Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

of all the things about america that make me want to leave, these killings are one of the biggest. and it's not just about gun violence. there is something cultural about this. it's like a sick form of expression to these people.

gun laws i mean -- it's not just about gun laws, or mental illness for that matter. it's a social pathology.

Workplace shootings seem to be the most anonymous and most quickly forgotten these days as well. Maybe back in the 80s ("going postal") they were still searing and commanded big media attention, but now they're so, so common.

School and box store shootings still manage to stir up some collective grief and a desire for a 'national conversation' that lasts a day or two, but these these are forgotten so quickly - except for the family, friends, and coworkers left behind.

exactly. it's just ambient death we accept in the background, like drone strikes or car crashes.

BREAKING: Knoxville, Tennessee, Police: "Multiple gunshot victims reported, including a KPD officer" at Austin-East Magnet High School.

"The investigation remains active at this time. Please avoid the area." https://t.co/5uPfjfRYJk

— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) April 12, 2021

Yeah, my work partner is out covering that school shooting now. Not an actual spree shooting but terrible anyway. A school security officer approached a kid who he'd been told was carrying a gun. The kid pulled out the gun and shot the officer (who's an actual Knoxville cop, not a school employee), and the officer shot the kid in return. The kid died, the officer is in the hospital but seems like he'll live. It's the latest in a series of shootings of students of that school since January, although none of the others have actually happened at school.

fucks sake. this is insane. one school!

https://eu.knoxnews.com/story/news/education/2021/02/18/austin-east-community-violence-knoxvilles-not-ours/6782730002/

a well regulated militia

Things you cannot actually make up: the shooting caused the Tennessee House of Representatives to delay its vote planned for today on a resolution declaring us a Second Amendment Sanctuary State. Even they realized it might look a little tacky. But just for a week.

Being governed by these assholes is exactly why I can never muster the outrage at neolib-centrist Democrats I'm supposed to. Neolib centrists would be a fucking godsend.

BREAKING: Four dead, 7 injured in mass shooting at FedEx facility in Indianapolis, police source says.

It never ends. And not a damn thing will be done about these endless mass shootings.

— Spiro Agnew’s Ghost (@SpiroAgnewGhost) April 16, 2021

8 dead.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56770200

we are just so fucked in this country when it comes to guns

good guy with a gun gets killed himself in this one too

the good guys with guns need better guns iirc

‘No way to prevent this, etc.’

I hear more libs are buying firearms these days, so it’s only a matter of time before the issue solves itself through sheer cosmic balance.

we buy love guns

Sigh. It just feels so goddamn hopeless.

Goddamn

It's quite intense to visit the paper of record online and discover that THERE WAS YET ANOTHER FRICKIN' ARMED SLAUGHTER that you had no idea about until that moment

"See a partial list of shootings with multiple victims in 2021."

Because these are so fucking commonplace that listing them all would be too much.

yeah, this line in the CNN article kind of illustrates the severity of the problem unintentionally:

Police were called to the facility at about 11 p.m. local time for what has become the country's deadliest shooting since 10 people were killed March 22 at a grocery in Colorado.

Oooof

I’m not sure that was unintentional after watching CNN’s morning coverage

yeah first thing my wife said to me in the morning was "there was a shooting in Indiana" and I was racking my brain trying to think if she had just heard about one of the recent ones

i guess one benefit of working from home is less risk of getting shot at place of employment. we had a legit threat at one of our offices years ago, and my office was the type that you wouldn't easily escape from in those situations.

i think we had a lockdown once for a few hours due to a gunman in the area but it never panned out.

we had a very disturbed guy in my office who more than once made specific angry threats about how he was going to do it, who he was going to go after, what he was going to use, etc. he lived around the corner from the office and had tons of guns at his house, once got caught with a huge hunting knife hidden in his desk. management never did anything but the fbi caught up with him eventually and he wound up behind bars for outside-the-workplace stuff. it was an exciting couple years in the office though, showing up to work every day thinking "is today the day he decides to do it?"

jeezus yall

wtaf?

