Gun Violence in America

[BlackSox13]

As for gun control. Most of my friends have guns and a few have what I would consider to be a small arsenal. Hell, my 68 year old mother has her card and so does my wife. None of them have hurt a soul, BTW.

[greg775]

In my opinion, depends on how you define it. You can have "mental illnesses" that create long-term issues, or you can (in my opinion), have events in your life that perhaps cause a drastic shift to your mental health which in my opinion could make you mentally ill. I separate conflicts of war from other scenarios because in that case, you are not being unique (presuming you are performing your act consistent with how a soldier should perform it). To just randomly murder other people is not a sane act and anyone that does such a thing clearly has a mental inbalance (at that point in time). A whole seperate question as to whether it should / could have been identified earlier and actions prevented. Lots of things unknown as it relates to this particular perpetrator.

Nice post. Food for thought.

 

Greg, this is an excellent post.

Thank u Mr. Raines.

 

Would you describe the 9/11 hijackers or the Paris attackers as mentally ill? (nonsarcastic question).

Good question. I'd say they were more brainwashed.

[Dick Allen]

Would you describe the 9/11 hijackers or the Paris attackers as mentally ill? (nonsarcastic question).

i

Think anyone who wakes up in the morning and says to himself, I am going to fly an airplane into a building today is mentally ill.

[Chisoxfn]

Would you describe the 9/11 hijackers or the Paris attackers as mentally ill? (nonsarcastic question).

Have to think about that for a bit. Somewhere in there, I think they have been brainwashed/rationalized their behavior for a greater cause as part of a "holy war". So it falls into a "gray" area as to what you define as "war". Like I said, need to think a bit about it, however, in general, I tend to separate acts against soldiers vs. innocent people (and I'm not referring to innocent bystanders).

[Balta1701]

Have to think about that for a bit. Somewhere in there, I think they have been brainwashed/rationalized their behavior for a greater cause as part of a "holy war". So it falls into a "gray" area as to what you define as "war". Like I said, need to think a bit about it.

And there's my problem with that - this guy could, for whatever reason, have decided that he was doing the same thing. Standard white terrorist with easy to purchase weapons who wants a body count. Anyway, just makes it hard to draw the dividing line people want to draw. Much more grey than any easy answer - other than the commonality of a heavily armed guy.

[Chisoxfn]

And there's my problem with that - this guy could, for whatever reason, have decided that he was doing the same thing. Standard white terrorist with easy to purchase weapons who wants a body count. Anyway, just makes it hard to draw the dividing line people want to draw. Much more grey than any easy answer - other than the commonality of a heavily armed guy.

I don't think stronger gun control laws (as in who is able to buy vs. who isn't (from a mental illness perspective or even a more detailed background check)) were going to stop this person (at least based upon the current information out there). So if you were going to look at this scenario in a vacuum, based on current facts, it would appear that the only thing stopping it would be an inability for anyone to purchase these type of firearms. I'm not a gun owner though (have barely shot a gun in my life, other than some rifles at scout camp), however, I do respect people's rights to own/protect / etc. I really see no scenario (outside of the ability to defend oneself from thy own government) where people need the types of firearms being used in these type of instances.

[RockRaines]

I don't think stronger gun control laws (as in who is able to buy vs. who isn't (from a mental illness perspective or even a more detailed background check)) were going to stop this person (at least based upon the current information out there). So if you were going to look at this scenario in a vacuum, based on current facts, it would appear that the only thing stopping it would be an inability for anyone to purchase these type of firearms. I'm not a gun owner though (have barely shot a gun in my life, other than some rifles at scout camp), however, I do respect people's rights to own/protect / etc. I really see no scenario (outside of the ability to defend oneself from thy own government) where people need the types of firearms being used in these type of instances.

That’s exactly correct. These types of weapons have no use in society. They only exist to fuel people’s egos.

 

My home protection weapon is a pump shotgun. Reason being I hope if I ever have to unlock it, the sound of me cocking it will scare anyone off. I don’t see the point of an Arsenal.

