[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?

I think making insurance mandatory would be great. But then you have to require that all gun owners register those guns regardless of how they're obtained. That kind of gun registry is already viciously opposed in a lot of places (despite that every one of those places requires a license and registration to drive a car on the road legally). Then you have to require insurance, and we saw how people took to being compelled to purchase health insurance.

Suggesting that both of those things become federal law will just never ever happen.

That opposition is in the minority and I'm not positive that can continue to stand.

One important key is keeping the pressure on. The NRA shame campaign is one way to fight an organization that has near limited resources. Make shame those who take their money (tweet your 'thoughts and prayers' and we'll let you know how much money you took from the NRA). Make it a point of pride for politicians to deny money from the NRA and their "F" rating. My local representative has been doing this and his Republican opponent has to mirror that. This was not the case in 2010.

This will not work everywhere but I believe that it will work in enough areas to make the NRA ratings toxic.

These kids are awesome

That is hard to watch.

I understand. But their voices are strong and urgent and powerful. If they keep talking they’ll change the country.

The dominant argument from "conservatives" on my FB feed is "if gun control was so important, why didn't Obama do something?".

Sigh.

Paleocon wrote:

The dominant argument from "conservatives" on my FB feed is "if gun control was so important, why didn't Obama do something?".

Sigh.

They're just parroting 45's tweet from last night.

If the 3/24 protest the kids are talking about is a real thing I might go. Do we have GWJers in DC?

I don't know if this goes here or the Social Media thread, but the last week has shot my blood pressure through the roof just due to the shit posting of meme's on Facebook from people I theoretically respect.

No, seriously, repeal the 2nd.

NY Times: Repeal the Second Amendment

Brett Stephens

October 5th, 2017

I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.

From a law-and-order standpoint, more guns means more murder. “States with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides,” noted one exhaustive 2013 study in the American Journal of Public Health.

From a personal-safety standpoint, more guns means less safety. The F.B.I. counted a total of 268 “justifiable homicides” by private citizens involving firearms in 2015; that is, felons killed in the course of committing a felony. Yet that same year, there were 489 “unintentional firearms deaths” in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Between 77 and 141 of those killed were children.

From a national-security standpoint, the Amendment’s suggestion that a “well-regulated militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State,” is quaint. The Minutemen that will deter Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are based in missile silos in Minot, N.D., not farmhouses in Lexington, Mass.

From a personal liberty standpoint, the idea that an armed citizenry is the ultimate check on the ambitions and encroachments of government power is curious. The Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, the New York draft riots of 1863, the coal miners’ rebellion of 1921, the Brink’s robbery of 1981 — does any serious conservative think of these as great moments in Second Amendment activism?

And now we have the relatively new and now ubiquitous “active shooter” phenomenon, something that remains extremely rare in the rest of the world. Conservatives often say that the right response to these horrors is to do more on the mental-health front. Yet by all accounts Stephen Paddock would not have raised an eyebrow with a mental-health professional before he murdered 58 people in Las Vegas last week.

What might have raised a red flag? I’m not the first pundit to point out that if a “Mohammad Paddock” had purchased dozens of firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition and then checked himself into a suite at the Mandalay Bay with direct views to a nearby music festival, somebody at the local F.B.I. field office would have noticed.

Given all of this, why do liberals keep losing the gun control debate?

Maybe it’s because they argue their case badly and — let’s face it — in bad faith. Democratic politicians routinely profess their fidelity to the Second Amendment — or rather, “a nuanced reading” of it — with all the conviction of Barack Obama’s support for traditional marriage, circa 2008. People recognize lip service for what it is.

Then there are the endless liberal errors of fact. There is no “gun-show loophole” per se; it’s a private-sale loophole, in other words the right to sell your own stuff. The civilian AR-15 is not a true “assault rifle,” and banning such rifles would have little effect on the overall murder rate, since most homicides are committed with handguns. It’s not true that 40 percent of gun owners buy without a background check; the real number is closer to one-fifth.

The National Rifle Association does not have Republican “balls in a money clip,” as Jimmy Kimmel put it the other night. The N.R.A. has donated a paltry $3,533,294 to all current members of Congress since 1998, according to The Washington Post, equivalent to about three months of Kimmel’s salary. The N.R.A. doesn’t need to buy influence: It’s powerful because it’s popular.

