Washington initiates "ritualized response" to Las Vegas massacre

boing
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Don’t suppressors also reduce muzzle flash? Making it harder to locate the location the shots are coming from?

I agree with you though, don’t argue too much on the specifics, you make it easier for your opponent to muddle the debate.

I’m white and I hope for the same thing… I get physically sick from all the hate spewing I see on Facebook from (mostly) my old hometown friends, on the (mostly) right wing news pieces. If it’s a white person I know it will still get blown up in the media but at least it will be treated as what it is, an anomaly, someone that we should have caught with (mental) health care, and not a orchestrated attack on our values. Not something that warrants striking back at a loosely defined group of unrelated and already marginalized “others”.

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I’m cool with most of what you said, but I have two niggles with this.

First: mass murder by white people in the USA is not an anomaly. It is, regrettably, normal.

Second: mentally ill people are not, statistically, more violent than “sane” people. But we are much more likely to be the victims of violence.

The wave of societal violence in the USA is not due to people who are ill. The problem is fascism.

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Fair niggles, I’m not sure I agree, I’ll expand my points and see if can clarify them.

I’m taking about risks in general, you’re (at least in Europe) more likely to be hit by lightning then to be hit by a terrorist attack, still the latter dominates the news, scaring everybody. It’s the (extreme) exception that is dominating what we talk and think about.

I don’t know how the mass shootings in the US factor into this but I’m willing to guess it’s still a statistical anomaly. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be a discussion about this, not to say no steps should be taken to prevent or minimize this, and definitely not to say the pain the victims feel is not big and real. It is just not something you should realistically fear or even think about on a daily basis.

I don’t know what drives people to do this, I guess we hardly ever get to find out unless they leave a manifesto and/or don’t kill themselves (like Anders Breivik from Norway, he did not seem to be mentally ill, but rather rational :confused: ). I do believe it is possible to find more of these people, and with as much compassion as possible, prevent them from committing these acts.

Maybe I’m using the wrong terminology and I really don’t want to lump anyone in with mass murderers I didn’t mean to say “don’t blame white guys or Muslims, blame mentally ill people” but I see (after careful rereading my this reply for the third time) that my response can be seen this way.

I just wanted to signify that if you want to kill that many people there is something wrong with the wiring in your brain, a healthy brain does not do this. Thus I think that would qualify you for the label mentally ill (this is a label that, for me at least, calls for compassion, not retribution).

Of course, even if all mass murderers are mentally ill (which is obviously not true), that would not mean that all, or even a significant amount of, mentally ill people are violent.

Maybe homicidal sociopath would be a better label? I don’t know, I can’t imagine ever even coming close to causing one person this much pain by accident, let alone causing it to this amount of people on purpose.

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This is what happens when the ritualized response is emulated by a cargo cult that doesn’t understand human emotions:

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Again and again and again.

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Because to some, happiness really is a warm gun?

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It’s been illegal to manufacture or import fully automatic weapons for civilian use for decades. Purchasers of existing weapons must submit to a thorough background check, including photos and fingerprints, and the guns are individually registered.

It appears likely that the Vegas shooter used what’s called a “bump stock” to achieve a high rate of fire. Currently legal. If banned, the ban could be pretty easily circumvented by building a small device to rapidly cycle a trigger. $10 Arduino, servo/stepper motor, something to hold it in place (sugru, zipties, etc), and switch or button to turn it on or off. Should we ban those?

Already 3-D printable, and the specs to do so have pretty thoroughly been Streisand-effected around the world. Should we ban 3-D printing technology? Being a responsible gun owner does not mean I must acquiesce to useless security theater.

This sentence contains several undefined adjectives upon which people of good faith may differ. Specifics please.

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We could do a lot more to respond when someone who shows signs of possibly becoming a mass killer is reported to a cop, or a psychiatrist, or a teacher. In many cases the signs were there but were never acted upon.

I’m open to any suggestion anyone has as long as it

(1) can be shown that it would have worked in the case of previous shootings,

(2) can be implemented without police state measures, see below


(3) recognizes that the coming age of 3D printing/milling is going to completely let the genie out of the bottle. The Vegas shooter appears to have been wealthy enough that he could have bought a CNC mill and built as many full auto weapons as he liked. In the near future, that capability is going to move down the income scale.

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I am not advocating this, but the logical answer to 3D printing would be regulation of smokeless powder, brass casings, and primers. Essentially regulating ammunition.

Having said that, so long as people can pee and have access to wood and matches, you can’t stop them from making their own black powder.

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Reports seem to indicate that people around Paddock had little indication that he was going to do this, so relying on see-something/say something won’t always be effective. In fact, I’m not sure how monitoring weirdos would work without some kind of Minority Report world … which seems kinda anti-liberty.

I’m thinking SpunkMonkey might be onto something. Strict, draconian limitations on the amount of ammo one is allowed to buy. Details about how that looks can be debated, but that’s a move I could easily support.

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Yeah, there may be a point here, America’s culture is so thoroughly used to their gun rights that it may be much, much harder to get this back to a normal (ie. the rest of the developed world) level trough the use of regulations.

Kinda like illegal downloading, everybody knows how to do it now and it’s really hard to effectively stop. Strong regulations or legal alternatives may have been really effective at some point in the past but are going to be much less effective now everybody is used to the current situation.

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No. A slave is when someone actually owns you. As property.

Still, I can imagine people are afraid in the US. It looks bad from the outside.

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You should see it from our point of view, it’s a doozy I tells you.

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Look, we just have to accept that people are going to murder people despite there being a law against it, we might as well make it legal.

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Yes, and I also hear republicans who refused to consider gun control even after dozens of children were gunned down in a school. One is being a partisan in politics, and the other is refusing to consider gun control after dozens of children were gunned down in a school.

“If you keep calling us names, we’ll refuse to work with you”. Yes. We know. Trump has shown us just how petulant, stubborn, and willfully ignorant republicans are.

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You’re partially missing my point.

But I’ll run with it:

Yeah, not calling people names is part of civil discourse. Would want to work with me if I called you a “dirty fucking tree hugger snowflake libtard”? That’s what I hear from the way you use the word Republican.

And it might interest you to know that those “inbred redneck Bible thumpers” are capable of being reasonable.

https://nytimes.com/2017/10/04/us/politics/bump-stock-fire-legal-republicans-congress.html

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My original point was republicans are the ones against gun control. Apparently pointing out reality is an insult now.

And I’m open to marrying this month’s Playboy Playmate. It’s about as likely to come of anything.

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