Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

And another... one a week now, pretty much

Man arrested in Maine shootings that left four dead and three wounded

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/19/maine-shootings-bowdoin-highway

more like one a day

Checks out, this year is 109 days old:

The Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit watchdog, defines a mass shooting as any shooting in which “four or more [people are] shot or killed, not including the shooter”. It has counted 165 such incidents in the US this year.

more like more than one day

This kind of incident seems to be a growing epidemic:

Texas cheerleaders shot after one says she got in wrong car

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-04-19/texas-cheerleaders-shot-after-one-says-she-got-in-wrong-car

See also: Shoot anything that moves: Hair trigger gun nuts standing their ground.

“Men who own handguns are eight times more likely to die of gun suicides than men who don’t own handguns”.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-ownership-associated-with-much-higher-suicide-risk.html

How can we get this number up, lads?

I just inherited an old .22 revolver a couple years ago, and I think about these stats all the time... as a (gently) aging GenX dude, the demographic that's probably at the top of this trend

8x sounds low tbh

i mean i guess that's what you'd expect, easier to kill yourself when you already have an instrument of death easily accessible in your house vs having to leave the house and acquire one and likely not get it right away, or go to a shooting range and try doing it there.

I know I talk about this book ALL THE TIME, but it really does an astonishing job of talking about the phenomenon of "gun rights" and increased suicide among poor and middle class white men. It's an incredible book, in many ways.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jonathan-m-metzl/dying-of-whiteness/9781541644960/?lens=basic-books

How can we get this number up, lads?

― Every post of mine is an expression of eternity (Boring, Maryland)

Gross

If I’d had ready access to a gun at certain times in my life — that is, if I had grown up in the USA — I would be dead now.

same ^^^^^

I just cannot even fathom owning a gun. I've fired one exactly two times, when I was 12 and my dad forced me to go pheasant hunting with an uncle and some work people. It was a terrible experience, I played along enough to shoot in the general direction of the pheasant without getting anywhere near in danger of actually hitting it. All I recall from this remove is a profound discomfort of holding something in my hands that could end a life. Absolutely no desire to touch one again.

I remember finding my dad's gun in a shoebox when I was looking for the power supply for the N64 that he hid. the ammo was in the same box. was pretty freaked out by it, just knowing "hey you can actually kill someone if you want"

on the plus side I found a way to get the power cord back

Yeah I have somehow made it 52 years without shooting a gun or even holding one. This while living in some of the most presumably dangerous urban settings (DC, Chicago, NYC, Richmond, St. Louis) and walking approximately one-third of a continent of semi-wilderness (Appalachian Trail).

Christ, I have even been spotty about locking the house and car doors, and never had even the slightest bit of fear or trouble about my person (much of which is probably six-foot-tall white dude privilege, but still).

One (1) time a guy stole some silverware from my childhood home when we were on vacation. My mother bought a grand piano with the insurance money. They found the dude, and maybe could have retrieved the silverware, but my Mother decided she'd rather have the piano. Another time someone took some CDs from my car. I think one of them was by Suzanne Vega. I bought another copy.

Yikes, eek, what a hellish apocalyptic dystopia, surely I should have been all tacticooled out.

The way I look at it is, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that someone wants to get in my house with the specific intent of killing me, I sure as fuck won't have time to calmly, rationally walk to the safe to unlock the gun and a secondary location to unlock the ammo in time to make one bit of a difference in an intense situation.

(nb I'm fully aware that, clearly given recent events, these 2A chuds don't follow any amount of basic gun safety that I would intend to follow, these dudes and locked and loaded every second of every day)

I remember finding my dad's gun in a shoebox when I was looking for the power supply for the N64 that he hid. the ammo was in the same box. was pretty freaked out by it, just knowing "hey you can actually kill someone if you want"

My father--lifetime NRA member and Guns & Ammo subscriber--did this as well; he's never had a gun safety measure that went beyond "tall closet shelf (next to the porno tapes)". To this day, I'll visit and still find loose bullets in kitchen junk drawers. He kept a revolver in his car's glove compartment, too. He's never hunted, just goes shooting at the range and generally liked firearms, I guess.

Here's the thing: when guns fire, they're loud. That's what you miss watching them go off in the movies.

They're pretty unmistakable. When you're at a shooting range, hearing them go off is startling enough. When you're in the middle of a public place and one starts going off, you won't ever forget it.

A couple of years ago someone stole my bike out of the garage; my wife had left the garage open while walking the dog around the block and actually bumped into the person on the sidewalk and didn't realize it was my bike before they got on and rode away.

She said something on facebook about this and a bunch of the good old boys from her high school were like 'oh boy better be glad I wasn't there I would have shot him' etc.

I asked them if anyone had ever considered that they'd have to spend the rest of their life knowing they murdered someone in their yard in front of their wife and child and neighbors over a bike that would maybe sell for $200 on craigslist and nobody ever answered me which was actually probably for the best.

