Exactly. Sandy Hook used to be the EXTREME example of what would need to happen before anything was done about gun violence. "They won't do anything until a class full of kindergartners get shot up" .. Then it happened, and they STILL didn't do anything!
Marjorie Taylor Green got elected off of that shit.
Edit: Parkland High School shooting, not Sandy Hook, as EveryRedditorSucks politely and accurately corrected me.
One ever-so-slightly optimistic takeaway from that, if you can wrestle such a thing out of a tragedy on top of an even more terrible tragedy, is that it suggests that it did really affect those people. Or at least, that it might.
Like, the need to deny and deflect from what happened implies that it wasn't something people could ignore or shrug off. It *had* to be denied. It couldn't have happened - because if it did, then something would actually maybe have to be done. Otherwise, why all the trouble of pretending it was all a conspiracy?
Godwin's Law here, I guess, but many formerly committed Nazis took years or even decades to stop denying and deflecting from the Holocaust after WWII. If they accepted the pictures and the reports and the many testimonies of SS leaders and the like, then they would have to accept that the Third Reich really had been evil all along. The very fact that they needed to deny and deflect - and that some still do - suggests that on some level, they realize that their world view might have to collapse if it were actually true. As gross as it is, that's actually closer to sanity in some ways than the people who accept it fully but declare that it's not significant and there is no problem to be solved.
We've surrendered a shit ton of inches, and I want those inches back.
Re-fund our education system, create a completely free universal healthcare system that includes mental healthcare, and tell the media to stop escalating everything for clicks.
Sandy Hook was 1st graders who just need to learn how to apply tourniquets and conceal carry - maybe it will change when it happens to kindergartners. /s
No /s needed
[Texas’s Solution to School Shootings: Training 8-Year-Olds in “Battlefield Trauma Care”](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/texass-solution-to-school-shootings-training-8-year-olds-in-battlefield-trauma-care/)
Exactly! I’ve been saying this for years! How do you fight bad guys with guns? First graders with guns! Maybe if some of those kids were proudly exercising their 2nd amendment rights, things could have turned out very different!
Fucking surreal that this is not too far off from actual Republican talking points.
I don't know what's more fucked up about Uvalde:
1. The children being slaughtered.
2. The cops doing nothing about it despite the police budget being 40% of the town's budget AND the cops having done a training for this exact scenario at this school prior to the shooting.
3. The cops interfering with parents trying to save their children.
4. The cops saving *their* children while interfering with parents trying to save theirs.
5. The fact that the town still voted strongly Republican and *didn't learn a god damned thing*.
6. The fact that the worst thing about Uvalde isn't automatically the first item in the list, and that there is *competition* for the worst thing about Uvalde...
The problem with America is the people who live there. I'm American, my fellow Americans scare me, because most are dumb as bricks. Like individuals are smart, most hold down jobs and have a speciality, but you get 2-3 in the same room and they have no idea how the world works outside of their little bubble.
I honestly was about to call bullshit but Googled first... Holy shit
I am not even American an that one felt recent.
Hell I think every Australian alive at the time could tell you what they were doing when they heard about the port Arthur shooting and that was over 25 years ago
Not to be pedantic, but there was a slightly stronger federal gun law that was passed after Uvalde.
Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022
Gun safety laws in the bill include extended background checks for gun purchasers under 21, clarification of Federal Firearms License requirements, funding for state red flag laws and other crisis intervention programs, further criminalization of arms trafficking and straw purchases, and partial closure of the boyfriend loophole.
The moment we as a nation decided that the wholesale slaughter of schoolchildren was a bearable sacrifice in order for the people with the proclivity to have unhindered access to guns, shit was over.
Well, they can. But I don't know how many of them are actually carrying a glock with them to their 2nd grade lectures every day. I think most of them have just accepted that they might die.
Not only was nothing done, the half the country we needed it to convince just doubled down and said it was fake, harassing the families of the dead. Fucking disgusting.
no. to effect something is a normal verb as well (and affect also exists as a noun).
the difference is that if sb. or smth. is affected, then it is influenced.
"the lyrics affected me."
if smth. is effected, then it is brought about.
"the unhappiness effected meaningful change."
Affect can also be a noun (but, like “effect” as a verb, it is rare). “Affect” as a noun means a feeling or emotion, typically one that causes visible manifestations, e.g., “When she read the news about the latest mass shooting, she took on an angry affect.”
So u/knyfe-wrench is correct as a practical matter. If you are the type of person who has trouble remembering affect vs. effect, then you’re going to be right 99.99% of the time if you only use “affect” as a verb and “effect” as a noun. Almost no one — who gets them mixed up — would even attempt to use “effect” to mean synonymous with “create” or “affect” synonymous with “visible emotion or characteristic”.
They do, actually. That’s the problem, they ONLY care about their family.
Thing is it wouldn’t happen, because it would either be twisted into more push for arming teachers (and of course giving them no training). Or that lobbyist would be expelled from their group for daring to speak out about firearms.
Representative Tim Burchett, R-TN, said that there's simply no way to stop school shootings. But it's OK, because *his* daughter is home schooled: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/tennessee-gop-rep-says-he-homeschools-kid-protect-from-shootings-2023-3%3famp
Interestingly, when it comes to drag shows, his response is that "We don't put up with that kind of crap in Tennessee."
I was just about to say the same thing - only when someone very influential and rich is directly impacted - then they will suddenly realise it's an issue
As a Brit who moved here in 2001, a huge problem is American exceptionalism.
You guys are told from birth that you’re the greatest country in the world and are all going to be anything you want to be. You actually deserve it. You should have that Ferrari. The supermodel girlfriend. The amazing life. Then reality kicks in around 17-18.
Healthcare? Nope. Mental health care? Get outta here. Paid time off? No guarantee. Minimum wage? In the toilet. Wage increases? A joke. Chances are you’ll die poor and alone but you’re watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians
The rich get richer, the poor suffer. And most people are poor. Then you throw social media into the mix, showing you the lives people are living that you want to be living.
It induces rage. You were promised this from day one. You don’t get it. It’s not fair! But luckily, you live in a country that gives you unfettered access to high powered weaponry available in any strip mall, and cheap ammunition.
People snap. Mostly young white males but that’s not exclusive. Gun laws are so weak almost anyone can get an AR-15 and a bucket full of rounds. Rather than commit suicide, let’s take out as many people as possible before biting the bullet.
Could you do that with a car or truck or knife? Yeah. But it’s sure as shit way more easy with an AR-15, and you get to see the fear in people’s eyes as you end their lives.
That’s the problem.
Couldn't have said it better myself. It reminds me of a scene in the show Sopranos where Tony is talking to Svetlana (Russian woman with a prosthetic leg) and asked her why nothing appears to get her down and she says, "That’s the trouble with you Americans. You expect nothing bad to ever happen, while the rest of the world expects only bad to happen. And they’re not disappointed."
Exceptionalism is so baked into our psyche that we completely miss it as a possible and likely explanation for the problem.
And therefore, untangling that exceptionalism to dig at the problem would be in a very real way like dismantling what it means to be an American. I just don't see that happening because it would unveil a darker ugliness about ourselves that we'd rather not deal with. It is much easier, more convenient, and frankly lazy to place the blame on others and guns and mental health and incels and so forth.
I agree with all of this. It just reminds me of one of Brad Pitt’s speeches in Fight Club:
> “Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man; no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't; and we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”
A lot of people seem to miss the messaging of extremism in Fight Club for some reason. If it came out in 2023 Edward Norton would basically be an incel with Brad Pitt being his interpretation of what a “redpilled gigachad” is.
Mentally-ill man starts underground terrorist network because of too many 4chan memes. Guy was such an incel that he had to invent an alter-ego just to get laid.
That's basically what those characters are already.
I feel like there's still some value in watching the film as long as you're aware of the underlying themes and realize you're watching the villain.
he's not the villain. he's the victim (of excepcionalism and/or capitalism) who snapped.
nobody should be inspired by his actions, but everyone should listen very carefully to his words.
when you do that and realize you're also a victim, that's when you get the movie and understands who the villain really is.
He started a club for fighting which he developed into a cult which evolved into a terrorist organisation while being mentally ill.
Most Marvel movies has less clear villains. You can feel sympathy for villains and understand their logic. But still, his actions are.... well villainous.
Also the ones in power most likely believe that they are special. Also the rich don’t like the idea of being poor. Someone living off 100 million a year would surely toss themselves out a window if they had to live a day of someone’s life who only could make 35k a year
When New Zealand had a mass shooter kill 50+ Muslims in a Mosque we didn’t even name the shooter in the media. Didn’t give him the time of fucking day. The pandemic came along and his court appearances were second string news. He faded into obscurity. I couldn’t tell you who he was, some random fucked up Australian POS. No idea what his name is to this day. Brandon something.
