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.

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33 points

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

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13 points

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

Mass shooter: because I’m a depressed white male

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-1 points
Deleted by creator
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1 point

Missed the capitalised B in because, but 👏👏👏

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5 points

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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-44 points

Racist.

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10 points

Explain how.

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-13 points
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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

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-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.

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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.

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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

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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

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-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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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1 point

But he continued to hit people while they were dispersing

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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

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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

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-2 points
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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.

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0 points

One life is that much, though.

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9 points
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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).

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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.

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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

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8 points
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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.

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5 points
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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.

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

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13 points

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

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40 points

A SCOTUS that Trump installed.

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52 points

This question was posted with a Wikipedia link. I didn’t read it, but let’s assume it didn’t answer the poster’s question.

Now I see in the comments a people saying “we know a lot” (but not Wikipedia I guess) or “it’s just what Americans do” or “we got some good laws out of it”. It just sounds like “move along, move along” to me.

Nobody answered the question. I don’t know the answer, but to say that a person who has never killed anyone before then planned and executed the biggest mass shooting in American history (and that’s saying something!) and we shouldn’t CARE about motive is just weird.

What makes someone arm themselves and go to a movie theater or an elementary school or a concert should be damned important to a society that cares about mental health and the safety of its citizens. It’s SO EASY to say “evil” and put it in the past, especially when the perpetrator is dead. It’s much harder to think about how to prevent the next one. Sure, they use guns. But then it’s knives. Or hammers. Slower you say? Well then how about sarin gas? Mail bombs? Potassium cyanide in Tylenol? Letters containing ricin?

We need to know more about the psychology of the mass killer. We act like saying “evil” is good enough. Are we all religious now? There’s devils out there? Or are they people, people with problems that never got recognized, until it was too late?

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-8 points

The article is right there

You didn’t read it

Your point is that we should care more

That about sum things up, super chief?

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15 points
Deleted by creator
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6 points

You should report him. Everyone who knows someone with the motive and the means should. You can have guns, or your head filled with caustic bile, but not both.

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6 points
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Deleted by creator
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5 points

Be as detailed as possible in your report, and focus especially on any specific threats against individuals or groups that he has mentioned.

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6 points

We need to know more about the psychology of the mass killer.

I genuinely don’t get why people are confused about someone who feels like they have nothing to live for taking their frustrations out on society.

Like, what is so confusing about that? Why is it so difficult for you to understand?

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3 points

So, that kinda makes sense to you? Like, you can “get it,” why someone would load up and kill a bunch of people indiscriminately?

Because I can’t. I could go vengeance on someone who hurt my family. I’m sure I could kill in self-defense, or to protect my family.

But to just go somewhere prepared to kill a bunch of people I don’t know? Who never had any contact with me or my life?

“Take out their frustrations on society?” I really hope you are just hyped up or talking out your ass or something. I’m any case, please talk to someone competent about this, preferably a licensed therapist.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists

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5 points
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“I don’t understand your point of view, so I think you need therapy” is a very condescending point of view.

The comment above you is making the point of

Angry at society -> Take out anger on society

The shooter doesn’t give a shit about the victims as individuals; to him they’re just components of the society, or actors within the society that he thinks wronged him somehow. They’re part of the problem to him.

I think you’re assuming that the shooter was seeing and experiencing the world and interpreting it the same way you do. THEY DO NOT, they are mentally ill, and have different thought patterns to people who are neurotypical. They have managed to convince themselves that they don’t have a problem, that society is the problem.

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2 points

Exactly like shouldn’t we acknowledge it so we can change for the better ?

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3 points

should be damned important to a society that cares about mental health and the safety of its citizens

Yeah … but also Las Vegas.

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2 points

That actually is a good point. This incident being in the news a lot would effect tourism in Vegas and that is big bucks. There may be people paying to suppress news on the killings.

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5 points

It’s a lot simpler that that. I mean not the cause of mass killings. That’s never a single factor but a range of mental health issues, a combination of things leading to the act. Impossible to predict.

The main issue is the shocking lack of mental health care. The inability for most to speak to someone at an early stage. There is no (coordinated) safety net.

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3 points

I don’t know about the lack of mental health care being the “main issue.” A healthy society wouldn’t be in dire need of such extreme amounts of mental health care. These mass shootings are a single symptom (among many) of a very complicated and interwoven set of factors that have brought us to this place. There is no single solution that will fix the problem, and the only way out of this mess will take significant investment and likely generations to break the cycle. But humans are greedy, and particularly in the USA, we only look for simple simgle-issue solutions that can have a measurable outcome (and be economically viable) within the next couple or fiscal quarters or an election term, at most. The solutions we should be implementing don’t work on that sort of time scale, and many will be very costly (in varying terms of both money and/or freedom)… So, we just don’t do those things.

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1 point

I don’t think you’re considering that bad things happen to good people. Everyone should have the right to easy access to healthcare.

It’s toxic Christianity to believe prayer and being a good person will get you favors with God and grant some kind of immunity to bad things. Bad things happen and it’s okay to feel bad, to have mental problems, to burn out, mourn, worry, etc.

