Central Maine Medical Center said staff were “reacting to a mass casualty, mass shooter event” and were coordinating with area hospitals to take in patients.
It’s also like saying cancer is not the only way you can die and pointing to something like syphilis also killing people. Sure they both kill people but one kills way more people and is much less avoidable.
The mass shootings are the symptom of a larger mental health problem. Here in Canada where we have much more gun control we recently memorialized one of our most deadly attacks, The Toronto van attack which killed 11 and wounded 15 (some critically). How is gun control going to help the fact that some people out there want to kill as many lives as possible?
Are you pointing to a single incident from 5 years ago as evidence that non-gun mass murders are common in Canada? Do you think that when gun control is enacted, all the people that would have committed murder via gun would instead commit as much murder using improvised weapons? If so, can you show any data that bears this out?
Even though other methods of murder can be devised, restricting access to the easiest, fastest method is effective in reducing murder.
Canada also has a health care system where mentally ill folks can get help.
Canada is also less population dense and only has roughly 1/10th of the US population.
Even though other methods of murder can be devised, restricting access to the easiest, fastest method is effective in reducing murder.
The per-capita rate while a useful tool is not going to compare the effects of mass shootings. You’re more than likely talking about handguns in this context which are responsible for a lot more deaths overall than AR-style rifles.
Switzerland has lots of guns but not mass shootings, and has a much lower murder rate. Finland similarly has lots of guns but not mass shootings.
The bigger issue is that half of the US government doesn’t want to fund mental health programs, red flag laws, etc. There are some models we could follow other than “ban guns” or “ban assault rifles” … but dealing with rampant mental health issues would help a lot. It’s just a shame the Republicans will parrot “mental health” but then not vote for bills that will actually do anything to improve mental health.
I hate this about lemmy. It looks like youve been banned/deleted/something from the thread. So now all your comments and all replies have disappeared from the conversation.
I think I said this before, but in case I didn’t: I agree that the mental health side of this equation is also critical. That doesn’t change the fact that the gun control side of the equation is a major factor. Also, if you’re going to cherry pick Switzerland stats, then don’t forget to also look at their gun control laws, which are much stronger than the US (and it appears Canada, although I’m less sure there). You seem to want to cherry pick data to show that it’s all mental health and guns aren’t a significant part of the problem. Good luck with that.
I don’t think it was me, but the other person who was acting like a jerk… Which is unfortunate.
I suspect we agree on more than we disagree here, I’m just sick of people who “can’t vote for Democrats because they want to take my guns.”
I also can’t dismiss maybe there are some benefits to having a well armed population.
I don’t expect to ever hit 0, maybe you do. But, I think we should be able to do much better than several public places shot up by someone who’s out of their mind per year. The fastest way towards that to me is effectively universal health care, research, appropriate treatment, and maybe even investment in some new technology/unexplored mitigation strategy.
That’s not the point at all. The point is that there are mentally ill people who want to kill and they’ll find a way. We’ve got a record number of people that are seemingly in this category as of late.
In prior decades mass shootings like this were not issues like they are today, the first AR-15s were available in the late 1950s. You can find “mass shootings” going back into the start of the 20th century, but they’re not the same mass shootings we’re seeing today. They’re much more targeted violence.
Now… It’s “I’m going to kill you because you’re at Walmart(?)”
Keep in mind the US has roughly 10x the population. If we want to do an apples oranges comparison of the two countries … that’s potentially 10 van incidents in the US in place of mass shootings.
But that’s not a fair comparison either because Canada has an accessible health care system.
If your argument is we need to address mental health, I’m not going to argue with you there. But guess which party in the US is described by all four of these bullet points:
gutted our mental health infrastructure
Consistently votes down legislation to fund investment in mental health infrastructure
Consistently opposes any measures to implement Red Flag laws or other attempts to make it harder to own guns
Consistently deflects to mental health being the problem whenever we have more people die
While they are refusing to budge on either of the two middle bullet points, people are just dying.
So I have little sympathy for folks who defend guns with the premise that mental health is the real problem. Fine, let’s say it is, doesn’t matter because you are preventing us as a nation from addressing either of those issues.
I have voted a pretty much straight blue ticket in all elections since 2016. I also have friends that guns are a very important issue for though, and I don’t think the Democratic party is getting anywhere being the “party out to get the guns.”
