Another Mass Shooting

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Oh hey. NRA fucking around in Australia:

🇺🇸 🇦🇺 Al Jazeera films US gun...

[The Man]

Shooting at San Diego synagogue. At least one dead and three injured.

At some point I'm going to have to devote some serious thought to whether this country is even safe to live in anymore.

[ShottleBop]

Originally Posted by The Man

Shooting at San Diego synagogue. At least one dead and three injured.

At some point I'm going to have to devote some serious thought to whether this country is even safe to live in anymore.

That happened just down the street from where Mrs. S's youngest sister lives. The downtown synagogue that I'm on call for (to make up an evening minyan--Jewish canon law requires a quorum of 10 Jewish adults for public prayer) will probably take another precaution or two, as they did after Philadelphia.

[Limoncello]

Wal*Mart Texas

[Ari]

As told to worried people using twitter to make sure their relatives left the Gilroy Festival before the shooting happened, by freedom loving conservatives: If only dirty dem loving communist california had the freedom to carry guns, then you wouldn’t be crying!

I am saddened that Texas’s strict and anti-american gun laws allowed this shooting to happen and hope that politicians will look to the sane solution like my newly formed Everyone-a-gun LLC that will place highly trained resellers in front of every store in america to assess their shooting style and give them a loaner gun to carry about through the store with them from our sponsored collection...

[SR71]

I watched the press conference. Neither the governor nor the mayor could bring themselves to utter the (gulp) dreaded R word. Maybe the police chief did, idk, I stopped watching.

The thoughts and prayers part has been memed out too bad, I guess, so it's been revised to praying so that glob will "bind the wounds" or some shit like that. I can't wait to go read my favorite right wing boards where they'll be trying to convince everyone this was an extreme leftist gunman.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

What you have to understand about the mass shooting is that it's Not About the tool the killer used or the political ideology that inspired him

— Bedtime is 10 pm (@InternetHippo) August 3, 2019

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Dayton.

[Pyrrho]

Missing from discussions of the perpetrators' ideologies, radicalization, mental illness, etc. is the question of substance abuse. I wonder, in my ignorance, if that could be contributing to to whatever flattening of affect is sufficient that an ordinary fool can commit murder. I wonder if mass shootings such as in El Paso and Dayton require less sociopathy than shooting another person at close range--that the more efficient, longer distance weaponry provides additional detachment from the blood and shattered bone.

I have no idea.

[Ari]

I was going to post that I think we will need them back to back, if not back to back to back, before hitting any sort of critical limit that will finally reach the scare factor of one brown man with a poorly made shoe bomb. I’ve wondered what it must be like living in America destabilized Iraq.

And low and behold, there was a mass killing in Dayton Ohio. So now we’ve got back to back, the question remains whether we will need another one, or another two next weekend, before it outweighs the fright of a brown man.

As it’s been a whole week and information is a bit more solid, the Gilroy shooter appeared to have bought his weapon online, then went to the store in Nevada to pick it up. The store owner did his required duty of psychological evaluation and said that the man was smiling when there to pick up his murder weapon, which was enough to clear him.

While a california man had to go all the way to Nevada to get his weapon, open carry Texas now has 4 or the 10 deadliest shootings. As americans know, it’s the God Given right of all white male citizens to hurt others when angry, and their right to mass killing weapons so others will hurt like they do is what this country was built on.

One of the many things ignored in these cases is how many are suicides with additional casualties. Even ones where the person gives up, they have basically self destructed their life and took a bunch of people out with them as, especially in Texas, they will end up being killed by the state. The Gilroy gunman was shot multiple times by the cops and managed to kill himself with his own gun.

I have a hypothesis that the Gilroy gunman killed so few and two of the three were children because either his weapon wasn’t calibrated or he was shooting low because he wanted to injure, not kill but the weapons of war these people can buy with a button click is designed to kill human targets. Far from a flatten affect, many of these people are angry, often at themselves as much as others.

[Pyrrho]

Thing is, these guys either kill themselves, are killed by police, or go to jail, and if there is ever any psychological evaluation done by a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist, we never really hear about it. There is always the obligatory search for motivation; we read their blatherings; we see photos of them and of their possessions, but those are insufficient for a useful evaluation. Angry? Possibly, but I think there's more to it, especially a victim mentality and, yes, flattening of affect. There are distinguishable patterns, such as men who kill estranged wives or girlfriends and their children before killing themselves. There are distinguishable patterns in these mass murders. Prevention is going to require a bit more insight than is available from "manifestos". The saturation of firearms is an aspect that has to be evaluated...but again, I don't have any useful ideas, and I'm not sure that anyone does. Politicians are all repeating the same things as if by rote, and so are the perpetrators. I don't believe that anything is going to change for the better. By Friday we'll be distracted by something else.