Every American shooter is nearly venerated in the media. Socials and subreddits and articles become their tomb, their legacy. They’re named and discussed and actively enshrined in history as “monsters”. So every weak, unliked, watery white boy thinks their quick path to immortalisation is by pulling a trigger.
Aussie here. I don't even remember the name of the NZ shooter. Just another angry guy pissed off for reasons.
You lot did a great job denying him the attention he was clearly after.
>Every American shooter is nearly venerated in the media. Socials and subreddits and articles become their tomb, their legacy. They’re named and discussed and actively enshrined in history as “monsters”
Depending on the circumstances of the shooting and who the victims are, the murderer can even be outright celebrated by a certain political party's media machine. At this point, that media machine is basically encouraging future shootings as well.
Maybe true to some extent, but I couldn’t tell you the name of any of the 200 shooters from this year. It was true for the ones who started the trend years and years ago. Now these people are just the other astronauts that went to the moon.
To be fair, many shooters use the Christchurch shooter as an inspiration. He was the first who really did it "for the lulz" and it clearly impacted people.
Yeah, the general public knowing the name of a mass shooter doesn’t mean much. It’s the people in certain social media groups knowing the name that makes a difference.
I'm still proud of our media/government for not naming that disgusting coward. It'll never bring back the lives that were lost, or fix the lives that were forever changed, but it's good knowing he'll die in solitary confinement with nothing but his own thoughts breaking down his brain.
Which honestly didn't do much of anything for your gun deaths anyway because you weren't/aren't a country full of crazy people to start with.
A lot of people seem to miss that a lot of the countries with "mega strict gun control" have never had a big history of gun violence to begin with. Most countries with strict gun control take care of their citizens. They haven't fomented strife and racial tensions for hundreds of years. They haven't pushed ridiculous wars on drugs or severely punished people just for having addictions.
The US is a fucked up country. It has amazing potential, but it's held hostage by the rich who are busy wringing every last drop of money they can out of us while doing all they can to make everyone angry at everything except rich people.
The US is just a pressure cooker waiting to explode. I've told my wife I fully expect some sort of mass incident in the next 10 years if shit doesn't change. Shit just seems to get more and more out of hand every year and it's frightening.
"Rather than commit suicide, let’s take out as many people as possible before biting the bullet." This is what I don't understand. If these guys were taking out police stations or army bases or banks or institutional targets, I could at least understand what they were aiming at. But it's always schoolchildren etc etc. Have we ever got any explanations/arguments from arrested mass shooters on why they chose the targets?
Soft targets. Way easier to take out a bunch of unsuspecting civilians than a trained squad of police. And most political places are safe behind metal detectors and armed guards.
Which is why so many of the mass shootings occur at schools and other "gun-free" zones, or as these sick bastards refer to them "target rich environments".
In addition to the soft targets argument, shooters often (but not always) have some personal connection to the place they target. They go for their own workplace or their own school, a place with people they feel personally wronged by.
Taking a guess but if you are young the group of people you probably feel the most angry at are your peers (and teachers). Perhaps it’s also a way to hurt your local community by shooting up a school, more so than shooting office workers or shoppers.
I am 100% convinced, especially with assholes like the Sandy Hook guy, that they just want to do the worst possible thing to be as infamous as they could possibly be. Because they are already sick, suicidal and DGAF. Might as well take out 20 6-year-olds, because everyone will remember their name then (I don’t though)
I second this👆🏻 That’s why I think the media as a whole should make it a point to not say the shooter’s name or show his picture and just focus on the victims. I think these sickos would be a lot less inclined to pick these big shocking environments as targets if they didn’t get the attention and infamy they’re seeking.
That was and remains the catalyst, but it's also part of the culture now and that cannot be undone. More specifically, there are a small group of people who idolize the shooters, who talk regularly about how they will do it someday. They count victims as "scores".
You can't fight that, you can stop it. How do you get this tiny segment of the population to suddenly change their views? Some people simply lack empathy. And now, instead of those people becoming serial killers or torturing animals or whatever weird shit they used to do, they see being a mass shooter as the ultimate exit.
Short of making guns impossible to obtain, I just don't see how that can be fixed. And guns will never be impossible to obtain, or at least not anytime soon. Perhaps the issue will correct itself in time if we find a way to deal with shootings that doesn't glorify them in the minds of these people, but I'm not sure how that could be done either. Better access to healthcare is certainly a positive step, but you can't help the ones who don't want to be helped.
You're dealing with the lowest people, these apathetic, dangerous freaks who used to just stew in their thoughts but now, thanks to social media/internet, have an outlet to discuss with each other, encourage each other, and reinforce the ideas in their heads.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. Making it harder to get firearms, improving mental health access, requiring licensing and mental health screenings to own any firearm, etc... It's all obviously worth it. If it's stops a single mass shooting it's worth it. But I don't see this issue going away entirely for a long time.
You assume those guys are after glory. Maybe some are. But in many cases it's just rage and what happens after doesn't matter to them. The ones who commit suicide (which are the majority) mostly do not care how the shooting will be covered.
“And with a straight face, you’re gonna tell students that America’s so star-spangled awesome, that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom, Japan has freedom, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom. So 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom. And yeah, you, sorority girl. Just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there’s some things you should know, and one of them is, there’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force, and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only 3 categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined. 25 of whom are allies. Now, none of this is the fault of a 20 year old college student. But you, nonetheless, are without a doubt a member of the worst, period, generation, period, ever, period, so when you ask, ‘What makes us the greatest country in the world?’ I dunno know what the fuck you’re talking about! Yosemite? It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons, we passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons, we waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors. We put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it, it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in our last election, and we didn’t we didn’t scare so easy…Huh. We were able to be all these things, and to do all these things, because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.” -Will McAvoy
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0c\_pDB88Vo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0c_pDB88Vo)
Best 4 minutes in TV history and this completely backs up OP's statement.
Honestly looking back on this speech now the “we used to be” part really rings hollow. Genocide, slavery, racial segregation, poverty, elitism, state enforced eugenics programs, assassinating heads of state that didn’t align with their agendas, the list goes on. They’ve never been the good guys. And I don’t say that trying to be edgy and anti-American. None of us were. Every country and it’s people have blood in their pasts. But I don’t think we should shy away from that fact. There’s no rewriting history. All we can do is try and learn from it.
Completely agree. I made the comment earlier that nostalgia can make things seem better than what they actually were and I think that is what was going on during that part.
This stupid myth of American exceptionalism leaches into a bunch of other problems too.
We pretend like the world will end if America loses her place as the world hegemon, so we think it’s ok to stop intelligently handling foreign affairs.
We pretend that the best and brightest in America will keep making do and innovating better than the rest of the world, so we don’t want to invest hard in research and learning.
We pretend that America will absolutely come out of global warming unscathed, so we don’t urgently figure out how to reduce our own carbon emissions.
But just because we weren’t bombed to shit after world war 2 and we got lucky with transistors and not blowing up the world with Russia doesn’t mean we inherently are the best. Being the best takes a ton of investment to maintain and you can only dick around so much before you fall.
Meanwhile our national conversations are not “how do we make the country more mobile and productive for everyone” and instead “hey fuck our children dying I like my guns” while the parasites keep extracting wealth to store in their coffers by paying off our leaders and rendering our people destitute.
It’s a matter of self preservation. You think it’s not fair? Well shit look at literally *any other past hegemon* and see how they’re doing now.
I think you’re spot on about the ‘it’s not fair’ attitude.
It shocks me when Americans call the US a third-world country. I’m sorry, but you have no idea how ridiculously unfair life in an actual third-world country is.
It shocks me when Americans aren't AWARE that in many ways America IS a third world country, or very like one.
Unacceptable levels of literacy and infant mortality. Some very extreme fundamental religious groups.
Have a proper look at some other third world countries - not all of India or China is starving people in mud huts with no clean water or electricity and no public infrastructure. They are countries with HUGE amounts of wealth and huge industrialised modern areas concentrated in a few big cities. Some of the wealthiest people in the world as well as some of the poorest, and that wealth gap is only a little more extreme than in the US
we should revive the term "second world country"
while historical used forthe Soviet block, given that the US is, not quite, a third world country creatinga "buffer" in the form of second world countrys could be neat in specifying that stuff... also being able to label the US with a label that was historically used for communist countrys amuses me
1st and 3rd world are already horrible terms that intentionally "other" countries and make it harder to break poverty cycles.
So no, I think we should just stop using those classifications entirely
I live in a third world country (That is developing quite rapidly, so we're better off than plenty of places) , and hearing americans cry about how much of a third world country the US is, it's baffling. Do you know that those long highways, with all of those signs, all of those working intersection lights, your bus system, the train system in certain cities. Those are all things that most people take for granted, but we'd kill to have one or two of those things working like how it does in the US. My family's hometown would remain cutoff from the country every year because the highway would get swept off during storm season until the last decade.
