Shootings

[Little Raven]

There's no doubt that because of the fetishization of guns in America and the Second Amendment that we need to do a much better job in convincing the other side. It's an incredibly hard task barring one mass shooting that somehow tops them all. We have to be reasonable, well-educated and yet implacably determined. There are no simple solutions that are politically feasible. But if we don't try... we're going to be posting in this thread in 2050 with the same sentiments, and we're only going to have ourselves to blame.

I agree 100%. And I'm trying. But boy is it hard.

[Skinypupy]

Anyone else have a REALLY hard time sending their kids off to school this morning?

[malchior]

There's no doubt that because of the fetishization of guns in America and the Second Amendment that we need to do a much better job in convincing the other side. It's an incredibly hard task barring one mass shooting that somehow tops them all. We have to be reasonable, well-educated and yet implacably determined. There are no simple solutions that are politically feasible. But if we don't try... we're going to be posting in this thread in 2050 with the same sentiments, and we're only going to have ourselves to blame.

I agree 100%. And I'm trying. But boy is it hard.

Of course it is hard, especially if we buy into their bullshit framing. We need to break the mold here. Otherwise we face cataclysm. This level of random mayhem is incompatible with an open society. End of story. And the way this will go will be wholly unpredictable and likely to be bad for almost everyone.

[Little Raven]

Anyone else have a REALLY hard time sending their kids off to school this morning?

No. As terrible as school shootings are, they remain incredible rarities. The sad truth is that children are far, FAR more likely to be killed at home than they are school.

[ImLawBoy]

I'm far from a Second Amendment scholar or gun rights/control expert. That said, I think there is wiggle room within the text of the 2A to allow for more meaningful gun control. Eliminating the 2A is not happening - it's just not. With a friendly SCOTUS, however, we could hang on the "well regulated" portion of the 2A to justify more restrictions/regulations on gun ownership. It doesn't even have to go into whether there's a militia involved, but the plain text of the 2A contains "well regulated" as a table setter for the right to ownership. (By the way, it's really an awkwardly worded amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.")

It may not have been interpreted that way in the past, but precedent doesn't seem to have the same value today as it has in the past. It's still a long shot, as it would require both a friendly SCOTUS and likely some national legislation in a world where the filibuster kills most meaningful stuff, but it's a heck of a lot more plausible than eliminating or even amending the 2A.

[ImLawBoy]

Anyone else have a REALLY hard time sending their kids off to school this morning?

It wasn't too bad for me - perhaps because as violent as Chicago can be, it hasn't really hit home in a school context for me. I did have to hide the newspaper this morning, as boy twin will read anything that he sees and I didn't want to have a discussion with him about the headline of the Chicago Tribune given his already . . . challenging . . . anxiety issues.

Anyone else have a REALLY hard time sending their kids off to school this morning?

No. As terrible as school shootings are, they remain incredible rarities. The sad truth is that children are far, FAR more likely to be killed at home than they are school.

The one item that gives me a little pause is the idea of copycats in the immediate aftermath. Couple that with most schools winding up for the year very soon and I do wonder if you might see someone emboldened and try to do something while schools are still in session.

[Skinypupy]

Anyone else have a REALLY hard time sending their kids off to school this morning?

It wasn't too bad for me - perhaps because as violent as Chicago can be, it hasn't really hit home in a school context for me. I did have to hide the newspaper this morning, as boy twin will read anything that he sees and I didn't want to have a discussion with him about the headline of the Chicago Tribune given his already . . . challenging . . . anxiety issues.

I felt like I should talk to the kids about it, but had the same concerns. The twins are already a bit prone to worry and tend to fixate on any negative outcome, however remote. Even mentioning it would likely send them into a freakout.

[malchior]

The one item that gives me a little pause is the idea of copycats in the immediate aftermath. Couple that with most schools winding up for the year very soon and I do wonder if you might see someone emboldened and try to do something while schools are still in session.

I see good news that we are nearing the end of school years at least. A lot of data shows that many of these active shooter incidents are influenced by other active shooter incidents. The problem is that doesn't prevent shifts into other venues.

