238 points

Because there’s another mass shooting every couple days. It’s hard to care about why one dude did something crazy 7 years ago while bullets are still flying. People are much more focused on trying to stop the next one.

permalink
report
reply
176 points

I agree with all of that, except for the part about people being focused on trying to stop the next one.

If anyone was actually serious about that, we wouldn’t average more than one per day across the U.S.

permalink
report
parent
reply
116 points

Focused on trying to stop the next one in every way except restricting guns, or funding mental health care, or reducing hate, or… Well anything that takes more than thoughts and prayers.

What a country.

permalink
report
parent
reply
11 points

The mental health care thing is so frustrating.

Let’s enact some gun control laws because most guns used in mass shootings are bought legally.

“No, it’s a mental health issue!”

Well, then let’s fund mental health services and increase access to them.

“No, that’s not my problem.”

Played out again and again. I mean I know it’s all just deflection, but dammit at least try to have a consistent position.

permalink
report
parent
reply
93 points

We have tried nothing and we are all out of options.

permalink
report
parent
reply
19 points

Gotta appreciate how I Googled that phrase, clicked on the first YouTube link, and the very first comment was along the lines of “US conservatives reacting to mass shootings”

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Ah c’mon, give them credit where it’s due. They didn’t try nothing - thoughts and prayers were tried in abundance.

permalink
report
parent
reply
40 points

At some point, a long time ago, we collectively transitioned from viewing mass shootings as an alarming epidemic, to something culturally endemic to our way of life. It’s an effortless rationalization made possible by for-profit news and for-profit politics.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

South Park had a great episode about this.

permalink
report
parent
reply
30 points

People are much more focused on trying to stop the next one.

Are they really? What is really being done?

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

A lotta hope. My 3 minutes are penciled in tomorrow at 2pm. Same 3 minutes my legislators spend on it. Gotta have hope!¹


  1. “Gotta have hope!” is a thing you hear in cancer wards and places where people know in their souls that there is no hope.
permalink
report
parent
reply
15 points

Disagreed. No one gives a shit about stopping the next one. We’d actually have stricter gun laws if that were true.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

*nobody in government.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

A lot of people not in govenment are also working against stopping mass shootings. And the only people who CAN stop this are in the government.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

It also wasnt a school.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
*

Except they’re not. They’re focused on blaiming everyone around them while not looking for actual causes. The CDC is banned BY LAW from researching the actual causes, because the NRA knows the answer is going to be mass gun ownership and them instilling a very toxic version of gun culture in this country.

No one is doing anything substantial to stop the next one.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Something about the Vegas one (other than total number of fatalities) was so much more sinister. We barely even ever heard about the perpetrator. It’s always seemed bizarre to me.

Not saying we should be giving any media attention to mass killers, but it definitely breaks with the normal media portrayal.

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points

Vegas was a failed hit on MBS by another Saudi Prince. They used the dude as a patsy to cover up the attempted assassination.

permalink
report
parent
reply
-25 points

No, there are not mass shooting every couple of days.

https://imgur.com/a/h6DvNwE

When we hear “mass shooting”, we’re all thinking about the Mother Jones and Violence Project numbers shown (hardly conservative sources). 6 for 2021. (And crime is way down since then.)

And if we go with the worst numbers on there, ~4,000, that’s about a month worth of vehicular fatalities, not dead plus injured.

Everyone on here bitches about capitalism and how billionaires control our lives. Everyone is keenly aware that most media outlets have been combined into Sinclair and a few other owners. But when the media presents a steady drumbeat of death and destruction, no one seems to be able to put 2 and 2 together. They want the commoners disarmed.

I don’t have answers, but all I know is that we had plenty of guns around when I was a kid, and yes, AR-15s as well, and this shit wasn’t anything like today.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Awesome point, yea, the “commoners” need to be disarmed.

So you were around plenty of guns in your childhood? As a child, you knew what an AR-15 was?

Hmmm. It’s almost like children growing up around guns, especially those exposed to rifles as you mentioned, became comfortable and used to them, know how to use them, and where to get them.

