Shooting with multiple casualties in Vegas at Aldeen's concert

I think it's something like 2,200 people a day die from heart disease. Without looking it up, I imagine more folks died in car accidents on Monday than at the concert.

Lots of folks dieing every day from all sorts of terrible things.

Americans don't care about mass murder and nothing can be done to make them care?

Apologies if that's how my comments came across, it wasn't intended. I suppose my point was that loads of people die in all sorts of ways every day and, unless you're directly impacted, there is little motivation to effect any sort of change. I think -that- kind of sums up how folks feel. There are so many people and the system is so big that actually changing anything seems an impossible task so most choose not to.

At the risk of being overly dramatic...we live in a shitty, selfish world where too many folks are too busy worrying about themselves to care about their neighbors.

That's a good summary.

This discussion seems to have got somewhat toxic. I suppose it could act like a honey trap for trolls, though. At least they might spend less time poisoning other threads, and the title alone will alert most people surfing the "new posts" that they will encounter more than the usual proportion of misanthrope-saddo-in-dank-basement type posts.

Not all topics are equally amenable to a dispationate discussion. We're talking about how a society came to tolerate mass murder as a fact of life, or worse, a price to pay for freedom. This is a pretty dark topic.

I don't want to kill anyone, not even the NRA leardeship, but I tend to agree with tibbleinparadise that "unless you're directly impacted, there is little motivation to effect any sort of change".

Therefore, the situation won't change until mass shootings affect the gun afficionados themselves.

Stephen Paddock shared a trait with other mass killers: He abused women

https://qz.com/1094160/las-vegas-shooter-stephen-paddock-abused-women-just-like-other-mass-killers-in-the-us/?utm_source=DB&source=TDB&via=FB_Page

Since our gun rights are not the cause of the mass murders, we can rule out "price we pay for freedom".

Since there is little we can do to stop the mass murders, I think we have no choice but to accept them as a fact of life.



No chance of that. First, our gun rights are not the problem to begin with. Second, even if our rights were the source of the trouble, we would still never consent to giving up our freedom even if we were directly impacted.

I think you mean country, not world.

Other first world countries don't have mass killings as a matter of daily routine.

it really is a marvel that China is getting so much done at a much larger scale

__

it does seem that America is a mix of don't want things to change/don't think things can change/unwilling to do anything to make things change (with a tiny leavening of worn out from trying to make things change)

and what would happen if there was a mass shooting at an NRA conference or gun show?

the NRA folks would buy even more guns and ammunition

How do you know that gun aficionados haven't already been affected?

There are a great many Americans who own guns. It seems highly unlikely that none of the victims of all the mass shootings that have taken place were gun owners or family and/or friends of someone who owns a gun.

Of course, we also don't know how they (those that were not killed) thought about the issue after undergoing their personal tragedy. I recently saw a headline about two people who survived the Vegas massacre and declared that it hadn't changed their minds about not wanting to see increased gun control. Didn't bother to read the article because it proves nothing other than it's not advisable to assume how people will think after facing a life and death situation.

If you've ever experienced a tornado or a hurricane you know how terrifying they can be, and yet there are people living in areas that are regularly beset by these storms who don't move to safer climes and a great many people in coastal areas who refuse to evacuate in advance of a hurricane. Maybe if they were maimed or crippled by one of these storms they would react differently, but then maybe not. People's perception of risk is not always logical.

I don't know this to be precisely true but I suspect that the odds of being killed by a lunatic or a terrorist in a mass shooting are pretty close to those of dying in a plane crash or being eaten by a shark. Certainly they are a lot less than dying in an auto accident.

I think it's worth noting that the extremely low probability of being killed by a terrorist has been repeatedly presented in this forum as support for a claim that Americans are irrationally afraid of Islamist terrorists or an argument against proposed measures to attempt to prevent jihadi attacks. I've gone back and looked at threads on various terror attacks here and in Europe, and interestingly enough, none of them seemed to have been consumed by a gun control debate. Instead, a commonly expressed concern has been that innocent Muslims are being blamed, stigmatized and even harmed because of the actions of Islamists. While that concern may be legitimate it's interesting that many of the same people who expressed it are not concerned that gun aficionados are facing the same sort of unfounded backlash.

Of course, there are those who argue that mass shootings are now so commonplace that one's chances of dying as a result of such a crime have become much greater than that of dying in a plane crash or being eaten by a shark.

I googled "number of mass shootings" and the first site I found was this website (https://www.massshootingtracker.org/data) that purports to track mass shootings in the US.