It’s not really the same… There are people that like guns for a variety of reasons and 99% of them will never take a life. Their only reason for existing isn’t to go on a murderous rampage.
This was the example where I just said “you know what, banning guns isn’t going to fix it”
Another person replied about an attack with a van in Canada.
I think we genuinely need to treat this as a mental health crisis, but like for real. Not the Republican “thoughts and prayers” mental health crisis, but a real thought out use of resources to figure out why so regularly we have people in our society that want to kill a bunch of random people.
We should also do more background checks and close loopholes, even though that wouldn’t have helped here.
It would have helped here. This guy was previously committed for mental health issues. That should have required him to give his guns to a friend or whoever for safe keeping.
I’m guessing you think that mental illness is the root cause and also that you don’t think a dime should go towards a universal healthcare plan that includes caring for the mentally ill.
Actually you are the one work the false equivalency.
You know why your comparison is idiotic? Because it is comparing a mountain (gun violence) to a mole hill (vehicular homicide). If what you said was at all accurate, people would be using those methods significantly more often in other developed countries. Guess what? They don’t. They are used at basically the same rates as here in the US. The major difference is that those countries have much guns per capita.
So again stop pretending like the comparison is even close to a good one or that you have some sort of gotcha.
Considering the same group of people who fights gun control legislation tooth and nail is also very much responsible for the lack of mental health services (and general sorry state of health care) in our country, it sounds to me like you don’t really want to solve the gun problem nor the mental health problem you predictably deflect to.
And yes, I’m assuming you are a Republican. If you aren’t, try not acting like one and folks won’t make that mistake.
R won’t support restrictions on gun ownership because they say the problem is mental health, but they won’t support spending on mental health either. (Most likely because they seem to oppose anything that would actually help people who suffer.)
Reagan undercuts funding on mental health, resulting in the closure of mental health institutions nationwide:
Japan and South Korea, for instances, are certainly not known for their great mental health. Guess what they don’t have? No constant mass shootings, no trucks being used to mow people down, no constant fertilizer bombs.
If I cut my hand I use a bandaid. Guess you just bleed?
There is no single cause or single solution. Calling for one is too say the problem is unsolvable. Gun control is part of the solution if not all of it.
No, you’re absolutely right. As soon as we repeal the 2nd, outlaw and confiscate all the guns, all shootings will immediately stop and never ever happen again. It’s simple really.
There is no single cause or single solution. Calling for one is too say the problem is unsolvable. Gun control is part of the solution if not all of it.
What a stupid fucking argument. Gun violence is a sheer numbers game. The ease of access and use of firearms is a massive problem, and when you combine that with the serious socio-economic/political problems in this country that is how you end up with this on-going violence.
Yeah, there are other ways for people to commit violence such as the examples you provided, but they aren’t used at the same scale or with the same frequency. Why? Well, partly because building a bomb is a lot more complicated than buying a gun. Does it still happen? Yes, but again with FAR less frequency.
Your argument that because there are other ways to commit violence that we should not do anything to combat gun violence is just so tired and misguided. We should do something where we can to combat problems that we know how to deal with. It isn’t a fucking mystery how you limit gun violence. You need to limit the number of guns.
Look at smoking as an example. Everyone knows that smoking causes cancer now. There are still people who choose to smoke, but it has become much less prominent thanks to social enforcement of not smoking in public places among other things. It took a generation, but millions of lives have been saved thanks to the slow roll of common sense limitations and restrictions on tobacco products.
Quit using these fallacious arguments, and just say what you really mean:
“I don’t personally care about people who die to gun violence because my personal desire to continue owning guns supercedes the need for any common sense gun reforms.”
What gun control would stop this? 95% of our violence via guns is from handguns. 85+% is drug and gang related, 2/3rds is suicides. Shootings like this are a rounding error in the 40k a year deaths, and when compared to the police killing 1k~ a year (yes 1 in 40 of those 40k is from the police) shootings like this aren’t an issue. They just get views because they cause more carnage. An AWB and background checks won’t stop this. Our society is breaking down and it’s not the firearms that are the root cause.
Second of all, I only put the words there that you were too disingenuous to utter yourself because you would rather use fallacious arguments than to own your position outright.
argue against the ones I’m actually saying you stupid shit.
I did that too, but you didn’t want to engage with that. I think that says a lot about the quality (or lack there of) in your arguments.
Do you think shooting up a public place is the action of a rational, sane individual?
