Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

I'm sure there's a lot of good people in that group, one member with mental problems shouldn't tarnish their reputation.

has this been posted already?

https://www.massshootingtracker.org/data/2018

Oh okay, so he's just a white supremacist and not a t-t-terrorist? Whew, what a relief.

And to think that I was grateful one of these shitbags was finally going to prison. He'll be welcomed with open arms.

how long before we are reading this kid's r/T_D post ?

So cool how white males are the biggest problem in this country from top to bottom.

https://scontent-ort2-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/27752439_733648053496551_7577427506378563946_n.jpg?oh=50d8c1897dae8d7e89691405b9ad5524&oe=5B196E97

thank god we got to the bottom of this

it's our fault for not looking

i was looking at recent mass shootings and i completely forgot about the one in Sutherland Springs TX a few months ago. there's too many to keep track of at this point.

yeah it's nuts. the kill count on this was higher than Columbine and it'll be out of the news cycle in two days (unless Trump manages to say something completely insensitive, in which case it'll be...maybe three?)

xp to that fucking stupid facebook meme:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Mass_Shooting_Deaths_by_Year_1994-2017.jpg

that 1999 spike being columbine of course

people are mentioning "he left a comment on a YouTube video" but weirdly no one has mentioned that the YouTube blogger in question pretty much makes videos solely about bounty hunting. like, talk about violent video games or whatever but at least right now this is the stuff we know he's (probably) looking up

Tomorrow the stocks of gun distributors and manufacturers will rise, as they always do. We have a market that falls when the poor secure slightly better wages and rises when there are mass shootings. The problem goes well beyond assault rifles. It is life's subservience to profit

— Emma Caterine 🌹⚖️💸 (@EmmaCaterine) February 15, 2018

Every time another one of these mass shootings happen - right when the Republicans start telling us that the answer is more guns, guns for everyone, guns for teachers, guns for students - I think about Chris Kyle.

— dame judi dench's secret woodland (@markpopham) February 15, 2018

^^ that's a whole thread, worth reading

these events totally make me think about video games. i think people are trying to outdo each other. see how many people they can kill. people who are angry and depressed. instead of killing themselves by themselves they decide to take their anger out on others and also see if they can get the new high score. the only hope is that its a horrible fad. like the hula hoop. but it doesn't seem to be waning in popularity.

From nikolascruzmakarov's instagram:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DWCNKAUUQAE_164.jpg

come on scott you're better than that

hey scott the entire rest of the world is playing the same games

tbf not the *entire* rest of the world

a point I will concede about games is that they are a potential funnel into a lot of overtly white supremacist-type spaces. but a potential one, not a definite one

i didn't read that post of scott's as blaming this on video games, i thought it was an analogy. i could be wrong (i usually am)

Senator from Florida on Channel 4 informing the UK that the problem is that these shootings are happening in areas where law abiding citizens aren't prevented from carrying guns.

Sorry, ignore that.

Senator from Florida on Channel 4 informing the UK that the problem is that these shootings are happening in areas where law abiding citizens ARE prevented from carrying guns.

He literally said the only way to stop the misuse of guns is with guns.

now seeing this video all over FB in which some rectangle headed bearded dude shouts at the camera about how shootings like this occur because students are too afraid to report "weird" kids because they're afraid to be called racist or homophobic, then screaming "YOUR FEELINGS ARE NOT WORTH A CHILD'S LIFE!"

never mind that the shooter was white and got expelled, so clearly someone reported him for something

this video has 11 million views by the way

He literally said the only way to stop the misuse of guns is with guns.

This trope has seeped deeply into the US gun-owning population psyche, where it is currently accepted as a truism: the only person who stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

arm teachers

i feel so depressed

Not used to that sort of psychosis being displayed on prime time UK television tbh.

hey, a good guy with a gun stopped the massacre in Texas, albeit after the massacre was already over

every school should have a bin of guns that students can come and borrow when they arrive in the morning

actually have these bins on every street corner

we won't solve the crisis until every man woman and child in america is armed

It’s time to arm our teachers!

— Students For Trump (@TrumpStudents) February 15, 2018

NRO saying the same thing

One reason for caution: the SPLC says the white supremacist claiming that Cruz was part of the group is unusually attention-seeking for a white supremacist. https://t.co/BdwULbXWX6 pic.twitter.com/gJryEL6C6W

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 15, 2018

when you're unwilling to even consider that guns might be net negative for society, to entertain any proposals of gun control, these are the sort of positions you're forced to take.

