Rooty-tooty point and shootys

[Thad]

The Buffalo shooting yesterday?

That town don't need any more problems, man. :(

I think there were three this weekend. I'm trying to avoid the news.

Four that I know of.

The lull was nice while it lasted.

The most unusual thing about this weekend was that all four mass shootings made the news.

[Joxam]

Yeah, I hate to be a Debbie Downer but we're averaging like 10 a week for a while now.

[Brantly B.]

One of them was at a church on the other side of town, cool cool.

One thing everybody is glossing over for some reason is that the Buffalo attack involved a trained ex-police officer who returned fire, accomplished nothing and fucking died, while the Laguna Hills attack ended when the pastor clonked the guy with a chair.

[nosimpleway]

Up in Arvada there was another shooting. Guy A was on a mission to kill cops, and already killed one. Guy B shows up and shoots Guy A. Cops show up on scene, shoot and kill Guy B. Cops release a press statement praising Guy B, whom they killed, as the ideal "good guy with a gun".

The Aristocrats!

[Thad]

This time it's another elementary school shooting. 14 students, a teacher, and the shooter (an 18-year-old high school student) dead.

What do you even. Jesus.

[Grath]

This is America. People looking to commit harm are gonna have access to guns, no matter what half-baked gun control scheme the Democrats propose (or the Republicans trying to arm teachers.) Better approach would be addressing the root causes of the violence (poverty, isolation, depression, loneliness, feeling like society owes them something, teaching men to respect women's autonomy...), but that's difficult and not politically advantageous.

[KingRoyal]

Restricting the manufacture and sale of guns and ammunition would go a long way to making sure that when someone breaks, they don't take out 14 people with them

[Thad]

no matter what half-baked gun control scheme the Democrats propose (or the Republicans trying to arm teachers.)

did you seriously just bothsides a mass child-murder

fucking seriously?

[Grath]

no matter what half-baked gun control scheme the Democrats propose (or the Republicans trying to arm teachers.)

did you seriously just bothsides a mass child-murder

fucking seriously?

No? I clearly indicated that the Republicans are actively trying even stupider things to make it worse, but the best case from the Democrats is something dumb that won't actually make anyone safer.

[Mongrel]

I interpreted it in the context of Grath being someone who takes it as a given that the Dems have totally capitulated to the Republicans WRT gun control. Which isn't exactly a wild opinion to hold.

An assertion that the Dems will either propose measures which can't pass or which effectively lack teeth is cynical and perhaps defeatist, but not both-siderism.

[Thad]

You know, Mongrel, if I think maybe now's not the most appropriate time to argue about semantics, what's that say about you?

[Mongrel]

You know, Mongrel, if I think maybe now's not the most appropriate time to argue about semantics, what's that say about you?

Look man, you're angry. You're not the only one.

I'm just saying maybe we don't need a fight? Nobody here is anti-gun control, including Grath, and knowing that, I chose to read Grath's post more charitably, and maybe you should too.

[Grath]

I'm just saying maybe we don't need a fight? Nobody here is anti-gun control, including Grath, and knowing that, I chose to read Grath's post more charitably, and maybe you should too.

I mean, I'm opposed to useless and/or blatantly racist gun control which is a lot of it, all the way back to the second amendment being primarily crafted to make sure Virginian slave owners could be armed to capture runaways without needing to be part of the federally-controlled military. Taking guns away from domestic abusers? We don't do nearly enough of this, because otherwise 40% of cops would be unarmed. Universal background checks? Yeah, worthwhile. Banning arbitrary features that rarely, if ever, actually matter? Pisses off gun owners, squanders political capital that could be better spent on addressing voter suppression and the growing threat from the not-even-alt-anymore-right-wing.

[Brantly B.]

They're gonna do something this time.

The common assumption is that nothing will be done, but I think we're hurtling toward a particularly stupid outcome that I'd been fretting about for a while. The Uvalde and Buffalo shootings had a particular feature in common which was quite inconvenient to the "Good" Guys With Guns, and does not have protection from a bylaw that was written 200 years before its invention.

They're gonna ban body armor.

We're going to live in a country where it's legal for any psycho to own a deadly weapon, but it's illegal for you to protect yourself from it.

[KingRoyal]

The only thing the Dems are gonna do in response to this is increase the rate of their weekly/daily fundraising emails

[Mongrel]

They're gonna do something this time.

