I just noticed that someone is commenting as C. Schroedinger and its not me.
6.
Kay
Have we moved on from the latest mass slaughter yet?
Remember- nothing can be done. Nothing. This level of carnage is now acceptable and ordinary.
How long until we beat our new record? 3 months? Tops. We’re the mass gun rampage country- we excel at this.
7.
raven
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.
8.
Elizabelle
Thank you Betty. Bird on a wire. Perfect.
@ Kay: We are exceptional. No doubt. Don’t learn from history either — ours or anyone else’s — until absolutely forced to do so. And it’s getting worse.
@schrodingers_cat: That’s Ginger Boy, the tux is the new kid, Ollie.
10.
The Moar You Know
In b4 Russian troll army
11.
raven
@Kay: I’m sure you can go back and make it 300 comments on the last thread. Maybe yours will be the one that changes the everything.
12.
Kay
One would think they would worry, in government, that they’ll become completely irrelevant. Trump will be nattering on and on about his stupid fucking wall and the travel ban when the biggest danger plays out right under his nose, and they do NOTHING. It would be comical if it weren’t so sad. The shooter is in the house and these morons are busy locking the doors.
They’ll have to keep us IN, pretty soon. We’ll want to escape this fucking loony bin of a country and they’ll have to pass laws to keep us here.
@Elizabelle:
See, the problem isn’t even just that we don’t learn from history.
Far too often, we learn the exact wrong lessons from it instead.
14.
Sab
@jeffreyw: Is that a framed snakeskin on the wall behind kittehs?
15.
ArchTeryx
@Kay: I have…at least on the surface. But I will never, ever forget the country these cocksuckers bequeathed the rest of us with.
It’s like David Brin was prophetic with his Uplift books. The right is numerically small but wields all effective power; the left is numerically small and utterly powerless; the establishment and the mushy middle look at the latest atrocities, shrug, and move on. The Five Galaxies, or 21st Century America?
16.
Elizabelle
I went to a concert Saturday night in Richmond, VA. The Psychedelic Furs at the National, former theatre. They were terrific. Was hanging out in the back of the venue, since acoustics are best there. Thought for a few moments of the tee shirt/merchandise seller for the Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan. He was among the first murdered, back of the venue.
But then remembered: we go through a metal detector to enter the National. Lots and lots of pleasant staff there for entry. And they search bags, I would assume for alcohol, but also for weapons, perhaps.
Because this mass murder at an outdoor venue? One point is to make us all more wary about assembling in public.
I wonder if we might see some changes out of this one. Being country music fans — heartland, All American. No chance of escape; you were either shot or not, in the first volleys.
Mandalay Bay. Name now associated with the US’s biggest mass murder. For now. For a little while.
@Kay: I am thinking they need to make sure we have an escape valve.
Used to be, you could vote bad legislators out. No more. We have an illegitimate POTUS; stole the election on technicality, with the aid of gazilionaires and the Russkies.
I think I would be a little fucking afraid of the silent majority now, because it’s actually us, not the gun humpers and rightwingers. You cannot make people witness this carnage, again and again and again, and they have no voice to stop it.
Hell, you just got over trying to take away their health insurance, and have made it clear, you’re good with tanking national healthcare. You don’t respond to a horrendous hurricane, on American soil.
@Kryptik:
We learned that unless they are kept in fear, women and black people might sometimes be in charge. Half of America prefers the former. Half of America prefers the latter.
21.
Tazj
@Kay: It’s completely frustrating. I saw a retired NYC police commissioner on television say that nothing could have been done to stop it and if the police wouldn’t have shown up when they did it would have been worse. A criminologist said on another station that mass murderers exist in every country and use things other than guns, which we know, people have used knives, chemicals and vehicles. However, they all seem too resigned to the fact that we should get used to living with these horrible deaths.
@Frankensteinbeck: more than half (or at least a plurality) of American voters prefer the latter, but thanks to an antiquated system designed to bribe and coddle slaveowners, are not represented.
23.
Starfish
@Elizabelle: What’s wild is that the politicians are still stupid.
This is all the Representative who got shot had to say about this? Really?
24.
The Dangerman
I know it’s way early and all but have we learned how the shooter knocked out the window? I don’t think it’s THAT easy.
25.
The Moar You Know
One point is to make us all more wary about assembling in public.
@Elizabelle: And that’s a real problem both from a societal, interpersonal relations point of view, and a hell of a deterrent to protesting.
@Sab: @Sab: Yes, that is the snake that killed a 2yo Brittany, Lizzie. We saw her stagger back home, she got to the door and collapsed, dead. Out for ten minutes, tops. We went snake hunting.
@The Dangerman: The cops said he had a hammer like device.
29.
RobertDSC-iPhone 6
I had one high school friend at the festival. She is safe with her family.
Another, different high school friend was in the area. She is also safe.
Last, my godmother passed away from lung cancer early Sunday morning. She was 80.
30.
The Moar You Know
I know it’s way early and all but have we learned how the shooter knocked out the window? I don’t think it’s THAT easy.
@The Dangerman: Fucker had at least one machine gun. I think it might have taken five seconds. Three rounds followed with the room chair.
31.
manyakitty
@RobertDSC-iPhone 6: Glad your friends are safe, and I’m sorry for your loss. So much happening all at once…
32.
coin operated
My daughter and I were having drinks outside NYNY when this shit went down. Rode by the concert venue not 30 minutes before.
I’m fine, only because I’ve been in professions where I was trained how to react in a situation like this…but my girl didn’t get a wink of sleep last night and is still somewhat distraught. Watching people run for their lives from the sound of automatic gunfire is not something I want *anyone* to experience…ever.
33.
Suzanne
Per Elizabelle’s request, I am reposting:
To follow up on my earlier comment in the previous thread about capacity in hospitals for these types of events….
I heard on NPR this morning that the entire state of Nevada has ONE Level 1 trauma center, which is in Las Vegas. They have three ORs. Some of the victims died in the facility. The facility was able to take approximately 30 of the victims.
Our healthcare system does not have the capacity for these kinds of events.
34.
Elizabelle
@Starfish: Not even looking. I was not among those wishing Scalise a recovery. Terrible man.
FWIW, Gabby Giffords is appearing in Virginia today, if memory serves, on behalf of Dem gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam. May just be an office meet and greet. We’ll have to see if she has anything to say.
Anyone whose passion is gunhumping is likely already voting for Gillespie.
35.
SiubhanDuinne (at some point in the indeterminate future to be known by my real name, Judith Mann Costello, but maybe not quite yet)
A sad and stressful time for you. I’m glad your friends are safe, and I hope your godmother had a peaceful and gentle transition to whatever comes next. My condolences.
36.
Betty Cracker
@Starfish: I’m glad the nutbag who shot Scalise didn’t manage to kill him. But Scalise was a far-right piece of shit before he got shot, and the experience doesn’t seem to have changed him.
37.
Betty Cracker
@coin operated: Whoa, glad y’all are okay. Every year, more Americans join the club of people who have had that horrific experience.
38.
Suzanne
This is something I am sharing, as it comes from my friend Brad, who is a US Army veteran and a resident of Las Vegas. (He drives a cab, and his boss recalled all the drivers this morning, so fortunately he is safe.) You may recall that I shared a GoFundMe a few months back to help out a friend—Brad is that friend. Fortunately, he has a new job lined up and will be starting next month, so his personal life should be stabilizing. Anyway, I thought this was great.
“I don’t care if people think it’s too soon. I’m outraged as an American to be seeing these stories over and over again. It’s time to get rid of the guns in this country. All of them. Without exception. The protection from tyranny that they are intended to provide is an illusion. In the days of modern warfare, these weapons do nothing to protect us from our government. Take it from me, I’VE PLAYED with the government’s toys. Beyond that alleged protection, there is no longer any other justifiable reason to permit these weapons in our country. Our healthcare and education systems are too broken to support a public that is also entrusted with guns. That is not politics. That is not opinion. That is a fact, and we can no longer afford to ignore it, redefine it, or take half-measures to address it. As a society, the blood from these attacks is on all of our hands because we are not learning from them and changing.”
Watching people run for their lives from the sound of automatic gunfire is not something I want *anyone* to experience…ever.
It should happen to Republican congresscritters. Again and again. Until they realize that we feel like prey now, in our own beloved country.
They hide behind taxpayer-funded security apparatus and staff. They hide from their constituents at town halls. They ride on airplanes, fares paid by taxpayers, and they’re secured by TSA protection — unless they’re catching a ride on private jets. They have topflight health insurance, paid for by the government, and get actual pensions, no matter if they leave office under a cloud.
I want to make those assholes more like the average Joe, and afraid of us.
They should have to worry about this.
I have always been good with the Capitol Hill security, because I think Fox etc. have made Nancy Pelosi public enemy number one for their irrational gunhumping audience.
I heard the reports of this on the car radio while coming home from my morning walk. Decided then I was just not going to turn the TV on today. It will be all over every channel drowning out all other news and virtually none of the coverage will be worthwhile. Reading the comments here makes me think I made a good decision.
Later today I will call my Senators and Rep to tell them how I feel about changing our tax structure, I will yell at them for letting CHIP lapse, I will remind them about DACA, and now I will add a little at the end about NOT making silencers easier to get. I’m probably wrong but maybe this event will finally get that provision removed from the bill.
However, the only long-term solution to waking up to all this shit is to go out and register folks to vote and encourage brave people to become candidates and to toss as many Republican Senators and House Reps out on their asses in 2018 as is possible. And we can start with the VA state legislature right now. If you live in or near VA get out there and help elect some Ds by making calls and knocking on doors. If like me you live in a distant state then do what I have done by giving some money to the VA Democratic party. I have never been a big fan of Terry McAuliffe but I have to give him props for doing as much as he can to help make VA a bluer state.
Treat this like a public health crisis. Because it is. And the GOP/NRA insisted that we not be allowed to study or compile the record of gun injuries and deaths in this country.
Terrible point, about the odds of a severely wounded person surviving when there is not capacity to deal with all wounds — it is triage.
A truly great song rewires your brain – I can’t see anything related to birds/wires without thinking about that song.
48.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore: The standard glass in curtain wall systems is heat-strengthened and laminated. Some is tempered, which is stronger than heat-strengthened. None of that is ballistic. The only buildings I’m aware of that have bullet-resistant envelopes are high-security government installations, and they aren’t usually made with big pieces of glass.
You could break that kind of window by throwing a big object, like a chair, if you were strong enough, but I bet he just shot it out.
49.
Barbara
@Suzanne: Nevada isn’t that big. Las Vegas has a population of around 1.7 million, give or take, and the entire state is just over 2 million. One of those 21 states that is smaller than Puerto Rico. The closest city for airlifting purposes would likely be Los Angeles, which has a population of more than 10 million.
Our healthcare system does not have the capacity for these kinds of events.
My son and I were discussing the mass murder event this morning on the way to school. And it struck me that I bet a large portion of the people wounded will not have insurance coverage. So we were discussing the insanity that our nation is about to be immersed in a few hundred more gofundme requests to help with healthcare bills for those injured.
If you haven’t talked to your vet about getting the rattlesnake vaccine for your dogs, do so. It’s a big thing out here in So Cal and makes all the difference in survival rates.
@marcopolo: I did not start out a fan of Terry McAuliffe, but he has been a superb governor. And he’s accessible. I get a kick of meeting tourists and visitors who show you their selfie with the governor.
Really good guy. He tried mightily to expand Medicaid.
54.
Mary G
WaPo is saying that the LVPD was able to identify the shooter’s room within minutes because there were so many shots the gun smoke set off the room’s detectors. He must have had a couple of big trunks or something to bring in all the guns and ammo.
A criminologist said on another station that mass murderers exist in every country and use things other than guns, which we know, people have used knives, chemicals and vehicles.
That’s infuriating. What kind of “criminologist” argues that not being able to prevent a crime 100% of the time means we can’t do anything? Might as well say “buildings collapse in earthquakes all over the world, so there’s no point to having building codes.”
Terrible point, about the odds of a severely wounded person surviving when there is not capacity to deal with all wounds — it is triage.
The facility (like all Level 1 trauma centers) said that they will not turn away a trauma patient, but that they also can’t treat more than the facility can accommodate at any one time.
Should be noted that Level 1 trauma is typically a money-loser for hospitals. It’s a community benefit that needs to be backed up by taxpayers.
@Elizabelle: I think the reality is that many people hold extreme positions on gun control with the assumption that mass shooters will target the kinds of groups they aren’t part of. I don’t know how they rationalize Newtown, CT or Aurora, CO, but I am still amazed by the Rand Paul Tweet about how the purpose of the second amendment was to enable people to actually kill tyrants. Of course Paul could not have dreamed in a million years that he might be seen as the tyrant, but when that possibility arose, he hid behind the bleachers (which I also would have done).
61.
Barbara
@Elizabelle: And McAuliffe made restoring voting rights about as personal as an issue can get for a governor.
I saw your post in the other thread and looked it up — Los Angeles has 5 Level I trauma centers, but that doesn’t do the victims in Las Vegas any good if they’re not stable enough for an hour-long airlift.
It’s depressing as fuck how little of this needs to be updated each time this happens. And that it keeps happening and there isn’t any progress towards a sensible gun policy. If anything, we get further from one every time this happens.
And it struck me that I bet a large portion of the people wounded will not have insurance coverage. So we were discussing the insanity that our nation is about to be immersed in a few hundred more gofundme requests to help with healthcare bills for those injured.
AND if the Level 1 trauma centers don’t get paid, they close. They are already (typically) operating at a loss, and are backed up financially by ludicrous fees for other services, as well as federal and state $$$. The one in Vegas is at their university research (quaternary care) institution. A few incidents like this and I would expect trauma centers to start closing.
65.
eclare
@The Dangerman: That was my question, glass cutter, like in the finale of Homeland’s first season?
66.
trollhattan
Learned of Las Vegas from the radio while trying to go to sleep. This a.m. the kiddo overslept and flew out the door for school having not heard anything about it, but certainly did within minutes of arriving, where 2,500 kids now get to consider the country they’ll be navigating on their own in a scant few years and running, a few years after that. Here’s hoping they do a better job.
She also learned last weekend one of her soccer teammates attempted suicide.
Gotta be tough to be a teen, today.
67.
Shalimar
@Kay: I don’t think anyone is going to beat this record anytime soon. It was on a level far beyond what was previously imaginable by one guy. How many settings do we even have in the whole country where tens of thousands of people gather outdoors, packed closely together, with a nearby public-accessible structure tall enough to look down on everyone like this?
Why the Jones Act Is Robin Hood in Reverse
The previously obscure law not only slowed delivery of relief supplies to Puerto Rico—it represents a whole category of ‘rent-seeking’ policies that redistribute income upwards.
by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles
October 2, 2017
In the midst of almost unimaginable horror in Puerto Rico, a bright light has shone on one of America’s most unjustifiable and economically backward laws, the previously obscure Jones Act. First created in the aftermath of World War I to buffer the impact of post-war demobilization, the Jones Act requires that all ships that carry cargo within the United States be built in America, with American crews.
The cost to American consumers each year runs in the billions of dollars, with particularly large impacts on places like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands that (unlike the mainland) depend almost exclusively on shipping for everything from food to fuel. What in normal times just increased prices on essential goods—bad enough for the poorest island-based Americans—has turned tragic.
The Jones Act is now approaching its centennial. Despite the huge cost to consumers and the puny size of the American ship-building industry—U.S. ships carry only 2 percent of global cargo—the law has proven all but politically bullet-proof. But what the law’s beneficiaries lack in numbers, they make up for in geographic concentration (in and around a few major ports), and the doggedness of their lobbying. In the American political system, these are powerful sources of influence, especially when playing defense in institutions with multiple veto points.
69.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: Phoenix has about that many, but each one only has a few trauma bays and trauma ORs. Flagstaff has one. Each facility has one helipad. The number of victims in this incident is literally enough to use all of the Level 1 trauma capacity of an entire region of the country, if their wounds are severe enough.
And that’s not considering all the other incidents that require Level 1 trauma care, like car wrecks.
When I am asked my recommendations for political non-fiction books, the top of my list is almost always Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites is a close second.)
Seven years after its publication, no other book better explains the state of the modern political world. The thesis of the book is simple: vulture capitalists saw profit to be had in institutions that eschewed profit to serve people, and when people would not give up those institutions, the vulture capitalists shocked entire populations into submission using disasters both natural and manmade as an opportunity to privatize entire industries. Kleptocracy, religious fundamentalism, ethnic sectarianism and dictatorship arose quickly from the ashes of stunned, impoverished and subjugated peoples, creating blowback for Western democracies even as the jet set luxuriated in champagne and caviar.
We are living that story today all over the world. Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Russia was the direct result of American-led privatization of the former Soviet Union’s assets, as Bill Clinton and Yeltsin worked to convert the USSR from Soviet Communism to American libertarianism overnight rather than manage a responsible transition to a Scandinavian-style democratic socialist system that might actually benefit a disoriented Russian people. Poverty and anger was the result, and desperate Russians (particularly from rural areas) sought to make their country great again by electing a despot who they imagined would bring back the glory days. Now with Russian interference in the U.S. election, many American elites who instigated the Yeltsin-era collapse have paid the price for their greed in spades, with a particularly bitter irony for the Clinton family.
………………………………………………
And, of course, it happened here in America. The same vulture capitalists who devastated the Russian and Iraqi towns and countrysides and gave rise to Vlaidimr Putin and ISIS, also did the same to the American Rust Belt. Entire communities were left to rot and die as factories were closed and jobs automated and sent overseas, just to boost next quarter’s stock returns and make the .1% even more fantastically richer. Youngstown, Ohio, shared much the same fate as Vladivostock and Baghdad, its citizens left behind and turned to indentured servants in a dystopia of despair so that a few incompetent elites in a pretend meritocracy could profit more obscenely from the excess than any Roman Emperor or French King. As in Russia, they voted to make their country great again by punishing the elites they rightly felt had betrayed them–even if it meant electing a racist, ignorant buffoon to the Oval Office.
It’s not always the direct doing of the vultures through military or economic aggression. Sometimes they swoop in after natural disasters, as occurred in New Orleans after Katrina when the public schools were converted into a failed privatization experiment. In the case of climate change, lucrative fossil fuel consumption neatly causes Arctic melt that in turn allows further irresponsible exploitation of carbon reserves. It also coincidentally worsens natural disasters that create the opportunity for more creative destruction and privatization at the expense of vulnerable people, species and habitats. It’s a perfect circle of greed and death.
And now the same thing is being done to Puerto Rico. Vulture capital has spent the last decade slowly grinding down the island territory into a cruel debtor’s prison so that Wall Street can scoop up unearned nickels from the impoverished populace. No sooner had Hurricane Maria departed than the same debt dealers were offering Puerto Ricans even more rope with which to entrap them. Wall Street has long been slavering over Puerto Rico’s electric utility, and now sees even more opportunity for privatizing it in the wake of the destruction.
There is no particular reason for America’s pro-business conservatives to come too quickly to Puerto Rico’s aid. The entire ideology of vulture conservatism is that government is incapable of helping, and that communities must fend for themselves (particularly if they lack the right skin tone and dialect.) But beyond that, there is no incentive for the hedge fund class to see Puerto Rico recover too quickly. It’s in their best interest to see Puerto Rico make a painful, grinding transition to full privatization, more debt and endless punitive interest payments.
How many settings do we even have in the whole country where tens of thousands of people gather outdoors, packed closely together, with a nearby public-accessible structure tall enough to look down on everyone like this?
Pretty much every city in the United States. I can think of several hotels from which someone could take potshots at the Rose Parade on live national TV, and Pasadena has a population of 130,000.
However, the only long-term solution to waking up to all this shit is to go out and register folks to vote and encourage brave people to become candidates and to toss as many Republican Senators and House Reps out on their asses in 2018 as is possible. And we can start with the VA state legislature right now.
Hear, hear!
And if you want a little schadenfreude to brighten your day, read this WaPo article full of Republicans making mealy-mouthed excuses for Gillespie’s lagging fundraising.
73.
trollhattan
@Corner Stone:
SWAG: zero dollars and zero cents. See, it really is the World’s Greatest Healthcare System ™.
Remember Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn doctrine” with regard to the Iraq War–”You break it, you own it”? That same rule should apply to the consequences of bad voting decisions. Those who voted for Donald Trump last November–especially the folks who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, only to take leave of their senses by voting for the bigoted billionaire to succeed him as President–broke this country…and they certainly own the mess we’re in, including the humanitarian tragedy in Puerto Rico.
Just as it is impossible to imagine a President Al Gore or a President John Kerry leaving American citizens to die on the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so too does it beggar belief to think that a President Hillary Clinton would leave American citizens to suffer and starve in Puerto Rico. As Keith Olbermann notes, Trump’s response to Puerto Rico is saturated with racial prejudice; in fact, actor and comedian John Leguizamo’s analysis of Trump’s deliberate mishandling of the Puerto Rico crisis is even more direct than Olbermann’s.
Those who voted for Trump generally, and former Obama voters who actually thought Trump was a worthy successor to Obama specifically, bear responsibility for this nightmare. With their votes, they gave Trump the power to hurt the people of Puerto Rico, to scoff at their suffering, to place the desires of supporters wearing hats of red over the needs of people desperate for water, shelter and bread.
@Elizabelle:
It is now a cliche that Republicans have no sympathy for suffering until it touches them. Elected Republicans are just like their constituents, except insulated from consequences. Among other things, it simply bewilders them that people don’t see how eviscerating health care is the right thing to do.
Let’s break that down. First of all, against the advice of his foreign policy experts, Trump continues to attempt to inflame the situation with name-calling. Secondly, in suggesting that his predecessors were “being nice to Rocket Man,” the president demonstrates his total ignorance of history, which was documented most thoroughly in this Washington Monthly story by Fred Kaplan. Thirdly, Trump makes it sound like he wasn’t aware of what his Sec. of State was doing in talking directly to North Korea. Otherwise, why would he tweet that it was a waste of time almost immediately following Tillerson’s remarks? One has to wonder how foreign policy decisions are made in this administration. Rather than discussing options in the situation room and agreeing on a course of action, it sure looks like members of the administration are free agents and Trump reacts on Twitter.
But the message the president is sending is that foreign leaders shouldn’t put any stock in what his Cabinet members do or say. These few tweets completely undermined anything Tillerson was attempting to accomplish and ensured that, if there was ever the possibility for diplomacy with North Korea, that is a dead end at this point. By saying, “we’ll do what has to be done,” Trump signaled that he’s the madman who can’t be trusted or predicted. To paraphrase what he told Lighthizer, “this guy is so crazy, he’ll do anything.”
The foundation of this madman approach to foreign policy was laid during the presidential campaign when Trump said, “We must as a nation be more unpredictable.” Given that I have always been skeptical that this president actually has a strategy for anything, I suspect that he gravitates towards this approach in order to avoid committing to a policy for which he might be held accountable. In other words, it keeps all of his options open at all times. It’s also a perfect cover for his ignorance. He doesn’t ever outline what he will do because he doesn’t know what he will do. Finally, being the unpredictable madman who never commits to a particular course of action, but might do anything, gives Trump the illusion of dominance.
77.
Jeffro
@Redshift: Gillespie’s just as nuts as the rest of the VA GOP – he just hides it beneath a veneer (largely abetted by the media) of ‘moderate conservatism’.
78.
Elizabelle
@Redshift: Did you ever learn if other canvassers Saturday were finding folks who didn’t want to talk to them at the doors?
What do you make of that? (Were you, maybe, working from a list of sporadic voters?)
79.
pat
@jeffreyw:
What on earth is that in the frame on the wall behind the cats? A skinned rattlesnake?
80.
Matt McIrvin
@raven: k. d. lang did a cover of that song that was astonishingly lovely. Heard it on the radio once.