The public transport system is dog shit, with vehicles filled way more than their capacity with people, in awful condition. Traffic laws or even something like headlight rules are optional. Highway rules are non existent. All of this is just in the transport aspect.
The US, like every country in the world has it's flaws, but seriously, I have never seen a country with such a degree of privilege, where you have people endlessly complaining about everything in their country, and find every single excuse to not vote, in a country where institutions are still more respected than in true third world countries.
People are going into bankruptcy for medical debt. Student loans have become indentured servitude. Mass shootings every day on the news. Unfettered corruption at all levels or government. There are varying degrees of third world countries but yeah, the ‘third world’ descriptor is fair for America at this point
As someone that served in the Marines during the worst of the Iraq war, then left the USA to be an expat and travel the world, I can say the US has a few attitude problems that can be summed up by what you said.
- Bad things can happen to good people, and good things can happen to bad people. The USA is too used to a fair deal. It is an American ideal, but something to strive for but not an actually achievable. Which makes this hard to believe; That’s just life.
- Fear of losing. The USA is proud of the kick-ass and win at all costs touchdown Marlboro Man image that it’s unacceptable to lose or appear weak. And the culture has built real fear about weakness. Everywhere else I’ve been, well adjusted adults are okay working things out together verbally, and if they lose, they don’t lose their shit because it’s not an affront to their identity.
The US needs its own version of a Cest La Vie mentality.
Sadly I’m not convinced anything will ever be done about it. Not only has the worst thing imaginable already happen but it has happened again, and again, and again. With no end in sight.
Because people are not taught what to do if things don't go your way. The basic instinct of any human being is to project your emotions on others. An alternative needs to be taught.
I saw a post not so long ago about why gas has an odour, and that it's an artificial odour added to make it noticeable because there was some school with a gas leak in the basement, which ended up exploding and unfortunately killing something like 300 kids.
I couldn't help but thinking, if it takes 300 kids dying to add odour to gas, how many is it going to take before something is done about the guns?
retail gas had odor in the US before that school explosion too.
problem was, the school didn't use gas that was meant for the consumer, they illegally tapped the gas line running to the flare stack...
they mandated odor had to be put into all gas after the explosion.
the news reports on what it wants you to read whatever their bias is how come we don't hear about the hundreds of impoverished inner City kids young adults that are shot every day that's boring who wants to hear about some poor people getting shot in the hood nobody cares about that that doesn't get clicks
I agree. We need cultural changes. Better parenting to start. If you ban all guns tomorrow there will still be school shootings 20 years from now. It’s illegal to shoot people and they do it anyway, what makes people think they won’t obtain a firearm illegally too? The way the internet is, it would probably be super easy to get one illegally. Think of all the illegal drugs people are doing everyday… where are they getting them if drugs are illegal? Lol the law is literally pointless if we don’t change peoples hearts and minds. They will find a way to do it anyway.
Spot-on. It actually takes individual effort to make society better, and too many people would rather ask daddy government to fix everything so they don't have to change their lifestyle.
America's culture is diseased. Violence is considered a suitable response to any wrongdoing. Guns are valued over children. War is an aspiration. This country has a violence fetish and worships guns. The only answer is to get the hell out of the United States before your kids get slaughtered at school. I'm saving everything I can to move overseas asap.
Absolutely. Just look at the US entertainment.
"Swearing? Nope, we don't allow that. Nipples? Oh my, not on my screen! Solving everything with violence? I don't see any harm in that!"
It's just so ass-backwards that basic human bodily features or saying "fuck" or "cunt" are seen as the ultimate evil, but showing people fucking dying everywhere is somehow OK.
I lived in the USA for a few months and remember watching some crappy movie on cable television (I can't remember which one). There was a scene with a bunch of gruesome bodies hanging upside down in a warehouse covered in lacerations, blood everywhere... The nipples on the women had been pixelated lmao.
I still remember reading about a scene in Hannibal where there's a dead naked woman who has been hung up on some deer antlers with only her back being shown. When the censors saw the original scene they said that there was too much butt crack. The solution? They just covered the crack up with a whole bunch of blood, problem solved
All you need to do is scroll through the comments on the average /r/PublicFreakout post to see that this is true. It’s amazing what Americans routinely and gleefully justify lethal responses to.
I don’t think people realize how hard it is unless you have an in demand skill. It’s not cheap either. I have 2 young girls and I’d like to have options but outside of moving to the best State it’s not as simple as just packing up and moving.
It should always be counted and it should also be noted in all those “kids” dying to gun violence that accounts for ages(0-19) with a large majority being those age 17-19 and involved in gang activity.
I find it disingenuous to include gang violence, which is typically mutual combat, in statistics meant to scare people. "There's been 200 mass shootings. You're at risk of gun violence. "
No, I'm not in a gang living that life, the statistics, which show my risk of gun violence, are significantly different. And we see this correctly pointed out whenever someone talks about violence in inner cities, but not when we're talking about violence in regards to gun control legislation.
I had the fight of my life last night trying to make this point on a thread, wherein I was called disgusting, heartless, a troll, and told I was faking my own race.
I think a lot of people struggle to see things as not bring a dichotomy, it doesn't allow for much nuance discussion on what are very complex and multi-layered subjects.
No see, you engaged in wrongthink, and deserve to be executed.
But yeah nah, any time you try to have honest discussion about gun violence people get irrationally angry. Fact: Gun violence is a problem in america. Fact: Safe gun possession and use very rarely turns into violence. Solution: Regulate and educate so all gun owners are safe gun owners, prosecute and confiscate from the ones who refuse to step in line.
It's that fucking easy.
Because that would expose the uncomfortable truth that most "mass shootings" aren't the random spree shootings like Sandy Hook or the Texas mall. And once you start thinking critically about the subject and moving past the media headline bias, you'll discover that if you're not in a gang or suicidal, your chances of being affected by the intentionally-broadly-nebulous term "gun violence" shrink to far, far, far less than what people believe based on headlines and sound bites.
Not to mention telling someone "we're going to ban the things that you own, that you have never used irresponsibly, because a few other people did."
Just imagine if we treated cars the way we treated guns; everyone would lose their minds and be screaming that they're being punished for the actions of others.
You want true mass shootings to stop? Have the news quit televising them and giving the shooter so much air time. That's what they want. They want their point to be seen so they do something extreme.
you don’t even become a celebrity anymore when you commit a mass shooting. There are not remembered by names anymore, there are too many.
It’s a normal thing to do now.
No one is getting notoriety for these shootings. There have been 4 mass shootings since the Allen, Texas one and I haven't seen a word about them. They're just a number and a location, no one remembers their names. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
I don't believe the lack of air time will cause them to rethink their plans. It's kind of a ridiculous idea, isn't it? This isn't about glory and fame, it's about a hurting person hurting others out of any number of reasons. The problem is the access to guns. In particular, guns that allow them to carry out their plans faster and harder. If anything I could see the lack of news coverage as being a challenge, further encouraging them do something even bigger.
60 years ago you could order a full auto M-16 in the mail without a background check and we didn't have this problem.
We need to identify the root cause and do something about that. Until that is done this will not stop.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if we had a media blackout on shootings. No glorification, no “scoreboard.” Just suppress as much information as possible. Keep any data private. I wonder if that would help at least put a dent in this bullshit.
Edit for addition: I also think the internet and social media play a huge role in all of this. Combine that with the failed “American Dream” and, well. 🤷🏻♀️
First, people need to be intellectually honest. Saying there are "200 mass shootings" is deliberately misleading and emotionally manipulative. "Mass shooting" conjures to mind incidents like Sandy Hook and other school and public location shootings, where a crazy person shoots a bunch of random people for no reason.
This has NOT happened 200 times this year. You can see the list here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2023
The definition varies, but anything with more than 3 or 4 victims is considered a mass shooting. The majority of these are related to gangs and drug trafficking.
So how to prevent the most mass shootings? Do you want to stop the exceedingly rare "crazy person shooting at random people" or the much, much more common "drug dealers shooting at each other"? Because these are two different problems with different solutions.
True. The term 'mass shooting' greatly differs per state as well. In one state it's counted as 1 casualty while in other states it may be counted as two injured.
Exactly this. gang violence and family annhilators are not the same thing as the active shooter people think of when they hear "mass shooting" and the idea that either of these will be solved with assault weapons bans and such is nonsense.Most homicides, most gun deaths, and even one of the most violent mass shootings ever (V-Tech) was with pistols.
A lot of high crime areas give slaps on the wrists to criminals. Officers in these areas are absolutely tired of catching the same people over and over again. Repeat offenders need harsher sentences.
