Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

^church shooting in Texas

another source saying 24 dead (plus shooter)

Seems like these mass shootings keep escalating.

how long can this continue

jeez

Well I can’t imagine it helps that the nation has anointed a sociopath as its supreme leader.

BBC radio just reported 27 casualties.

the New fucking Normal

After Newtown, the NRA has become unbeatable. This country.

It's not new

Xp

i'd have to see the data but pretty sure regular attacks with double-digit numbers of ppl dead is pretty new

5 of the 10 deadliest have occurred in the past 5 years (Sandy Hook in Dec 2012 being the least recent, the rest being Vegas/Orlando/San Antonio/San Bernardino.)

used to be extremely unusual historically speaking, then it used to happen every decade, then every year, now it seems to occur every month.

hold up, were there just two mass church shootings? One in Texas and one in Tennessee?

one disturbing thing to me is that they're occurring so frequently that you end up subconsciously developing a system to filter your attention to it. e.g., if the number of deaths is particularly high, or if it targeted a location or community that you can imagine yourself in (church, school, a concert, a dance club, etc), or if the backstory behind the shooter(s) is unusually compelling. it's just so fucked up to have a model for how to deal with a mass shooting, and you can't help it because it happens so frequently and there's not enough time to devote full attention and energy to thinking about all of them, every time.

oh I see, that other one was a few weeks ago.

One witness, Carrie Matula, told NBC News: "We heard semi-automatic gunfire… we're only about 50 yards away from this church."

maybe i live a sheltered life but something that always bugs me in reports like this is how it's apparently normal to know what semi-automatic gunfire sounds like.

We go camping in Wisconsin, and we like to go to this living history farm called Old World Wisconsin. Not far off - it's hard to tell where - is a shooting range, so when you're wandering around these old barns and learning how they made horseshoes and jars and bricks and stuff you just hear this constant "crack! crack crack crack! crack!" Same thing when we went horseback riding in the area. Sort of ruins the mood.

Bruce Willis fans xp

To be honest, as horrifying as it seems it's gotten to the point where people in this country should probably familiarize themselves with the sounds of guns, semi-auto or not. We are on a local Facebook group, and every weekend there is inevitably a thread where someone asks "is that fireworks or are those gun shots?" I want to say witnesses in Las Vegas thought the gunfire was fireworks at first, too.

Greg Abbott called the shooting an “evil act”

President Trump said...that he is “monitoring the situation from Japan.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement: “The thoughts and prayers of all Texans are with the people of Sutherland Springs..."

“I never thought it would happen here,” she said.

and just when it was finally the appropriate time to start politicizing the Vegas shooting

yeah didn't even time to process what happened in NYC then this happened.

It feels like we need a German word for the weird kind of dread that accompanies the wait for an explanation in these things. Who the shooter is, why they did it, etc.

Here's the church's YouTube page, if you'd like to see them before they became a national phrase like "Sandy Hook".

To be honest, as horrifying as it seems it's gotten to the point where people in this country should probably familiarize themselves with the sounds of guns, semi-auto or not. We are on a local Facebook group, and every weekend there is inevitably a thread where someone asks "is that fireworks or are those gun shots?" I want to say witnesses in Las Vegas thought the gunfire was fireworks at first, too.

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, November 5, 2017 9:36 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Commend you for finding a silver lining in all this (if I understand you correctly?) but it should not be normal for people to familiarize themselves with (the sound or sight of) guns.

Here's the church's YouTube page, if you'd like to see them before they became a national phrase like "Sandy Hook".

― pplains, Sunday, November 5, 2017 10:00 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I should not have watched this. Looks like there are only 50 people at those services, tops, so... Fuck.

The town itself is fewer than 400.

shooter ID'ed

https://www.mediaite.com/online/texas-church-shooter-identified/

Chekohov's NRA

https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/23172564_1569369099809766_9200286685181902630_n.jpg?oh=00f46d8cfd5aee6ef0b84635f7c6281d&oe=5A6ECAFE

wow

note the date. that cartoon gets to be evergreen now, as they say.

If you feel like things are getting worse, you aren't imagining it. Things are getting worse. pic.twitter.com/nHpFoJtzxG

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) November 6, 2017

Jailed by the Air Force for assaulting his wife and child and then dishonorably discharged.

one disturbing thing to me is that they're occurring so frequently that you end up subconsciously developing a system to filter your attention to it. e.g., if the number of deaths is particularly high, or if it targeted a location or community that you can imagine yourself in (church, school, a concert, a dance club, etc), or if the backstory behind the shooter(s) is unusually compelling. it's just so fucked up to have a model for how to deal with a mass shooting, and you can't help it because it happens so frequently and there's not enough time to devote full attention and energy to thinking about all of them, every time.