'Murica.

yeah we fired a guy a while ago who apparently wound up having a hit list in his desk. I know a few people were legitimately disturbed by it, like "how did I wind up on that, I barely talked to the guy" but mostly it was treated like kind of a joke. in retrospect...gorsh

sorry if i got too dark. its just every time one of these happens i always think about my office and if it had happened there, how it would have been described with the same banal boilerplate phrases in every one of these stories: "searching for a motive", "believed to be an employee", etc.

I worked with a guy who left a job a month before one of his coworkers shot the place up; I feel in some ways at this point in our stupid history it's strange to NOT know someone who has experienced this (including yourself).

I've worked with multiple angry dudes who kept assault rifles in the trunks of their cars. Really don't miss sharing an office with psychotic gun nuts.

Yeah I had a similar experience at my first job. Nutty firmware guy claimed he had guns in his car. Ended up getting fired after he told me he was erasing all his code because he was mad about something. We had cops guarding the building for a few months.

would be a neat trick to successfully erase all one's code in any contemporary dev shop

Looks as though that Knoxville shooting was actually the cop shooting himself and then killing the kid. They are refusing to release body cam footage.

Was just reading an article about that, though still not sure I understand the timeline. The working theory being the cop shot himself first (to provide cover or a "reason" for what happened next?) then shot the kid?

my understanding was there was a scuffle with the kid, the cop's gun went off wounding him, and then he shot the kid. No idea if the shooting was as cover or thinking that the kid had fired the shot or something else.

Oh okay, the one article I saw initially said the kid's gun went off during the scuffle, but that wasn't the bullet that hit the cop - which is why I was confused about the timeline. That makes more sense.

Disarm the police.

The Knoxville story as we know it for now is summed up in this update from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation: https://tbinewsroom.com/2021/04/12/tbi-agents-investigating-knoxville-officer-involved-shooting/

Things that are clear from it: The kid had a gun, which "was fired" in the course of a struggle. The bullet from that gun did not hit the officer. The kid was then hit by one or more bullets. The officer was hit by a bullet not fired by the kid.

Things that are not clear: How was the kid's gun actually discharged? Did the bullet from the kid's gun hit the kid, or did it just go somewhere else? Did the officer shoot himself or was he shot by the other cop? How many bullets actually hit the kid? And, really to me the biggest question, why did the officers go barging into the bathroom after him? If they had him trapped in there, they had already neutralized any threat he posed to other people in the school. It's hard to see how they didn't have other options at that point. And I don't think any explanation of that decision is ever going to satisfy a lot of people in the community.

Our city is pretty fucked up over this whole thing. It's going to be ugly for a while.

Not a spree shooting, but it was nonetheless unsettling to be following the Indianapolis news and get a call from my mother in law who was out for her first post COVID shopping trip with a friend, only to get caught in a lockdown at a mall in Ann Arbor with what was originally reported as an active shooter situation. Thankfully she is out safe.

Officers are investigating a report of shots fired at @Briarwood mall. At this time there IS NOT an active shooter and we ask people to avoid the area of the mall while the investigation is in progress.

— Ann Arbor Police (@A2Police) April 16, 2021

America, 2021. Fucking hell.

My wife was asked to come in early to work today, but as she was getting ready to go, she got a call to hold off. Apparently there is an active shooter at the Starbucks at the shopping center where she works. At least 3 people shot. Her coworkers are all stuck sheltering in the back of their store right now.

Jesus. This won’t end until every American has had an encounter with a mass shooting.

Nope. This is in a fairly nice, quiet area, right by my local Trader Joe's. Don't know what the story is yet, but doesn't sound good.

jesus that's scary. glad your wife hadn't left yet when this happened.

Three dead in Austin, Texas:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/dead-active-shooting-incident-texas/story?id=77151159

Three dead in Kenosha, Wisconsin

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/04/18/3-dead-2-injured-in-kenosha-wisconsin-shooting/7276067002/