81.
The Dangerman
If taking out a high rise window IS that easy (relatIvey speaking, anyway) I’m, sadly, surprised this doesn’t happen more often. The last time there was a high snipers nest may have been U of Texas, though I may be forgetting something. Still early West Coast.
Where do you get enough blood, for mass casualty events like this one?
83.
DCrefugee
@Mnemosyne: I’m headed there Saturday, for business reasons. Lost Wages is one of my least favorite places on Earth, even before I was grounded there on 9/11…
@The Dangerman:
That’s always been my argument to people who overstate the threat Americans face from terrorism – – If there are so many terrorists, why aren’t there more mass shootings in America. It would be so easy to do – parades, shopping malls, high school football games, etc.
@jeffreyw: I thought that was Toby.
So how many kittehs do you have?
92.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Kay:
The only hope I have is that the “guns everywhere for everyone” policy backfires on the GOP and right-wing in the potential upcoming insurgency within the next few decades.
93.
mike in dc
One average old white guy, firing for 10 minutes from 1700 feet away, using commercially available firearms, killed 58+ and injured 500+ people. This shit can’t be hand-waved or shrugged away. Imagine what a team of terrorists with ARs could do in a mall, shopping center, arena or in Times Square during busy season.
@Elizabelle: I suspect it was just random, or maybe they had gotten more door-knocks in that area (Falls Church) because there’s also a city council election.
95.
Adam L Silverman
@Redshift: As an actual criminologist, and the son of an actual criminologist, I think I’m uniquely qualified to answer this one.
While we have a great deal of good, and a few excellent, empirical theories that explain crime, deviance, delinquency, violence, rage, and even to an extent terrorism we have never been good at adapting what we actually learned into policies and strategies that actually make a difference in changing behavior. There seems to be a real disconnect between empirical theory grounded, evidence based understandings of the phenomena and the ability to translate what we know about the drivers, root causes, correlates, etc into effective policies and strategies to combat them, retard them, etc.
Many of us, though I’ve never tried to assess or even look up if there’s been a formal study of criminologists, recognize that the single largest factor in reducing crime, violence, deviance, and delinquency over the past 40 years or so has been the removal of lead from paint and gas and many/most other products. Just doing that seems to have more positive effects than anything else that has been tried.
Basically we’re good an understanding what the problems and their causes are. We’re not so good at using that to build solutions to them. Perhaps the best example of the limits of the social and behavioral sciences to deal with the messy reality that are humans and the groups, communities, organizations, and societies they build.
96.
Tazj
@Redshift: I don’t know, but this man really irritated me. He was a professor at a university, which I didn’t catch, or his name. In fairness to him, maybe he did say something about gun control before or after I switched off CNN. He was mainly talking about mass murderers and how they think and that this was carefully planned and how it was extremely difficult to spot or identify a mass murderer before one commits the crime. This was not surprising given his expertise that he would focus on a murderer’s state of mind but I wanted to hear him give an answer about how this can be stopped, and he didn’t when I was watching.
97.
Elizabelle
@Redshift: That’s a fabulous WaPost article. Gillespie even gets dissed by Mrs. Bloody Bill Kristol.
… As one of just two governor’s races in the country, the Virginia contest is widely seen as a referendum on Trump and a hint of what’s to come in next year’s midterm congressional elections.
“Part of it’s because the Democratic base is just very incensed right now,” said former congressman Tom Davis, a moderate Northern Virginia Republican. “They’re angry and incensed and opening their wallets more than the despondent Republican base. . . . He’s running with an unpopular president and a popular Democratic governor — against a Democrat who doesn’t have any flies on him. This is not a scandal-prone Democrat, so we’ll see.”
Susan Kristol of McLean donated to the past two Republican gubernatorial nominees but said the party’s embrace of Trump inspired her to cut a $200 check for Northam.
“I’m very disappointed in the Republican Party in general and its inability to stand up to Donald Trump’s behavior and message,” said Kristol, who is married to Bill Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard and a fierce Trump critic. “I don’t think we should keep feeding the Republican pipeline with new officeholders if all they are going to do is toe the line and agree with every one of [Trump’s] policies.”
Note also, Tom Davis remark about “flies” on Democratic candidates. Don’t think of an elephant.
The GOP usually lines up and votes for the R. I am hoping enough of the loopy Corey Stewart (Confederate candidate) supporters cannot bring themselves to do so.
98.
SiubhanDuinne (at some point in the indeterminate future to be known by my real name, Judith Mann Costello, but maybe not quite yet)
Treat this like a public health crisis. Because it is. And the GOP/NRA insisted that we not be allowed to study or compile the record of gun injuries and deaths in this country.
I would have to look up the number of states, but I believe there are quite a few with laws on the book prohibiting physicians from asking their patients about guns in the home. Yes, including pediatricians who might have concerns about the safety of young children in their care.
Gillespie’s just as nuts as the rest of the VA GOP – he just hides it beneath a veneer (largely abetted by the media) of ‘moderate conservatism’.
I get the feeling he has no real core beliefs, and will go along with any current craziness that he thinks will get him elected, which makes him always exactly as crazy as the rest of them, but less enthusiastic about it.
Interestingly, there was another article today that he agreed to oppose any “bathroom bills” to get the NoVa chamber of commerce endorsement. Since they nearly always endorse Republicans, I see that as selling out the rabid base just to avoid losing a routine endorsement, and not really gaining anything.
@Elizabelle: Vichy Times has a hit out for her too, now that their public enemy #1 HRC is vanquished.
105.
Cckids
@Mary G: My first thought was a golf bag, or one of the hard cases used to send golf bags on an airplane. No one would think twice about seeing one or two of those being rolled through Mandalay Bay.
@Tazj: Greg Sargent had a really good post this morning about how mass shootings and general gun violence are really different problems, and we’d be better off not lumping them together when advocating for solutions.
Charles Whitman had a glioblastoma that is credited with changing his personality. My first thought in hearing the scant details about the alleged shooter — no history of anything out of the ordinary, no social media presence, a recent history of large gambling transactions, his age — was some sort of brain problem. Frontal lobe tumors can induce both psychosis and violent behavior, along with bad impulse control (i.e. gambling).
111.
Tazj
@Adam L Silverman: I suppose I’m frustrated and want an easy answer to solving this problem and there is none.
112.
A Ghost To Most
Fox News host Howard Kurtz was quick to slam Democrats for talking about sensible gun control after the Las Vegas shooting death toll increased to make it the largest mass shooting in U.S. history.
“Gun control is a legitimate issue, but for the Dems already raising it after Las Vegas massacre, could we just have a day before plunging in,” Kurtz tweeted Monday morning.
HowardKurtz ✔@HowardKurtz
Gun control is a legitimate issue, but for the Dems already raising it after Las Vegas massacre, could we just have a day before plunging in
9:08 AM – Oct 2, 2017
5,414 5,414 Replies 112 112 Retweets 395 395 likes
As a fact check, there is a mass shooting nearly every day in the United States. Out of the 275 days that have passed so far in 2017, Sunday’s shooting at Mandalay Bay was one of 273 shootings in the country.
IIRC, we’ve done pretty well at reducing the number of suicides at attractive places like the Golden Gate Bridge by putting up barriers that make it more difficult to jump, but God forbid we should put up any barriers to people wanting guns. ?
@Mnemosyne: that’s because Fat Tony didn’t invent a constitutional right to jump off a bridge.
123.
Elizabelle
@A Ghost To Most: I would not mind if someone took Howard Kurtz’s worthless ass out.
And the teevee has been off for hours. Bored with the usual routine, the shock, the eyewitnesses … we normalize everything in this exceptional country.
How many settings do we even have in the whole country where tens of thousands of people gather outdoors, packed closely together, with a nearby public-accessible structure tall enough to look down on everyone like this?
More than you might realize. For example, every time there’s a big march in the downtown of a major city, you’ll have a large gathering that’s surrounded by tall buildings, some of which are publicly accessible*. Same thing when there’s a big parade. Some sports venues have associated hotels with views of the event. Then you have to consider all the locations where there’s an overlooking location that isn’t publicly accessible but might be accessible to an employee and all the employees in all those places.
*In that case, there’s also a potential political motivation for an attack, which might draw out additional crazies.
125.
Shalimar
@Matt McIrvin: Pulse was 49 killed, 58 wounded, 107 total casualties. Las Vegas is at least 58 killed, 515 wounded, 573 total casualties, so far.
126.
mai naem mobile
Had Steve Scalise said anything yet? Wi)l he help the uninsured LV victims?
127.
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: So we have removed lead, but won’t remove bullets. (Used to be called “lead” as slang.)
IMHO, here’s why we can’t seem to do anything about de gunz…
129.
Amir Khalid
@Suzanne:
From what I hear, he may have been shot from a grassy knoll.
I don’t understand why some Americans believe in a constitutional right to amass a hoard of firearms. But it was never the intent of your Second Amendment to allow citizens a means of armed rebellion; why would any sane country would put that in its constitution, and invite its own disintegration?
130.
Shalimar
@Mnemosyne: I grew up in Mobile, AL with several hundred thousand people in the streets at a time for Mardi Gras, so I considered parades. People are scattered all along the route, so in most cases, you wouldn’t have as many people available to target from one building and there would be more routes for those on the streets to get out of the line of fire.
131.
woodrowfan
how about an author thread??
132.
Elizabelle
For a lighter topic: dogs on patios in DC: listen up. You have your advocates, and even a twitter feed in your honor. @Pupson Patios.
DC Department of Health cracking down on dogs in outdoor spaces of restaurants. Including a really cute photo of Andypants, who is getting kicked out — along with his doghouse.
Imagine what a team of terrorists with ARs could do in a mall, shopping center, arena or in Times Square during busy season.
One only has to look at the Mumbai attacks to get a hint.
134.
Adam L Silverman
@jacy: We have to wait. One of the great things about the 21st Century: we have access to more information than ever 24/7/365. One of the worst things about the 21st Century: we have access to more information than ever 24/7/365.
When we have to wait for more and accurate information we get antsy.
At this point we know a small amount: 1) He was going through a divorce/divorced. 2) He had income from rental properties owned with his mother. 3) He has worked in the past for a subsidiary of a defense contractor. 4) He has done quite a bit of recent gambling, but it was unclear (at least as of an hour ago) if he had won or lost. 5) He has a female house mate that does not appear to be his wife and who is out of the country.
What we don’t know is: A) Did the divorce suddenly turn acrimonious? B) Did his income situation suddenly turn negative? C) Did he lose more than he could handle during his recent gambling stint. D) Had he been trying to pursue a romantic relationship with his house mate and been rebuffed? Or had they been involved and she broke it off?
And we also don’t know if there is a medical explanation. Or if he woke up yesterday morning, had a psychotic break, and as a result heard the squirrels living outside his kitchen window distinctly tell him that the musicians at the concert were going to perform a mass child sacrifice and had to be stopped.
Given the number of weapons reported to be involved and the amount of ammo and the target selection, I doubt this was a spur of the matter thing. Though whatever made him choose yesterday to do this may appear to the rest of us to be random (he only got two, not three olives in his martini while playing the slots and someone had to pay). It is not easy and it is very expensive to get a fully automatic rifle in the US. So if these were legally purchased as semi-automatic, then they had to be converted. And while that isn’t all that difficult to do it does take time.
So we wait for more and more accurate information.
135.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin: I should also say that some of the variation I was looking at there is probably just explainable by the US increasing in population (and becoming more urban). My hunch is that it’s not all of it, but it’s just a hunch.
I heard on NPR this morning that the entire state of Nevada has ONE Level 1 trauma center, which is in Las Vegas. They have three ORs. Some of the victims died in the facility. The facility was able to take approximately 30 of the victims.
OH NO
137.
germy
@Adam L Silverman: Interesting info about his father at one time being on the FBI’s most wanted list.
138.
jonas
@Elizabelle: Glad to know he’s been an effective governor. Because campaign advising and political consulting were *definitely* not his thing.
139.
Adam L Silverman
@Tazj: As one of my favorite professors when I was doing my doctorate used to say: “humans are squishy”. I would think she still says it. We are very good at predicting backwards when doing empirical social and behavioral research. Using what we’ve just verified to forecast forward is much, much more difficult. And while I’m a huge believer in rooting strategy and policy in what we can empirically explain and verify, for both foreign and domestic policy, it is not easy to translate this into effective strategy and policy. Developing effective strategy and policy is art, as in something an artisan does, not science.
140.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
As much as 9/11 “changed everything” for many, Mumbai changed everything for me as it perfectly illustrated 21st century asymmetrical warfare. So very few men with such trivially common weapons paralyzing one of the world’s largest cities for so long. Flight school? Defeating TSA screening? Why bother?
Yes, I don’t want to jump in with a half-baked diagnosis of this guy’s problem — whether it was psychiatric, physical, emotional — it was just the first thing I thought of. The similarity to Whitman in the tower was probably what put the thought into motion. Hopefully over the coming weeks, we’ll have some kind of idea what lead to it. (Other than the fact that this country has an very unhealthy gun culture…..)
143.
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: He was not a friendly neighbor. Quite the odd fish. Although nice to the groundskeepers on his community’s golf course. He played alone.
Neighbor spied some kind of huge safe in his garage, refrigerator sized, when door was open.
@Suzanne:
Had an employee severely injured in a vehicle accident on the way to work one day. He ended up at USC medical center, which is a county general hospital. They were so backed up that he was on a gurney out in the hall waiting for a OR. His wife had arrived from 20 miles away. His leg was held on by his quad muscle, everything else was cut, broken or torn. They didn’t know at the time that his back was also broken. What saved him was an intern came down the hall and looked at him, his wife and figured they weren’t there because they’d been shot or knifed, like the rest of the patients. Looked at his chart and told her to get him out of that hospital asap because if they took him into the OR he was losing his leg. Got him to another hospital, he spent 4 months there, quite a few weeks in intensive care. Six months later he was walking, if you didn’t know the background you’d never know he’d come that close to losing a leg.
So it’s not only that there are too many, it’s that it then becomes about not losing a life, not about making that life better. And those healthcare workers feel that. Not like the victims but that stress adds up on them as well.
515 wounded? What the hell was he shooting?
@Suzanne:
I wrote on the last post that I was paid to carry a loaded weapon and had orders that if I saw an occasion I was allowed to shoot to kill. That was in the military, protecting a ship with big guns, missiles, etc, like your friend Brad. I’ve seen the guns go off, the missiles launched and hit targets, I’ve shot that gun off the back of the ship underway, and I’ve seen machine guns fired off that same day. Guns are meant to kill things. That is all they are meant to do. You go to a range to practice to shoot things, things are alive that you want dead. There really is a level of ethics, morality and just plain what the fuck about guns. A lot of the people who like them do so because that makes them feel powerful in a world they have none in. We need to move on beyond the wild west movie concept that was never true in the first place. I wish I had even a glimmer of how to do that.
Many of them actually are lead, which turns out to be a cause of lead poisoning in some species of scavenger, most notably condors. Naturally, the gun humpers are fighting like crazy against laws requiring shotgun pellets be made out of less toxic metals than lead.
But it was never the intent of your Second Amendment to allow citizens a means of armed rebellion
Exactly right. For an idea of how the founding fathers viewed insurrection, see Whiskey Rebellion, The. The Second Amendment was about states retaining the right to provide for their own security by maintaining “well regulated militias.” The idea that it is a license for any citizen to amass and carry around hordes of lethal weapons without any regulation whatsoever is a wholly modern invention (thanks, Scalia!). But it benefits the armaments industry, so I guess a few dozen people here or there have to die every six months to pad those profits. Whaddya gonna do?
The pleasures of Andypants Sherwood, like those of other dogs, are intense but few. The D.C. Department of Health put a stop to one of them two weeks ago.
Intense but few. Perfect. Reporter is Peter Jamison. Worked for the LA Times, and the Tampa Bay Times, previously.
150.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: Some of our state constitutions actually have a “right of revolution” clause, in some cases dating from the Revolutionary War era; though they don’t specifically mention armed rebellion, just some collective right to alter, abolish or reform the government as the people think proper, with no process defined.
I know of no serious claims that the Second Amendment had anything to do with it until the late 20th century.
151.
germy
On September 6, 1949, Howard Unruh murdered 13 people in downtown Philadelphia. It’s considered the first mass shooting in US history. Tragically, it wasn’t the last. From a 2015 article about Unruh in Smithsonian:
In a few hours, on the morning of Tuesday, September 6, Unruh would embark upon his “Walk of Death,” murdering 13 people and wounding three others in a 20-minute rampage before being hauled off by police after a dangerous firefight. A somewhat forgotten man outside of criminology circles and local old-timers, Unruh was an early chapter in the tragically-all-too-familiar American story of an angry man with a gun, inflicting carnage…
“There have been notorious killers since America was founded, but you didn’t have the mass shooting phenomenon before Unruh’s time because people didn’t have access to semi-automatic weaponry,” says Harold Schechter, a true crime novelist who has written about infamous murderers going back to the 19th-century.
While the terminology is a bit fungible, Unruh is generally regarded as the first of the “lone wolf” type of modern mass murderers, the template for the school and workplace shooters who have dominated the coverage of the more than 1,000 victims since 2013. Unruh was a distinctive personality type, one that has also come to define those who have followed in his bloody footsteps.
“Unruh really matches the mass murder profile. He had a rigid temperament, an inability to accept frustration or people not treating him as well as he wanted, and a feeling of isolation, all things people accept and move on from,” says Katherine Ramsland, a professor of forensic psychology and the director of the master of arts in criminal justice at DeSales University, as well as the author of some 60 nonfiction books including Inside the Mind of Mass Murderers: Why They Kill. “He had a free-floating anger, held grudges, owned weapons he knew how to use, and decided somebody was going to pay. It’s a typical recipe for internal combustion.”
@Roger Moore: That’s right. Didn’t der Trump overturn the Obama era law prohibiting lead in ammo? I believe he did.
Libtards can’t tell these shooters what to do. Freedom.
154.
HeleninEire
I got this: my friend Jazman (I told you in the morning thread that she was there last night and got grazed in the leg) is now back home in CA. She’s a stew (yeah I’m old) for an airline so as soon as she was treated at the scene she went to McCarren and got the first flight home.
She’s lovely and funny and just great. She is freaking (and like most 23 year olds is posting everything on FB). I hope this doesn’t change her.
@Adam L Silverman:
One of the things I heard about him is that he enjoyed going to Vegas to go to the kind of concert he attacked. That led me to formulate two possible explanations for why he chose that target:
1) He was familiar with those concerts and knew they would provide an opportunity
2) He was deeply angry about those concerts- possibly because he couldn’t go to them anymore- and attacked one as a form of revenge.
Obviously, 2 is compatible with 1.
156.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: When I was doing the report on Soldiers who commit mass murders, including mass shootings, for the US Army Office of the Provost Marshall General and US Army Corrections Command in 2014 the numbers were largely stable over time. And time here is decades. Part of the problem with running just the numbers, and I’m aware of your professional background and am not going to argue running the numbers with them with you – I’m just going to work with you’re better than I was when I was teaching two stats sections per week and leave it at that – is the context. A significant number of serial murders count as mass murders because there are four or more victims killed. The same with spree killings. If you have a serial or spree killer who’s tool of choice is a firearm then these also qualify as mass shootings given how we technically define mass shootings – four or more killed, not including the shooter.
Now we’re in a data categorization problem. Do we include serial and spree murders where the weapon was a firearm in the overall count of mass shooting? Especially as mass shooting is sort of a term of art. And when we drill down, if I’m recalling correctly from the data I was looking at 3 years ago, a lot of mass shootings turn out to be familial. One parent kills the other, the kids, perhaps the grandparents, and then himself. Or one of the children does so. All of these are clearly different than what happened at the Pulse nightclub. And they’re also different than the DC sniper, which was actually a pair of spree killers operating nationwide.
157.
lgerard
What do you do with places like this, where you can experience the thrill of being a mass murderer without the messy consequences?
I’ll never understand the concept of violence as entertainment..
158.
A Ghost To Most
@jacy: Funny, no one seems to care about the mental state of a non-christian terrorist.
159.
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar: Good point–the nature of this shooting means a much larger number of injured, and the death toll is probably going to rise some more.
160.
sharl
I got nothing as well Betty. Tweeted out a melancholy youtube video just because, otherwise retweeting smarter and more eloquent people, just because. Case in point: the usually smart-assed and darkly comedic Ashley Feinberg, who quite properly took a well known fraudulent “media critic” to task
HowardKurtz @HowardKurtz
Gun control is a legitimate issue, but for the Dems already raising it after Las Vegas massacre, could we just have a day before plunging in
both my father and my sister are dead because of guns and I would like to plunge in now https://t.co/BmXyEX4U7w— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) October 2, 2017
One explanation for the 2nd amendment is to allow armed slave patrols in the slave states.
That’s a bit of a canard. They could have done that anyway. Militias were for suppressing domestic unrest (Shay’s Rebellion in particular being on folks’ mind at the time) and fighting Indians in frontier areas. States didn’t want the feds interfering in either of those things.
163.
trollhattan
@Elizabelle: This caught me.
“We are in complete shock, bewilderment and horror,” one anonymous relative who spoke to the Washington Post said. “We have absolutely no idea how in the world Steve did this. Absolutely no concept. There was nothing secret or strange about him.”
@jeffreyw: I am so sorry. Mnemosyne commented that they now have rattlesnake vaccines. I learn something every day here.
166.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: It’s not the barriers to wanting guns. Its the barriers to getting them. You could outlaw firearms in the US tomorrow – this is a thought exercise, so let’s ignore the 2nd Amendment and the Supreme Court – and then round up everything out there and destroy it. What you can’t do is get rid of people wanting them. And to be honest, if you have the mechanical aptitude, you can build a gun with stuff you have lying around your house or can easily get at the hardware store.
@Elizabelle: Without sounding glib, different type of lead poisoning.
That said, a lot of the highest performance hunting rounds are made without lead. They’re all copper.
170.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: Well, I’m not a social scientist and am actually way outside my area of expertise here. As I said, I do suspect the increasing and increasingly urban population of the US probably has an effect on the numbers here–more people in one place means more potential victims for a spree killer.
And I’m deliberately looking at the extreme of the extreme, spree killings with huge body counts, which is different from looking at all things categorized as mass shootings. Still, I think that’s valid to some degree just because these attacks have such an outsize ability to terrorize and alter policy.
171.
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: People want to rape small children and eat other humans.
We can make that a lot harder, and taboo.
You could build a weapon, but maybe not one that hits over 550 targets, meters away, in a matter of minutes.
People “wanting something” could be made a lot harder to satisfy. Civilized nations have done it. We have not.
ETA: not ragging on you. I know you’re horrified as we all are.
172.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: Yep, bank robber if I read the article correctly.
173.
Elizabelle
@trollhattan: Nothing secret or strange about him.
They never talked to any of Steve’s neighbors, did they? Ah well. Neither did Steve. For the most part.
174.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: Unfortunately. It shouldn’t. It isn’t supposed to. But it does.
175.
trollhattan
A TPM article on the LV gunman has this link on the page:
“New device turns any handgun into a sniper rifle”
We sure are good at monitizing stuff.
176.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Amaranthine RBG: Then RM wasn’t talking about you. But please act offended.
177.
Adam L Silverman
@Elizabelle: Standard large gun safe. Means he was, at least, a responsible gun owner. Until he wasn’t.
178.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: He had at least two rifles. Converted to full automatic. And he was dumping magazines.
179.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: Flint, Michigan is performing a horrifying social experiment. I’ve been wondering what happens to the kids there in 20 years.
As is apparent from reading these comments, few people in these threads have any actual knowledge of firearms or the laws regarding firearms so I try to inject facts when possible.
