Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

Americans have the murder gene

I can’t tell who is being serious here anymore.

i can't either but we are veering towards "the irishman has a natural tendency to drink and violence due to their skull shape" areas

No, that's the Scots.

I suppose pulling it into % gun ownership and overall shootings was a poor start away from mass shootings which like it or not is pretty inarguably something associated strongly as a modern american phenomenon

Might have something to do with all the guns here. I dunno.

we all have the murder gene.

Heavy amount of firearms + high social inequality + lack of social connection + slowly cascading collapse of infrastructure both civil and physical

all contribute. But also a deliberate prevention of any ability or process to try to address this stuff, too.

The Wild West never really ended..

We're even back to shooting wolves again.

murder gene

Ahem

https://people.com/thmb/IJLqJz3GkGR2_HCQVKcoxA22sg8=/1500x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(644x309:646x311)/gene-simmons-kiss-091922-4d67183a82c44ee6963b22a9e2f74cdc.jpg

Xpost Jesus you can just delegate us holmes

*relegate

lol but i fuckin hate a missed landing on a decent pun

And why wouldn't you be? You're fed a solid diet of highly individualized, us versus them (but really me versus everyone), fear and resentment from day nought. You are taught to treat your country like a beloved sports team even though that team, your government, is literally killing and bankrupting millions of their own citizens and somehow making you think its another citizen or group of citizens fault. We all know this but no one will ever do anything about it because no-one seems to understand the govt works for us, we dont work for them. Above all, in good times and bad, one must stand behind the team.

― But who are we doing it versus? (sunny successor), Friday, 26 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Nothing that exceptional about this. Throughout Europe there are nationalist movements. Groups are demonised by politicians to divert attention from actual problems. Sweden has recently elected hard right politicians. Sweden might not be as unequal as parts of America but it has poor people in it. Migrants are demonised.

If you regulate gun use and reduce its use you get these shootings down. But in the US it might be too late for that.

It’s sort of funny that the person suggesting an enormous country with a large and diverse population is filled entirely with amoral gun-toting lunatics has the user ID initials of “SS,” cuz the whole suggestion is fucking ludicrous and fascistic. Anyone who believes that kind of rhetoric has been lost to a bankrupt and hopeless vision that also isn’t borne out on the ground.

its funny that a point made by someone with table twice in their username isnt something that could bear any weight

ok now someone do me

tell me why what i said doesn’t bear any weight but the ridiculousness of ss’s post does.

“this entire country is filled with bloodthirsty idiots” that is fucking absurdly reductive and insulting.

tbh i expected at least an attempt to do something with my username

2/10 and only that because tbf its in irish

ok now someone do me

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac)

It's funny that a person whose first three letters of his name come from the protagonist of The Beastmaster

thats better

Seeing as this discussion now has people suggesting the US has a "murder gene", I'll chime in, years later, once again, and probably get shouted-at about it, with what I personally think is The Main Difference Between the USA and everywhere else, and the biggest contributing factor to all of this: CCW and open carry.

To be clear, I was mocking the psychoanalyzing of Americans

The national narrative surrounding Chicago is of course overblown, but maybe not as overblown as I'd like. One of our local middle schools a mile away went on lockdown just as school let out yesterday because there were shots fired outside.

It doesn't take many maggots on my steak for me to consider it "filled with maggots."

Refrigerate your meats dude

Now is not the time

As a reasonable starting point, let's assume that the maggotty-ness of any given steak is explained 50% by exposure to flies, and 50% by the genetics of the cow.

The Taco Bell Curve

Refrigerate your meats dude

― Every post of mine is an expression of eternity (Boring, Maryland)

Uhh, Oh yeah.

https://apnews.com/article/hollywood-florida-beach-shooting-93dda56246a69d8913f35349c52d83c5

Question to parents: how prevalent are toy guns still?