[LawBeefaroni]

That's because they're selfish. They hear "gun laws" and think about how it would affect them personally. They're also unable to see the wider picture.

I don't think any of this is true. My friends aren't particularly selfish, and frankly, on gun issues, they're generally much MORE informed than much of the Left. They know the statistics. Sure, I suppose we could say that they suffer from flawed risk analysis, but that's true for virtually everyone.

If it were a foreign national setting off a bomb, they'd be strapping on their US Gray Seal outfits and be ready to fight to the death. If it were protestors destroying commerical property, they'd send in kids with AR15s. But dead kids? Not willing willing to wait 72 hours for an impulse buy of rifle #10.

Again, this is all terrible stereotyping. None of my friends are militia types, and virtually all of them thought that the Rittenhouse incident was a culmination of MANY bad ideas. They are all reasonable people - convince them that a waiting period of 72 hours is going to stop the next Salvador Ramos and I think I could get several of them on board. But I can't make that argument - can you?

I can make that argument that I live under the 72 hour waiting period and it is not an undue burden. The common argument that it puts people in danger who need a gun NOW for self defense is just an emotional one. It is not statistically supported at best and disingenuous at worst. It's impossible to prove a negative, in this case a prevented shooting. But it certainly makes buying a firearm a more serious process and adds points of intervention. It's not just a "cooling off" period. It's an opportunity for the 4473 to process properly and any red flags to be recognized.

And I'm not stereotyping. I put a few thousand rounds down range every month and that includes a lot of time chatting with a multitude of gun owners. The ones ardently opposing thoughtful gun regulations are the majority and blindly preach the same old talking points. Several are friends but they are entirely all too predictable when it comes to this topic.

[Little Raven]

That said, I think there is wiggle room within the text of the 2A to allow for more meaningful gun control.

There is...even with THIS Supreme Court...as you say, it's quite the awkward wording. We can definitely do more than we do right now - heck, the vast, VAST majority of American gun owners are cool with the idea of the NFA, even if the implementation is frustrating.

But at the risk of invoking the Dark Lord - "politics is downstream of culture." The problem isn't the 2nd Amendment per say, it's that millions and millions of American citizens value their right to acquire a firearm if they decide they need it. And in the last couple of years, the demand for guns by all kind of Americans - black, female, gay, trans - has exploded. We made something like 11 million pistols in 2020, virtually all of which were produced for the domestic market. And once a person buys a gun, they almost always get significantly more hostile to "gun control" as it has been traditionally practiced by the Democratic party.

I still have dreams of a grand compromise where we dramatically expand the NFA, extending it to cover basically all semi-automatics, but simultaneously reform it, spending a lot of money on digital technology to reduce wait times, and reducing restrictions on things like silencers and cosmetic features. But I have a terrible time selling it to both sides. My lefty friends listen to me and then say, "Wait, why are we GIVING the other side anything? They should be GIVING UP everything!!!" and my gun friends say "This sounds like my guns are going on a list. Convince me that doesn't lead somewhere terrible." Then I get bogged down trying to explain that silencers don't work like they do in the movies or that Google already knows whether or not you have a gun and it all goes south.

But there must be a way.

[Kurth]

Mass shooting tragedies don’t really matter, though. Things can always be worse, but Sandy Hook was just about the most horrific mass shooting I can imagine in terms of an event that might shock people into action. But it didn’t. Neither will this.

And, frankly, that makes sense in a really grotesque way. The chances of someone dying in a mass shooting are so small as to be inconsequential:

In 2018, mass public shootings were responsible for approximately one death per 4 million people in the United States (Duwe, 2020), representing fewer than one of every 200 homicides in that year.

We can focus our outrage on ARs and dead school kids all we want, but mass shootings just don’t move the needle from an actual risk perspective, and we already know that we don’t care enough about kids and their well being to consider the emotional and psychological toll seeing this kind of news take on them.