And, to be fair to the poster I corrected, there is a current controversy about banning lead statewide in California but I think that is less about resistance towards lead generally and is more focused on whether there is solid science to support the argument that condors are endangered by lead used to hunt small game. There is solid science that lead in larger game animals has impacted condors.
and then round up everything out there and destroy it. What you can’t do is get rid of people wanting them. And to be honest, if you have the mechanical aptitude, you can build a gun with stuff you have lying around your house or can easily get at the hardware store.
Ah, but how many people have that aptitude or desire to acquire it? Restricting access to guns, more so the high-round capacity, automatic kind, would logically make it harder to get one in the first place. I doubt most people are that determined. It would certainly decrease the likelihood of someone who has “snapped” being able to kill dozens or hundreds within a half-hour. That’s the point you were trying to make correct?
184.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: At this point anything is possible. We have to wait.
185.
jonas
@The Dangerman: Reports are he used a hammer of some kind. Must have been a big one — I’ve stayed at the Mandalay Bay before. The windows are really thick (as they are in all Vegas hotels, I presume) to provide insulation in the hot sun.
One explanation for the 2nd amendment is to allow armed slave patrols in the slave states.
The most likely explanation is that it was intended to protect the right of states to have their own militias. The founding fathers were justifiably worried about the dangers of a standing army- it’s interesting to reflect that they were closer in time to the English Civil War than we are to the American Civil War- and felt militias were the best way of avoiding the need for a standing army large enough to threaten the government. Those militias may have been used for slave patrols in states where slavery was legal, but it was far from their only, or even primary, purpose at the time the 2nd Amendment was proposed.
188.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: …So the argument was always there, but a decidedly minority position.
As is apparent from reading these comments, few people in these threads have any actual knowledge of firearms or the laws regarding firearms so I try to inject facts when possible.
Until you establish your qualifications that includes you, Skippy. For now you’re just another internet expert, so skip the fucking lectures.
190.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: I’m not trying to pick apart what you did, just pointing out that the context is important here for determining how to sort and bin the data. So just running overall numbers over time may be obscuring some important information.
As is apparent from reading these comments, few people in these threads have any actual knowledge of firearms or the laws regarding firearms so I try to inject facts when possible.
While also being condescending at the same time. And what’s there to know about firearms? Point and shoot. Reload a new magazine when you’re done wasting some “gun grabbers”. Oh and of course cleaning and oiling. Not that complicated, really. That’s the nice thing about guns, isn’t it? A lot easier than a knife or even a composite bow. Takes less courage to use too.
192.
germy
According to the WaPo death toll is up to 58.
193.
Adam L Silverman
@Elizabelle: I would expect that a significant number of injuries are not gun shot related. Rather they’re likely to have been the result of people knocking each other over trying to flee. So broken bones, crush injuries, and things like that. I’m sure there are enough gun shots out of the total, but we won’t know the numbers on this for a while as well.
194.
Adam L Silverman
@trollhattan: No device turns a handgun into a sniper rifle.
You seem to just want to engage in histrionic insults. I’ll pass.
196.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Nothing good. Not in terms of mental or physical health.
197.
Amir Khalid
@Elizabelle:
I don’t remember this one. Did der Trump do that by himself, or did Republicans in Congress pass a new law repealing the no-lead-in-ammo law? If the former, it would have been the Dotard rescinding one of Obama’s executive orders.
198.
Amir Khalid
@trollhattan:
@Adam L Silverman:
I’m sure a lot of men would be very interested in the barrel-lengthening part.
@Adam L Silverman:
I think most of the definitions of mass shootings would exclude serial killers because they require all the shootings to be part of a single event or closely connected events. That’s very different from the typical serial killer MO of killing one person at a time.
I do — but from the aspect of how brain chemistry shapes our actions. In everyday life, I’m much more afraid of an angry white guy with a gun than any other type of person. The thing that stuck out to me was this guy’s age — he’s 64, with no obvious history of aggression, anger problems, violence, or fringe ideology. Why all of the sudden would he do something so horrific? It’s a separate question from the gun control problem, and the domestic terrorism problem — both of which are things we should be openly talking about. It’s just that the circumstances so far — and it is very, very early — seem to make this guy an outlier in terms of personality traits that would mark him as someone who would be dangerous. Although I’m sure that many “normal” people could be quite dangerous given the right circumstances. Just very wild speculation.
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
The issue isn’t the complexity of firearms versus compound bows (I assume that is what you mean when you posted “composite bows.”
The issue is the unintended consequences that arise when people call for regulations of things they don’t understand factually.
205.
A Ghost To Most
@Amaranthine RBG: There are a lot of responsible gun owners here, including several refuting you. But hey, don’t let facts get in your way.
206.
trollhattan
@Amaranthine RBG:
After writing this sniffy bit of pomposity
few people in these threads have any actual knowledge of firearms or the laws regarding firearms
You’re precluded from tossing accusations of “histrionics.” At this point you’re writing for one reader: your own beautiful self.
@trollhattan: In my opinion 1993 was worse because people who lived and worked in city and knew it like the palm of their hand were responsible. 2008 was perpetrated by Pakistani gunmen. Even the death toll in 1993 was much higher. 2008 garnered more eyeballs in this country because the gunmen targeted western tourists.
And I say that as a 5th generation Mumbaikar.
209.
Repatriated
@jacy: Interesting point, which goes back to one I raised in the last thread. What makes him different from other “law-abiding gun owners”?
Yeah, practically none of them go on premeditated killing sprees — but how many are close to the edge? And how could we know this?
Look, if you think I’ve said something wrong, it’s easy to quote me and state why I was wrong.
But this nonsense – “There are lots of people saying you said things wrong” is just a weak attempt at pot-stirring.
211.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman: Should I feel bad that I thought that was from Castle as soon as I saw Nathan Fillion, until I noticed how youthful he looked?
212.
Cermet
@trollhattan: Yes; my daughter had two friends (One she knew very well) commit suicide a year and half ago (both lived in her dorm.) Discovered the university she attends has the highest rate in the country (also, a terrible side note: the university just up the street has the second highest rate – hopefully, this has change since then for both places.) That’s when I realize it was not appropriate to ask if this was still occurring with people she knows – so VERY happy she decide to live off campus for her last year.
This country will never address guns until the 0.001% realize this poses a danger to them (it will in the not too distant future) and then and only then will these issues be addressed. Speaking of white male terrorism – most all woman murdered are murdered by their husbands/boyfriends with …wait for it …a gun! (Surprise!)
The pie of Freedom is baked in Liberty’s oven and filled with the Flesh of many good Men. Also.
This is perfect.
215.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Yep, the anti-Federalists largely ignored the group making it, who I refer to as the radical localists. The anti-Federalists were far more focused on the debate with the Federalists over the 2nd Amendment. The debate between the Federalists and anti-Federalists was largely and almost exclusively about who would have responsibility of provisioning the state militias. The Federalists wanted the Federal government to do this so as to standardize things including weaponry, ammunition, and training. The anti-Federalists argued that this should be a state responsibility. Some of the context for this was that the militia was considered largely useless during the Revolution, which is why Washington ordered Lafayette to raise and train a real army and ordered von Steuben to provision and outfit them properly.
There is, unfortunately, precious little Congressional record pertaining to the amendment. It is unclear why it was rewritten by the Senate, why the House passed it with almost no debate after it came back from the Senate, or just how broad or narrow the Founders and Framers thought it should be because it was almost completely unremarked upon during the debates on it in either chamber of Congress. We have better state information. Many states included their own versions. Some expanded on it to include keeping and bearing arms for sporting and/or defense purposes. Other states just had completely separate provisions for these in their constitutions.
216.
sharl
This seems to be appropriate time – again – to link to TBogg’s 2014 piece, “I was the NRA.” For context, he’s around 61 or 62 years of age (like me).
When I was eight, I attended gun safety courses put on by the NRA at the local community center where thick-necked men with serious faces and butch haircuts promised us hell and worse if we mishandled a rifle or a shotgun. There was no Eddie Eagle cartoon character who spent his time talking about the 2nd amendment because the important thing was to learn not to shoot yourself or someone else. It was serious people teaching the next generation how to safely hunt and not just how to shoot.
As I grew older I began to notice a different breed of hunter; men who showed up with multiple shotguns as if they were golf clubs needed for specific shots. While most of us wore jeans, t-shirts and hunting vests, these newcomers dressed like they were going on safari, wearing bush hats, shooting jackets (in the 100 degree heat), and cargo pants with more pockets than there existed implements to fill them. You would see them walking the fields; shotgun draped over one arm, can of beer in the other hand. We learned to stay away from them.
For these men hunting was a manhood thing, a way to get in touch with their alpha male, a way to prove they weren’t soft city dwellers and what better way to do that than to get together with some buddies and shoot some guns at whatever moved.
It was no coincidence that, at this same time (this being early seventies), the NRA changed their focus from hunting programs to promoting gun ownership and defending the 2nd Amendment from imaginary enemies.
Each trip afield meant running into more men concerned with the idea of shooting but unburdened with any concept of the etiquette of hunting. For an adult, all you needed was the cash to purchase a gun and a hunting license and you were good to go forth and kill.
After one of these dumb-asses almost killed the family hunting dog:
When we got home, we released Candy to the yard while my dad went into the garage and cleaned the pheasants we had shot. Afterward he cleaned the shotguns before sticking them in his bedroom closet without a word.
He never took us hunting again, and we never asked to go.
no obvious history of aggression, anger problems, violence, or fringe ideology
One thing I noticed about ten years ago after spending some time on a shooter’s blog and reading his readers’ comments: A definite hard line between “Good” people and Criminals. The blogger and every one of his commenters saw the world that way. There were the decent folk (who of course should be armed) vs. the bad people (criminals & “crazies”) who should be locked up or shot.
(Of course, quite a few discussions betrayed an obsession with urban inner-city violence, even though the blog host lived out in an exurb, as did his readers, nowhere near any person of color.)
But aside from race, they really saw it as a simple matter of good vs. bad people. They couldn’t conceive of formerly law-abiding people suddenly snapping, or of previously convicted criminals being rehabilitated.
The issue is the unintended consequences that arise when people call for regulations of things they don’t understand factually.
What unintended consequences might those be? Interference in the right of any God-fearing White Christian Man to open-carry his prosthetic penis to intimidate to anyone he doesn’t like? Won’t someone think of the Oathkeepers, those brave freedom fighters, speaking truth to power and threatening libtards with ventilation?
So there’s no barrier at all to jumping off the Golden Gate? No existing fence or anything?
WTF is wrong with you people? Even Pasadena tries to fence their suicide bridge off, though it’s still not 100 percent effective.
221.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: Exactly. And that’s the differentiation that is made in the literature between serial and spree homicides on one side and just a mass shooting on the other. You have to remember that all three of these are niche areas of study within criminology and sociology and psychology. And mass shootings didn’t even count as niche, just largely not studied, until a few years ago. This was what terrorism was like through about 2005/2006. In criminology there were 8 of us who regularly focused on it until around 2005. There were several dozen of us in political science/international relations, but here too it was considered a niche area and most people in the discipline didn’t know what to make of us. That was the nice thing about criminology, because of the violence component, at least other criminologists didn’t think we were just way off the scholarly reservation. And there are some real niche areas in criminology. I have a friend who is a specialist on female serial killers. That’s a very small population of offenders.
The issue is the unintended consequences that arise when people call for regulations of things they don’t understand factually.
What unintended consequences might those be? Interference in the right of any God-fearing White Christian Man to open-carry his prosthetic pen$s to intimidate to anyone he doesn’t like? Won’t someone think of the Oathkeepers, those brave freedom fighters, speaking truth to power and threatening libtards with ventilation?
223.
Corner Stone
@Adam L Silverman: That guy is going to get a few people killed.
224.
A Ghost To Most
@Amaranthine RBG: You are a fucking putz,yammering on like you are the only one here familiar with firearms. FOAD.
You have to climb over a waist high railing – that has been in place for decades. They’re currently constructing a multi-million dollar horizontal fence type thing below that railing that people will land on after the jump. Nothing to stop them from then jumping off the fence type thing, but I guess the hope is that people will reconsider after falling a few feet.
Like I said, if I’ve posted something incorrect, please feel free to quote it and correct me. I’m always happy to learn.
But what your doing, just throwing random insults without any support, shows that you are not a serious person.
228.
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: Our technical advances in being able to hurt ourselves and others has never stood still. And usually outpaces our advances in knowing when and where to use the technical advances we’ve just made.
When we had the LAX airport shootout st the El Al counter a year or two after 9/11, there were a whole lot of indications that it was a suicide by cop: the guy’s wife had just left him and taken the kids back to Egypt and he committed the crime on his birthday.
Didn’t matter — because of who he was (an Egyptian Muslim) and who he attacked (Israel via their national airline), it was ruled a terrorist attack.
As is apparent from reading these comments, few people in these threads have any actual knowledge of firearms or the laws regarding firearms so I try to inject facts when possible.
What was that about throwing random insults, d-bag?
The unfortunate tendency of people — and most often ideologically rigid people — to group people. The in group and the out group. Anybody “like’ you is the in group, whether it be color, religion, political views, nationality, whatever. And therefore it’s okay to blame whatever problems you have on an out group. They are always the bad people. Like I said, the person who worries me most is the angry white guy with a gun, but that’s because, statistically, that’s the person most likely to present a danger to me….
Old-people mail-order catalogs sell special hammers designed to shatter the tempered glass used in automobiles.
(The marketing pitch is to imagine yourself unable to open the doors, trapped; the same hammer has a guarded blade specifically designed to cut seat belts.)
My first guess is that he had one of those.
237.
A Ghost To Most
@Mnemosyne: Only white christians get the “mental health” excuse.
Gorilla Sales Skyrocket After Latest Gorilla Attack
SAN DIEGO—Following the events of last week, in which a crazed western lowland gorilla ruthlessly murdered 21 people in a local shopping plaza after escaping from the San Diego Zoo, sources across the country confirmed Thursday that national gorilla sales have since skyrocketed.
“After seeing yet another deranged gorilla just burst into a public place and start killing people, I decided I need to make sure something like that never happens to me,” said 34-year-old Atlanta resident Nick Keller, shortly after purchasing a 350-pound mountain gorilla from his local gorilla store. “It just gives me peace of mind knowing that if I’m ever in that situation, I won’t have to just watch helplessly as my torso is ripped in half and my face is chewed off. I’ll be able to use my gorilla to defend myself.”
“Law enforcement and animal control can only get there so quickly,” Keller added. “And you never know when you’ll need to use a gorilla to save your life.”
[…]
“Listen, it’s my God-given right as an American to have the freedom to own a gorilla to protect myself and my family,” said Nashua, NH resident James Harrington, 46, adding that he personally owns 12 different gorillas of various sizes, but keeps them “safely locked away in [his] home.” “And the government has another thing coming if they think they can come into my house and take away my gorillas.”
It’s insane that brown people = terrorism. Reducing motive like that doesn’t do anything to address any real world problem. I’m more worried about the “radicalization” of Fox News watchers than anybody else.
They couldn’t conceive of formerly law-abiding people suddenly snapping, or of previously convicted criminals being rehabilitated.
They can’t conceive it because they don’t want to think it might apply to them. Nobody wants to think that they or somebody they know might one day snap and decide to murder their whole family. It’s much easier and less terrifying to imagine the people who do that are somehow inherently broken and deeply different from ordinary people like yourself.
What you can’t do is get rid of people wanting them. And to be honest, if you have the mechanical aptitude, you can build a gun with stuff you have lying around your house or can easily get at the hardware store.
That’s why I used the suicide comparison. We used to think that there was no way to prevent people from killing themselves if they want to, but it turns out that making it more difficult for people to commit suicide gives us more chances to get help to them that may save their lives. Preventing impulsive or easy suicides saves lives.
That’s why it’s crazy to me that supposed “experts” (not you, obvs) claim that there’s no way to prevent mass shootings with better gun control.
I also hate the whole media and economic elite who decided to manipulate the yahoos into voting Republicans by persuading them that “Freedom” = owning an arsenal of firearms. Meanwhile, Mark Kelly for President. https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/914902900333322245
247.
A Ghost To Most
Tom Petty was rushed to the hospital Sunday night after he was found unconscious, not breathing and in full cardiac arrest … law enforcement sources tell TMZ.
EMTs rushed to his Malibu home and were able to get a pulse. He was rushed to the UCLA Santa Monica Hospital and our sources say he was put on life support.
248.
Corner Stone
@Adam L Silverman: That’s essentially a pipe bomb, built with inferior materials and a poor eye to detail. The stress fractures will be invisible to the eye until it blows his arm off and punctures his lungs.
249.
Adam L Silverman
@joel hanes: I have one of those in my car. And I put one in my mother’s. Your point?
@Mnemosyne:
The terrifying thing about your comment is that I got the shooting you were talking about confused with a separate LAX shooting, the one that happened in 2013. What does it say about our society that we have to give dates for these things so we can tell public shootings apart?
Is it weird that Larry Fitzgerald still has the greeting message answering machine from his mother who passed in 2003?
254.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: It is not. But building weapons out of whatever is at hand is a human specialty. I’m not arguing here against new restrictions and laws. All I’m saying is that even if you completely outlawed and removed every firearm in the US, someone who wanted to would find a way to make one.
255.
LAO
@Adam L Silverman: While I knew that, I’m simply flabbergasted by this. I really thought, given the state of medical care during the late 18th century, that more soldiers would have been killed in these battles. It also highlights, to me, a better understanding of the context surrounding the adoption of the 2d Amendment.
Oh and thanks for the comic recs, Adam. I really enjoyed Trinity and have checked out the JLA annuals from the library. Just have to wait for it to come in. Some of the newer comics are on this really cool “free” (paid for by the library) service called Hoopla as ebooks.
257.
daverave
Now Tom Petty too… 2017 just as bad as 2016
258.
sherparick
@Mnemosyne: You have to be a pretty good machinist to do this, and I don’t think most of our recent spree killers have skill. Australia, UK, Germany, Russia, and even Norway also have nutjobs, but the frequency is far less (21 years since the Port Arthur Massacre) when you simply are not able to buy automatic and semi-automatic weapons.
I have a friend who is a specialist on female serial killers. That’s a very small population of offenders.
Or quiet and diligently successful. Often poisoners, I think. I am amazed that someone like Belle Gunness got away with so much for so long. Belle (1859 – 1908)
was a Norwegian-American serial killer. Standing six feet tall and weighing over 200 pounds, she was a physically strong woman. She killed most of her suitors and boyfriends, and her two daughters, Myrtle and Lucy. She may also have killed both of her husbands and all of their children. Her apparent motives involved collecting life insurance, cash and other valuables, and eliminating witnesses. Reports estimate that she killed between 25 and 40 people.
She may have died in a fire, or substituted another body and escaped any capture.
@Adam L Silverman: Wow. I have a reply comment to you in moderation. Very curious as to what the offending words might be.
266.
A Ghost To Most
@LAO: When the best you can do is 3 shots a minute, it’s hard to kill a lot of people.
267.
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: Took time, even for proficient shooters, to reload a muzzle loader. And under stress it gets even longer. And these were not rifled long guns, so accuracy could be sketchy. Not everyone had or could afford a Kentucky rifle. A lot of these were home made – as in even if you bought it, it was from a local blacksmith who may or may not have been good at making them.
Reports are he used a hammer of some kind. Must have been a big one — I’ve stayed at the Mandalay Bay before. The windows are really thick (as they are in all Vegas hotels, I presume) to provide insulation in the hot sun.
The glass likely isn’t that thick. Most IGUs (insulated glazing units) are two 1/4″ pieces of glazing with 1/2″ of air space in between. Often, glass in those IGUs are laminated for strength, but the glass itself is no stronger than what’s in your car windshield. It could be broken with common tools. Glass curtain wall has to be structurally hefty to resist wind loading on a structure, but a point load like a hammer or even repeated blows with furniture could take out glass like that (think of how even small pieces of rock can break a windshield). Not to mention—he could have just shot it out.
it turns out that making it more difficult for people to commit suicide gives us more chances to get help to them that may save their lives. Preventing impulsive or easy suicides saves lives.
A remarkable example comes from the UK. Guns are tightly restricted there, so the most common way of committing suicide is to overdose on pills, most commonly paracetamol/acetaminophen. The UK was able to substantially reduce the number of suicide attempts by making it difficult to buy more than 16 pills at a time and putting them in blister packs rather than bottles. Just the need to go to more than one store to buy the pills and to take the time to break them out of the individual blisters was enough to prevent a lot of suicides.
This country will never address guns until the 0.001% realize this poses a danger to them (it will in the not too distant future) and then and only then will these issues be addressed. Speaking of white male terrorism – most all woman murdered are murdered by their husbands/boyfriends with …wait for it …a gun! (Surprise!)
Wife had a client, young mother of two girls. Her boyfriend (not the girls’ father) became obsessive-aggressive and she broke up with him. He started stalking her and vandalizing her residence, and her landlord eventually evicted her because of the continual damage. She obtained a restraining order and went about buying a house anonymously, to avoid a paper trail. Wife helped her and the family to get a loan (tricky!) and she moved in.
One day after dropping her daughters off she returned home and the boyfriend murdered her still in the car in the garage, with her brother as witness. The shooter took off in his car, eventually committing suicide on the interstate when he was cornered by the state patrol.
You are correct to my point of view–we have surrendered ourselves to the steady drip, drip of domestic terrorism by armed people with a grudge, anger management issues, rampaging paranoia and countless other destabilizing maladies. We could say no, but we do not.
My retired boss flew out of LAX that same morning in 2013. She missed the shooting by about an hour.
274.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: I stopped watching about halfway through the second to final season. They should have just had them get married and lived happily ever after.
Oh, I’m not a gun expert. Nor am I an expert in composite bows. I
Arrow to the guts strikes with uncommon timing!
276.
Monala
@jacy: I do wonder if we’ll find out he has a history of domestic violence. Most of the mass killers do. Although this guy apparently had no history of interactions with police, so I’m not sure we’d know.
So we should remove the restrictions on buying chemical fertilizers that were put in place after Oklahoma City because Boston proved that anyone who is determined to build a bomb can still do it?
Come on. This is a bogus argument.
281.
trollhattan
@Suzanne:
Drifting way off-topic I keep a window-break device in each car, in case any of us rolls into the drink while driving through the Delta on its winding 1.5-lane levee roads. It’s small and you simply press it against the glass and a spring smacks a ball bearing into the glass. Mind you, I haven’t tested it on one of my windows….
To your point, glass breaks with sufficient force concentrated on a small enough area.
282.
Corner Stone
@Adam L Silverman: Sure. I may know someone who has some past experience with stupidity in that area.
Speaking of humanity finding a way, along with the requisite #humblebrag, my son was in a STEM type summer camp and they were tasked with making a tiny catapult with odd shit you’d never think made sense. All the teams seemed to find a way to do it and smash their targets. Ah, humanity!
@Mnemosyne:
I remember it clearly because I was on vacation in Moab, UT. I drove out, but some people I was supposed to meet there were flying from LAX to Salt Lake and driving down. Their flight was after the shooting, so they missed the flight and had to come the next day.
284.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: I didn’t say that. Nor am I suggesting it.
285.
A Ghost to Not
@Mnemosyne:
To be fair, the ANFO bomb McVeigh used dwarfed the pressure cooker bombs in Boston.
I stopped watching about halfway through the second to final season. They should have just had them get married and lived happily ever after.
I think there was issues between Nathan and Beckett’s actress that cut the show short and forced them to air that half-assed “happily married after” ending you wanted.
@Adam L Silverman: there will always be tools for making tools. I don’t see what much that has to do with a discussion about the availability of the tools themselves.
There’s lots of stuff you can do with a computer that most of those with ill intentions don’t do, because it’s not out of the box functionality. If you could go to corner the store and buy a massive botnet I’ll bet there would be a lot more DDoS attacks, data spills and hacking.
