Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

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.

booming and sad post del

was at a bar a few weeks ago, my wife got out of her seat and accidentally knocked some woman's purse over and a handgun fell out of it, it was such a surreal moment, having to go "uhhh ma'am? your gun is on the floor". I mean it's not like this was a bar where shit usually gets started either, someone just decided "well I may need to kill someone tonight"

I got into a shootings and handgun casual discussion with a millenial woman at a taco bar a few weeks ago and I prefaced with my standard "ah, so you know, I'm def a "melt every one of 'em" type, don't be shocked..." Conversation was real nice and cordial, she was carrying concealed and was just like, "I'm not letting any miscreant a-hole take me down, I need a gun to be safe." I told her that I hate having to live around that mindset, but what can I do other than try to persuade you that you'd likely be net safer if we could get many many many fewer guns around, and going unarmed? And she responded that such is not the world we live in, so I'd better learn to deal with it.

Pretty boring post, but if you told me when I was 17 that this would be the reality of USA in the future in the suburb of a nice town, I'da been depressed.

Thanks for that, ENBB.

And the mentions of people folks know who have been shot without any public acknowledgement… man, damn.

As for me - a cousin was shot and killed in a “push in” robbery in 2011. One of the suspects was finally brought to justice … LAST YEAR.

There was another shooting I just remembered, we'd moved into a new place back in 2012 and on New years Eve some guy was just shot in his car two blocks down, literally two doors down from some friends of ours, the story was acknowledged in one local blog but nowhere else and occasionally I Google to see if there's any update but nothing, zero. Even googling the victim's name comes up with nothing. It's amazing there are so many incidents like these which are simply never acknowledged.

death of local journalism has to be a factor here, too

OTM, even if we somehow "solved" mass shootings, the number of "regular" single shootings/suicides are staggering--yet largely invisible except occasionally in local news coverage. Car-related deaths are like that as well, as though it's just the unavoidable cost of daily American life. And similar to firearms, it often feels like any attempt to regulate cars--even with something as mundane as reducing wasteful parking requirements, or adding bike lanes--is met with an anger as though some sort of American ideal is being attacked.

There was an LA times column, the Homicide Report. Jill Leovy covered every single homicide in LA County. She also wrote an excellent book called Ghettoside about a murder investigation. Her column went away, but it was so good, so important. Probably won't see the likes of it again here.

if you're a seriously shitty or psycho driver you probably should be banned from being behind the wheel. But if they're not going to regulate guns in that way they'll never do it for cars.

In 2021, there were 48,830 gun deaths in the US. That same year, there were 42,939 motor vehicle deaths in the US. I mean these numbers are just insane. I realize the motor vehicle stuff is for another thread obv.

true but motor vehicles at least DO provide a very useful function in American life whereas guns are only a necessity in the FOX News America where everyone is trying to rob you or burn down the CVS or turn your kids gay. so yes the fact that FOX is the #1 news source in America is kind of a big big problem here.

even if we somehow "solved" mass shootings, the number of "regular" single shootings/suicides are staggering

This is true, but two caveats: The random mass shootings are essentially impossible for your average person to protect themselves from, which is why they resonate so much. Most other shootings are situational and circumstantial at least to the degree that an individual's own behavior and choices factor into them in a way that they don't with random mass shootings. Not that people can easily "choose" to extricate themselves from, say, a violent relationship. (It's in attempting the extrication that people are often killed.) But you know what I mean, it's not just that you're randomly walking down the street and suddenly you have a homicidal partner who kills you. Ditto being involved in interstate drug trafficking, another high-risk situation for being shot — once you're involved, it could be hard to get out, but your involvement won't be just a matter of chance.

The other caveat is that anything that works to make it harder to get guns for random mass shootings will also make it harder to get them for any purpose at all.

There was an LA times column, the Homicide Report. Jill Leovy covered every single homicide in LA County. She also wrote an excellent book called Ghettoside about a murder investigation. Her column went away, but it was so good, so important. Probably won't see the likes of it again here.

― omar little, Wednesday, May 31, 2023 12:00 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Baltimore's defunct City Paper weekly had a column, Murder Ink (originally by Anna Ditkoff) that I think did the same.

Hell, I didn’t even make the paper
‘Cause I only killed one man

- Steve Earle, “Billy Austin,” 1990 (!)

I'm going to read that book, OM. Thank you.

Wanted to add that when I said upthread that a lot of this feels foreign to me I meant that is because I never experienced the rural/suburban US obsession with guns. It's the average joe being gun crazy and feeling the need to carry 24/7 cause freedom shit that I've never really experienced. I did work as a youth workerworker in one of the roughest parts of Boston for a while so I absolutely saw an obsession and the impact of guns there. One of the guys on my caseload was killed in a gang shooting a year after I left.

(tried to link to an old thread there but don't think it worked. If anyone who can fix sees this pls do. ty.)

God I love all of you and it’s awful this culture we gave. Feels pretty hopeless sometimes.

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.

I love this post, del

I still argue that the biggest difference between America and the rest of the "Western" world is the issuance of open carry and concealed carry permits. It is shocking to be in Canada and the rest of the world for years, and years, and years, and never once see a firearm in the hands of a civilian, not-ever, and then see people carrying within 48 hours of arriving in USA.

I seem to recall that New York State boasts one of the most stringent and bureaucratic processes for civilians to obtain concealed-carry permits, to the point that only six have been issued (with one of the issuees being none other than Trump, lol). Statistically it's pretty amazing (and telling) that New York State (and NYC, of all places) is rated in the top five safest states wrt gun violence.

But I feel that my argument is unpopular, given that police violence is such an epidemic in USA, to propose that "we should restrict the civilian population's right to carry firearms"; I stand by the argument nevertheless

I don't know where I read that about New York State, but now I'm reading otherwise

Anyway, I am curious as to what would happen, when SCOTUS says “hey Illinois you have to issue CCWs”, or “hey New Jersey you have to make it easier for people to get their PCHs”, if the state just says “no we are not doing that”.

I think these murders happen so often that they simply can't give each one the attention they deserve, both as news and as investigations. So instead they get thrown together as this monolithic shorthand of "crime," which often gets conflated with cities, and sometimes distilled down to simply "Chicago." Which the usual bad actors use to foster more fear and anxiety and lure people into buying (more) guns.

But of course Chicago *is* dangerous, and there *are* lots of crimes, both random and not. The reason the focus is so often on mass shootings, however relatively rare, is that those goddamn AR-style weapons are typically to blame, and there is literally no excuse to own one. That gun nuts defend them is simultaneously sick and sad, because they remain both the sensible start and, tragically, likely end of the debate in this country. If they can't move the needle on weapons of war so big they can't even be concealed, I don't have a lot of hope, but if they did, hopefully they could start inching toward solutions that might reduce all the other shootings that occur all the time.

That (seemingly random, apparently victimless) shooting that happened outside a middle school here last week (nine rounds fired) earned the usual "what can we do?" responses on the neighborhood Facebook group, to which most could only sigh and say "not much." Then someone brought up guns, and one of the dudes on the group piped in with the inevitable, and stupid: " I’ve probably sat next to or walked past you or your friends in a grocery store … my gun didn’t shoot someone did it?" This guy is the fabled wild west type gun owner, and if he walks among us here, he walks among us all, everywhere. But if he really thinks his gun is making anyone safer, even though it's more like to do damage to himself, a loved one, an innocent victim rather than a target in the name of self-defense, he's either deluded or dangerous.