Nor will it do to follow the “Australian model” of a gun buyback program, which has shown poor results in the United States and makes little sense in a country awash with hundreds of millions of weapons. Keeping guns out of the hands of mentally ill people is a sensible goal, but due process is still owed to the potentially insane. Background checks for private gun sales are another fine idea, though its effects on homicides will be negligible: guns recovered by police are rarely in the hands of their legal owners, a 2016 study found.

In fact, the more closely one looks at what passes for “common sense” gun laws, the more feckless they appear. Americans who claim to be outraged by gun crimes should want to do something more than tinker at the margins of a legal regime that most of the developed world rightly considers nuts. They should want to change it fundamentally and permanently.

There is only one way to do this: Repeal the Second Amendment.

Repealing the Amendment may seem like political Mission Impossible today, but in the era of same-sex marriage it’s worth recalling that most great causes begin as improbable ones. Gun ownership should never be outlawed, just as it isn’t outlawed in Britain or Australia. But it doesn’t need a blanket Constitutional protection, either. The 46,445 murder victims killed by gunfire in the United States between 2012 and 2016 didn’t need to perish so that gun enthusiasts can go on fantasizing that “Red Dawn” is the fate that soon awaits us.

Donald Trump will likely get one more Supreme Court nomination, or two or three, before he leaves office, guaranteeing a pro-gun court for another generation. Expansive interpretations of the right to bear arms will be the law of the land — until the “right” itself ceases to be.

Some conservatives will insist that the Second Amendment is fundamental to the structure of American liberty. They will cite James Madison, who noted in the Federalist Papers that in Europe “the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” America was supposed to be different, and better.

I wonder what Madison would have to say about that today, when more than twice as many Americans perished last year at the hands of their fellows as died in battle during the entire Revolutionary War. My guess: Take the guns—or at least the presumptive right to them—away. The true foundation of American exceptionalism should be our capacity for moral and constitutional renewal, not our instinct for self-destruction.

Not that people here have been arguing this, but I have an important point to make. I've said it before in other contexts: most mass murderers are perfectly sane.

Connecting mental illness and mass shooting misses the point, experts say

Why Better Mental-Health Care Won't Stop Mass Shootings: Improved access to treatment might help many Americans, but experts say it would not prevent Las Vegas–style tragedies

When someone does something violent that we wouldn't do, there's a desire to draw a line and put them on the other side. We wouldn't murder someone, so therefore the murder must be sick in some way. But it's much more likely to be their ideas, and ideas are not a disease.

(As a total aside, this comes up quite a lot in Agatha Christie novels. Characters who think the murderer must be insane miss the clues and are part of her making her point about who can commit murder.)

Attacking people with mental illness is a double wrong: they have done nothing wrong (and may need your help for other things) while the murderers are left alone. It's a scapegoating process that enables the larger community to purge their sins by pinning them on an exiled innocent.

Psychology Today: Mass Shooting and the Myth of the Violent Mentally Ill

Associating mental illness with violence is, in a certain respect, a natural reaction to an action that to most people seems unfathomable. It is natural in the sense that in trying to understand mass shootings—and to find something to blame them on—especially when they involve children, one immediately asks who would do such a thing and a common answer is that nobody who thinks like us, like most people, would. In this, purely statistical sense, a person who acts in this way is abnormal.

One could then take the further step and associate this behaviour to other kinds of behaviour that is often incomprehensible to the unaccustomed eye and which is often associated with mental illness—such as behaviour exhibited by depressed individuals or by people suffering from anxiety, psychosis, obsessions and compulsions. Though mental illness is not necessarily accompanied by strange behaviour (and exhibiting strange and abnormal behaviour does not mean you have a mental illness), the belief that it is is held by many people and so the connection is easy to make. So one way the association between mental illness with extreme violent behaviour can be made is by associating it first with incomprehensible behaviour, and then connecting it with other behaviour we experience as incomprehensible. Another way to make the association could be by saying that only someone who is “sick” could do such a thing—and the sickness in this case would not be associated with heart disease or diabetes, but with sickness of the mind.

However the link may be made, and however easy it may be to be led to make this link, this association is not only not supported by empirical evidence, but it is also counterproductive—both when it comes to addressing mental illness, and to addressing mass shootings and gun violence in general.

You know? If you are stockpiling guns and ammo in the hopes that there will be some kind of catastrophic social event that "levels" society and puts white men "back in charge", you have a mental illness. A serious and dangerous mental illness. It isn't an expression of your "freedom of speech". It is an indicator of your unfitness to own firearms.