No.
Do you think that maybe, just maybe, this country’s healthcare system, especially it’s mental healthcare, could maybe use some improvement?
Yes.
Do you think that the rights of innocent, sane individuals should be violated just because someone else unrelated to them committed a crime?
This is a bad argument. I never said “ban guns” because I know that is never going to happen in this country. However, I am also aware there are other ways to combat the problem like mandatory registration, increasing the age to buy firearms, better red flag laws, and many other enforcement options.
I’m sorry you don’t like the truth, but the truth is that our existing regulations would work just fine if we actually had a functioning healthcare system that could, I dunno, maybe help these people before they go off the deep end. Crazy, I know.
Two things can need improvement at the same time. We can have better gun laws, and better healthcare. They are not mutually exclusive. Only knuckle-dragging half-wits think these problems aren’t interrelated, and therefore a multi-pronged approach to solving them would obviously be necessary.
Then again, maybe you’d prefer another Oklahoma City instead.
More fallacious argumentation from you. What a surprise. This doesn’t even justify engaging with.
These are really great ideas. If only we had manditory registration, a high age restriction for guns (why not 35? That’s the same age you have to be president right?), and really strong red flag laws (seems like we need to take the guns from people in the military, they don’t seem to be fit to have guns), there’s a chance this shooting wouldn’t have happened.
If those were just as deadly and easy, people would be using them. A fertilizer bomb can easily kill the person making it and the spread of a truck is significantly slower and more obvious than a bullet.
You are correct that there are multiple ways to kill people. But the other methods are not as likely to kill and are harder to operate effectively. There is no comparison so stop acting like there is one.
Are you this dumb? Seriously? If you intent is to kill someone, it is significantly easier to do with a gun than with a fucking truck. If you miss with a truck, you think you can just ask the people to wait a bit while you back up and try to hit them again? How many hours do you think you can get in with one truck vs with one gun? You miss with a gun, it is easy to fire again.
As for a fertilizer bomb, it is not like the Anarchist Cookbook makes it out to be. Lots of people die while making explosives. Many die trying to set them off. How many people die purchasing a gun? How many people die using a gun compared to the number of bullets expended from guns. Going to guess the death ratio is a hell of a lot lower than fertilizer bombs.
You know that nobody has ever claimed it’s the only way a nutjob would kill people
But for whatever reason, it’s vastly more common to murder.people with a gun than with a truck or fertilizer bomb.
Coincidentally trucks are licensed, registered, and highly regulated. And while I’m sure you can get around it, the sale of ingredients that can be used in bombs are generally tracked/regulated as well.
I think the point you seemed to have missed is that building a fertilizer bomb is not as simple as obtaining a gun in many places in the US. There are no specific fertilizer bomb stores. There are no fertilizer bomb “shows”. They cannot be reused, you would have to build a new one every time…unlike a gun. They are illegal everywhere because they are bombs, and and every time you make a new one, you risk blowing yourself up first…which is a great feature!
Running a truck into a crowd, I mean sure, but I doubt you’d take out, say, 20 (just going off of what the current number of dead is in Maine), or 60 (Las Vegas) people. The Boston bombing “only” killed 3 people, so yeah sure I guess I’d prefer a relatively few people to take the time to make one and, assuming they didn’t fuck up, sure, I guess some innocent people could die here and there. It would suck, but I like trying to minimize easily preventable deaths. People escape from prison, too, but most don’t, and so we don’t just throw our hands up and say “oh well, guess we won’t investigate” every time that happens.
And I guess you could run a truck into an elementary school classroom somehow and manage to mow down 19 kids, but I really doubt it. I don’t have anything to compare that to, unlike…well yeah there’s been a lot of those in schools to look at over the past 20 or so years, so pick one.
It’s interesting that you bring up McVeigh, not too long ago I finished the book “Homegrown, Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism” by Jeffrey Toobin. It’s fantastic, highly recommend.
While he did have numerous weapons, his major beef was with the federal government, and it took him years to become as radicalized as he did. There were also other factors, like him failing out of a military special forces class, so he went awhile between jobs and sleeping at friends’ places just to make ends meet. And he was upset over Ruby Ridge and Waco.
