[Discussion] Mass Shootings - Yeah, we need a thread just for this...

This year is the deadliest year ever in terms of mass shootings. In a political climate of polarization, it becomes harder to suss out legitimate information from the misinformation propagated by those with political agendas. Complicating this more is the continual resistance of 2nd amendment advocates to allow for political talk surrounding these massacres. This will involve political discussion to see if there are ways we can all agree might be good ways to prevent mass shootings.

This discussion should involve the details of any current, or future mass shooting, and how they compare to past mass shootings. How are they the same? How are they different? Do gun laws have an impact? Does the race of the shooter affect how we treat them? What makes one a hate crime and one an act or terrorism? Are these shootings the price of freedom?

sonny615 wrote:

Holland as a country has the most warm and welcoming people.

....if you're white.

If you're not, then hello culturally ingrained racism!

Ran across this, found it moving, leaving it here.

Report in the Times left a rather bad taste in the mouth today.

Seems President Erdogan of Turkey is actually using the body cam footage at his political rallies, and because most of the media is under his thumb as well their broadcasting the rallies uncensored around the country.

Oh and apparently Erdogan has declared that the nut job responsible is actually a "Christian terrorist" to boot, you know just encase his base wasn't whipped up enough.

Sydney Aiello, one of the survivors of the Parkland shooting, took her own life last Sunday. She struggled with survivor guilt and had been diagnosed with PTSD. She was attending college, but had difficulty because she felt unsafe in the classrooms.

Jesus that's awful

Tragic and infuriating that these poor kids felt so trapped that they saw no other way out. Society as a whole and the government in particular have failed them and their families.

And now one of the Sandy Hook parents. That one hits me very close to home.

f*ck

It looks like NZ voted nearly unanimously to ban assault weapons (single dissenting vote).

My Australian friends are all making note of the fact that a native Australian had to travel 4100 km (roughly the distance between Los Angeles and Raleigh) over open ocean to a foreign country to commit his mass murder because the gun laws in Australia would and did prevent him from obtaining the tools for his atrocity there.

Gun laws work.

Meanwhile in America a law in Pennsylvania finally went into effect that requires people convicted of domestic violence to surrender their firearms to the police, their lawyer, or a licensed gun dealer within 24 hours. Previously, people convicted of domestic violence had 60 days to surrender their guns, which they could just give to a friend or family member.

Sri Lanka blasts: At least 75 dead and more than 150 injured in multiple church and hotel explosions

More than 75 people have been killed and more than 150 injured after coordinated bomb blasts hit a number of high-end hotels and churches in Sri Lanka on Sunday.

The blasts, reported to have occurred in the cities of Negombo, Batticalo and the capital Colombo, targeted at least three hotels and three churches as worshippers attended Easter services.
Bodies of the dead have been received at Colombo National Hospital, according to hospital sources. Most of those injured were also taken there, hospital officials said..
There have been "many casualties including foreigners," tweeted Sri Lankan MP Harsha de Silva.
De Silva said two locations of the explosions were Kochchikade church and Shangri-La Hotel in Kingsbury, Colombo.

The death toll is now up to 290.

And this will of course be more ammunition for the bigots to yell about how dangerous Islam is. Ignoring the fact that many thousands of Muslims have been victims of sectarian violence in this part of the world. Maybe if Muslims suffered less persecution, they’d have fewer radicals who feel the need to blow up buildings....

Also sounds like it was a breakdown in security that could have stopped this. Much like the breakdown in security that led to the deaths on 9/11 here in the U.S.

Were shootings involved in any of the crimes? It seems like the media is only discussing explosions not gunmen.

Good point, this probably should be in a different thread.

Or rename the thread 'senseless mass violence'. While there's potentially 'value' in discussing the topics separately, since the perpetrators of one type of act is so different from the other, the outcomes are similar.

polypusher wrote:

Or rename the thread 'senseless mass violence'. While there's potentially 'value' in discussing the topics separately, since the perpetrators of one type of act is so different from the other, the outcomes are similar.

Are they that different? The perpetrators are usually ideological zealots with access to weapons.

They have access to excessive levels of firepower either because the country they live in is a failed state with insanely loose access to explosive material and ordinance or it’s a country like Sri Lanka.

They're different enough to make a reasonable argument that they could be discussed separately, but I was advocating a thread name/scope change so that they could be discussed together.