293.
gorram
@Redshift: Why stop there, why even have laws against murder? Someone somewhere will break it. It’s an absurd argument, but they won’t carry it to its natural endpoints because its purpose is just to dismiss any action on this issue, not actually be something considered and believed.
A touch Orwellian, isn’t it? We’re so used to it being used to describe surveillance, that I think people have forgotten the real fixation of 1984 – on winnowing down language into a tool by which you can get people to bleat and adopt the Party line without much thought as to why. For that matter, a Party line that’s updated daily too.
294.
Elizabelle
@catclub: Yeah. That was effective. John Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo. The trick was the beater car, with the shooting platform in the trunk.
That was my point, yes — the Tsarnaevs were limited in how effective their bomb would be because we restrict access to the most efficient bomb-making materials.
Now imagine if you could buy plastic explosives with the same ease you can buy a gun.
297.
Repatriated
@Adam L Silverman: So, to match the amount of lead one gunman with a semi-auto pistol can send downrange, you’ve needed twenty trained shooters (and might be about as accurate, too…)
298.
Mothra
I’ve got a lot I don’t want. I feel like I’m watching America being beaten and kicked. I want to go to Congress when they have these moments of silence and I’ll start saying the names of massacres until they arrest me.
@MomSense: It was a long time ago, the hurt isn’t fresh but I still have it in for rattlesnakes in my yard. She was a beautiful dog, full of joy. The only Brit we’ve had that would enter the water like a Lab at a field trial. We buried her in the shade of a sycamore, next to the pond.
301.
Mothra
@catclub: @Monala: his father was a criminal and possibly mentally ill
302.
Elizabelle
@Monala: LA Times had glowing review of shooter from ex-brother in law. Although that was 8 year marriage with divorce many years ago.
303.
Jeffro
@sylvania: Supposedly no brain activity and pulled off of life support.
304.
Elizabelle
@jeffreyw: I am so sorry. She was robbed, as were you. #fucksnakes
That’s the thing. At the age of 64, you’re likely to have some sort of evidence that you are a violent or abusive person. Police reports, restraining orders, familial anecdotes. It’s not impossible that this guy has just flown under the radar all his adult life. But his family was, to quote CNN, “befuddled.” Nobody said they had any inkling that he was capable of something like this. That — combined with his age — is what’s different from every other white, home-grown terrorist. Like I said, so far an outlier, but we have only the bare bones of information. I shouldn’t even speculate on it — I hate it when people spout off with little or not information — but it just struck me as really odd. Of course, the human instinct is to make sense of things, so maybe my brain is just trying to make sense of something so utterly awful.
306.
A Ghost To Most
@Mnemosyne: You can, if you know the right people. I do, but choose to stay away from them.
307.
trollhattan
@sylvania: Noooo! Spouse saw him just last month said he was great, full of energy. Hang in there Tom, we need you! Best Florida export, evah.
@PJ: And that was also a convoluted case of domestic violence. John Muhammed was trying to kill his estranged wife, and wanted to create enough diversion to do it.
317.
A Ghost To Most
@Repatriated: Our 8-man civil war gun team (.58 muzzle loaders) once went toe-to-toe with a 4-man M-16 team, shooting at breakable targets (clay pigeons, clay pots, charcoal briquettes). The m-16 team had a devil of a time, since their hi-powered loads would often go right through without breaking the target. The last event was to cut a 3′ by 6″ board in half using bullets. The m-16s never accomplished it; the bullets just passed through without doing enough damage.
BREAKING: Trump’s company had more contact with Russia during campaign, according to documents to investigators https://t.co/j0RNctlODX
— Holly O’Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) October 2, 2017
321.
Corner Stone
I am still not sure why he would have 10 rifles. Two or three I guess I can get. But what was he going to do with 10 different ones?
322.
clay
Damn it. Tom Petty Radio on SiriusXM has been one of my main pleasures while driving around. Saw him twice live, back in the 90s. Excellent shows, both. He could craft rockin’ pop tunes like no other. Local boy made good, RIP.
323.
Elizabelle
CBS report:
Tom Petty, the rocker best known as the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, is dead at 66, CBS News has confirmed.
The legendary musician suffered a full cardiac arrest and was found unconscious and not breathing in his Malibu home Sunday night. He was taken to UCLA Santa Monica Hospital and put on life support, reports TMZ.
Petty rose to fame in the 1970s with his band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The group put out several hits, including “American Girl,” “Free Fallin’,” “Breakdown,” “Listen to Her Heart” and more. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
Though Petty and his band debuted their first self-titled record in 1976, they continued to perform over the past four decades. Petty played his last show last Monday, performing three sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl to conclude their 40th anniversary tour. The band wrote on their website that the tour included 53 shows in 24 states.
In December, Petty told Rolling Stone that he thought this would be the group’s last tour together. He said, “It’s very likely we’ll keep playing, but will we take on 50 shows in one tour? I don’t think so. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was thinking this might be the last big one. We’re all on the backside of our sixties. I have a granddaughter now I’d like to see as much as I can. I don’t want to spend my life on the road. This tour will take me away for four months. With a little kid, that’s a lot of time.”
Petty, who released three solo albums and 13 albums with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, also took part in the 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne.
While you were doing drugs, I studied the composite bow.
While you were engaged in premarital sex I practiced the composite bow.
While you spent months at the gym for the sake of vanity I used the composite bow.
Not what demons are here you are unprepared. Except for me.
For I studied the composite bow.
327.
Seanly
@clay:
Yeah, I saw a post on LGM re: Tom Petty. Looks like latest reports are that he had a massive heart attack last night, no brain activity seen, and he’s been taken off life support.
Never got to see him live but I like a lot of his music. One of my favorites.
@Adam L Silverman: this still required access to and know how for a 3D printer, which most Americans won’t have any time soon. The same cannot be said for a gun shop.
ETA oddly enough if I wanted 3D printer access I would go to the same place I’d go to acquire a massive botnet
331.
Cacti
May I humbly request a dedicated Tom Petty thread?
Tom Petty, the rocker best known as the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, is dead at 66, CBS News has confirmed.
I’m free fallen, broke down and heartbroken. Really liked his music.
I wish his soul peace.
333.
trollhattan
@Corner Stone:
If he was this “high-stakes gambler” being touted in headlines maybe he was on a losing streak and maybe he owned a crapton of money to the wrong sort of people? Who abandons their house, holes up in a presumably expensive hotel surrounded by his beloved precious? Somebody with nothing left to lose.
334.
Patricia Kayden
@Elizabelle: I assume VA has a state government dominated by Republicans which explains why Medicaid wasn’t expanded. What a shame. Thank goodness for the northern part of the state for being deeply blue.
335.
Repatriated
@Adam L Silverman: Indeed. The point here is that when one discusses the Founders’ intentions regarding possession of firearms, they have to be considered in the context of contemporaneous weapons technology.
Now I’m wondering if he was put on life support because he was an organ donor. We’d probably need one of our commenting doctors or nurses to tell us if that might have been the case.
337.
Elizabelle
@Seanly: Saw him at the Hollywood Bowl a few years back. ZZ Topp opened. Superb show.
Have been trying to see these “legacy” acts when possible. Can’t take anyone for granted anymore.
Prince’s loss. That still hurts. I was hoping to see him one day.
Post that says “Fuck this Day.” My guess is that it’s by John Cole.
351.
Patricia Kayden
@germy: A little bit of good news on such a horrid day.
352.
sharl
@Monala: Well that brings back memories, none of them good. I remember that the sniper took out a couple of people – or at least tried – outside of Michael’s craft stores, which turned out to be one of the places where his estranged wife liked to shop.
I just remember all of us being kinda jumpy, especially every time a white van drove by, or was in a parking lot.
{Ron Howard Narrator’s Voice: The snipers never used a white van.}
The point is that special-purpose hammers designed to break tempered glass are readily available.
If I’m right, and he used one, it points to foresight.
While you were doing drugs, I studied the composite bow.
While you were engaged in premarital sex I practiced the composite bow.
While you spent months at the gym for the sake of vanity I used the composite bow.
Not what demons are here you are unprepared. Except for me.
For I studied the composite bow.
355.
Corner Stone
@joel hanes: He had 10 rifles in a hotel room on the Vegas strip. A full week+ ahead of any gun show where he might trade/sell them.
356.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: I always figured what got in there was sort of the pro-army faction’s sop to the anti-army faction. “Okay, even though the federal government has the power to raise an army, here, we’ll promise we’ll never take away your citizen militia.”
357.
The Moar You Know
Old-people mail-order catalogs sell special hammers designed to shatter the tempered glass used in automobiles.
(The marketing pitch is to imagine yourself unable to open the doors, trapped; the same hammer has a guarded blade specifically designed to cut seat belts.)
My first guess is that he had one of those.
@joel hanes: I use a punch press, the thing you use to start drill holes in wood. They’re like $1.99 from any hardware store. Just put the point on glass and push it until it does the “pop” thing. They break any kind of glass you care to name.
My point was that you can reduce the number of mass shootings by reducing the availability of guns. Not end them completely, but greatly reduce the number.
Since you disagree with that statement, please explain why. 3D printers and YouTube tutorials are not convincing evidence that mass shootings will continue at the same level that they are now.
@The Moar You Know: thank you for info re punch press. Sounds affordable and worthwhile. My car and I tend to stay out of large bodies of water, but you never know.
@trollhattan: The killer didn’t just “hole up”. He got a room on the corner of the hotel closest to the festival terrain. I doubt that that was incidental.
It’s interesting, in the footage I have seen it looks like most of the crowd crouches or lies down once the shooting starts.
That was apparently the wrong thing to do when the shooter is up above shooting down into a crowd. I suspect there would have been fewer casualties had people exited the area. No way for the people to know that at the time, of course. Terrible.
367.
The Lodger
@Amaranthine RBG: “Not what demons are here”?
Let me guess. While the rest of us were studying grammar, you studied the composite bow.
368.
trollhattan
@Calouste:
Definitely not incidental at all. I’m going with “trapped by circumstances of his own making and determined to go out in a blaze of glory.” Glory, in this case, is becoming America’s most notorious gun murderer. Too bad it will be a relatively fleeting crown.
369.
Adam L Silverman
@Sab: You’re welcome. That’s where I learned about what I call the radical localists for lack of a better term for them. As Cornell didn’t officially label them.
370.
Adam L Silverman
@joel hanes: Okay, now I’m tracking. I couldn’t tell if you were suggesting that having one was somehow strange.
371.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: It was a little more than that. For all that it was recognized that the militia just wasn’t going to cut it against a real Army like what the British fielded, the Founders and Framers, both Federalist and Anti-Federalist, had a real concern with standing armies. They thought they promoted or contributed to tyranny. So my understanding of the reasoning is that the militia gives you a warm(ish) start if you need to call them up while you get your Army in place.
372.
trollhattan
Cripes, BBC reporting he had nineteen rifles in his hotel room. “He seemed normal” from the family isn’t going to cut it.
373.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: I don’t disagree with it. But I also recognize that people can make them, including both semi-auto and automatic ones if they so chose. The information is not going away. Nor is the ability to do so.
You’re right. And a big pile of ammo for them.
I wasn’t thinking very clearly, was I ?
Treat my comment as one more irrelevancy on the internet.
375.
Adam L Silverman
@OldDave: It’s now been reported he was shooting fully automatic AR pattern rifles. One, at least, an AR 15 in .223/5.56 NATO. The other an AR 10 in .308/7.62 NATO.
dude was spraying bullets into a thick crowd. seems crazy to have that many wounded but it makes sense.
377.
trollhattan
Don’t wish to muck up the Tom Petty thread, so here’s how the Republican Ministry of Propaganda has decided to deal with the San Juan mayor.
Fox News host Geraldo Rivera flew to Puerto Rico after the hurricane and — despite grim reports from the devastated island — has not yet witnessed anyone die.
He shook hands with the governor, and no one died. He flew in a big U.S. Marine Corps helicopter. Zero casualties. A week after the hurricane destroyed the island’s infrastructure, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without electricity, desperate for food and drinking water, Rivera met 84-year-old “Aunt Ellie.”
“She had us all worried but she’s doing fine thx,” he wrote.
And so after several days on the island, Rivera decided to weigh in on a debate between President Trump — whose administration has been accused of being slow to help the U.S. territory — and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto, who famously pleaded, “We are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency and the bureaucracy.”
…he went on.
“What I really lament in this politically driven island, where you have a Republican governor and a hard left-wing Democratic mayor, is that the mayor is blaming Donald Trump for the lack of aid.”
Then on to the interview, in which Cruz would point out she is not in fact a Democrat, and explain the nuances of “dying.”
“The aid isn’t getting here as quick as it should be getting here,” the mayor told Rivera, as workers packed boxes behind her. “There are people in all municipalities literally starving, dehydrating. There was no electricity in most of the island, and frequent brownouts in the hospitals, she said — and meanwhile the Federal Emergency Management Agency “asks people to register on the phone or Internet.”
Trump had accused Cruz of being controlled by the Democratic Party, and Rivera had erroneously said she belonged to it.
In fact, as The Post reported, the island’s party system is different from the mainland United States. Republicans and Democrats have little bearing on Puerto Rican politics. While Cruz has been friendly with some mainland Democrats, her Popular Democratic Party is defined largely by its stance in Puerto Rico’s independence from the United States. “I’m not a member of the Democratic Party,” she told Rivera, who did not ask another question in the clip.
“I could find no one dying,” the host summarized after the segment, the second half of which will air on Fox on Sunday night.
Still intent on forging a truce between the mayor and the president, Rivera chided Trump for tweeting about Cruz and ingrates and such. “Unnecessary,” he said. But that mayor. “She’s very partisan,” Rivera said. “I think she has a loathing for Donald Trump. I think she needs an open heart and some gratitude,” he concluded.
the Founders and Framers, both Federalist and Anti-Federalist, had a real concern with standing armies.
A well-justified concern. As I like to say, the English Civil War was closer in memory for them than the American Civil War is for us today, and they had recent experience of all the ways a standing army could be used to stifle dissent. Even the Federalists wanted to make sure the army was kept within reasonable bounds, which is why there are some specific rules that apply to the military (e.g. no appropriations longer than 2 years) and not to any other part of the government. I think a key insight into the Bill of Rights in general is to understand that the authors had a big list of ways they had recently been oppressed by the British government, and they wanted to prevent, or at least obstruct, the new government from being able to do those same things.
I’m arguing for harm reduction. You’re arguing that there is no such thing as completely eliminating gun violence. I honestly don’t get what the problem is that you have with what I’m arguing in favor of, unless you’re against harm reduction.
“He seemed normal” from the family isn’t going to cut it.
It makes me wonder how close contact the rest of the family had with him. I can imagine somebody going pretty far off the deep end but managing to conceal it from their family if they were only in occasional contact by phone. It sounds as if he didn’t use social media, which might have given friends and family a clue if he were getting wrapped up in any kind of craziness.
381.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: Exactly. Same with how and why they structured the 3 branches of government and decided to provide semi-autonomy/sovereignty to the states. They recognized after the failures of the Articles of Confederation that they needed to centralize more power, but they wanted to diffuse that centralization as much as possible.
I’ve been reading about the Federalist Era lately (up through the War of 1812) and IIRC it was the burning of Washington DC by the British that caused the US to change their mind about having a standing army. They realized that ragtag militias weren’t cutting it against other armies.
383.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: I’m not in disagreement with you in terms of harm reduction.
@Mnemosyne:
Even when they became convinced it was necessary to have a real standing army, they still wanted to keep it as small as practical and station it out on the frontier rather than close to the centers of power. The latter was more or less dictated by the former- a small army has to be kept where it’s most likely to be needed- but it was still an important way of keeping the army from getting too powerful.
385.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: For the official policy yes. Washington and several others that served under him in the army were very cognizant of the problem well before 1812. Moreover, Washington, as president, had to deal with several localized rebellions where the local militia (as in the immediate municipalities and adjacent unincorporated areas) actually sided with the rebels or the local militia was split. Some responded to Washington’s call for the militia to support resolution of the standoff and some sided with the local rebels. So he had a lot of personal experience with just how problematic the militias were. One final note, the first Federal mandate was issued by President Washington. It required everyone in the militia to keep a specific amount of shot, wadding, and powder in specific types of ammo cases at all times.
the Founders and Framers, both Federalist and Anti-Federalist, had a real concern with standing armies. They thought they promoted or contributed to tyranny.
They may well have been right about that, in any event, considering the way various forms of obeisance get framed as “supporting the troops” and therefore obligatory. Maybe that has more to do with endless war and the mystique that grows around a volunteer army.
387.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: No matter what you do or how you structure the force you’re going to have some sort of issue. The bigger issue, I think, for us today is that the type of people the Founders and Framers assumed or hoped or wanted (not sure any of these are the right word) to aspire to office, in both elected and appointed positions, would seek service would be better than what actually exist. Not that they themselves were perfect, but they assumed a civic virtuousness in people that I think was, at best, naive if not downright foolish and deluded.
388.
A Ghost to Not
“Enough is enough,” guitarist Caleb Keeter wrote on Twitter the day after a gunman opened fire at the Las Vegas festival where he’d performed hours earlier with the Josh Abbott Band.
Although Keeter had been a lifelong proponent of gun rights, witnessing Sunday’s horrific act of gun violence changed his mind. At least 58 people died and over 500 were injured at the Route 91 Harvest festival when Stephen Paddock, 64, fired on a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.
He was semi-OK when he was doing local news for Eyewitness News (Channel 7, Anne Laurie probably remembers those days, too) in NYC, but somewhere along the way, he got the idea that he actually had something not-fucking-stupid to say. He was wrong. He’s been an asshole for at least 30 years, and I think (but am not sure) he became a right-wing asshole at some point in there.
It’s all fun and games until it’s country fans getting killed
I think there’s a little bit more to it than that. A big part of what he’s saying is that he had believed the hogwash about a good guy with a gun being able to stop a bad guy with a gun. Seeing what happened at an actual mass shooting showed him how nonsensical that idea was. I will classify this in the “better late than never” category.
393.
Elizabelle
This has been a really interesting thread, folks. Thanks much. Sad, but all the historical stuff.
And, CBS and others have pulled back their death reports on Tom Petty. He is off life support, but still survives, at least until further confirmation. Godspeed.
394.
sharl
@Roger Moore: Then as now, fears based on national security concerns – legitimate or not – can help national leaders achieve all kinds of military permissions and largess that were previously not made available. The “Indian Wars” in what was then known as the northwestern frontier (including what is now western Ohio and Indiana) helped George Washington get Congressional agreement to fund a standing national army.
@Amir Khalid:
I believe the concept is that we had been under the king without any input and we had to invoke an armed revolution to fix that. If the new government took away the arms then we’d have no way of defending ourselves. That’s the gist of the private citizens to have guns as I understand it. Of course that leaves off a rather important part of the amendment, that silly thing about a militia.
@Adam L Silverman:
Even with that and with the close crowd and his angle, he had to put a lot of rounds out of those 2 rifles. Even with 50 round mags that had to be a lot of changing. I understand how fast that can be but still 573 injuries in such a short time meant a lot of rounds.
Not to try to analyze him specifically but it seems he might have been a bit off.
398.
d58826
Just watching the press conference about the shooting from Boston, oh wait it was Orlando. Sorry Los Vegas. They have become mind numbing cookie cutter the same. Everybody has to get their say. The Sheriff, the fire chief, the mayor, the Congress critters, the candle stick maker. I tuned in late so I must have missed the dog catcher.
The script is the same
1. thoughts and prayers
2. brave law enforcement and first responders
3. community in shock
4. community is strong
5. all of the donations
6. to soon to talk about gun control
7. and just biding our time till the next one.
I don’t mean to make light of what happened but the script just plays out the same way every time.
@jacy:
Never underestimate what a human is capable of. Many over the ages has done things that “normal” people would most likely never think to do on their own and yet they still do them. So I’d ask questions.
1. What does a mass murderer look like? Talk like?
2. What were they like as kids? Did they blow stuff up, burn stuff, pull the wings off flies, that sort of thing?
3. How do we know that something just clicked with this guy one day and he decided to do, something, something big?
4. How do you stop or slow down the number of shootings and shear numbers of victims? Unless everyone is tested 12 ways from Sunday (and even then, still we have no way of knowing) how do we stop this? Remove the tools. Figure out how to get that one done and win the grand prize.
400.
Elizabelle
@d58826: I did not watch any of it. It’s kabuki, to distract from mass murder.
@Mnemosyne:
Having been a trained suicide counselor I can tell you that for the most part, you are correct. However someone so inclined will get the job done, one way or another. Our hope was to buy time, which often removed/resolved enough of the issue to end the desire. Like a lot of thing that humans do sometimes they don’t say anything to anyone and there really isn’t any way to fix or stop an activity, other than making it more difficult. Making it more difficult to jump from a bridge, removing the guns or at least making it far more difficult to do the level of killing this guy did. We have the technology, the desire is strong with some to do something, but the yelling and rendering of garments seems to limit what is possible.
thanks for posting about the Jones Act. I grew up in Hawaii and as school kids, we knew about this unjust law and how it was ripping off the citizens of Hawaii. I would have thought this damned robber Barron law would have been killed decades ago. But no — make Hawaii and PR victims again with another disaster. But I guess we need to make the rich guys richer because don’t you know that god is smiling on the rich folk (Prosperity doctrine 101 — new wave christian church.)
@jacy:
Trying to make sense of the clutter in anyone else’s head can cause you to literally explode. Sometimes I’m amazed that we get along and live as well as we do.
At #402 I stated that I was a suicide counselor a long time ago, we also were a public mental health clinic. One day a fellow walked in said very calmly that he needed to talk. Had an hour available so we went back to a counseling room. The first 2 minutes were OK, small talk and getting a little feel for the situation. Now you always end at 55 min so that you can see the next client. Those next 53 minutes were about the most scary I’ve ever had. I had no idea what was going on in this guys head, not then, not today. Turned out he was under professional care and deemed stable enough to be in the wild. His medication may have not been totally effective that day. I’ve seen a guy in a ward in a military hospital who was on heavy dosage of Thorazine, who had not that long before been shooting up a hillside in the Philippines with an M-16 because he thought everyone was out to get him, come out of his stupor and talk completely incoherently about 3 or 4 subjects at the same time. Another 40 yrs goes by and I see that there are more people than one might realize that are not all right in the head and we’ve done everything possible to make it more difficult to get them help.
@Adam L Silverman:
Report I’m reading, from Clark county sheriff, he had 17 guns. That’s a bit different than 2. Of course you might have meant 2 full auto. Either way that’s a lot of ammo expended by one person. Even if a lot of the injured are from just trying to get away.
405.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: Only 2 full auto according to the reports.
aimai
Nothing. Between Puerto Rico and this, I’ve got nothing.
jeffreyw
Got kitteh pic.
Major Major Major Major
@jeffreyw: Aww, well don’t they look pleased with themselves.
I should get Samwise a taller tree one of these days.
schrodingers_cat
@jeffreyw: Who is the orange and white kitteh? Bitsy is all grown up!
schrodingers_cat
I just noticed that someone is commenting as C. Schroedinger and its not me.
Kay
Have we moved on from the latest mass slaughter yet?
Remember- nothing can be done. Nothing. This level of carnage is now acceptable and ordinary.
How long until we beat our new record? 3 months? Tops. We’re the mass gun rampage country- we excel at this.
raven
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.
Elizabelle
Thank you Betty. Bird on a wire. Perfect.
@ Kay: We are exceptional. No doubt. Don’t learn from history either — ours or anyone else’s — until absolutely forced to do so. And it’s getting worse.
jeffreyw
@schrodingers_cat: That’s Ginger Boy, the tux is the new kid, Ollie.