Eventually he was able to convince Terry Nichols to help him, but quite a few told him to get lost before Nichols agreed. But he definitely already had plenty of guns if he had wanted to do something before OKC (spoiler alert, he is a “person of interest” in at least one, an infant), but he didn’t. He wanted to make a statement. And we haven’t seen anything on that scale other than 9/11 and maybe Boston (if you count straight up terrorism). So yeah, let’s do it. Seems like we already have people who want to make enough of a statement that they make bombs and kill people, in addition to all of the guns in this country.
I’d be cool with making at least one of those options much less accessible.
You’re in denial. Stop being in denial. Seriously.
There’s a reason why you can’t buy bombs in the bomb store. These things are professionally designed to explode and kill as many people as possible.
Yet, you can go and buy an AR-15 or worse in a gun store. A weapon professionally designed to kill as many people as possible in as little time as possible.
This is an almost entirely American problem. It’s not like the US is more mentally ill than every other developed country in the world. What distinguishes the US is the easy access to weapons. Take the tools of these killings away.
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This is like saying that cancer isn’t the only way you can die so we should stop trying to cure cancer
It’s also like saying cancer is not the only way you can die and pointing to something like syphilis also killing people. Sure they both kill people but one kills way more people and is much less avoidable.
The mass shootings are the symptom of a larger mental health problem. Here in Canada where we have much more gun control we recently memorialized one of our most deadly attacks, The Toronto van attack which killed 11 and wounded 15 (some critically). How is gun control going to help the fact that some people out there want to kill as many lives as possible?
By reducing access to a very powerful tool for murder. Here is a comparison of USA and Canadian homicide rates
Are you pointing to a single incident from 5 years ago as evidence that non-gun mass murders are common in Canada? Do you think that when gun control is enacted, all the people that would have committed murder via gun would instead commit as much murder using improvised weapons? If so, can you show any data that bears this out?
Even though other methods of murder can be devised, restricting access to the easiest, fastest method is effective in reducing murder.
Canada also has a health care system where mentally ill folks can get help.
Canada is also less population dense and only has roughly 1/10th of the US population.
The per-capita rate while a useful tool is not going to compare the effects of mass shootings. You’re more than likely talking about handguns in this context which are responsible for a lot more deaths overall than AR-style rifles.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/
Switzerland has lots of guns but not mass shootings, and has a much lower murder rate. Finland similarly has lots of guns but not mass shootings.
The bigger issue is that half of the US government doesn’t want to fund mental health programs, red flag laws, etc. There are some models we could follow other than “ban guns” or “ban assault rifles” … but dealing with rampant mental health issues would help a lot. It’s just a shame the Republicans will parrot “mental health” but then not vote for bills that will actually do anything to improve mental health.
I hate this about lemmy. It looks like youve been banned/deleted/something from the thread. So now all your comments and all replies have disappeared from the conversation.
I think I said this before, but in case I didn’t: I agree that the mental health side of this equation is also critical. That doesn’t change the fact that the gun control side of the equation is a major factor. Also, if you’re going to cherry pick Switzerland stats, then don’t forget to also look at their gun control laws, which are much stronger than the US (and it appears Canada, although I’m less sure there). You seem to want to cherry pick data to show that it’s all mental health and guns aren’t a significant part of the problem. Good luck with that.
I don’t think it was me, but the other person who was acting like a jerk… Which is unfortunate.
I suspect we agree on more than we disagree here, I’m just sick of people who “can’t vote for Democrats because they want to take my guns.”
I also can’t dismiss maybe there are some benefits to having a well armed population.
I don’t expect to ever hit 0, maybe you do. But, I think we should be able to do much better than several public places shot up by someone who’s out of their mind per year. The fastest way towards that to me is effectively universal health care, research, appropriate treatment, and maybe even investment in some new technology/unexplored mitigation strategy.
Ah yes, the epidemic of van killings we all suffer from.
No one claims gun restrictions are going to stop every last murder.
And if folks were killing each other with Vans several times a week, you can bet there would be some Van Control legislation passed in a hot minute.
That’s not the point at all. The point is that there are mentally ill people who want to kill and they’ll find a way. We’ve got a record number of people that are seemingly in this category as of late.
In prior decades mass shootings like this were not issues like they are today, the first AR-15s were available in the late 1950s. You can find “mass shootings” going back into the start of the 20th century, but they’re not the same mass shootings we’re seeing today. They’re much more targeted violence.
Now… It’s “I’m going to kill you because you’re at Walmart(?)”