I was reflecting earlier on how fucked up it was that, growing up in the '90s, toy guns were still prevalent and relatively uncontroversial (except among parents deemed crunchy granola types). I never thought about it at the time, but it's wild how the first thing kids are taught to associate guns with are playthings--and later on, deadly force. I had cowboy revolvers that used caps, a mini-Tommy gun that made noise, water guns... and those aren't even counting less realistic gun toys like laser blasters or Nerf. (Not trying to make a correlation, just reflecting on how I never questioned this bizarre thing until now.)

There are still lots of water pistols/rifles and Nerf guns, but they are all brightly colored so they can't be mistaken for real guns by the pigs.

My now almost 15 year old son grew up playing with nerf guns, but I don't remember ever seeing any toy gun which even remotely looks like a real gun.

I had a few black toy cap guns over the years, they came with the little plastic ring percussion caps you'd stick in the cylinder, pull the trigger and you'd have a nice pop and some smoke. Basically terrible.

my buddy's 13 year old son ordered a VERY realistic replica pistol online and without permission.. but he wears super baggy pants, vapes, and thinks he's gangsta

get him a Chronic NFT for his birthday

My son is years beyond this stuff but … I don’t remember *realistic* toy guys being part of what we got him to play with. It never occurred to us, even in his youth, to go there. He had one of those neon colored nerf dart shooters, but that’s as close as he came.

And maybe a brightly colored water gun or two.

Not a spree shooting, but just found out a former co-worker pal of my brother's was shot and killed in Chicago a couple nights ago. An attempted robbery, Lakeview neighborhood.

No items taken. Shot him and fled.

Yeah, the single victim killings are barely covered anymore. A 10th grader from the local high school was shot and killed this weekend. My son's friend's mother was shot in the head and killed awhile back and it didn't even make the paper.

Mentioned probably upthread but I witnessed a shooting near the beginning of the pandemic, likely the guy didn't make it, and there was a single mention on Twitter and zero news.

My (british, in britain) parents sent our kids (california) toy weapons at christmas/birthdays until I asked them to stop. they didn't realize how culturally ... loaded(ha!) toy guns are here, and also how much more dangerous it is would be for kids to walk around with replica weapons.

That shooting I was in the middle of four years ago never made the papers, either, but I suspect the park owner pulled some strings with the local paper.

It’s been a little over two decades since I worked for a weekly newspaper covering a county on Maryland’s Eastern Shore - but we covered pretty much every crime, and a shooting would’ve been huge news that would’ve been reported relentlessly.

That said, there were four staffers then. A decade ago they were down to two staffers. Today, I’m not sure the newspaper still exists.

Not a spree shooting, but just found out a former co-worker pal of my brother's was shot and killed in Chicago a couple nights ago. An attempted robbery, Lakeview neighborhood.

― omar little, Tuesday, May 30, 2023 3:08 PM

This the one that happened on early Saturday? It happened on the street I live, exactly one block away. One of three shootings that has happened within a few blocks since last Thursday.

As far as American bloodlust goes, isn't it safe to say that roughly a third of the country reflexively adulates the police and the military and subscribes to religious doctrines calling for, if not also reveling in the violent destruction and I guess eternal torture in some instances of people who are the "bad guys"? Comparatively speaking it's a hyper-violent country by just about any metric (our death penalty issues alone are majorly o.O) and regardless of how much a given person may wish to reject all of that, they are nevertheless steeped in that environment. It's all-pervading in a sense. There is an undercurrent of menace and hostility here in daily life that simply isn't present in most other countries.

It's often really strange thinking/reading about all of this as someone who now lives in England and didn't grow up in a gun crazy part of America. I've never known anyone who owned guns for fun. My dad had hunting rifles but they were locked in a cabinet and I never saw him ever even open it. I've never seen a handgun in real life or known anyone who was openly pro-gun and when reading about this stuff it honestly feels like I grew up in an entirely different country. This is not the US that I know. Then I remember that I was caught in a workplace shooting where I had to hide in an office for nearly an hour and one of my colleagues was shot and killed.