Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

Before the attack, Mr. Farook, 28, who was born in Illinois and whose parents are from Pakistan, joined colleagues at an annual holiday party for the San Bernardino County Public Health Department, where he worked for five years as an environmental inspector, officials said. He had attended the same party the year before, and he did not appear out of place.

Soon, however, he stormed out in anger. The nature of the dispute was not clear, but when he returned with his wife, 27, both of them were dressed in tactical gear and carrying assault rifles, officials said. That level of preparation is among the factors investigators are weighing as they examine a motive for the attack.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/us/san-bernardino-shooting-syed-rizwan-farook.html

It's a weird one, this one.

gun was legally purchased

― akm, Thursday, December 3, 2015 5:38 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

California has the strictest gun control laws in the country. And they're still not nearly strict enough.

so a guy shot 4 people in Savannah yesterday

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/the-other-mass-shooting-that-happened-today-in-the-united-states/

hmm:

Ted Alcorn, the research director for Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit organization that advocates gun control, said the shootings with multiple victims were a tiny subset of everyday gun violence in America. “You have 14 people dead in California, and that’s a horrible tragedy,” he said. “But likely 88 other people died today from gun violence in the United States.”

In studying shootings that left four or more dead from 2009 to mid-2015, his organization found certain patterns. In only 11 percent of cases did medical, school or legal authorities note signs of mental illness in the gunmen before the attack, the organization said. Domestic violence figured strongly: In 57 percent of the cases, the victims included a current or former intimate partner or family member of the attacker. Half of all victims were women.

More than two-thirds of the shootings took place in private residences; about 28 percent occurred in public spaces, the study found.

More than 60 percent of the attackers were not prohibited from possessing guns because of prior felonies or other reasons. But the organization still found there was less likelihood of mass killings in states that require background checks for all handgun sales than in states that do not — and even less chance of shootings by people who were prohibited by law from possessing firearms.

In a recent report, the Congressional Research Service found a slight uptick in recent years in shootings in which four or more victims died. The report found an average of 22.4 mass shootings a year from 2009 to 2013, compared with 20.2 shootings a year during the previous five years.

But James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said his research showed the number of such shootings has roughly held steady in recent decades.

He said that if analysts added a single year, 2014, and looked at four-year intervals instead of five-year intervals, the average number of annual mass shootings actually declined slightly from 2011 to 2014, compared with the previous four-year period.

“It’s a matter of how you slice it,” said Professor Fox, who nonetheless praised the research service’s report.

Reisinger said she heard that the office recently threw a baby shower for Farook and that he had taken paternity leave.

I find this detail additionally heartbreaking

The nature of the dispute was not clear

Kinda the piece of the jigsaw that's needed, and shouldn't be difficult to obtain from his colleagues?

https://nomadtravels.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/shootfirst.jpg

I'll go out on a limb and assume that there's no explanation for this that a sane and rational mind will be able to grasp.

Scalia's interpretation of the Constitution's 2nd Amendment allows anyone to buy 223-caliber assault-style rifles, semiautomatic handguns and explosive devices

Terrible

xpost to Alfred's NYTimes link: This reminds me of the experience I had earlier this year, when I was reading Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, a sort of low-mimetic long poem of everyday violence in late-19th/early-20th century America, culled from thousands of pages of legal documents. So many arguments over card games or perceived insults that AT MOST should have resulted in a scuffle, instead escalating into gun slayings... not just in the "wild west" but everywhere you look. I don't know what it is about this country -- I'm sure some people are still charmed by the old myths that prop up this kind of 'honor culture', but I (thankfully) feel more distant from it with each passing year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/the-simple-reason-why-the-shootings-wont-stop/?tid=sm_fb

So many arguments over card games or perceived insults that AT MOST should have resulted in a scuffle, instead escalating into gun slayings...I don't know what it is about this country

one factor that escalates a scuffle into a gun slaying is the presence of guns

I don't remember where I saw it, but I read that an average of two guns per second were being sold on black friday.