Keep in mind the US has roughly 10x the population. If we want to do an apples oranges comparison of the two countries … that’s potentially 10 van incidents in the US in place of mass shootings.
But that’s not a fair comparison either because Canada has an accessible health care system.
If your argument is we need to address mental health, I’m not going to argue with you there. But guess which party in the US is described by all four of these bullet points:
gutted our mental health infrastructure
Consistently votes down legislation to fund investment in mental health infrastructure
Consistently opposes any measures to implement Red Flag laws or other attempts to make it harder to own guns
Consistently deflects to mental health being the problem whenever we have more people die
While they are refusing to budge on either of the two middle bullet points, people are just dying.
So I have little sympathy for folks who defend guns with the premise that mental health is the real problem. Fine, let’s say it is, doesn’t matter because you are preventing us as a nation from addressing either of those issues.
I have voted a pretty much straight blue ticket in all elections since 2016. I also have friends that guns are a very important issue for though, and I don’t think the Democratic party is getting anywhere being the “party out to get the guns.”
It’s not really the same… There are people that like guns for a variety of reasons and 99% of them will never take a life. Their only reason for existing isn’t to go on a murderous rampage.
This was the example where I just said “you know what, banning guns isn’t going to fix it”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongsberg_attack
Another person replied about an attack with a van in Canada.
I think we genuinely need to treat this as a mental health crisis, but like for real. Not the Republican “thoughts and prayers” mental health crisis, but a real thought out use of resources to figure out why so regularly we have people in our society that want to kill a bunch of random people.
We should also do more background checks and close loopholes,
even though that wouldn’t have helped here.It would have helped here. This guy was previously committed for mental health issues. That should have required him to give his guns to a friend or whoever for safe keeping.
Fair enough, I wasn’t aware of that detail when the comment was written last night.
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So according to you just because we haven’t figured out how to stop it we should just throw in the towel, right?
Gtfo with your fatalism.
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I’m guessing you think that mental illness is the root cause and also that you don’t think a dime should go towards a universal healthcare plan that includes caring for the mentally ill.
Actually you are the one work the false equivalency.
You know why your comparison is idiotic? Because it is comparing a mountain (gun violence) to a mole hill (vehicular homicide). If what you said was at all accurate, people would be using those methods significantly more often in other developed countries. Guess what? They don’t. They are used at basically the same rates as here in the US. The major difference is that those countries have much guns per capita.
So again stop pretending like the comparison is even close to a good one or that you have some sort of gotcha.
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Considering the same group of people who fights gun control legislation tooth and nail is also very much responsible for the lack of mental health services (and general sorry state of health care) in our country, it sounds to me like you don’t really want to solve the gun problem nor the mental health problem you predictably deflect to.
And yes, I’m assuming you are a Republican. If you aren’t, try not acting like one and folks won’t make that mistake.
R won’t support restrictions on gun ownership because they say the problem is mental health, but they won’t support spending on mental health either. (Most likely because they seem to oppose anything that would actually help people who suffer.)
Reagan undercuts funding on mental health, resulting in the closure of mental health institutions nationwide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980
https://sociology.org/content/vol003.004/thomas.html
This last one is a ddg search - you can just pick which article you want to read about Republicans voting against mental health funding.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=republicans+vote+against+mental+health+funding
For mental health? Most of them are not much better. Try again.
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Japan and South Korea, for instances, are certainly not known for their great mental health. Guess what they don’t have? No constant mass shootings, no trucks being used to mow people down, no constant fertilizer bombs.
https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1848971668
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Kinda like how you singularly invented the rhetoric that it’s useless to discuss gun control because it wouldn’t solve 100.00% of possible killings?
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The root cause of people doing mass shootings isn’t guns, okay.
Do you think shooting up a public place is the action of a sane, rational individual?
Many mass shooters do not suffer from a mental illness, and mental illness is not a major factor for those that do.
https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/news/mass-shootings-and-mental-illness
You can just say “yes” and be wrong, no need to go cherry picking for the one article that supports your warped view
I happen to think that killing masses of people isn’t a sane decision, but you do you champ
It’s literally not what you said, but you’re clearly not out here in good faith, so enjoy the shit flinging.
Maybe you should read my comments instead for a change but it’s fine, I accept your concession
If I cut my hand I use a bandaid. Guess you just bleed?
There is no single cause or single solution. Calling for one is too say the problem is unsolvable. Gun control is part of the solution if not all of it.
