Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

I assumed that was a riff on an existing pro-life meme but I don't exactly keep track of pro-life memes.

jon i'm not in the US, so it's easy for me to say this, but regular people have taken pretty large risks to their own well-being to change terrible situations throughout US history - and we all owe a lot to them!

I don't disagree with risks taken in the past, but I think the dynamics and the current gun situation in America changes the equation of the risks considerably. I also think it's only going to add to the large sense of persecution that these nuts carry around with them. It's not that I don't think risks aren't sometimes worth taking to enact change, it's more that I don't think the risks are going to move the needle on this at all, rather I think it will actually fuel the persecution complex of gun nuts to an even greater degree, and it's not going to be worth the body count.

I don't know about the dangers of confronting these gun nuts - certainly I've seen video and news footage of various factions in each others faces, with and without violent results - but "shaming?" They can't be shamed. They have no shame. If anything they have a surplus of pride.

The persecution complex of gun nuts is a given, the goal should be to actually persecute them

I don't disagree with risks taken in the past, but I think the dynamics and the current gun situation in America changes the equation of the risks considerably.

can I just drop the entire history of Black people in America here

Some massive gun nutter site just got hacked and all the user info shared online.
It’s not abortion clinic-level confrontation, but it’s certainly safer.

Four dead, including child, in Orange County mass shooting incident.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/police-four-dead-including-child-in-orange-county-mass-shooting-incident/ar-BB1fbwRZ

"Orange Police said this is the first mass shooting there since 1997."

Fuck

Horrific story out of South Carolina. A source close to the investigation says former NFL player Phillip Adams killed five people including doctor Dr. Robert Lesslie & his wife Barbara and his grandchildren Adah, age 9 & Noah, age 5. #FOX35 @fox35orlando https://t.co/uFP2lDDezI

— Amy Kaufeldt FOX 35 (@Fox35Amy) April 8, 2021

jfc

I feel completely hopeless that America is ever going to tackle this, we all are being forced to live with the reality that being shot is an acceptable* price for living in America in 2021.

* - and of course it's not fucking acceptable, but whatever. I'm furious about how easily and quickly we've shifted back to this being just a normal part of daily life.

horrifying.

and overlapping with another ongoing american mess (football)

well the way to stop gun violence is for everybody to have guns and then there will be no more gun violence.

I know things were trending in this direction anyway but the timing of "enough, here are executive orders to manage gun violence" hot off the backs of two shooting incidents where the shooter was Black has some very unfortunate echoes with the way this country has conducted itself in the past

This probably has something to do with it too

Gun ownership among Black Americans is soaring https://t.co/eb8ULoz4Ag pic.twitter.com/OyFTYLMXrK

— The Hill (@thehill) April 5, 2021

JFC... busy day in America:

Several people injured in shooting in Bryan, Texas, police say
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/08/us/bryan-texas-shooting/index.html

Industrial-park shootings are some of the saddest. Imagine going to work in those nondescript places for years and then...

it's a meme. when people feel like they're at their wit's end, this is an idea that feels available to them.

of all the things about america that make me want to leave, these killings are one of the biggest. and it's not just about gun violence. there is something cultural about this. it's like a sick form of expression to these people.

gun laws i mean -- it's not just about gun laws, or mental illness for that matter. it's a social pathology.

Workplace shootings seem to be the most anonymous and most quickly forgotten these days as well. Maybe back in the 80s ("going postal") they were still searing and commanded big media attention, but now they're so, so common.

School and box store shootings still manage to stir up some collective grief and a desire for a 'national conversation' that lasts a day or two, but these these are forgotten so quickly - except for the family, friends, and coworkers left behind.

exactly. it's just ambient death we accept in the background, like drone strikes or car crashes.

BREAKING: Knoxville, Tennessee, Police: "Multiple gunshot victims reported, including a KPD officer" at Austin-East Magnet High School.

"The investigation remains active at this time. Please avoid the area." https://t.co/5uPfjfRYJk

— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) April 12, 2021

Yeah, my work partner is out covering that school shooting now. Not an actual spree shooting but terrible anyway. A school security officer approached a kid who he'd been told was carrying a gun. The kid pulled out the gun and shot the officer (who's an actual Knoxville cop, not a school employee), and the officer shot the kid in return. The kid died, the officer is in the hospital but seems like he'll live. It's the latest in a series of shootings of students of that school since January, although none of the others have actually happened at school.

fucks sake. this is insane. one school!

https://eu.knoxnews.com/story/news/education/2021/02/18/austin-east-community-violence-knoxvilles-not-ours/6782730002/

a well regulated militia

Things you cannot actually make up: the shooting caused the Tennessee House of Representatives to delay its vote planned for today on a resolution declaring us a Second Amendment Sanctuary State. Even they realized it might look a little tacky. But just for a week.

Being governed by these assholes is exactly why I can never muster the outrage at neolib-centrist Democrats I'm supposed to. Neolib centrists would be a fucking godsend.

BREAKING: Four dead, 7 injured in mass shooting at FedEx facility in Indianapolis, police source says.

It never ends. And not a damn thing will be done about these endless mass shootings.

— Spiro Agnew’s Ghost (@SpiroAgnewGhost) April 16, 2021

8 dead.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56770200

we are just so fucked in this country when it comes to guns

good guy with a gun gets killed himself in this one too

the good guys with guns need better guns iirc

‘No way to prevent this, etc.’

I hear more libs are buying firearms these days, so it’s only a matter of time before the issue solves itself through sheer cosmic balance.

we buy love guns

Sigh. It just feels so goddamn hopeless.

Goddamn

It's quite intense to visit the paper of record online and discover that THERE WAS YET ANOTHER FRICKIN' ARMED SLAUGHTER that you had no idea about until that moment

"See a partial list of shootings with multiple victims in 2021."

Because these are so fucking commonplace that listing them all would be too much.

yeah, this line in the CNN article kind of illustrates the severity of the problem unintentionally:

Police were called to the facility at about 11 p.m. local time for what has become the country's deadliest shooting since 10 people were killed March 22 at a grocery in Colorado.

Oooof

I’m not sure that was unintentional after watching CNN’s morning coverage

yeah first thing my wife said to me in the morning was "there was a shooting in Indiana" and I was racking my brain trying to think if she had just heard about one of the recent ones

i guess one benefit of working from home is less risk of getting shot at place of employment. we had a legit threat at one of our offices years ago, and my office was the type that you wouldn't easily escape from in those situations.

i think we had a lockdown once for a few hours due to a gunman in the area but it never panned out.

we had a very disturbed guy in my office who more than once made specific angry threats about how he was going to do it, who he was going to go after, what he was going to use, etc. he lived around the corner from the office and had tons of guns at his house, once got caught with a huge hunting knife hidden in his desk. management never did anything but the fbi caught up with him eventually and he wound up behind bars for outside-the-workplace stuff. it was an exciting couple years in the office though, showing up to work every day thinking "is today the day he decides to do it?"

jeezus yall

wtaf?

'Murica.

yeah we fired a guy a while ago who apparently wound up having a hit list in his desk. I know a few people were legitimately disturbed by it, like "how did I wind up on that, I barely talked to the guy" but mostly it was treated like kind of a joke. in retrospect...gorsh

sorry if i got too dark. its just every time one of these happens i always think about my office and if it had happened there, how it would have been described with the same banal boilerplate phrases in every one of these stories: "searching for a motive", "believed to be an employee", etc.

I worked with a guy who left a job a month before one of his coworkers shot the place up; I feel in some ways at this point in our stupid history it's strange to NOT know someone who has experienced this (including yourself).