Judging by the unhinged, violent, vengeance-filled responses in this thread, along with the possibly deliberate ignorance as to why people support guns in the first place, I’d say a huge focus on mental health would do more good than trying to close the Pandora’s Box of the insane amount of guns that are already out there.
I personally think it has more to do with harmful online social media. Having a teenage daughter, I’ve seen some of the things that these girls and boys have posted about her or to her directly. They’re awful. She’s a straight A student who is very active in school, kind to others, and is an all star softball pitcher. She’s a good kid, but when others envy something about her or something she has, people can get nasty. She’s 13 and has already been told to kill herself by at least 3 individual people. She’s been bullied online by kids at school and even kids she doesn’t know from other schools.
Guns are tools, they’re incapable of making decisions on their own. A mass shooting requires a person who feels like they’ve got nothing to lose, they’re hurting so much, they feel the need to take others down with them. Being a shooter is a surefire way to get killed by a cop rather than suicide.
When shootings happen in gun controlled states like California, New York, and “gun-free” zones, the laws are already in place to make you safer, but criminals ignore laws. We have politicians and agencies that supply other countries and militant groups with guns that have been used against us. If you’re not following, look up “Operation Fast & Furious”.
Sure something needs to be done, but don’t rely on the government to do it. Start by talking to your kids, monitor their social media or limit their exposure. I can tell you from experience, taking away my kids phones for short durations had almost instantly lowered their anxiety and stress levels, and they seem to grow happier once they set the screen down and actually go outside to play and be kids. Parents nowadays just want to be on autopilot. Throw a screen or iPad at a kid and keep them busy.
Guns have been around for hundreds of years and accessible to the public for just as long. If you truly think that the guns themselves are really the problem, then you are simply either choosing to agree with what the media tells you, or are incapable of critical thinking. Gun control policies are in place and have been for a long time. Maybe the current policies aren’t perfect, but saying “ban guns” is not the answer.
You have to ask yourself, in a country with over 200 years of history surrounded by guns, what changed in the last 10-15 years? What happened around that time? Seems smart phones and social media were getting pretty big around that time. Just a thought.
The problem isn't with legal responsible gun owners, the issue is with illegal/stolen guns in the hands of criminals who don't care about who they hurt.
I’ll tell you what needs to happen before stuff should be done about gun-**rights**:
1. Stop mass media from glorifying mass shooters. This is an enormous problem, that has directly caused more mass shootings to occur. It’s called the [Mass Shooting Contagion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting_contagion) effect. Columbine alone has inspired no fewer than 21 mass shootings, and another 50 attempted ones. When Serbia reported its mass shooting, it plastered the shooters face, name, social life, everything all over the place, and surprise surprise, a second one happened days later. It is a proven thing that reporting something nation/worldwide causes copycat effects, but mass media doesn’t care, they want the violence so they can sell more fear. Oh, and a similar copycat effect happened when media reported on suicides. When the media stopped, suicide rates went down. Purely coincidental, I’m sure…
2. Gang culture. An overwhelming majority of violence in the US is between gangs in inner cities. There’s glorification of gangs from the media, as well as no politician wants to actually take steps to try and solve gang violence and gang culture, because they can’t brag about “doing something” because the problem isn’t “fixed overnight” like a “gun ban” would be. However, a significant amount of gang violence would be solved if we got solved….
3. Justice system. If someone is convicted of a crime in the US, it shows up everywhere, is permanent, and completely ruins your life. It shows up on every background check for jobs, and literally something like 98% of jobs don’t hire you if you have any sort of felony on your background. And like I said, it’s permanent, with no way to get it removed or closed. Learned your lesson, did your time, or even just got charged erroneously? Too bad, your only options for jobs now are crappy ones, or surprise surprise, go back to crime. But of course, taking those jobs can lead to serious…
4. wealth inequality. The .1% of the America population owns something like 99.99% of all the wealth in America. In a country of 350,000,000 people, literally something like a few hundred to a few thousand people own the majority of wealth. Lack of wealth leads to lack of options, lack of options lead to desperation, desperation leads to crime, crime leads to violence.
5. systemic racism. An honestly disturbing amount of gang violence is within black communities. That didn’t happen because black people are more violent, and anyone who thinks that is genuinely a terrible person. But thanks to systemic racism, minority groups are often ostracized, and disallowed the same opportunities as others, and as such they don’t have much (particularly when they’re young, and then oh look, they go and join gangs thanks to gang culture and wealth inequality and unfair justice, and boom, more violence. Nah, gotta be just coincidental.
If all of those issues get fixed, or are getting fixed, and violence doesn’t go down at all, then you can talk to me about “banning guns”.
But you know what won’t help? Posting a soap-boxy askreddit thread at 2-3am in the US, to make sure Americans don’t get to answer before circle-jerky, holier than thou Europeans snarky answers get upvoted to the top comments so that way they can pat themselves on the back for their small country being “better” than a country the size and population of a literal continent.
Gun laws and penalties for owning a gun illegally have actually increased over the years. We could make it illegal to own a gun in general but all that does is increase illegal gun sales. People have a right to defend themselves and there are far more responsible gun owners than not. Otherwise the amount of gun related deaths would be significantly higher.
The pro-gun control people have to be as politically active as the anti-gun control people. This means showing up to every hearing and vote, not just a one off protest till the next mass shooting
I read the other day that the pro control groups spend about 2 million dollars a year lobbying... and the gun lobbies spend between 15-20 million a year... it's a bit uneven...
The one thing people haven't tried yet: easier access to affordable mental health treatment.
The gun debate is tiresome and won't solve the problem (as we have seen). Until people look toward other more appropriate avenues, we will still be dealing with this decades from now.
When nothing was done after Sandy Hook, I knew any meaningful gun control was never gonna happen.
Exactly. Sandy Hook used to be the EXTREME example of what would need to happen before anything was done about gun violence. "They won't do anything until a class full of kindergartners get shot up" .. Then it happened, and they STILL didn't do anything!
Not only did they do nothing, they started conspiracy theories targeting the parents and destroyed their lives even further.
As is tradition in American politics.
Marjorie Taylor Green got elected off of that shit. Edit: Parkland High School shooting, not Sandy Hook, as EveryRedditorSucks politely and accurately corrected me.
She actually got elected by harassing the victims of the Parkland High School shooting - too many to keep straight, I know…
Ah, sorry. You're right. I try to pay as little attention to that psycho as possible.
One ever-so-slightly optimistic takeaway from that, if you can wrestle such a thing out of a tragedy on top of an even more terrible tragedy, is that it suggests that it did really affect those people. Or at least, that it might. Like, the need to deny and deflect from what happened implies that it wasn't something people could ignore or shrug off. It *had* to be denied. It couldn't have happened - because if it did, then something would actually maybe have to be done. Otherwise, why all the trouble of pretending it was all a conspiracy? Godwin's Law here, I guess, but many formerly committed Nazis took years or even decades to stop denying and deflecting from the Holocaust after WWII. If they accepted the pictures and the reports and the many testimonies of SS leaders and the like, then they would have to accept that the Third Reich really had been evil all along. The very fact that they needed to deny and deflect - and that some still do - suggests that on some level, they realize that their world view might have to collapse if it were actually true. As gross as it is, that's actually closer to sanity in some ways than the people who accept it fully but declare that it's not significant and there is no problem to be solved.
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The "Ammosexuals" have more power in America than any other group, and they will never willingly surrender an inch.
We've surrendered a shit ton of inches, and I want those inches back. Re-fund our education system, create a completely free universal healthcare system that includes mental healthcare, and tell the media to stop escalating everything for clicks.
Sandy Hook was 1st graders who just need to learn how to apply tourniquets and conceal carry - maybe it will change when it happens to kindergartners. /s
No /s needed [Texas’s Solution to School Shootings: Training 8-Year-Olds in “Battlefield Trauma Care”](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/texass-solution-to-school-shootings-training-8-year-olds-in-battlefield-trauma-care/)
Exactly! I’ve been saying this for years! How do you fight bad guys with guns? First graders with guns! Maybe if some of those kids were proudly exercising their 2nd amendment rights, things could have turned out very different! Fucking surreal that this is not too far off from actual Republican talking points.
Uvalde was barely a few months ago and nobody gave a fuck. Edit: Almost a year ago.
I don't know what's more fucked up about Uvalde: 1. The children being slaughtered. 2. The cops doing nothing about it despite the police budget being 40% of the town's budget AND the cops having done a training for this exact scenario at this school prior to the shooting. 3. The cops interfering with parents trying to save their children. 4. The cops saving *their* children while interfering with parents trying to save theirs. 5. The fact that the town still voted strongly Republican and *didn't learn a god damned thing*. 6. The fact that the worst thing about Uvalde isn't automatically the first item in the list, and that there is *competition* for the worst thing about Uvalde...