Cool graphic you shared in an attempt to justify gun violence. Ml

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Switzerland

permalink
report
parent
reply
190 points
*

If Americans can be numb to mass killings of elementary school children, Vegas never stood a chance of remaining in the public discourse.

permalink
report
reply
19 points
*
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

It hurts to read but. It’s the answer for sure.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

When the discourse goes in circles and gets nowhere, it becomes a perceived waste to continue it. The people who profit from gun sales – including the politicians who reap campaign contributions from exploiting misconceptions about it – like it this way.

permalink
report
parent
reply

So fun fact

The reason why it was the deadliest shooting is because the shitstain was using a bump stock, which makes semiautomatics into pseudo-automatics, so he just mag dumped into a crowd

After it happened, the Trump admin of all fucking people banned bump stocks. Broken clock or something.

Now SCOTUS is about to hear a court case to repeal the ban, and they look poised to legalize bump stocks again under the BS reason that “they’re not technically automatic weapons”

With the added bonus that now everyone knows about them

permalink
report
reply
55 points
*

Not trying to minimize the bump stock thing but I would wager that having 23 different guns and hundreds of rounds of ammo is why so many people got shot that night. This guy had it all planned out including bipods, red dots, cameras etc. this guy even went as far as to nailing his door shut so in any case someone got to his hotel before he was done, he would have extra time.

Yeah the bump stocks made a difference but I don’t think it was by that much.

https://www.ktnv.com/news/las-vegas-shooting/list-guns-and-evidence-from-las-vegas-shooter-stephen-paddock

permalink
report
parent
reply
25 points

For those of us who don’t wank ourselves to sleep every night to pictures of guns and have no idea what the fuck a bump stock is -

Essentially, bump stocks assist rapid fire by “bumping” the trigger against one’s finger (as opposed to one’s finger pulling on the trigger), thus allowing the firearm’s recoil, plus constant forward pressure by the non-shooting arm, to actuate the trigger

permalink
report
parent
reply
-2 points
*

For those of us who don’t wank ourselves to sleep every night to pictures of guns and have no idea what the fuck a bump stock is

Interesting observation, I’d have thought anyone old enough at the time to follow news of the deadliest mass shooting in history would have known, especially since bump stocks became the largest discussion point of gun violence debate at the time, before Glock switches.

Since you don’t watch news about gun violence wank yourself to sleep watching gun videos every night, here’s what that is:

A Glock switch or Glock auto-sear (sometimes called a button or a giggle switch) is a small device that can be attached to the rear of the slide of a Glock handgun, converting the semi-automatic pistol into a machine pistol capable of fully automatic fire.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Yeah that’s fair, the guy was armed to the teeth. The bump stock is just the icing on the shit cake.

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points
*

Can someone who’s more into gun stuff tell me why people are always talking about the number of guns someone has?

What makes 23 different guns better than one good one? I can see the point of having like two, in case the first jams, but based on my (limited) experience I would much rather have a single HK416 than a dozen of anything else.

Also with fewer guns you need fewer ammo types (unless you for some reason have 23 guns with the same ammo, which to me makes even less sense).

permalink
report
parent
reply
12 points

Can someone who’s more into gun stuff tell me why people are always talking about the number of guns someone has?

Can be one of several things, or usually a combination:

  • to show how prepared they were
  • to imply the person was crazy because they had that many guns
  • to imply people having that many guns somehow itself makes them more dangerous

A lot of it is just rhetoric

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points
*

He brought all those guns to the hotel room he shot from. I imagine it was so he could shoot as many rounds as possible at the crowd with out the need to reload.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Because it grabs attention and sounds scary, which really what media outlets care about. My other favorite is when they talk about someone having being caught with “hundreds of rounds of ammunition”, which clearly indicates that’s how many people they were planning on murdering, and isn’t just a pretty typical range day, or in the case of reallly common stuff like 9mm, 22LR, or even 223, can literally be a single box of ammo.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points
*

The guy just had a lot of guns. He had 23 with him and he had like another 20 at home.

But I would also imagine that him having them all loaded put into a row each mounted on its own bipod in his suite is faster than reloading.

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points

One life is that much, though.

permalink
report
parent
reply
40 points

A SCOTUS that Trump installed.

