• PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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    2 years ago

    So your objection is that they call a mass shooting a mass shooting? What magic number would you like them to use?

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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      2 years ago

      No, my objection is they call normal shootings mass shootings with the agenda of making and keeping people scared.

        • 🤘🐺🤘@monero.town
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          2 years ago

          You just made me realize how much I’d love to live in a country where there was no such thing as a “normal shooting”.

          Gun culture in America is absolutely fucked.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
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          2 years ago

          They’re so goddamn brain rotted that they don’t even realize how completely fucked that is.

          • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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            2 years ago

            The “normal” number of people getting shot is 0.

            They want you to sweep gun violence under the rug. You don’t need to ask why, it’s because gun sales bring in millions in profits for the gun-lobby and the Republicans they purchase.

              • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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                2 years ago

                I didn’t claim the number could be 0, I claimed the acceptable number is 0.

                Following every one of those shootings you linked, people demanded to know how it happened. Why did they have a gun? Was there warning signs that were missed? Was anybody negligent? How can we stop it from happening again and limiting the damage if it does?

                That is the reaction of a society that finds any number above 0 unacceptable. They treat mass shootings as a failure of the system.

                Meanwhile in America, they don’t bother to ask those questions.

                They had a gun because it’s trivial to get your hands on semi-automatic rifles and handguns, even if you can’t pass a background check, because there are millions of unsecured weapons and no universal background checks.

                The police and politicians are deliberately negligent, staunchly opposing red flag laws despite most mass shooters having multiple red flags.

                No effort is made to prevent it happening again, because the murder of 20 children is shrugged off as some kind of inevitability, no more preventable than an earthquake or tornado – much the same as you’re doing right now.

                Limiting the damage isn’t just staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, many of them fully support making more dangerous weaponry available.

                These are not the actions of people who find all gun violence unacceptable and the only reason the Ulvade police are criticized and the Newtown police are given a pass is because the Ulvade police didn’t bother to pretend they cared.

                • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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                  2 years ago

                  To be clear, I’m not arguing against sensible legislation, there are many things that can and should be done starting with an actual analysis if what could or should have prevented any specific shooting, once you realize that “banning guns” is off the table thanks to the second amendment.

                  An example I like to cite is the guy who shot up Michigan State. He had previously been arrested on a felony gun charge, was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, did his time, did his probation, had a clean background check, bought guns and shot up the school.

                  Now, we already prevent felons from owning guns. Maybe, just maybe, if someone is arrested on a felony gun charge, that is something that should not be allowed to be pled down to a misdemeanor? Ya think?

                  Alternately, since we block felons from owning guns, as well as domestic abusers, and people charged with crimes that can land them in prison for more than a year, how about we block people with ANY gun charge from owning a gun? Felony OR misdemeanor? They’ve already proven they can’t be trusted with a gun.

                  These are the sorts of conversations we need to have but aren’t having because people get so caught up in knee jerk actions that can’t be taken.

                  I remember years ago the call was for “common sense gun reform!” and the action was “Did you know, people on the no-fly list can buy guns? How is that common sense??!??” Obama was making that call.

                  To which my reaction was “How many of these shooters were on the no-fly list? Oh, right, NONE of them? Good jorb!”

                  And there’s no set process for adding or removing people from the no fly list and it, itself, appears to be non-sensical:

                  https://www.aclu.org/documents/statement-david-c-nelson

                  • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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                    2 years ago

                    I’m sure that reply was fascinating but you’ve already revealed that you’re full of shit, so I’m not going to read it.

      • zaph@sh.itjust.works
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        2 years ago

        So you’ll only care about children dying in school when the numbers go up even higher than they already are?

        • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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          2 years ago

          No, a shooting at a school would most likely be a mass shooting, unless it were something like a gang shooting, or a robbery, or some fight that got out of control.

          I’m talking about the Gun Violence Archive posting up stories like this:

          https://www.koin.com/local/clark-county/vancouver-murder-suicide-suspect-victims-identified-by-clark-county-authorities/

          Which, regardless of how many people died, is a murder/suicide, not a mass shooting. The general public was not at risk, the killings weren’t random, and did not happen in a public space. In fact, based on the early reporting, may not have even been a shooting.

          • zaph@sh.itjust.works
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            2 years ago

            There is no widely-accepted definition of “mass shooting” and different organizations tracking such incidents use different definitions. Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare and sometimes exclude instances of gang violence, armed robberies, familicides and terrorism.

            Maybe it has something to do with it not being any kind of official term and your panties are twisted over how the media writes them up ignoring the pain and suffering from others and building your strawman off semantics?

            • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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              2 years ago

              It’s not that the media writes it up in such sensationalist terms, “if it bleeds, it leads” has been journalism 101 since… well since forever.