[erimir]

I saw something pointing out that 6 of the 9 victims in Dayton were black. The shooter was white, but he also killed his own sister. It seems pretty likely that she was the reason he picked that location to attack, so his motives are a bit more murky.

The Gilroy shooter seemed to have had white nationalist/anti-immigrant/anti-Hispanic leanings, and the El Paso shooter definitely did.

[Ari]

There are indeed many parallels to domestic violence that can be used to better understand this and we know a lot of domestic violence. A lot comes from feelings of inadequacy, loss of control and insecurities, often transferring blame onto the partner. “You’re making me do this [hurt you]” is often said by so many domestic abusers. By transferring their anger onto the other person as if they are the cause, they not only provide a justification for enacting their anger and rage but it provides an artificial relief when they defeat the other and gain control again. “Because I’m angry” was the Gilroy shooter’s response when someone screamed “why are you doing this.”

As far as stopping it, gun control would go a long way to triage the harm. Knifes just don’t kill as many as fast, and home made firearms are unreliable, so are homemade bombs. Had the shoe bomber had a ShoeBoomz™ 900e mass produced and 100% reliability guaranteed to cut through airplane skin up to the largest model in flight today or your money back! we wouldn’t be talking about the failed shoe bomber.

A second less likely option than gun control but a better long term solution is that most men need to go see a therapist to help deal with and undo the shit they’ve been taught by an emotionally abusive society so they know how to handle their emotions when not all of their general needs are being met being able to keep it together and act like an adult instead of a lonely scared child lashing out in the only acceptable way in our society, violence. But that would require a self awareness that these men often don’t have. Trying to find a specific tell tale cause, a specific testable mental illness, a specific video game, anything that allows them to say to themselves ‘I’m fine, I’m not like them, I don’t have/do ____” when the reality is I’m talking about most if not all men not just ones that fit a thin profile.

Then there’s the racist dark underbelly reason, that 2nd amendment rights is code for white power and white control. As of a few days ago, white male americans valued their ability to kill a scary brown criminal doing brown criminal things like playing rap music or making them imagine being burglarized and their property taken, more than they value other’s lives.

It’s important to always keep in mind the only reason we have any form of gun control in the US is because a group of Black men enacted their 2nd amendment rights and carried around firearms. The history of how communist gun grabber california’s hate for true-american-freedoms is rooted in fear that the smart outspoken blackman had a gun and he was organizing.

Once all the talk is done, American’s actions around guns have been and still are based in racism and profit first, not about saving lives. Any lives saved are just a side consequence.

[JoeP]

[JoeP]

FB_IMG_1564939079137.jpg

[The Lone Ranger]

Generation Lockdown (from March For Our Lives):

March For Our Lives

[Stephen Maturin]

That fill-in-the-blanks Mass Shooting News Story form needs some updating, especially in the "while prominent Republicans" section. Under the current narrative, which fits comfortably within an ever-more Nazified GOP, the real problem isn't video games or want of mental health but rather "diversity." The Nordic (Aryan) countries don't have this problem because they're "homogeneous," that is to say, filled with educated, high-IQ white people. By contrast, the U.S. has a severe mass shooting problem because it's "diverse," that is to say, full of ignorant, low-IQ non-whities.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

By contrast, the U.S. has a severe mass shooting problem because it's "diverse," that is to say, full of ignorant, low-IQ non-whities.

Ironically, being full of ignorant, low-IQ whites is pretty much the problem. And underfunding education while promoting lowest-common-denominator media has very much been the strategy of the 1%.

[The Lone Ranger]

McSweeney's: God Has Heard You Thoughts and Prayers

[The Man]

Adam Silverman at Balloon Juice argues against criminalising domestic terrorism specifically on the grounds that such statutes have historically been used by the powerful to threaten marginalised groups and not the other way around, citing at length a discussion from Ken White, also known as Popehat, one of the country’s better known First Amendment litigators.

I’m inclined to agree with both of them, and incidentally, this historical case study illustrates a large part of the reason my philosophical thought inclines towards anarchism in the first place. Power is most often used by the powerful to reinforce their own power and not the other way around, so the solution is to flatten out unnecessary hierarchies as much as possible so that no one has undue control over others’ lives. (You’ll always have parent/child, teacher/student, etc., but a lot of our current hierarchies are completely unnecessary for the functioning of a civil society, if not outright destructive to it.)

