Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

i'm not sure it's really tenable to prevent the media from talking about these guys (and they are always guys), especially nowadays... if the major networks don't report it, sadly buzzhole and gawkfeeder and etc. will.

but i'm not under any illusions that the conversation about the killers themselves is productive of anything.

btw was that 4 chan thing determined to be not linked to the Oregon shooting?

Yes. It was people trolling, pretending to be other channers

http://gawker.com/how-4chan-trolled-two-of-its-friends-by-framing-them-fo-1734265649

Pareene makes some decent arguments here:

http://gawker.com/the-gun-control-movement-needs-its-own-pro-life-fanatic-1734711064

I tend to disagree on the principle that adopting tactics you would normally find abhorrent is not a sign of a winning hand

This Mother Jones article details some of the things we have learned from mass shootings:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/mass-shootings-threat-assessment-fbi-columbine

Incl. amazing stuff about the Cult of Columbine.

Elsewhere, MJ gives pointers to the media about handling these shootings. I still don't buy the need for censorship. There doesn't seem to be any good science behind it. What if broadcasts of funerals and memorials trigger outrage in potential shooters. I don't think we know what will provoke the next shooter. You may as well pull video games off the shelves or shut down 4chan and Reddit.

The only obvious thing is that the role of guns in the culture certainly plays a role in all of this.

Anyway, I tend to feel triggered by all of the coverage and get depressed, but I find that criminal profiling helps me cope w. violence.

It's one thing to censor it completely, it's another to just report it as an unsensationalized crime story.

Pareene makes some decent arguments here:

http://gawker.com/the-gun-control-movement-needs-its-own-pro-life-fanatic-1734711064

I tend to disagree on the principle that adopting tactics you would normally find abhorrent is not a sign of a winning hand

― BRAAAAAAMETHEUS (El Tomboto), Tuesday, October 6, 2015 3:15 PM (49 minutes ago)

the pro-life methods are abhorrent mainly because of the ideas they advocate, not the methods themselves

I still don't buy the need for censorship. There doesn't seem to be any good science behind it.

I wonder what science would say if TV News was all positive stories and Crime and Cop shows only talked about financial crimes?

It is obvious that seeing murder constantly every day desensitizes people to it.

Hence the tone of the title of this thread.

They are showing murders on daytime tv, during the commercials for Ellen.

You may as well pull video games off the shelves or shut down 4chan and Reddit.

Videogames, 4chan, and Reddit aren't legit mainstream news media. False equivalency.

Here is your censorship. Hiding the violence.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/06/doctors-without-borders-airstrike-afghanistan-us-account-changes-again

well some the methods are pretty abhorrent too - shouting at women walking up to the front door of an abortion clinic, for instance. but there isn't a comparable figure in the gun control debate to the young, emotionally vulnerable woman seeking an abortion. the people that need shaming are just fuckos who want handguns.

yeah. When you start spending most of your time appealing to disgust and fear, that's essentially an admission that your position isn't actually rational, just based on disgust and fear.

well some the methods are pretty abhorrent too - shouting at women walking up to the front door of an abortion clinic, for instance. but there isn't a comparable figure in the gun control debate to the young, emotionally vulnerable woman seeking an abortion. the people that need shaming are just fuckos who want handguns.

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, October 6, 2015 4:53 PM (31 minutes ago

hence my point...

none of us is going to bat an eye if some gun nuts are heckled. it's the fact that it's done to women who are seeking health care that is abhorrent to us

shaming people in public is good theater but profoundly poor as a technique for anything other than proving you're a bully. If shaming people in public was good for anything then civil rights for any minority you care to name would fail every time all the time

I do think Pareene's on to something, identifying a strain of maudlin martyrdom in american populist politics, and I understand the desire to recruit it for good. But the instances I can think of where the left has gone this route - candle-light vigils for the victims of nuclear weapons, placards graphically showing the effects of napalm during Vietnam, it's just incredibly off-putting to me, like I'm being hectored, and I AGREE with them!

pretty sure pareene saw that 'gun purchasers should go through what women in red states have to go through to get an abortion' meme and took it to thinkpiece level

but maybe I'm not the audience! maybe this sort of obnoxious guilt-tripping would work on enough of the kind of people who respond to that sort of thing that it would be a good idea!

xpost

the audience for those tactics isn't really the general public, it's elected officials who don't want controversy and are afraid of well-funded and rabid lobbyists and their supporters

and throwing in some bits about winning in the SC and winning in the state legislatures and moving the window of debate for good measure. So basically we need to pull out all the stops AND reduce ourselves to the level of planned parenthood's most incoherent foes. See what sticks!

politics is a bloodsport, you play to win

if you scare the other side they start to compromise

and there is something to be said about moving the framing of the debate, moving the goalposts so that it's not gun rights vs. gun control, it's gun control vs. no guns.

