Such a tragedy, such a disaster, such a needless loss of young life. 

Yet all over Twitter you've got people not even wanting to talk about gun control or ways to prevent the next disaster. Everyone is just getting defensive about holding onto their weapons.

How do you even begin a dialogue so that we're not back here in a months time going in the exact same circle?

I have long since given up hope for change. We are not even allowed to discuss it. By time I make this post another shooting has probably pushed the Florida one to yesterday's news. This is just a way of life in America now. Only way to avoid this is to move.

The right has quickly jumped to the “Just another wacko, don’t talk about gun control” defense while slashing mental health care support around the country. They blame the thing they drastically underfund, probably because it becomes a good defense in these situations.

I haven’t read much about this one, I have a really hard time reading about them anymore because I want to be naive about the possibilities... but how did the kid get the gun(s)?

Feb 16, 2018 1:38:27 GMT mikec said:

The right has quickly jumped to the “Just another wacko, don’t talk about gun control” defense while slashing mental health care support around the country. They blame the thing they drastically underfund, probably because it becomes a good defense in these situations.

I haven’t read much about this one, I have a really hard time reading about them anymore because I want to be naive about the possibilities... but how did the kid get the gun(s)?

He legally purchased it. He's 19 and probably had no crimes on his record. Even though people had reported him twice to the FBI, they disregarded it or didn't bother to report it to local law enforcement agencies.

Guns aren’t going anywhere, so a solution that doesn’t involve gun control is the only option. It’s almost been 20 years since Columbine and it’s the same debate.

Feb 16, 2018 3:31:03 GMT System said:

Guns aren’t going anywhere, so a solution that doesn’t involve gun control is the only option. It’s almost been 20 years since Columbine and it’s the same debate.

There is no solution that doesn’t involve gun control, short of pumping trillions of dollars into fortifying every public school in the country.

Feb 16, 2018 3:47:00 GMT mikec said:

Feb 16, 2018 3:31:03 GMT System said:

Guns aren’t going anywhere, so a solution that doesn’t involve gun control is the only option. It’s almost been 20 years since Columbine and it’s the same debate.

There is no solution that doesn’t involve gun control, short of pumping trillions of dollars into fortifying every public school in the country.

I disagree, I know, shocker.  Gun culture is the problem not exactly guns.  The notion that guns are the answer for everything needs to be changed and addressed.

The fact that the kid was caught helps greatly.  Seeing the person go through crime and punishment is vital to showing that there is no easy way out and helping people not choose this path.  See Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point for the long version of this.

Bringing Father's back into the mainstream household.  The correlation of poor male role models and lack of fathers in boys lives and shooters both spree and in the urban community is too strong to deny.   It is time to stop glorifying the single mother.

Also, I would love for the leaders in innovation, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Apple etc to design a more elegant nonlethal weapon to replace guns as the go to weapon.

To throw your hands up and just say gun control or bust is rubbish.  It is also rubbish to only have an emotional response to the ills of gun culture once there is a mass shooting.  Everyday shootings are indicative of the problem that shooting someone is just too easy of a choice.  Valuing life changes that.  Seeing the repercussions of choice changes that behavior.  

Turning our schools into police zones is crap too.

When your solution is inventing a less lethal gun, making dad’s be parents, and changing the culture of gun enthusiasts, I suppose I was trying to answer the question realistically. If we’re able to dream up any and every solution possible I’ll just go meds for everyone to sedates us, getting rid of all violent video games and tv shoes, or homeschool for all.

And there have been 18 shootings in schools over the past 45 days in this country, an emotional response to only school shootings would create more than enough movement towards something.

And I don’t know of any empirical evidence to suggest that highly publicized trials and acknowledgement of punishment has ever served as much of a deterrent to mass murderers, but we can hope.

I also think militarized schools are crap, it was sarcasm.

Here. We. Go. Again.

The death of innocent people is outweighed by the apparent right to buy, own, have access to these weapons. As families mourn the loss of loved ones, right-wing commentators will prove just how insensitive they are yet again in protecting this dead-shit, out of date ideology. Drop the bullshit, people are dead yet again. Whether it's lunacy, mental health, domestic terrorism or good old fashion criminal violence.. the one constant, guns.

You've got a problem America. An addiction that's hurting a lot of people, and from all side of politics, the first step is collectively admitting it.

I hate guns. It's only a matter of when not if some wacko goes off somewhere around here where I live, a movie theater, starbucks, some restaurant, a school, it's going to happen sooner or later and it's always on the back of my mind whenever I'm out in public and always has been ever since Dimebag got killed(that shit rattled me to the core). I just hope nobody in my family gets caught in the crossfire. They need to start putting bullet proof vests on those school supply lists. 