I was making a snarky comment about America. I understand what you were trying to say and agree they could be discussed together. Especially since we know America is never going to restrict access to weapons.

I wonder how the same mind can hold both of these claims simultaneously without even a hint of introspection:

Ammon Bundy and that crew, and the United Constitutional Patriots, have taken or are taking up arms to fight injustice!
Those Muslims are radicals and violent and are toting guns and are bad!
muraii wrote:

I wonder how the same mind can hold both of these claims simultaneously without even a hint of introspection:

Ammon Bundy and that crew, and the United Constitutional Patriots, have taken or are taking up arms to fight injustice!
Those Muslims are radicals and violent and are toting guns and are bad!

It's super easy, you just consider white Christians to be human, and non-white and/or non-Christians to be less than human. That makes in non-contradictory.

Y'know, just like Jesus did!

Docjoe wrote:

And this will of course be more ammunition for the bigots to yell about how dangerous Islam is.

Islam isn't dangerous, Islamism is. Many can't seem to spot the difference.

Docjoe wrote:

Maybe if Muslims suffered less persecution, they’d have fewer radicals who feel the need to blow up buildings....

I don't accept this claim one bit.

Many nations\religions\people were persecuted at one point or another, yet only one group consistently "feels the need to blow up buildings" (BTW, people, not buildings...).

They also don't do it out of self defense nor out of feeling of persecution. It's a twisted, violent and sick take on Islam, an offensive strategy to kill all infidels and raise a khalifate under strict Shaariah laws (this time the victims are christians, next time it's jews, another time it's other muslims who aren't radical enough).

ISIS took responsibility, BTW.

I suggest everyone to give this man a follow on twitter. A very brave muslim with incredible views. A minority, unfortunately.

sonny615 wrote:

Many nations\religions\people were persecuted at one point or another, yet only one group consistently "feels the need to blow up buildings" (BTW, people, not buildings...).

This is...objectively not true. There have been plenty of Christian, Buddhist, and atheist terrorists.

Terrorism, like other forms of irregular warfare, is a tactic that is a reaction to unequal strategic force. When conventional warfare is insufficient to address a grievance (to say nothing of diplomacy, trade, and other peaceful ways of resolving conflict) then irregular warfare tends to get more desperate. It takes a fairly extreme situation to push all the way to suicide attacks, though it can be hard to put it back in the bottle once it is out.

Note that this has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the grievance: the Klu Klux Klan is a terrorist organization that started because white people could no longer own slaves. But it didn't exist during the American Civil War because the power of the state enforced the enslavement.

Gremlin wrote:
sonny615 wrote:

Many nations\religions\people were persecuted at one point or another, yet only one group consistently "feels the need to blow up buildings" (BTW, people, not buildings...).

This is...objectively not true. There have been plenty of Christian, Buddhist, and atheist terrorists.

List of Terrorist Incidents in 2018

Note that terrorism related to drug wars and cartel violence is not included in these lists.

There is also a conspicuous absence of the several terrorist attacks undertaken by christian white supremacists in 2018.

It;s a definitional problem: If you define terrorism as only those attacks undertaken by nominal Muslims, then certainly all terrorism is Muslim. That's not really an accurate or useful definition though.

sonny615 wrote:
Gremlin wrote:
sonny615 wrote:

Many nations\religions\people were persecuted at one point or another, yet only one group consistently "feels the need to blow up buildings" (BTW, people, not buildings...).

This is...objectively not true. There have been plenty of Christian, Buddhist, and atheist terrorists.

List of Terrorist Incidents in 2018

I'm not sure what you think the point of that is. Yes, there's a lot of Muslim terrorists at the moment, because there are fewer Muslim cultures with lots of strategic power and there's a lot of open conflict in the Middle East right now. But the list of attacks in 2018 also includes the Atomwaffen Division, groups involved in the Colombian conflict, the Mapuche conflict in Chile, the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency, white supremacists, the Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon, Italian anarchists, and a lot of others.

Muslims don't have a monopoly on terrorism.

Yarp. Especially if it rules out state sanctioned acts of terror.

Tanglebones wrote:

Yarp. Especially if it rules out state sanctioned acts of terror.

I mean, the British Empire didn't need suicide bombers because it could invent concentration camps or deliberately starve millions of people within its normal bureaucratic procedures.

Don’t feed the troll, folks.