Another Fucking Mass Shooting At US School

[bigfield]

It looks like you're going to need a few of these school massacres, every year for a few years, for enough people to decide that children's lives are more important than easy access to guns.

 

[Elixir]

It looks like you're going to need a few of these school massacres, every year for a few years, for enough people to decide that children's lives are more important than easy access to guns.

Looks to me like that will happen in an election cycle following the four year period during which MOST conservotards lose their children to mass murderers.
As long as grieving parents are in the minority nothing is likely to change.

 

[marc]

Well in all other areas of life it has seemed that conservatives only start to care when it affects them. (gay family members, maternity leave, etc.) So things will change once every conservative has lost family members to school shootings. The red states are helping this along by relaxing their gun regulations.

 

[Ford]

Well in all other areas of life it has seemed that conservatives only start to care when it affects them. (gay family members, maternity leave, etc.) So things will change once every conservative has lost family members to school shootings.

So they'll only care when a gunman shoots up a charter/private/parochial school.

Sounds about white.

 

[Swammerdami]

The liars are already coming out of the woodwork. A photograph is making the rounds on Truth Social and other social media showing the shooter to be a transsexual! Another social media lie is the claim that ABC News altered a photograph of the shooter to make him appear more Caucasian.

All that may not be true, but what is true (as I have seen it myself) the CNN was very interested in speculating about the shooter being a "white supremacist" because the school was mostly hispanic. After the identity of the shooter was revealed as being "Salvador Ramos" they immediately lost all interest in the identity of the shooter.

What you write MIGHT be true (just as you seem ready to concede that the shooter MAY not have been a transsexual) but to compare the minor stupidities of CNN with the concerted bullshit consistently peddled by Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump et al, would be like standing in the middle of a pig farm and complaining about someone's after-shave. CNN and MSNBC may spin some stories, but FoxNews is a 24-hour non-stop Bullshit Machine.

But it's easy to agree that in America the right-wing has no monopoly on stupidity. I check Google News to get a quick idea of the headlines but for any details, even about American stories, I go to foreign sources like Reuters or Al-Jazeera.

Did CNN or any of the other allegedly anti-police main-stream media publish an opinion as frank as this one ?

Turns out, tough Texans in Stetsons aren't so tough.
. . .
If only one of the 19 armed police who apparently waited for 78 minutes for a key to charge into the classroom where 19 children were being dismembered by bullets had had even a speck of the steel of two unarmed teachers, then perhaps some of those children would be alive.

But they did not. Instead, 19 armed police loitered in a hallway until they were convinced the killing was over, that all the children were dead before they finally broke into the classroom.

That was not a "wrong decision". It was cowardice.

The tough guys in Stetsons lied, as well. At first they said they stood firm. They shot back while they were being shot at. That's what "heroes" do: Face the danger in spite of the danger. . . . Liars and cowards.
. . . It is so disgraceful that it seems surreal. Beyond belief or comprehension. So much so that the mind, indeed, the body, reverberate with fury and questions. How could they stand outside and listen to what was happening to children inside that classroom and do nothing? Why did they stand outside and listen to what was happening to children inside that classroom and do nothing? Shame on them.

The shame of their cowardice can never be erased or forgotten. It will follow those 19 police officers like a long shadow in the late day Texas sun. From when they wake until they sleep. In their nightmares, too. Always.

In the midst of the horror some of the fourth graders summoned, remarkably, the will and the courage to call 911. Send the police. Please. Now. To save us.

. . . One tough guy in a Stetson admitted on TV that the 19 police officers were afraid. Paralysed by fear. That they allowed 19 children and two teachers to be murdered to save themselves.

. . . But we know that police across America prefer to kill innocent people a lot of Black people who are unarmed. They break down doors all the time, without warning or a warrant and start firing. During the day. At night. It doesn't matter. Bullets and battering rams first. Questions if any later.

They shoot Black people in their homes. They shoot Black people in their bedrooms. They shoot Black people in their cars. They shoot Black people on the street. They shoot Black people in the back.

. . . All this in a state led by a slick Republican governor who prides himself on letting disturbed teenagers buy weapons and bullets designed not only to kill lots of people, including children, fast, but to disfigure their face and body, sometimes beyond recognition.

