Three dead in shooting spree at video game tournament

I admitted I was wrong about the motive

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Nah, a sensible law in the UK preventing the sale of kitchen knives to people under 18 is not anywhere close to the ridiculous scenarios disingenuously floated by the gun-huggers as they silently scream “pay no attention to the firearms used in this murder spree!”

Also, I’m fine with repealing the Second Amendment as long as a new amendment is added codifying the existence of the National Guard, which is what the Second Amendment was about in its originalist sense.

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The second amendment is bullshit, that’s what’s wrong. Or at the very least the way it’s read into a constant block for law evolution.

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All kidding aside… and here I was, thinking that “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” documentary was as serious as things could get in the gaming world.

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Toxic masculinity up the wazoo.

“It’s the fault of those violent video games where people pretend to shoot guns and fantasize about killing aliens! They should be shooting actual guns and fantasizing about killing brown people! Amurrica!” - the NRA

I’m sure you’re right, and the fact that it involved sports video games won’t get in the way of that framing for them either.

But… video game! If only those young people were engaging in the real, brain-damaging sports, this wouldn’t have happened!
I suspect they can fall back on a narrative that the kid was a “loser” who couldn’t play real sports, and that’s why he did it, akin to how, post-Columbine, having been bullied was seen as a risk factor for being a school shooter…

Gamergate, “swatting”… there’s a seriously toxic aspect to “gaming culture” because the culture’s been defined by a lot of toxic young men. Hopefully people will start taking that toxicity more seriously. During “Gamergate,” people getting death threats were being dismissed because, “it’s gamers, they won’t do anything.” Which, given the overlap between “angry young men who own guns” and “angry young men who pay video games” was a foolish assumption, really.

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Had to read that three times before it parsed correctly… got “monosexuals” (???) the first time and “MMOsexuals” (Hey! I resemble that remark!) the second.

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Precisely. I’m in the middle of Drums Along the Mohawk now, an historical fiction account of frontier battles in central NY. The whole “well regulated militia” always struck me as the biggest intentional blind spot in the gun non-debate, but reading about all of the factions, infrastructural scarcity and immediate need for self-defense really puts it into context. We are very clearly in a situation the framers never envisioned.

What’s really frustrating is that no credible person on the national stage has ever suggested doing what the paranoid gun nuts seem to feel is the inevitabilible outcome once someone suggests that maybe we shouldn’t all have military-grade weaponry at home. I mean, that’s what a quartermaster is for, right?

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Bear in mind that DeVos is on track to give them a US$1bn sloppy kiss, followed by perpetual seconds of several hundred million per year, under the guise of arming school teachers.

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One lens, no film – filter bubble echo chamber.
Us vs. Them. Coke Vs. Pepsi. Purple vs. Green.
The machine is functioning exactly as designed.

Also… Look at me.

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I guess you’ve never experienced the kind of love for a product that is so very profound and conveniently sanctioned by marketing materials which intersect with the creation myths of your empire that you’d do anything to keep it.

Also fetishes of externalized masculinity are damn hard to quit.

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I’ve been posting on most of the shooting threads for almost a year. Someday we’ll get Groundhog Day right.

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We’ll save them every time, but they’ll never thank us!

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Not really- quite easy.

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Are you insane?

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There’s also the Swiss option, where fully automatic rifles are kept in thousands of private homes under very strict rules and conditions (including a lot of “regulation” of the militia members in the original sense of the term).

I’ve seen ammosexuals claim that the reason Switzerland doesn’t have levels of gun violence close to the U.S.'s despite its having a strong but heavily regulated (in the legal sense) gun culture is because it’s a “homogeneous” society, which is not even wrong and verges on racism.

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Gator, maybe. Those are gator colours.

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It’s a reference to Babylon 5. Under other circumstances it would elicit a smile and like from me, but I’m not in the mood for levity.

I do feel bad about inadvertently @ing our newcomer. A lesson to me not to post when I’m angry.

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He was apparently on his high school football team.

I think it might well be an issue with someone being too invested in their identity as a gamer (so devastated when they lost the qualifier) combined with easy access to guns.

I worry about this effect of serious school sports: it occupies a very large fraction of your world while you are on the team, and if you graduate and don’t continue to play what happens to you inside if you don’t find something equally consuming to fill it?

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