There is no broadly accepted definition of a mass shooting event, however, the United States' Congressional Research Service defines a "public mass shooting" as one in which four or more people selected indiscriminately, not including the perpetrator, are killed

Matching this definition to the website's list, you can eliminate most of designated mass shootings. The creators clearly subscribe to a definition of the term that involves 4 or more dead and/or injured and pays no mind to the motivation behind victim selection.

Obviously these are not insignificant events simply because less than 4 people were killed, and the shooter knew and selected one or more of his victims, but they are also not mass shootings as defined by the USCRS or mass murders as defined by the FBI.

If you visit the website you will notice that for most of the incidents the perpetrator is listed as "Unknown." To its credit, the website provides links to news accounts of each incident. When you connect to the articles you find that most of the shootings where the shooter isn't identified are gang related, related to criminal activity (e.g. robbery) or a result of a violent dispute that escalates. In many cases, the victims are innocent bystanders which is particularly tragic and infuriating but the shooters had a target which they either missed or were included among the dead or wounded.

There are also a sickening number of domestic disputes which ended up with someone using a gun. More tragedy.

There are, in fact, very few acts of terrorism or massacres perpetrated by someone with a lifetime of grudges who one day simply snaps and goes on a rampage.

That society tolerates these crimes as a fact of life or the price of freedom is a tricky statement to make.

In 2015 headlines in major news sources declared that statistics showed that there is at least one mass shooting every day in America. The definition of the term used to calculate this was pretty much what the linked website uses: Four or more people killed or injured, regardless of motivation and victim selection. More than 2/3rds of the incidents involved shootings in homes and the majority of victims were family members, spouses or a girlfriend/boyfriend.

For the last several years, Mother Jones has maintained a database of mass shootings that exclude criminal acts such as robberies, gang activity and domestic violence. In 2016 the magazine reported they had identified 75 mass shootings since 1982. In other words for a 34 year period, there were less than 1/4th of the number of incidents the Washington Post and other outlets were reporting had occurred in 2015 alone.

Of course this is not to say that 75 mass murders in 34 years are trifling, but clearly, the type of incidents that occurred in Vegas, Newtown, CT, Aurora, CO and Columbine (the ones that make the national news) are not happening every day in America.

First of all, the statement that society has come to tolerate mass murder as the price of freedom implies (as intended) that the gun control measures that are called for following each tragedy could have prevented them and this is simply not true.

Secondly, it would be more accurate to state that society (or more precisely, certain Mayors and City Councils) have come to tolerate the murder of young black men and innocent bystanders in ghettos within our major cities, and yes, in some cases, as the price of freedom from bigotry and profiling. Intensified policing in specific urban neighborhoods (even specific blocks) has proven effective in reducing gun deaths however they also give rise to claims of racism and oppression which have put an end to some efforts.

And it would seem that our society (and indeed the entire world) has come to tolerate domestic violence. It's difficult to track the rise or fall of domestic violence because it is so rarely reported to police by the victims. One study contends that less than 1% of such incidents are reported. This seems, to me and most researchers, to be unlikely, but if we change it to less than 25% it still makes quantification nearly impossible and prevention extremely difficult. We do know that the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 to 2012 was approx. half of the number of women killed in America by their intimate partners over the same period of time.

As the statistician in the WaPo article I linked suggests if we really want to do something about gun deaths in America we need to focus more on their causes and less on the tools used. Over the last several years more than a dozen states have increased gun restrictions and prohibition on known abusers and stalkers. This is a sensible gun control measure that even the NRA has often supported. And it's not just in blue states. Wisconsin and South Carolina have both passed laws requiring the subjects of domestic abuse restraining orders to surrender their guns within 48 hours or flat out bans convicted abusers from ever owning a firearm.

It's quite common for people to react emotionally to horrific tragedies like the one in Vegas, and to demand that something be done to stop them from ever happening again. It's a lot less common for an easy solution to be found, and when proposed solutions involve the potential infringement of a Constitutionally protected right, and sensible people who are anything but gun-nuts can argue with credibility that the solutions proposed have little to no chance of solving the problem, imposing them just so we can say we did something is no a solution at all.

