monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

@snood,

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Re: ehBeth (Post 6514731)
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Americans do seem fearful. Not sure where that came from - it started before 9-11 but sure escalated then.

I'm not entirely sure where it comes from, either.

The obvious earlier instance was COMMUNISM!

But really this is a much older thing that is ever-present but which ebbs and fades through time. This is a high point now. By far the best historical analysis I've read on the phenomenon is Richard Hofstadter's essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics This really is necessary reading.

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It would be interesting to see what steps various people here believe the US should take to solve mass shootings.

I think most people agree on some steps.

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@Lash,

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what steps various people here believe the US should take to solve

Or even to mitigate

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@blatham,

from the Hofstadter piece

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Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.

style/branding

yup there is that

and

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A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

I wonder what his take on the current anti-intellectualism would be. Pages of footnotes a la McCarthy aren't the thing these days.

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@snood,

Or do you think the rising body count is just the required sacrifice this American society needs to pay for "freedom"?

Bill O'Reilly does.

Bill O'Reilly Calls Las Vegas Mass Shooting the "Price of Freedom (The Hollywood Reporter)

You're right though, I would like to hear from who oppose gun control any solutions they may have to stop mass shootings and deaths.

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@revelette1,

I’ll bet O’Reilly didn’t lose a loved one in the Las Vegas massacre.

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@Olivier5,

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Exactly. The only way forward involves killing the NRA folks, en masse, since they are murdering the country en masse.

Do you have any stats on how many NRA members have committed mass shootings?

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@snood,

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Yeah, that's witty, I guess. Can you two honestly say you'd have the same reaction to a young dark skinned person carrying several weapons into a hotel lobby as you would to an older white man?

Do you honestly think he carried in the guns themselves or even used things that looked like gun cases? With as many guns as he had, I'm interested in seeing video footage from the hotel. If you have ever been to Las Vegas then you know there isn't an inch of a hotel that isn't covered by security camera's. I want to know how many trips he made to get them all in the room. I can't help but think this guy had help in the setup of this whole thing.

Can you just stop with the race baiting BS, "if it were a black guy he would have been shot in the lobby...".

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@blatham,

Good for them. If the extreme left-wing ever got a hold of such a database, they would use it as a target list against gun owners. Several newspapers have already tried to expose gun owners in different states by publishing their names either in print or on their websites.

Once you know who owns the guns you make it easier to take them away. Screw your invasion into my privacy.

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@Baldimo,

The NRA makes these mass murder possible in the first place. They share the guilt.

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@Olivier5,

Then car and beer companies share the blame for drunk driving accidents.

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@Baldimo,

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Can you just stop with the race baiting BS, "if it were a black guy he would have been shot in the lobby...".

It is not as though there is not a perfectly good reason for such a statement.

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@Baldimo,

Some insurers and courts agree with you.

The issue of breathalyzers for all cars has been rumbling quite loudly in a number of jurisdictions for somewhat over five years.

Breweries and auto manufacturers are regularly named in lawsuits around drunk driving - and insurance money sometimes pays out on those lawsuits/claims (which is why the companies carry the coverages they do).

The awareness of their responsibility is a reason breweries (and other alcohol makers/providers) as well as automobile companies advertise safe use and sponsor safety events. It's not just for tax write-offs.

Some insurers now offer significant discounts to drivers who have breathalyzers installed in their vehicles, in addition to the discounts for having on-board driving monitors activated - and trackable by the insurer.

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@Baldimo,

We do have stats on how many NRA .members supported Obama's background checks after Sandy Hook. As I recall, it was about 2/3 supported expanding checks. Family members of NRA members supported checks even more, I think in the 80 percent ranges. And the public at large supported them over 90. The NRA leadership on the other hand rejected expanded checks to a man (and they were mostly men). Which means they were seriously out of touch with what Americans and their own members wanted.

Maybe it's time to put Wayne LaPierre and his cohorts in the slammer for lengthy terms on the "You can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre" principle for aiding and advocating violence. That might have a salutary effect on the rest of the gun zealots.

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@Baldimo,

Baldimo wrote:

Can you just stop with the race baiting BS, "if it were a black guy he would have been shot in the lobby...".

talk to your kids sometime about the things some of their friends can easily/comfortably do that they can't

I sometimes travel with a friend who is visibly black. I pass for white. Our experiences are very different.

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@revelette1,

There isn't a good reason, the FBI stats prove that white people are killed by police more often that black people. This is why the whole BLM movement is suspect in my eyes.

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@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

Baldimo wrote:
Can you just stop with the race baiting BS, "if it were a black guy he would have been shot in the lobby...".

talk to your kids sometime about the things some of their friends can easily/comfortably do that they can't

I sometimes travel with a friend who is visibly black. I pass for white. Our experiences are very different.

I still marvel at how low a level of awareness someone like Baldimo would have to have in order to call a statement like "if he had been black he'd have been shot" - "race baiting". The point of such a statement is much the same point you allude to in your comment about white appearance giving a pass in some circumstances. In this society, blacks/browns are held to a different kind of scrutiny - and sometimes that discrepancy in how they are perceived ends in death at the hands of police. It's why I asked Baldimo (and he dismissed it out of hand as race baiting) if he'd react the same way to a black man with twenty rifles in a hotel lobby.

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@ehBeth,

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talk to your kids sometime about the things some of their friends can easily/comfortably do that they can't

My kids do all the same things their friends do, and without fear of the police. I talked to my kids about interactions with the police when they were young teenagers, about how to interact with the police and what to do and not do. Their advantage was that their grandfather, my dad is a retired cop and I was in the military when when they were still single digit ages.

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@Baldimo,

Baldimo wrote:

There isn't a good reason, the FBI stats prove that white people are killed by police more often that black people. This is why the whole BLM movement is suspect in my eyes.

Do me a favor. Read this and get back to me.
(bolds mine for emphasis)

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Between Jan. 1, 2015 and July 11, 2016 (when this article was written), 1,502 people were shot and killed by on-duty police officers. Of them, 732 were white, and 381 were black (and 382 were of another or unknown race).
As data scientists and policing experts often note, comparing how many or how often white people are killed by police to how many or how often black people are killed by the police is statistically dubious unless you first adjust for population.
According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. That means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/?utm_term=.f84b4c402097
http://www.snopes.com/do-police-kill-more-whites-than-black-people/

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@Baldimo,

of course there are5,or 6 times as many \whites as blacks in the country, wihich might have something to do with it I see snood covered that while I was writing my post, the rate at which blacks are killed IS noticeably much higher, and has not gone unnoticed, which is why BLM is important. It ain't equal treatment under the law. Never has been.

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