No, you’re absolutely right. As soon as we repeal the 2nd, outlaw and confiscate all the guns, all shootings will immediately stop and never ever happen again. It’s simple really.
This Australian study to argues that’s the case for mass shootings, yes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26822013/
There’s also https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JCRPP-05-2015-0013/full/html
Which suggests that the US already had measures with that effect until 2004.
So we’re comparing mass shootings to small cuts, now. Here I thought you considered them a big issue?
Or do you slap a bandaid on giant lacerations, too?
I was… Stretching your analogy. Nevermind. 🙄
And I extended yours. Slapping a bandaid on a much larger issue really doesn’t solve the giant fucking issue. Better luck next time!
Here’s some 🧀 with your whine.
Lookit you trying to be clever, how precious. Did you steal that from your schoolmates?
🧀🧀🧀
I’ll take that as a yes. Ought to go run along and play, this discussion seems a bit adult for you.
What a stupid fucking argument. Gun violence is a sheer numbers game. The ease of access and use of firearms is a massive problem, and when you combine that with the serious socio-economic/political problems in this country that is how you end up with this on-going violence.
Yeah, there are other ways for people to commit violence such as the examples you provided, but they aren’t used at the same scale or with the same frequency. Why? Well, partly because building a bomb is a lot more complicated than buying a gun. Does it still happen? Yes, but again with FAR less frequency.
Your argument that because there are other ways to commit violence that we should not do anything to combat gun violence is just so tired and misguided. We should do something where we can to combat problems that we know how to deal with. It isn’t a fucking mystery how you limit gun violence. You need to limit the number of guns.
Look at smoking as an example. Everyone knows that smoking causes cancer now. There are still people who choose to smoke, but it has become much less prominent thanks to social enforcement of not smoking in public places among other things. It took a generation, but millions of lives have been saved thanks to the slow roll of common sense limitations and restrictions on tobacco products.
Quit using these fallacious arguments, and just say what you really mean:
“I don’t personally care about people who die to gun violence because my personal desire to continue owning guns supercedes the need for any common sense gun reforms.”
What gun control would stop this? 95% of our violence via guns is from handguns. 85+% is drug and gang related, 2/3rds is suicides. Shootings like this are a rounding error in the 40k a year deaths, and when compared to the police killing 1k~ a year (yes 1 in 40 of those 40k is from the police) shootings like this aren’t an issue. They just get views because they cause more carnage. An AWB and background checks won’t stop this. Our society is breaking down and it’s not the firearms that are the root cause.
And yet they happen in the U.S. far more than any other Western country. Which sounds like an issue.
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First of all, make me.
Second of all, I only put the words there that you were too disingenuous to utter yourself because you would rather use fallacious arguments than to own your position outright.
I did that too, but you didn’t want to engage with that. I think that says a lot about the quality (or lack there of) in your arguments.
No.
Yes.
This is a bad argument. I never said “ban guns” because I know that is never going to happen in this country. However, I am also aware there are other ways to combat the problem like mandatory registration, increasing the age to buy firearms, better red flag laws, and many other enforcement options.
Two things can need improvement at the same time. We can have better gun laws, and better healthcare. They are not mutually exclusive. Only knuckle-dragging half-wits think these problems aren’t interrelated, and therefore a multi-pronged approach to solving them would obviously be necessary.
More fallacious argumentation from you. What a surprise. This doesn’t even justify engaging with.
These are really great ideas. If only we had manditory registration, a high age restriction for guns (why not 35? That’s the same age you have to be president right?), and really strong red flag laws (seems like we need to take the guns from people in the military, they don’t seem to be fit to have guns), there’s a chance this shooting wouldn’t have happened.
Ah, so now you claim to read minds. Ok. Not reading the rest of this drivel, it’s clear you’re not really up to this. Better luck next time, champ!
Sane yes
Rational no
You just want these shooters to be mentally ill so they’re one of the lesser people. It’s sad.
If those were just as deadly and easy, people would be using them. A fertilizer bomb can easily kill the person making it and the spread of a truck is significantly slower and more obvious than a bullet.
You are correct that there are multiple ways to kill people. But the other methods are not as likely to kill and are harder to operate effectively. There is no comparison so stop acting like there is one.
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Yeah. I once had a hot brass land on my neck. It was just like getting shot!
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And people die from getting tangled in their bedsheets. What’s your point, Rambo?