Where our outrage should be focused is on the overall level of gun violence in this country:

People in the U.S. are 25 times more likely to die from gun homicide than people in other wealthy countries, a 2016 study in the American Journal of Medicine found. In 2017, the most recent year with available data, nearly 40,000 people in the U.S. died from firearm injuries, more than eight times the number of U.S. military members who died overseas during Operation Iraqi Freedom between 2003 and 2010. Most of the U.S. gun deaths in 2017 were suicides, but statistics show that if someone is murdered in the U.S., there’s a high probability it will be with a gun. According to an FBI breakdown of homicides, more than 70% of murder victims were killed by firearms in 2017.

But with more than 265M guns in circulation in this country right now, it’s going to require nation-wide buy-in to put that tooth paste back in the tube. And we all know that’s not going to happen.

So that all leaves me in a place where gun control measures are near the bottom of my list when it comes to political preferences. I’d gladly trade off weak, ineffectual measures that might have an impact on curtailing mass shootings (but would do little about the actual danger of gun violence) if I were able to secure civil rights, freedom of choice, due process and basic preservation of our democracy in the deal.

Instead, we’re going to take yet another tragic mass shooting and divide up into our camps over gun control. Nothing will be accomplished, accept the left will probably hand the right some great talking points and some red meat to drive voter turnout.

I know this is a really callous take (and kind of horrible), but that’s how I see it.

[LawBeefaroni]

That said, I think there is wiggle room within the text of the 2A to allow for more meaningful gun control.

There is...even with THIS Supreme Court...as you say, it's quite the awkward wording. We can definitely do more than we do right now - heck, the vast, VAST majority of American gun owners are cool with the idea of the NFA, even if the implementation is frustrating.

But at the risk of invoking the Dark Lord - "politics is downstream of culture." The problem isn't the 2nd Amendment per say, it's that millions and millions of American citizens value their right to acquire a firearm if they decide they need it. And in the last couple of years, the demand for guns by all kind of Americans - black, female, gay, trans - has exploded. We made something like 11 million pistols in 2020, virtually all of which were produced for the domestic market. And once a person buys a gun, they almost always get significantly more hostile to "gun control" as it has been traditionally practiced by the Democratic party.

I still have dreams of a grand compromise where we dramatically expand the NFA, extending it to cover basically all semi-automatics, but simultaneously reform it, spending a lot of money on digital technology to reduce wait times, and reducing restrictions on things like silencers and cosmetic features. But I have a terrible time selling it to both sides. My lefty friends listen to me and then say, "Wait, why are we GIVING the other side anything? They should be GIVING UP everything!!!" and my gun friends say "This sounds like my guns are going on a list. Convince me that doesn't lead somewhere terrible." Then I get bogged down trying to explain that silencers don't work like they do in the movies or that Google already knows whether or not you have a gun and it all goes south.

But there must be a way.

There's definitely a way but people are too emotional on the subject. It takes good leadership to bring them together but we don't have good leaders.

[LawBeefaroni]

Mass shooting tragedies don’t really matter, though. Things can always be worse, but Sandy Hook was just about the most horrific mass shooting I can imagine in terms of an event that might shock people into action. But it didn’t. Neither will this.

And, frankly, that makes sense in a really grotesque way. The chances of someone dying in a mass shooting are so small as to be inconsequential:

In 2018, mass public shootings were responsible for approximately one death per 4 million people in the United States (Duwe, 2020), representing fewer than one of every 200 homicides in that year.

We can focus our outrage on ARs and dead school kids all we want, but mass shootings just don’t move the needle from an actual risk perspective, and we already know that we don’t care enough about kids and their well being to consider the emotional and psychological toll seeing this kind of news take on them.

Where our outrage should be focused is on the overall level of gun violence in this country:

People in the U.S. are 25 times more likely to die from gun homicide than people in other wealthy countries, a 2016 study in the American Journal of Medicine found. In 2017, the most recent year with available data, nearly 40,000 people in the U.S. died from firearm injuries, more than eight times the number of U.S. military members who died overseas during Operation Iraqi Freedom between 2003 and 2010. Most of the U.S. gun deaths in 2017 were suicides, but statistics show that if someone is murdered in the U.S., there’s a high probability it will be with a gun. According to an FBI breakdown of homicides, more than 70% of murder victims were killed by firearms in 2017.