The Moar You Know
In b4 Russian troll army
raven
@Kay: I’m sure you can go back and make it 300 comments on the last thread. Maybe yours will be the one that changes the everything.
Kay
One would think they would worry, in government, that they’ll become completely irrelevant. Trump will be nattering on and on about his stupid fucking wall and the travel ban when the biggest danger plays out right under his nose, and they do NOTHING. It would be comical if it weren’t so sad. The shooter is in the house and these morons are busy locking the doors.
They’ll have to keep us IN, pretty soon. We’ll want to escape this fucking loony bin of a country and they’ll have to pass laws to keep us here.
Kryptik
@Elizabelle:
See, the problem isn’t even just that we don’t learn from history.
Far too often, we learn the exact wrong lessons from it instead.
Sab
@jeffreyw: Is that a framed snakeskin on the wall behind kittehs?
ArchTeryx
@Kay: I have…at least on the surface. But I will never, ever forget the country these cocksuckers bequeathed the rest of us with.
It’s like David Brin was prophetic with his Uplift books. The right is numerically small but wields all effective power; the left is numerically small and utterly powerless; the establishment and the mushy middle look at the latest atrocities, shrug, and move on. The Five Galaxies, or 21st Century America?
Elizabelle
I went to a concert Saturday night in Richmond, VA. The Psychedelic Furs at the National, former theatre. They were terrific. Was hanging out in the back of the venue, since acoustics are best there. Thought for a few moments of the tee shirt/merchandise seller for the Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan. He was among the first murdered, back of the venue.
But then remembered: we go through a metal detector to enter the National. Lots and lots of pleasant staff there for entry. And they search bags, I would assume for alcohol, but also for weapons, perhaps.
Because this mass murder at an outdoor venue? One point is to make us all more wary about assembling in public.
I wonder if we might see some changes out of this one. Being country music fans — heartland, All American. No chance of escape; you were either shot or not, in the first volleys.
Mandalay Bay. Name now associated with the US’s biggest mass murder. For now. For a little while.
Major Major Major Major
Obligatory classic Onion article: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
dr. bloor
@schrodingers_cat: How can we be sure if it’s You or NotYou?
Elizabelle
@Kay: I am thinking they need to make sure we have an escape valve.
Used to be, you could vote bad legislators out. No more. We have an illegitimate POTUS; stole the election on technicality, with the aid of gazilionaires and the Russkies.
I think I would be a little fucking afraid of the silent majority now, because it’s actually us, not the gun humpers and rightwingers. You cannot make people witness this carnage, again and again and again, and they have no voice to stop it.
Hell, you just got over trying to take away their health insurance, and have made it clear, you’re good with tanking national healthcare. You don’t respond to a horrendous hurricane, on American soil.
Powder keg.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kryptik:
We learned that unless they are kept in fear, women and black people might sometimes be in charge. Half of America prefers the former. Half of America prefers the latter.
Tazj
@Kay: It’s completely frustrating. I saw a retired NYC police commissioner on television say that nothing could have been done to stop it and if the police wouldn’t have shown up when they did it would have been worse. A criminologist said on another station that mass murderers exist in every country and use things other than guns, which we know, people have used knives, chemicals and vehicles. However, they all seem too resigned to the fact that we should get used to living with these horrible deaths.
Major Major Major Major
@Frankensteinbeck: more than half (or at least a plurality) of American voters prefer the latter, but thanks to an antiquated system designed to bribe and coddle slaveowners, are not represented.
Starfish
@Elizabelle: What’s wild is that the politicians are still stupid.
This is all the Representative who got shot had to say about this? Really?
The Dangerman
I know it’s way early and all but have we learned how the shooter knocked out the window? I don’t think it’s THAT easy.
The Moar You Know
@Elizabelle: And that’s a real problem both from a societal, interpersonal relations point of view, and a hell of a deterrent to protesting.
jeffreyw
@Sab: @Sab: Yes, that is the snake that killed a 2yo Brittany, Lizzie. We saw her stagger back home, she got to the door and collapsed, dead. Out for ten minutes, tops. We went snake hunting.
Immanentize
@raven: This
raven
@The Dangerman: The cops said he had a hammer like device.
RobertDSC-iPhone 6
I had one high school friend at the festival. She is safe with her family.
Another, different high school friend was in the area. She is also safe.
Last, my godmother passed away from lung cancer early Sunday morning. She was 80.
The Moar You Know
@The Dangerman: Fucker had at least one machine gun. I think it might have taken five seconds. Three rounds followed with the room chair.
manyakitty
@RobertDSC-iPhone 6: Glad your friends are safe, and I’m sorry for your loss. So much happening all at once…
coin operated
My daughter and I were having drinks outside NYNY when this shit went down. Rode by the concert venue not 30 minutes before.
I’m fine, only because I’ve been in professions where I was trained how to react in a situation like this…but my girl didn’t get a wink of sleep last night and is still somewhat distraught. Watching people run for their lives from the sound of automatic gunfire is not something I want *anyone* to experience…ever.
Suzanne
Per Elizabelle’s request, I am reposting:
To follow up on my earlier comment in the previous thread about capacity in hospitals for these types of events….
I heard on NPR this morning that the entire state of Nevada has ONE Level 1 trauma center, which is in Las Vegas. They have three ORs. Some of the victims died in the facility. The facility was able to take approximately 30 of the victims.
Our healthcare system does not have the capacity for these kinds of events.
Elizabelle
@Starfish: Not even looking. I was not among those wishing Scalise a recovery. Terrible man.
FWIW, Gabby Giffords is appearing in Virginia today, if memory serves, on behalf of Dem gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam. May just be an office meet and greet. We’ll have to see if she has anything to say.
Anyone whose passion is gunhumping is likely already voting for Gillespie.
SiubhanDuinne (at some point in the indeterminate future to be known by my real name, Judith Mann Costello, but maybe not quite yet)
@RobertDSC-iPhone 6:
A sad and stressful time for you. I’m glad your friends are safe, and I hope your godmother had a peaceful and gentle transition to whatever comes next. My condolences.
Betty Cracker
@Starfish: I’m glad the nutbag who shot Scalise didn’t manage to kill him. But Scalise was a far-right piece of shit before he got shot, and the experience doesn’t seem to have changed him.
Betty Cracker
@coin operated: Whoa, glad y’all are okay. Every year, more Americans join the club of people who have had that horrific experience.
Suzanne
This is something I am sharing, as it comes from my friend Brad, who is a US Army veteran and a resident of Las Vegas. (He drives a cab, and his boss recalled all the drivers this morning, so fortunately he is safe.) You may recall that I shared a GoFundMe a few months back to help out a friend—Brad is that friend. Fortunately, he has a new job lined up and will be starting next month, so his personal life should be stabilizing. Anyway, I thought this was great.
“I don’t care if people think it’s too soon. I’m outraged as an American to be seeing these stories over and over again. It’s time to get rid of the guns in this country. All of them. Without exception. The protection from tyranny that they are intended to provide is an illusion. In the days of modern warfare, these weapons do nothing to protect us from our government. Take it from me, I’VE PLAYED with the government’s toys. Beyond that alleged protection, there is no longer any other justifiable reason to permit these weapons in our country. Our healthcare and education systems are too broken to support a public that is also entrusted with guns. That is not politics. That is not opinion. That is a fact, and we can no longer afford to ignore it, redefine it, or take half-measures to address it. As a society, the blood from these attacks is on all of our hands because we are not learning from them and changing.”
Roger Moore
@The Dangerman:
It may not be that easy, but I doubt it’s bulletproof. A few rounds from a high-powered rifle would undoubtedly give you a very good start.
Elizabelle
@coin operated:
It should happen to Republican congresscritters. Again and again. Until they realize that we feel like prey now, in our own beloved country.
They hide behind taxpayer-funded security apparatus and staff. They hide from their constituents at town halls. They ride on airplanes, fares paid by taxpayers, and they’re secured by TSA protection — unless they’re catching a ride on private jets. They have topflight health insurance, paid for by the government, and get actual pensions, no matter if they leave office under a cloud.
I want to make those assholes more like the average Joe, and afraid of us.
They should have to worry about this.
I have always been good with the Capitol Hill security, because I think Fox etc. have made Nancy Pelosi public enemy number one for their irrational gunhumping audience.
Corner Stone
@Betty Cracker: Hmmmm….
marcopolo
I heard the reports of this on the car radio while coming home from my morning walk. Decided then I was just not going to turn the TV on today. It will be all over every channel drowning out all other news and virtually none of the coverage will be worthwhile. Reading the comments here makes me think I made a good decision.
Later today I will call my Senators and Rep to tell them how I feel about changing our tax structure, I will yell at them for letting CHIP lapse, I will remind them about DACA, and now I will add a little at the end about NOT making silencers easier to get. I’m probably wrong but maybe this event will finally get that provision removed from the bill.
However, the only long-term solution to waking up to all this shit is to go out and register folks to vote and encourage brave people to become candidates and to toss as many Republican Senators and House Reps out on their asses in 2018 as is possible. And we can start with the VA state legislature right now. If you live in or near VA get out there and help elect some Ds by making calls and knocking on doors. If like me you live in a distant state then do what I have done by giving some money to the VA Democratic party. I have never been a big fan of Terry McAuliffe but I have to give him props for doing as much as he can to help make VA a bluer state.
Also wishing everyone here a decent week.
Mnemosyne
@jeffreyw:
Why am I not surprised that Bitsy is queen of the castle?
We spent the last three days battling a massive ant invasion, so I was already cranky. This morning’s news did not help.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
And the Republicans want to gut healthcare so we lose what capacity we have.
Corner Stone
@Elizabelle:
Out of simple morbid curiosity, I am wondering what portion of Scalise’s yooooge medical bill he was personally responsible for paying?
Elizabelle
@Suzanne: Such an interesting angle.
Treat this like a public health crisis. Because it is. And the GOP/NRA insisted that we not be allowed to study or compile the record of gun injuries and deaths in this country.
Terrible point, about the odds of a severely wounded person surviving when there is not capacity to deal with all wounds — it is triage.
Amaranthine RBG
@raven:
I was about to pose those exact lines.
A truly great song rewires your brain – I can’t see anything related to birds/wires without thinking about that song.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore: The standard glass in curtain wall systems is heat-strengthened and laminated. Some is tempered, which is stronger than heat-strengthened. None of that is ballistic. The only buildings I’m aware of that have bullet-resistant envelopes are high-security government installations, and they aren’t usually made with big pieces of glass.
You could break that kind of window by throwing a big object, like a chair, if you were strong enough, but I bet he just shot it out.
Barbara
@Suzanne: Nevada isn’t that big. Las Vegas has a population of around 1.7 million, give or take, and the entire state is just over 2 million. One of those 21 states that is smaller than Puerto Rico. The closest city for airlifting purposes would likely be Los Angeles, which has a population of more than 10 million.
Corner Stone
@Suzanne:
My son and I were discussing the mass murder event this morning on the way to school. And it struck me that I bet a large portion of the people wounded will not have insurance coverage. So we were discussing the insanity that our nation is about to be immersed in a few hundred more gofundme requests to help with healthcare bills for those injured.
Mnemosyne
@jeffreyw:
If you haven’t talked to your vet about getting the rattlesnake vaccine for your dogs, do so. It’s a big thing out here in So Cal and makes all the difference in survival rates.
delk
My dog, Gav
Elizabelle
@marcopolo: I did not start out a fan of Terry McAuliffe, but he has been a superb governor. And he’s accessible. I get a kick of meeting tourists and visitors who show you their selfie with the governor.
Really good guy. He tried mightily to expand Medicaid.
Mary G
WaPo is saying that the LVPD was able to identify the shooter’s room within minutes because there were so many shots the gun smoke set off the room’s detectors. He must have had a couple of big trunks or something to bring in all the guns and ammo.
Redshift
@Tazj:
That’s infuriating. What kind of “criminologist” argues that not being able to prevent a crime 100% of the time means we can’t do anything? Might as well say “buildings collapse in earthquakes all over the world, so there’s no point to having building codes.”
Mnemosyne
@coin operated:
A friend of mine just canceled her Vegas vacation. She’s not going to be able to enjoy herself while blood is literally staining the streets.
Elizabelle
@delk: Every day is a good day to see Gav. Hello there, pup.
Suzanne
@Elizabelle:
The facility (like all Level 1 trauma centers) said that they will not turn away a trauma patient, but that they also can’t treat more than the facility can accommodate at any one time.
Should be noted that Level 1 trauma is typically a money-loser for hospitals. It’s a community benefit that needs to be backed up by taxpayers.
eclare
@Major Major Major Major: Thank you, I needed that.
Barbara
@Elizabelle: I think the reality is that many people hold extreme positions on gun control with the assumption that mass shooters will target the kinds of groups they aren’t part of. I don’t know how they rationalize Newtown, CT or Aurora, CO, but I am still amazed by the Rand Paul Tweet about how the purpose of the second amendment was to enable people to actually kill tyrants. Of course Paul could not have dreamed in a million years that he might be seen as the tyrant, but when that possibility arose, he hid behind the bleachers (which I also would have done).
Barbara
@Elizabelle: And McAuliffe made restoring voting rights about as personal as an issue can get for a governor.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
I saw your post in the other thread and looked it up — Los Angeles has 5 Level I trauma centers, but that doesn’t do the victims in Las Vegas any good if they’re not stable enough for an hour-long airlift.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Major Major Major Major: Today’s updated version.
It’s depressing as fuck how little of this needs to be updated each time this happens. And that it keeps happening and there isn’t any progress towards a sensible gun policy. If anything, we get further from one every time this happens.
Suzanne
@Corner Stone:
AND if the Level 1 trauma centers don’t get paid, they close. They are already (typically) operating at a loss, and are backed up financially by ludicrous fees for other services, as well as federal and state $$$. The one in Vegas is at their university research (quaternary care) institution. A few incidents like this and I would expect trauma centers to start closing.
eclare
@The Dangerman: That was my question, glass cutter, like in the finale of Homeland’s first season?
trollhattan
Learned of Las Vegas from the radio while trying to go to sleep. This a.m. the kiddo overslept and flew out the door for school having not heard anything about it, but certainly did within minutes of arriving, where 2,500 kids now get to consider the country they’ll be navigating on their own in a scant few years and running, a few years after that. Here’s hoping they do a better job.
She also learned last weekend one of her soccer teammates attempted suicide.
Gotta be tough to be a teen, today.
Shalimar
@Kay: I don’t think anyone is going to beat this record anytime soon. It was on a level far beyond what was previously imaginable by one guy. How many settings do we even have in the whole country where tens of thousands of people gather outdoors, packed closely together, with a nearby public-accessible structure tall enough to look down on everyone like this?
rikyrah
Why the Jones Act Is Robin Hood in Reverse
The previously obscure law not only slowed delivery of relief supplies to Puerto Rico—it represents a whole category of ‘rent-seeking’ policies that redistribute income upwards.
by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles
October 2, 2017
In the midst of almost unimaginable horror in Puerto Rico, a bright light has shone on one of America’s most unjustifiable and economically backward laws, the previously obscure Jones Act. First created in the aftermath of World War I to buffer the impact of post-war demobilization, the Jones Act requires that all ships that carry cargo within the United States be built in America, with American crews.
The cost to American consumers each year runs in the billions of dollars, with particularly large impacts on places like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands that (unlike the mainland) depend almost exclusively on shipping for everything from food to fuel. What in normal times just increased prices on essential goods—bad enough for the poorest island-based Americans—has turned tragic.
The Jones Act is now approaching its centennial. Despite the huge cost to consumers and the puny size of the American ship-building industry—U.S. ships carry only 2 percent of global cargo—the law has proven all but politically bullet-proof. But what the law’s beneficiaries lack in numbers, they make up for in geographic concentration (in and around a few major ports), and the doggedness of their lobbying. In the American political system, these are powerful sources of influence, especially when playing defense in institutions with multiple veto points.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: Phoenix has about that many, but each one only has a few trauma bays and trauma ORs. Flagstaff has one. Each facility has one helipad. The number of victims in this incident is literally enough to use all of the Level 1 trauma capacity of an entire region of the country, if their wounds are severe enough.
And that’s not considering all the other incidents that require Level 1 trauma care, like car wrecks.
rikyrah
Don’t Let The Vultures Shock Doctrine Puerto Rico
by David Atkins October 1, 2017
When I am asked my recommendations for political non-fiction books, the top of my list is almost always Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites is a close second.)
Seven years after its publication, no other book better explains the state of the modern political world. The thesis of the book is simple: vulture capitalists saw profit to be had in institutions that eschewed profit to serve people, and when people would not give up those institutions, the vulture capitalists shocked entire populations into submission using disasters both natural and manmade as an opportunity to privatize entire industries. Kleptocracy, religious fundamentalism, ethnic sectarianism and dictatorship arose quickly from the ashes of stunned, impoverished and subjugated peoples, creating blowback for Western democracies even as the jet set luxuriated in champagne and caviar.
We are living that story today all over the world. Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Russia was the direct result of American-led privatization of the former Soviet Union’s assets, as Bill Clinton and Yeltsin worked to convert the USSR from Soviet Communism to American libertarianism overnight rather than manage a responsible transition to a Scandinavian-style democratic socialist system that might actually benefit a disoriented Russian people. Poverty and anger was the result, and desperate Russians (particularly from rural areas) sought to make their country great again by electing a despot who they imagined would bring back the glory days. Now with Russian interference in the U.S. election, many American elites who instigated the Yeltsin-era collapse have paid the price for their greed in spades, with a particularly bitter irony for the Clinton family.
………………………………………………
And, of course, it happened here in America. The same vulture capitalists who devastated the Russian and Iraqi towns and countrysides and gave rise to Vlaidimr Putin and ISIS, also did the same to the American Rust Belt. Entire communities were left to rot and die as factories were closed and jobs automated and sent overseas, just to boost next quarter’s stock returns and make the .1% even more fantastically richer. Youngstown, Ohio, shared much the same fate as Vladivostock and Baghdad, its citizens left behind and turned to indentured servants in a dystopia of despair so that a few incompetent elites in a pretend meritocracy could profit more obscenely from the excess than any Roman Emperor or French King. As in Russia, they voted to make their country great again by punishing the elites they rightly felt had betrayed them–even if it meant electing a racist, ignorant buffoon to the Oval Office.
It’s not always the direct doing of the vultures through military or economic aggression. Sometimes they swoop in after natural disasters, as occurred in New Orleans after Katrina when the public schools were converted into a failed privatization experiment. In the case of climate change, lucrative fossil fuel consumption neatly causes Arctic melt that in turn allows further irresponsible exploitation of carbon reserves. It also coincidentally worsens natural disasters that create the opportunity for more creative destruction and privatization at the expense of vulnerable people, species and habitats. It’s a perfect circle of greed and death.
And now the same thing is being done to Puerto Rico. Vulture capital has spent the last decade slowly grinding down the island territory into a cruel debtor’s prison so that Wall Street can scoop up unearned nickels from the impoverished populace. No sooner had Hurricane Maria departed than the same debt dealers were offering Puerto Ricans even more rope with which to entrap them. Wall Street has long been slavering over Puerto Rico’s electric utility, and now sees even more opportunity for privatizing it in the wake of the destruction.
There is no particular reason for America’s pro-business conservatives to come too quickly to Puerto Rico’s aid. The entire ideology of vulture conservatism is that government is incapable of helping, and that communities must fend for themselves (particularly if they lack the right skin tone and dialect.) But beyond that, there is no incentive for the hedge fund class to see Puerto Rico recover too quickly. It’s in their best interest to see Puerto Rico make a painful, grinding transition to full privatization, more debt and endless punitive interest payments.
Mnemosyne
@Shalimar:
Pretty much every city in the United States. I can think of several hotels from which someone could take potshots at the Rose Parade on live national TV, and Pasadena has a population of 130,000.
Redshift
@marcopolo:
Hear, hear!
And if you want a little schadenfreude to brighten your day, read this WaPo article full of Republicans making mealy-mouthed excuses for Gillespie’s lagging fundraising.
trollhattan
@Corner Stone:
SWAG: zero dollars and zero cents. See, it really is the World’s Greatest Healthcare System ™.
rikyrah
Obama-Trump Voters Need to Apologize to Puerto Rico
by D.R. Tucker
October 2, 2017
Remember Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn doctrine” with regard to the Iraq War–”You break it, you own it”? That same rule should apply to the consequences of bad voting decisions. Those who voted for Donald Trump last November–especially the folks who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, only to take leave of their senses by voting for the bigoted billionaire to succeed him as President–broke this country…and they certainly own the mess we’re in, including the humanitarian tragedy in Puerto Rico.
Just as it is impossible to imagine a President Al Gore or a President John Kerry leaving American citizens to die on the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so too does it beggar belief to think that a President Hillary Clinton would leave American citizens to suffer and starve in Puerto Rico. As Keith Olbermann notes, Trump’s response to Puerto Rico is saturated with racial prejudice; in fact, actor and comedian John Leguizamo’s analysis of Trump’s deliberate mishandling of the Puerto Rico crisis is even more direct than Olbermann’s.
Those who voted for Trump generally, and former Obama voters who actually thought Trump was a worthy successor to Obama specifically, bear responsibility for this nightmare. With their votes, they gave Trump the power to hurt the people of Puerto Rico, to scoff at their suffering, to place the desires of supporters wearing hats of red over the needs of people desperate for water, shelter and bread.
Frankensteinbeck
@Elizabelle:
It is now a cliche that Republicans have no sympathy for suffering until it touches them. Elected Republicans are just like their constituents, except insulated from consequences. Among other things, it simply bewilders them that people don’t see how eviscerating health care is the right thing to do.
rikyrah
The Trump Doctrine: ‘I’m a Madman’
by Nancy LeTourneau
October 2, 2017
………………………………………
Let’s break that down. First of all, against the advice of his foreign policy experts, Trump continues to attempt to inflame the situation with name-calling. Secondly, in suggesting that his predecessors were “being nice to Rocket Man,” the president demonstrates his total ignorance of history, which was documented most thoroughly in this Washington Monthly story by Fred Kaplan. Thirdly, Trump makes it sound like he wasn’t aware of what his Sec. of State was doing in talking directly to North Korea. Otherwise, why would he tweet that it was a waste of time almost immediately following Tillerson’s remarks? One has to wonder how foreign policy decisions are made in this administration. Rather than discussing options in the situation room and agreeing on a course of action, it sure looks like members of the administration are free agents and Trump reacts on Twitter.
But the message the president is sending is that foreign leaders shouldn’t put any stock in what his Cabinet members do or say. These few tweets completely undermined anything Tillerson was attempting to accomplish and ensured that, if there was ever the possibility for diplomacy with North Korea, that is a dead end at this point. By saying, “we’ll do what has to be done,” Trump signaled that he’s the madman who can’t be trusted or predicted. To paraphrase what he told Lighthizer, “this guy is so crazy, he’ll do anything.”
The foundation of this madman approach to foreign policy was laid during the presidential campaign when Trump said, “We must as a nation be more unpredictable.” Given that I have always been skeptical that this president actually has a strategy for anything, I suspect that he gravitates towards this approach in order to avoid committing to a policy for which he might be held accountable. In other words, it keeps all of his options open at all times. It’s also a perfect cover for his ignorance. He doesn’t ever outline what he will do because he doesn’t know what he will do. Finally, being the unpredictable madman who never commits to a particular course of action, but might do anything, gives Trump the illusion of dominance.
Jeffro
@Redshift: Gillespie’s just as nuts as the rest of the VA GOP – he just hides it beneath a veneer (largely abetted by the media) of ‘moderate conservatism’.
Elizabelle
@Redshift: Did you ever learn if other canvassers Saturday were finding folks who didn’t want to talk to them at the doors?