This is a random story that is on topic but not.

I work in an employment office, where people might look for jobs, go to get welfare information, take resume class, or file for unemployment. Unemployment is exclusively a computer thing and I live in a part of the world where people aren’t great with tech.

So one day I help three ladies, two in their 40’s and one in her 60’s file their claims because they’re having a difficult time getting through it. The 40 year old ladies get through it and start telling me about their job loss. Since I hear about job loss a lot I’m listening but not necessarily absorbing it, trying to think of some suggestions. The sixty year old lady gets up in a huff and says “And they wonder why people shoot up public places!” and walks off. Thank goodness this was a sixth year old lady because if it had been a 30 year old guy we would have been having words. It only later dawned on me the other two ladies lost their job at the only live in mental health facility in a forty mile radius and the elder lady was bemoaning the poor state of mental health care.

We’ve had active shooter training in my office and I try to be pretty naive about why we would need it.

Since the emotional responses have been working swimmingly since Columbine or Sandyhook I will keep investing in those. And I don't know of any empirical evidence that shows that gun controls work but we can hope.


Smaller schools and class sizes would be a nice dream too.

Feb 16, 2018 12:05:54 GMT mikec said:

We’ve had active shooter training in my office and I try to be pretty naive about why we would need it.

And it doesn't even help anyway. They had teachers from this school on CNN saying they could not have been more prepared if they tried, and yet 17 people are still dead.

This school has lock down drills all the time. Everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do when gunshots started ringing out. Drills are so commonplace at this school I was reading comments on reddit and twitter from students that said their first reaction was they decided to do a drill by firing blanks. Their first thought wasn't even "oh shit, someone is shooting people in the hallway."

I saw a comment on Facebook from an American teacher that said they got a text message alert yesterday that someone was spotted near the school pond with a gun and everyone just put their phones away and went back to what they were doing. People are ignoring potential shooting alerts like they ignore the fire alarm (which is a whole other thing that doesn't need to be ranted about in this thread by this fire alarm tech).

There's a simple-but-not-simple answer to all of this: vote out the politicians controlled by gun lobbyists. I know, easier said than done, but it is the best solution to this problem. Too many politicians are influenced by the NRA and other lobbyists, and too many of the people that vote for them look the other way because they believe that guns aren't the problem.

Well they are. Every single country that didn't have gun control, had a tragedy occur, then instituted it saw a drastic decline in gun violence and suicides. That's a fact. People will ignore that fact or dispute it, but it's still a fact and one that America needs to take seriously if anything is going to change.

Ok, let's say we vote out all the politicians supposedly controlled by gun lobbyists. Let's go back a step or two further. Let's look at the NRA who is the common denominator in funding the said lobbyists.

America has a population of 323 Million. 250 million are of voting age. 139 million voters in the last presidential election. 5 million Americans are NRA members. Estimates of 14 million support the NRA, 9 million non-members who claim to be on polls but don't pay to be members. Generally, I would guess all of them are of the voting age. I would generally assume that a good chunk of the NRA shows up to vote in their local elections when it comes to their guns and definitely on the national level if they can. They don't just pay $40/ year for a snazzy duffle bag and magazine subscription. They care and are basically a lobby of people and votes. Dollars or not.

But if you do the math their numbers that you can nearly count 14 million of the 139 million support guns in a measurable effect. 5 million paying and 9 million posers. You can strip away the money. But can you strip away the voting power? Voting gun lovers have numbers.

It seems like the easy answer is to kill the lobbys, the money, and the corruption. But I think it is partially a denial that there is a huge portion of America who loves their guns and the freedom to have them for whatever reason.

Following the money backwards, the anti-gun people could just form a lobby with more to corrupt the senators their way. But they likely wouldn't have the money because they wouldn't have the numbers. The money is in part reflective of their numbers in my opinion. Seems to be rather straight line.

Feb 16, 2018 13:58:36 GMT theend said:

Since the emotional responses have been working swimmingly since Columbine or Sandyhook I will keep investing in those. And I don't know of any empirical evidence that shows that gun controls work but we can hope.


Smaller schools and class sizes would be a nice dream too.

plenty of empirical evidence on gun control practically everywhere else in the industrialized world.

And RT without the drills we don’t know how many would have been killed, so you can’t really say it doesn’t work. It’s not preventative training, it is just supposed to keep the most possible people safe.