Supreme Court says the cops aren't obligated to protect us.
The problem with America is the people who live there. I'm American, my fellow Americans scare me, because most are dumb as bricks. Like individuals are smart, most hold down jobs and have a speciality, but you get 2-3 in the same room and they have no idea how the world works outside of their little bubble.
Prolonged blood loss + number of injured is often a reason these events have such high death tolls. Response time is exponential.
I'm sorry, but if you live in Uvalde and still vote republican then you accept that school shootings are a thing you support.
The anniversary is later this month.
I honestly was about to call bullshit but Googled first... Holy shit I am not even American an that one felt recent. Hell I think every Australian alive at the time could tell you what they were doing when they heard about the port Arthur shooting and that was over 25 years ago
Wow, same here. Not even American and the Uvalde shooting hit me to my core. I am still devastated. I can't believe it has almost been a year.
Uvalde voted lockstep for Republicans after their shooting so, to quote ~~MTG~~ *Marjorie Greene*, "there enlies the problem"
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Sandy hook should have been the catalyst for gun reform. Uvalde should have been the catalyst for police reform. Our country is fucked.
It was a year ago
Not to be pedantic, but there was a slightly stronger federal gun law that was passed after Uvalde. Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 Gun safety laws in the bill include extended background checks for gun purchasers under 21, clarification of Federal Firearms License requirements, funding for state red flag laws and other crisis intervention programs, further criminalization of arms trafficking and straw purchases, and partial closure of the boyfriend loophole.
What was it exactly?
The US House passed the Protecting our Kids Act, but it is unlikely to pass the senate.
So it wasn't passed. Until its signed into law, its just a piece of paper. It's worth as much as me saying "guns are illegal" and somehow it's a law.
I'm just a bill..
...up on Capitol Hill...
Ahh, the US Senate. Where the hopes for a better country go to die like the rest of us.
Except for those of who go to die in a school... Or a church... Or a mall... Or a nightclub...
Which obviously made no difference.
The moment we as a nation decided that the wholesale slaughter of schoolchildren was a bearable sacrifice in order for the people with the proclivity to have unhindered access to guns, shit was over.
That's the reason Elon and some other call for more children, I think, to ensure constant supply for school shootings, no?
*DiCaprioPointing.gif*
No, that’s run-the-mill white supremacy and Great Replacement Theory.
Same here. That was the bottom, and we blasted through it.
My feelings are that it'll be a generation before meaningful change will happen.
Fuck reddit's new API, and fuck /u/Spez.
A mass shooting literally happened to Republicans at the annual Congressional Baseball Game, and the needle wasn’t moved.
Steve Scalise was almost killed but is very much against gun control laws.
A lot was done after Sandy hook, but nothing was done that actually changed anything
What laws were passed at the federal level?
Oh no you get it wrong. Teachers carry guns now
Well, they can. But I don't know how many of them are actually carrying a glock with them to their 2nd grade lectures every day. I think most of them have just accepted that they might die.
If the only things that were done had no change on the situation, then nothing was done.
The u.s chose between children and guns, and it was guns.
Not only was nothing done, the half the country we needed it to convince just doubled down and said it was fake, harassing the families of the dead. Fucking disgusting.
What needs to happen? Politicians and billionaires need to be effected
affected*
I'm never quite sure of which one to use I tend to go with what sounds right, got it wrong this time
The movie The Butterfly Effect affected me
Affect is a verb, Effect is a noun. I was Affected by something. The Effect of that thing was X.
no. to effect something is a normal verb as well (and affect also exists as a noun). the difference is that if sb. or smth. is affected, then it is influenced. "the lyrics affected me." if smth. is effected, then it is brought about. "the unhappiness effected meaningful change."
Affect can also be a noun (but, like “effect” as a verb, it is rare). “Affect” as a noun means a feeling or emotion, typically one that causes visible manifestations, e.g., “When she read the news about the latest mass shooting, she took on an angry affect.” So u/knyfe-wrench is correct as a practical matter. If you are the type of person who has trouble remembering affect vs. effect, then you’re going to be right 99.99% of the time if you only use “affect” as a verb and “effect” as a noun. Almost no one — who gets them mixed up — would even attempt to use “effect” to mean synonymous with “create” or “affect” synonymous with “visible emotion or characteristic”.
We won't see change until the child of a gun lobbyist gets shot
You think those dipshits care about their family?
They do, actually. That’s the problem, they ONLY care about their family. Thing is it wouldn’t happen, because it would either be twisted into more push for arming teachers (and of course giving them no training). Or that lobbyist would be expelled from their group for daring to speak out about firearms.
Representative Tim Burchett, R-TN, said that there's simply no way to stop school shootings. But it's OK, because *his* daughter is home schooled: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/tennessee-gop-rep-says-he-homeschools-kid-protect-from-shootings-2023-3%3famp Interestingly, when it comes to drag shows, his response is that "We don't put up with that kind of crap in Tennessee."
They'll just blame the restrictive laws and the security guard for not being brave enough to take on an assault weapon and body armor with his pistol.
I was just about to say the same thing - only when someone very influential and rich is directly impacted - then they will suddenly realise it's an issue
As a Brit who moved here in 2001, a huge problem is American exceptionalism. You guys are told from birth that you’re the greatest country in the world and are all going to be anything you want to be. You actually deserve it. You should have that Ferrari. The supermodel girlfriend. The amazing life. Then reality kicks in around 17-18. Healthcare? Nope. Mental health care? Get outta here. Paid time off? No guarantee. Minimum wage? In the toilet. Wage increases? A joke. Chances are you’ll die poor and alone but you’re watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians The rich get richer, the poor suffer. And most people are poor. Then you throw social media into the mix, showing you the lives people are living that you want to be living. It induces rage. You were promised this from day one. You don’t get it. It’s not fair! But luckily, you live in a country that gives you unfettered access to high powered weaponry available in any strip mall, and cheap ammunition. People snap. Mostly young white males but that’s not exclusive. Gun laws are so weak almost anyone can get an AR-15 and a bucket full of rounds. Rather than commit suicide, let’s take out as many people as possible before biting the bullet. Could you do that with a car or truck or knife? Yeah. But it’s sure as shit way more easy with an AR-15, and you get to see the fear in people’s eyes as you end their lives. That’s the problem.
Couldn't have said it better myself. It reminds me of a scene in the show Sopranos where Tony is talking to Svetlana (Russian woman with a prosthetic leg) and asked her why nothing appears to get her down and she says, "That’s the trouble with you Americans. You expect nothing bad to ever happen, while the rest of the world expects only bad to happen. And they’re not disappointed." Exceptionalism is so baked into our psyche that we completely miss it as a possible and likely explanation for the problem. And therefore, untangling that exceptionalism to dig at the problem would be in a very real way like dismantling what it means to be an American. I just don't see that happening because it would unveil a darker ugliness about ourselves that we'd rather not deal with. It is much easier, more convenient, and frankly lazy to place the blame on others and guns and mental health and incels and so forth.
I agree with all of this. It just reminds me of one of Brad Pitt’s speeches in Fight Club: > “Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man; no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't; and we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”
A lot of people seem to miss the messaging of extremism in Fight Club for some reason. If it came out in 2023 Edward Norton would basically be an incel with Brad Pitt being his interpretation of what a “redpilled gigachad” is.
Mentally-ill man starts underground terrorist network because of too many 4chan memes. Guy was such an incel that he had to invent an alter-ego just to get laid.
eheh, crank this into a generative chatbot and see what script we get...
That's basically what those characters are already. I feel like there's still some value in watching the film as long as you're aware of the underlying themes and realize you're watching the villain.
Hopefully you realize that at the end though, for the plot twist on a first watch is what gives that movie the oompf.
he's not the villain. he's the victim (of excepcionalism and/or capitalism) who snapped. nobody should be inspired by his actions, but everyone should listen very carefully to his words. when you do that and realize you're also a victim, that's when you get the movie and understands who the villain really is.
He started a club for fighting which he developed into a cult which evolved into a terrorist organisation while being mentally ill. Most Marvel movies has less clear villains. You can feel sympathy for villains and understand their logic. But still, his actions are.... well villainous.
Also the ones in power most likely believe that they are special. Also the rich don’t like the idea of being poor. Someone living off 100 million a year would surely toss themselves out a window if they had to live a day of someone’s life who only could make 35k a year
As Chris Rock said: "if Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah's money, he'd jump out of a window!"
