A Combustible Lemon wrote:Death is an archaic concept for simpleminded commonfolk, not Victorian scientist whales.
D-LOGAN wrote:Not that if it had stayed at 2 it would have been less tragic or anything ... but ... fuck!
"Australia has strict gun control laws... and hasn’t had a mass shooting in almost 30 years..."
Just for the record, they've had a couple.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Hectorville_siege
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monash_ ... y_shooting
They've also had a few mass murders committed with other weapons, most recently this one just this year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Melbourne_car_attack
That said, overall the mass murder situation in Australia seems to be roughly comparable to the situation in Canada, which has substantially more permissive gun laws (though tighter than in the US), and where around half of all households have a gun in the home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... _Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... _in_Canada
Of course, neither compares to the US with respect to massacres, mass shootings, or even gun deaths in general, despite Canada having about 7 million guns in 10 million civilian households. That isn't a new observation, nor is it unique to conservatives like [name withheld]-- Michael Moore made the same point in Bowling for Columbine 15 years ago. After noting the high rate of gun ownership in Canada, he examined various other commonly hypothesized causes of the US mass shooting epidemic, from family breakdown to poverty to violent media. The result was this highly effective scene:
https://youtu.be/2Yub7Lc-lnU?t=142
Ultimately, if we're going to find a solution to this problem, we need to give it some serious thought and refrain from indulging snarky one-liners or automatically slapping down anyone who criticizes our pet theories, because none of the easy answers that we all reflexively point to really make sense on closer examination. We don't have this problem figured out yet, and figuring it out is going to require all of us to think harder, consider more possibilities that we would ordinarily dismiss, and overall be *better people* than we currently are.
As a longtime friend of [name withheld], I can assure you that he hates seeing people get murdered senselessly; we all do. Motivation to solve the problem isn't the issue here--the issue is firstly that it's a really hard problem, and secondly that we Americans spend more time bickering with each other than working together to solve problems these days. Until that changes, people will keep dying from fundamentally solvable problems, including this problem and so many other major problems that we've neglected for so long.
Pseudoman wrote:I think he went through an existential crisis realizing that he didn't matter and no one would take notice if he was alive or dead and he desperately wanted to change that and now the rest is history.
He's at the moment the largest mass shooter in the US. Like it or not because of this he's going to get a Wikipedia page that will chronicle his life or at the very least this incident. Like it or not he'll be more remembered than his victims. Even if we outright hate all of this, he got what he wanted, being noticed in the world. That or he really hated country music.
tinyrick wrote:I want my representatives in Congress to point out this is not a gun issue, but a mental health issue, then cut funding to mental health related services.
Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:tinyrick wrote:I want my representatives in Congress to point out this is not a gun issue, but a mental health issue, then cut funding to mental health related services.
What funding?
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