It’s toxic consumer ideology to believe that people are inherently greedy, as it makes you consume more. There is no reason to believe this at all. It’s simply a justification for over consumption in a capitalist system that defines your worth to your wealth.

I’m not trying to make the point that mental Healthcare is some kind of panacea. Mass killings happen everywhere. But I do strongly believe that the rate at which it happens will be drastically reduced by a good system of care.

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4 points

People have been studying the psychology of mass killers since the 70s. Without an actual living subject at hand in this case, it’s hard to do anything more than speculate. I tend to agree that it would be useful to know more about what pushed him to such an act, but how do you suggest going about this? Should we round up and interrogate everyone he knew in his life? Would that even be productive?

Motive isn’t as mysterious as we like to pretend it is. All it really required was a loss of fundamental empathy for his fellow humans. We see that everywhere these days. He’s not unique in that respect. What’s unique is the lengths he went to to commit this act. He seemed to want the spectacle of it. Like many serial killers, perhaps the idea of murder gave him a rush of feeling he couldn’t find anywhere else in his life, and so he figured why not get as much of that as he could?

Again, it’s all speculation. And it’s also not hard to trace it back to a sickness eating at the roots of our society. What do you do with that knowledge? What can any of us do but try a little harder in our own lives to be kind to others and generous to those who might be quietly slipping down into the lake of poison seething under the world?

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1 point

What people are looking for is the manifesto or the “ah-ha!” moment. Columbine had plenty of this, as have many other spree killings. Even the tower shooter in Texas was discovered to have a brain tumor.

What people are looking for is a reason that separates him from the rest of us. The box they can check to safely file him away as being a schizo, abuser, or something worse and then snapping.

What they won’t get is the reason. The Vegas shooter was deep in his own mind and seems to have not shared these things with anyone. His life on paper seems kind of grim, but nothing in the way of committing a massive shooting.

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9 points

People did answer the question. Re-read the top two comments, sorted by Top. The question was “Why don’t we hear more about…?”.

It is emotionally difficult to accept, but it is the reality that we live in. The richer people have bodyguards and send their kids to better-protected schools, maybe bring in private tutors that are each more expensive than a cheap college education. They deal with this shit in their own way, leaving everyone else to the “freedom” to do as they please - subject to the whims of other lords who e.g. buy up all the media outlets, or buy up all the houses, etc. People do not wish to understand that this is what “absolute freedom” looks like, aka anarchy.

And quite frankly, random gun violence isn’t even the top threat in America, bc climate change seems much more likely to kill us all, or else an actual civil war, or perhaps Russia or China will shut down our entire power grid, if our own home-grown terrorist extremists don’t beat them to it.

iirc, most people here die of heart disease and cancer, and other things that mere exercise may provide a partial solution for. So we don’t care about the deaths of kids or strangers for the sake reason we continue to eat burgers every single day: bc they are tasty and we DGAF about anything else.

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1 point

I did what you said, sorting by “top,” and I think you’re doing a lot of projecting because I do not read anything there that could be an answer to the question

Second, I read your response, and I’m confused. Are you proposing redistribution of wealth and veganism as a solution to mass killings? If not, I guess I didn’t understand your answer.

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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.

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-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.

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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

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1 point

Switzerland

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15 points

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

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1 point

*nobody in government.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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93 points

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

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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”

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3 points

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

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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.

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3 points

South Park had a great episode about this.

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3 points

It also wasnt a school.

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30 points

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

Are they really? What is really being done?

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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.
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2 points
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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.

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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.

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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.

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42 points
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It is impossible to type out all of the reasons, but here are a few. Check out Bowling for Columbine btw - a movie from two thousand fucking two, 15 years BEFORE that particular one. We’ve seen that particular bullet coming for a LONG time, and the ones before it, and the ones after it, and the ones yet to come - we KNOW, yet we do NOTHING. Most especially the “Pro-Life” crowd.

Lobbying. It’s a thing. The NRS especially is one of the more powerful ones. More than 80% of American citizens - rising to >90% of NRA members even!!! - want some form of extremely limited gun control. However, we do not live in a democracy, not even one dominated by conservatives or rural Americans - rather, we live in a plutocracy where despite the OVERWHELMING support of the VAST MAJORITY of Americans, we cannot manage to get anything done.

Also, much of that money supposedly flowing to politicians from the “NRA” actually has been found to have ties back to Russia. Many of the politicians receiving that money may not even know the true source of where it came from - nor do they particularly seem to care.

Oh, and then billionaires bought up pretty much all of the major news outlets (a handful of others still exist - did The Guardian escape that? Well, even if they were, they seem to be allowed to talk about other corporate take-overs (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/03/billionaires-extra-power-media-ownership-elon-musk).