 

Here’s a thought, if we want to reduce the number of guns in this country, give anyone who turns in an assault weapon a tax credit.

[southsideirish71]

I am a gun owner. With that being said there has to be limits. First of all if you want to own a gun you should go through a rigorous background check. You should also be required to go through a gun safety class. I don't see why anyone needs an assault rifle. I find it interesting that hunters need things like silencers for hunting. You don't need an AR15 with an large scope, laser site and a silencer to kill a deer. Not everything is a video game.

 

The next part of this is people caught with assault rifles in the commission of a crime should automatically get a multiplier on their sentence. One thing we fail at is the proper enforcement of gun laws.

Edited October 3, 2017 by southsideirish71

[RockRaines]

I am a gun owner. With that being said there has to be limits. First of all if you want to own a gun you should go through a rigorous background check. You should also be required to go through a gun safety class. I don't see why anyone needs an assault rifle. I find it interesting that hunters need things like silencers for hunting. You don't need an AR15 with an large scope, laser site and a silencer to kill a deer. Not everything is a video game.

 

The next part of this is people caught with assault rifles in the commission of a crime should automatically get a multiplier on their sentence. One thing we fail at is the proper enforcement of gun laws.

 

I couldnt agree more

[TaylorStSox]

And there's my problem with that - this guy could, for whatever reason, have decided that he was doing the same thing. Standard white terrorist with easy to purchase weapons who wants a body count. Anyway, just makes it hard to draw the dividing line people want to draw. Much more grey than any easy answer - other than the commonality of a heavily armed guy.

Anyone unaffiliated with an organized association that commits a random act of violence to this scale is mentally ill. This isn't like the 911 hijackers who were part of an organization and truly believed they were soldiers in a war. There's a clear distinction.

[Balta1701]

I don't think stronger gun control laws (as in who is able to buy vs. who isn't (from a mental illness perspective or even a more detailed background check)) were going to stop this person (at least based upon the current information out there). So if you were going to look at this scenario in a vacuum, based on current facts, it would appear that the only thing stopping it would be an inability for anyone to purchase these type of firearms. I'm not a gun owner though (have barely shot a gun in my life, other than some rifles at scout camp), however, I do respect people's rights to own/protect / etc. I really see no scenario (outside of the ability to defend oneself from thy own government) where people need the types of firearms being used in these type of instances.

 

 

Anyone unaffiliated with an organized association that commits a random act of violence to this scale is mentally ill. This isn't like the 911 hijackers who were part of an organization and truly believed they were soldiers in a war. There's a clear distinction.

Take the same words in your posts and turn them around the other way. This guy "WAS" a "Good guy with a gun". He has limited criminal history. He has no history of mental illness, at least of the level that would deny him firearm ownership. The same way you say "I don't think stronger gun control laws" were going to stop this person, no phony "improved mental health treatment" was going to stop this person either. This was apparently the kind of guy we're supposed to trust to be ok with buying weapons.

 

Today, some kid under 10 is going to accidentally shoot someone. Today, there's going to be another incident where 3 or 4 people get gunned down. In those cases it'll almost certainly be a handgun, and there's a good chance that the person who purchased the gun the toddler will use was a good person with a gun, a responsible gun owner. It happens literally every day.

 

Next week, we'll go back to discussing the importance of tax cuts and how government spending on things like, I dunno, mental health care, is a waste.

 

This is just what Americans are ok with. Every one of us knows we're not going to do anything. We're not going to deny people who live in the Vegas suburbs their god-given right to build an arsenal. We're going to treat a 5 year old who shoots their 4 year old sibling as a natural disaster, totally nothing we could have done.

 

Everything else is a cop-out. "Oh they don't need these weapons, but there's now ways to 3-D print them so nothing we can do." "Who needs a fully automatic weapon? Except there are a few hundred thousand of them legally licensed in Nevada that were grandfathered in and taking guns away from law abiding people is so wrong!".