              My beef is the unquestioning repetition. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it:

              https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/campus-shooting-2

              “nearly a thousand mass shootings to have taken place since the Newtown shooting in 2009”

              Newtown is the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting. So when they conflate those two things in the same sentence they want you to believe that there have been nearly 1000 shootings as horrific, deadly, senseless and random as the one that claimed the lives of 20 six and seven year olds, and that is absolutely, patently, false.

              • zaph@sh.itjust.works
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                2 years ago

                Why are you like this? So since every mass shooting isn’t worse than the worst one they don’t matter? Stop making up excuses. I’m don’t with you.

          • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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            2 years ago

            You have no idea how badly you’ve outed yourself as living in a little bubble where you think it will never happen to you, so you don’t care.

            Because you’ll never be in a relationship with a domestic abuser that executes a house full of people will you? You’re the gun owning male, so you get to decide who around you lives or dies.

            4 innocent people were killed – a number that is much more difficult to achieve without a gun – but you don’t want them counted because they knew the gun owner.

            You’ve let the gun lobby turn you into a fucking sociopath.

          • prole@sh.itjust.works
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            2 years ago

            I don’t really understand why it fucking matters. It is literally the number one cause of death among young people in this country. This happens nowhere else in the modern world. It’s unacceptable.

            Stop trying to make the conversation about semantics

            • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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              2 years ago

              It matters because the Gun Violence Archive and the uncritical mass media are inflating the statistic to make people scared so they can push an agenda.

              When you read a headline talking about the UNLV shooting and they go “more mass shootings than days in the year!” they are NOT talking about a random nut with a gun showing up in a public place and killing random people like the UNLV shooter.

              It’s disingenuous to conflate the two together, and I’d argue, disrespectful of the victims of actual mass shootings.

              • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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                2 years ago

                It matters because the Gun Violence Archive and the uncritical mass media are inflating the statistic to make people scared so they can push an agenda

                Bullshit. You’re attacking it because it’s counter to your agenda.

                Republicans, right-wing media, the gun lobby and the pro-gun community routinely fearmonger as a way to boost their own profits and power.

                Not only do you not care when they do it, you’ve enthusiastically put yourself and your own family in more danger because of it.

                You’re hopelessly compromised and your thoughts about how gun violence statistics are about as trustworthy as a cops views on police brutality statistics.

      • Nudding@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        You don’t think the nra telling people to be scared and that they need a gun to feel safe is more of the issue?

        • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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          2 years ago

          Not really, because the vast, vast, number of gun owners don’t use them.

          Let me give you some perspective…

          We don’t REALLY know, but the best estimate is there are around 474 MILLION guns in the United States.

          https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total/

          In 2021, 48,830 people died from gun injuries.

          https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/

          54% of those were suicides. So 22,462 murders or accidents.

          Gun laws are never going to prevent suicides, only national mental health care can do that. So looking at the murders and accidents:

          22,462 / 474,000,000? 0.0000473878

          That’s not a crisis, it’s a rounding error. And, yes, each one of those 22,000 deaths individually is a tragedy, but that also means 473,978,000 guns sat around collecting dust.

          • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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            2 years ago

            but that also means 473,978,000 guns sat around collecting dust.

            Nah, many were used for hunting, self defense that didn’t lead to a death, sport shooting, target practice… Etc… Likely orders of magnitude higher than the amount used to commit murders.

          • zaph@sh.itjust.works
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            2 years ago

            And, yes, each one of those 22,000 deaths individually is a tragedy, but that also means 473,978,000 guns sat around collecting dust

            So if a gun isn’t being used to kill someone it is collecng dust?

            • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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              2 years ago

              Not necessarily, it could be used for hunting, or target practice, but any gun that isn’t actively being used is, yeah, kind of just sitting around somewhere.

          • Nudding@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            In 2021, 48,830 people died from gun injuries.

            Jesus christ… Let’s compare to other developed nations, wanna do per capita or total?

                • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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                  2 years ago

                  Oh, I absolutely get it, what folks outside the US don’t get is the 2nd amendment isn’t going anywhere.

                  To repeal it, you first have to get 290 votes in the House, which is largely insurmountable. It took George Santos to get that many Congressmen to agree on something.

                  Then you need 67 votes in the Senate, the body that can’t get past 60 to disable a filibuster.

                  Assuming, miracle of miracles, that happens, then you need ratification by 38 states.

                  Biden only won 25, and of those only 19 have Democratic statehouses. You’d need 19 red states to be on board with giving up guns, assuming you didn’t lose any blue states.

                  So, yeah, Good Luck!

                  • zaph@sh.itjust.works
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                    2 years ago

                    You’ve looped back around to not getting it. Biden isn’t trying to get rid of the second ammendment but keep being scared of your own shadow.

                  • Nudding@lemmy.world
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                    2 years ago

                    So, yeah, Good Luck!

                    My advice to the kids in tomorrow’s mass shooting I guess 🤷

              • Nudding@lemmy.world
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                2 years ago

                You’re right, you guys have the right to shoot yourselves and each other. Carry on.