Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

Jesus crust

Just got an email from my school that ATF are watching an unspecified threat made online against "a school near Philadelphia" for tomorrow. More than a little freaked out tbh

Four students arrested in California for a shooing plot.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/4-students-arrested-for-calif-school-shooting-plot/ar-AAf5xJk

i think self absorption is as big of a factor as gun access with these shooting. of course people will lash out in antisocial ways when they care about no one but themselves and feel the world has slighted them

not a productive observation, maybe, as you can't control for that on a macro scale, but self-centeredness seems as relevant here as the more nebulous term "mental health." these people need to volunteer at a soup kitchen or something

The guy in Oregon seems to have a support system, I'd say...

school shootings are caused by an infinite number of causalities - the only unifying one across all of them is access to guns.

What do you folks think of the call for greater censorship of information on mass shooters? I strongly disagree, I think society benefits when literacy in criminology is improved. The US has not only a gun problem, but a serious violence problem, and censorship of info about violent people can't help.

Look at this article on schools in Indiana.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/10/06/3709027/indiana-mass-shooting-prevention/
We're willing to spend a ludicrous amount of time and money in security, but we repress any attempts at understanding perps. Feels like denial.

However, I'm just a lay person and a true crime buff. Maybe there are points to be made in favor of censorship?

Rather than censor the details of mass shooters, I'd prefer that the media go to great lengths to make them look as clownish and unimposing as possible. Anything to deflate the idea of them as scary boogymen. It's harder to posthumously glorify someone who's made to look like a sad loser.

More on the side that I'd rather know about perpetrators than hide the information. The argument for that seems to be that the media is responsible for encouraging these people by "glorifying" them through excessive press, which I don't really buy. This isn't like winning the lottery or being a rock star - I think a baseline "normal" person doesn't want that kind of infamy, and such murderous killers have existed whether they wanted the acknowledgement or not. I think it's pretty clear when reading the details how much these guys are sad losers; don't think it effects future shooters either.

And it's always easier to sell things like metal detectors, guns, and security guards than social studies, just like with the drug war

if you ever look at old american newspapers from like 1905 the number of random gun deaths is extraordinary. the causes usually drunkenness or madness or both. bar fights immediately turn fatal, etc. i feel like this just par for the course in america and the only difference now is that the news travels around the world like lightning. well that and the fact that violent crime in general has been on a downward trend for decades now yet gun deaths not. so maybe there is something to it.

I'm warming to the idea of "idea contagion," a theory leading to why early 80s American teenage suicides got downplayed instead of blowing up all the networks for weeks

That BBC interview with the American psychologist from some years back that always gets reposted when shit like this happens has a lot of great ideas as to how you can tamp this shit down

The more press it gets, the more normalized it becomes, the more it looks like a viable option to someone leaning in that direction. I know it's not that facile, but the normalization is the concerning part.

Have we ever learned anything of use from any cases of studying these mass murderers?

i was going to say... what difference does it make, as long as people can get their hands on a bunch of guns? what are we going to use this knowledge for?

Banning Marilyn Manson CDs.

sticking your head in the ground isnt going to make a problem go away. this is like when people advocated editing the twin towers out of all movies just in case we dont see them and get the sads.

It's a lot different than that. That doesn't happen every week.

i'm not sure it's really tenable to prevent the media from talking about these guys (and they are always guys), especially nowadays... if the major networks don't report it, sadly buzzhole and gawkfeeder and etc. will.

but i'm not under any illusions that the conversation about the killers themselves is productive of anything.

btw was that 4 chan thing determined to be not linked to the Oregon shooting?

Yes. It was people trolling, pretending to be other channers

http://gawker.com/how-4chan-trolled-two-of-its-friends-by-framing-them-fo-1734265649

Pareene makes some decent arguments here:

http://gawker.com/the-gun-control-movement-needs-its-own-pro-life-fanatic-1734711064

I tend to disagree on the principle that adopting tactics you would normally find abhorrent is not a sign of a winning hand

This Mother Jones article details some of the things we have learned from mass shootings:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/mass-shootings-threat-assessment-fbi-columbine

Incl. amazing stuff about the Cult of Columbine.

Elsewhere, MJ gives pointers to the media about handling these shootings. I still don't buy the need for censorship. There doesn't seem to be any good science behind it. What if broadcasts of funerals and memorials trigger outrage in potential shooters. I don't think we know what will provoke the next shooter. You may as well pull video games off the shelves or shut down 4chan and Reddit.

The only obvious thing is that the role of guns in the culture certainly plays a role in all of this.

Anyway, I tend to feel triggered by all of the coverage and get depressed, but I find that criminal profiling helps me cope w. violence.

It's one thing to censor it completely, it's another to just report it as an unsensationalized crime story.