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

No hardware required, also not some new technique suddenly discovered:
How to Bump Fire an AR-15/M4
AK47 bump fire

permalink
report
parent
reply
-5 points

The reason why it was the deadliest shooting is because the shitstain was using a bump stock

No, he was looking over a massive crowd of people with a rifle. He may have killed more people without a bump stock, given the difficulty it causes for accuracy. Saying it is a settled fact that it led to the deaths is just not true.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

He didn’t exactly need accuracy when there was a sea of targets in front of him, especially if his objective was to hit as many of them as possible before they could disperse.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

But he continued to hit people while they were dispersing

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

I mean, he didn’t really have much of a problem with accuracy - he fired a total of 1058 rounds, and those rounds or shrapnel from them injured 413 different people. Of course, many people received more than a single gunshot wound. He killed 58 (later 60) in ten minutes of shooting – effectively one person every 10 seconds. I think it would be difficult for a single person to injure or kill more from where he was standing with any weapon short of an RPG.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

kill more from where he was standing with any weapon short of an RPG.

I think short of somehow knocking down a build that would make it more difficult because of the very slow reload speed.

kill more from where he was standing with any weapon short of an RPG.

And a semi-auto rifle can fire much faster than that without a bumpstock

permalink
report
parent
reply
109 points

Never found a motive? Are you joking? We’ve got tons of info on the psycho who did it. He was a distraught aging white male with a history of depression, gambling, and firearms who wanted to hurt the world and kill himself.

Sad losers are a dime a dozen but at least most of them aren’t as stupid as that guy. There is no reason to discuss this outside of proposed changes to our society as a whole to better prevent these stains on history.

permalink
report
reply
33 points

Ahh yes no need to discuss why people become who they are or to change society for the better

permalink
report
parent
reply
29 points

I don’t mean to sweep this under the rug, but I think that just stands as another case for the fact that an enormous amount of people in this country have mental health issues. It’s normalized at this point.

Besides that, news outlets that report on this only do so basically of the drama and the views. The solutions are in front of us, always have been, but that’s not what anyone truly cares about.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

I think framing it as a ‘mental health’ issue puts all the blame on the individual.

It’s not a ‘mental health’ epidemic. Society is broken and more people are realizing it every day.

These problems will only get worse as the disparity in wealth continues to grow and more people feel like they have nothing to live for as a result.

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

Depressed white male dressed as a policeman: So, why did you do it?

Mass shooter: because I’m a depressed white male

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Missed the capitalised B in because, but 👏👏👏

permalink
report
parent
reply
-1 points
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

I mean you can discuss it to death, but without facts – which don’t exist, because he didn’t tell anyone the intimate workings of his fucked up mind – the best you can do is speculate. By all means, go ahead.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

If you had read my comment then you would know that was exactly what I would rather we discussed.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

But but but why did he spray bullets at a crowd with intent to murder hundreds? Why, man, why? We need his manifesto, his tax records, the political affiliations of his associates and family! How else am I supposed to fit him into my narrative if I can’t prove why he thought to do the unthinkable?

/s

permalink
report
parent
reply
-44 points

Racist.

permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points

Explain how.

permalink
report
parent
reply
-13 points
*

In an alternate universe…

He was a distraught aging black male with a history of depression, gambling, and firearms who wanted to hurt the world and kill himself.

It’s the inclusion of ‘aging white male’ listed with the other negatives, so it could be viewed as ageist, sexist, and racist.

Yes, yes, let your feelings guide the mouse to the downvote button

permalink
report
parent
reply
-19 points

There’s no need to mention their race right? Unless it was a racially motivated attack, which I don’t remember coming up.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

It is unfortunately relevant information on the topic of demographic shifts and marginalized groups. What the shooter did was not typical by any means, but who he was is extremely typical for what he did, sadly.

permalink
report
parent
reply
65 points
*

Well I can’t speak for anyone else, but me personally I never talk about it because I don’t talk about mass shootings in general.

But occasionally I do think about that one. And Sandy Hook. And Aurora. And Uvalde. And Columbine.

permalink
report
reply
8 points

Realizing Columbine losing all sorts of national attention, then seeing schools teach kids how to survive a school shooting, and parents buying kids bulletproof bookbags was when I realized we really don’t give a shit about mass shootings, we just work around them.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Pretty much this. I lived through the Columbine days as a middle school student. I remember being confused, even more now looking back, that nobody really made time to talk about “how do we stop this from happening in the first place”, people just seemed to assume that it could happen and we should all be OK with that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

And Santa Fe. And Virginia Tech. And El Paso. And Parkland. And UT Austin.

permalink
report
parent
reply

No Stupid Questions

!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

Create post

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others’ questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That’s it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it’s in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

Community stats

  • 9.6K

    Monthly active users

  • 2.7K

    Posts

  • 106K

    Comments