Another Bloodbath in Texas- What the Hell is Going On?!

[TheMastersSon]

The only thing that would have saved those poor parishioners would have been someone else with a legal weapon in the church, but who in God's name brings a gun to pray? Unfortunately they made perfect victims, unarmed in a confined space with the only avenue of retreat blocked.

Whattaya wanna bet some of 'em start carryin' to church.........

 

Statistically a person's odds of being killed in a mass shooting or other terror attack are slightly worse than being killed by a meteorite from space:

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/13/death-by-meteorite/

[Aurielius]

 

The only thing that would have saved those poor parishioners would have been someone else with a legal weapon in the church, but who in God's name brings a gun to pray? Unfortunately they made perfect victims, unarmed in a confined space with the only avenue of retreat blocked.

Whattaya wanna bet some of 'em start carryin' to church.........

 

Statistically a person's odds of being killed in a mass shooting or other terror attack are slightly worse than being killed by a meteorite from space:

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/13/death-by-meteorite/

 

I would point out that lethal meteorites are less frequent than mass shootings / terror attacks these days.

[RGMage2]

Interesting article in the NY Times today.

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

quote by British journalist Dan Hodges

[HeyYou]

Interesting article in the NY Times today.

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

quote by British journalist Dan Hodges

A fair few of their statistics are skewed, to say the least. Note that they only include GUN CRIME in their figures..... If you look at ALL violent crime, the story changes dramatically, and the US ranks about 99th out of 193 countries.

 

But then, it's the New York times...... and they are only *slightly* biased.......

[PretentiousElizabeth]

As someone from the outside of the US looking in, I'm always reminded of this Onion article every month or so when one of these stories makes news in the Anglosphere:

 

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1819576527

 

" 'No way to prevent this' Says Only Nation Where This Happens Regularly"

 

It just seems totally bizarre that you can all look at your country and have this debate, when every other modern country solved it. Same thing with healthcare - it shouldn't be a debate, you can just look at everywhere else to find out, across the Atlantic or a lot of the time just slightly North of you or over in Australia.

 

*sigh* Politics aside, the thing that drives people to do mass murder and other such horrific acts? Differs from person to person, I'd assume. I'd imagine it's probably a combination of all kinds of things - people don't just snap over something or other, it's just a boiling for whatever else they've got going on - whether that be social, mental, emotional, what have you. Is the response irrational? Yeah, but that's human beings for ya - we're not rational. It's very rare, I think, that people can just wake up one morning and go "Yeah, I wanna kill people, that sounds like fun."

They're usually angry, pent-up somehow, or occasionally downright depressed or full of self-loathing. The spree killer isn't some cackling maniac who laughs at the bloodshed - they're a human being, just a very broken one. To chalk what they do up to "Evil" as a force rather than just a concept to mean "immorality" is to declare all people with the capacity to be spree killers as being completely and utterly beyond any form of redemption or help before they do the spree killing. Is there sometimes something just fundamentally wrong with some people? Yeah - but that doesn't mean most people are just broken beyond repair.

 

This guy was a domestic abuser, right? So he's probably got a lot of anger and control issues - if you can get to the root of why, you can either fix it, or institutionalise the guy if he's well and truly beyond help. But for whatever reason, some people don't get that help. Maybe they don't think it's a problem, maybe we as a society aren't willing to tell them it's a problem, maybe the infrastructure and paths to such things just don't exist where he was.

Prevention is the best cure is a mantra that rings true for a reason - so, in my opinion, we should work on preventing these people from getting to such a state in their lives where they feel murdering people - usually with a suicide or suicide-by-cop as the end result, something I assume they're aware of - is the best outlet or solution to their problems.

 

Are these mass shootings getting worse, more common? Perhaps, or perhaps we're just hearing about it more because we're so interconnected now with our technology and communications. It's like when people bring up terror attacks being more common - in the last 20 years, yes definitely. In the last lifetime? I didn't, but I know people who lived through "The Troubles", when Britain was dealing with a terrorist problem from Irish nationalists - not as globalised an issue, but terrorism is still terrorism no matter which flag it drapes itself in, so maybe it's always been there, and maybe that's the same with spree killers.

 

No matter the answers to any of that, I'm just sad we're going to go through the same cycle - we'll talk about it, debate it a little, forget about it in a few weeks unless we're directly connected to it, then there will be another mass shooting and nothing will get done all over again. I'd say "Maybe there needs to be something truly shocking to inspire change", then I remember that schools get shot up in the US on a seemingly regular basis, and you can't really escalate from "killing children".

[TheMastersSon]

We have an explicit right to keep and bear arms in our country. Period. You can whine and complain all you want about it, the two and only two choices are to abide by our Constitution, or move to a country that doesn't recognize these rights.

 

Also, I wasn't sure from your post, but you *do* understand The Onion is a satirical news site and not a real news site, right? The referenced article title is meant in jest. Mass murder has occurred and will occur more frequently in free countries. Choose freedom or choose security, because the two are mutually exclusive regardless of what anyone might claim to the contrary. It was the majority opinion of our country's founding fathers and please don't make me start quoting them.

Edited November 14, 2017 by TheMastersSon

[HeyYou]

I'm not going to disable my ad-blocker for The onion......

 

Over the years, I have noted that Europeans have a totally different attitude toward guns than most americans. Having grown up in a society where guns are a rarity, they don't seem to be able to grasp what it means to have grown up in a society where guns are more than simply common, they are everywhere.

 

Still and all, even WITH our mass-shootings, our violent crime rate isn't as bad as some other first-world nations....... And if you drop a select few cities, where gang crime accounts for most murders in the us...... we drop even further down the list. It ISN'T JUST guns, and we are not the only country having to deal with this. Granted, it makes the news more often here, but, even in countries where it is almost impossible to get a gun, it still happens.

[TheMastersSon]

HeyYou, the major difference among free countries is only in the amount of reporting of and focusing on these attacks. They do in fact happen everywhere, because a certain but thankfully very small percentage of people in any country are or can become mentally ill enough to commit these crimes. No amount of government protection (or rather, delusional claimed protection), or even majority attempts to subjugate our Second Amendment rights is or ever can be effective against it. The more freedom is sacrificed for artificial security, the less secure we become.

 

[Oblivionaddicted]

What happens is simple : the power is concentrated in the hands of a minority of psychopaths.

 

-People don't know how to identify the psychopaths and nothing forces those who want a post with power to pass psychological tests everyone would have access to

-Anyone can cumulate a political with an economic power allowing the bosses to prevent the vote of laws going against their unavowable interests and allowing the corrupted politicians to receive bribes disguised a commissions

-The medias are largely controlled by the company bosses and the state

-The more a party serves the rich psychopaths the more money it receives the more it's likely to win the elections

-The key characters in the "justice" work for the state (and the companies by the way) making the rich criminals are never annoyed for their crimes

 

 

The free sale of fire weapons in the USA is a symptoma of this concentration of powers. If the USA were a democracy people's lives would be considered more important than the wealthy psychopaths greed.

[TheMastersSon]

The free sale of fire weapons in the USA is a symptoma of this concentration of powers. If the USA were a democracy people's lives would be considered more important than the wealthy psychopaths greed.

I'm not following your logic. Are you claiming power is less concentrated in countries where only the government can possess and bear firearms?

Edited November 15, 2017 by TheMastersSon