I don’t ever expect this to happen in practice, though, and I don’t entirely know what an adequate short-term solution is, either. You can probably prosecute the terrorists under existing hate crime statues, under which their acts certainly qualify. Like Silverman, I’m not convinced that punishment acts as a particularly effective deterrent to crimes. The most effective way to reduce the prevalence of such attacks would of course be effective gun control measures (and I’m increasingly coming to the position that the Second Amendment should be repealed entirely, since the Supreme Court has decided to ignore the “well-regulated militia” clause outright), but #MassacreMitch is blocking those, and some people would still end up slipping through the cracks and obtaining weaponry.

The real problem is that when hate this intense emerges like a malevolent genie from a bottle, it’s very difficult to put it back in. Racists and misogynists are emboldened in a way they absolutely weren’t before Dump’s “victory”. Social censure impelled many of them to keep their views underground, but seeing a fellow bigot as president* leading Nuremberg rallies all over the country has emboldened them, and it’s unsurprising that many of them have acted on their views (several news programmes have noted how when someone suggested shooting immigrants, his reaction was “Only in the Panhandle could you get away with a statement like that”, as though it were a joke. Incidentally, fuck the Panhandle).

The problem, essentially, is our entire system of government, which is designed to favour the interests of the more powerful over the less powerful. This was an explicit intention of the Framers of the Constitution, who constructed several veto points precisely because they did not trust the masses of people; for instance, the Electoral College was intended to prevent the election of an unqualified demagogue, and we’ve all seen how that worked out in practice. The Senate is another example, and it’s worth noting that Senators were originally appointed rather than elected. The design of our Constitution is why the exact same form of hate speech laws that might work perfectly well in Canada and Germany would inevitably be subject to abuse here. I don’t know what the fix is; we’d have to change our entire Constitution. Getting rid of the Senate would probably be a necessary step. Obviously electoral reform, overturning Citizens United, fixing the Supreme Court (though I’m not sure how) – there are a long list of steps.

(ETA: Deplatforming also helps a lot. Forcing sites like 8chan underground is going to drive away a lot of members who might otherwise be radicalised by them. Same with Alex Jones losing most of his social media accounts.)

The thing that keeps me from losing all hope is that there are way more of us than there are of them, and that will get even truer as more of them die off; younger people are much more on our side, mostly due to our increased diversity. This is exactly what scares the shit out of the extreme right, by the way – one of the shooters explicitly referred to a racist meme known as the “great replacement” in the collection of putrid rambling that I refuse to dignify with the label “manifesto”. But holy shit, the next several years are going to be ugly. And that’s not even getting into climate change, which I don’t have any faith that we’re going to be able to solve.

Some days it’s all I can do to get out of bed.

[The Man]

…probably important enough to double-post about: a boycott that will probably actually do some good. A similar campaign probably contributed to Alex Jones getting banned from Twitter.

Now, here's how to participate in the #untwitter8chan boycott!

It's super-easy.

All you have to do is follow this link, log in with your Twitter account, and click "Block all and subscribe."https://t.co/2MSx8Xy0Zf

— Gwen Snyder is uncivil (@gwensnyderPHL) 6 August 2019

I don’t see a clear guide to how to participate in this if one doesn’t use Twitter, though. If I find any information on that, I’ll update this post.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by The Man

(ETA: Deplatforming also helps a lot. Forcing sites like 8chan underground is going to drive away a lot of members who might otherwise be radicalised by them. Same with Alex Jones losing most of his social media accounts.)

(So, get Dump off Twitter? I'm all for that.)

[Corona688]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

That fill-in-the-blanks Mass Shooting News Story form needs some updating, especially in the "while prominent Republicans" section. Under the current narrative, which fits comfortably within an ever-more Nazified GOP, the real problem isn't video games or want of mental health but rather "diversity." The Nordic (Aryan) countries don't have this problem because they're "homogeneous," that is to say, filled with educated, high-IQ white people. By contrast, the U.S. has a severe mass shooting problem because it's "diverse," that is to say, full of ignorant, low-IQ non-whities.

I had someone try to tell me Canada has less gun violence because we don't have the bad races here...

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Canadian lectures American on how only 17 people were shot in Toronto over the weekend - The Beaverton

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Norway mosque shooting: Unarmed 65-year-old describes how he took down 'far-right' gunman before he could kill anyone | The Independent