The US's narcissistic failure to conceive of foreign models as potentially more successful than its own – in this and so many other instances – will only hasten its undoing. Viewed from abroad, the level of obliviousness is astounding.

One reason for caution: the SPLC says the white supremacist claiming that Cruz was part of the group is unusually attention-seeking for a white supremacist. https://t.co/BdwULbXWX6 pic.twitter.com/gJryEL6C6W
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 15, 2018
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, February 15, 2018 12:09 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Apparently, I'm alone in not believing the Florida-shooter-Nikolas-de-la-Jesus-Cruz-trained-with-white-supremacists narrative. Has the world gone mad or have I?

Don't answer that. pic.twitter.com/809ZIZMrU8

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) February 15, 2018

level of obliviousness

None so blind as he who will not see.

Only way to fight drunk driving is to get more drunks out on the road.

social ill accelerationism

"hey scott the entire rest of the world is playing the same games"

i'm not blaming video games. i said these things make me THINK of video games. and movies with big body counts. i could be wrong, but it feels like a new kind of competition among angry+depressed+disturbed men. how many can i take out? that kind of thing.

I know it's reactivity in the moment but I'm suddenly feeling like the old 'pry it from my cold, dead hands!' saw should be met with a 'yeah, okay, if that's the way you need it to go down'.

I've heard the concept of "kill count" echoed in places like 4chan, so Scott's not wrong here. I'm sure part of it comes from the desire to be immortalized - I mean how long did we spend poring over every detail of that Vegas shooter's life, as I'm sure we will this guy. The Boston Bomber got a Rolling Stone cover and a cool nickname.

Allegedly this was the motivation (in part) for the Port Arthur massacre:

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. Bryant is only allowed to listen to music on a radio outside his cell, and is denied access to any news reports of his massacre. Photographers allowed in to take pictures of him in his prison cell were forced to destroy the film in his presence when the Governor found out.[28]

part of that "kill count" thing comes from the way these shootings are reported. i get the instinct to show what happened, or try to illustrate the scale of events with a wicked d3 dataviz or an interactive map of a fucking school, in the hope that it will shock people into changing their attitude to, e.g. gun control. but that kind of coverage also seems to inspire and motivate the kinds of people who do this.

e.g. see this thread

Time for that sad reminder. After Robin Williams' suicide, sensational media coverage that violated the CDC guidelines resulted in a 10 PERCENT increase in suicides. Same effect applies to mass shootings. Newsrooms, please be considerate in your coverage. https://t.co/O5Gy81rSP0

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) February 14, 2018

on games: as i tried to make clear upthread, i am in no way blaming everything on videogames. not only does that veer into tipper gore territory, but i've also played a bajillion dark as fuck videogames and i have absolutely no desire to harm people. however, i think it's just as wrong to totally dismiss any claim to any connection between the two. there's a loooooot of space between the two viewpoints, and i think it's weird to just stake a claim on the very edge of that space and plug the ears, as if games and our relationship to them isn't constantly evolving.

that's my more rational thought that i hope at least some people might agree with. here's my bonus personal wacko thought:

i think that the roles of simulation and reality are shifting and almost switching places. simulation used to be about representing a state of reality, pointing backward to the past, or at least to the present. as the power to simulate becomes more powerful and widely used, we're simulating what could be, simulating before the reality happens. simulation becomes a preparation for a future reality, rather than a representation of reality. games and the way that we play them are changing rapidly. even if you agree (as i do) that games like doom (either the old one or the new) or GTA or whatever haven't led to more violence, or even that they can reduce violence (as mordy mentioned upthread), that doesn't mean that this will be the state going forward. there's much more to be said about it (everything from the improving realism to the kinds of simulation that are possible to the shift from controllers/tv to VR) but i'll stop shitting up this thread with it because it's off-topic. my point is just that even if you strongly believe that videogames have nothing to do with real life violence, that doesn't mean that the reasons for that belief will continue to stay true because the way that we experience games evolves much faster than the way that we experience, for example, books, tv, and film.

Heard someone nonchalantly ask someone else if they’d “seen the videos from the Florida shooting,” like it was an episode of some television show

I realize that in this age it is impossible to keep the info from getting out one way or another, but I don't understand why mainstream news outlets are so eager to release the names of mass killers and pore over the details of their sad lives.

Bc the media is antisocial and directly profits from this shit.