 

Until we face up to the fact that the problem, the only problem is the sentence "I do respect people's rights to own/protect / etc." then we better just face up to the fact that we're ok with this. That given the choice between these 59 people's lives, and the lives of the people who will die today and tomorrow and the next day, we have decided that keeping weapons of death around is more important. We have decided as a people that this is freedom and that this freedom is more important than the right of those 59 people to be alive.

 

So, in a few weeks, we'll make silencers easier to get, another 4 year old will kill a 2 year old, flags will return to full mast, and this will be forgotten. We're ok with this. This is freedom, USA Style. And in a few months, or a year or two, we'll have another one this scale. And we'll be ok with that too.

[StrangeSox]

This seems more political than would be appropriate in the SLaM thread. It's about the shooting but not necessarily about guns or gun control, but I think it's important to discuss the disinformation, often deliberate, that is out there and is greatly amplified by companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. That their algorithms wouldn't automatically blacklist sites like 4chan from being promoted as legitimate news sources shows how much modern technology can spread false information and outright lies. e: The tieback to gun violence is that this sort of bulls*** helps to radicalize people.

Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

 

Google News took the unusual step of confirming its use of the imageboard site 4chan as a news source on Monday. The admission followed Google News' propagation of an incorrect name as a potential shooter in the tragic Las Vegas shooting on Sunday night.

 

A reporter from tech-news site The Outline posted the full text of an e-mail he received from an unnamed Google representative. Reporter William Turton said that he had not discussed any "attribution terms" before receiving Google's e-mail, which confirmed that the Google News service was bombed into automatically reposting a false shooter's name.

 

The incorrect shooter's name, which Ars Technica will not repost to reduce any further robo-aggregated hits, began appearing on 4chan's "pol" board, which is infamous for pushing intentionally inflammatory content. The name appeared on the board when its members began looking through people connected to names that had been mentioned by Las Vegas investigators. One of those people—a sibling of a person of interest who was later cleared by Vegas police of wrongdoing—had social-media attachments to left-leaning subjects such as MoveOn.org and MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show. Both 4chan and right-wing misinformation sites like Gateway Pundit began spreading the false name as a suspect while calling the person a "far-left loon." (GP's article has since been removed, but a Google Cache of it still exists.)

 

Google News' statement claims that these false reports landed on the service's "Top Stories" feed due to a burst of activity for a name that had never received many search attempts. "When the fresh 4chan story broke, it triggered Top Stories, which unfortunately led to this inaccurate result," the statement reads.

 

"We use a number of signals to determine the ranking of results—this includes both the authoritativeness of a site as well as how fresh it is," the statement continues. "We're constantly working to improve the balance and, in this case, did not get it right."

 

4chan's inclusion anywhere near Google News' "authoritative" list is a troubling one, since 4chan users have consistently and repeatedly used the site to promote false stories about newsworthy figures. As of press time, Google has not responded to Ars' request to confirm the legitimacy of this reposted e-mail.

 

Facebook admitted to a CNN reporter to having the same false information appear on its "Crisis Response" page for "a few minutes" on Monday. "We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen," the Facebook representative told CNN.

 

Monday's news follows more than a year of questions about how social-media platforms like Facebook handle propagation of posts either through advertising or automatic, algorithmically selected links.

Edited October 3, 2017 by StrangeSox

[whitesoxfan99]

I am a gun owner. With that being said there has to be limits. First of all if you want to own a gun you should go through a rigorous background check. You should also be required to go through a gun safety class. I don't see why anyone needs an assault rifle. I find it interesting that hunters need things like silencers for hunting. You don't need an AR15 with an large scope, laser site and a silencer to kill a deer. Not everything is a video game.

 

The next part of this is people caught with assault rifles in the commission of a crime should automatically get a multiplier on their sentence. One thing we fail at is the proper enforcement of gun laws.

 

Agree with all of this and I'll go as far as to say that anyone who continues to fight against laws restricting background checks, limits on the mentally ill getting guns or bans on how powered rifles legitimately have blood on their hands. It is absurd how easy it is to get these types of weapons in this country and I'm sick of hearing we can't do anything about it. We have already made cuts that certain weapons cannot be held by citizens, we certainly have the ability to further restrict gun ownership but we choose not to because our politicians are bought by a bunch of terrible people from the NRA. We don't have a mental health issue that is unique to America. The unique American issue vs. other first world countries is our gun culture and how easy it is to obtain weapons here.