The common assumption is that nothing will be done, but I think we're hurtling toward a particularly stupid outcome that I'd been fretting about for a while. The Uvalde and Buffalo shootings had a particular feature in common which was quite inconvenient to the "Good" Guys With Guns, and does not have protection from a bylaw that was written 200 years before its invention.

They're gonna ban body armor.

We're going to live in a country where it's legal for any psycho to own a deadly weapon, but it's illegal for you to protect yourself from it.

While this may or may not be true, one of the especially poisonous aspects of this shooting is that the killer crashed his car and was accosted by cops BEFORE he even got into the school.

Then they let him get away because he was scary and might hurt them, and either refused to move or were ordered not to move until backup came. They stood by and let him kill children.

The reason this wasn't even worse thanks to cops being their usual hypocritical chickenshit garbage subhuman selves, is because a border patrol agent ignored the order to stay away and went and confronted the killer himself.

[Grath]

They're gonna ban body armor.

Worth noting, Texas one was just wearing the vest to put body armor into - he didn't actually have body armor, the cops just saw a guy with a rifle and the potential for body armor, and they decided to hide and let children deal with him instead.

[pacobird]

They're gonna do something this time.

The common assumption is that nothing will be done, but I think we're hurtling toward a particularly stupid outcome that I'd been fretting about for a while. The Uvalde and Buffalo shootings had a particular feature in common which was quite inconvenient to the "Good" Guys With Guns, and does not have protection from a bylaw that was written 200 years before its invention.

They're gonna ban body armor.

We're going to live in a country where it's legal for any psycho to own a deadly weapon, but it's illegal for you to protect yourself from it.

While this may or may not be true, one of the especially poisonous aspects of this shooting is that the killer crashed his car and was accosted by cops BEFORE he even got into the school.

Then they let him get away because he was scary and might hurt them, and either refused to move or were ordered not to move until backup came. They stood by and let him kill children.

The reason this wasn't even worse thanks to cops being their usual hypocritical chickenshit garbage subhuman selves, is because a border patrol agent ignored the order to stay away and went and confronted the killer himself.

When I heard this, I was hit with a level of revulsion and ACAB I was unprepared for, and it took me a little while to process what I was thinking and feeling, and how best to articulate it. Here goes.

1. The fact that the responding officers intercepted the shooter, got into a firefight, and fled, allowing him to proceed to the school and murder people for a half hour until a border patrol agent heard gunfire and came on his own - the whole department backed down out of fear and allowed 19 children to be murdered - is more damning of American policing than the murder of George Floyd, Daniel Shaver, or any unarmed person of any color could ever be. I mean that. Derek Chauvin may personally be more of a scoundrel than either of these two officers, but the entire reason we as a society tolerate the class of state-sanctioned protagonists that unacceptably-often produce a Derek Chauvin is that on occasion, something like this happens, it will happen, and in the event that it does we will want to entrust someone with the Power of Life and Death to be there and respond. For such a person to run completely undermines the entire analysis. If I'm to accept the ridiculous premise that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun and so I must tolerate putative "good guys" with guns on every street corner, I demand that they understand and agree with the "only" part of the cliche and not shirk the duty they have willingly taken upon themselves.

2. I would never wish someone to do themselves harm, but if this is not a situation where one has brought down a dishonor upon himself so great that it can only be cleansed through ritual suicide, no such situation exists.

[Grath]

1. The fact that the responding officers intercepted the shooter, got into a firefight, and fled

I find it kinda hard to believe that the school heard an actual firefight and didn't immediately lock all the doors, so I think it's more likely that any extent of "engagement" by police was them seeing the shooter, maybe trading a shot or two, and then immediately hiding while shitting their pants.

[pacobird]

1. The fact that the responding officers intercepted the shooter, got into a firefight, and fled

I find it kinda hard to believe that the school heard an actual firefight and didn't immediately lock all the doors, so I think it's more likely that any extent of "engagement" by police was them seeing the shooter, maybe trading a shot or two, and then immediately hiding while shitting their pants.

We know they were treated for "minor injuries" so they had at least some kind of altercation with him.

It seems unlikely we'll ever get a straightforward account of what happened because it would be so outrageously discrediting of the very concept of armed police.