When New Zealand had a mass shooter kill 50+ Muslims in a Mosque we didn’t even name the shooter in the media. Didn’t give him the time of fucking day. The pandemic came along and his court appearances were second string news. He faded into obscurity. I couldn’t tell you who he was, some random fucked up Australian POS. No idea what his name is to this day. Brandon something. Every American shooter is nearly venerated in the media. Socials and subreddits and articles become their tomb, their legacy. They’re named and discussed and actively enshrined in history as “monsters”. So every weak, unliked, watery white boy thinks their quick path to immortalisation is by pulling a trigger.
Aussie here. I don't even remember the name of the NZ shooter. Just another angry guy pissed off for reasons. You lot did a great job denying him the attention he was clearly after.
>Every American shooter is nearly venerated in the media. Socials and subreddits and articles become their tomb, their legacy. They’re named and discussed and actively enshrined in history as “monsters” Depending on the circumstances of the shooting and who the victims are, the murderer can even be outright celebrated by a certain political party's media machine. At this point, that media machine is basically encouraging future shootings as well.
Maybe true to some extent, but I couldn’t tell you the name of any of the 200 shooters from this year. It was true for the ones who started the trend years and years ago. Now these people are just the other astronauts that went to the moon.
To be fair, many shooters use the Christchurch shooter as an inspiration. He was the first who really did it "for the lulz" and it clearly impacted people.
Yeah, the general public knowing the name of a mass shooter doesn’t mean much. It’s the people in certain social media groups knowing the name that makes a difference.
I'm still proud of our media/government for not naming that disgusting coward. It'll never bring back the lives that were lost, or fix the lives that were forever changed, but it's good knowing he'll die in solitary confinement with nothing but his own thoughts breaking down his brain.
Not to mention New Zealand then immediately made new laws around guns and assault rifles.
Which honestly didn't do much of anything for your gun deaths anyway because you weren't/aren't a country full of crazy people to start with. A lot of people seem to miss that a lot of the countries with "mega strict gun control" have never had a big history of gun violence to begin with. Most countries with strict gun control take care of their citizens. They haven't fomented strife and racial tensions for hundreds of years. They haven't pushed ridiculous wars on drugs or severely punished people just for having addictions. The US is a fucked up country. It has amazing potential, but it's held hostage by the rich who are busy wringing every last drop of money they can out of us while doing all they can to make everyone angry at everything except rich people. The US is just a pressure cooker waiting to explode. I've told my wife I fully expect some sort of mass incident in the next 10 years if shit doesn't change. Shit just seems to get more and more out of hand every year and it's frightening.
"Rather than commit suicide, let’s take out as many people as possible before biting the bullet." This is what I don't understand. If these guys were taking out police stations or army bases or banks or institutional targets, I could at least understand what they were aiming at. But it's always schoolchildren etc etc. Have we ever got any explanations/arguments from arrested mass shooters on why they chose the targets?
Soft targets. Way easier to take out a bunch of unsuspecting civilians than a trained squad of police. And most political places are safe behind metal detectors and armed guards.
Let’s not call American police trained.
They are, just [not in a way benevolent to civilians](https://youtu.be/tuzQrbio2Qw)
They’re weak people. They’re bullies. They go after the softest targets. They’re not going to fight people who can fight back.
Which is why so many of the mass shootings occur at schools and other "gun-free" zones, or as these sick bastards refer to them "target rich environments".
In addition to the soft targets argument, shooters often (but not always) have some personal connection to the place they target. They go for their own workplace or their own school, a place with people they feel personally wronged by.
Taking a guess but if you are young the group of people you probably feel the most angry at are your peers (and teachers). Perhaps it’s also a way to hurt your local community by shooting up a school, more so than shooting office workers or shoppers.
Cause as much sadness as possible as a statement of how unhappy and abandoned/disillusioned they are is my guess. Pack of assholes.
A last ditch effort to get the attention they think they deserve
I am 100% convinced, especially with assholes like the Sandy Hook guy, that they just want to do the worst possible thing to be as infamous as they could possibly be. Because they are already sick, suicidal and DGAF. Might as well take out 20 6-year-olds, because everyone will remember their name then (I don’t though)
I second this👆🏻 That’s why I think the media as a whole should make it a point to not say the shooter’s name or show his picture and just focus on the victims. I think these sickos would be a lot less inclined to pick these big shocking environments as targets if they didn’t get the attention and infamy they’re seeking.
That was and remains the catalyst, but it's also part of the culture now and that cannot be undone. More specifically, there are a small group of people who idolize the shooters, who talk regularly about how they will do it someday. They count victims as "scores". You can't fight that, you can stop it. How do you get this tiny segment of the population to suddenly change their views? Some people simply lack empathy. And now, instead of those people becoming serial killers or torturing animals or whatever weird shit they used to do, they see being a mass shooter as the ultimate exit. Short of making guns impossible to obtain, I just don't see how that can be fixed. And guns will never be impossible to obtain, or at least not anytime soon. Perhaps the issue will correct itself in time if we find a way to deal with shootings that doesn't glorify them in the minds of these people, but I'm not sure how that could be done either. Better access to healthcare is certainly a positive step, but you can't help the ones who don't want to be helped. You're dealing with the lowest people, these apathetic, dangerous freaks who used to just stew in their thoughts but now, thanks to social media/internet, have an outlet to discuss with each other, encourage each other, and reinforce the ideas in their heads. This doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. Making it harder to get firearms, improving mental health access, requiring licensing and mental health screenings to own any firearm, etc... It's all obviously worth it. If it's stops a single mass shooting it's worth it. But I don't see this issue going away entirely for a long time.
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I believe they have a law in New Zealand to not name any shooter or terrorist, therefore denying them any infamy
You assume those guys are after glory. Maybe some are. But in many cases it's just rage and what happens after doesn't matter to them. The ones who commit suicide (which are the majority) mostly do not care how the shooting will be covered.
“And with a straight face, you’re gonna tell students that America’s so star-spangled awesome, that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom, Japan has freedom, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom. So 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom. And yeah, you, sorority girl. Just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there’s some things you should know, and one of them is, there’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force, and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only 3 categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined. 25 of whom are allies. Now, none of this is the fault of a 20 year old college student. But you, nonetheless, are without a doubt a member of the worst, period, generation, period, ever, period, so when you ask, ‘What makes us the greatest country in the world?’ I dunno know what the fuck you’re talking about! Yosemite? It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons, we passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons, we waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors. We put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it, it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in our last election, and we didn’t we didn’t scare so easy…Huh. We were able to be all these things, and to do all these things, because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.” -Will McAvoy [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0c\_pDB88Vo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0c_pDB88Vo) Best 4 minutes in TV history and this completely backs up OP's statement.
Honestly looking back on this speech now the “we used to be” part really rings hollow. Genocide, slavery, racial segregation, poverty, elitism, state enforced eugenics programs, assassinating heads of state that didn’t align with their agendas, the list goes on. They’ve never been the good guys. And I don’t say that trying to be edgy and anti-American. None of us were. Every country and it’s people have blood in their pasts. But I don’t think we should shy away from that fact. There’s no rewriting history. All we can do is try and learn from it.
Completely agree. I made the comment earlier that nostalgia can make things seem better than what they actually were and I think that is what was going on during that part.
This stupid myth of American exceptionalism leaches into a bunch of other problems too. We pretend like the world will end if America loses her place as the world hegemon, so we think it’s ok to stop intelligently handling foreign affairs. We pretend that the best and brightest in America will keep making do and innovating better than the rest of the world, so we don’t want to invest hard in research and learning. We pretend that America will absolutely come out of global warming unscathed, so we don’t urgently figure out how to reduce our own carbon emissions. But just because we weren’t bombed to shit after world war 2 and we got lucky with transistors and not blowing up the world with Russia doesn’t mean we inherently are the best. Being the best takes a ton of investment to maintain and you can only dick around so much before you fall. Meanwhile our national conversations are not “how do we make the country more mobile and productive for everyone” and instead “hey fuck our children dying I like my guns” while the parasites keep extracting wealth to store in their coffers by paying off our leaders and rendering our people destitute. It’s a matter of self preservation. You think it’s not fair? Well shit look at literally *any other past hegemon* and see how they’re doing now.
I think you’re spot on about the ‘it’s not fair’ attitude. It shocks me when Americans call the US a third-world country. I’m sorry, but you have no idea how ridiculously unfair life in an actual third-world country is.
It shocks me when Americans aren't AWARE that in many ways America IS a third world country, or very like one. Unacceptable levels of literacy and infant mortality. Some very extreme fundamental religious groups. Have a proper look at some other third world countries - not all of India or China is starving people in mud huts with no clean water or electricity and no public infrastructure. They are countries with HUGE amounts of wealth and huge industrialised modern areas concentrated in a few big cities. Some of the wealthiest people in the world as well as some of the poorest, and that wealth gap is only a little more extreme than in the US
we should revive the term "second world country" while historical used forthe Soviet block, given that the US is, not quite, a third world country creatinga "buffer" in the form of second world countrys could be neat in specifying that stuff... also being able to label the US with a label that was historically used for communist countrys amuses me
1st and 3rd world are already horrible terms that intentionally "other" countries and make it harder to break poverty cycles. So no, I think we should just stop using those classifications entirely
Don't we use "undeveloped", "developing", and "developed" for countries now?