But with more than 265M guns in circulation in this country right now, it’s going to require nation-wide buy-in to put that tooth paste back in the tube. And we all know that’s not going to happen.

So that all leaves me in a place where gun control measures are near the bottom of my list when it comes to political preferences. I’d gladly trade off weak, ineffectual measures that might have an impact on curtailing mass shootings (but would do little about the actual danger of gun violence) if I were able to secure civil rights, freedom of choice, due process and basic preservation of our democracy in the deal.

Instead, we’re going to take yet another tragic mass shooting and divide up into our camps over gun control. Nothing will be accomplished, accept the left will probably hand the right some great talking points and some red meat to drive voter turnout.

I know this is a really callous take (and kind of horrible), but that’s how I see it.

That's how it's been for a decade or more. And that's been my take for a while But we don't have to be resigned to this fate.

[Little Raven]

But we don't have to be resigned to this fate.

I'll keep trying.

[Blackhawk]

Anyone else have a REALLY hard time sending their kids off to school this morning?

I hope it doesn't sound selfish, and I don't mean it to suggest that I don't care, but this week is the first week in 25 years where I haven't had any kids in school, and it is a huge relief. And it says something that along with the traditional - "We did it - all of my kids finished school", there was also a bit of "We did it - all of my kids survived school."

[malchior]

Instead, we’re going to take yet another tragic mass shooting and divide up into our camps over gun control. Nothing will be accomplished, accept the left will probably hand the right some great talking points and some red meat to drive voter turnout.

I know this is a really callous take (and kind of horrible), but that’s how I see it.

I think this is unfortunately the truth. However, the utter unwillingness to even discuss the weak measures also increases the pressure on the system. It becomes just another thing driving lack of trust and lack of faith in the system. It's incredibly corrosive.

It doesn't help that we're in a precarious position overall. We are living in an incredibly dangerous time - not even withstanding the constant level of gun violence we face - but also just fundamentally things are not going well. We face so many risks and are unable to even have any sort of semblance of an outcome based discussion about any of them. It doesn't take much to look at other societies that have failed and realize we are smack dab in the middle of a major failure despite the many people cautioning against talking about it that way. It does appear that the sky *is* falling and all we can do is influence people we know and encourage folks to prepare themselves as best we can. It's bleak.

There's definitely a way but people are too emotional on the subject. It takes good leadership to bring them together but we don't have good leaders.

I don't think this is due to emotional reactions. They certainly don't help but I see this as evidence that the system as designed doesn't work. It has failed. This isn't about just one thing that we are too emotional about. It is many issues. We can't solve any problems. We can't act in any sort of common good. We can't even agree in almost any arena what good looks like. Sure we have shitty leaders but they are also what this rotted system spits out. It incentivizes bad outcomes and bad leaders.

[Defiant]

[Isgrimnur]

FBI

[Unagi]

Posted 9 days ago. Not a reaction to this shooting.

[Unagi]

I want to see more of this, across every facet of our culture. No one should talk about anything else.

[hepcat]

Herschel Walker: A man with a plan. Or not. We'll just have to see it and everything and stuff.

[Little Raven]

Posted 9 days ago. Not a reaction to this shooting.

I don't always agree with Beau, but I REALLY disagree with him here.

The idea that the MCX Spear hitting the civilian market is going to fundamentally change the gun control argument in the United States because it fires a more powerful round strikes me as....ridiculous. Yes, the 5.56 round is not particularly high-powered as far as rifle rounds go, but against unarmored targets it's pretty goddamn horrific.

In a typical handgun injury, which I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?

There's a reason NATO adopted it as a standard round for killing large numbers of people. It gets the job done.

Presumably, the great thinkers at the Pentagon see a time coming when the battlefield will require a bit more oomph, and the Spear certainly delivers that, but that isn't going to mean a thing for civilian spree shooters....or the doctors who try to patch up the victims afterwards.

[Smoove_B]

Where does an 18 year old get the money for all this *and* body armor?