I was thinking seriously about moving to Canada about five years back. I'm starting to think seriously about it again.

xp ehhhh I'll believe that when you can show me a peer-reviewed scientific study on the subject ;)

do they want you? xp

sure. bonus points if he's Syrian or willing to live in Nunavut.

xpost to Alfred's NYTimes link: This reminds me of the experience I had earlier this year, when I was reading Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, a sort of low-mimetic long poem of everyday violence in late-19th/early-20th century America, culled from thousands of pages of legal documents. So many arguments over card games or perceived insults that AT MOST should have resulted in a scuffle, instead escalating into gun slayings... not just in the "wild west" but everywhere you look. I don't know what it is about this country -- I'm sure some people are still charmed by the old myths that prop up this kind of 'honor culture', but I (thankfully) feel more distant from it with each passing year.

― bernard snowy, Thursday, December 3, 2015 3:48 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this sounds like a great thing. Reznikoff is a mensch of the highest order

Don't know why this is diagnosed as particularly American. Honor culture was imported here from Europe and persists anywhere that people feel powerless. Everyone with a gun in s the American innovation to this.

+ historical ignorance and persistence of romantic myths about that past = for some reason this is a good thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfuK_KJTRyg

romantic myths about the past are hardly just an American thing

LOL too right

maybe "It's an American thing!" is an American thing

that isn't to say that Europe hasn't moved further away from this kind of stuff, but I guess you become most sophisticated after you kill half the planet

yeah i think the US never having to deal w a land war for more than a hundred years has something to do w it. Europe has been through some hell.

Not all of it.

btw xp to imago: Testimony *is* a really really great book, & you could probably teach excerpts of it to sharp teenagers... in moments of loftier sentiment I have been known to describe it as 'an American decameron' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's the opening page of part 3 (the parts are arranged chronologically, with further subdivision into North/South/West and then by 'themes') (TRIGGER WARNING: pretty much anything you can think of)

PART THREE: TESTIMONY
THE UNITED STATES (1891-1900)
RECITATIVE

* * *

THE WEST

I
SOCIAL LIFE

1
Before daybreak, Clay, a professional gambler,
went to a colored prostitute's tent
in the outskirts of town. About fifteen minutes after he got there,
sitting on the bed and taking off his shoes,
Ross, who "kept" her and whose mistress she was,
knocked on the screen door.
She called out that she had company
but Ross was drunk:
he jerked the screen door open
(it was only fastened by a hook over a nail),
kicked open the wooden door, closed but unlocked,
and came in.

The light in the tent was dim
but the two men knew each other:
Ross was also a gambler by profession
and had once gone to Clay's gaming-table
and punched a pistol in Clay's money
throwing it around.

Clay jumped up from the bed where he was sitting
and, pistol in hand,
asked Ross why he "broke in" on him.
Ross answered he didn't break in:
the door was "already open."
He had one hand at his mouth, holding a cigarette,
and asked Clay for a match.
Clay said he had no match,
but Cora got up from bed to get one
and Ross lit his cigarette.
[ . . . ]

(btw if anybody wants to come at me, I am prepared to argue for the social usefulness of my work repeating sordid details about our country's past on social media, as a way to bring the problems of the present-day into sharper relief)

re. yesterday's murders in San Bernardino: I'm still not clear on what happened, but is the claim that a husband and wife with a baby were the killers? if so...I'm sure it's not the first time a husband and wife with a child have murdered someone (besides each other / one of their children), but what are other examples of this?

not married iirc but obv bonnie + clyde are the classic example of romantic murderers

Fred and Rosemary West spring to mind, tho the circumstances are totally different.