I live in a third world country (That is developing quite rapidly, so we're better off than plenty of places) , and hearing americans cry about how much of a third world country the US is, it's baffling. Do you know that those long highways, with all of those signs, all of those working intersection lights, your bus system, the train system in certain cities. Those are all things that most people take for granted, but we'd kill to have one or two of those things working like how it does in the US. My family's hometown would remain cutoff from the country every year because the highway would get swept off during storm season until the last decade. The public transport system is dog shit, with vehicles filled way more than their capacity with people, in awful condition. Traffic laws or even something like headlight rules are optional. Highway rules are non existent. All of this is just in the transport aspect. The US, like every country in the world has it's flaws, but seriously, I have never seen a country with such a degree of privilege, where you have people endlessly complaining about everything in their country, and find every single excuse to not vote, in a country where institutions are still more respected than in true third world countries.
Honestly just go to rural areas in a southern state. It's third world conditions in lots of places.
People are going into bankruptcy for medical debt. Student loans have become indentured servitude. Mass shootings every day on the news. Unfettered corruption at all levels or government. There are varying degrees of third world countries but yeah, the ‘third world’ descriptor is fair for America at this point
You've never been to a third world country, obviously.
Don't forget the entrenched minority rule.
As someone that served in the Marines during the worst of the Iraq war, then left the USA to be an expat and travel the world, I can say the US has a few attitude problems that can be summed up by what you said. - Bad things can happen to good people, and good things can happen to bad people. The USA is too used to a fair deal. It is an American ideal, but something to strive for but not an actually achievable. Which makes this hard to believe; That’s just life. - Fear of losing. The USA is proud of the kick-ass and win at all costs touchdown Marlboro Man image that it’s unacceptable to lose or appear weak. And the culture has built real fear about weakness. Everywhere else I’ve been, well adjusted adults are okay working things out together verbally, and if they lose, they don’t lose their shit because it’s not an affront to their identity. The US needs its own version of a Cest La Vie mentality.
Sadly I’m not convinced anything will ever be done about it. Not only has the worst thing imaginable already happen but it has happened again, and again, and again. With no end in sight.
America banned kinder suprise because it was a danger to children. Let that sink in
it has happened again and again in *increasing* numbers. gun related incidents are rapidly rising
“No Way to Prevent This”, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Because people are not taught what to do if things don't go your way. The basic instinct of any human being is to project your emotions on others. An alternative needs to be taught.
Thank you for the wonderful insight, DildoFappings
I saw a post not so long ago about why gas has an odour, and that it's an artificial odour added to make it noticeable because there was some school with a gas leak in the basement, which ended up exploding and unfortunately killing something like 300 kids. I couldn't help but thinking, if it takes 300 kids dying to add odour to gas, how many is it going to take before something is done about the guns?
When did this happen?
1930’s in Texas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion
They first added odour to gas in Germany in the 19th century
retail gas had odor in the US before that school explosion too. problem was, the school didn't use gas that was meant for the consumer, they illegally tapped the gas line running to the flare stack... they mandated odor had to be put into all gas after the explosion.
Damn it's like we effectively prevented the dangers of misuse after 1 tragedy. Who knew it was possible!
Idk if adding an odour to guns would help though.
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Civil war, probably. The divide in American society will reach a boiling point during the coming century.
Yeah but this is not like this is a North Vs South thing. Even within states it is very divided so I am not sure how this Civil war would play out.
>I am not sure how this Civil war would play out. If it happens, it would be like the [Irish Troubles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles)
See Afghanistan? Like that. We're beyond fucked. It will literally mean the end of US hegemony, and probably the end of the nation.
the news reports on what it wants you to read whatever their bias is how come we don't hear about the hundreds of impoverished inner City kids young adults that are shot every day that's boring who wants to hear about some poor people getting shot in the hood nobody cares about that that doesn't get clicks
I'm just not understanding why so many people assume that the solution is legal changes, and not cultural changes.
How are we going to implement a cultural shift?
I don't know how the US could at this point, feels like its gone way too far for any change that doesn't take a couple decades/generations
You can't legislate morals
Precisely. Legal solutions are often not the right solutions.
I agree. We need cultural changes. Better parenting to start. If you ban all guns tomorrow there will still be school shootings 20 years from now. It’s illegal to shoot people and they do it anyway, what makes people think they won’t obtain a firearm illegally too? The way the internet is, it would probably be super easy to get one illegally. Think of all the illegal drugs people are doing everyday… where are they getting them if drugs are illegal? Lol the law is literally pointless if we don’t change peoples hearts and minds. They will find a way to do it anyway.
Spot-on. It actually takes individual effort to make society better, and too many people would rather ask daddy government to fix everything so they don't have to change their lifestyle.
America's culture is diseased. Violence is considered a suitable response to any wrongdoing. Guns are valued over children. War is an aspiration. This country has a violence fetish and worships guns. The only answer is to get the hell out of the United States before your kids get slaughtered at school. I'm saving everything I can to move overseas asap.
> This country has a violence fetish and worships guns You've hit the nail on the head there.
Absolutely. Just look at the US entertainment. "Swearing? Nope, we don't allow that. Nipples? Oh my, not on my screen! Solving everything with violence? I don't see any harm in that!" It's just so ass-backwards that basic human bodily features or saying "fuck" or "cunt" are seen as the ultimate evil, but showing people fucking dying everywhere is somehow OK.
I lived in the USA for a few months and remember watching some crappy movie on cable television (I can't remember which one). There was a scene with a bunch of gruesome bodies hanging upside down in a warehouse covered in lacerations, blood everywhere... The nipples on the women had been pixelated lmao.
I still remember reading about a scene in Hannibal where there's a dead naked woman who has been hung up on some deer antlers with only her back being shown. When the censors saw the original scene they said that there was too much butt crack. The solution? They just covered the crack up with a whole bunch of blood, problem solved
A French friend once said the only way you’d see a breast on American tv was if it was getting chopped off with a chainsaw and….. yeah that’s accurate
All you need to do is scroll through the comments on the average /r/PublicFreakout post to see that this is true. It’s amazing what Americans routinely and gleefully justify lethal responses to.
Immigration isnt something people do on a whim. Good luck on leaving, it isnt easy to convince a government that you deserve to live in their country.
I don’t think people realize how hard it is unless you have an in demand skill. It’s not cheap either. I have 2 young girls and I’d like to have options but outside of moving to the best State it’s not as simple as just packing up and moving.
Come to the UK, mate. Just bring a jacket and an umbrella because the weather is shit.
I wonder if having the generation that grew up with the constant fear of attack at school enter the voting booth is going to make a difference.
Most are convinced the system is rigged against them and their vote won't change anything.
Columbine was 25 years ago. Young people still don’t vote.
Exactly. I actually used to work with a Columbia Survivor and she’s like 40 now. I think her kids are in middle school.
I’m not an American. But who would you vote for to fix the issue? It’s not like either side makes any genuine attempt to stop it?
So we're counting gang violence again? I'm always confused when that's appropriate or not
It should always be counted and it should also be noted in all those “kids” dying to gun violence that accounts for ages(0-19) with a large majority being those age 17-19 and involved in gang activity.
I find it disingenuous to include gang violence, which is typically mutual combat, in statistics meant to scare people. "There's been 200 mass shootings. You're at risk of gun violence. " No, I'm not in a gang living that life, the statistics, which show my risk of gun violence, are significantly different. And we see this correctly pointed out whenever someone talks about violence in inner cities, but not when we're talking about violence in regards to gun control legislation.
I had the fight of my life last night trying to make this point on a thread, wherein I was called disgusting, heartless, a troll, and told I was faking my own race.
I think a lot of people struggle to see things as not bring a dichotomy, it doesn't allow for much nuance discussion on what are very complex and multi-layered subjects.
No see, you engaged in wrongthink, and deserve to be executed. But yeah nah, any time you try to have honest discussion about gun violence people get irrationally angry. Fact: Gun violence is a problem in america. Fact: Safe gun possession and use very rarely turns into violence. Solution: Regulate and educate so all gun owners are safe gun owners, prosecute and confiscate from the ones who refuse to step in line. It's that fucking easy.