 

Oh and let me also say that the 2nd amendment argument is bulls*** for allowing weapons like this to be in civilian's hands. We have grown and evolved as a society. The founders were ok with slavery, but we got rid of that. I'm sure the founders never envisioned people would have weapons that could kill 50+ people and injure hundreds in a matter of minutes.

Edited October 3, 2017 by whitesoxfan99

[StrangeSox]

Photos a Boston channel has of some of the weapons in the shooter's room.

 

 

 

Large capacity magazines--apparently the one in the second photo is 100 rounds, which matches the ~90 shots per round of firing people estimated from the audio files-- and the "bump fire" modification that lets you fire a gun that is still technically a semi-automatic at near-automatic speeds. If there actually is a push for gun control after this, I imagine it'll be trying to go after high capacity magazines again and also rewriting the classifications around things like "bump fire" so they're considered to fall under the NFA.

[RockRaines]

Agree with all of this and I'll go as far as to say that anyone who continues to fight against laws restricting background checks, limits on the mentally ill getting guns or bans on how powered rifles legitimately have blood on their hands. It is absurd how easy it is to get these types of weapons in this country and I'm sick of hearing we can't do anything about it. We have already made cuts that certain weapons cannot be held by citizens, we certainly have the ability to further restrict gun ownership but we choose not to because our politicians are bought by a bunch of terrible people from the NRA. We don't have a mental health issue that is unique to America. The unique American issue vs. other first world countries is our gun culture and how easy it is to obtain weapons here.

 

Oh and let me also say that the 2nd amendment argument is bulls*** for allowing weapons like this to be in civilian's hands. We have grown and evolved as a society. The founders were ok with slavery, but we got rid of that. I'm sure the founders never envisioned people would have weapons that could kill 50+ people and injure hundreds in a matter of minutes.

80+ percent of americans are in favor of background checks. Yet....

[RockRaines]

Look at those f***ing guns. What person needs those? What purpose does it serve?

[Dick Allen]

Look at those f***ing guns. What person needs those? What purpose does it serve?

They did what they were built to do. Kill in mass.

[illinilaw08]

Agree with all of this and I'll go as far as to say that anyone who continues to fight against laws restricting background checks, limits on the mentally ill getting guns or bans on how powered rifles legitimately have blood on their hands. It is absurd how easy it is to get these types of weapons in this country and I'm sick of hearing we can't do anything about it. We have already made cuts that certain weapons cannot be held by citizens, we certainly have the ability to further restrict gun ownership but we choose not to because our politicians are bought by a bunch of terrible people from the NRA. We don't have a mental health issue that is unique to America. The unique American issue vs. other first world countries is our gun culture and how easy it is to obtain weapons here.

 

Oh and let me also say that the 2nd amendment argument is bulls*** for allowing weapons like this to be in civilian's hands. We have grown and evolved as a society. The founders were ok with slavery, but we got rid of that. I'm sure the founders never envisioned people would have weapons that could kill 50+ people and injure hundreds in a matter of minutes.

 

This is a good post.

[bmags]

If we are resigned to baby steps, here are my baby steps:

 

- Allow full collection of data on gun violence and prioritize studies on causes and possible solutions (which will be marginal) for violence in america. It is clear we are unique in the developed world for this problem, yet we are not allowed to study it.

- Law that allows for revocation of firearms from people who fall under the federal restrictions of Purchasing a firearm. So that not only can they not buy future weapons. This can be done a number of ways, PA requires they sell the weapons by 60 days, MA requires they turn them in.

- Expand federal law to restrict gun purchases to those with gun related misdemeanors

- Expand definition of mental health to those voluntarily committed

- require identify individuals whom access to guns is restricted via federal guidelines

- please just some thoughtful restriction on powerful weapons, modificiations and bullets that allow ongoing regulation similar to FDA approval so there aren't loopholes so easily applied.

