[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?

Doesn't matter. As Steve Bannon said, you just flood the zone with sh*t.

FWIW, Elon appears to be Team PsyOp.

It’s always a false flag. Except when it isn’t.

Mental illness is not responsible for America’s guns crisis

*well actually it is but not the kind they are refuting. Believing you must have a gun and easy access to it to be safe, believing you need to have semi-automatic weapons to be safe etc. it a metal illness I would argue but it isn't the kind they are talking about in this article.

Even if it is, generally, the first thing mental health professionals do is remove avenues of extreme harm from people having a crisis or who even might potentially use them in crisis.

Again, this doesn't happen anywhere else, and for one very, very obvious key reason.

being so f'ing scared all the time that you'll shoot someone for pulling into your driveway or who rings your doorbell.
being so entitled that you'll shoot someone for making a reasonable request about the disturbing sh*t you do on your property

A gun rights guy tried to tell me that restrictive gun laws don't work because there is gun crime in California.

I replied that there is far LESS gun crime in California than in places with lax carry laws like Louisiana, Florida, or Alabama, but even if that were not the case, to characterize California gun laws as "restrictive" only works in an asinine American context. If California were a country unto itself, it would have the second most insanely lax gun laws of any industrialized nation on the planet.

Behind America.

It's like looking into an entirely different dimension.

Serbians hand over thousands of weapons after mass shootings

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Serbian citizens have handed over nearly 6,000 unregistered weapons in the first three days of a month-long amnesty period that is part of an anti-gun crackdown following two mass shootings last week, police said Thursday.

Police also have received nearly 300,000 rounds of ammunition and about 470 explosive devices during the same period, the Serbian Interior Ministry said on Instagram.

The effort to rid Serbia of excessive guns was launched after 17 people were killed in two mass shootings last week and 21 were wounded, many of them children. One of the shootings took place in a school for the first time ever in Serbia.

Authorities have told citizens to give up unregistered weapons by June 8 or face prison sentences. Other anti-gun measures include a ban on new gun licenses, stricter controls on gun owners and shooting ranges, and tougher punishment for the illegal possession of weapons.

The school shooter was a 13-year-old boy who used his father’s gun to open fire on his fellow students at an elementary school in central Belgrade last Wednesday, police have said. A day later, a 20-year-old man opened fire with an automatic weapon in a rural area south of the capital city.

Serbia is estimated to be among the top countries in Europe when it comes to gun possession per capita, which are partly left over from the wars in the 1990s. On Wednesday, police arrested the father of the suspected village shooter for illegal possession of weapons.

The two shootings have sparked calls for changes and more tolerance in Serbia’s society. Thousands have marched in opposition-led protests in Belgrade and other towns, demanding resignations of populist government ministers as well as a ban on television stations that air violent content and host war criminals. More protests are planned on Friday.

Serbia’s populist president, Aleksandar Vucic, has accused opposition parties of using the tragedy for political ends. He has announced plans for an own rally in late May.

Vucic, a former ultranationalist who now says he wants to take Serbia into the European Union, has faced accusations of promoting hate speech against opponents, curbing free speech with a tight grip over mainstream media and taking control of all state institutions. He has denied this.

Like, Serbia's leadership is Not Good for a variety of other reasons, but it's still nuts to watch the response.

It's the only sane response to children being murdered.

America is nuts

I mean, backpacks are clearly super dangerous. Best to focus on that aspect rather than whether guns need to be more tightly regulated.

That amnesty and buyback response was exactly Australia's response to its last mass shooting event decades ago. Our then Prime Minister John Howard is probably most famous for his economic achievements but despite being a conservative leader he just up and convinced the rest of parliament to reform gun ownership and control and everyone agreed.

It works. People can still have guns. An attorney I know has 7 of them for hunting bigger game including culling feral goats for meat. They're just well regulated and subject to screening and licensing controls.

It's not perfect, I mean, a few years ago in our area a man stalked his ex wife and teen kids, somehow got semi auto pistols despite having warning flags against his file, killed his kids and then himself. But those incidents are extremely rare here.

Well that doesn't count, as we learned during the pandemic, Australia is a totalitarian state where no-one has any freedom.

(I hope the size of the /s is implied.)

A gunman killed 3 people and wounded multiple others in New Mexico today.

To give you an idea of just how normalized this has become, I genuinely had to go hunting on CNN.com's homepage to find their coverage.

The fact that "gunman killed three people" just honestly barely registers a shrug from me anymore is quite a depressing indictment of this nation.

Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland, yesterday signed into law Senate Bill 1, The Gun Safety Act of 2023. This law prohibits “a person from knowingly wearing, carrying, or transporting a firearm in certain locations”. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

Naturally, the NRA sued him immediately.

Not a mass shooting (thank god), but yet another great example of how very polite this armed society is:

Clifton Williams got angry Saturday “and began throwing tiles” at his roommate after the roommate ate the last Hot Pocket, the victim told police, according to a court citation.

The roommate said he tried to fight back before telling Williams he was leaving, the citation said.