Fred and Rose west had a lot of kids

Xp

there's always the clintons amirite

People with a 6 month old will do anything to get out of the house

Fred and Rose west had a lot of kids

One of which they killed.

holy shit @ Fred and Rose, I had no idea :(

xps to people talking about Europe: surely firearms were never as widespread/'democratic' over there though, right? maybe for hunting & pest control, but I have to imagine yr c.1900 black forest peasant didn't look to a rifle as a means of "taking the law into his own hands" (because he has greater trust in the institutions of justice? or because they're just more well-established?? honest questions, I am no expert)

while the centuries of 'westward expansion' (aka paramilitary settler activity) & inequal treatment of different races under the law seem to have rooted the notion of "self-defense" very deeply in the American mental soil

Yeah I guess the European immigrants to America in the 19th century were pretty sedate

Idk I'm just suspicious of all these "there is something rotten in the soul of America" arguments when we're going really talking about a gun addiction problem enabled by a powerful lobby and a shitty campaign finance system

Yeah, Great Britain* had it's Sandy Hook moment back in 1997 and just effectively banned private handgun ownership.

*Not the UK, as there are very high ownership rates in Northern Ireland.

Which state might be the first to ban guns?

CA, NJ, NY or MA i'd assume if it was going to happen anywhere. they're already the states w/ the strictest laws in the country

y'all I know this might not be the time or the place but I have so many feelings, and so many FACTS, and I just can't seem to stop myself today

so what I was trying to get at with the historical, frontier-justice stuff was, there is this basic trajectory that goes:
1. Take your guns to the frontier and kill indians until it's safe enough for your wife & kids to join you there
2. Hang onto your guns for a while, because all of the neighbors are similarly armed shady men from dubious pasts, & the laws are not well-enforced
3. Gradually relax your gun-hand as 'civilization' begins to take hold

at stage 2 of this process, the argument that you put yourself at risk if you're one of the the first citizens to stop carrying his gun everywhere does have a certain game-theoretical logic to it; thing is, we are SO FAR past that point, the only way not to see it is to be willfully ignorant of statistical realities (the ones that say stuff like, "If you keep a loaded gun in your house, it is vastly more probable that you will end up shooting a cousin of yours who got too drunk at a party in the neighborhood but then remembered your house was nearby, or that one of your kids will take it to school, than it is that you will ever use it to stop a crime")

just very tired of the argument that goes:
"But I love to hunt! At least let me keep my guns for that?" --> "Okay, but keep them unloaded & trigger-locked." --> "WHAT?! Then how am I supposed to protect my family?!" --> "You don't get to do that anymore. Guns are demonstrably not effective when used in that way, while the risks associated with their misuse are substantial enough to create a societal interest in regulating your guns." --> "WTF 2ND AMENDMENT!!!11!"

Maybe one of the "regulations" of our "well-regulated militia" could be: you can have a gun, but you don't get to sleep with it next to your bed.

"But I love to hunt! At least let me keep my guns for that?" --> "Okay, but keep them unloaded & trigger-locked." --> "WHAT?! Then how am I supposed to protect my family?!" -->

Every male member of my family (and some of the girls) hunts, and tbh I've never heard them complain about trigger locks and unloading their weapons; they think they're sensible, stemming from the suspicion that there is no such thing as an unloaded gun.

... but obviously all of this is moot speculation, because it's going to turn out that the San Bernardino shooter with the Arab name was a 100% red-blooded American gun-nut who had been stockpiling ammunition for the end times, and the response will be to blame to FBI for not using racial profiling to catch him sooner **sigh**

xp: yeah at this point my diatribe is less about beliefs of individuals, more about the pundits & organizations who draw ad libitum from those beliefs to defend the status quo, but are under no obligation to actually believe them in any kind of internally-consistent way

No matter what the ultimate finding is about the cause of this massacre there will be people in the right wing media claiming that ISIS was behind it and we all need our guns and why won't Hillary say radical Islam...

you know when people say, "We live in interesting times"
America 2015 feels like the exact opposite of that
"We live in predictably horseshit times"

the problem is more the batshit insane NRA membership and the politicians in their pockets than the gun owners, although fuck them too.