Mass shootings poll -- your personal experiences with them

On a direct personal level, I remain blessedly unaffected by mass shootings. Although there was a shooting in my junior high once which prompted an evacuation but thankfully resulted in no injuries or loss of life. This was in Florida, shockingly.

I had friends who were going to Dawson College in Mtl when they had theirs 8-9 years back.

my brother was in Vegas last year across the street from that one. he was seeing a show and they locked the place down until early morning.

non-Americans shouldn't vote in this tbh

Whoops.

One of my former students was killed in the Virginia Tech shootings.

I am not American but have an (American) friend who was at Virginia Tech.

My wife's coworker's kids were at Columbine when it happened.

As noted previously on ILX my wife and kid and I were less than half a block from a gun massacre at a business either right as or immediately after it occurred.

When my Mom & Dad were first married, they had an apartment in Austin TX, in a building that received gunfire from Charles Whitman. My Mom was home at the time, and iirc she hid in the bathtub. Some of their neighbors had shattered windows, but no fatalities.

I had a good friend in college whose father was killed in this one

one of my oldest friends is really tight w/Jesse (eodm)

Never close. I can't even fathom what it would feel like.

My friend at work was on a road trip with friends in the Southwest a few years ago when she got shot by that spree killer who was driving around several states shooting at other cars. Bullet fortunately went in through her cheek, through her mouth and out her other cheek, exit wound was not massive and she “only” had to deal with (considerable) dental damage. Which took a couple of years to fully finish reconstructing. Her strength through all that still blows me away.

Friends of friends were killed in the cafe racer incident in Seattle

The closest I ever got to any real gun violence was someone shooting a round into the ceiling above my head during a bookie robbery. The bang the gun made was fucking terrifying, the mushroom hole in the thick wooden joist even scarier, so not like in Duke Nukem. The shooter topped himself the next day after getting surrounded by armed response units. Guns don't belong in any modern civilisation.

Friends of friends killed at Utøya, but I'm not going to vote.

i 'telecommute' to one of my higher ed jobs so i have not been on campus for the most recent 'armed distressed/weirdo' incidents on my campus, none of which became serious, but higher ed being what it is it seems it's only a matter of time before there's a shooting on one or the other campus. i expect the large public institutions are more ripe for it than the private ones, but then again, one woman locally was recently arrested for apparently terrorism-related arson on her private u. campus, so.

There was a different kind of violent tragedy on my campus when I was an undergrad. I knew the victim — not very well — but I knew close friends of both the victim and the perpetrator well. What I learned from this is that access to mental health care — while wonderful — won’t stop these kinds of events, and also that I don’t think “mental illness” is a very good causal explanation for why people do these things, even if it is in many cases a contributing factor.

There's also this old post, but I voted "know people personally affected"

I mean where I live we have an active shooter in some major workplace or another basically every year, never you mind the random pop-offs between gangs like the one right outside the first home I ever bought the month we moved in

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, October 4, 2017 (four months ago)

I don’t think “mental illness” is a very good causal explanation for why people do these things, even if it is in many cases a contributing factor.

ok, so is it just that "social animal" includes the word animal?

Also male jealousy, possessiveness and entitlement are serious red flags and no one should have any tolerance for even a hint of it. A lot of these killers — the mass killers and orher kinds — seem to be like, wounded ego types, and definitely in a particularly male way. I wonder if we could do more as a culture to discourage self-centeredness because that’s part of the root of it.

I just think it’s too simple. Certain people might be made vulnerable to being overtaken by horrible impulses because of mental illness, but like the way illness and other factors intersects in each of these cases is unique. Yet the general pattern of how these people think does not seem to me to be so unique. If that makes sense.

More mental health care for everyone, definitely, but I think this violence is caused primarily by 1.) guns and 2.) pathological attitudes, which is different from just like a neurochemical imbalance

Xp tom

Didn't vote as it wasn't the US but i have vivid memories of zig-zag sprinting away from the central courthouse in Milan, in business suit and sensible shoes, after a guy who had managed to smuggle a gun into his bankruptcy hearing started shooting people - leaving four dead iirc. I didn't really know what was going on at the time but the crowd of people being evacuated going from 'this is weird / inconvenient' to 'RUN!' in a fraction of a second when they heard more shots was surreal.

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In HS I went to a summer program at the school where this happened and met/befriended several people who were there at the time.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/12/16/student-held-in-shooting-rampage-at-massachusetts-school-for-gifted/f36452ea-3a1f-4201-9c0e-6acf750d3747/?utm_term=.002aa31964bf

A few years ago when I was working at a hospital the son of a former patient came in and shot/killed one of the Dr's in my department. I had to hide in a office with three colleagues for 45 mins while they said there was an active shooter in the hospital and we had no idea what was going on. It was very scary but that wasn't a mass shooting since he only shot one person?

I don't know how to answer.

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