What do you make of that? (Were you, maybe, working from a list of sporadic voters?)
pat
@jeffreyw:
What on earth is that in the frame on the wall behind the cats? A skinned rattlesnake?
Matt McIrvin
@raven: k. d. lang did a cover of that song that was astonishingly lovely. Heard it on the radio once.
The Dangerman
If taking out a high rise window IS that easy (relatIvey speaking, anyway) I’m, sadly, surprised this doesn’t happen more often. The last time there was a high snipers nest may have been U of Texas, though I may be forgetting something. Still early West Coast.
Elizabelle
@Suzanne: Plus blood.
Where do you get enough blood, for mass casualty events like this one?
DCrefugee
@Mnemosyne: I’m headed there Saturday, for business reasons. Lost Wages is one of my least favorite places on Earth, even before I was grounded there on 9/11…
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar:
The Orlando Pulse shooter killed almost as many. That was about a year ago.
A Ghost To Most
I want to hear what Steve Scalise thinks of this.
pat
@Starfish:
and he doesn’t even know the difference between Affected and Effected.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@delk: Such a handsome dog. Always nice to see a pic.
Suzanne
@Elizabelle: Every Level 1 trauma center has an on-site blood bank, but no, none of them will have enough storage capacity for something like this.
@The Dangerman: Considering that a president was assassinated from a high window, one would think that we would be more attuned to this danger.
jeffreyw
@pat:
yes
Amaranthine RBG
@The Dangerman:
That’s always been my argument to people who overstate the threat Americans face from terrorism – – If there are so many terrorists, why aren’t there more mass shootings in America. It would be so easy to do – parades, shopping malls, high school football games, etc.
schrodingers_cat
@jeffreyw: I thought that was Toby.
So how many kittehs do you have?
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Kay:
The only hope I have is that the “guns everywhere for everyone” policy backfires on the GOP and right-wing in the potential upcoming insurgency within the next few decades.
mike in dc
One average old white guy, firing for 10 minutes from 1700 feet away, using commercially available firearms, killed 58+ and injured 500+ people. This shit can’t be hand-waved or shrugged away. Imagine what a team of terrorists with ARs could do in a mall, shopping center, arena or in Times Square during busy season.
Redshift
@Elizabelle: I suspect it was just random, or maybe they had gotten more door-knocks in that area (Falls Church) because there’s also a city council election.
Adam L Silverman
@Redshift: As an actual criminologist, and the son of an actual criminologist, I think I’m uniquely qualified to answer this one.
While we have a great deal of good, and a few excellent, empirical theories that explain crime, deviance, delinquency, violence, rage, and even to an extent terrorism we have never been good at adapting what we actually learned into policies and strategies that actually make a difference in changing behavior. There seems to be a real disconnect between empirical theory grounded, evidence based understandings of the phenomena and the ability to translate what we know about the drivers, root causes, correlates, etc into effective policies and strategies to combat them, retard them, etc.
Many of us, though I’ve never tried to assess or even look up if there’s been a formal study of criminologists, recognize that the single largest factor in reducing crime, violence, deviance, and delinquency over the past 40 years or so has been the removal of lead from paint and gas and many/most other products. Just doing that seems to have more positive effects than anything else that has been tried.
Basically we’re good an understanding what the problems and their causes are. We’re not so good at using that to build solutions to them. Perhaps the best example of the limits of the social and behavioral sciences to deal with the messy reality that are humans and the groups, communities, organizations, and societies they build.
Tazj
@Redshift: I don’t know, but this man really irritated me. He was a professor at a university, which I didn’t catch, or his name. In fairness to him, maybe he did say something about gun control before or after I switched off CNN. He was mainly talking about mass murderers and how they think and that this was carefully planned and how it was extremely difficult to spot or identify a mass murderer before one commits the crime. This was not surprising given his expertise that he would focus on a murderer’s state of mind but I wanted to hear him give an answer about how this can be stopped, and he didn’t when I was watching.
Elizabelle
@Redshift: That’s a fabulous WaPost article. Gillespie even gets dissed by Mrs. Bloody Bill Kristol.
Note also, Tom Davis remark about “flies” on Democratic candidates. Don’t think of an elephant.
The GOP usually lines up and votes for the R. I am hoping enough of the loopy Corey Stewart (Confederate candidate) supporters cannot bring themselves to do so.
SiubhanDuinne (at some point in the indeterminate future to be known by my real name, Judith Mann Costello, but maybe not quite yet)
@Elizabelle:
I would have to look up the number of states, but I believe there are quite a few with laws on the book prohibiting physicians from asking their patients about guns in the home. Yes, including pediatricians who might have concerns about the safety of young children in their care.
Thanks, NRA/GOP.
Redshift
@Jeffro:
I get the feeling he has no real core beliefs, and will go along with any current craziness that he thinks will get him elected, which makes him always exactly as crazy as the rest of them, but less enthusiastic about it.
Interestingly, there was another article today that he agreed to oppose any “bathroom bills” to get the NoVa chamber of commerce endorsement. Since they nearly always endorse Republicans, I see that as selling out the rabid base just to avoid losing a routine endorsement, and not really gaining anything.
jeffreyw
@schrodingers_cat: We are up to six, now. Not pictured are Bea, Toby, and Homer. Two dogs, Gabe and Katie.
Amaranthine RBG
@Adam L Silverman:
Always nice to see someone whose posts are fact-driven posting here.
albertZ
@Major Major Major Major: Updated by the Onion: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
A Ghost To Most
Tom Toles nails it again
schrodingers_cat
@Elizabelle: Vichy Times has a hit out for her too, now that their public enemy #1 HRC is vanquished.
Cckids
@Mary G: My first thought was a golf bag, or one of the hard cases used to send golf bags on an airplane. No one would think twice about seeing one or two of those being rolled through Mandalay Bay.
Redshift
@Tazj: Greg Sargent had a really good post this morning about how mass shootings and general gun violence are really different problems, and we’d be better off not lumping them together when advocating for solutions.
Mnemosyne
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, but that didn’t count, because it was Teh Gheys who got murdered, not Real Americans.
I wish I were joking, but I’m not.
raven
Just chatted with my sis. Her oldest daughter almost went and then didn’t. Two of her friends were injured but they will book.
Mnemosyne
@Amaranthine RBG:
San Bernardino was a classic workplace shooting where the murderers decided to justify their actions to themselves by claiming they did it for ISIS.
jacy
@Adam L Silverman:
Charles Whitman had a glioblastoma that is credited with changing his personality. My first thought in hearing the scant details about the alleged shooter — no history of anything out of the ordinary, no social media presence, a recent history of large gambling transactions, his age — was some sort of brain problem. Frontal lobe tumors can induce both psychosis and violent behavior, along with bad impulse control (i.e. gambling).
Tazj
@Adam L Silverman: I suppose I’m frustrated and want an easy answer to solving this problem and there is none.
A Ghost To Most
rawstory
Drink!
Matt McIrvin
@Redshift: A bit of napkin-level statistical noodling I did on that subject. Mass-casualty shootings seem to be getting worse even while general gun homicide rates have declined (admittedly there’s been a tick up in general homicide very recently, but it’s nothing like when I was a kid).
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
IIRC, we’ve done pretty well at reducing the number of suicides at attractive places like the Golden Gate Bridge by putting up barriers that make it more difficult to jump, but God forbid we should put up any barriers to people wanting guns. ?
Tazj
@Redshift: Thanks, I’ll take a look.
Amaranthine RBG
@Mnemosyne:
You don’t RC.
Construction on those barriers started in April and will be complete in 2020 or 2021.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: no, I distinctly remember trump saying that he would prevent future Pulse attacks by being tough on radical Islam, thus protecting gays.
Matt McIrvin
@Mnemosyne: Ah, but it was also Radical Islamist Terrorism!!! and therefore nothing like a crazy lone wolf shooting people.
Calouste
@mike in dc:
No need to imagine, that already happened in Kenya a few years back.
Adam L Silverman
@Amaranthine RBG: When I get my hands on that guy, he’s in a lot of trouble. He’s making us all look bad!//
trollhattan
@Roger Moore: That’s how Adam Lanza got past the Sandy Hook School security doors.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: that’s because Fat Tony didn’t invent a constitutional right to jump off a bridge.
Elizabelle
@A Ghost To Most: I would not mind if someone took Howard Kurtz’s worthless ass out.
And the teevee has been off for hours. Bored with the usual routine, the shock, the eyewitnesses … we normalize everything in this exceptional country.
Roger Moore
@Shalimar:
More than you might realize. For example, every time there’s a big march in the downtown of a major city, you’ll have a large gathering that’s surrounded by tall buildings, some of which are publicly accessible*. Same thing when there’s a big parade. Some sports venues have associated hotels with views of the event. Then you have to consider all the locations where there’s an overlooking location that isn’t publicly accessible but might be accessible to an employee and all the employees in all those places.
*In that case, there’s also a potential political motivation for an attack, which might draw out additional crazies.
Shalimar
@Matt McIrvin: Pulse was 49 killed, 58 wounded, 107 total casualties. Las Vegas is at least 58 killed, 515 wounded, 573 total casualties, so far.
mai naem mobile
Had Steve Scalise said anything yet? Wi)l he help the uninsured LV victims?
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: So we have removed lead, but won’t remove bullets. (Used to be called “lead” as slang.)
Interesting.
Oblio
IMHO, here’s why we can’t seem to do anything about de gunz…
Amir Khalid
@Suzanne:
From what I hear, he may have been shot from a grassy knoll.
I don’t understand why some Americans believe in a constitutional right to amass a hoard of firearms. But it was never the intent of your Second Amendment to allow citizens a means of armed rebellion; why would any sane country would put that in its constitution, and invite its own disintegration?
Shalimar
@Mnemosyne: I grew up in Mobile, AL with several hundred thousand people in the streets at a time for Mardi Gras, so I considered parades. People are scattered all along the route, so in most cases, you wouldn’t have as many people available to target from one building and there would be more routes for those on the streets to get out of the line of fire.
woodrowfan
how about an author thread??
Elizabelle
For a lighter topic: dogs on patios in DC: listen up. You have your advocates, and even a twitter feed in your honor. @Pupson Patios.
DC Department of Health cracking down on dogs in outdoor spaces of restaurants. Including a really cute photo of Andypants, who is getting kicked out — along with his doghouse.
WaPost: D.C. tries to ban dogs from bar patios, and lawmakers bite back
I’d take a dog on a patio over a gun on a person any fucking day of the week. @doglover
(LOL: Andypants’ doghouse has sign warning patrons that Andy has “resting sad face.” He is warm and well fed. Despite what he tells you.)
Roger Moore
@mike in dc:
One only has to look at the Mumbai attacks to get a hint.
Adam L Silverman
@jacy: We have to wait. One of the great things about the 21st Century: we have access to more information than ever 24/7/365. One of the worst things about the 21st Century: we have access to more information than ever 24/7/365.
When we have to wait for more and accurate information we get antsy.
At this point we know a small amount: 1) He was going through a divorce/divorced. 2) He had income from rental properties owned with his mother. 3) He has worked in the past for a subsidiary of a defense contractor. 4) He has done quite a bit of recent gambling, but it was unclear (at least as of an hour ago) if he had won or lost. 5) He has a female house mate that does not appear to be his wife and who is out of the country.
What we don’t know is: A) Did the divorce suddenly turn acrimonious? B) Did his income situation suddenly turn negative? C) Did he lose more than he could handle during his recent gambling stint. D) Had he been trying to pursue a romantic relationship with his house mate and been rebuffed? Or had they been involved and she broke it off?
And we also don’t know if there is a medical explanation. Or if he woke up yesterday morning, had a psychotic break, and as a result heard the squirrels living outside his kitchen window distinctly tell him that the musicians at the concert were going to perform a mass child sacrifice and had to be stopped.
Given the number of weapons reported to be involved and the amount of ammo and the target selection, I doubt this was a spur of the matter thing. Though whatever made him choose yesterday to do this may appear to the rest of us to be random (he only got two, not three olives in his martini while playing the slots and someone had to pay). It is not easy and it is very expensive to get a fully automatic rifle in the US. So if these were legally purchased as semi-automatic, then they had to be converted. And while that isn’t all that difficult to do it does take time.
So we wait for more and more accurate information.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin: I should also say that some of the variation I was looking at there is probably just explainable by the US increasing in population (and becoming more urban). My hunch is that it’s not all of it, but it’s just a hunch.
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
OH NO
germy
@Adam L Silverman: Interesting info about his father at one time being on the FBI’s most wanted list.
jonas
@Elizabelle: Glad to know he’s been an effective governor. Because campaign advising and political consulting were *definitely* not his thing.
Adam L Silverman
@Tazj: As one of my favorite professors when I was doing my doctorate used to say: “humans are squishy”. I would think she still says it. We are very good at predicting backwards when doing empirical social and behavioral research. Using what we’ve just verified to forecast forward is much, much more difficult. And while I’m a huge believer in rooting strategy and policy in what we can empirically explain and verify, for both foreign and domestic policy, it is not easy to translate this into effective strategy and policy. Developing effective strategy and policy is art, as in something an artisan does, not science.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
As much as 9/11 “changed everything” for many, Mumbai changed everything for me as it perfectly illustrated 21st century asymmetrical warfare. So very few men with such trivially common weapons paralyzing one of the world’s largest cities for so long. Flight school? Defeating TSA screening? Why bother?
germy
@Adam L Silverman:
Unfortunately it remains in many homes’ tap water.
jacy
@Adam L Silverman:
Yes, I don’t want to jump in with a half-baked diagnosis of this guy’s problem — whether it was psychiatric, physical, emotional — it was just the first thing I thought of. The similarity to Whitman in the tower was probably what put the thought into motion. Hopefully over the coming weeks, we’ll have some kind of idea what lead to it. (Other than the fact that this country has an very unhealthy gun culture…..)
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: He was not a friendly neighbor. Quite the odd fish. Although nice to the groundskeepers on his community’s golf course. He played alone.
Neighbor spied some kind of huge safe in his garage, refrigerator sized, when door was open.
Washington Post. Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock enjoyed gambling, country music, lived quiet life before massacre
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Had an employee severely injured in a vehicle accident on the way to work one day. He ended up at USC medical center, which is a county general hospital. They were so backed up that he was on a gurney out in the hall waiting for a OR. His wife had arrived from 20 miles away. His leg was held on by his quad muscle, everything else was cut, broken or torn. They didn’t know at the time that his back was also broken. What saved him was an intern came down the hall and looked at him, his wife and figured they weren’t there because they’d been shot or knifed, like the rest of the patients. Looked at his chart and told her to get him out of that hospital asap because if they took him into the OR he was losing his leg. Got him to another hospital, he spent 4 months there, quite a few weeks in intensive care. Six months later he was walking, if you didn’t know the background you’d never know he’d come that close to losing a leg.
So it’s not only that there are too many, it’s that it then becomes about not losing a life, not about making that life better. And those healthcare workers feel that. Not like the victims but that stress adds up on them as well.
515 wounded? What the hell was he shooting?
@Suzanne:
I wrote on the last post that I was paid to carry a loaded weapon and had orders that if I saw an occasion I was allowed to shoot to kill. That was in the military, protecting a ship with big guns, missiles, etc, like your friend Brad. I’ve seen the guns go off, the missiles launched and hit targets, I’ve shot that gun off the back of the ship underway, and I’ve seen machine guns fired off that same day. Guns are meant to kill things. That is all they are meant to do. You go to a range to practice to shoot things, things are alive that you want dead. There really is a level of ethics, morality and just plain what the fuck about guns. A lot of the people who like them do so because that makes them feel powerful in a world they have none in. We need to move on beyond the wild west movie concept that was never true in the first place. I wish I had even a glimmer of how to do that.
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
Many of them actually are lead, which turns out to be a cause of lead poisoning in some species of scavenger, most notably condors. Naturally, the gun humpers are fighting like crazy against laws requiring shotgun pellets be made out of less toxic metals than lead.
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: When 1993 or 2008?
catclub
@Amir Khalid:
One explanation for the 2nd amendment is to allow armed slave patrols in the slave states.
jonas
@Amir Khalid:
Exactly right. For an idea of how the founding fathers viewed insurrection, see Whiskey Rebellion, The. The Second Amendment was about states retaining the right to provide for their own security by maintaining “well regulated militias.” The idea that it is a license for any citizen to amass and carry around hordes of lethal weapons without any regulation whatsoever is a wholly modern invention (thanks, Scalia!). But it benefits the armaments industry, so I guess a few dozen people here or there have to die every six months to pad those profits. Whaddya gonna do?
Elizabelle
WRT the story on dogs banned from patios in the Washington Post. You have to love a reporter who comes up with these opening sentences.
Intense but few. Perfect. Reporter is Peter Jamison. Worked for the LA Times, and the Tampa Bay Times, previously.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: Some of our state constitutions actually have a “right of revolution” clause, in some cases dating from the Revolutionary War era; though they don’t specifically mention armed rebellion, just some collective right to alter, abolish or reform the government as the people think proper, with no process defined.
I know of no serious claims that the Second Amendment had anything to do with it until the late 20th century.
germy
On September 6, 1949, Howard Unruh murdered 13 people in downtown Philadelphia. It’s considered the first mass shooting in US history. Tragically, it wasn’t the last. From a 2015 article about Unruh in Smithsonian:
chris
Interesting site.
http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/last-72-hours
Las Vegas is on page 3… 60 shootings ago.
Also worth a look. https://massshootingtracker.org/
Site is down, probably overloaded.
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore: That’s right. Didn’t der Trump overturn the Obama era law prohibiting lead in ammo? I believe he did.
Libtards can’t tell these shooters what to do. Freedom.
HeleninEire
I got this: my friend Jazman (I told you in the morning thread that she was there last night and got grazed in the leg) is now back home in CA. She’s a stew (yeah I’m old) for an airline so as soon as she was treated at the scene she went to McCarren and got the first flight home.
She’s lovely and funny and just great. She is freaking (and like most 23 year olds is posting everything on FB). I hope this doesn’t change her.
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
One of the things I heard about him is that he enjoyed going to Vegas to go to the kind of concert he attacked. That led me to formulate two possible explanations for why he chose that target:
1) He was familiar with those concerts and knew they would provide an opportunity
2) He was deeply angry about those concerts- possibly because he couldn’t go to them anymore- and attacked one as a form of revenge.
Obviously, 2 is compatible with 1.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: When I was doing the report on Soldiers who commit mass murders, including mass shootings, for the US Army Office of the Provost Marshall General and US Army Corrections Command in 2014 the numbers were largely stable over time. And time here is decades. Part of the problem with running just the numbers, and I’m aware of your professional background and am not going to argue running the numbers with them with you – I’m just going to work with you’re better than I was when I was teaching two stats sections per week and leave it at that – is the context. A significant number of serial murders count as mass murders because there are four or more victims killed. The same with spree killings. If you have a serial or spree killer who’s tool of choice is a firearm then these also qualify as mass shootings given how we technically define mass shootings – four or more killed, not including the shooter.
Now we’re in a data categorization problem. Do we include serial and spree murders where the weapon was a firearm in the overall count of mass shooting? Especially as mass shooting is sort of a term of art. And when we drill down, if I’m recalling correctly from the data I was looking at 3 years ago, a lot of mass shootings turn out to be familial. One parent kills the other, the kids, perhaps the grandparents, and then himself. Or one of the children does so. All of these are clearly different than what happened at the Pulse nightclub. And they’re also different than the DC sniper, which was actually a pair of spree killers operating nationwide.
lgerard
What do you do with places like this, where you can experience the thrill of being a mass murderer without the messy consequences?
I’ll never understand the concept of violence as entertainment..
A Ghost To Most
@jacy: Funny, no one seems to care about the mental state of a non-christian terrorist.
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar: Good point–the nature of this shooting means a much larger number of injured, and the death toll is probably going to rise some more.
sharl
I got nothing as well Betty. Tweeted out a melancholy youtube video just because, otherwise retweeting smarter and more eloquent people, just because. Case in point: the usually smart-assed and darkly comedic Ashley Feinberg, who quite properly took a well known fraudulent “media critic” to task
Feinberg wrote about this back in 2015: How to Talk About Suicide on Father’s Day
raven
@germy: It was in Camden NJ.
jonas
@catclub:
That’s a bit of a canard. They could have done that anyway. Militias were for suppressing domestic unrest (Shay’s Rebellion in particular being on folks’ mind at the time) and fighting Indians in frontier areas. States didn’t want the feds interfering in either of those things.
trollhattan
@Elizabelle: This caught me.
“We are in complete shock, bewilderment and horror,” one anonymous relative who spoke to the Washington Post said. “We have absolutely no idea how in the world Steve did this. Absolutely no concept. There was nothing secret or strange about him.”
At least one secret.
raven
@Adam L Silverman: never mind
Sab
@jeffreyw: I am so sorry. Mnemosyne commented that they now have rattlesnake vaccines. I learn something every day here.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: It’s not the barriers to wanting guns. Its the barriers to getting them. You could outlaw firearms in the US tomorrow – this is a thought exercise, so let’s ignore the 2nd Amendment and the Supreme Court – and then round up everything out there and destroy it. What you can’t do is get rid of people wanting them. And to be honest, if you have the mechanical aptitude, you can build a gun with stuff you have lying around your house or can easily get at the hardware store.
Amaranthine RBG
@Roger Moore:
?
There has been a nationwide ban on lead shotgun ammo when hunting ducks for 20 years and no duck hunter I know is “fighting like crazy” against that.
trollhattan
@schrodingers_cat: 2008, the one Roger links to.
Adam L Silverman
@Elizabelle: Without sounding glib, different type of lead poisoning.
That said, a lot of the highest performance hunting rounds are made without lead. They’re all copper.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: Well, I’m not a social scientist and am actually way outside my area of expertise here. As I said, I do suspect the increasing and increasingly urban population of the US probably has an effect on the numbers here–more people in one place means more potential victims for a spree killer.
And I’m deliberately looking at the extreme of the extreme, spree killings with huge body counts, which is different from looking at all things categorized as mass shootings. Still, I think that’s valid to some degree just because these attacks have such an outsize ability to terrorize and alter policy.
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: People want to rape small children and eat other humans.
We can make that a lot harder, and taboo.
You could build a weapon, but maybe not one that hits over 550 targets, meters away, in a matter of minutes.
People “wanting something” could be made a lot harder to satisfy. Civilized nations have done it. We have not.
ETA: not ragging on you. I know you’re horrified as we all are.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: Yep, bank robber if I read the article correctly.
Elizabelle
@trollhattan: Nothing secret or strange about him.
They never talked to any of Steve’s neighbors, did they? Ah well. Neither did Steve. For the most part.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: Unfortunately. It shouldn’t. It isn’t supposed to. But it does.
trollhattan
A TPM article on the LV gunman has this link on the page:
“New device turns any handgun into a sniper rifle”
We sure are good at monitizing stuff.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Amaranthine RBG: Then RM wasn’t talking about you. But please act offended.
Adam L Silverman
@Elizabelle: Standard large gun safe. Means he was, at least, a responsible gun owner. Until he wasn’t.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: He had at least two rifles. Converted to full automatic. And he was dumping magazines.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: Flint, Michigan is performing a horrifying social experiment. I’ve been wondering what happens to the kids there in 20 years.
Elizabelle
@Matt McIrvin: Yes. Exactly.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Actually there were a lot by a radical offshoot of the anti-Federalists. Give this a read:
https://balloon-juice.com/2017/06/14/some-thoughts-on-todays-shootings/
Amaranthine RBG
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
I’m not offended – I’m just stating facts.
As is apparent from reading these comments, few people in these threads have any actual knowledge of firearms or the laws regarding firearms so I try to inject facts when possible.