 

None of this will happen.

[Quin]

They did what they were built to do. Kill in mass.

 

Exactly. And to many he had the right to own them.

 

But the victims only have the "privilege" of health insurance

 

[StrangeSox]

This Shooting Isn’t About Gun Control We Refuse To Pass, It’s About Access To Mental Health Care We’re Continuing To Gut

[maggsmaggs]

I am a gun owner. With that being said there has to be limits. First of all if you want to own a gun you should go through a rigorous background check. You should also be required to go through a gun safety class. I don't see why anyone needs an assault rifle. I find it interesting that hunters need things like silencers for hunting. You don't need an AR15 with an large scope, laser site and a silencer to kill a deer. Not everything is a video game.

 

The next part of this is people caught with assault rifles in the commission of a crime should automatically get a multiplier on their sentence. One thing we fail at is the proper enforcement of gun laws.

It's not truly a failure to enforce gun laws. In Illinois, for example, the use of a firearm during the commission of an offense automatically adds on 15 years to life in prison on to certain crimes such as armed robbery. There are two main issues with gun laws and criminal punishments. First, with regard to criminals, it can be exceedingly difficult to prove someone had possession of a firearm for purposes of many gun crimes (think, aggravated unlawful possession of a firearm or felon in possession) beyond a reasonable doubt. Unless the gun is found on the person or an officer sees a gun thrown, many of the guns found are in multiple person circumstances where it is hard to pin the gun on one specific person. Second, the basic gun crimes such as felon in possession is punishable by a minimum 2-3 years in jail depending on if its a first offense. Many times, by the time a guy goes to trial and if he has good-time credits for behaving in jail, his sentence is considered time served at the time of sentencing. Long story short, it's not the lack of enforcement, it's the lack of legislatively enacted punishment.

[Balta1701]

This Shooting Isn’t About Gun Control We Refuse To Pass, It’s About Access To Mental Health Care We’re Continuing To Gut

I think the satirical newspaper is inaccurate here as there's literally no evidence that this person would have been classified as having any mental health issue prior to pulling the trigger unless we categorize "owning too many guns" as a sign of mental illness. Hell, he even seems to have planned the purchases to come from multiple sources so as to avoid setting off anything that would notify law enforcement.

 

This was responsible ownership of an arsenal, as any good and freedom loving American should. The first thing he did that broke the law was breaking the window.

[Dick Allen]

Keith Olbermann says the NRA should be branded a terrorist organization.

[greg775]

Agree with all of this and I'll go as far as to say that anyone who continues to fight against laws restricting background checks, limits on the mentally ill getting guns or bans on how powered rifles legitimately have blood on their hands. It is absurd how easy it is to get these types of weapons in this country and I'm sick of hearing we can't do anything about it. We have already made cuts that certain weapons cannot be held by citizens, we certainly have the ability to further restrict gun ownership but we choose not to because our politicians are bought by a bunch of terrible people from the NRA. We don't have a mental health issue that is unique to America. The unique American issue vs. other first world countries is our gun culture and how easy it is to obtain weapons here.

 

Oh and let me also say that the 2nd amendment argument is bulls*** for allowing weapons like this to be in civilian's hands. We have grown and evolved as a society. The founders were ok with slavery, but we got rid of that. I'm sure the founders never envisioned people would have weapons that could kill 50+ people and injure hundreds in a matter of minutes.

Good post. To those who say nothing can be done, well, we need to have some of the politicians respond to some of the things being said by people like Kimmel in his monologue yesterday. Not just saying him but a lot of reasonable people have solutions to this assault rifle issue. Cmon, folks, this madman in Vegas should never have had an arsenal of weapons in his possession. Like you said the second amendment argument is crap here. 500 people injured, 50 dead by one man?? My gawd that is unacceptable. And people are right. Somebody else is going to try to break the new record of deaths.

 

One other thing: People need to be aware. Wouldn't it have been perfect if somebody in Vegas or somewhere had caught this guy before the incident? I kind of agree with the Vegas sheriff though. Not much could have been done if anything to prevent this.