Passion is not a problem if it leads to actual, meaningful solutions and not feel-good, ineffectual and possibly harmful symbolic gestures. Creating an artificial moral divide between those who want across the board increased gun control and those who do not is not particularly helpful either, and while I certainly accept your claim that you don't want to kill or see killed NRA leadership, the sort of passion that leads to such statements is not pretty and can be harmful. Thankfully, no one in this forum is so callous and vile to suggest that the victims in Vegas got what they deserved or are not worthy of sympathy because they were Country Music fans and therefore most likely Republicans, Trump supporters or racists, but those sentiments have been expressed throughout social media (and not just by basement dwelling troglodytes) and are as despicable as claiming the tragedy was God's punishment for America's growing acceptance of homosexuality. It may be that such disgusting expressions after events like this one were just as common in the past but social media has taken them from someone's living room and aired them to the world, but I don't think that's true, and even if it is, it's of no comfort.

America has a violence problem, the world has a violence problem and even if it was possible, eliminating all firearms from the face of the earth will not solve these problems nor the growing divide in this country and others that result in people hating one another simply because of their politics; to the point where decency and compassion are lost and for some, violence becomes an acceptable option. We still don't know the motive of the Vegas shooter, but whatever it was we won't be enlightened when we finally learn it. It will be sickening no matter what it was but will it, for some, be fathomable? If he turns out to be like the recent DC shooter and motivated by politics, will some people such as network lawyers and political party officials consider him to be something other than just a madman who for reasons only his dark and broken mind could fathom murdered in cold blood over 50 people and injured hundreds more?

(For those who might experience irritation due to the length of this post, I suggest availing yourselves of the thumb down icon directly below my avatar)

I think that you described the situation quite well. [I do think, however, that domestic violence is fortunataly more often reported tha in former times.]

Wo geholt wird, fallen auch Späne we say in German, the equivalent win English would be (nearly) "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs".
If you want weapons for everyone, you have to accept 'misconduct' by some owners. And that happens even if the ownership is controlled. And with everything else that could be dangerous.

There are, however, in any case some measurements to reduce the possible danger. Some work, others are populist reactions without any real outcome.

It all depends on how you see it. And how you are used to it.
The Mandalay Bay horror was no different to all the other mass shootings: just bigger and bloodier.

In a nutshell that's the message of the right. The World is **** and there's nothing that can be done about it so don't bother.

The left hopes, actually imagines a better World. I was clocked breaking the speed limit and went on a driver's course. The first thing we were told is how the amount of people being killed on the road keeps going down. Great strides are being made in the treatment of heart disease.

Most people are decent, things can change, we don't have mass shootings over here. Choose hope, not inertia.

The German proverb Einmal ist keinmal means "once doesn't count". I've counted your agreements as one.

Lot easier to get things done when you don't have to deal with pesky things like democracy, independent judiciary, etc.

Of course, as the Chinese example illustrates, the 'getting things done' then tends to involve brutalizing a lot of people.

Meaning that they don't count or amount to much?

I have the feeling, my friend, that I've been insulted here, but can't be certain since in many A2K threads in which you and I exchange comments there often seems to be at least one of yours that I find utterly inscrutable; to the extent that I sometimes worry that I may have suffered some sort neurological episode resulting in a loss of cognitive function. The above response is just such a comment.

I have read it over a dozen times now and still can't say with anything approaching certainty that I at all understand the message you have conveyed. You are clearly very intelligent and your command of English (which I assume is not your native tongue) is quite impressive and, in any case, far beyond my ability to converse in German or any other language in which I can communicate, at best, at the level of a pre-school child. Nevertheless, as I don't wish to give serious consideration to the possibility of diminished cognition I have alway always assumed the issue is with your English and not my brain. However, your response received at least two thumbs up which suggests that at least two people visiting this thread have read your response, believed they understood it and registered their appreciation of it. I wish you or they would explain it to me so that I might appreciate it as well.

I considered the possibility that two individuals who religiously thumb down my posts regardless of their content after attending to mine, perceived, without truly understanding it, that yours contained mockery or insult directed at me and therefore thumbed yours up, but that's an overly paranoid supposition and too ungracious towards you. Instead, I'll just leave it that I don't really have a clue as to what you meant to convey in your response and request that you take pity on a possible victim of early-onset dementia and attempt to explain it to me.

(If there is a jab for me contained within the response, wouldn't it be more satisfying if I were to understand it? And if the jab is there, that's fine. I actually did enjoy having the opportunity to find myself in such agreement with you for a change )

All things considered, I don't think that's a bit paranoid.

I feel like i'm talking to a climate change denier.... Nothing is ever possible with defeatists like you, except more stonewalling of course.

As Walt said, this last massacre is just bigger than previous ones, that's all. You know the story of the frog placed in water that is progressively brought to boiling point? Proverbially, it never feels like it should jump out because the change is progressive. That's what's happening here. An entire society is being brought to boiling point, slowly slowly. One day it's gona boil.