. . . Like the two repellant Republican senators from Texas, he doesn't "represent" the "state," but the NRA and profiteering death merchants who prefer the "right" to sell and "bear arms" over the right of fourth graders to go and come back from school to their families whole.

If the "libtard" "lame-stream" media didn't use diction like this, I say What good are they?

We permit cops to kill unarmed blacks because "they're bravely putting their lives at risk." I've previously posted stats to prove that policing is nowhere on the list of most dangerous professions. The next time someone posts anything about U.S. police that is not contemptuous I will ask them about Uvalde.

What is definitely irresponsible is far left politicians like AOC and Tiffany Caban using this tragedy to push their "defund the police" agenda (see tweets posted upthread by lpetrich)

So your take-away from this tragedy is to hit on AOC? Got it.

 

[Elixir]

What you write MIGHT be true (just as you seem ready to concede that the shooter MAY not have been a transsexual) but to compare the minor stupidities of CNN with the concerted bullshit consistently peddled by Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump et al, would be like standing in the middle of a pig farm and complaining about someone's after-shave.

That’s what conservotards do!
When they cause a train wreck, they point to someone else’s fender bender.

 

[ZiprHead]

It's straight forward. Judd believes guns aren't the problem it's people. I disagree with him on that. It's both people and guns in my opinion. Guns are designed to kill. The act of killing is something that needs to be done in some situations and guns make the job easier (aka level the battle field). Guns also make the job easier for people who chose to misuse them. I'd prefer there to be no guns but that is a pipe dream so I prefer we adopt laws like comparable (term used loosely) countries that don't have issues with gun violence like America does.

You are correct that it is both guns and people. Guns are the expression of hatred, anger etc. They do not cause it. Reduce the amount of guns and the body count will drop accordingly. You haven't solved the hatred, anger issue but it is a start.

Looking from Australia I am always astounded at how much you Yanks hate each other. I cannot understand it.
Why do you shoot first and ask questions later?
Why is a gun the first response for so many of you?

That's because there is a gun. It's so easy to get and use.

 

[laughing dog]

How did the "good guy with a gun" work out this time?

The good guys with a gun got the perp eventually. But I agree the police were too hesitant to act. There should certainly be consequences to those responsible.

What is definitely irresponsible is far left politicians like AOC and Tiffany Caban using this tragedy to push their "defund the police" agenda (see tweets posted upthread by lpetrich)

I can think of at least 19 police officers who ought to be defunded.

 

[Copernicus]

It's straight forward. Judd believes guns aren't the problem it's people. I disagree with him on that. It's both people and guns in my opinion. Guns are designed to kill. The act of killing is something that needs to be done in some situations and guns make the job easier (aka level the battle field). Guns also make the job easier for people who chose to misuse them. I'd prefer there to be no guns but that is a pipe dream so I prefer we adopt laws like comparable (term used loosely) countries that don't have issues with gun violence like America does.

You are correct that it is both guns and people. Guns are the expression of hatred, anger etc. They do not cause it. Reduce the amount of guns and the body count will drop accordingly. You haven't solved the hatred, anger issue but it is a start.

Looking from Australia I am always astounded at how much you Yanks hate each other. I cannot understand it.
Why do you shoot first and ask questions later?
Why is a gun the first response for so many of you?

That's because there is a gun. It's so easy to get and use.

If only the  gun laws in Australia were changed to guarantee gun ownership as a sacred, untouchable right, Tigers would be in a position to see how much his Aussies hate each other and come to finally understand it. Repealing the 1996  National Firearms Agreement would give us some idea of whether the implementation of that law really did work the way people seem to think it did.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Looking from Australia I am always astounded at how much you Yanks hate each other. I cannot understand it.
Why do you shoot first and ask questions later?
Why is a gun the first response for so many of you?

That's not it. What's "it" is money. Those dead kids don't contribute to the political coffers of Abbott or Gonzalez. But the NRA does, to the tune of millions. So who's more important? It sounds overly simplistic but just follow the money.

 

[lpetrich]

Before long we'll be hearing that the massacre was a "false flag" operation, or didn't happen at all.

How is that different than left wingers claiming "false flag" whenever #BLMers or Antifa torch a building?
Pox on both extremes!

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Derec, than are dreamt of in Fox News. Have any known BLM activists been caught setting fires? Known Antifa activists?