― Karl Malone, Sunday, November 5, 2017 4:10 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Exactly, this one happened while I was working & busy but I saw the alert on my phone & death toll. Less than Vegas, not a new scenario or twist- so it went to the back of my mind. Haven't even read about it yet, as if I need to subject myself to that. The answer has been obvious for years now and nothing ever changes.

To be honest, as horrifying as it seems it's gotten to the point where people in this country should probably familiarize themselves with the sounds of guns, semi-auto or not. We are on a local Facebook group, and every weekend there is inevitably a thread where someone asks "is that fireworks or are those gun shots?" I want to say witnesses in Las Vegas thought the gunfire was fireworks at first, too.

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, November 5, 2017 9:36 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Commend you for finding a silver lining in all this (if I understand you correctly?) but it should not be normal for people to familiarize themselves with (the sound or sight of) guns.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Sunday, November 5, 2017 5:36 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as sad as Josh's advice is, it's necessary at this moment in time in the USA. I think about it a lot more when I'm out and have over the last year and a half. things have obviously escalated since 2012, even 2015. it's becoming a fact of life and people are so desensitized to it happening on a weekly basis. Again there are obvious steps the government can take to immediately mitigate the frequency of mass shootings but their cause is so much deeper more multi-faceted than the abundance of guns. but hey let's START WITH THAT

my grim sense is that a lot of these guys are trying to top each other, cf the obsession a lot of these guys seem to have w/previous shooters. i remember, perhaps incorrectly, that the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre in Australia (the one that set into motion their current gun regulations) continually asked authorities when he was visited how many people he killed. i might be misremembering this part, but my understanding is that no one tells him and he still asks.

> regular attacks with double-digit numbers of ppl dead is pretty new

Deaths in parentheses not including perpetrators (attacks with assault rifles in bold)

1949 Camden, NJ (13)
1966 U Texas tower (17)
1984 San Ysidro McDonald's (21)
1986 Edmond post office (14)
1991 Kileen Luby's (23)
2007 Virginia Tech (32)
2009 Binghamton immigration center (13)
2012 Aurora theater (12), Sandy Hook elementary (27)
2013 Washington Navy Yard (11)
2015 Umpqua Community College (10), San Bernardino (14)
2016 Orlando (49)
2017 Las Vegas (58), Sutherland Springs (26)

regular attacks with double-digit numbers of ppl dead

I think the key word there is regular.

Wiki says of Martin Bryant: "Bryant's motivation for the massacre remains a closely guarded secret,[26][27] known only to his lawyer, who is bound not to reveal confidences without his client's consent. The lawyer later released a book outlining that Bryant was motivated largely by the media reports of the then-recent Dunblane school massacre. From the moment he was captured, he continually wanted to know how many people he had killed and seemed impressed by the number. "

my grim sense is that a lot of these guys are trying to top each other, cf the obsession a lot of these guys seem to have w/previous shooters.

this is otm and obvious, i mean if you're gonna do it you're probably gonna wanna be the very best like no one ever was

putting their photo on the front page and writing about the details of the shooting like it's a sporting event or an oral history of the seinfeld finale seems unhelpful https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/02/us/mandalay-bay-vegas-shooting.html?_r=0

I'm okay with listing the deadliest earthquakes or volcanos but these kinds of mass shooting charts, I don't know. Not saying they directly say "can you do better/worse?" to the wrong kind of individual, but it all fits into the "we sure seem to get a lot of eyeballs when something like this happens, let's focus on it 24/7 for a week - again" modus operandi.

i was in high school when columbine happened and remember being struck by how strange it was that the killers were almost my exact age. someone born that day would be their age today, and nothing has changed. it's ancient history.

i couldn't be happier that the stupidest president in history has come out four-square with the preferred NRA narrative again and again. it's a clear indication of exactly how much respect those arguments deserve

wharton school

like a very smart guy

cool that the right is focusing more on the "good guy with a gun" who pursued him and (apparently) killed him and will inevitably point to that as Reason No. 1 why the solution is to just arm everyone

yes it worked so well this time

That's the part that gets me. It's almost as though the underlying argument were something like 'as long as the lex talionis is enforced by a heroic gunslinger, the death toll is negligible, as the victims did not die in vain.' Fitting for a state that will never abolish the death penalty.