Jayhawker wrote:

No, seriously, repeal the 2nd.

NY Times: Repeal the Second Amendment

Brett Stephens

October 5th, 2017


Repealing the Amendment may seem like political Mission Impossible today, but in the era of same-sex marriage it’s worth recalling that most great causes begin as improbable ones. Gun ownership should never be outlawed, just as it isn’t outlawed in Britain or Australia. But it doesn’t need a blanket Constitutional protection, either. The 46,445 murder victims killed by gunfire in the United States between 2012 and 2016 didn’t need to perish so that gun enthusiasts can go on fantasizing that “Red Dawn” is the fate that soon awaits us.

Don't kid yourself that repealing the second amendment is going to be anything like same sex marriage, where the conservatives just stop talking about the issue and pretend the pitched political fight against homosexual rights never happened. Gun control will be far, far more like abortion, spawning 50 years of single issue voters fervently and irrevocably set against the Democratic party, bringing in millions and millions of donations every year. States will add there own versions of the second amendment to their constitutions, probably worse versions, and who knows how the Courts will decide between Federal gun regulation and State pro-gun constitutions.

I'm not saying gun control is a bad thing, or shouldn't be done (although I admit to being skeptical/pessimistic as to whether liberals could weather that political cost), but anyone who thinks that a one time accomplishment will cause conservatives to realize they lost the issue, and should never have been fighting it in the first place... not a chance in hell.

I think the Onion had an article about that Alabama judge, Moore, that portrayed him as a Democrat plant trying to discredit the Republican party.

The conclusion was that the only thing he could have actually done to lose the election would be to propose gun ban legislation.

@Gremlin thank you for making that point.

As someone who suffers from and gets treatment for clinical depression I get a lot of advice that equates to "don't make the choice to be sad." People who suffer mental illness are mot making a choice. Most people who suffer from any sort of mental illnesses are not violent. Every time there is a mass shooting there is a segment that attempts to demonize those with mental illnesses putting the blame on a group of people who should be blameless.

You know? If you are stockpiling guns and ammo in the hopes that there will be some kind of catastrophic social event that "levels" society and puts white men "back in charge", you have a mental illness. A serious and dangerous mental illness. It isn't an expression of your "freedom of speech". It is an indicator of your unfitness to own firearms.

And this is incorrect too. Someone who does these things may have a mental illness but they may not. They certainly have a different viewpoint on the world than me - then again so do most people but if that makes one mentally ill then I am the only sane one.

Mass murder does not require a broken mind. It only requires broken ideas.

Racism isn't a mental illness, it's an ideology that leads sane people to do horrific things. Toxic masculinity likewise, with the addition of a strong dose of self-hate. Well-adjusted, perfectly normal people can calmly commit genocide if they believe that they are in the right.

Our problem is that the right to own guns is taken as an unquestioned axiom rather than something that can be reasoned about (and possibly deprioritized). Our discussion of rights is terribly muddled; the rights my side believes in are inevitable, the rights that your side believes in are juridical activism.

And we're seeing repeated cultural conflicts these days because there are many beliefs that were previously shared unspoken assumptions that are now able to be questioned. (Many of those unspoken assumptions were invented recently and were carefully cultivated by US Government propaganda films in the '50s, but that's another conversation altogether, one that's mostly unconnected this thread.)

Yonder wrote:

Don't kid yourself that repealing the second amendment is going to be anything like same sex marriage, where the conservatives just stop talking about the issue and pretend the pitched political fight against homosexual rights never happened. Gun control will be far, far more like abortion, spawning 50 years of single issue voters fervently and irrevocably set against the Democratic party, bringing in millions and millions of donations every year. States will add there own versions of the second amendment to their constitutions, probably worse versions, and who knows how the Courts will decide between Federal gun regulation and State pro-gun constitutions.

I'm not saying gun control is a bad thing, or shouldn't be done (although I admit to being skeptical/pessimistic as to whether liberals could weather that political cost), but anyone who thinks that a one time accomplishment will cause conservatives to realize they lost the issue, and should never have been fighting it in the first place... not a chance in hell.

The Second Amendment already spawns single issue voters and brings in millions and millions in political donations. And the typical gun owner is a white dude living in the suburbs or sticks who, as a group, hasn't voted voted Democratic since the early 60s.