Latest: Uvalde gunman legally purchased two AR platform rifles at a local federal firearms licensee on May 17 and May 20, says Texas state Sen. John Whitmire. On May 18, the suspect purchased 375 rounds of ammunition. Inside the school, police found seven 30-round magazines.

[malchior]

The idea that the MCX Spear hitting the civilian market is going to fundamentally change the gun control argument in the United States because it fires a more powerful round strikes me as....ridiculous. Yes, the 5.56 round is not particularly high-powered as far as rifle rounds go, but against unarmored targets it's pretty goddamn horrific.

In a typical handgun injury, which I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?

There's a reason NATO adopted it as a standard round for killing large numbers of people. It gets the job done.

This was to be most of my critique as well. I think his model is mostly right that people want it for the military-ness but what he is getting wrong is the balance between light and deadly and cost considerations. The US army going to a high powered round is more about armor which is sorta less relevant here. He sort of dances right past the cost issue and gets ever so close to hitting the spot there. He mentions it is as "low tech" but doesn't follow that thread to its logical conclusion. That is a component of making it cheap plus the volume he mentions. Cheap, easily available, and very deadly. A bad combo.

[Enough]

Anyone else have a REALLY hard time sending their kids off to school this morning?

No. As terrible as school shootings are, they remain incredible rarities. The sad truth is that children are far, FAR more likely to be killed at home than they are school.

At first blush your logic is certainly sound. But as someone who had a best friend killed by handgun violence I am not counted in those statistics. I was "lucky" this happened after my formative years when he was a practicing rock star lawyer leading the AZ bar and not the kid in school who helped me move past extreme bullying I experienced. I still suffered pretty mightily by his death (nothing like his family of course), but I can only imagine the negative impacts on my growth and confidence had this happened in junior high school. Had I been an eye-witness, literature shows the odds are good I would be experiencing extreme PTSD. We have generations of kids in CO who know someone killed in a mass shooting. This is not good. I wonder what the statistics look like if we look at the likelihood of a single school experiencing a shooting incident over ten years? I mean you're right that the odds of dying in a mass-shooting or other gun violence are quite low but the odds of your kids being directly impacted by one are quite a bit higher. And apparently I'm not rare, something like nearly 50% of Americans know someone,

Many Americans (44%) say they personally know someone who has been shot, either accidentally or intentionally. This is particularly common among black adults, 57% of whom say they know someone who has been shot; about four-in-ten whites (43%) and Hispanics (42%) say the same.

Higher share of gun owners (51%) than non-owners (40%) report that they know someone who has been shot, either accidentally or intentionally.

Separately, about a quarter of Americans (23%) – including roughly equal shares of gun owners and non-owners – say they or someone in their family have been threatened or intimidated by someone using a gun. Again, blacks are more likely than whites to say they have had this experience: About a third of blacks (32%) say they or someone in their family have been threatened or intimidated by someone with a gun, compared with 20% of whites. About a quarter of Hispanics (24%) say this has happened to them or to someone else in their family.

Edit, not to mention the leading cause of death among children in the USA is now guns.

[Enough]

https://twitter.com/CharisHamilton8/sta ... 6224968707

[YellowKing]

Give them hell Beto! He stood up to the governor during the press conference and got thrown out.

Watching the Texas gov and Lt. Gov speak on this is infuriating. Typical response - "Now is not the time to blah blah blah, now is the time to focus on the families." Mental health issue, not a "18-year old can casually walk into a gun store and legally buy an AR-15" issue. Fuck these people. I absolutely agree they should be forced to look at every single child's corpse and talk to every parent and explain why they will do absolutely nothing to stop this from happening again.

[naednek]

Anyone else have a REALLY hard time sending their kids off to school this morning?

No, we didn't even talk about it yesterday. They are pretty segregated from the outside world. Figured why make them worry. Maybe that will bite us in the butt later, but they have plenty of years to worry about things, I want them to enjoy their childhood.

Please note, I'm not judging those who are more open, I respect it and often considered to.

[Unagi]

Anyone else have a REALLY hard time sending their kids off to school this morning?

