he used, how big his magazine was, how many more rounds he was carrying, or how many more guns he had at home.
  • No, thoughts and prayers are not enough.
  • YES, it is fucking well the time to talk about gun control.
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Excellent use of first post.

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Thank you. It’s profoundly depressing that we’ve seen this play out so often that I can assemble a list like that off the top of my head.

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But how do you know it was not the garlic’s fault? /s

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I won’t argue with that, but when I read that he’d been killed by police I was almost sure he must be non-white, since it seems often police go to great lengths to let a white shooter survive. The term “pleasantly surprised” is certainly wrong here, but I was glad to see the shooter was stopped, decisively, regardless of skin color.
The term “glad” seems wrong too, given the circumstances, but shit is just shitty.

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Hopefully this time with the NRA circling the drain we can get something done.

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Perimeter fence?

Thanks to you and @Faffenreffer for your posts. I’ll also add:

No way to prevent this, cry America’s ammosexuals in response before boring us with technical minutiae.

and

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Point taken, maybe I didn’t give enough consideration to that line item.

If the shooter were black or brown, the media would be covering this as a terrorist incident. Since he was white, it’s being handled as a run-of-the-mill mass shooting.

If I may paraphrase you, terror is terrorism. It should be called what it is.

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Am I right in thinking this was not the first time there has been shooting at the Garlic Festival?

“Ayyy garlic festival time. Come get wasted on overpriced shit.” -Instagram posted shortly before incident by the asshole shooter. (Reported)

Edited to more accurately reflect the shooter’s designation.

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Yes it does. If you want fewer shootings it’s just as important to attack the reasons and meta-reasons behind the crime as it is to attack the means of production.

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The reasons? How about, before you do a mass shooting you’re just a schlub with schlubby opinions that nobody cares about, and afterwards you have wall to wall media coverage with your own theme song practically, and everybody and their mother is picking through your shitty little stunted-adolescent “manifesto”?

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NRA should have been the first to step up and try and solve this. In most hobby communities, whenever there is a fatality, people come together to find the cause, and then solve it – aviation, scuba, horseback riding… everywhere except guns.

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Arguably. But what’s the cause, how do we best address it, etc. etc.? We engage in a circular debate and then it’s Groundhog Day again.

There is merit to the notion of focusing on the one easily defined common factor in these shootings.

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That’s spot on. And it would be great if we can find a way to disrupt that cycle.

Also, we had another mass shooting yesterday in Brooklyn: https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/28/us/nyc-brownsville-brooklyn-shooting/index.html

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The US is not unique in any of those respects.

The main factor that sets our country apart from countries that do not regularly experience mass shootings isn’t that we have disturbed (usually) young men who feel motivated to carry out such an attack; the difference is that we have so many people who are equipped to carry out such an attack.

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If there’s a charge to enter, they would want to funnel people through an entrance that collects the money.

Without knowing the details, I’m picturing something like snow fencing or maybe just a ribbon/tape between posts. Literally, a fence that goes around the perimeter.

Not some chain link barbed wire barrier. More like the power of a velvet rope.

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