And hopefully you already know what happened to Google, where SEOs took over the searches so that it is nearly impossible to find things that just five years ago were easily retrievable, with the only lingering hold-out being Reddit, before then that whole thing happened…

BTW, the government is literally not allowed to collect statistics on how many violent gun deaths occur in America. I am not sure if this is the video where Jordan Klepper showcases that, but if not then he has a bunch of others. Or take your pick - there are millions if not billions of videos, of varying degree of quality and relevance. I’ve never seen one show a truly “unbalanced” take though - that is just not how for-profit corporations work. You just have to educate yourself by watching a bunch of stuff until you know how trustworthy the source is, and also each and every material topic too. It is sad, but we cannot seem to trust any (especially for-profit) advice these days. Though if you want another recommendation, there’s John Oliver’s whole expose on the NRA. To provide a modicum of balance, on the other side there are series such as Paul Harrell’s Mass Shootings: Causes and Possible Solutions.

And - yes there is always more - there are other arguments such as: “if someone cannot get a gun they will simply make their own bomb” (ignores how much harder it is to do that), and the whole thing of plastic ghost guns (again ignores how difficult it would be to do that). Ultimately, i think that children being sacrificed is itself merely a symptom of a much deeper cause. People on Lemmy call it “capitalism”, which has a LOT of truth to it - but then again, nations such as communist China have their own different issues. But, again, since ~90% of Americans already are in favor of stopping these kinds of mass-shootings, this will not be solved by merely educating yourself or “getting the word out”. In fact, this type of issue is precisely the type of thing that Trump leaned heavily on as his route to the White House - “Hillary Clinton is corrupt so you should elect me and I will get rid of all the corruption, everywhere”. So realistically, this is just something that we are going to simply have to live with, unless and until people fucking DO something about it. e.g. a responsible gun owner could patrol their own neighborhood schools. However, do note that every time someone does try to do that, they end up shooting innocent people instead, and yet it does nothing to stop the actual shooters, who can pull guns out of a bag (long-ish violin or trumpet case maybe?) and start shooting in mere seconds - not enough time to notice and prevent it. So start by educating yourself, since that’s really all you can do, and also it will help enormously to ensure that you are on the correct side of the issue.

For those so inclined, there is a verse commanding the latter point even in the actual Holy Bible, at 1 Thessalonians 5:21: “Test EVERYTHING against what you KNOW to be true”. I don’t know what can be done, after the education stage, but I know it MUST begin with that.

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-3 points
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The thing that stuck with me about Bowling for Columbine is that the school was in the same zip code as a DoJ establishment manufacturing rocket technology for war, in the most violent country in modern history. Drawing that connection between the violence done by the State and the violence done by citizens was very eye opening for me. The problem isn’t just the guns, or the NRA, or lobbying - the problem is that the United States is an evil country and we are all complicit in its evil. This is normal. ‘Dad goes off to the factory every day, he builds missiles of mass destruction.’ What’s the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?

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2 points

As @lad said, it is not the identical same thing, but yeah it certainly does seem connected.

As for evil, I could not name a single country on earth that wasn’t, especially in a historic context, but neither does that excuse the USA for being thus.

Watching Rules for Rulers really opened my eyes on that score though.

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-1 points
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The scale of America’s evil is just so much greater than every other country, so the scale of its own social sickness is similarly greater.

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4 points
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Normalisation of violence most likely had an effect, but I don’t think that the connection is as simple as

Dad goes off to the factory every day, he builds missiles of mass destruction

Edit: I was reminded that the world in the 90s, in this case 25 years ago, was quite different and likely less connected. So probably the point about geographic proximity to centers of violence production played a larger part than I thought

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0 points
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From an interview Michael Moore gave to DemocracyNow he explains the connection pretty well, I think. America is a violent country and it makes violent people.

  1. the Columbine shootings occurred on the same day as the heaviest United States bombing of the Kosovo war,

  2. the number one private employer in Littleton is Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons maker

  3. Rocky Flats, the largest plutonium-making place in the world, is just down the road

  4. NORAD is just up the road.

But you don’t think children with a childhood steeped in violence and families steeped in violence are going to grow up thinking about this? All of this militarization and violence are a cultural miasma and children absorb the lessons taught to them by America.

Kill your enemies, make them fear you, rule the world, Be a Man!

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4 points

Its been a while since i saw it, but isn’t Bowling for Columbine just footage of Michael Moore going around asking people stupid loaded questions?

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-1 points

Possibly. He’s not the best at making documentaries, and perhaps watching a trailer for it would be sufficient and better than watching the whole entire thing. Or maybe that one was actually good? It’s been awhile for me too and I do not recall either the details of how “entertaining” it was, but I do recall that it pointed out how news media aims to make profits rather than inform the public - and that is a very necessary lesson to learn. There are other sources to do so ofc, though this was also a commentary on gun violence at the same time, so I thought of it. But if people want to point to other, better documentaries that’s awesome.

But more than all that, and whether OP actually watches it or not, my point is that it exists, and moreover it did so for DECADES. In all that time since, protections against gun violence have actually gone down, as some stuff has expired and new protections for the violence have been added - e.g. in California where the judge ruled that AK-15s or whatever were perfectly fine home defense weapons. i.e., Bowling for Columbine shows one example of how long we’ve known about all of this stuff. Surely there are other documentaries too - probably some from the 70s even - but this is one that I could recall offhand.

And for that purpose it does its job just fine, merely by existing:-).

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