And, to be fair to the poster I corrected, there is a current controversy about banning lead statewide in California but I think that is less about resistance towards lead generally and is more focused on whether there is solid science to support the argument that condors are endangered by lead used to hunt small game. There is solid science that lead in larger game animals has impacted condors.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman:
Ah, but how many people have that aptitude or desire to acquire it? Restricting access to guns, more so the high-round capacity, automatic kind, would logically make it harder to get one in the first place. I doubt most people are that determined. It would certainly decrease the likelihood of someone who has “snapped” being able to kill dozens or hundreds within a half-hour. That’s the point you were trying to make correct?
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: At this point anything is possible. We have to wait.
jonas
@The Dangerman: Reports are he used a hammer of some kind. Must have been a big one — I’ve stayed at the Mandalay Bay before. The windows are really thick (as they are in all Vegas hotels, I presume) to provide insulation in the hot sun.
Adam L Silverman
@raven: Shouldn’t that be never more?
Roger Moore
@catclub:
The most likely explanation is that it was intended to protect the right of states to have their own militias. The founding fathers were justifiably worried about the dangers of a standing army- it’s interesting to reflect that they were closer in time to the English Civil War than we are to the American Civil War- and felt militias were the best way of avoiding the need for a standing army large enough to threaten the government. Those militias may have been used for slave patrols in states where slavery was legal, but it was far from their only, or even primary, purpose at the time the 2nd Amendment was proposed.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: …So the argument was always there, but a decidedly minority position.
trollhattan
@Amaranthine RBG: .
Until you establish your qualifications that includes you, Skippy. For now you’re just another internet expert, so skip the fucking lectures.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: I’m not trying to pick apart what you did, just pointing out that the context is important here for determining how to sort and bin the data. So just running overall numbers over time may be obscuring some important information.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Amaranthine RBG:
While also being condescending at the same time. And what’s there to know about firearms? Point and shoot. Reload a new magazine when you’re done wasting some “gun grabbers”. Oh and of course cleaning and oiling. Not that complicated, really. That’s the nice thing about guns, isn’t it? A lot easier than a knife or even a composite bow. Takes less courage to use too.
germy
According to the WaPo death toll is up to 58.
Adam L Silverman
@Elizabelle: I would expect that a significant number of injuries are not gun shot related. Rather they’re likely to have been the result of people knocking each other over trying to flee. So broken bones, crush injuries, and things like that. I’m sure there are enough gun shots out of the total, but we won’t know the numbers on this for a while as well.
Adam L Silverman
@trollhattan: No device turns a handgun into a sniper rifle.
Amaranthine RBG
@trollhattan:
My comments today speak for themseves.
You seem to just want to engage in histrionic insults. I’ll pass.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Nothing good. Not in terms of mental or physical health.
Amir Khalid
@Elizabelle:
I don’t remember this one. Did der Trump do that by himself, or did Republicans in Congress pass a new law repealing the no-lead-in-ammo law? If the former, it would have been the Dotard rescinding one of Obama’s executive orders.
Amir Khalid
@trollhattan:
@Adam L Silverman:
I’m sure a lot of men would be very interested in the barrel-lengthening part.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
I think most of the definitions of mass shootings would exclude serial killers because they require all the shootings to be part of a single event or closely connected events. That’s very different from the typical serial killer MO of killing one person at a time.
jacy
@A Ghost To Most:
I do — but from the aspect of how brain chemistry shapes our actions. In everyday life, I’m much more afraid of an angry white guy with a gun than any other type of person. The thing that stuck out to me was this guy’s age — he’s 64, with no obvious history of aggression, anger problems, violence, or fringe ideology. Why all of the sudden would he do something so horrific? It’s a separate question from the gun control problem, and the domestic terrorism problem — both of which are things we should be openly talking about. It’s just that the circumstances so far — and it is very, very early — seem to make this guy an outlier in terms of personality traits that would mark him as someone who would be dangerous. Although I’m sure that many “normal” people could be quite dangerous given the right circumstances. Just very wild speculation.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
LAO
This historical context up at TPM is fascinating.
Amaranthine RBG
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
The issue isn’t the complexity of firearms versus compound bows (I assume that is what you mean when you posted “composite bows.”
The issue is the unintended consequences that arise when people call for regulations of things they don’t understand factually.
A Ghost To Most
@Amaranthine RBG: There are a lot of responsible gun owners here, including several refuting you. But hey, don’t let facts get in your way.
trollhattan
@Amaranthine RBG:
After writing this sniffy bit of pomposity
You’re precluded from tossing accusations of “histrionics.” At this point you’re writing for one reader: your own beautiful self.
Don’t bother.
MomSense
@jeffreyw:
That’s quite a rattlesnake skin you have mounted on the wall.
Kittehs are lovely.
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: In my opinion 1993 was worse because people who lived and worked in city and knew it like the palm of their hand were responsible. 2008 was perpetrated by Pakistani gunmen. Even the death toll in 1993 was much higher. 2008 garnered more eyeballs in this country because the gunmen targeted western tourists.
And I say that as a 5th generation Mumbaikar.
Repatriated
@jacy: Interesting point, which goes back to one I raised in the last thread. What makes him different from other “law-abiding gun owners”?
Yeah, practically none of them go on premeditated killing sprees — but how many are close to the edge? And how could we know this?
Amaranthine RBG
@A Ghost To Most:
What are you yammering on about?
Look, if you think I’ve said something wrong, it’s easy to quote me and state why I was wrong.
But this nonsense – “There are lots of people saying you said things wrong” is just a weak attempt at pot-stirring.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman: Should I feel bad that I thought that was from Castle as soon as I saw Nathan Fillion, until I noticed how youthful he looked?
Cermet
@trollhattan: Yes; my daughter had two friends (One she knew very well) commit suicide a year and half ago (both lived in her dorm.) Discovered the university she attends has the highest rate in the country (also, a terrible side note: the university just up the street has the second highest rate – hopefully, this has change since then for both places.) That’s when I realize it was not appropriate to ask if this was still occurring with people she knows – so VERY happy she decide to live off campus for her last year.
This country will never address guns until the 0.001% realize this poses a danger to them (it will in the not too distant future) and then and only then will these issues be addressed. Speaking of white male terrorism – most all woman murdered are murdered by their husbands/boyfriends with …wait for it …a gun! (Surprise!)
MomSense
@jeffreyw:
OH WOW. So sorry about your dog.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
Amaranthine RBG said:
This is perfect.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Yep, the anti-Federalists largely ignored the group making it, who I refer to as the radical localists. The anti-Federalists were far more focused on the debate with the Federalists over the 2nd Amendment. The debate between the Federalists and anti-Federalists was largely and almost exclusively about who would have responsibility of provisioning the state militias. The Federalists wanted the Federal government to do this so as to standardize things including weaponry, ammunition, and training. The anti-Federalists argued that this should be a state responsibility. Some of the context for this was that the militia was considered largely useless during the Revolution, which is why Washington ordered Lafayette to raise and train a real army and ordered von Steuben to provision and outfit them properly.
There is, unfortunately, precious little Congressional record pertaining to the amendment. It is unclear why it was rewritten by the Senate, why the House passed it with almost no debate after it came back from the Senate, or just how broad or narrow the Founders and Framers thought it should be because it was almost completely unremarked upon during the debates on it in either chamber of Congress. We have better state information. Many states included their own versions. Some expanded on it to include keeping and bearing arms for sporting and/or defense purposes. Other states just had completely separate provisions for these in their constitutions.
sharl
This seems to be appropriate time – again – to link to TBogg’s 2014 piece, “I was the NRA.” For context, he’s around 61 or 62 years of age (like me).
After one of these dumb-asses almost killed the family hunting dog:
FREEDUMB!
Mnemosyne
@Shalimar:
People at the Rose Parade sit in bleachers. Not a lot of escape routes.
And having several hundred thousand panicked people stampeding through the streets is going to cause its own death toll.
germy
@jacy:
One thing I noticed about ten years ago after spending some time on a shooter’s blog and reading his readers’ comments: A definite hard line between “Good” people and Criminals. The blogger and every one of his commenters saw the world that way. There were the decent folk (who of course should be armed) vs. the bad people (criminals & “crazies”) who should be locked up or shot.
(Of course, quite a few discussions betrayed an obsession with urban inner-city violence, even though the blog host lived out in an exurb, as did his readers, nowhere near any person of color.)
But aside from race, they really saw it as a simple matter of good vs. bad people. They couldn’t conceive of formerly law-abiding people suddenly snapping, or of previously convicted criminals being rehabilitated.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Amaranthine RBG:
What unintended consequences might those be? Interference in the right of any God-fearing White Christian Man to open-carry his prosthetic penis to intimidate to anyone he doesn’t like? Won’t someone think of the Oathkeepers, those brave freedom fighters, speaking truth to power and threatening libtards with ventilation?
Mnemosyne
@Amaranthine RBG:
So there’s no barrier at all to jumping off the Golden Gate? No existing fence or anything?
WTF is wrong with you people? Even Pasadena tries to fence their suicide bridge off, though it’s still not 100 percent effective.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: Exactly. And that’s the differentiation that is made in the literature between serial and spree homicides on one side and just a mass shooting on the other. You have to remember that all three of these are niche areas of study within criminology and sociology and psychology. And mass shootings didn’t even count as niche, just largely not studied, until a few years ago. This was what terrorism was like through about 2005/2006. In criminology there were 8 of us who regularly focused on it until around 2005. There were several dozen of us in political science/international relations, but here too it was considered a niche area and most people in the discipline didn’t know what to make of us. That was the nice thing about criminology, because of the violence component, at least other criminologists didn’t think we were just way off the scholarly reservation. And there are some real niche areas in criminology. I have a friend who is a specialist on female serial killers. That’s a very small population of offenders.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
Take two:
@Amaranthine RBG:
What unintended consequences might those be? Interference in the right of any God-fearing White Christian Man to open-carry his prosthetic pen$s to intimidate to anyone he doesn’t like? Won’t someone think of the Oathkeepers, those brave freedom fighters, speaking truth to power and threatening libtards with ventilation?
Corner Stone
@Adam L Silverman: That guy is going to get a few people killed.
A Ghost To Most
@Amaranthine RBG: You are a fucking putz,yammering on like you are the only one here familiar with firearms. FOAD.
Amaranthine RBG
@Mnemosyne:
You have to climb over a waist high railing – that has been in place for decades. They’re currently constructing a multi-million dollar horizontal fence type thing below that railing that people will land on after the jump. Nothing to stop them from then jumping off the fence type thing, but I guess the hope is that people will reconsider after falling a few feet.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Corner Stone:
Co-signed.
Amaranthine RBG
@A Ghost To Most:
Like I said, if I’ve posted something incorrect, please feel free to quote it and correct me. I’m always happy to learn.
But what your doing, just throwing random insults without any support, shows that you are not a serious person.
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: Our technical advances in being able to hurt ourselves and others has never stood still. And usually outpaces our advances in knowing when and where to use the technical advances we’ve just made.
Amaranthine RBG
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
How’s your composite bow practice coming?
The Golux
The view of the concert venue that Paddock had.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Depends. How overdeveloped is your sense of guilt?
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone: Possibly.
Mnemosyne
@A Ghost To Most:
When we had the LAX airport shootout st the El Al counter a year or two after 9/11, there were a whole lot of indications that it was a suicide by cop: the guy’s wife had just left him and taken the kids back to Egypt and he committed the crime on his birthday.
Didn’t matter — because of who he was (an Egyptian Muslim) and who he attacked (Israel via their national airline), it was ruled a terrorist attack.
A Ghost To Most
@Amaranthine RBG:
What was that about throwing random insults, d-bag?
jacy
@germy:
The unfortunate tendency of people — and most often ideologically rigid people — to group people. The in group and the out group. Anybody “like’ you is the in group, whether it be color, religion, political views, nationality, whatever. And therefore it’s okay to blame whatever problems you have on an out group. They are always the bad people. Like I said, the person who worries me most is the angry white guy with a gun, but that’s because, statistically, that’s the person most likely to present a danger to me….
joel hanes
@jonas:
Reports are he used a hammer of some kind.
Old-people mail-order catalogs sell special hammers designed to shatter the tempered glass used in automobiles.
(The marketing pitch is to imagine yourself unable to open the doors, trapped; the same hammer has a guarded blade specifically designed to cut seat belts.)
My first guess is that he had one of those.
A Ghost To Most
@Mnemosyne: Only white christians get the “mental health” excuse.
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
That does not look like a weapon that would be practical for murdering dozens of people.
Kelly
@Amir Khalid: Trump and lead
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-interior-zinke/new-interior-head-lifts-lead-ammunition-ban-in-nod-to-hunters-idUSKBN16930Z
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: yes.
dmsilev
(The Onion, because of course.
jacy
@Mnemosyne:
It’s insane that brown people = terrorism. Reducing motive like that doesn’t do anything to address any real world problem. I’m more worried about the “radicalization” of Fox News watchers than anybody else.
joel hanes
@LAO:
Wounded Knee : 250 Americans killed.
Roger Moore
@germy:
They can’t conceive it because they don’t want to think it might apply to them. Nobody wants to think that they or somebody they know might one day snap and decide to murder their whole family. It’s much easier and less terrifying to imagine the people who do that are somehow inherently broken and deeply different from ordinary people like yourself.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
That’s why I used the suicide comparison. We used to think that there was no way to prevent people from killing themselves if they want to, but it turns out that making it more difficult for people to commit suicide gives us more chances to get help to them that may save their lives. Preventing impulsive or easy suicides saves lives.
That’s why it’s crazy to me that supposed “experts” (not you, obvs) claim that there’s no way to prevent mass shootings with better gun control.
sherparick
@Kay: Trump is MAGA at gun violence.
I also hate the whole media and economic elite who decided to manipulate the yahoos into voting Republicans by persuading them that “Freedom” = owning an arsenal of firearms. Meanwhile, Mark Kelly for President. https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/914902900333322245
A Ghost To Most
Tom Petty was rushed to the hospital Sunday night after he was found unconscious, not breathing and in full cardiac arrest … law enforcement sources tell TMZ.
EMTs rushed to his Malibu home and were able to get a pulse. He was rushed to the UCLA Santa Monica Hospital and our sources say he was put on life support.
Corner Stone
@Adam L Silverman: That’s essentially a pipe bomb, built with inferior materials and a poor eye to detail. The stress fractures will be invisible to the eye until it blows his arm off and punctures his lungs.
Adam L Silverman
@joel hanes: I have one of those in my car. And I put one in my mother’s. Your point?
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
The terrifying thing about your comment is that I got the shooting you were talking about confused with a separate LAX shooting, the one that happened in 2013. What does it say about our society that we have to give dates for these things so we can tell public shootings apart?
germy
@Roger Moore:
I tried leaving a comment like that one day, and more than a few of them took offense. They thought I was trying to insult them.
sherparick
Also, talking about RWNJ grifters making a big buck off the Right Wing Infotainment Complex, here Dana Loesch modeling perhasp the very gun and magazine used in this latest massacre. http://crooksandliars.com/2017/10/its-perfect-time-re-watch-dana-loeschs-nra
Corner Stone
Is it weird that Larry Fitzgerald still has the greeting message answering machine from his mother who passed in 2003?
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: It is not. But building weapons out of whatever is at hand is a human specialty. I’m not arguing here against new restrictions and laws. All I’m saying is that even if you completely outlawed and removed every firearm in the US, someone who wanted to would find a way to make one.
LAO
@Adam L Silverman: While I knew that, I’m simply flabbergasted by this. I really thought, given the state of medical care during the late 18th century, that more soldiers would have been killed in these battles. It also highlights, to me, a better understanding of the context surrounding the adoption of the 2d Amendment.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman: @Major Major Major Major:
What can I say? I liked Castle when it was on. Can’t say I liked how it ended. Way too rushed.
Oh and thanks for the comic recs, Adam. I really enjoyed Trinity and have checked out the JLA annuals from the library. Just have to wait for it to come in. Some of the newer comics are on this really cool “free” (paid for by the library) service called Hoopla as ebooks.
daverave
Now Tom Petty too… 2017 just as bad as 2016
sherparick
@Mnemosyne: You have to be a pretty good machinist to do this, and I don’t think most of our recent spree killers have skill. Australia, UK, Germany, Russia, and even Norway also have nutjobs, but the frequency is far less (21 years since the Port Arthur Massacre) when you simply are not able to buy automatic and semi-automatic weapons.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
Or quiet and diligently successful. Often poisoners, I think. I am amazed that someone like Belle Gunness got away with so much for so long. Belle (1859 – 1908)
She may have died in a fire, or substituted another body and escaped any capture.
Amaranthine RBG
@Adam L Silverman:
I think the point is that you are scared old person. Ha.
(And I have one of those in each of my cars, too.)
jacy
@A Ghost To Most:
That’s awful. What a shitty day.
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone: I’m not saying it is a good design, was just one of a number of examples that came up with a very quick keyword search.
LAO
@joel hanes: I, who live in NYC, have one of those too.
ETA: In my car, if that wasn’t clear. I don’t actually carry it around with me.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@A Ghost To Most: It’s okay when Gun Expert RBG does it.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman: Wow. I have a reply comment to you in moderation. Very curious as to what the offending words might be.
A Ghost To Most
@LAO: When the best you can do is 3 shots a minute, it’s hard to kill a lot of people.
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: Took time, even for proficient shooters, to reload a muzzle loader. And under stress it gets even longer. And these were not rifled long guns, so accuracy could be sketchy. Not everyone had or could afford a Kentucky rifle. A lot of these were home made – as in even if you bought it, it was from a local blacksmith who may or may not have been good at making them.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: I’m willing to give you an exception, barely, based on age.
Suzanne
@jonas:
The glass likely isn’t that thick. Most IGUs (insulated glazing units) are two 1/4″ pieces of glazing with 1/2″ of air space in between. Often, glass in those IGUs are laminated for strength, but the glass itself is no stronger than what’s in your car windshield. It could be broken with common tools. Glass curtain wall has to be structurally hefty to resist wind loading on a structure, but a point load like a hammer or even repeated blows with furniture could take out glass like that (think of how even small pieces of rock can break a windshield). Not to mention—he could have just shot it out.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
A remarkable example comes from the UK. Guns are tightly restricted there, so the most common way of committing suicide is to overdose on pills, most commonly paracetamol/acetaminophen. The UK was able to substantially reduce the number of suicide attempts by making it difficult to buy more than 16 pills at a time and putting them in blister packs rather than bottles. Just the need to go to more than one store to buy the pills and to take the time to break them out of the individual blisters was enough to prevent a lot of suicides.
Amaranthine RBG
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Oh, I’m not a gun expert. Nor am I an expert in composite bows.
trollhattan
@Cermet:
Wife had a client, young mother of two girls. Her boyfriend (not the girls’ father) became obsessive-aggressive and she broke up with him. He started stalking her and vandalizing her residence, and her landlord eventually evicted her because of the continual damage. She obtained a restraining order and went about buying a house anonymously, to avoid a paper trail. Wife helped her and the family to get a loan (tricky!) and she moved in.
One day after dropping her daughters off she returned home and the boyfriend murdered her still in the car in the garage, with her brother as witness. The shooter took off in his car, eventually committing suicide on the interstate when he was cornered by the state patrol.
You are correct to my point of view–we have surrendered ourselves to the steady drip, drip of domestic terrorism by armed people with a grudge, anger management issues, rampaging paranoia and countless other destabilizing maladies. We could say no, but we do not.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
My retired boss flew out of LAX that same morning in 2013. She missed the shooting by about an hour.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: I stopped watching about halfway through the second to final season. They should have just had them get married and lived happily ever after.
Break
I also highly recommend Jim Krueger and Alex Ross’s, with art by Ross, Justice:
https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Jim-Krueger/dp/1401235263/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506973263&sr=8-1&keywords=alex+ross+justice
And Mark Waid’s and Alex Ross’s, with art by Ross, Kingdom Come:
https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Come-Mark-Waid/dp/1401220347/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506973327&sr=1-1
Corner Stone
@Amaranthine RBG:
Arrow to the guts strikes with uncommon timing!
Monala
@jacy: I do wonder if we’ll find out he has a history of domestic violence. Most of the mass killers do. Although this guy apparently had no history of interactions with police, so I’m not sure we’d know.
A Ghost To Most
@Amaranthine RBG: But he plays one on Balloon Juice.
raven
Shooter at USC.
of shots fired on the USC campus, prompting university officials to urge people to shelter in place.
USC said the police activity was occurring arounf 610 Childs Way.
At about 12:30 p.m., a police chopper was circling overhead and students sitting outside a campus food court have all been moved inside.
“Shelter in place threat or danger to the USC community,” the university said.
The LAPD said it was looking into reports of a shooting but did not provide further details
PJ
@trollhattan: The DC sniper in 2002 showed that 2 people with a car and a rifle could paralyze an entire metro area for weeks.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
So we should remove the restrictions on buying chemical fertilizers that were put in place after Oklahoma City because Boston proved that anyone who is determined to build a bomb can still do it?
Come on. This is a bogus argument.
trollhattan
@Suzanne:
Drifting way off-topic I keep a window-break device in each car, in case any of us rolls into the drink while driving through the Delta on its winding 1.5-lane levee roads. It’s small and you simply press it against the glass and a spring smacks a ball bearing into the glass. Mind you, I haven’t tested it on one of my windows….
To your point, glass breaks with sufficient force concentrated on a small enough area.
Corner Stone
@Adam L Silverman: Sure. I may know someone who has some past experience with stupidity in that area.
Speaking of humanity finding a way, along with the requisite #humblebrag, my son was in a STEM type summer camp and they were tasked with making a tiny catapult with odd shit you’d never think made sense. All the teams seemed to find a way to do it and smash their targets. Ah, humanity!
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I remember it clearly because I was on vacation in Moab, UT. I drove out, but some people I was supposed to meet there were flying from LAX to Salt Lake and driving down. Their flight was after the shooting, so they missed the flight and had to come the next day.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: I didn’t say that. Nor am I suggesting it.
A Ghost to Not
@Mnemosyne:
To be fair, the ANFO bomb McVeigh used dwarfed the pressure cooker bombs in Boston.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman:
I think there was issues between Nathan and Beckett’s actress that cut the show short and forced them to air that half-assed “happily married after” ending you wanted.
I’ll check those out probably too.
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone:
http://www.motifake.com/image/demotivational-poster/1309/jacques-trebuchet-and-sons-helping-solve-real-estate-problem-demotivational-posters-1378706794.jpg
trollhattan
@PJ:
You’re right, I forgot about that other bit of terrorism while GW Bush was busy “keeping us safe.”
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Amaranthine RBG:
Can’t let that bow comment go, can you? How pathetic.
catclub
@PJ:
I am still amazed that ISIS or Al Qaeda never noticed this.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
Realistically, how many people would build their own guns rather than purchasing them at a local store or off the internet?
Reducing access to guns reduces the death rate from guns. The gun-huggers hate to hear that, but it’s true. Harm reduction works.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: there will always be tools for making tools. I don’t see what much that has to do with a discussion about the availability of the tools themselves.
There’s lots of stuff you can do with a computer that most of those with ill intentions don’t do, because it’s not out of the box functionality. If you could go to corner the store and buy a massive botnet I’ll bet there would be a lot more DDoS attacks, data spills and hacking.
gorram
@Redshift: Why stop there, why even have laws against murder? Someone somewhere will break it. It’s an absurd argument, but they won’t carry it to its natural endpoints because its purpose is just to dismiss any action on this issue, not actually be something considered and believed.
A touch Orwellian, isn’t it? We’re so used to it being used to describe surveillance, that I think people have forgotten the real fixation of 1984 – on winnowing down language into a tool by which you can get people to bleat and adopt the Party line without much thought as to why. For that matter, a Party line that’s updated daily too.