Pareene makes some decent arguments here:

http://gawker.com/the-gun-control-movement-needs-its-own-pro-life-fanatic-1734711064

I tend to disagree on the principle that adopting tactics you would normally find abhorrent is not a sign of a winning hand

― BRAAAAAAMETHEUS (El Tomboto), Tuesday, October 6, 2015 3:15 PM (49 minutes ago)

the pro-life methods are abhorrent mainly because of the ideas they advocate, not the methods themselves

I still don't buy the need for censorship. There doesn't seem to be any good science behind it.

I wonder what science would say if TV News was all positive stories and Crime and Cop shows only talked about financial crimes?

It is obvious that seeing murder constantly every day desensitizes people to it.

Hence the tone of the title of this thread.

They are showing murders on daytime tv, during the commercials for Ellen.

You may as well pull video games off the shelves or shut down 4chan and Reddit.

Videogames, 4chan, and Reddit aren't legit mainstream news media. False equivalency.

Here is your censorship. Hiding the violence.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/06/doctors-without-borders-airstrike-afghanistan-us-account-changes-again

well some the methods are pretty abhorrent too - shouting at women walking up to the front door of an abortion clinic, for instance. but there isn't a comparable figure in the gun control debate to the young, emotionally vulnerable woman seeking an abortion. the people that need shaming are just fuckos who want handguns.

yeah. When you start spending most of your time appealing to disgust and fear, that's essentially an admission that your position isn't actually rational, just based on disgust and fear.

well some the methods are pretty abhorrent too - shouting at women walking up to the front door of an abortion clinic, for instance. but there isn't a comparable figure in the gun control debate to the young, emotionally vulnerable woman seeking an abortion. the people that need shaming are just fuckos who want handguns.

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, October 6, 2015 4:53 PM (31 minutes ago

hence my point...

none of us is going to bat an eye if some gun nuts are heckled. it's the fact that it's done to women who are seeking health care that is abhorrent to us

shaming people in public is good theater but profoundly poor as a technique for anything other than proving you're a bully. If shaming people in public was good for anything then civil rights for any minority you care to name would fail every time all the time

I do think Pareene's on to something, identifying a strain of maudlin martyrdom in american populist politics, and I understand the desire to recruit it for good. But the instances I can think of where the left has gone this route - candle-light vigils for the victims of nuclear weapons, placards graphically showing the effects of napalm during Vietnam, it's just incredibly off-putting to me, like I'm being hectored, and I AGREE with them!

pretty sure pareene saw that 'gun purchasers should go through what women in red states have to go through to get an abortion' meme and took it to thinkpiece level

but maybe I'm not the audience! maybe this sort of obnoxious guilt-tripping would work on enough of the kind of people who respond to that sort of thing that it would be a good idea!

xpost

the audience for those tactics isn't really the general public, it's elected officials who don't want controversy and are afraid of well-funded and rabid lobbyists and their supporters

and throwing in some bits about winning in the SC and winning in the state legislatures and moving the window of debate for good measure. So basically we need to pull out all the stops AND reduce ourselves to the level of planned parenthood's most incoherent foes. See what sticks!

politics is a bloodsport, you play to win

if you scare the other side they start to compromise

and there is something to be said about moving the framing of the debate, moving the goalposts so that it's not gun rights vs. gun control, it's gun control vs. no guns.

It's so tiring always trying to tailor your views to what the current CW is, it would be amazing to just be like yep, you're convinced we want to take your guns away. You know what? You're absolutely right, we DO want to take your guns away. Every last Ruger and Glock. If you have a hunting license you can keep a rifle and a shotgun and that's it. And hunting licenses will be at least as hard to get as a driver's license. CAN YOU LIVE WITH THAT, WILL THAT BE ENOUGH GUNS FOR YOU

It is obvious that seeing murder constantly every day desensitizes people to it.

http://www.signspecialist.com/decals/beevault/images/Entertainment%20And%20Circus%20033-0151.gif

Honestly it's like cigarettes, people just couldn't conceive that their liberty to light up several cigarettes in a busy restaurant could ever be taken away. And then it was. And it was like, actually I didn't need to do that anyway

Oh there are still people whining loudly about that too.

I was trying to make the point that the strategy/s outlined in the piece isn't/aren't really a strategy, more a rant. As is warranted, of course.

Actually would prefer what (ugh) McAuliffe and the Democratic Governors Association are planning to try and do re: ensuring redistricting in 2020 swings in Dems' favor - that's one pillar, addressing local level bullshit;

coupled with a dedicated press to move the window, addressing the minimizing of control topics by the NRA that even Fred fucking Hiatt's editorial page was able to point out this week;

and I guess my third stool leg would be national elections to ensure the federal courts and the SC are populated by judges who believe the federal government has some fucking business regulating this shit, and that stuff like that Colorado law where anybody who sues a gun company automatically owes the gun company a shitload of money is blatantly unconstitutional, if it even rises to that level (instead of just being fucking nonsense, or whatever the JD jargon is).