Gun ownership is already highly politically polarized. Whether you own a gun or not has become a greater predictor of your political affiliation than your gender, your race, where you live, and a host of other demographic variables. Guns have been thoroughly incorporated into the political identity of Republicans and their vision of America.

I don't doubt that Republicans will lose their goddamn minds over a movement to repeal the Second Amendment.

But, deep down, they know they're to blame for pushing a perverted interpretation of it, one where gun ownership is considered sacrosanct and, apparently, a god-given right. That absolutist view means the only remedy is to get rid of the Second Amendment. Were gun owners willing to accept the "well-regulated" part of the Second Amendment we wouldn't be here.

And Republicans are also to blame for pushing an equally perverted version of American history, one where the Second Amendment is positioned as the single-most important part of the Constitution and an essential ingredient of what makes America America.

As the past couple of years have shown us Republicans--white people--are going to be losing their goddamn minds about a lot of things. Especially over the next 50 years. A push to repeal the Second Amendment is just going to be one more way they think they're losing power.

And, sadly, those extreme political views coupled with stockpiles of deadly weapons and a growing sense of desparation is very likely going to end in more tragedy.

There's a study doing the rounds today backed by the American Psychological Association stating that fewer than 1% of gun homicides are carried out by a mentally ill person.

Just under 20% of americans experience major mental health issues in any given year.

Whenever I hear someone say they support mental health checks for gun ownership I hear "Maq, I think you are murderously unstable based on absolutely zero factual evidence". There is no other way for me to read this. It's an inaccurate and dangerous prejudice against an already marginalized minority.

Emma Gonzales is a prodigy.

Maq wrote:

There's a study doing the rounds today backed by the American Psychological Association stating that fewer than 1% of gun homicides are carried out by a mentally ill person.

Just under 20% of americans experience major mental health issues in any given year.

Whenever I hear someone say they support mental health checks for gun ownership I hear "Maq, I think you are murderously unstable based on absolutely zero factual evidence". There is no other way for me to read this. It's an inaccurate and dangerous prejudice against an already marginalized minority.

Sure, a low rate of homocides are carried out by mentally ill people.

It's the rate of suicides carried out by mentally ill people that provide a more compelling case to me, particularly on the personal level - with a bipolar wife, I'm damn sure not keeping a tool handy for fast-tracking that moment of suicidal ideation into the worst day of my life.

I'd be delighted if people were talking about it in the context of suicide. I would be all in favour of checks for that reason. But that's not what people mean when they say mental health checks at all.

Thank you all for bringing this up. My own mental health struggles have helped me be more empathetic and in tune to this sort of thing.

I do wonder however what has changed in American culture that is driving all these mass shootings. Not trying to be the smug Gen-Xer who denies my generation ever having problems back in the day, but it does seem there has been a remarkable change when it comes to mass violence.

Yeah, this tactic of labeling anyone that does something abhorrent as mentally ill just confuses the issue. The first thing I hear from people around me when something like this happens is the person must have been mentally ill.

As if a mentally sound person couldn't possibly decide to do something despicable. It's very common and isn't solely a Republican viewpoint though. Heck, people use the same argument against Trump. He's not just a horrible person. He also must have dementia to explain his behavior away. Half the people I know that say that are tongue and cheek about it but I think it shows how prevalent that line of thought is in our society. I'm not sure dementia is technically a mental illness or not but I think you get my point

I'm not sure how you change it though. I tried to have this conversation with a coworker once, probably not my best idea, and they looked at me like I was nuts.

Jonman wrote:
Maq wrote:

There's a study doing the rounds today backed by the American Psychological Association stating that fewer than 1% of gun homicides are carried out by a mentally ill person.

Just under 20% of americans experience major mental health issues in any given year.

Whenever I hear someone say they support mental health checks for gun ownership I hear "Maq, I think you are murderously unstable based on absolutely zero factual evidence". There is no other way for me to read this. It's an inaccurate and dangerous prejudice against an already marginalized minority.

Sure, a low rate of homocides are carried out by mentally ill people.

It's the rate of suicides carried out by mentally ill people that provide a more compelling case to me, particularly on the personal level - with a bipolar wife, I'm damn sure not keeping a tool for fast-tracking that moment of suicidal ideation into the worst day of my life.

Yup. Two thirds of all firearm deaths are suicides. And firearms account for half of all suicides, about 21,000 people a year.

Mental health check for gun ownership serves multiple purposes. One is to keep the most popular--and effective--way to commit suicide out of the hand of people who might commit suicide.