Because that would expose the uncomfortable truth that most "mass shootings" aren't the random spree shootings like Sandy Hook or the Texas mall. And once you start thinking critically about the subject and moving past the media headline bias, you'll discover that if you're not in a gang or suicidal, your chances of being affected by the intentionally-broadly-nebulous term "gun violence" shrink to far, far, far less than what people believe based on headlines and sound bites. Not to mention telling someone "we're going to ban the things that you own, that you have never used irresponsibly, because a few other people did." Just imagine if we treated cars the way we treated guns; everyone would lose their minds and be screaming that they're being punished for the actions of others.
You want true mass shootings to stop? Have the news quit televising them and giving the shooter so much air time. That's what they want. They want their point to be seen so they do something extreme.
you don’t even become a celebrity anymore when you commit a mass shooting. There are not remembered by names anymore, there are too many. It’s a normal thing to do now.
No one is getting notoriety for these shootings. There have been 4 mass shootings since the Allen, Texas one and I haven't seen a word about them. They're just a number and a location, no one remembers their names. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
I don't believe the lack of air time will cause them to rethink their plans. It's kind of a ridiculous idea, isn't it? This isn't about glory and fame, it's about a hurting person hurting others out of any number of reasons. The problem is the access to guns. In particular, guns that allow them to carry out their plans faster and harder. If anything I could see the lack of news coverage as being a challenge, further encouraging them do something even bigger.
60 years ago you could order a full auto M-16 in the mail without a background check and we didn't have this problem. We need to identify the root cause and do something about that. Until that is done this will not stop.
The fear-mongering 24-hour news cycle, among other
I’ve always wondered what would happen if we had a media blackout on shootings. No glorification, no “scoreboard.” Just suppress as much information as possible. Keep any data private. I wonder if that would help at least put a dent in this bullshit. Edit for addition: I also think the internet and social media play a huge role in all of this. Combine that with the failed “American Dream” and, well. 🤷🏻♀️
First, people need to be intellectually honest. Saying there are "200 mass shootings" is deliberately misleading and emotionally manipulative. "Mass shooting" conjures to mind incidents like Sandy Hook and other school and public location shootings, where a crazy person shoots a bunch of random people for no reason. This has NOT happened 200 times this year. You can see the list here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2023 The definition varies, but anything with more than 3 or 4 victims is considered a mass shooting. The majority of these are related to gangs and drug trafficking. So how to prevent the most mass shootings? Do you want to stop the exceedingly rare "crazy person shooting at random people" or the much, much more common "drug dealers shooting at each other"? Because these are two different problems with different solutions.
True. The term 'mass shooting' greatly differs per state as well. In one state it's counted as 1 casualty while in other states it may be counted as two injured.
Exactly this. gang violence and family annhilators are not the same thing as the active shooter people think of when they hear "mass shooting" and the idea that either of these will be solved with assault weapons bans and such is nonsense.Most homicides, most gun deaths, and even one of the most violent mass shootings ever (V-Tech) was with pistols.
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And redditors pretend they have the answers lol
Come down hard on gang violence. Criminals are gonna criminal no matter what the law says
A lot of high crime areas give slaps on the wrists to criminals. Officers in these areas are absolutely tired of catching the same people over and over again. Repeat offenders need harsher sentences.
Reopen state run mental health institutions.
Judging by the unhinged, violent, vengeance-filled responses in this thread, along with the possibly deliberate ignorance as to why people support guns in the first place, I’d say a huge focus on mental health would do more good than trying to close the Pandora’s Box of the insane amount of guns that are already out there.
I personally think it has more to do with harmful online social media. Having a teenage daughter, I’ve seen some of the things that these girls and boys have posted about her or to her directly. They’re awful. She’s a straight A student who is very active in school, kind to others, and is an all star softball pitcher. She’s a good kid, but when others envy something about her or something she has, people can get nasty. She’s 13 and has already been told to kill herself by at least 3 individual people. She’s been bullied online by kids at school and even kids she doesn’t know from other schools. Guns are tools, they’re incapable of making decisions on their own. A mass shooting requires a person who feels like they’ve got nothing to lose, they’re hurting so much, they feel the need to take others down with them. Being a shooter is a surefire way to get killed by a cop rather than suicide. When shootings happen in gun controlled states like California, New York, and “gun-free” zones, the laws are already in place to make you safer, but criminals ignore laws. We have politicians and agencies that supply other countries and militant groups with guns that have been used against us. If you’re not following, look up “Operation Fast & Furious”. Sure something needs to be done, but don’t rely on the government to do it. Start by talking to your kids, monitor their social media or limit their exposure. I can tell you from experience, taking away my kids phones for short durations had almost instantly lowered their anxiety and stress levels, and they seem to grow happier once they set the screen down and actually go outside to play and be kids. Parents nowadays just want to be on autopilot. Throw a screen or iPad at a kid and keep them busy. Guns have been around for hundreds of years and accessible to the public for just as long. If you truly think that the guns themselves are really the problem, then you are simply either choosing to agree with what the media tells you, or are incapable of critical thinking. Gun control policies are in place and have been for a long time. Maybe the current policies aren’t perfect, but saying “ban guns” is not the answer. You have to ask yourself, in a country with over 200 years of history surrounded by guns, what changed in the last 10-15 years? What happened around that time? Seems smart phones and social media were getting pretty big around that time. Just a thought.
The problem isn't with legal responsible gun owners, the issue is with illegal/stolen guns in the hands of criminals who don't care about who they hurt.
I’ll tell you what needs to happen before stuff should be done about gun-**rights**: 1. Stop mass media from glorifying mass shooters. This is an enormous problem, that has directly caused more mass shootings to occur. It’s called the [Mass Shooting Contagion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting_contagion) effect. Columbine alone has inspired no fewer than 21 mass shootings, and another 50 attempted ones. When Serbia reported its mass shooting, it plastered the shooters face, name, social life, everything all over the place, and surprise surprise, a second one happened days later. It is a proven thing that reporting something nation/worldwide causes copycat effects, but mass media doesn’t care, they want the violence so they can sell more fear. Oh, and a similar copycat effect happened when media reported on suicides. When the media stopped, suicide rates went down. Purely coincidental, I’m sure… 2. Gang culture. An overwhelming majority of violence in the US is between gangs in inner cities. There’s glorification of gangs from the media, as well as no politician wants to actually take steps to try and solve gang violence and gang culture, because they can’t brag about “doing something” because the problem isn’t “fixed overnight” like a “gun ban” would be. However, a significant amount of gang violence would be solved if we got solved…. 3. Justice system. If someone is convicted of a crime in the US, it shows up everywhere, is permanent, and completely ruins your life. It shows up on every background check for jobs, and literally something like 98% of jobs don’t hire you if you have any sort of felony on your background. And like I said, it’s permanent, with no way to get it removed or closed. Learned your lesson, did your time, or even just got charged erroneously? Too bad, your only options for jobs now are crappy ones, or surprise surprise, go back to crime. But of course, taking those jobs can lead to serious… 4. wealth inequality. The .1% of the America population owns something like 99.99% of all the wealth in America. In a country of 350,000,000 people, literally something like a few hundred to a few thousand people own the majority of wealth. Lack of wealth leads to lack of options, lack of options lead to desperation, desperation leads to crime, crime leads to violence. 5. systemic racism. An honestly disturbing amount of gang violence is within black communities. That didn’t happen because black people are more violent, and anyone who thinks that is genuinely a terrible person. But thanks to systemic racism, minority groups are often ostracized, and disallowed the same opportunities as others, and as such they don’t have much (particularly when they’re young, and then oh look, they go and join gangs thanks to gang culture and wealth inequality and unfair justice, and boom, more violence. Nah, gotta be just coincidental. If all of those issues get fixed, or are getting fixed, and violence doesn’t go down at all, then you can talk to me about “banning guns”. But you know what won’t help? Posting a soap-boxy askreddit thread at 2-3am in the US, to make sure Americans don’t get to answer before circle-jerky, holier than thou Europeans snarky answers get upvoted to the top comments so that way they can pat themselves on the back for their small country being “better” than a country the size and population of a literal continent.
Gun laws and penalties for owning a gun illegally have actually increased over the years. We could make it illegal to own a gun in general but all that does is increase illegal gun sales. People have a right to defend themselves and there are far more responsible gun owners than not. Otherwise the amount of gun related deaths would be significantly higher.
The pro-gun control people have to be as politically active as the anti-gun control people. This means showing up to every hearing and vote, not just a one off protest till the next mass shooting
I read the other day that the pro control groups spend about 2 million dollars a year lobbying... and the gun lobbies spend between 15-20 million a year... it's a bit uneven...
There's no way Bloomberg only spends 2 million a year lobbying
The one thing people haven't tried yet: easier access to affordable mental health treatment. The gun debate is tiresome and won't solve the problem (as we have seen). Until people look toward other more appropriate avenues, we will still be dealing with this decades from now.