I think that activists who organize demonstrations should give some thought to training some of their number in vigilante tactics to combat the sorts of troublemakers who seem to tag along to some of their demonstrations. Like wearing body armor and helmets and carrying baseball bats.

How did the "good guy with a gun" work out this time?

The good guys with a gun got the perp eventually. But I agree the police were too hesitant to act. There should certainly be consequences to those responsible.

Right-wingers have done a lot to protect cops from liability for their actions - Qualified Immunity and stuff like that - and it's now coming back to bite them.

 

[lpetrich]

Police Have No Duty to Protect the Public - The American Prospect

"Though often unsaid in police reform debates, numerous court precedents have established that cops aren’t obligated to act in the interests of citizens."

In 2005, Jessica Gonzales sued Castle Rock, Colorado police for failing to arrest her husband, who had violated a protective order, resulting in the murder of her three children. Her case went to the U.S. Supreme Court in The Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, where she lost because even though the order required arresting her husband upon violation, then-Justice Antonin Scalia successfully argued that “a well-established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes.”

This case builds upon Supreme Court precedent in Deshaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989). In that case, a young boy was repeatedly abused at the hands of his father, something that county Social Services was aware of, but made no effort to remove the child. His mother sued once the four-year old entered a vegetative state, and the Court ruled that that the state did not have a special obligation to protect a citizen against harms it did not create.

Based on these precedents, Lozito was told in the New York City case that “no direct promises of protection were made” to him, and therefore he could not sue the police for failing to come to his aid. In other words, the police do not have to act if someone is actively being harmed, they do not have to arrest someone who has violated orders, and they do not have any obligation to protect you from others.

Those negligent Uvalde cops can easily hide behind such court rulings.

 

[Swammerdami]

Police Have No Duty to Protect the Public - The American Prospect

"Though often unsaid in police reform debates, numerous court precedents have established that cops aren’t obligated to act in the interests of citizens."

Interesting.

Instead of defunding the police, I want to give them more money. Not much money — just enough to replace the motto on their vehicles "To protect and to serve" with "To harass innocent black boys and to stand around jerking off."

 

[Politesse]

To protect and serve certain political interests for certain parties.

 

[Toni]

Looking from Australia I am always astounded at how much you Yanks hate each other. I cannot understand it.
Why do you shoot first and ask questions later?
Why is a gun the first response for so many of you?

That's not it. What's "it" is money. Those dead kids don't contribute to the political coffers of Abbott or Gonzalez. But the NRA does, to the tune of millions. So who's more important? It sounds overly simplistic but just follow the money.

Gun control and abortion are both red meat issues with significant guaranteed fund raising. Not even potential: guaranteed big buck thrown at both parties.

With the bonus of distracting from a lot of other issues which need attention.

 

[Elixir]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The idea that you can completely eliminate guns is dumb. The idea that you need to, in order to eliminate the vast majority of shootings, is even dumber.

If your boat is sinking, bailing out the vast majority of the water is a good idea even if you understand that you can never get rid of it all.

Getting rid of all guns is a strawman. It’s never going to happen, and it doesn’t need to happen.

The problem is that you imagine that getting guns out of society is an even process. In reality, though, you'll be disarming the law abiding but doing little about the criminals. You'll probably reduce mass shootings--but you'll increase other crime because you've deprived people of the ability to protect themselves. Less dramatic but probably more victims.

The problem is that you imagine stuff, so you assume that others are just imagining stuff too.

I am not making a theoretical argument; I am saying what has actually happened in countries where guns became less common due to changes in regulation.

In reality, you end up disarming the criminals. It’s an indirect process, so you find it hard to imagine. But it happens regardless of the failures of your imagination.

By the way, having a gun has almost zero impact on a law abiding person’s ability to defend themselves. So the effect there is almost zero.

Getting rid of the guns does reduce mass shootings--but they're outliers in the first place. The US is not an outlier in crime rates in general--if anything we're below average.

And having a gun is most certainly useful if a bad guy is coming for you. We have a few hundred cases/year where civilians kill attackers. That means there are probably tens of thousands of attacks stopped by armed defenders. (The typical stopped attack is the attacker realizes their target is armed and beats a hasty retreat. Such things generally don't lead to police reports so we don't have a good count.) A few of those are certainly cases where the threat turned out not to be real (for example, when I was growing up there was a case in the news where a bozo forced a car off the road in a road rage incident and then took something off the rifle rack in his truck and came after the car he had run off the road--two people coming back from the range who could shoot straight. Turns out the guy took down a club, not a rifle) but most were serious threats (for example, local case woman wakes up to her stalker ex in her bedroom.)