As the roommate was leaving, “Mr. Williams went inside the residence and got a gun,” the victim told investigators. Williams then shot his roommate “in the ass while he was trying to leave,” according to the citation.

gewy wrote:

Not a mass shooting (thank god), but yet another great example of how very polite this armed society is:

I see you and raise...

Charlotte bus driver fired after exchanging gunfire with passenger

When an argument between a passenger and a bus driver escalated outside a Charlotte mall last week, two other passengers moved to the back of the bus. Then gunshots were exchanged.

“It’s never okay for passengers to assault drivers to threaten drivers,” Cagle said during an afternoon press conference.

“However, we also acknowledge that gun violence and violence in general is pervasive throughout the community.” Fullard failed to follow deescalation protocol because he didn’t leverage the appropriate alarms.

Fullard also broke CATS policy by carrying a gun, Cagle said.

So polite.

I bet he sues and wins that the no gun policy is an infringement on his rights.

Is he black? Because then nope.

We do live in a world where a person's race needs to be told to tell what kind of "justice" they will have.

The aftermath of mass shootings infiltrates every corner of survivors’ lives

CHICAGO (AP) — More than a year after 11-year-old Mayah Zamora was airlifted out of Uvalde, Texas, after being critically injured in the Robb Elementary school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers, the family is still reeling.

Knocks on the door startle Mayah into a panic. The family is skipping Fourth of July celebrations to avoid booming fireworks. An outing to the Little Mermaid movie requires noise-canceling headphones.

Since 2016, thousands of Americans have been wounded in mass shootings, and tens of thousands by gun violence, with that number continuing to grow, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Beyond the colossal medical bills and the weight of trauma and grief, mass shooting survivors and family members contend with scores of other changes that upend their lives.

Survivors talked to The Associated Press about the mental and physical wounds that endure in the aftermath of shootings in Uvalde; Las Vegas; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, during a July Fourth parade last year.

A coworker in Tokyo got news of the shooting last night in Baltimore and texted me to ask if I was alright. I thanked him for his concern, but also let him know that Baltimore was a very segregated place and that there was literally no reason at all for me to ever be at a block party in Brooklyn Park.

I think the last time I was even within a half mile of Brooklyn Park was when I was working as a process server 35 years ago.

When I looked at the CNN headline, I was struck by how much I knew about the story without even having to read it.

"30 injured, 2 dead in shooting at Brooklyn Park block party"

I knew the shooters were black, that they used handguns, and it was probably an interpersonal beef where testosterone and possibly alcohol was involved.

If it had said, "30 dead, 2 injured in Pikesville synagogue shooting", I would have known it was a single white dude with an AR15 who spent too much time on 8Chan and loves Trump and Hitler.

Yeah, I knew within reading a few lines about the story what was going on. Like, yes, it was a "mass shooting," but what happened in Baltimore and what happened in Uvalde or Las Vegas are two different things.

Like, a blue whale is a mammal, and so is a rat. A rat is not a blue whale.

Either way, just hugely sad and depressing, but predictable in communities where guns are exponentially easier to access than the kind of services and community investment that richer ones have.

Charlene Bowie, 66, who lives close to where the shooting took place, said she saw a huge crowd, largely made up of teenagers.

“They were having fun in the beginning, but you know kids ... they started drinking and they was getting all out of order,” she said.

Bowie said she called the police and told her 15-year-old granddaughter to come inside. They heard gunshots a little while later, and a bullet struck her air conditioner, breaking off a piece of it and hitting her granddaughter in the back. The girl was unhurt, and they both laid on the floor, Bowie said.

“Then I heard some banging on the door — boom, boom, boom, real loud — so I come down and got the door. The little girl (was) laying on my steps, shot,” she said.

Bowie said she ran inside to get a rag, then tied a makeshift tourniquet around the girl’s leg.

“I just kept talking to her so she wouldn’t get panicky, you know,” she said.

Learning that young people were killed in the shooting was especially painful for Bowie because she lost her son, 19, and her grandson, 15, to gun violence in separate shootings years ago.

“It hurts so bad because they haven’t begun to live. They don’t even know what life is, they don’t. All they know is guns. That’s all they know, and it’s sad,” she said.

EDIT: In the time it took me to write that, I have just seen that there was another mass shooting in Philadelphia, 8 shot, 4 dead.

I know I shouldn't become numb to these things, which is what the right-wing wants. But after realizing that nothing is going to change in my lifetime I feel that I have to become numb or I will fall down a well of despair that I won't climb out of.

a journalist in the UK made the statistical observation that, on average, toddlers in the US have injured or killed people with guns once a week for the last three years.

Toddlers.

As in kids 5 years old and under.

So much freedumb.

Guns don't kill people!

...Toddlers do!

Farscry wrote:

Guns don't kill people!

...Toddlers do!

I just want to know where all the good toddlers with guns were.

If all the toddlers were armed, we wouldn't have this problem. An armed sandbox is a polite sandbox!