Feb 16, 2018 18:03:17 GMT mikec said:

Feb 16, 2018 13:58:36 GMT theend said:

Since the emotional responses have been working swimmingly since Columbine or Sandyhook I will keep investing in those. And I don't know of any empirical evidence that shows that gun controls work but we can hope.


Smaller schools and class sizes would be a nice dream too.

plenty of empirical evidence on gun control practically everywhere else in the industrialized world.

And RT without the drills we don’t know how many would have been killed, so you can’t really say it doesn’t work. It’s not preventative training, it is just supposed to keep the most possible people safe.

Just like you, all I did was state that I didn't know of any    .  Any piece of evidence or research saying gun control works I am sure is debated AF.  I am not saying I agree with the debaters or disagree without any evidence.  Just like you stated, I don't know of any.  But just because you or I don't know of any, doesn't mean jack or whether or not it exists.

and I am sure Gladwell didn't write his book on pure conjecture.

I’ve read the tipping point and am not actively convinced that he solved the reason for NYC’s crime rate drop and there are several people including research done by NYU and the Freakanomics Guy to suggest he’s wrong in the book, and I don’t think that the Broken Windows theory is particularly applicable mass shootings anyway.

I agree, obviously many factors contributed and I am a fan Freakanomics too. But I wasn't looking at the Broken Windows theory. I was looking more at I believe the end of the book and how he mentioned disrupting the message and agenda of the kids copying each other. I think it was like the suicide and smoking end of the book. And how ideas like the suicides stick in Micronesia. And that kids not just dying but being punished could be a way to break the cycle. I don't think it was having to do with his threshold psychology bit, I think that comes different writing he has done. Anyhow.

Now I wish I could directly piece it together and link the right parts.

My favorite debate look at the efficacy of gun control centers around the Saturday Night Special. A type of gun that was to be banned and how much that helped or didn't help with gun violence.

It is one thing to cry about gun control. But it is a different thing to come up with a way to make it work.

" There's nothing to be done " said The United States, the only western country in which this regularly happens. 

Feb 17, 2018 6:53:34 GMT NATH45 said:

" There's nothing to be done " said The United States, the only western country in which this regularly happens. 

But this is true. Unless you are willing to change your entire culture there is nothing to be done.

This is not a gun control issue, this is not a mental health issue. This is an American people idealogy issue. The Americans psyche is warped.

'the American dream' causes people to fight each other in a struggle to achieve. Everyone is out for themselves. The fact that universal healthcare is such a preposterous idea is emblematic of how little you care for each other. Your American anthem is a war anthem, and every sporting event you all gather and sing about how great it is your country kills people. It is completely normalized that your country is the one going around unnecessarily inserting itself into other countries business. Your country is one of few modern countries where it is legal to kill someone just because they are on your property. And the right to bear arms thing, holy shit y'all are nuts.

These people that do these shootings are only abnormal when you compare them to normal people around the world. They are completely normal people relative to the culture of America.

Waiting for some FBI firings to rain down.
Someone seriously dropped the ball.

Feb 18, 2018 0:15:03 GMT Mistress said:

Waiting for some FBI firings to rain down.
Someone seriously dropped the ball.

Trivia point I would love to know is how many warnings like this do they get.

Feb 18, 2018 0:47:48 GMT theend said:

Feb 18, 2018 0:15:03 GMT Mistress said:

Waiting for some FBI firings to rain down.
Someone seriously dropped the ball.

Trivia point I would love to know is how many warnings like this do they get.

Good question...

Ahh, a scapegoat. That'll fix it.

Who said anything about a scapegoat. The FBI's job is to investigate. It's in their name. No one investigated and 17 people died...

Sounds almost, exactly, like a direct link to this tragedy.

The shooter has been caught...now it's time to find out who dropped the ball...

I reckon there is no scapegoat here. The kid did it. He was made efficient with an easy to use popular weapon. That's about it.

Preventative measures?

Well there is one thing you can do...

So much for, "if you see something, say something"
Lot of good it did this time...

I'd have the heads of every person in the office where that guy from Mississippi called in to report the message. EVERYONE working in that office would be immediately fired, blacklisted from ever having anything remotely resembling a law enforcement job including security and night watchman jobs. No severance package, nothing. And if they bitched about it, I'd charged them with 17 counts of accessory to murder. 17 people died because somebody didn't take information seriously when it was reported to them with ALL law enforcement agencies. I have no tolerance for those agents, NONE.

Or, address the real issue. The one thing every shooting has in common.