Elizabelle
@catclub: Yeah. That was effective. John Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo. The trick was the beater car, with the shooting platform in the trunk.
Meanwhile, everyone was looking for a white van.
A Ghost To Most
@Corner Stone: trebouchet for the win!
Mnemosyne
@A Ghost to Not:
That was my point, yes — the Tsarnaevs were limited in how effective their bomb would be because we restrict access to the most efficient bomb-making materials.
Now imagine if you could buy plastic explosives with the same ease you can buy a gun.
Repatriated
@Adam L Silverman: So, to match the amount of lead one gunman with a semi-auto pistol can send downrange, you’ve needed twenty trained shooters (and might be about as accurate, too…)
Mothra
I’ve got a lot I don’t want. I feel like I’m watching America being beaten and kicked. I want to go to Congress when they have these moments of silence and I’ll start saying the names of massacres until they arrest me.
Major Major Major Major
@Corner Stone: I did something like that as a youth but we had to make a crane out of spaghetti and pennies and stuff.
jeffreyw
@MomSense: It was a long time ago, the hurt isn’t fresh but I still have it in for rattlesnakes in my yard. She was a beautiful dog, full of joy. The only Brit we’ve had that would enter the water like a Lab at a field trial. We buried her in the shade of a sycamore, next to the pond.
Mothra
@catclub: @Monala: his father was a criminal and possibly mentally ill
Elizabelle
@Monala: LA Times had glowing review of shooter from ex-brother in law. Although that was 8 year marriage with divorce many years ago.
Jeffro
@sylvania: Supposedly no brain activity and pulled off of life support.
Elizabelle
@jeffreyw: I am so sorry. She was robbed, as were you. #fucksnakes
jacy
@Monala:
That’s the thing. At the age of 64, you’re likely to have some sort of evidence that you are a violent or abusive person. Police reports, restraining orders, familial anecdotes. It’s not impossible that this guy has just flown under the radar all his adult life. But his family was, to quote CNN, “befuddled.” Nobody said they had any inkling that he was capable of something like this. That — combined with his age — is what’s different from every other white, home-grown terrorist. Like I said, so far an outlier, but we have only the bare bones of information. I shouldn’t even speculate on it — I hate it when people spout off with little or not information — but it just struck me as really odd. Of course, the human instinct is to make sense of things, so maybe my brain is just trying to make sense of something so utterly awful.
A Ghost To Most
@Mnemosyne: You can, if you know the right people. I do, but choose to stay away from them.
trollhattan
@sylvania: Noooo! Spouse saw him just last month said he was great, full of energy. Hang in there Tom, we need you! Best Florida export, evah.
Repatriated
@catclub:
I don’t doubt they noticed.
I do doubt that they had, qualified, infiltratable agents to exploit it.
This is retroactive confirmation — if any were still needed at this point — that the whole idea of The War On Terror was a vast exaggeration.
Mothra
@Major Major Major Major: I think it might be predict not prevent
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: There is an entire subset of firearm owners that build their own handguns and rifles. With 3D printing it is only going to get easier. Stay out of the comments. Or not…
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2017/10/jeremy-s/ghost-gunner-cnc-machines-now-completing-80-pistol-frames/
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2017/10/jeremy-s/exclusive-ttag-shoots-defense-distributed-ghost-gunner-pistols/
Brendancalling
Safe travels, Tom Petty
MomSense
@Brendancalling:
He was only 66.
Corner Stone
Damn you, Brian Williams. Tell MSNBC I want Nicolle Wallace on air, not your ignorant pasty mug.
Elizabelle
@trollhattan: Confirmed by CBS.
I think one of my friends saw his last show ever, Saturday night? Maybe Friday? LA. He shared clips. Tom and band in great form.
rikyrah
Tom Petty – damn.
RIP :(
Monala
@PJ: And that was also a convoluted case of domestic violence. John Muhammed was trying to kill his estranged wife, and wanted to create enough diversion to do it.
A Ghost To Most
@Repatriated: Our 8-man civil war gun team (.58 muzzle loaders) once went toe-to-toe with a 4-man M-16 team, shooting at breakable targets (clay pigeons, clay pots, charcoal briquettes). The m-16 team had a devil of a time, since their hi-powered loads would often go right through without breaking the target. The last event was to cut a 3′ by 6″ board in half using bullets. The m-16s never accomplished it; the bullets just passed through without doing enough damage.
Adam L Silverman
@Repatriated: Yep. Progress marches on…
Mnemosyne
@A Ghost To Most:
@Adam L Silverman:
A gif for both of you. Jaysus.
rikyrah
BREAKING: Trump’s company had more contact with Russia during campaign, according to documents to investigators https://t.co/j0RNctlODX
— Holly O’Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) October 2, 2017
Corner Stone
I am still not sure why he would have 10 rifles. Two or three I guess I can get. But what was he going to do with 10 different ones?
clay
Damn it. Tom Petty Radio on SiriusXM has been one of my main pleasures while driving around. Saw him twice live, back in the 90s. Excellent shows, both. He could craft rockin’ pop tunes like no other. Local boy made good, RIP.
Elizabelle
CBS report:
Tom Petty, the rocker best known as the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, is dead at 66, CBS News has confirmed.
The legendary musician suffered a full cardiac arrest and was found unconscious and not breathing in his Malibu home Sunday night. He was taken to UCLA Santa Monica Hospital and put on life support, reports TMZ.
Petty rose to fame in the 1970s with his band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The group put out several hits, including “American Girl,” “Free Fallin’,” “Breakdown,” “Listen to Her Heart” and more. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
Though Petty and his band debuted their first self-titled record in 1976, they continued to perform over the past four decades. Petty played his last show last Monday, performing three sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl to conclude their 40th anniversary tour. The band wrote on their website that the tour included 53 shows in 24 states.
In December, Petty told Rolling Stone that he thought this would be the group’s last tour together. He said, “It’s very likely we’ll keep playing, but will we take on 50 shows in one tour? I don’t think so. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was thinking this might be the last big one. We’re all on the backside of our sixties. I have a granddaughter now I’d like to see as much as I can. I don’t want to spend my life on the road. This tour will take me away for four months. With a little kid, that’s a lot of time.”
Petty, who released three solo albums and 13 albums with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, also took part in the 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne.
germy
Trump’s company had more contact with Russia during campaign, according to documents turned over to investigators
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
Crap. Too young, but not a completely unexpected age for a heart attack. ?
Amaranthine RBG
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
While you were doing drugs, I studied the composite bow.
While you were engaged in premarital sex I practiced the composite bow.
While you spent months at the gym for the sake of vanity I used the composite bow.
Not what demons are here you are unprepared. Except for me.
For I studied the composite bow.
Seanly
@clay:
Yeah, I saw a post on LGM re: Tom Petty. Looks like latest reports are that he had a massive heart attack last night, no brain activity seen, and he’s been taken off life support.
Never got to see him live but I like a lot of his music. One of my favorites.
Mnemosyne
@Amaranthine RBG:
You know that a composite bow is an actual thing, right?
Elizabelle
Yeah. Wound up his career with 3 concerts at the Hollywood Bowl; dead a week later. My friend saw one of the HB shows; put the clips up after.
I heart Tom Petty.
Guy’s house burned down years ago, he had a long marriage and then a divorce. He lived his life. Wanted to spend more time with his granddaughter.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: this still required access to and know how for a 3D printer, which most Americans won’t have any time soon. The same cannot be said for a gun shop.
ETA oddly enough if I wanted 3D printer access I would go to the same place I’d go to acquire a massive botnet
Cacti
May I humbly request a dedicated Tom Petty thread?
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
I’m free fallen, broke down and heartbroken. Really liked his music.
I wish his soul peace.
trollhattan
@Corner Stone:
If he was this “high-stakes gambler” being touted in headlines maybe he was on a losing streak and maybe he owned a crapton of money to the wrong sort of people? Who abandons their house, holes up in a presumably expensive hotel surrounded by his beloved precious? Somebody with nothing left to lose.
Patricia Kayden
@Elizabelle: I assume VA has a state government dominated by Republicans which explains why Medicaid wasn’t expanded. What a shame. Thank goodness for the northern part of the state for being deeply blue.
Repatriated
@Adam L Silverman: Indeed. The point here is that when one discusses the Founders’ intentions regarding possession of firearms, they have to be considered in the context of contemporaneous weapons technology.
Mnemosyne
@Seanly:
Now I’m wondering if he was put on life support because he was an organ donor. We’d probably need one of our commenting doctors or nurses to tell us if that might have been the case.
Elizabelle
@Seanly: Saw him at the Hollywood Bowl a few years back. ZZ Topp opened. Superb show.
Have been trying to see these “legacy” acts when possible. Can’t take anyone for granted anymore.
Prince’s loss. That still hurts. I was hoping to see him one day.
trollhattan
@Cacti:
+1.
GregB
Psst. The NRA and the gun industry is in the deepest end if the DC swamp.
Adam L Silverman
@A Ghost To Most: NATO hardball full metal jacket 5.56/.223. That’s the reason the Army is considering going up to a 7.62/.308 round.
Felony Govt (formerly Old Broad in California)
@Elizabelle: And we thought 2016 was bad.
Corner Stone
Anytime someone feels like fixing the fucking back button that would be great.
Patricia Kayden
@Corner Stone: It’s bizarre because he injured 500 plus people along with the 58 he killed. It’s not as if he needed ten guns to do what he did.
Elizabelle
@Patricia Kayden: Yes. That’s exactly what happened. Blood on the legislature’s hands.
Sab
@Adam L Silverman: Many months ago you recommended a book about the 2nd amendment by Saul Cornell. I read it. It was fascinating. Thank you.
Patricia Kayden
@Elizabelle: So sorry to hear this. Driving home just now, I’d heard that he had a heart attack. R.I.P. Tom.
Elizabelle
@Brachiator: Learning to fly.
Godspeed, Mr. Petty. You were great.
Repatriated
@Corner Stone:
Oh, and while you’re at it, could we get a back button for 2017, too?
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: It didn’t.
Elizabelle
I assume we may have a memorial thread up next.
Post that says “Fuck this Day.” My guess is that it’s by John Cole.
Patricia Kayden
@germy: A little bit of good news on such a horrid day.
sharl
@Monala: Well that brings back memories, none of them good. I remember that the sniper took out a couple of people – or at least tried – outside of Michael’s craft stores, which turned out to be one of the places where his estranged wife liked to shop.
I just remember all of us being kinda jumpy, especially every time a white van drove by, or was in a parking lot.
{Ron Howard Narrator’s Voice: The snipers never used a white van.}
joel hanes
@Adam L Silverman:
The point is that special-purpose hammers designed to break tempered glass are readily available.
If I’m right, and he used one, it points to foresight.
Amaranthine RBG
@Mnemosyne:
While you were doing drugs, I studied the composite bow.
While you were engaged in premarital sex I practiced the composite bow.
While you spent months at the gym for the sake of vanity I used the composite bow.
Not what demons are here you are unprepared. Except for me.
For I studied the composite bow.
Corner Stone
@joel hanes: He had 10 rifles in a hotel room on the Vegas strip. A full week+ ahead of any gun show where he might trade/sell them.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: I always figured what got in there was sort of the pro-army faction’s sop to the anti-army faction. “Okay, even though the federal government has the power to raise an army, here, we’ll promise we’ll never take away your citizen militia.”
The Moar You Know
@joel hanes: I use a punch press, the thing you use to start drill holes in wood. They’re like $1.99 from any hardware store. Just put the point on glass and push it until it does the “pop” thing. They break any kind of glass you care to name.
danielx
An awful beginning to the week.
RIP Tom Petty.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
My point was that you can reduce the number of mass shootings by reducing the availability of guns. Not end them completely, but greatly reduce the number.
Since you disagree with that statement, please explain why. 3D printers and YouTube tutorials are not convincing evidence that mass shootings will continue at the same level that they are now.
geg6
@A Ghost To Most:
Oh no! He’s a favorite of mine. Damn.
Elizabelle
@The Moar You Know: thank you for info re punch press. Sounds affordable and worthwhile. My car and I tend to stay out of large bodies of water, but you never know.
Steeplejack
@Brachiator:
Specialist.
Calouste
@trollhattan: The killer didn’t just “hole up”. He got a room on the corner of the hotel closest to the festival terrain. I doubt that that was incidental.
OldDave
@Ruckus:
Add to the obvious (non-fatal bullet wounds) being trampled by the crowd, tripping/falling while running, etc.
The Lodger
@Corner Stone: So he could die surrounded by his loved ones.
Amaranthine RBG
@OldDave:
It’s interesting, in the footage I have seen it looks like most of the crowd crouches or lies down once the shooting starts.
That was apparently the wrong thing to do when the shooter is up above shooting down into a crowd. I suspect there would have been fewer casualties had people exited the area. No way for the people to know that at the time, of course. Terrible.
The Lodger
@Amaranthine RBG: “Not what demons are here”?
Let me guess. While the rest of us were studying grammar, you studied the composite bow.
trollhattan
@Calouste:
Definitely not incidental at all. I’m going with “trapped by circumstances of his own making and determined to go out in a blaze of glory.” Glory, in this case, is becoming America’s most notorious gun murderer. Too bad it will be a relatively fleeting crown.
Adam L Silverman
@Sab: You’re welcome. That’s where I learned about what I call the radical localists for lack of a better term for them. As Cornell didn’t officially label them.
Adam L Silverman
@joel hanes: Okay, now I’m tracking. I couldn’t tell if you were suggesting that having one was somehow strange.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: It was a little more than that. For all that it was recognized that the militia just wasn’t going to cut it against a real Army like what the British fielded, the Founders and Framers, both Federalist and Anti-Federalist, had a real concern with standing armies. They thought they promoted or contributed to tyranny. So my understanding of the reasoning is that the militia gives you a warm(ish) start if you need to call them up while you get your Army in place.
trollhattan
Cripes, BBC reporting he had nineteen rifles in his hotel room. “He seemed normal” from the family isn’t going to cut it.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: I don’t disagree with it. But I also recognize that people can make them, including both semi-auto and automatic ones if they so chose. The information is not going away. Nor is the ability to do so.
joel hanes
@Corner Stone:
You’re right. And a big pile of ammo for them.
I wasn’t thinking very clearly, was I ?
Treat my comment as one more irrelevancy on the internet.
Adam L Silverman
@OldDave: It’s now been reported he was shooting fully automatic AR pattern rifles. One, at least, an AR 15 in .223/5.56 NATO. The other an AR 10 in .308/7.62 NATO.
chopper
@Ruckus:
dude was spraying bullets into a thick crowd. seems crazy to have that many wounded but it makes sense.
trollhattan
Don’t wish to muck up the Tom Petty thread, so here’s how the Republican Ministry of Propaganda has decided to deal with the San Juan mayor.
Somebody should smother Rivera with his mustache.
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
A well-justified concern. As I like to say, the English Civil War was closer in memory for them than the American Civil War is for us today, and they had recent experience of all the ways a standing army could be used to stifle dissent. Even the Federalists wanted to make sure the army was kept within reasonable bounds, which is why there are some specific rules that apply to the military (e.g. no appropriations longer than 2 years) and not to any other part of the government. I think a key insight into the Bill of Rights in general is to understand that the authors had a big list of ways they had recently been oppressed by the British government, and they wanted to prevent, or at least obstruct, the new government from being able to do those same things.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
I’m arguing for harm reduction. You’re arguing that there is no such thing as completely eliminating gun violence. I honestly don’t get what the problem is that you have with what I’m arguing in favor of, unless you’re against harm reduction.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
It makes me wonder how close contact the rest of the family had with him. I can imagine somebody going pretty far off the deep end but managing to conceal it from their family if they were only in occasional contact by phone. It sounds as if he didn’t use social media, which might have given friends and family a clue if he were getting wrapped up in any kind of craziness.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: Exactly. Same with how and why they structured the 3 branches of government and decided to provide semi-autonomy/sovereignty to the states. They recognized after the failures of the Articles of Confederation that they needed to centralize more power, but they wanted to diffuse that centralization as much as possible.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I’ve been reading about the Federalist Era lately (up through the War of 1812) and IIRC it was the burning of Washington DC by the British that caused the US to change their mind about having a standing army. They realized that ragtag militias weren’t cutting it against other armies.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: I’m not in disagreement with you in terms of harm reduction.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Even when they became convinced it was necessary to have a real standing army, they still wanted to keep it as small as practical and station it out on the frontier rather than close to the centers of power. The latter was more or less dictated by the former- a small army has to be kept where it’s most likely to be needed- but it was still an important way of keeping the army from getting too powerful.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: For the official policy yes. Washington and several others that served under him in the army were very cognizant of the problem well before 1812. Moreover, Washington, as president, had to deal with several localized rebellions where the local militia (as in the immediate municipalities and adjacent unincorporated areas) actually sided with the rebels or the local militia was split. Some responded to Washington’s call for the militia to support resolution of the standoff and some sided with the local rebels. So he had a lot of personal experience with just how problematic the militias were. One final note, the first Federal mandate was issued by President Washington. It required everyone in the militia to keep a specific amount of shot, wadding, and powder in specific types of ammo cases at all times.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman:
They may well have been right about that, in any event, considering the way various forms of obeisance get framed as “supporting the troops” and therefore obligatory. Maybe that has more to do with endless war and the mystique that grows around a volunteer army.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: No matter what you do or how you structure the force you’re going to have some sort of issue. The bigger issue, I think, for us today is that the type of people the Founders and Framers assumed or hoped or wanted (not sure any of these are the right word) to aspire to office, in both elected and appointed positions, would seek service would be better than what actually exist. Not that they themselves were perfect, but they assumed a civic virtuousness in people that I think was, at best, naive if not downright foolish and deluded.
A Ghost to Not
It’s all fun and games until it’s country fans getting killed
Corner Stone
@A Ghost to Not: He’ll be backtracking within 24 hours if he has not already.
A Ghost to Not
@Corner Stone:
Can you say Dixie Chicks?
SFAW
@trollhattan:
He was semi-OK when he was doing local news for Eyewitness News (Channel 7, Anne Laurie probably remembers those days, too) in NYC, but somewhere along the way, he got the idea that he actually had something not-fucking-stupid to say. He was wrong. He’s been an asshole for at least 30 years, and I think (but am not sure) he became a right-wing asshole at some point in there.
Shorter me (or efgoldman):
Fuckem
Roger Moore
@A Ghost to Not:
I think there’s a little bit more to it than that. A big part of what he’s saying is that he had believed the hogwash about a good guy with a gun being able to stop a bad guy with a gun. Seeing what happened at an actual mass shooting showed him how nonsensical that idea was. I will classify this in the “better late than never” category.
Elizabelle
This has been a really interesting thread, folks. Thanks much. Sad, but all the historical stuff.
And, CBS and others have pulled back their death reports on Tom Petty. He is off life support, but still survives, at least until further confirmation. Godspeed.
sharl
@Roger Moore: Then as now, fears based on national security concerns – legitimate or not – can help national leaders achieve all kinds of military permissions and largess that were previously not made available. The “Indian Wars” in what was then known as the northwestern frontier (including what is now western Ohio and Indiana) helped George Washington get Congressional agreement to fund a standing national army.
I haven’t read it, but the historian William Hogeland wrote about this in Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West. I did hear a fascinating interview with Hogeland on a podcast that is behind a subscription paywall, but the 23-minute free preview excerpted from that episode is pretty good IMO; note that there are a few vividly grim passages discussed and/or read in that interview.
A Ghost to Not
@Roger Moore:
I’m not convinced. Also, as corner stone suggests, let’s see what happens when the (expected) wingnut blowback hits him.
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
I believe the concept is that we had been under the king without any input and we had to invoke an armed revolution to fix that. If the new government took away the arms then we’d have no way of defending ourselves. That’s the gist of the private citizens to have guns as I understand it. Of course that leaves off a rather important part of the amendment, that silly thing about a militia.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
Even with that and with the close crowd and his angle, he had to put a lot of rounds out of those 2 rifles. Even with 50 round mags that had to be a lot of changing. I understand how fast that can be but still 573 injuries in such a short time meant a lot of rounds.
Not to try to analyze him specifically but it seems he might have been a bit off.
d58826
Just watching the press conference about the shooting from Boston, oh wait it was Orlando. Sorry Los Vegas. They have become mind numbing cookie cutter the same. Everybody has to get their say. The Sheriff, the fire chief, the mayor, the Congress critters, the candle stick maker. I tuned in late so I must have missed the dog catcher.
The script is the same
1. thoughts and prayers
2. brave law enforcement and first responders
3. community in shock
4. community is strong
5. all of the donations
6. to soon to talk about gun control
7. and just biding our time till the next one.
I don’t mean to make light of what happened but the script just plays out the same way every time.
Ruckus
@jacy:
Never underestimate what a human is capable of. Many over the ages has done things that “normal” people would most likely never think to do on their own and yet they still do them. So I’d ask questions.
1. What does a mass murderer look like? Talk like?
2. What were they like as kids? Did they blow stuff up, burn stuff, pull the wings off flies, that sort of thing?
3. How do we know that something just clicked with this guy one day and he decided to do, something, something big?
4. How do you stop or slow down the number of shootings and shear numbers of victims? Unless everyone is tested 12 ways from Sunday (and even then, still we have no way of knowing) how do we stop this? Remove the tools. Figure out how to get that one done and win the grand prize.
Elizabelle
@d58826: I did not watch any of it. It’s kabuki, to distract from mass murder.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Having been a trained suicide counselor I can tell you that for the most part, you are correct. However someone so inclined will get the job done, one way or another. Our hope was to buy time, which often removed/resolved enough of the issue to end the desire. Like a lot of thing that humans do sometimes they don’t say anything to anyone and there really isn’t any way to fix or stop an activity, other than making it more difficult. Making it more difficult to jump from a bridge, removing the guns or at least making it far more difficult to do the level of killing this guy did. We have the technology, the desire is strong with some to do something, but the yelling and rendering of garments seems to limit what is possible.
barb 2
@rikyrah:
thanks for posting about the Jones Act. I grew up in Hawaii and as school kids, we knew about this unjust law and how it was ripping off the citizens of Hawaii. I would have thought this damned robber Barron law would have been killed decades ago. But no — make Hawaii and PR victims again with another disaster. But I guess we need to make the rich guys richer because don’t you know that god is smiling on the rich folk (Prosperity doctrine 101 — new wave christian church.)
Ruckus
@jacy:
Trying to make sense of the clutter in anyone else’s head can cause you to literally explode. Sometimes I’m amazed that we get along and live as well as we do.
At #402 I stated that I was a suicide counselor a long time ago, we also were a public mental health clinic. One day a fellow walked in said very calmly that he needed to talk. Had an hour available so we went back to a counseling room. The first 2 minutes were OK, small talk and getting a little feel for the situation. Now you always end at 55 min so that you can see the next client. Those next 53 minutes were about the most scary I’ve ever had. I had no idea what was going on in this guys head, not then, not today. Turned out he was under professional care and deemed stable enough to be in the wild. His medication may have not been totally effective that day. I’ve seen a guy in a ward in a military hospital who was on heavy dosage of Thorazine, who had not that long before been shooting up a hillside in the Philippines with an M-16 because he thought everyone was out to get him, come out of his stupor and talk completely incoherently about 3 or 4 subjects at the same time. Another 40 yrs goes by and I see that there are more people than one might realize that are not all right in the head and we’ve done everything possible to make it more difficult to get them help.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
Report I’m reading, from Clark county sheriff, he had 17 guns. That’s a bit different than 2. Of course you might have meant 2 full auto. Either way that’s a lot of ammo expended by one person. Even if a lot of the injured are from just trying to get away.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: Only 2 full auto according to the reports.
Ithink
@Kay:
This is what I was thinking & saying but I can’t imagine most people have the means to escape out even if the desire is there!