Yeah, the 'good guy with a gun' fantasy... probably like .025% percent of all gun related homicides, if that

I fired about a dozen rounds from my bro-in-law's weapons, a decade ago in a sandpit up in his secluded Northern Ontario campsite...was happy enough to eventually puncture a Coors can one time,but didn't really see the appeal otherwise

exactly. the whole idea of using lethal force in one's home was always meant to be a situation where someone broke in and you were in mortal danger - someone with a deadly weapon trained on you with a clear intent to kill, whether verbal or implied, or an actual physical altercation which threatened to end your life if you lost it.

the situations where people are willing to accept lethal force stems from a carceral mentality. accepting the State as an avenging angel in the form of capital punishment (which now, has extended to Florida passing bills allowing the state to execute people who commit sex crimes against children - which as heinous as those crime are, exceeds an eye for an eye). accepting that people that commit a crime, regardless of severity, in the presence of someone with a gun should be gunned down. accepting that someone who raises their voice in public in a manner deemed disagreeable might progress to violence and thus you can snuff them out with REAL ACTUAL VIOLENCE.

obviously racism is most of the impetus behind this (and Lib hate) but it's like as a kid of the 80s I remember cartoons telling me I couldn't take the law into my own hands.

my dad shot guns as a kid, he used to tell me he couldn't hear right for a week after shooting his handgun without earplugs one time.

could have updated any number of threads but jfc, this piece in the Times magazine really brings it home. read here

All the hardest stuff is just alluded to through the reactions of the responders more than directly described and it's still pretty harrowing.

Great job, Davie police:

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/actions-of-gunman-instacart-delivery-driver-justified-in-davie-shooting-incident-police/3019765

I only know one person who a.) owns a gun and b.) had an actual home invasion. Apparently the guy who owned his house before him was a drug dealer (in a suburban subdivision, no less), and some guys who were looking for him broke in one night. Hearing the noise, the guy I know came downstairs with his gun out. Then the burglars saw him and shot him and he almost died. End of story. (The cops eventually caught the guys, but the gun was useless in the scenario.)

i dunno it sounds like it was pretty useful in getting him shot. jeez what a story

Seeing "Each party appeared justified" in the lede of that Instacart story had me thinking someone in the delivery vehicle had returned fire or something, but they literally just went to the wrong house and then hit a rock in the yard (???) while trying to reverse out of the driveway with the homeowner grabbing at the car and brandishing his weapon, which presumably terrified the shit out of them, even before he started trying to shoot out their tires like a fucking NPC in a Grand Theft Auto game

NEW: A Texas man firing an AR-15 in his front yard killed five people in a neighboring home after they asked him to stop shooting because a baby was sleeping. Police said all were shot execution-style; the youngest victim was 8-years-old. #txlege https://t.co/8UsDJ56RfT

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) April 29, 2023

jeeeesus

holy shit

that is the shit of nightmares, why I frantically tell one of my close friends to avoid engaging other psychotic people in situations where it's best avoided (i.e. road rage)

and yet...what could this family have done, just allowed it to continue?

…

Terrible

It just hit me that there was a baby sleeping in the house and the youngest victim was 8 years old. I guess the only worse thought would be the alternative.

somehow even scarier than your standard mass shooting, knowing he wasn't even planning it, it was merely a guy with a gun being told he couldn't do something

I always wonder how much alcohol plays a role in these things, seems like it’s rarely mentioned but pretty likely to be involved

Enough is enough. There is no reason for citizens to own guns like this.

K3vin I can confidently assure you that have consumed quite a lot of alcohol. As much as, if not more than, most extant humans.

But for some reason I have not shot anybody. Including myself. Maybe the reason is that I don't have a fucking arsenal of lethal weapons in my house? Just guessing here. Perhaps there is another reason.

that’s good…

Alcohol can play a role in violence but to YMP's point it should be easier in society to stop people from possessing deadly weapons than to stop them from drinking

I definitely can remember a time or two where I was more aggressive when intoxicated.

I am not violent and haven't been in a fight since high school but the few times it almost happened alcohol was involved at an egregious level.

Though one could argue one is equally likely to just become disoriented

I am, I think, on record as unabashedly loving both booze and weed. There is an approximately 100% chance that my bloodstream will be contaminated in one way or another this very evening.

Why do I keep not killing anybody? Oh, that's right, because I don't think it's necessary for me (or, indeed, most normal humans) to have deadly weaponry sitting about the house.

Even in the end-times Mad Max apocalypse scenarios some folks have postulated upthread, I'd probably rather be a casualty than a participant.

I don't think anyone has suggested that alcohol is the cause of violent behavior, YMP. But alcohol definitely can erase inhibitions and bring buried anger to the surface. Even then, I think we all understand that in the absence of a loaded firearm, it would be impossible to express that inchoate rage by shooting people.

yep

There are plenty of people who own firearms that get wasted, and don't ... you know