Self-defense killings always exceed mass shooter deaths.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I agree that America's gun culture, and its fetish for the Second Amendment, are a big part of the problem. America has more privately-owned guns than people; almost half of white male adults own a gun. The demographics may be interesting: White Americans with a college degree are much less likely to own a gun than those without a degree. (For non-whites, the correlation to education disappears.) Republicans are a whopping 2.5 times as likely to own a gun as Democrats!

Note, however, that Republicans tend to be rural and Democrats tend be urban. Guns are much more common in rural areas regardless of party affiliation. While it's probably related beware of confounding factors.

Availability of guns certainly correlates with gun violence. The three states with most guns per capita are Montana, Wyoming and Alaska. The three states with most suicides per capita are Montana, Wyoming and Alaska. (Most successful suicides are by gun. Non-gun suicide attempts often result in survival and second thoughts.) This perfect correlation does not extend to murder: The seven states with highest murder rate are Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee. (Not exactly the list of states where QOPAnon accuses liberals of filling youth with CRT or anti-God anger. )

Strangely, though, states either have a high murder rate or a high suicide rate but almost never both. That suggests that there's some other factor that's more important.

But, as other posters have mentioned, mental illness is another reason that America is dysfunctional compared with other developed countries. By many measures, including suicides and drug-related deaths, the U.S. does worse than other Western democracies. This is due partly to healthcare: in Europe free counseling or treatments are readily available. This is not the case in the U.S. and even some "good" insurance plans may not pay for mental health treatment.

Note that while we are above average we are far below Korea--where guns aren't the factor.

Heston was interviewed in Michael Moore's famous documentary. Asked why he wanted to own a gun, Heston replied "because I can." Asked why Canada had less of a murder problem, Heston referred to U.S.'s "ethnic diversity." Sensing this was a wrong answer, Heston terminated the interview soon after.

I watched a little bit of his "documentary"--very obviously mean to push his viewpoint without much regard for the truth. It didn't take me long to realize there could be nothing of value and turn it off. (And consider the other one I know of the problems--Sicko. He was comparing the US system to what was available to medical tourists in a country that ignores patents. That care was not available to locals. And note the usual risks of medical tourism--while the basic care very well might be at near western levels the backstopping most certainly isn't. They will be nowhere near as able to deal with serious problems that develop as an equivalent US facility.)

 

[Elixir]

An Anecdote is not data.
Correlation is not always causation.
But facts are facts.


The ubiquity of guns correlates very neatly with mass shootings and deaths. So even getting rid of some of them can be expected to reduce mass shootings and deaths.
Also, FAR more gun deaths occur by accident than in mass shootings OR in self defense killings.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The liars are already coming out of the woodwork. A photograph is making the rounds on Truth Social and other social media showing the shooter to be a transsexual! Another social media lie is the claim that ABC News altered a photograph of the shooter to make him appear more Caucasian.

All that may not be true, but what is true (as I have seen it myself) the CNN was very interested in speculating about the shooter being a "white supremacist" because the school was mostly hispanic. After the identity of the shooter was revealed as being "Salvador Ramos" they immediately lost all interest in the identity of the shooter.

Or look at the Korean hair salon attack. It was committed by a black perp, and so the media is downplaying his identity unlike in cases where the perp is white.
One congresswoman (Joyce Beatty) even claimed that the attack was perpetrated by a "white supremacist".
Ohio Democratic rep. blames white supremacy for Dallas Korean hair salon shooting

That MSM and many politicians are interested in blaming everything on whitey is not a conspiracy theory.

Before long we'll be hearing that the massacre was a "false flag" operation, or didn't happen at all.

How is that different than left wingers claiming "false flag" whenever #BLMers or Antifa torch a building?
Pox on both extremes!

Racism gets eyeballs. Thus they will play it up when they can. It's not that they are trying to portray whites as bad, it's that they're trying to find an angle to make their version of the news more attractive. You'll do better if you read your news and don't watch news.