No, we didn't even talk about it yesterday. They are pretty segregated from the outside world. Figured why make them worry. Maybe that will bite us in the butt later, but they have plenty of years to worry about things, I want them to enjoy their childhood.

Please note, I'm not judging those who are more open, I respect it and often considered to.

I had assumed that Skinypupy just meant that it was hard to trust that a school was a safe place to send them... Not that his kids were worried about it and pushing back on attending school.

[Defiant]

FBI

And yet, it seems to be the gun shooters chose in these high profile, mass shootings.

I wonder if that's coincidence.

[Isgrimnur]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/476 ... ypes-used/

[Unagi]

Posted 9 days ago. Not a reaction to this shooting.

I don't always agree with Beau, but I REALLY disagree with him here.

The idea that the MCX Spear hitting the civilian market is going to fundamentally change the gun control argument in the United States because it fires a more powerful round strikes me as....ridiculous. Yes, the 5.56 round is not particularly high-powered as far as rifle rounds go, but against unarmored targets it's pretty goddamn horrific.

Right, this rifle will be much more effective at countering body armor. And when do all of these shooting incidents stop? When does the body-count stop getting larger? It is when the cops show up. Beau's point here is that this may not be the case going forward. So, yeah - while the bodies that are piling up are not any more 'dead' than they were... there may be 10 more bodies because the first 3 cops to arrive were also shot dead.

I'm not convinced you are hearing the right argument.

Now, will these new rifles end up being used in shootings in the years that are ahead of us? I have no idea. I assume they will be because I do believe a lot of gun owners are going to celebrate the idea of owning this new rifle.

[malchior]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/476 ... ypes-used/

Hey Siri uh I mean Isgrimnur - show me the crosstab of mass shootings showing total victims, victims injured, and victims dead between guns and rifles.*

*Sorry I just had to...

[Enough]

Give them hell Beto! He stood up to the governor during the press conference and got thrown out.

Watching the Texas gov and Lt. Gov speak on this is infuriating. Typical response - "Now is not the time to blah blah blah, now is the time to focus on the families." Mental health issue, not a "18-year old can casually walk into a gun store and legally buy an AR-15" issue. Fuck these people. I absolutely agree they should be forced to look at every single child's corpse and talk to every parent and explain why they will do absolutely nothing to stop this from happening again.

In the comments on that tweet a person discusses Sandy Hook and how if all of America had seen those trauma photos the gun debate would have ended there. Here's another trauma surgeon from Parkland saying the same essentially. I have no clear opinion on if this is a good idea but a part of me thinks it is.

[Unagi]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/476 ... ypes-used/

Honestly, 40 years of data?

I'm guessing that the 40 years of data are being given in the same way a drunk uses a lamp-post. For support, not illumination.

[Archinerd]

I'm just glad we finally have enough data on mass shootings so we can comb through the details to find out exactly which types of guns and bullets are the best.~ (saracasm)

[Isgrimnur]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/476 ... ypes-used/

Honestly, 40 years of data?

I'm guessing that the 40 years of data are being given in the same way a drunk uses a lamp-post. For support, not illumination.

Published by Statista Research Department

Overall, we rate Statista Least Biased based on the curation of stats from various sources and High for factual reporting due to indicating the source.

[malchior]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/476 ... ypes-used/

Honestly, 40 years of data?

I'm guessing that the 40 years of data are being given in the same way a drunk uses a lamp-post. For support, not illumination.

FWIW mass shootings are defined different ways, I doubt that any methodology could correct for the various data collection efforts that happened over the years, and this appears pretty transparently to be a vast undercount. One org has catalogued more mass shootings this year than the Statista data says happened over the last 40. A difference in methodology is at the root but the link above links to every source. It looks solid. Another consideration is the number of injured killed is *always* undercounted. Most of these tracking efforts have to use media sources and don't track the folks who die later due to their injuries.

[Isgrimnur]

Digging deeper would cost me ~$500 for an annual subscription.

[LordMortis]

I want to see more of this, across every facet of our culture. No one should talk about anything else.

Wow. I don't want to say but I do.