Another Fucking Mass Shooting At US School

[Gospel]

Ok, let's look at that. Many gang-related shootings are in public. And this church shooter was deliberately targeting the school, so it was not indiscriminate. So why is this a legitimate "mass shooting" and, say, shooting up a party full of teens in Douglasville is not?

If the school itself had been the target, arson or vandalism might have made sense. But that wasn’t the case, the shooter wasn’t attacking a building, they were attacking the people inside. Even if someone had an issue with the institution, the act was indiscriminate: the students and staff are individuals who merely attend the school, not embodiments of it. And they weren’t treated as individuals. The shooter didn’t single anyone out; he opened fire on multiple people without distinction. That’s the key difference between gang violence that sometimes leaves multiple casualties and a mass shooting like Pulse or Sandy Hook, where the motive is to kill as many random people as possible. The outcomes may look similar, lives lost, families shattered, communities devastated, but the motives and intent are not the same. Gang-related shootings occur more often and have claimed way too many bystanders, but when the purpose is indiscriminate mass killing, the motive changes everything, especially when it comes to how we as a society discuss how to address the root causes.

I hate to say it, but if gang members set out with the goal of killing as many people as possible on site during a shootout, the body count would be far higher than what we currently see. WAY HIGHER.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

These events are about anger, rage at the world and wanting to make a point, leave the world with a scar they made. In a civilized world, we'd tend to want to restrict their access to weapons. Your solution is more like you want to rewrite history and pretend it didn't happen so that hopefully we don't have to pretend it didn't happen in the future.

Most shooters are of an age to have access to cars.

If they see mass shootings barely get a mention they'll see that it still leaves them an unknown, thus removes most of the reason for it.

The main reason is anger and rage, isolation. Desire to no longer live. All of that still exists. It'll be hard to kill off the media seeing that the death of children is considered very bad and results in news.

It won't remove the reason for suicide, but if you deny them the ability to leave a mark via mass shooting they'll be less likely to take that route.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That's not how it works. Remember, guns are a means, not an end. Remove guns, some of those murders will still happen, just by other means. With domestics the murderer generally has the access and the strength to kill by other means. Why would you not expect most of it to be displaced?

It's like putting a bank door on your front door while leaving the windows unprotected.

For the bolded part, could you at least consult your crystal ball and show us a screenshot of the ‘evidence’? Every time, your pulled-from-thin-air opinions derail the conversation away from actual data and into your unfounded premonitions and feel-good guesses the discussion goes nowhere.

I can't imagine how what you are pointing to is remotely a matter of dispute. Reality reacts to changes, you can't just remove one path and assume everyone who took that path will simply stop. Does the city grind to a halt when one street is closed? Removing the easiest path will stop some people, it will never stop all of them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I hate to say it, but if gang members set out with the goal of killing as many people as possible on site during a shootout, the body count would be far higher than what we currently see. WAY HIGHER.

While I agree with your general point you're making a mistake here--even if shooting others was a goal things would play out about how they do because in a shootout the threat is from the other side, they're going to be shooting at the people shooting at them. Even if shooting bystanders is a secondary objective 100% of their focus is going to be on the primary objective so long as a threat exists.

 

[bilby]

Does the city grind to a halt when one street is closed?

Yup. Been there, done that, sat in the queue of three hundred buses.