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Taking the cowards way out. Typical.
Are you this dumb? Seriously? If you intent is to kill someone, it is significantly easier to do with a gun than with a fucking truck. If you miss with a truck, you think you can just ask the people to wait a bit while you back up and try to hit them again? How many hours do you think you can get in with one truck vs with one gun? You miss with a gun, it is easy to fire again.
As for a fertilizer bomb, it is not like the Anarchist Cookbook makes it out to be. Lots of people die while making explosives. Many die trying to set them off. How many people die purchasing a gun? How many people die using a gun compared to the number of bullets expended from guns. Going to guess the death ratio is a hell of a lot lower than fertilizer bombs.
You know that nobody has ever claimed it’s the only way a nutjob would kill people
But for whatever reason, it’s vastly more common to murder.people with a gun than with a truck or fertilizer bomb.
Coincidentally trucks are licensed, registered, and highly regulated. And while I’m sure you can get around it, the sale of ingredients that can be used in bombs are generally tracked/regulated as well.
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Nice dodge there.
Hey that’s my line.
I think the point you seemed to have missed is that building a fertilizer bomb is not as simple as obtaining a gun in many places in the US. There are no specific fertilizer bomb stores. There are no fertilizer bomb “shows”. They cannot be reused, you would have to build a new one every time…unlike a gun. They are illegal everywhere because they are bombs, and and every time you make a new one, you risk blowing yourself up first…which is a great feature!
Running a truck into a crowd, I mean sure, but I doubt you’d take out, say, 20 (just going off of what the current number of dead is in Maine), or 60 (Las Vegas) people. The Boston bombing “only” killed 3 people, so yeah sure I guess I’d prefer a relatively few people to take the time to make one and, assuming they didn’t fuck up, sure, I guess some innocent people could die here and there. It would suck, but I like trying to minimize easily preventable deaths. People escape from prison, too, but most don’t, and so we don’t just throw our hands up and say “oh well, guess we won’t investigate” every time that happens.
And I guess you could run a truck into an elementary school classroom somehow and manage to mow down 19 kids, but I really doubt it. I don’t have anything to compare that to, unlike…well yeah there’s been a lot of those in schools to look at over the past 20 or so years, so pick one.
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It’s interesting that you bring up McVeigh, not too long ago I finished the book “Homegrown, Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism” by Jeffrey Toobin. It’s fantastic, highly recommend.
While he did have numerous weapons, his major beef was with the federal government, and it took him years to become as radicalized as he did. There were also other factors, like him failing out of a military special forces class, so he went awhile between jobs and sleeping at friends’ places just to make ends meet. And he was upset over Ruby Ridge and Waco.
Eventually he was able to convince Terry Nichols to help him, but quite a few told him to get lost before Nichols agreed. But he definitely already had plenty of guns if he had wanted to do something before OKC (spoiler alert, he is a “person of interest” in at least one, an infant), but he didn’t. He wanted to make a statement. And we haven’t seen anything on that scale other than 9/11 and maybe Boston (if you count straight up terrorism). So yeah, let’s do it. Seems like we already have people who want to make enough of a statement that they make bombs and kill people, in addition to all of the guns in this country.
I’d be cool with making at least one of those options much less accessible.
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Ah right, the hundreds of fertilizer bomb attacks we have every year.
As if it wouldn’t become a lot harder to buy fertilizer in days if that were the case.
(No I didn’t miss the McVeigh reference, I just found it to be a ridiculous false equivalence.)
And if folks were running into crowds with trucks twice a week, we’d see some new restrictions there also.
Remind me the last time that happened
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Wow you had to go all the way back to the 90s for an example of a fertilizer bomb, but for guns we don’t even need to go back to dinner.
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The number of guns per capita was significantly lower in previous decades.
Mass shootings have been a problem for a long time in the US, long before the 90s
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No. Crime has been down since the 80s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Monday
You’re in denial. Stop being in denial. Seriously.
There’s a reason why you can’t buy bombs in the bomb store. These things are professionally designed to explode and kill as many people as possible.
Yet, you can go and buy an AR-15 or worse in a gun store. A weapon professionally designed to kill as many people as possible in as little time as possible.
This is an almost entirely American problem. It’s not like the US is more mentally ill than every other developed country in the world. What distinguishes the US is the easy access to weapons. Take the tools of these killings away.