It's so tiring always trying to tailor your views to what the current CW is, it would be amazing to just be like yep, you're convinced we want to take your guns away. You know what? You're absolutely right, we DO want to take your guns away. Every last Ruger and Glock. If you have a hunting license you can keep a rifle and a shotgun and that's it. And hunting licenses will be at least as hard to get as a driver's license. CAN YOU LIVE WITH THAT, WILL THAT BE ENOUGH GUNS FOR YOU

It is obvious that seeing murder constantly every day desensitizes people to it.

http://www.signspecialist.com/decals/beevault/images/Entertainment%20And%20Circus%20033-0151.gif

Honestly it's like cigarettes, people just couldn't conceive that their liberty to light up several cigarettes in a busy restaurant could ever be taken away. And then it was. And it was like, actually I didn't need to do that anyway

Oh there are still people whining loudly about that too.

I was trying to make the point that the strategy/s outlined in the piece isn't/aren't really a strategy, more a rant. As is warranted, of course.

Actually would prefer what (ugh) McAuliffe and the Democratic Governors Association are planning to try and do re: ensuring redistricting in 2020 swings in Dems' favor - that's one pillar, addressing local level bullshit;

coupled with a dedicated press to move the window, addressing the minimizing of control topics by the NRA that even Fred fucking Hiatt's editorial page was able to point out this week;

and I guess my third stool leg would be national elections to ensure the federal courts and the SC are populated by judges who believe the federal government has some fucking business regulating this shit, and that stuff like that Colorado law where anybody who sues a gun company automatically owes the gun company a shitload of money is blatantly unconstitutional, if it even rises to that level (instead of just being fucking nonsense, or whatever the JD jargon is).

what strikes me about these cases is that the victims are basically strangers to the perpetrator. what kind of mindset causes someone to believe the average person is their enemy? the fact that our culture produces individuals who feel victimized by "the public" to the extent that they lash out against them in this nihilistic manner is the thing that bothers me the most (after our gun laws). what's weirder is that the people who lash out aren't really among the most victimized members of our society, but they still feel like outcasts.

is there anything we could do to prevent people from feeling like this? it seems like a sick consequence of individualism... the "messaging" that leads ppl to do this seems more involved than just "the media glorifies shooters," which isn't true anyway

the shooters are the most selfish people in the world so of course they are outliers. but they always remind me that living for oneself alone is not sustainable. people need to feel some sort of responsibility to the social. anything else leads to monomania/misery/insanity

i think one thing most of these guys have in common is an extended adolescence, or at the very least a poor transition to adulthood. take away the guns and the nurturing of violent power fantasies and a lot of them (not all) would grow out of it given enough time. that's why the gun issue is so central to these cases, because you've got to put more barriers between them and the enactment of the fantasy.

That's what makes that case in the Mother Jones story all the more tragic - they were putting a great amount of manpower and social effort to put this guy on the right path, and as soon as he was away from it, he still committed a shooting.

http://theweek.com/speedreads/581824/people-publishes-all-535-congressional-phone-numbers-asks-readers-push-antigun-agenda

interesting move. although that headline is misleading, the People post clearly doesn't advocate for anything specific

That's awesome. People!!

the problem is that it's so inconvenient to call your representative when you're in the dentist's waiting room thumbing through People

its also possible kids with emotional issues detach from their peers, stick around home with mom, read 4chan all day and lose all empathy for other people.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/hillary-clinton-foundation-state-arms-deals

Could be the leaders we look up to are setting a shitty example.

its also possible kids with emotional issues detach from their peers, stick around home with mom, read 4chan all day and lose all empathy for other people.

― panettone for the painfully alone (mayor jingleberries), Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:26 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Before the internet, was it harder to seal oneself off from real human contact? Honest question. What would these ppl have done with their time before the internet? Television gets boring after a while.

People are still going around senselessly murdering kittens, so I don't think people have ever had trouble pursuing psychotic fantasies to fill up their time.

people became weird shut-ins and fully immersed in some complex fantasy life well before the internet but i imagine it was much harder to find a whole ideological justification for your self-exclusion from society. there's a whole fantasized structure of resentment that's already there for them to buy into.

i mean, i was a weird shut-in throughout my early 20s but i just read books and felt sorry for myself, there were no violent urges. i dont think there's even anything unusual about people (usually men) going through that kind of stage, especially if they are introverted, but its the turn to explosive violence that's strange to me and maybe best explained by a combination of a poisonous ideology and some baseline impulsiveness or sociopathy.

you're convinced we want to take your guns away. You know what? You're absolutely right, we DO want to take your guns away.

Small problem. The same people who are convinced that liberals want to confiscate all guns also fervently believe this is a threat to their very existence, so those who are willing to publically come out in favor of repeal of the second amendment and confiscation of guns should be prepared to become the targets of people who are very bit as violent as the Ku Klux Klan. That's a steep hill to climb.

Well it seems the argument finally needs to be had, rather than ducked.

ben carson does not duck, he charges

These people are children

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/us/oregon-roseburg-shooting-umpqua-community-college.html

this is a sickness