Another should be to prevent people with emotional or behavioral issues from accessing firearms. A simple check of Cruz's social media would have shown that he posed a danger to those around him and no one should have sold him a firearm (let alone seven).

jdzappa wrote:

Thank you all for bringing this up. My own mental health struggles have helped me be more empathetic and in tune to this sort of thing.

I do wonder however what has changed in American culture that is driving all these mass shootings. Not trying to be the smug Gen-Xer who denies my generation ever having problems back in the day, but it does seem there has been a remarkable change when it comes to mass violence.

Easy access to readily available military and paramilitary firearms.

Reaper81 wrote:

I do wonder however what has changed in American culture that is driving all these mass shootings. Not trying to be the smug Gen-Xer who denies my generation ever having problems back in the day, but it does seem there has been a remarkable change when it comes to mass violence.

I can't help but wonder if the thing that changed is (y)our myopia when it comes to comparing history with today.

The 70s was a comparatively violent decade in America. Political assassinations like we don't see today. Airplane hijackings were a regular occurrence (as opposed to a rarity today, when we have many more airplanes in the sky). Hundreds of domestic bombings, mostly by left-wing extremist groups.

I grew up in London. There weren't any trash cans in train stations, because the IRA kept dropping bombs in them. Yes, white people setting off bombs in the capital of the nation. Repeatedly.

The real remarkable change is how much less violence there is today compared to 40 years ago. The other remarkable change is the media environment, and that's why you're sitting there thinking "this didn't used to be a problem", when the reality is that holy f*ck, yes it did and it used to be worse, it's just that we didn't have 24 news coverage being blared into our faceholes about it the whole time.

jdzappa wrote:

I do wonder however what has changed in American culture that is driving all these mass shootings. Not trying to be the smug Gen-Xer who denies my generation ever having problems back in the day, but it does seem there has been a remarkable change when it comes to mass violence.

Looking through the data Mother Jones gathered on mass shootings, nothing seems to have really changed except frequency. A history of mental illness or behavioral problems (typically untreated or not officially diagnosed) is almost universal, as is the guns being legally obtained. The number of victims goes up drastically whenever a semi-automatic rifle used, but people were using them back in the 80's too.

Reaper81 wrote:
jdzappa wrote:

Thank you all for bringing this up. My own mental health struggles have helped me be more empathetic and in tune to this sort of thing.

I do wonder however what has changed in American culture that is driving all these mass shootings. Not trying to be the smug Gen-Xer who denies my generation ever having problems back in the day, but it does seem there has been a remarkable change when it comes to mass violence.

Easy access to readily available military and paramilitary firearms.

For more context, in 1994 such weapons were restricted. Those restrictions lapsed in 2004. They were not renewed because Republicans made the excellent case that "nobody uses these weapons, so why bother banning them?". Some of you following along at home may have spotted a flaw with the logic of that argument.

Thirteen and a half years of those weapons entering the market and becoming more and more commonplace and, well, here you go. We've once again proven that laws cannot effect access to guns, and access to guns does not effect shooting rates. Right? I think that was the lesson. That must have been the lesson.

Jonman wrote:
Reaper81 wrote:

I do wonder however what has changed in American culture that is driving all these mass shootings. Not trying to be the smug Gen-Xer who denies my generation ever having problems back in the day, but it does seem there has been a remarkable change when it comes to mass violence.

I can't help but wonder if the thing that changed is (y)our myopia when it comes to comparing history with today.

The 70s was a comparatively violent decade in America. Political assassinations like we don't see today. Airplane hijackings were a regular occurrence (as opposed to a rarity today, when we have many more airplanes in the sky). Hundreds of domestic bombings, mostly by left-wing extremist groups.

I grew up in London. There weren't any trash cans in train stations, because the IRA kept dropping bombs in them. Yes, white people setting off bombs in the capital of the nation. Repeatedly.

The real remarkable change is how much less violence there is today compared to 40 years ago. The other remarkable change is the media environment, and that's why you're sitting there thinking "this didn't used to be a problem", when the reality is that holy f*ck, yes it did and it used to be worse, it's just that we didn't have 24 news coverage being blared into our faceholes about it the whole time.

As Irish-Americans seem to have collective amnesia about supporting the IRA, I've always wanted to pull that thread when discussing how can people support terrorists (i.e. Muslims in this case) with family.
I imagine lots of "that's different".